Can any of the “Teeming Millions” offer guesses as to what computers will be like in 10 to 20 years time?
Will they resemble workstations of today?
What technology is expected to be developed over the next few decades?
Will humans always be more clever than computers?
Will we ever be able to control computers using our minds?
How significant a role will the Internet play in the future of computing?
My 0.000002 cents
Will they resemble workstations of today?
Probably much much smaller
What technology is expected to be developed over the next few decades?
Nanotech?
Will humans always be more clever than computers?
Depends how you define clever
Will we ever be able to control computers using our minds?
We can already…can’t find the link at the moment 
How significant a role will the Internet play in the future of computing?
Depends on how much SDMB expands 
Various links:
Wishful Thinking and Thought Recognition (a few more links to look at at the bottom of that page).
A Chip ID That’s Only Skin-Deep
As an example of how integrated I think it will be in our everyday lives: the Internet Refrigerator. I think the computer we saw Tom Cruise use in Minority Report wouldn’t be too far off the mark (though my arms would get tired awfully fast :rolleyes: ).
Data Gloves, 3D Displays, Electronic Paper, and a whole slew of other gadgets in research now will hopefully be old hat in 10-15 years, provided the market is hit at the right time on a receptive public.
Whups, meant to include this link I just read a few weeks ago (just cuz it looks cool): Virtual Keyboard.
I predict this thread will end up in IMHO, but in the meantime…
I think there’s a real possibility of true convergence between the PDA and the PC and that your ‘desktop’ would be some sort of flat screen that is the surface of your desk; when you dock your PDA with it, it functions as a full computer, when you take the PDA with you, it has all of the data there, but the interface is stripped down a little so that it all fits on the small screen, plus it’s a phone, a camera, a media player etc…
I’ll try, although good answers already from Nishroch Order and Horseflesh.
Will they resemble workstations of today?
I expect computers to adapt to fit into their enviroment, so I guess it depends what you’re using for. For example in 10 years I’d expect a lot of people to have a console/computer which played games, DVDs, CDs, MP3s and allowed websurfing/e-mail. Probably video recording / playback / TiVo like abilities too. These would probably look like your standard black/silver Audio seperate style. Or whatever the style of the time is. Like the PS2 today maybe.
At work, or in a home office/study, however you’ll probably still have a basic box connected to things, no need to look nice. It’ll be smaller I’d expect.
Input/Output devices will changes, so expect a nice compact remote control for your home unit, maybe a control pad for games and a cordless keyboard stashed away for other things. Speech and handwriting recognition will probably improve and there may be some new input methods created.
Also look for parts to be distrubted around houses, I wouldn’t think it’ll be too long before modern houses are built with in-built audio/network cabling and space for a central computer system.
You’ve already got a few links for new technology so I’ll skip that.
Will humans always be more clever than computers?
Define clever.
Sorry, I’m an AI geek and that’s the standard answer. In some respects computers are cleverer than us, normally in very specific respects. I assume you mean a generic cleverness. I think computers (particular computers that play a major part of your life i.e. home or work) will be able to learn and adapt. I’m thinking here a computer that senses you pacing around a room and puts on the sort of music you like for that, or that knows that you like to watch such-and-such and can tell you the new series is on in 10 minutes.
Will we be able to have a converstation with a computer as an equal ? Who knows, personally I think yes. But not in ten years, I think we’re missing a few breakthroughs before we get there.
How significant a role will the Internet play in the future of computing?
Depends. If broadband takes off, and the mobile phone companies pull themselves out of the depression and make use of it then you’ve got a pretty good network there. You could store your files remotely and access them anywhere. But then the piracy concerns and such may force companies to clamp down on this too much and prevent the uptake.
I think Message boards like this one will become more important, I think meeting people ‘virtually’ will become more common. Although I expect a backlash against this as well.
The internet is at a crossroads with companies not sure how to make money, users not sure what to do with it, other companies panicing about piracy, goverments panicing about crime, etc, etc. In ten years it’ll have settled down somewhat and I expect it’ll bring about a new wave of entertainment, communication and computing (look for distributed networks performing powerful tasks).
However it may get very strange in the between times.
That’s my thoughts for the moment, bear in mind that I’m in no way an expert in the field.
SD
And on preview what Mangetout said sounds pretty cool too.
And I swear I had that virtual keyboard idea years ago, damn, guess I shoulda done something with it rather than say “Hey, this’d be cool”.
In ten years? My (somewhat educated) guess is that it will be very similar to what you use today, just more powerful. The technology may be more advanced in 10 years, but will people really be willing to change their habits built up over the last 10 years drastically? I doubt it. I’m betting the demand for a chip under your skin to control a totally wired house simply won’t be there.
Well, let’s consider what PCs were like about 10 to 20 years ago.
GUIs weren’t that much different. They were less refined visually(with the exception of the NeXT OS), but the concept was the same.
The cases looked about the same, although they tended to reflect industrial design of the day.
Monitors were somewhat smaller, with lower resolution displays.
So, in the crystal ball, I see the following:
Expect Moore’s law to progress onward, although not without bumps. You’l see hard drives with capacities measured in terabytes, very pretty GUIs that aren’t really much different than those today, photorealistic games, and displays that are as easy to read as paper.
The cases will still look about the same. A typical workaday computer won’t have motherboards, video cards, hard drives, and other components and peripherals smaller than those today. Cooling will be even more of a concern, though, with outrageously fast processor speeds. Peltier-basedwater cooling systems will probably be more mainstream.
Voice command won’t be widespread. For the average person, it’s easier typing than to formulate a thought, then to orally compose a document, improv style, and say “backspace backspace backspace” to correct typos. The dominant interface will continue to be keyboards and mice. I doubt that the control key will be placed back where God had intended it to be placed.
As for mind-reading computers … not likely. If voice command is hard enough to train, imagine brain command … and the intense focus that would be required for someone to use it effectively.
Consider that a 10 or 15 year old PC, Mac, Amiga, or Atari ST is just as useful as it was when it was first booted. Programs ran as fast as those today, work still got done, games were played, the Internet and bulletin boards were still accessed, and the economy still hummed. I don’t imagine things would be that much different in 2010 or 2015. Word XP would probably boot about as fast on this computer as Word 2010 does on a 100 gigahertz PC of the future.
There’ll still be Microsoft-based PCs, Linux, and the venerable Macintosh (OS XX, anyone?). There will also be some other hobbyist operating systems, but they won’t have the polished look of the commercial OSen.
You’ll also still see Germans using the Amiga, and a few stubborn companies holding out with Windows 3.1 for Workgroups.
As a computer scientist often involved creating and designing cutting edge software and hardware – the most important changes in the next 20 years will be:
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The proliferation of more subtle and dangerous attacks, such as hacking and viruses. Rampant information theft and invasion of privacy.
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The shift from technology the man on the street understands to arcane software and hardware that only experts understand. As an analogy, computers are about at the stage of “do-it-yourself” that cars were in the 1950s – when it was still possible to do most repairs yourself, at home, with a good set of tools. These days are almost over for computers.
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Massive online communities such as the SDBM, but with substantial annual fees and/or entrance examinations.
A a number of the factors mentioned in other posts are likely to be cosmetic in relation to where the real money and advances are actually happening. If the question is recast as “What will Windows look like in 2022?” then the focus is on the user experience, not what makes computers powerful. As elmwood points out, there’s enough historical experience to extrapolate a trend. His predictions are only true, however, if Billy Gates manages to maintain a stranglehold on GUI and OS development for 20 years. My bet is: competition shows up within 15 years.
What about total immersion?
sights & sounds can be transmitted directly to the implants in your skull and we’ll all sit like Red Dwarfers looking for answers in a microdot.
I predict the internet will run out of IP addresses soon - they’ll have to shut it down for a week or so to upgrade it.
Windows will go 3D for those who can handle it. I’ve always liked the idea of adding depth to my desktop.
And an entrance Exam to the SDMB???
That’ll empty the Pit, and most of IMHO too. I’ll miss F_X and Mr Evil etc. Probably couldn’t afford to be a member either 
Look, one prediction came true already!
We’ll be thinking back… “HAHA!! They thought 50 gigs was a pretty good chunk of memory!!!”
Total emersion? Definitely. That might be seen as an improvement to the GUI and to controls like pointing devices. That would be a part of the next gen online communities.
The idea of entrance exams wouldn’t be to exclude people who were genuinely interested or committed. More like grouping folks with similar proclivities. I’m trying to imagine what the SDMB will be like when there are 10 times the number of active members. How will we make sure that threads interesting to us don’t disappear without notice? How can we alert people that a thread concerning their favorite topic has come up?
As for paying, well, if we could shake Cecil off his perch more frequently, I’d be willing to pay something. Lord knows detailing lapses in the evidence supporting some columns works infrequently enough. . . .
Hey, 640 Gigabytes ought to be enough for anybody.
GUI’s will probably be very different. One of the professors when I went to school was doing research on touch-based and 3D user interfaces; combine that with voice recognition, and there’s no telling what could happen.
Your desktop computer may actually just be the input/output devices, with the actual processor and storage devices located halfway around the world.
With any luck, quantum computing will take off and become a realistic technology. Who knows what that will bring about?
Everything partly_warmer mentioned will probably come true. Personally, I think that cybercrime and other aspects of internet life will be a big factor in the creation of a global government, but that’s a topic for another thread.
I don’t when, if ever this would happen, but here’s what I want:
I want my computer to turn into paper. I want my monitor just to be a piece of paper. Or maybe even a book. It’d be great - no longer would computers be in one place, but you’d have your CPU and you just grab a new monitor when you use it.
Imagine the newspaper. It’d still be a paper, but it’d also be a computer screen, so you’d be able to watch the Presidents Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen give their address to their nation, as well as seeing photos from the inauguration and reading all about it. And what’s more, I could get all my news from a place with liberal bias, so it’d tell me all about it exactly how I want. And if I want to read a paper from overseas, I don’t have to go online to look it up, because it would all be in my one personalised newspaper.
And then I turn to the comics page. Yes! I don’t have to see Cathy or For Better or For Worse, because only my favourite comics appear.
And extend this to everything in the world. I don’t have to mess around on the computer to listen to music, I just go over to the sound system, tell it to play one of my playlists and it gets it off the CPU and plays it for me. I want computers to be so good that I don’t have to do anything to them. I spose I’d still have to sit down in front of a keyboard if I wanted to type a document, but I’d only use that for word processing.
OK. That’s what I want. Boffins, go do.
Don’t make me quote you on this…
hmmmm, it seems I already have…
I don’t see much of a change beyond the emergance of flat screens. Computers really haven’t changed much in the past ten. The applications get bigger, requiring more memory, requiring more storage, the small versions of RAM and HDDs cost more so everyone sticks to standard sizes. Things look like they might get smaller, then the apps grow again. by 2010 Word will require 10 gigs of hard drive space, and an allocation of 2 gigs of Ram. It will still be buggy.
Stumbled across this thread here pretty near 20 years in the future, thought that it would be an entertaining zombie to set shuffling again.
I have a certain fascination with revisiting “X number of years in the future” predictions to see what people did and did not get right.
The implanted chip, so far, has not caught on. I think in part that’s because of the association of RFID chips and chattel (possessions and animals) and also because quite a few people start wondering about “how do you get this out of you when you’re done with it?” Or are we all supposed to have a dozen or a hundred implanted chips over the course of our life? Then there’s the issues of privacy it raises.
Most people seem happy to open doors with their hands, the old-fashioned way. Not to mention the cost of upgrading all the doors currently in existence to “smart locks”. Rinse and repeat for most proposed applications of this.
I’ve never understood why I’d want my refrigerator connected to the internet.
I’m even pulling back from auto-paying any bills - too easy for your appliances and apps to spend your money if you’re not paying attention,
Actually… right on all counts. Although “e-ink” and “e-paper” seems mostly in the realm of e-books. Terabyte drives are readily available.
Depending on how you define “workaday” computer this is or is not true: water-based cooling for high-end gaming systems and some other types of computers are becoming more common, most people seem to have figured out that day-to-day they don’t need that much oomph to cruise the internet and update their Facebook page. Hence the widespread use of “phones”.
True, although voice recognition software has improved significantly.
Correct.
Also, people are hanging onto their computers longer - sure, capabilities are increasing, but for many they don’t need that increase capability, the computer they bought 4 or 5 years ago still serves fine.
Correct.
Correct.
Getting there.
Correct that there are massive communities (like Facebook) but incorrect about the annual fees/exams. Instead, the owners of the communities sell advertising.
News, however, is increasingly becoming subscription as are many other actually useful sites.
Now, here’s my shot at predictions going forward:
I think we’ll have more and more variety of computers. Just as today the computers of 2000 have proliferated into smartphones, iPads, e-watches, Fitbits, e-books, and others alongside the still extant laptops and desktops, the future will see a further increase in the forms computers take. No one type will be ubiquitous, but all will continue to exist because they all serve different needs.
That I don’t feel knowledgeable enough to guess at.
Again, define “clever”.
Right now that’s a laboratory curiosity. I’m not sure that this is a solution that has a need out in the world, outside of severely disabled people. Most people seem to be OK with manipulating the world, including computers, via biological appendages. I think voice control might become more popular/common.
Major.
How else are you supposed to do refrigerator dating?
I note that nobody predicted that billions of people would constantly carry around a pocket-sized general-purpose multimedia computer that also can make telephone calls. (The PDA one was closest.)