I was kidding…
Vent first, predictions later.
Quantum computers won’t happen. People have started to do the math on the power required to maintain the huge number of states required and it is clear that it’s a non-starter.
neutron star already cleared up some history. Here’s another. Apple introduced Hypertalk threaded document model in the mid 1980’s, it in turn was based on stuff going back to the 1940’s. People were dreaming about the Web for a long time. Read about the middle part of Hackers on “The Well” and such.
Predictions:
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Moving media is going away. No more rotating disks of any kind. Physical motion is just plain too slow.
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The physical separation of the interface from the PC. There’s been Yet Another Introduction of this idea recently, but it will probably take off. Move around the house with your little screen+input devices and talk to the box/network wirelessly. Once this takes hold, then there will be more centralization of the raw computing power. You’ll have one central PC in your home that controls everything. It will be tucked away somewhere and out-of-sight, out-of-mind.
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About Natural Language in the OP. AI people have been predicting that computers are 20 years away from understanding natural language since the 1950’s. So don’t hold your breath.
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The Next Big Thing to speeding up computers for several years has been multiple-CPU computers. (Your PC probably has several CPUs already, on your graphics card, your modem, etc. But those cannot be used for general tasks.) Unfortunately, economics and MS have prevented this from happening. It takes almost all the resources of a MB maker just to keep up with the latest in memory and CPUs for just 1 CPU, making MBs that can hold 16 CPUs and not be out of date is expensive. MS controls the PC world. And since they have never done any sort of multi-processing/multiprogramming right, they have only limited support for multi-CPU machines, there is no rush to produce MBs for a decent number of CPUs.
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DNA computing might make it, but for very specialized tasks. Don’t expect DNA based devices in the home.
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Watch for X-ray lasers and LEDs. (There are already X-ray LEDs that produce “laser like light” in the lab.) When this stuff hits, expect everything to shrink.
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(I know nobody likes this one but me.) Forget “traditional” LCD displays, TVs. It’s going to be eyeglass type displays. That means 3D automatically. That means our ancient 2D movies and TV shows are going to seem like old B&W shows of yesteryear.
If Benjamin was at a graduation cocktail party today, the guy would be giving him the word “wireless”.
(I love the irony that the most egotistically hip computer magazine is called "Wired.)
Umm,… cite? Or at least a clarification? I know of no physical reason that you need a lot of power to maintain the “huge number of states” in a quantum computer, though this may be true of some implementations. The huge number of states comes for free because of the tensor-product structure of Hilbert spaces. (I suspect you’re talking about something else, but I’m not sure what, so I can’t give a good counterargument. But though it’s a technically-challenging problem I don’t know of any reason that quantum computing is a clear non-starter.)
I didn’t include any cites of my own, so here are some:
Here’s one proposed quantum computer architecture (this references earlier proposals as well); this is somewhat technical, but I don’t know any good online review articles.
Here’s a review paper on fault tolerance. It’s somewhat long, but the idea is that you can design a quantum computer so that errors occurring during processing can be corrected, just as with standard digital computers.