This topic has been addressed before and probably will be again, but since we got a TiVo for Christmas and a new cell phone a few weeks ago I can’t help but be amazed at the state of technology that tends to overwhelm anyone who hasn’t been keeping up with new fads and gizmos.
My parents and grandparents went through what seemed to me in the 60’s and 70’s to have been almost impossible to adapt to in terms of the steps taken by inventions and technological advancements. From horse and buggy and newspaper to the to-the-moon-and-beyond space flight and the internet and instantaneous worldwide communication. Not to mention movies, radio, TV, computers, genetic engineering, nanotechnology and things I have only heard of and make no pretense at understanding.
Those of you younger than 30 have to go to some trouble to imagine a world without electronics and 24/7 news cycles. Slightly older Dopers will be able to remember “way back when” a home computer measured its memory in K instead of Gigs. Some may recall dial phones, winding watches, cars with carburetors, 8-track tapes, vinyl records, 3c stamps, alphabetical telephone exchanges like Cherry or Amherst, postal zones instead of ZIP codes, and on and on.
Considering how much is already being provided in the electronics world, computer technology, communications gear, personal devices like cell phones, iPods, PDA’s, and such, what do you foresee as the next wave of gizmos and methodologies that will make the 30-and-over crowd gaga with how we were ever able to get along without it?
(If you want to link to older threads where this topic has been addressed, feel free to, but I’m hoping some new ideas can be spread around.)
I am pretty sure I know of a revolutionary computer “invention”. Like most inventions, more primitive versions of the idea have been around for quite some time like there were search engines before Google. It is already here and starting to be rolled out. I am referring to Citrix and other services like it. These are services that let you access whole computers through the internet and a web browser. It may not sound like much but it actually lets you interact with a computer over the internet like you are sitting in front of it. Like I said, primitive versions have been around for a while but it isn’t the same. Everything that I have at work is just a few clicks away and my home computer morphs into my work computer with all of the applications, data, and everything. Virtually any computer can “become” any other computer. You even set your home computer up like this for free with a small utility called LogMeIn among others. Pretty soon, it won’t matter where you are in the world. Your actual home computer or work computer is just seconds away. More complicated setups would allow users to have the power of supercomputers at their fingertips or subscribe to a special purpose computer that has any software that they want installed and managed. Anyone will be able to jump from one type of computer to another at will. This type of thing is a great breakthrough for at least part-time telecommuting which has been somewhat cumbersome and inconvenient until now.
GPS… It should do for space what the watch did for time.
That said, I’m uncomfortable with the comparison, because our interaction with time and space are so different – namely that we get some choice over where we are in space, but not in time.
Probably not the next invention to come along, but one I certainly expect to see in my lifetime - the automatic car.
You get in, tell it where you want to go, press “Start”, then sit back, relax, read a book, whatever, until you arrive. I forsee that knowing how to drive will become merely a hobby and sporting pastime rather than an essential of everyday life well before the end of the century.
Older people aren’t impressed with techno toys for a reason:
Some “earth shaking” inventions were flash in the pans.
Never had a cordless phone. Now obsolete.
Never had a pager. Now obsolete.
Never sent or received a text message. Now obsolete.
Tried the video camera in my phone for the trial period and found it pointless. Obsolete for me.
That one is really, really difficult. The artificial intelligence just isn’t there to do it outside closed courses. There are too many variables and liability is high.
Contrast that with newer commercial airliners and even some smaller planes and drones that already have the capability to fly from one place to another on their own including landing.
Remote control of another computer? They had that in the earliest PCs, before Windows even.
Remote access to your work computer? Most companies have had that for ten years. It’s just a private web page interface, and the company server is accessed just like your hard drive but by a different letter.
On this board, full reading of the text is recommended before posting. I specifically said that similar sounding technology has been in place for a long time. I work in IT and have for a long-time myself. Just like “search engines” have technically been around since the first “Find” command was issued, Google was considered a revolution. Sometimes, a revolutionary idea requires lots of loose ends to come together rather than being new from the ground up. That applies to most important inventions.
The technology I am talking about lets you instantly morph any desktop into any computer. That computer may be your home computer or it may be a workplace server cluster running high-end applications. Instead of just running applications in a dumb terminal or “remote-control” style, your computer becomes that computer and you could run anything from MS Office (that isn’t on your computer) to work on corporate databases.
You could always dial in or, more recently, VPN but that is not what I am talking about.
The technology runs over the web and all you need is a link and a password to morph your computer to another. That breaks sown physical and financial barriers to computing. It makes it possible for companies to rent or lease expensive applications or desktop space to any end-user with little setup. It also means that you can access home or work computers from anywhere without worrying about setting up software on the computer that you want to access them from.
Text message is just really getting popular in the US in the last 2 or 3 years. I know it’s been popular in Europe for a little while longer but it’s definitely growing, not fading out. How do you figure it’s obsolete?
I saved an old hard drive at work that was probably the size of a brick and was… 10 megabytes. Now I look at my old camera memory chip of 1 gigabite and see how obsolute it has already become.
One thing I remember as a kid was hating phone numbers with 9’s in them, particularly if I was trying to call a radio station to win a new phonograph record (in STEREO), so I could record it on 8 track and play it on my underdash tape deck.
I’d say text messaging is pretty big here. My friends always prefer messaging to calling. It’s straight forward and simple and without hearing complications. Oftentimes cheaper too.
Then again, paging was pretty big in its heyday also, but you don’t see that now with cellphones. I suppose a revolutionary invention isn’t one that easily gets outdated.
I wonder if it will ever be possible to sleep and wake up at will. Just something I was mulling over in the break room at work a few days ago while I was napping on my lunch hour. Imagine some kind of gadget that puts your brain into a REM state; set it for one hour and wake up automatically.
Maybe not feasible; maybe just a product of my own sleep-deprived brain. But heck, diabetics checking their blood-sugar level quickly and discreetly was once unimaginable too.
Two areas that have (as far as I’m aware) remained off-limits to technology’s grasp except in sci-fi/fantasy regions are Anti-gravity and Telekenesis. Something makes me suspect the understanding of these phenomena, at least to the point of having devices to simulate mastery over them, may be in the next wave of advances. The matter tramsmission a la Star Trek’s “beam me up” dohickeys may be a while longer coming, but I suspect some inanimate matter can already be sent across significant distances even now (although I don’t know that specifically.)
In any case, I expect to be confronted with having to accept that things deemed pseudo-scientific or paranormal in the recent past were just poorly understood branches of “real” science. This will be a step into an even murkier region of “reality” for us older types. Cynicism should drop off some. I think.
Personally I see the next big advancement as having to with interaction.
Voice recognition(VR) specifically. Well it seem every thing else has gotten much better, VR hasn’t gotten any more useful for most people since a decade ago. I figure long before I die, keyboards mouses, and remote controls will be gone.
What??? It’s not the Segway? I’d have to say biometrics, that and electronic currency or even more so biometric electronic currency. We had biometric lockers at Universal Islands of Adventure in Orlando, no keys to lose, just use your thumbprint.
I’ll tell you who will be the guy that will become so rich he will make Bill Gates look like a peon. The guy that invents the reverse microwave.
Put a warm item in the unit ( a room temp beer for example) push the button and 1 minute later remove a frosty cold one.
Yeah, like the network latency introduced by the speed of light and electronic switching. Let’s face it: The reason VNC, Remote Desktop, X, etc. suck is that there’s neither the bandwidth nor the latency in the internet to support that kind of operation. You’d need orders of magnitude faster connections to make remote computing as seamless as you want it to be. I just don’t think it’s going to happen.
Wouldn’t that just mean that the software comes pre-installed? Windows has been shipping with Remote Desktop for as long as XP (6 years?). Linux has been shipping with X for, what, 20 years? Of course, leaving them setup and open is a huge security risk.
Personally, I think the next major revolution is going to be truly ubiquitous computing with mesh networks connecting it all. This will start with RFID tracking of every item commercially made, and will eventually extend to miniature computers in nearly everything. Eventually, we’ll have personal computers implanted into our bodies and antennas sewn into our clothes. We’ll each have a personal network that encompasses all our electronic devices. And, then, beyond that, some kind of direct human to computer interface. A computer that plugs directly into your brain and bypasses senses and motor control would lead to huge jumps in human knowledge capacity, although it could probably only be fully realized by those who had implants from birth.
I’d have to say biometrics, that and electronic currency or even more so biometric electronic currency. We had biometric lockers at Universal Islands of Adventure in Orlando, no keys to lose, just use your thumbprint.