I think the next big step in biotech/genetics/cloning/nanotech will get fierce resistance from religious fundamentalists both Christian & Moslem, especially if it has anything to do with reproduction.
I don’t think the religious fundamentalists will be consulted. Even if they are able to lock it down in the Middle-East and the US, the places where some of the greatest advances are going ahead as planned, like Japan, China, France and South Korea will master it. If they make it impossible to accomplish here in the states corporations will just move to some failed state or an island and complete their work there.
Triple-frosted Pop-Tarts. I hope.
If my thought dreams
Could be seen
They’d probably put my head
in a guillotine.*
- Dylan.
I don’t think so, or at least not until we learn to censor our thoughts. Picture phones bombed partially due to too much information.
I have visions of real world style IDs like in the online video games where above everyone’s head is their name, class, and level. In addition, you can select to inspect and learn more.
“Hey, that’s a 28 year old marketing analyst. She graduated from Penn, is wearing Versace, and is single!”
I also go with nanotech/genetic engineering. What we do to ourselves is going to be a lot more significant than advances in computing. When I was in college there was a massive fight about whether dna research should be allowed in Cambridge - fear of monsters getting out. Now my daughter is doing sequencing in freshman biology. Every doctor will have a genetics analysis system, and you’ll be able to find out all about your new baby. Think how that will affect the abortion debate. If you have bad recessives, are you going to gamble with your kid?
This stuff is also going to lead to much longer lifespans, with better quality of life.
For those of you who say computing - I see roadmaps ten years out, and not much exciting is going to happen. There will be massive computing power in home PCs, maybe even more than Microsoft can waste. The real change is that everything is going to be on the Internet, and everything will have intelligence. But this won’t be as big as bioengineering.
Is it time to mention these guys again?
I might be just a little excited about that if the website offered even a vague, general, layman’s-terms explanation of how it supposedly works.
Orbo is based upon the principle of time variant magneto-mechanical interactions. The core output from our Orbo technology is mechanical. This mechanical energy can be converted into electrical energy using standard generator technology either by integrating such technology directly with Orbo or by connecting the mechanical output from Orbo to the generation technology. The efficiency of such mechanical/electrical conversions is highly dependent on the components used and is also a function of size.[right]–Steorn: Discover Orbo Technical Specifications[/right]
“Time variant magento-mechanical interactions”; jeeze, what more do you want? A detailed explanation of how the ionization potentials differentiate the opto-gravametric nullities by polarizing the theta-meson matrix? If they told you that, they’d give away their whole Process, and then where would they be?
Stranger
Actually, now I think of it, that’s quite enough right there; I can slap one together in my garage. I wonder, though, why these guys don’t seem to have considered the obvious WMD applications of the process?
Well, they’ll find out soon enough, from the newspapers. Heh-heh-heh. 
Iconography. Icons will become so ubiquitous across the world that they will transcend language and make technology usable by even the least educated. Autocracies will crumble if they can no longer control the flow of learning and information to the masses.
Sadly I wish my undo button in Office looked like this: :smack:
Aren’t ‘speech’ and ‘hearing’ mechanically assisted telepathy?
Can you give me the memories of your last vacation in perfect fidelity ? Can you really communicate how something smells to me, unless I’ve smelled it myself ? There are lots of things that speech and vision do badly, if at all.
Oh, Ok, you’re talking about “Lossless” transmission
I’m thinking of something more along the lines of Strange Days, or Spider Robinson’s Deathkiller series. And remember, there’s no obvious reason why the technology, if possible at all, need be limited to recordings of sense impressions; it could also be used for recordings of internal experience, i.e., thoughts and memories. Nor is there any reason why it need be limited to recording-and-playback; real-time communication might also be possible.
We are Borg.
Cats genetically engineered not to have claws.
Bolding mine
I think what you actually meant was Mu-hu-hu-ha-ha-ha-ha! 
You honestly think our understanding of brain activity will be so advanced in 50 years that we’ll be able to download a memory from one brain and send it to another brain?
Maybe this will someday happen, but we haven’t the first clue how memories are stored in the brain, and even less clue that they are stored the same way for the same people. Sure, memory storage is a physical process, so ultimately we’ll get a handle on it. But this is on par with predicting strong AI for 2007 back in 1957.
The more we learn about the brain–even a fly brain–the more we realize just how little we understand about it.
Maybe we’ll have neural interfaces in 50 years, but those interfaces won’t be able to transmit memories or pictures. It should be possible to stimulate the auditory nerve to produce sounds, or the retina to produce images, or the olfactory nerve to produce smells.
I’m not saying that we’ll never figure out the brain. I’m just saying we have no good reason to suspect we’re anywhere close to figuring out the brain. This is equivalent to predicting desktop fusion. The more we work at fusion, the harder it looks and the farther away we get.
Won’t be the biggest breakthrough, but they are already working on this and cats without dander. So it probably will happen within 50 years.
mswas, I totally missed that Wired article. Life is kinda hectic right now and my Wired reading time was one of the first to go. Can you link?