What the Future is Bringing Us (2007)

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What the Future is Bringing Us entries are grouped by year. Click on the desired year.

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(2000 to 2003) Golden Oldie News Oct-December 2000 up through Jan-March 2003. These materials were moved from an old Oregon Technology Education Council (OTEC) site developed by David Moursund). Most of links in the referenced articles no longer work.

(1974 to 2001) All of David Moursund's editorials published in Learning and Leading with Technology from its inception in 1974 until he retired from ISTE in 2001.

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Contents 1 Introduction 2 A Free Book on Future of ICT in Education 2.1 Petascale Computers 2.2 The World in 2030 2.3 Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust 2.4 3-D Printers 2.5 Supercomputer on a Chip 2.6 Increased Disk Storage 2.7 The Futurist Magazine Predictions 2.8 IBM Predictions 2.9 Wall Street Journal Predictions 2.10 Better Batteries 2.11 Reader Contributions Are Welcome 3 References

"All education springs from some image of the future. If the image of the future held by a society is grossly inaccurate, its education system will betray its youth." (Alvin Toffler; American writer and futurist; born October 3, 1928.)

"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn't violate too many of Newton's Laws!" (Alan Kay; American computer scientist and educator; born May 17, 1940.)

Introduction

The "What the Future is Bringing Us" Page continues to grow. To keep the page down to a reasonable length, entries from 2008 and 2007 have been split off to separate Pages. Many readers enjoy looking back at forecasts from past years, and seeing their accuracy of lack of accuracy as time goes on.

All of education is future oriented. Through informal and formal education, students are being prepared for their futures. Of course, a major goal of education is to preserve and pass on the culture, values, history, and so on from the past. Ideally, this is done in a manner that helps prepare students for their futures as members of local, regional, national, and world societies.

Special Message for Teachers. Consider establishing a "futures" time period each week, in which you engage your students in an exploration of possible futures they will live in and how the subject(s) you are teaching are helping to prepare them for these possible futures. One way to do this is to select a topic from the (growing) list given below. Engage students in a discussion of what they know about the topic. Perhaps point them to some material to read. Engage them in a discussion of how the content you are teaching fits in with preparing them for life in a world in which the forecasts may well come true.

Another approach is to encourage your students to bring in hard copy materials and Web links that contain forecasts of the future. Each week a different small team of students could assume responsibility for leading the weekly "futures" session.

A Free Book on Future of ICT in Education

The following book is available free on the Web in both PDF and Microsoft Word formats.

Moursund, D.G. (2005). Planning, Forecasting, and Inventing Your Computers-in-Education Future. Eugene, OR: Information Age Education. Retrieved 12/1/07: http://i-a-e.org/eBooks/cat_view/37-free-ebooks-by-dave-moursund.html.

Quoting from the Preface:

I strongly believe that our education system can be a lot better than it currently is. Indeed, I predict that during the next two decades we will substantially improve our educational system. In this book, I enlist your help in making this prediction come true.

The focus in this book is on two aspects of improving our educational system:

1. Improving the quality of education that K-12 students are receiving.
2. Improving the professional lives of teachers and other educators.

This book is mainly designed for preservice and inservice teachers and other educators. If you fall into this category, you will find that this book focuses on your possible futures of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education. It will do this by:

1. Helping you make and implement some ICT-related decisions that will likely prove very important to you during your professional career in education.
2. Helping you to increase your productivity and effectiveness as you work to improve the quality of education being received by your students.

Petascale Computers

Tay, Liz )11/29/07). Petascale computers: the next supercomputing wave. iTnews. Retrieved 12/1/07:http://www.itnews.com.au/Feature/4081,petascale-computers-the-next-supercomputing-wave.aspx.

Quoting various paragraphs from the article:

The author of the world's first published collection on petascale techniques, David A. Bader, discusses petascale, exascale and the future of computing.

Now, academics have turned their attention to petascale computers that are said to be capable of performing one quadrillion – that's one million billion –operations per second. Running at nearly ten times the speed of today's fastest supercomputers, petascale computing is expected to open the doors to solving global challenges such as environmental sustainability, disease prevention, and disaster recovery.

In addition to theory and experiment, computation is often cited as the third pillar as a means for scientific discovery.

Computational science enables us to investigate phenomena where economics or constraints preclude experimentation, evaluate complex models and manage massive data volumes, model processes across interdisciplinary boundaries, and transform business and engineering practices.

This article forecasts faster and faster computers. It emphasizes the steadily increasing importance of such computers in doing science. Thus, it helps to lay foundations for making changes to our science education programs so that they better reflect computational science andcomputational thinking.

The World in 2030

Hammond, Ray (November 2007). The World in 2030. Retrieved 12/1/07:http://www.plasticseurope.org/Content/Default.asp?PageID=1318.

This is a published (not free) book. However, an extensive (1.6 MB) summary and some accompanying video is available free on the Website listed above. In addition, there is a short article available athttp://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2204325/futurologist-predicts-life-2030.

Quoting from theexecutive summary:

The speed of technological development is accelerating exponentially and, for this reason, by the year �2030 it will seem as if a whole century’s worth of progress has taken place in the first three decades of the 21st century.

Most of the world’s futurists, futurologists and computer scientists agree that at some point between 2030 and 2040 a milestone in technological development will be reached that will cause a rupture, a complete disjoint, in human evolution. Around this time we will build the first computer that is the intellectual equal of a human. Because of the accelerating, exponential nature of technological development (fueled entirely by faster and richer information flows) it follows that a short time after that we will be assisted by our super-intelligent computers to build a machine twice as clever as the most capable human. Shortly after will appear a machine four times as clever as a human, then ight times as clever, then sixteen times as clever, and so on.

This projected point in future human history is called ‘The Singularity’ by futurists and futurologists because once super-intelligent machines begin to take over the task of technological development it is expected that progress will be so rapid, and will take such unforeseeable directions, that it is pointless to speculate about life beyond a twenty-five year timeline.

This forecast of a singularity is talked about by many futurists.Kurzweil is one such futurist, and has written a book on the topic. Our current educational system is giving very little thought on how to educate people for a life in which computers become smarter and smarter, and perhaps eventually are smarter than people.

Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust

Markoff, John (12/17/07). Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust. Retrieved 12/17/07: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/technology/17chip.html?_r=1&oref=slogin.

Here are two predictive quotations from the article:

The challenges have not dented the enthusiasm for the potential of the new parallel chips at Microsoft, where executives are betting that the arrival of manycore chips — processors with more than eight cores, possible as soon as 2010 —will transform the world of personal computing.

To accelerate its parallel computing efforts, Microsoft has hired some of the best minds in the field and has set up teams to explore approaches to rewriting the company’s software.

If it succeeds, the effort could begin to change consumer computing in roughly three years. The most aggressive of the Microsoft planners believe that the new software, designed to take advantage of microprocessors now being refined by companies like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, could bring as much as a hundredfold computing speed-up in solving some problems.

3-D Printers

Guth, Robert A. (12/12/07). How 3-D Printing Figures to Turn Web Worlds Real. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 12/18/07:http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119742129566522283-JN3ovlHqlrKtudZWU8ol62lpBDw_20081211.html?mod=rss_free

Quoting from the article:

The 3-D technology combines computer software and specialized "printers," which are copier-size machines that sculpt objects using a tool akin to a set of high-tech glue guns. Following a 3-D design on a computer, the gun nozzles squirt layers of material that harden into a porcelain-like object.

For 20 years, 3-D printers have primarily been used in labs and research groups at auto makers, aerospace companies and other design-intensive businesses. But during the next 12 months, 3-D printing will move closer to the mainstream, thanks to some entrepreneurs and consumer-focused companies like FigurePrints that are building businesses around the machines.

There is a very educational 5-minute video on 3-D printing included with the article. The forecasts are for continuing decrease in price and eventually large numbers of people having easy access to such printers. In terms of education, this will add another area in which students can actually do somethin and see the results.

Supercomputer on a Chip

IDG News Service (12/19/07). IBM thinks green with supercomputer-on-a-chip. itWorldCanada. Retrieved 12/19/07:http://www.itworldcanada.com/Pages/Docbase/ViewArticle.aspx?id=idgml-f2f9cd91-3c15-4860&Portal=6a487ccd-235d-418e-a956-22a6f29a03ca&sub=1502494

Quoting from the Website:

Supercomputers may soon be the same size as a laptop if IBM brings to market a recent research project in which pulses of light replace electricity to make data transfer between processor cores on a chip up to one-hundred times faster.

…

The improved data bandwidth and power efficiency of silicon nanophotonics will bring massive computing power to desks, Green said. "We'll be able to have hundreds or thousands of cores on a chip," Green said. Users will be able to render virtual worlds in real-time and have a better gaming experience, he said.

Increased Disk Storage

UC Riverside (12/20/07). The Library of Congress in Your Wrist Watch? UC Riverside research on nanolasers promise an explosion of memory capacity. Retrieved 1/2/08:http://www.newsroom.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/display.cgi?id=1739. Quoting from the article:

As reported in the latest issue of Technology Review, Khizroev is leading a team exploring lasers so tiny that they point to a future where a 10-terabit hard drive is only one-inch square.

That is 50 times the data density of today’s magnetic storage technology, a technology that has nearly reached its limit for continued miniaturization.

Khizroev said there are a number of challenges for getting the tiny disk drives to the market, including lubricating tiny parts and integrating the nanolaser with a recording head. Still, he insisted, the 10-terabit hard drive will be a near-term innovation, appearing in as little as two years.

Ten terabits is 1.25 terabytes, or roughly equivalent of 1.25 million books. While the Library of Congress is much larger than this, the combination of steady increases in disk storage and with improvements in connectivity suggest a significant change in education. Education needs to help store information in one's brain, help a person become facile at retrieving information, and help a person become facile at solving problems and accomplishing tasks using the stored information, brain power, and computer power. This is calledcomputational thinking.

1.25 million books is a lot of data to store and manipulate. However, it is a small amount compared to the data sets in some ongoing projects. Quoting from a 12/10/07 Government Newsletter article The archiving tsunami:

Mike Wash, chief information officer at the Government Printing Office, expects GPO to have more than a petabyte of content available in five or 10 years. But to properly manage that data, the agency has to achieve a few critical transitions.

A petabyte is approximately equal to a billion books. With a recording density of 1.25 terabytes per square inch, this much storage would require 800 square inches of disk surface area. Of course, this would not consist of a single circular disk. However, the area of a circle that in a yard in diameter, is over a thousand square inches.

The Futurist Magazine Predictions

The Futurist. Top 10 Forecasts for 2008 and Beyond. Retrieved 1/12/08:http://www.wfs.org/Nov-Dec%20Files/TOPTEN.htm. Here is an example from the list:

10. More decisions will be made by nonhuman entities. Electronically enabled teams in networks, robots with artificial intelligence, and other noncarbon life-forms will make financial, health, educational, and even political decisions for us. Reason: Technologies are increasing the complexity of our lives and human workers' competency is not keeping pace well enough to avoid disasters due to human error. --Arnold Brown, "'Not with a Bang': Civilization's Accelerating Challenge," Sep-Oct 2007, p. 38

IBM Predictions

PCWorld (n.d.). BM Dishes Five Predictions for Future. retrieved 1/12/08:http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140818/article.html. Here is an example of one of the IBM 5-year forecasts:

The company's crystal ball also revealed that the long-simmering trend toward "smart energy" devices will proliferate wildly. "Dishwashers, air conditioners, house lights, and more will be connected directly to a 'smart' electric grid, making it possible to turn them on and off using your cell phone or any Web browser," a company statement asserts.

Wall Street Journal Predictions

(1/28/08). Thinking About Tomorrow. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 1/29/08:http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120119369144313747-YIywHFZmhYwbeCw_KU_tuFAkbQQ_20080227.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top

The site includes a short video based on interviews of "ordinary" people. Not one directly mentioned the word education.

Quoting from the article:

Most of these changes will spring from a couple of rapidly improving technologies. Mobile devices will get smaller and more powerful, and will connect to the Internet through high-speed links. The result: People will be able to do anything on a hand-held that they can now do on a desktop computer.

In fact, they'll be able to do even more, as mobile gadgets increasingly come equipped with global-positioning-system gear that can track your every move. As you drive around, for instance, you might get reviews of nearby restaurants automatically delivered to a screen in your car -- maybe even projected onto the windshield.

Better Batteries

Computerworld (12/20/07). Researchers: Nanowires could boost battery life 10X Retrieved 1/12/08: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=mobile_and_wireless&articleId=9053820&taxonomyId=15&intsrc=kc_top

Quoting from the article:

Researchers at Stanford University are using silicon nanowires that allow lithium-ion batteries to hold 10 times the charge they could before.

That means a laptop that now holds a four-hour charge could last for 40 hours using the new battery, according to Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford. "This is really a revolutionary result," said Cui, who has worked on the nanotech project for more than a year. "We're talking about a 10-times improvement. It's a big jump."

Reader Contributions Are Welcome

Readers are encouraged to contribute to this Web Page.

References

Anderson, Chris (6/23/08). The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete. Wired Magazine. Retrieved 8/21/08:http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory. Quoting from the article:

"All models are wrong, but some are useful."

So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don't have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don't have to settle for models at all.

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

Anthes, Gary (8/11/08). The new face of R&D: IBM, HP and Microsoft all talk about 'open innovation.' Is it a feel-good catchphrase or the R&D strategy of the future? Retrieved 8/23/08: Computerworld. http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=software&articleId=322517&taxonomyId=18&intsrc=kc_feat. Quoting from the article:

Is R&D going down the tubes in the U.S.?

Pundits have taken to bemoaning a retreat by U.S. industry from basic research. And indeed, it's easy to find research labs whose glory days have come and gone --Bell Labs comes to mind. But consider this: IBM, Microsoft Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. collectively spend $17 billion annually on research and development.

That's right: $17 billion.

While much of that is for product development, hundreds of millions flow into areas like computational biology and nanotechnology, which may take years to bear fruit, if they ever do.

Apple (n.d.). Here are some videos giving some insight as to where Apple is headed.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-d_CHY92Aw&feature=related

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQtrng6LzUY&feature=related

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_lxBwvf3Vk&feature=related

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_lxBwvf3Vk&feature=related

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8O_sgvKrKs&feature=related

EFRI (n.d.). Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation. Quoting from this NSF Website:

The Office of Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (EFRI) has been established as a result of strategic planning and reorganization of NSF Engineering Directorate (ENG). Motivated by the vision of ENG to be the global leader in advancing the frontiers of fundamental engineering research, EFRI serves a critical role in helping ENG focus on important emerging areas in a timely manner. Each year, EFRI will recommend, prioritize, and fund interdisciplinary initiatives at the emerging frontier of engineering research and education. These investments represent transformative opportunities, potentially leading to: new research areas for NSF, ENG, and other agencies; new industries or capabilities that result in a leadership position for the country; and/or significant progress on a recognized national need or grand challenge.

The programs that EFRI funds are selected because of their possible importance in the future of engineering-oriented technology.Two new topic areas were announced on April 19, 2008:

1. Cognitive Optimization and Prediction through Reverse Engineering
2. Resilient and Sustainable Infrastructures

NSF Press Release (9/4/08). Climate Computer Modeling Heats Up. Retrieved 9/5/08: http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=112166&govDel=USNSF_51. Quoting from the article:

New "petascale" computer models depicting detailed climate dynamics, and building the foundation for the next generation of complex climate models, are in the offing.

Researchers at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmospheric Studies (COLA) in Calverton, Md., and the University of California at Berkeley are using a $1.4 million award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to generate the new models.

The development of powerful supercomputers capable of analyzing decades of data in the blink of an eye marks a technological milestone, say the scientists, capable of bringing comprehensive changes to science, medicine, engineering, and businesses worldwide.

Petascale computers can make 1,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second, a staggeringly high rate even when compared to supercomputers.

Vinge, Vernor (1993). The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era. retrieved 8/28/08: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html. Quoting the article:

Abstract: Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended. Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible answers (and some further dangers) are presented.

What is the Singularity? The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence. There are several means by which science may achieve this breakthrough (and this is another reason for having confidence that the event will occur):

• The development of computers that are "awake" and superhumanly intelligent. (To date, most controversy in the area of AI relates to whether we can create human equivalence in a machine. But if the answer is "yes, we can", then there is little doubt that beings more intelligent can be constructed shortly thereafter.

• Large computer networks (and their associated users) may "wake up" as a superhumanly intelligent entity.

• Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.

• Biological science may find ways to improve upon the natural human intellect.