The future is here but changing

An ant carries a computer chip in his mandibles. Nanotechnology promises a future of tiny chips with enormous power. Picture / Reuters

In the early 1980s, Microsoft founder Bill Gates proposed a bold initiative: he wanted to see a PC on every desk in America.

At the time he was laughed at. What was the point of giving everyone a computer, his detractors asked.

Today the goal seems laughable for another reason - we have long since accepted the computer into our working lives and our homes and are well on the way towards the goal of having at least one computing device for every person, at least in the developed world.

But the modern PC is just the beginning. We now have access to the world's greatest database, the internet, from a plethora of devices.

We can carry with us every song we ever bought, thanks to the digital music revolution, and that will soon extend to TV shows and even movies.

The office has also undergone an extreme makeover in the past decade - from typewriters to green-screen mainframe computers to the PC and more processing power than we know what to do with.

That is all about to increase yet again.

The desktop PC has reached a plateau in terms of market saturation. Millions of customers worldwide have taken advantage of tremendous price drops in the past year or so to buy not only a top-of-the-range PC but also a huge range of peripheral devices: printers, scanners, digital cameras and DVD burners.

Most PCs on sale today can be upgraded to a flat-panel monitor relatively cheaply and this whole package spells trouble for the PC market in the next few years: the gains in speed and capacity are not really all that noticeable after a certain point.

The PC's greatest strength, its ever-increasing list of specifications, has become its Achilles' heel. Word processing, web surfing and a bit of video footage do not really need faster processors. Customers are tired of the numbers game and PCs have become commodities. 

Gordon Moore, founder of chip-maker Intel, is famously quoted as saying processors double in capacity every 18 months.

Moore's Law has held sway over the industry for the past decade or more and is still with us today. In effect, it means processor power doubles almost every two years.

Chips now commonly run at speeds of up to 3GHz. By 2015, that number will be more like 25GHz.

The circuits on the chips are measured in nanometres (millionths of a millimetre) and the plants that turn out 130nm chips will this year build them at 90nm.

By the start of next year, Intel expects the circuit lines to be about 65nm. That means packing more transistors on to a chip without any significant change in the underlying technology for some time. By 2015,

 

The future is here but changing

Caption1: ANIMAL FORCE: An ant carries a computer chip in his mandibles. Nanotechnology promises a future of tiny chips with enormous power. Picture / Reuters

our desktop processors will be powerful enough to handle multiple tasks, such as game playing, homework, household expenses, TV recording and air-conditioning control simultaneously without breaking a sweat.

Of course, with that much processing power, you will want to store all that data somewhere. Fortunately, the price of data storage has fallen almost as dramatically as processing power has increased.

The Apple iPod has revolutionised the music industry but is, in effect, nothing more than a hard drive with a smart marketing campaign.

Today's iPod Photo can hold 60GB (gigabytes) of data - enough for all three Lord of the Rings extended-version films.

By 2015, at present rates of development, you will be able to hold a million gigabytes in the palm of your hand. That is enough for every TV show, movie and song you have seen or heard.

And this device will be big enough to slip into your backpack or handbag. That kind of storage is likely to re-shape the entertainment industry.

Combine the two forces - processor power and storage capacity - and you have a powerful tool for education. Schoolchildren, adults, anybody can carry every textbook they will ever need on one device, cheaply and easily, alongside their favourite songs and sitcoms.

Of course, the other trend in technology during the past decade has been the interconnection of such libraries. We call it the internet and it has changed the way business is conducted, as well as leading to the invention of new business models.

But when we connect processors and storage over a network, the overall value is astonishing. Grid computing is a way of making use of this network effect.

Grid computing, where computers are linked together to make a giant virtual computing device, has been around for several years in various forms.

The most famous is probably the SETI@Home screensaver that helps to search for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Whenever a PC that is running the SETI screensaver is idle, the machine analyses data from the Arecibo observatory.

Initially, the observatory was gathering so much information each night that only a fraction of it could be analysed. The backlog worried scientists - what if someone had sent us a signal and we had simply missed it?

The original data was expected to take about a decade to analyse but the volunteer workforce churned through it in a matter of months.

Several other projects allow users to help out with cancer research, high-energy physics work and theoretical mathematical computation.

Instead of buying supercomputers, universities are considering how best to use the collection of PCs they already have.

The University of Illinois took the whole idea one step further, bought 70 PlayStation 2 game consoles and linked them all together to create one of the cheapest supercomputers on the planet, capable of half a trillion calculations a second.

While thinking large-but-cheap is one driving force, thinking small and expensive is another.

Nanotechnology, the creation of devices on an atomic level, is soaking up a huge amount of investment capital worldwide. The US Government is spending billions over the next decade working out whether its scientists can create machines so small that quantum mechanics must be taken into account.

The potential benefits are enormous. Imagine a doctor being able to tackle a tumour directly with no fear of damaging surrounding tissue.

Imagine being able to recycle waste molecule by molecule, creating stockpiles of pure carbon, pure oxygen and so on to be used to build new products.

Nanotechnology is the true merger of biology and technology.

The future does look bright, but also somewhat murky. Few picked the internet to make the impact it has so looking 20 years or more out is almost impossible.

How do we prepare ourselves for such a world? Someone born in the early 1900s would have seen vast changes in technology. What will the next 100 years bring? 

Pushing the boundaries

Five revolutionary technologies:

Storage gets sexy: Carry every book, song, TV show and movie you have ever watched in a device the size of a cellphone.

Grid computing: When your PC isn't busy, let it help to cure cancer.

Processors: The computer processor is so fast it has become dull.

Build your own supercomputer for $50,000: Just buy game consoles.

Nanotechnology: Devices that are only millionths of a millimetre in size but huge in impact.