Disappearing Computers
Already much of our software and data is moving to giant remote servers connected to the Internet. Our photos, music, software applications like Microsoft Word, and just about everything else we use a computer for will soon be accessible to us wherever we go.
The cellphone is becoming more like a PC. The next great era of computing will be about smaller, cheaper, more-powerful portable devices.
A major innovation we’re seeing right now is vastly-improved voice-recognition software. While it only works on the fast processors of a PC today, the inexorable growth of computing power will soon take that kind of power into your cellphone. So long keyboard!
In the next phase, the devices essentially disappear, due to quantum computing.
“Coming soon: Google on your brain,” by David Kirkpatrick
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Matthew Nagle, a 26-year-old quadriplegic, was hooked up to a computer via an implant smaller than an aspirin that sits on top of his brain and reads electrical patterns. Using that technology, he learned how to move a cursor around a screen, play simple games, control a robotic arm, and even turn his brain into a TV remote control. All while chatting amiably with the researchers. He even learned how to perform these tasks in less time than the average PC owner spends installing Microsoft Windows.
Nagle was able to accomplish all this because the brain has been greatly demystified in laboratories over the last decade or so. Researchers unlocked the brain patterns for thoughts that represent letters of the alphabet as early as 1999.
Neurodevices - medical devices that compensate for damage to the brain, nerves, and spinal column - are a $3.4 billion business that grew 21 percent last year, according to NeuroInsights. There are currently some 300 companies working in the field.
Already this kind of technology can enable a hooked-up human to write at 15 words a minute - half as fast as the average person writes by hand. Remember, though, that silicon-based technology typically doubles in capacity every two years.
So if improved hardware is all it takes to speed up the device, Cyberkinetics’ chip could be able to process thoughts as fast as speech - 110 to 170 words per minute - by 2012.
Last year, Sony took out a patent on a game system that beams data directly into the mind without implants. It uses a pulsed ultrasonic signal that induces sensory experiences such as smells, sounds and images.
And Niels Birbaumer has developed a device that enables disabled people to communicate by reading their brain waves through the skin, also without implants.
“Surfing the Web with nothing but brainwaves,” by Chris Taylor