By Roland Piquepaille
In this must-read article, MIS, from Australia, asserts than in 10 to 15 years, we'll be unable to use today's technologies to build electronic devices always smaller and more powerful. Instead, three disruptive technologies will converge and deeply change our lives: nanotechnology, sensors and wireless technology. The author explains how this will influence molecular computing or quantum information processing. She also describes future advances in robotics, including nanobots. And the transportation industry will welcome the arrival of skycars, which are under development today. But will we travel anymore when holographic videoconferencing tools will be available? Please take a moment to check this fascinating article or read more below...If nanobots and skycars sound more like sci-fi than a sane view of the future, then you may need to reprogram your mindset. Helene Zampetakis reports on the technology that will shape our lives in the decades to come.
A trio of disruptive technologies will converge over the next five to 15 years to overtake our incumbent systems and create new competencies that will profoundly change the way we organise our lives and the way we do business.
The driving principles behind modern technology are running out of steam: it is becoming prohibitively costly to continue to shrink technology, while Moore's Law, which postulates the doubling of computer power every 18 months, is reaching its physical limits under current processes.
Luckily, help is coming with the convergence of three technologies.
But research that is underway today is expected to usher in a new technological era. Dubbed 'embedded connectivity' by Bob Hayward, vice-president and research fellow at Gartner, it will draw strength from nanotechnology, sensors and wireless technology.
The embedded world of the future will harness the power of billions of microprocessors on a single device, wirelessly connected to others, that can read the environment and react accordingly. Scientists portray a future in which we attach these devices to our bodies to communicate, set them loose on our streets to do menial tasks, and embed them in the commonplace objects of our lives to address our daily requirements.
The underlying foundation for this new era of embedded connectivity is nanotechnology, which is based on the manipulation of molecules less than 100 nanometres in size. "Nanotechnology means that rather than taking a chunk of silicon and carving it down to size, we build from the bottom up by assembling single molecules and atoms," says Dr Terry Turney, director of CSIRO's nanotechnology centre.
Zampetakis then looks at electronic circuitry and how it will be transformed by molecular self-assembly technology. She also describes future quantum information processing and wireless networks of sensors.
Now, let's look at what she says about robotics.
It will be at least 20 years before we see microscopic 'nanobots', the much-hyped molecular manufacturing systems that have generated sci-fi like fears of mutating swarms running amok. But miniature robots are in fact under serious investigation.
In 2000, for example, MIT's Bioinstrumentation Laboratory unveiled the Nanowalker, a sugar-cube sized prototype of the first autonomous nanorobot. The Nanowalker is able to move with great precision at a speed of about 4,000 steps a second and communicate wirelessly to a central computer.
Nanorobots will eventually construct materials atom by atom to create products that do anything from surveillance to in vitro navigation.
Larger robots will also be present and will become more independent.
Currently robots operate in controlled environments designed around them, such as car assembly plants, but the next generation of machines will be designed to function in a less structured world and to cope with unexpected changes to their environment.
Robotics research today centres around embedding these devices with fuzzy logic skills using sensors that will allow them to perceive and respond. Dr Peter Corke, autonomous systems team leader at CSIRO, says we could expect to see this class of machine delivering mail or medication or stacking store shelves at low cost to replace human labour in five to 10 years from now. Larger versions could be used down mines; and indeed this research is principally funded by the mining industry, along with organisations interested in flying robots that can inspect assets such as power lines.
And after decades of science-fiction stories, skycars will finally be there.
These will let us travel "when and where but especially how we wish", according to Mark Moore, personal air vehicle sector manager for NASA's Vehicle Systems Program.
NASA's area of focus is a skycar (or personal air vehicle -- PAV) designed not for getting about the city, but for travelling at high speeds for distances of between 160kms to 800kms. That would allow people to live in regional areas and commute into urban airfields for work.
Over the next decade Moore expects to see flying cars priced at less than US$100,000 using automated functionality based on NASA's EquiPT (Easy-to-use, quiet Personal Transportation) technology set.
Moore says an obstacle to PAVs has been the intensity of training required to fly them, so automation is critical. The goal is to have the vehicle controlled by a computerised brain that senses and responds to weather conditions or other crafts in the vicinity, and compensates for technical failures.
And did you know you could order a skycar today? Moller International, based in California, is developing the M400 Skycar and hopes it will be certified by 2006. And you can purchase a 4-passenger Skycar today for a cool $995,000!
But will we travel with the arrival of the next generation of videoconferencing tools?
The synergy of vastly increased bandwidth, three-dimensional video projection and interactive holography systems is expected to change the way we collectively communicate, according to James Anderson, country manager of Polycom.
Videophones as a standard business tool are a decade away but it will be more like 20 years before research from bodies such as MIT's Spatial Imaging Group or 3D visualisation company, Actuality Systems, yields practicable holographic videoconferencing. By then, however, "we'll be looking at life-size holograms in 3D that can move around the room in full motion", says Anderson.
Finally, Zampetakis looks at changes in information technology likely to happen in the next five to ten years.
Now, I have a question for you. Is this message from the future a one you like? Personally, I do.
Source: Helene Zampetakis, Managing Information Strategies, Australia, December 17, 2004; Moller International
Related stories can be found in the following categories.
Famous quotes containing the words message and/or future:
“No it is better not. She would only ask me to take a message to Albert.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)
“We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this Nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)