I had a dinner discussion with friends about the upcoming last stage of our current oil-based (fuel, materials) economy. By 2030, oil supplies will be nearly finished thus the price of oil will rise sky high. I hope we can eventually switch to a clean hydrogen based economy in which hydrogen fusion will only yield harmless Helium gas, and hydrogen burning just plain water.
I’m not an expert and don’t know whether oil from seeds and solar energy is an economically viable replacement in the near future or whether we will temporarily be stuck with nuclear power plants as a main power source. However, I do have some ideas about the future (the year 2030) of IT which are listed below, but not to be taken too seriously. I hope my braindump will inspire some of you.
- By 2030 business is almost exclusively happening on the Internet. The need for personal advice and contact for closing the deal, will for the majority of products be met using one-to-one VR conferencing or artificially generated realistic avatars on flat screens at home.
- Everybody in developed countries will be continuously online, always and everywhere using a variety of devices. By 2100 people will have to pay in order to be unreachable for friends and their boss. Telecom free holidays will be a hype in certain circles. Many companies will earn a lot arranging those information-free retro-holidays.
- The practical application of A.I. will have reached new heights in 2030, not because revolutional new algorithms will have been devised, but because computer power, storage size and connectivity all have continuously increased and have become a commodity.
I think systems that display true intelligent (maybe even conscious) behaviour will only be possible using complex systems with more than 10 to the power 12 self-organising interconnected computing units. Does this only emerge when artificial systems are coupled to external systems that are truly random or of analog nature? I don’t expect this to happen before 2100.
- End-user operation of computers will be largely voice controlled. Cobol source code will have finally disappeared (yes Philip!). Legacy object-oriented programs will still be around. Computers will be able to create large parts of applications themselves, because functional libraries and categorised data are available in a distributed self-describing fashion. Application control logic that needs to be guided by hand is generated based on transition rules and end-state definitions derived from business logic, so a revival of the Prolog programming paradigm.
Eventually, memory and computing power will not be an issue anymore. Complex systems can generate themselves after we have provided them with boundary conditions only, because they’ll have the luxury to trial and error their bruteforce way through the complete solution space.
- Hot IT research topics in 2030 will include human cybernetics, organic low energy CPU’s and distributed computing genomics. Moreover, 90% of all social research will be conducted using only the Internet as the authorative information source.
- Before 2015, the whole Internet will have been unavailable various times for up to three days due to bandwidth-only-limited malicious trojans. But, by 2030 legal measures, special hardware and low OSI layer based mutual authentication between universal thin peer-to-peer clients will have controlled the computer virus crime rate to manageable levels. Many remaining problems are based on social engineering attacks to start a process of identity theft.
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