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November 27, 2000

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We Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

The changes that information technology has brought to everyday life pale in comparison to what could lie ahead

s we stand at the brink of a new century (the year 2000 was actually the last year of the 20th century), I've been thinking about what life may be like in coming decades. So I'm going to advance some educated guesses based on work under way in research labs around the world.

Let's start off with Moore's Law. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, made a prediction back in the mid-1960s. Roughly stated, it said the number of transistors that can be crammed on to a square inch of silicon would double every 18 months while the price would fall by half. As it turned out, he was right.

In a 1994 video for Microsoft employees entitled Roadkill On The Information Highway, then-chief technologist Nathan Myhrvold, a Princeton Ph.D. in theoretical physics, put it this way: Moore's Law means that a computer 20 years from now will be able to calculate in 30 seconds what the average computer today would take an entire year to complete. Further, in 40 years, a computer would be able to calculate in 30 seconds what today's computer would take a million years to complete. It's a sobering thought.

But there have been dire predictions every year or two that we're going to hit a wall. There is a real fear that eventually we will reach some quantum limit--the point at which the smallest light waves are still too large to be used to etch ever-smaller circuit lines. It will probably be 15 years before we reach that point. Researchers in labs around the world have started constructing experimental logic gates, the basic building blocks of processors, using electrons in individual atoms to do the computing--the beginnings of what's called quantum computing. IBM recently created a series of eight quantum logic gates that worked together as a rudimentary microprocessor. So by the time we reach the physical limits of using light to etch chips, current semiconductors may be well on their way to obsolescence.

Enter another law: In 1980, Bob Metcalfe, the former Xerox Palo Alto Research Center researcher who invented Ethernet and later founded 3Com, put forward what has come to be called "Metcalfe's Law": The value of a network to those using it increases exponentially as the number of users on the network increases. This is one of the key reasons for the Web's explosive growth. Metcalfe's Law has also been successfully applied to the field of economics--what is an economy but a giant network of people buying and selling things? After all, the earliest form of writing, Mesopotamian cuneiform, started out about 5,300 years ago as a technology for keeping track of business transactions.

Other technologies to watch: Communications speeds will continue to increase rapidly, though not exponentially. With the spread of fiber optics and the arrival of emerging standards such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet, it's not inconceivable that many of you will have a gigabit line or faster into your homes, and much more for business, within 10 years. We also continue to see big leaps in memory and disk storage capacities with concomitant drops in price. One Microsoft researcher, Gordon Bell, the engineering genius who created the VAX minicomputer, says that in the not-distant-future, so much cheap storage will be available that we could shoot video of every second of our lives and be able to index and search it at will.

With the proliferation of long-and short-distance wireless devices, including Bluetooth and fixed wireless, we'll be connected every second without ever thinking about it. Applications will be highly distributed and self-managing. Microprocessors will become so small and inexpensive that they'll be sewn into our clothes, perhaps put into food packaging, and probably even implanted into our brains. Quantum physics may yield encryption technologies that could make messages virtually unbreakable. Advances in display technologies may soon yield paints that you brush onto the wall to turn it into an instant electronic whiteboard. And while it's still not possible to predict with certainty, intelligent agents may actually become intelligent--what's called "machine intelligence,"--but those are problems that pure processing power alone can't solve.

What will the world be like? That's up to your imagination and the inventive genius of generations yet to be born. It's clear, though, that the Internet and the Web are just the start. We ain't seen nothin' yet.

Stuart J. Johnston has covered Microsoft for more than 12 years. He can be reached at stuartj@halcyon.com.

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