Watching technology grow over the last few decades
has been very exciting when you consider all of the things we have accomplished. My background was spent working with a number of people involved in inventing many of these devices. The people working on future technology have a need to test there designs. My job as a consulting sales and application engineer was to design and recommend test equipment and procedures to assist them in testing these new designs. So, I saw first hand the blood sweat and tears going into the design of technology. One could look at technology as being “the good, the bad and the ugly.” A lot of effort has gone into the design of technology in developing weapons. I do not feel good about that and wish it did not have to be. But the space and weapons development has made it possible to have technical devices that save a lot of lives also. Visit a modern hospital and you will see giant machines that analyze your entire body; keep your lungs and blood working while they take your heart out and repair it; allow remote monitoring and make it possible for doctors to conduct an operation while physically being thousands of miles away.
 
A worldwide study was done in 2003 to find out what lies ahead in technology. Here is a summary of that study.

Materials

A fellow named Moore made a prediction that the number of transistors on the fastest CPUs (central processing units) would double every 18 months. That prediction has proven to be true, but it requires greater and greater precision on the etching of silicone. The law of physics will eventually determine the limit. A new discovery called Carbon Nano tubes will probably be the material used in some future generation processors. This material, 10 to 100 times stronger than steel will find its use in many new devices. It is 1/100,000 the thickness of a human hair

Biosensors

A chip implanted in your body will function as an on board doctor which will monitor your vital systems. It will make a decision to automatically administer medication etc. Sandia National Laboratories is developing a sensor to detect biotoxins. This will be on-line in the Boston subway next year. These could be attached to clothing or placed in a home, like a smoke detector.

E-Bombs

One fall out of a nuclear detonation is EMP (Electronic Magnet Pulse). Spectrum Analyzers are manufactured
 to test things like airplanes and communications gear for EMP. This pulse is very high power and very short in duration, but it can destroy anything electronic in a certain range from the detonation. The military has taken advantage of this well known EMP to build a bomb.The military circles call this HPM (High Power Microwave). The pulse is short enough to not heat human skin or damage buildings, but it can rip apart the motherboard in your computer or destroy an incoming missile.

Infrared Countermeasures

There are an estimated 500,000 shoulder launched IR (infrared) missiles around the world, and some of these could be in the hands of people who want to harm us. They would consider themselves heros if they could stand near the runway of an airport and shoot down a plane loaded with 300 people!

The good news is technology has come to the rescue again with something called DIRMC (Directed Infrared Countermeasures). The bad news is this system is very sophisticated and expensive. And on top of that commercial airplanes do not have them installed as yet.

Mobile

The FCC has allocated spectrum (a band of frequencies) at 5.9 GHz for (wireless short range communications). It will be similar to the 802.11a scheme that they use on the Internet. Initially it will be used for toll taking and trafic congestion measurements etc. Maybe a self driving car is in the future.

Energy

As we speak, or write, the closest thing to being the hottest technology of this decade is the fuel cell. The first wave
will probably be miniature methanol based fuel cells for laptops, tablet computers, handhelds and cell phones. The benefit would be longer life and lower expenses, because methanol costs next to nothing.An example: Toshiba recently demonstrated a prototype of a direct methanol fuel cell that can power a notebook PC for 5 hours. It works by converting chemical energy directly into electricity. The by products are oxygen and water, which are recycled back into the cell. They plan to start selling it next year.

Ford and Daimler-Chrysler are investing $420,000,000 and partnering with a Canadian fuel cell company (Ballard Power Systems) to produce a commercial hydrogen-powered car in 2004. My plan is to write a separate article on this fuel source and why it will take some time to get the info structure ready to use it.

Silicon Photonics

This technology is 5 to 10 years away, but has the advantage of broadband communications .40 Mbps (million bits per second) vs. 1.5 Mbps for cable. With a 56k modem you can download a million bytes in about four minutes. The new technology would reduce that time to about 0.2 seconds (200 milliseconds.)

Networking

Microsoft Research Inc. has developed a new way to communicate with an always on wristwatch or pendent type device using the existing FM Radio frequency band. It uses the frequency in between stations to transmit digital data to your communicator.Step off a plane and your communicator will get an update of your schedule,your personal calendar and contact information automatically.
.
 
 

Security

The Internet is a wonderful thing and will continue to grow with new uses discovered as time goes on. It has changed the way the world communicates and does business. But, it has some problems and one of the biggies is security. RSA is the current method of encryption, which lets people send messages over the Internet using a public key and a private key. Cracking RSA is extremely difficult, but given enough time and a large fast computer, it can be done. Scientists are working currently on new technology to develop a quantum computer, which will make RSA useless.

Never fear, there are other people who see this as a wonderful opportunity and are working on a new technology called “Qantum Cryptography”. They discovered that photons follow the same principals as quantum mechanics. They can use this principal to send encrypted information, which will make the method entirely safe. Until someone invents a way to tap into it! They predict it will take years and a super computer that is way out in the future before anyone can crack it.

Magnetic Memory

Today’s computers use SRAM (static RAM) and DRAM (dynamic RAM). Both of these are know as volatile memory. So what? Suppose you are typing a four-page e-mail and just as you are putting the final period on you kick the power cord and turn off power to your computer. While your computers rebooting and you are cursing because you are late for a meeting and you have to retype the message. Relax, help is on the way with something called MRAM (Magnetic Memory.) The big advantage is it is nonvolatile so you would not need to reboot or retype. MRAM should debut in 2004 or 2005.
 
Text Mining

Feel like we are on information overload? This is serious business. Consider the intelligence community, which has to weed out meaningful information from the millions of messages it monitors every day. Suppose there was software available to take text and weed out the garbage, then give you an executive summary, similar to what I am doing here.

Bell Labs and the Palo Alto Research Center are doing a lot of work on text mining software. This will be a big deal in the future.

Nanotechnology

This category was not part of the article, however I consider it important.There is a need to make things smaller such, as miniature cameras to explore blood vessels etc. The world
is becoming more and more used to embedding chips in animals, appliances, human bodies and many other things we haven’t even thought of, I think nanotechnology will come up with a killer application in the future. Apparently Congress has similar thoughts. See the following paragraph.


Marking what could be a huge boost for the science of small things, a bill is pending in Congress that would provide more than $2 billion over the next three years for nanotechnology research and development. The bill, hr 766, calls for the National Science Foundation and other government agencies to dole out grants to universities and other organizations.

There are other elements in the article such as robotics, environmental problems and computer applications. I think the article makes a good case that technology is not dead yet.

To see what a super cell phone will likely look like in the future click on this link  Super Cellphone