30 years of computers

Michael Gartenberg | May 24, 2004, 03:01 PM

Jakob Nielsen talks about computers 30 years from now. A million times more power than we have today... but I think he falls short in terms of potential applications.

Ray Kurzweil discusses this at length in his work the "age of spiritual machines" and I tend think the future is a lot like Ray's vision. (and that scares me a bit too). We're talking with machines that have computing power roughly equal or greater than that of the human brain. With the ability to store every thought, idea and experience and instantly recall it. The capacity to interface with other machines and assimilate those thoughts and skills at instantaneous speeds. Imagine learning a new language in five minutes (sort of like trading iPod collections over FireWire, but a lot cooler).

What advances in medicine and neurobiology will allow us to interface more closely with these devices? Will machines have souls? As Kurzweil points out what happens when you can do a scan of the human brain and translate the organic computer to a silicon one? As one accelerates the exponential curve, the advances of the next 30 years will make the first 30 seem as crude as comparing an abacus to a Pentium 4 or G5.