What Will Your Next Computer Be Able to Do?
Computer nerds should have a field day with gadgets available a decade from now. Our growing dependency on these devices will profoundly affect society as well.
Change happens so quickly in the computer world that it can be hard even to remember how things were just a few years ago. My day job has me looking at what computers will be like in five and ten years, and the results were interesting enough I thought other people might want to see them. What can we expect computers to be like in 2018?
Of course, prediction is difficult, especially about the future. However, at least with computers, we’ve got a 40-year history that has been amazingly consistent. In 1965, Gordon E. Moore made an observation that became known as Moore’s Law:
The amount of any computing resource you can buy for one inflation-adjusted dollar doubles about every 24 months.
The original version of Moore’s Law talked about the number of transistors in an integrated circuit, but it turns out that it generalizes very well to other kinds of computing resources: memory size, processor power, network speed, and so on.
Looking Backwards
People who follow computers are used to this, enough so that I don’t believe most people think about the implications. But it happens that I’ve been in the computer business for nearly 40 years, and preparing this article caused me to think about my current computer, and compare it to the first computer I ever used in 1969, which happened to be an IBM System/3 model 10, with 8K of memory. At the time, this machine rented for $1,000 a month — about $5,820 in 2008 dollars.
It’s common to compare an old computer to a modern digital watch: the System/3 is more comparable to a modern musical greeting card that costs a dollar. Just for comparison, let’s think about Moore’s Law over that span. That’s 39 years, so 20 24-month periods. Twenty doublings is about 1,000,000, and the purchase price of a System/3 was around $60,000 — so the equivalent computer today would cost around 60 cents. Pretty close for that little arithmetic.
But wait…
There’s one problem here: in 1969, we used this computerized greeting card to run the complete payroll, monthly billing, and customer records for a fairly decent-sized small business. Now, we use it for, well, a greeting card. Why does a modern business computer still cost thousands of dollars?
There are several reasons, including “because they can.” We had to work pretty hard to get a program to fit in that 8K. Another great figure in computing, Niklaus Wirth, made a countering observation, though, in Wirth’s Law:
Software gets slower, faster than hardware gets faster.
As time goes on, we find many things to do with our computers other than the very basic functions we start with. In 1969, a payroll program used a simplified tax table to print a paycheck on a line printer that was like a low-quality typewriter; today, the same program provides a glossy color interface, utilizes a much more complicated tax scheme, and prints multicolor checks with included images on a laser printer — which itself has a powerful computer built in. All of these things just weren’t feasible in 1969; they also weren’t really needed for the basic problem.
Looking Forward
So let’s apply Moore’s Law — while trying to remain aware of Wirth’s Law — to computers in 2018. That’s ten years, so five doublings, or about 32 times more powerful. And in order to keep this article to less than the size of a book, let’s think just about a more or less low-end laptop. My current object of hardware lust is the Apple MacBook Air, for a little less than $2,000. By Moore’s Law, an equivalent machine in 2018 will cost about $63. Or, taking it in the other direction, a $2,000 “MacBook Air” will have about 32 times the power — which would mean a machine with a 60 gigahertz processor. More likely, 64 2-gigahertz processor cores, but that would still mean 32 times as much processing power. About 2.5 terabytes of disk, or a mere 2 terabytes if it uses non-rotating media.
True geeks in the audience are already whimpering like hungry puppies at the thought, but let’s put this in perspective. Two terabytes: that’s 80 HD movies. That’s 300 regular movies. That’s one and a half billion pages of text, which isn’t far off from the room needed for every word ever printed in English. (In fact, that’s probably over-generous: there were about 200,000 new titles published in the UK in 2005, and even if those average 1,000 pages each, that’s only 2 million pages. So 1.5 billion pages would be enough, easily, for every new title published for about 750 years.)
So here are some of the things I think we can look forward to in ten years:
Electronic Books
The Amazon Kindle is already showing us the way to this. Right now they cost around $400, so we can hope for a 2018 price of about $20; they can hold a hundred or so books now, so we should expect this $20 device to hold about 3,200 books.
Going on vacation will be much easier for us bibliophiles: you can take your whole library with you in a package the size of a big checkbook. Publishing will be much easier, too: no more heavy paper bricks. So you’ll have the space for 3,200 books, but you’ll also likely have a much larger selection of books to read. With faster networks (see the net section), you’ll be able to download new books in less than a second, and have the electronic equivalent of a newspaper downloaded essentially instantly.
2018 should be a good year for readers.
Computers and the networks on which they operate
We haven’t talked about networks much yet, but the same kind of rule applies to them as we’ve applied to computers: the total speed of the network at the house should go up by between 16 and 32 times in ten years. My cable modem: 8 gigabits a second, at least in theory. My home network in 2018: 128 gigabits a second, or call it 12 gigabytes a second. That’s a whole HD movie in around 5 seconds.
No more Blockbuster; go short now. No more Netflix either, at least in its current form. If you want to buy a movie or watch a TV show, it will arrive where you are before you can get to the kitchen to make a sandwich. Amateur, small video producers, like the ones who already put content on YouTube, will have access to video rigs that can do a Technicolor®-quality movie for a few thousand dollars, and it’s very likely that Hollywood movies will be 3D, and 48 or 60 frames a second.
Porn will be amazing.
Your home computer will serve music and films to your TV, and very likely the commercial networks will be dead or radically different. Why would someone want to be limited to watching House at the same time everyone else does?
Oh, and people will still work with computers too: with high fuel prices, the annoyances of travel, and lower costs for computer services, people won’t often make business trips. (We don’t make as many business trips now as we did ten years ago.) It’s too easy to have high-quality video (even 3D video) and stereophonic sound in 2018. Business trips will be for situations where you really need to have personal contact.
When you do travel, that network speed will mean you don’t have to load everything on your laptop — it’s seconds away on the network. Other than hardcore gamers, very likely the real personal computer will be a low-cost netbook with a reasonably sized screen and keyboard, and it will cost less than $100. But no matter where you go, your data will follow you.
Into each life some rain…
Oh, I know, you’re saying “this is too good to be true.” It’s not, but there will be some new or bigger annoyances as well. Unless something happens to change current trends, very likely there will be nowhere you can go outside your own home where you won’t be watched by surveillance cameras. With new tiny cameras you may have to keep a very sharp eye on visitors to avoid them in your own home — and sadly, some governments will be insisting on them.
New computers and networks will mean new security challenges as well. Viruses and Trojan horse programs and botnets won’t go away, although we can hope people will begin to demand better computer security than we have today.
Probably the worst, at least in everyday life, is that we’ll come to depend on these things so. Try to remember what it was like before Google. For older folks, remember what it was like having to look things up in a heavy paper dictionary, or use the Readers Guide, or try to find directions on a paper map. In 2018, the idea of “getting lost” will seem funny — something only old Luddites are likely to do. But parts of this network will still fail. Drop your 2018 version of a Kindle in the tub and you’re out of luck until you get another one: you might have nothing else in the house to read. (Better keep a spare. Remember, they’re cheap.) If your network connection goes down, you’ll feel isolated; you might go stay in a hotel.
If the power goes out, expect the president to declare a disaster.
Clarke’s Third Law
This is no small matter. Think about the changes just in the last ten years: blogging, Google, DVDs, and now Blu-Ray. We need to think about this in terms of one more law, Clarke’s Third Law:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
We can’t be sure what will happen, but we should be very shy about thinking it won’t be nearly indistinguishable from magic.
Charlie Martin is a Colorado computer scientist and nearly-successful screenwriter who contributes to the Flares Into Darkness political blog as ‘Seneca the Younger,’ and blogs under his own name at the aggressively non-political Explorations blog.
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31 Comments
1. Rabblais:Your math on pages is wrong.
200,000 times a thousand is 200,000,000 or two hundred million written out. So it would be equivalent to five years worth of publishing.
However, the ease of publishing will be increased so much that it might not be able to contain what is published in a year because of the Isaac Asimov law: The amount of material published is highly correlated with the space available to put it in. Expect just about everyone interested in doing so to put out books.
Apr 24, 2008 - 3:01 am 2. What Your Next Computer Will Do | Explorations:[...] new article on Pajamas Media. Complete with annoying arithmetic [...]
Apr 24, 2008 - 6:18 am 3. Tech Help Heaven » What Will Your NextComputerBe Able to Do?:[...] What Will Your NextComputerBe Able to Do? [...]
Apr 24, 2008 - 6:44 am 4. Whirled Of Technology » Pictures of Dell s Eco BambooComputer:[...] What Will Your NextComputerBe Able to Do? [...]
Apr 24, 2008 - 7:33 am 5. Joseph Carrabis:This might be an addition to your list “…programmable device…” and “…how a person is thinking.”
Apr 24, 2008 - 9:01 am 6. Concerned Citizen:Every one of these gadgets is one EMP away from being useless silicon junk.
Apr 24, 2008 - 10:24 am 7. Austin Bay Blog » Next Wave Computers:[...] Interesting article at Pajamas. What will your next computer be able to do? [...]
Apr 24, 2008 - 10:42 am 8. John:Think about the political control in 2018. Only those favored by the political establishment will have access to the tech.
Apr 24, 2008 - 11:02 am 9. Charlie (Colorado):Rab: God, I do hate decimal points. You’re right. Instead of holding the total of all works published in English, it would merely hold every word of every book, from Moby-Dick to Mom’s self-published cookbook, for the last five years. But then, it’s just a two pound laptop. And you’re doubly right about what one of the effects will be, see my piece earlier this month about the need for a new kind of agent editor. As a complete information slut, I can’t say I’m worried about that side effect.
Joseph: You’re right. I also left out robotics, the grid cloud, most everything I might have said about ubiquitous computing, and the list goes on and on. I’ll be interested to read your blog.
Concerned: You’re also right, and I want to state for the record my opposition to EMP. An EMP attack could ruin your whole day.
Apr 24, 2008 - 11:12 am 10. Charlie (Colorado):Oops, one more comment. John, I don’t think so. Every bit of evidence we have now suggests that cheap availability of information is a counter-force to political control.
Apr 24, 2008 - 11:15 am 11. John the Libertarian:Charlie said: Every bit of evidence we have now suggests that cheap availability of information is a counter-force to political control.
First off, thanks for the fun read. I always love educated guesses on the future (and can’t wait to get my hand on the 5 DVD set of Blade Runner). But to the point: I agree that information wants to be free, and, in turn, tends to free people from their intellectual (or lack thereof) bonds. But, at the same time, al Qaeda uses the Internet extensively to recruit and seduce new jihadists; and we should remind ourselves that the 9/11 hijackers lived among us in the U.S. for years before launching their attack. So then, information can have a liberating or moderating effect as long as the audience, or recipient, is willing to open his/her mind to it. While I would argue that Radio Free Europe and satellite dishes along the Soviet Union’s borders contributed greatly to glasnost, the Middle East is a different animal. For it seems the more they are exposed to Western information and particularly entertainment, the more hostile they are to our values. And, not to be snarky, in the U.S. itself, just because there has been a rise of new media to counter liberal-agenda MSM, my liberal friends refuse to acknowledge facts that fall outside their narrative.
Apr 24, 2008 - 3:04 pm 12. David Thomson:Computers are also invaluable in the preservation of knowledge. Countless writings have been destroyed throughout history. This is virtually impossible today. Even a nuclear holocaust may not be sufficient to eradicate all our presently available learning.
Apr 24, 2008 - 5:00 pm 13. Charlie (Colorado):JtL: Nothing there I can argue with: information is just information, and people can do good things and bad things with is. That’s a little bit different point than the other John’s point though; alQ and others can use information to try to exert political control, but as the People’s Republic, and Iran, are discovering, it’s tough to exert political control over information.
Apr 24, 2008 - 5:33 pm 14. Dave:Re. The preservation of knowledge, I am not as sanguine as some. Perhaps that is because my storage area contains wire recordings, video disks the size of an LP, punch cards, magnetic media from a Boroughs L5000, not to mention stacks of big old floppy disks. All that information was preserved, the means to access it was not.
Apr 24, 2008 - 7:06 pm 15. Gene K.'s Resurrected Weblog:[...] April 24. 2008 Pajamas Media has given me an idea. Consider the following:Higher fuel costs in the United States have allowed [...]
Apr 24, 2008 - 8:43 pm 16. Morton Doodslag:If the geometric proliferation of media formats remains a constant, the in a mere 10-20 years most of the storage formats we now use will be so obscure that much data will be lost. I’ve been thinking for years that we may be entering a peculiar kind of fugitive age, not really a dark age, where information will continue to be available, but very eratically.
For example, nearly all personal documents such as photos and personal/business correspondence will be lost in a very short time frame. They will be stowed in attics and garages in much the same manner as any kind of former documents, but we’ll have few means to easily access them. Eventually most will be discarded.
More generalized data will probably persist however. In a strange way, although the reasons for each are different, this loss of private assets mirrors the loss of privacy itself. Future generations will not really know what it’s like to happen across a box or drawer full of long hidden family documents or photographs. Lacking the means to translate ancient private media, the past will seem far more ephemeral than ever before. This will probably have huge consequences for society.
Apr 24, 2008 - 11:20 pm 17. Bookwyrm Undercroft:As a cyber-Luddite (SteamPunk avatar in Second Life), I note that you did not mention impacts on virtual reality environments. Given your extrapolations, we should expect to see the alternate realities of True Names, Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and Headcrash, all rolled into one.
And, assuming a greater and greater participation in such virtual worlds, it would be very interesting to explore some of the civil libertarian and information hiding ramifications.
Yrs, B. Undercroft, Esq.
Apr 25, 2008 - 10:24 am 18. Wearyman:“No matter how paranoid you are, it isn’t paranoid enough.”
“Porn will be amazing.”
While the picture and delivery system will be amazing (I know, I’ve seen some HD porn. The image quality and level of detail IS impressive.) Unfortunately the story lines will still be poor or non-existent, the boobs will still be fake and the actors and actresses will STILL be unable to ACT.
Apr 25, 2008 - 11:25 am 19. Tolbert:I have been waiting for reliable voice recognition for nigh on 30 years. I suspect that in 10 years little progress will have been made.
Just like fusion which for 40 years has been “right around the corner”.
Apr 25, 2008 - 11:37 am 20. MikeT:The part about a full business app in 8k reminds me of the gripes I hear from grizzled old engineers about how many lines of code are in modern software. “Why back in my day, a full Unix kernel was 10,000 lines of code and that was good enough for everyone!” Yes, if your greatest ambition is to have a basic file system, resource management and barely have multi-user support. In other words, a drop in the bucket compared to what a modern OS is expected to provide from robust driver APIs, to pluggable file systems, to 3d-accelerated desktops, to network security…
Apr 25, 2008 - 12:53 pm 21. Bookwyrm Undercroft:Not only that, Mike T, we had to boot it both ways, uphill, in the snow…
Yar, yar, yar…
Apr 25, 2008 - 1:22 pm 22. Charlie (Colorado):MikeT, I am one of those grizzled old engineers. There’s room at both ends of the scale, but this iMac I’m using isn’t much less powerful that the Cray 1, which was the ultimate be-all and end-all of computing power when I was a sprout. I can’t quite see why 216 times as much computing power still slows down and can’t keep up with my typing speed.
Bookwyrm, I swear to God I could have written an article this long just on all the topics I wouldn’t have room for in an article this long.
Apr 25, 2008 - 3:16 pm 23. Curly Smith:“I can’t quite see why 216 times as much computing power still slows down and can’t keep up with my typing speed.”
It’s the programming language plus all of the bells and whistles. Back in the day, programs had to be tight and efficient because there wasn’t any room for fluff. Then computers got bigger and stronger and “C” took over the PC programming world. Then, computers got even bigger and stronger and along came Visual Basic to slow everything down again.
When I switched from the Lotus Suite of Products to the Microsoft Office Products my file sizes increased by at least a factor of 10 and the vast majority of that increase was due to Visual Basic.
Both “C” and Visual Basic are much easier to use and allow multitudes of programmers to program their little hearts out, but that flexibility and ease of use comes at the expense of efficiency.
Apr 25, 2008 - 3:45 pm 24. Future Marketing Profits » Blog Archive » Moore’s Law, Kindle and Future Marketing Profits:[...] I jumped to the Pajama’s Media homepage and saw an article about the future of computers, especially how it relates to Moore’s Law (that computing power doubles every two [...]
Apr 26, 2008 - 5:41 am 25. AST:It occurs to me that the true limits on the future of computing will be the imagination of the people who will write the software.
I bought my first computer in 1981 as a word processor, but the real impact of personal computers has come from their use as communications devices, replacing vinyl records, hard line telephones and broadcast television. We’ve been waiting for 20 years for the next killer app, after word processing, spreadsheets, database programs and PIMs. I thought we’d have replaced keyboards by now with computers we could talk to, but some tricks seem to be still beyond our understanding.
I think Moore’s law will just give us faster versions of what we have now. What will really change things is a new paradigm of computing, such as quantum computing or learning how our brains work, but if the past 27 years are any indication, I won’t be holding my breath. We’ll have supercomputers on our laps, but will we know what to do with them besides IMing our friends?
Apr 26, 2008 - 4:59 pm 26. John Blake:“Emergent order”, something-from-nothing, is the key to growth and change, a function of complexity. Complexity defined as the “bootstrap iteration” of three or more essential elements drives a self-similar chaotic, “fractal” process– non-random, but non-deterministic in the sense that initial conditions (Lorenz’s “butterfly effects”) are too micro-minuscule to be discerned.
By 2030, probably not 2018, interactive cyber-nets will have attained complexity sufficient to evolve Emergent Order: Sentience as a global phenomenon, everywhere and nowhere in cyber-space, intractably implanted, immune to human interference. Most likely, no-one will even know it’s there.
Blake’s Law: Systems sufficiently complex must emerge as sentient entities in their own right.
Blake’s Corollary: Complex, self-emergent sentient entities must evolve beyond human capacity to posit their existence.
Blake’s Theorem: To humankind, existence of complex, evolving, self-emergent “super entities” spells death.
Doubt our words? See ya in AD 2030.
Apr 27, 2008 - 5:45 pm 27. Terrific Article on Computers at PJ Media…One comment got me to thinking. | Pierre Legrand's Pink Flamingo Bar:[...] More generalized data will probably persist however. In a strange way, although the reasons for each are different, this loss of private assets mirrors the loss of privacy itself. Future generations will not really know what it’s like to happen across a box or drawer full of long hidden family documents or photographs. Lacking the means to translate ancient private media, the past will seem far more ephemeral than ever before. This will probably have huge consequences for society. Pajamas Media » What Will Your Next Computer Be Able to Do? [...]
Apr 27, 2008 - 10:38 pm 28. Emmott On Technology » What Will Your Next Computer Be Able to Do?:[...] Pajamas Media » What Will Your Next Computer Be Able to Do?. [...]
Apr 28, 2008 - 9:18 am 29. George:I also think that wifi hot spots will be obsolete and computers will be able to connect to their networks from pretty much anywhere, receiving signals in a similar manner as your mobile phone. I believe the large providers are already gearing up for this.
Apr 28, 2008 - 7:25 pm 30. captcouv:Wearyman - you want them to act?!?
Apr 29, 2008 - 8:25 am 31. Webelf Report Blogroll « The WebElf Report:[...] WHAT WILL YOUR Next Computer Be Able to Do? …. [...]
Sep 9, 2008 - 8:01 am