Computing’s low-cost, Cloud-centric future is not Science Fiction
October 22, 2012
In early 2009 I wrote an article called "I’ve seen the future of computing: It’s a screen." It was a an almost Sci-Fi sort of peice, projecting what I thought the personal computing experience might resemble ten years into the future, in 2019, based on the latest industry trends at the time. It was the second of such pieces, the first of which I wrote in 2008.
In May of 2011 I also wrote another speculative piece about what I thought personal computers would be like in the year 2019. Late last year, I imagined another speculative and futuristic scene, portraying the shift towards ecommerce and the fall of brick and mortar retail shopping.
Futurist thought exercises such as these are always fun, but inevitably, with any sort of long-range predictions of the future, there are things which are very easy to miss and get so wrong that you fall flat on your face. Futurism never gets everything right, but sometimes it can also be dead-on and flat out uncanny in its accuracy…
Excellent examples of these complete miss and "holy crap, were they right!" type of predictions can be found in classic Sci-Fi movies like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982).
In 2001, Kubrick is way ahead of his time in his depictions of manned and commercial space travel and the colonization of the moon, as well as true artificial intelligence, things which are probably at least several decades away. Still, the technologies to accomplish such feats are definitely within our reach if the world’s governments can cooperate and establish clear goals to achieve them…
Read more from the source @ http://www.zdnet.com/computings-low-cost-cloud-centric-future-is-not-science-fiction-7000006094/