The future of technology

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Microsoft is a company I don't like, but they are pioneering the future with:
3d glasses: http://www.patentbolt.com/2012/03/micro ... eyond.html
keyboards: http://www.patentbolt.com/2012/03/micro ... -ways.html
and there newest freeware app to control every device in your home: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGB4yBoX-To


The battle for the future is one that focuses more heavily on your living room then it does your office, because you never fully leave work, but you want to have entertainment everywhere, so the all important cloud will stream everything, and sync both your work life and home life into one.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/ ... iving_room

I found this insightful on who is planning to take the lead on cloud market share, infrastructure, and shaping the system: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/2 ... the-cloud/

A big part of this recent push to keep everything on "the cloud" and only rent content like games, books and the like is because of greed on the part of corporations. They see it is much more profitable to rent content and services with recurring payments rather than one time outright sales of those things. It's a return to feudalism where the one, central ultra wealthy individual lords over the serfs. It not really about reducing piracy, it's about the corporation owning and controlling everything and demonizing those who oppose them, labeling them as "thieves" and "pirates".

As the corporations improve technology to expand their tentacles of control over everything, the "pirates" as they would call them will also improve technology for resisting corporate domination.

I for one, don't like this new trend and plan on doing all I can to keep my own personal property locally stored. I much prefer to own things outright rather than make monthly payments and rent them from some corporate entity.

I find nothing appealing about the idea of "the cloud" and I have no use for it.
Another thing about "the cloud" is that it creates all kinds of unnecessary network traffic, bogging down servers. Also, what happens if the network goes down? You are S.O.L. with no access to your files and your programs. Local storage is much more preferable to network storage.

I find it somewhat concerning that our modern society is becoming so dependent on an ever-present network.
I think we are setting ourselves up for disaster if anything happens to the internet. All it would take is one really massive solar flare and the world could be screwed for weeks or months.

Hopefully folks are developing ways to make sure the net is ultra-resilient with many layers of redundancy.

I like to spend periods of time off-line. I believe it's important to remember I live in a physical realm.

That's why I mainly use a desktop at home.
When I get up from my desk, I want to be away from a computer. I don't feel the need to be "connected" ALL the time.
heck, most of the time I leave my cell phone at home ...which happens to be a "dumb" phone, I just use it for phone calls (imagine that!)

Maybe the world has become just a little bit TOO obsessed with the internet and information.

Focus on biotech so that we can extend the lifespan of human beings, thus letting our best minds work for longer to solve problems. With biotech we could also produce food artificially and feed everyone on Soylent Green. Then the next step would be space, which would be greatly helped by technology that makes humans less susceptible to issues due to zero gravity or excessively long space travel. Speaking of, I need to check my biotech investments in the morning.

There can be good uses for network storage and processing (aka the "cloud")
But it needs to be more practically applied. Really, marketing people grabbed a hold of the concept of network storage and processing and slapped the label "cloud" on it for sales purposes.

I mean really, how much traffic is being sent across the network just because it is there? tech companies need to think more about using the network more efficiently. It seems as if the internet is suffering from the same problems that freeways suffer from. As soon as you add more lanes, they fill up as fast as you can build them. It's not as if local storage is something hard to come by, we can pack 64Gigs in the size of a pinkey nail for not much of a cost. People just get sold on fancy marketing speak about convenience they never really or rarely use.

But back to the main topic: The future of technology.
It's hard to say where technology is headed. It's not really driven by what we are capable of, but the whims of the marketplace.

There is a lot of room for growth in the realm of energy generation, but big oil stands in the way of that. They want to milk dirty, inefficient 20th century technology for all they can get before allowing new methods of harnessing advanced energy generation methods. But eventually, shortages will demand we move on to something better.

Visual display technology is bound to advance a lot in the coming decades, for this feeds right in to the current mass media economic paradigm. But it will advance only as fast as each level of technology is sold. New stuff isn't rolled out until the stocks of the old stuff is sufficiently obsolete.

Profit motive holds back medical advancement. Currently, too much money is being made on "treating" ailments rather than "curing" them. Only the rich can afford the truly groundbreaking advancements. A LOT still needs to change in the economics of medicine.

Transportation technology still has a very long wait ahead of it. Infrastructure will remain quite expensive for a long time. And there are still a lot of HUGE mysteries around "star trek" type modes of transport.

Weapons technology is moving along at a terrifying pace given the trillions upon trillions spent on R&D each year, I'm sure we will be capable of making the sun go nova within 50 years. We humans just LOVE to blow crap up!

And one thing I know for sure is that if you think things are bad now, Just imagine our ability in 15 years to spew our uninformed, egotistical opinions about anything and everything thorough social media. If Facebook & Twitter aren't around in 2027, I shutter to think of what will replace them..... YIKES!! !