Comment Articles

The future's bright, the future's strange

Rupert Goodwins AnchorDesk

Published: 04 Sep 2001 13:03 BST

The PC's 20th birthday party is over. We've cleared away the streamers and empty Tizer bottles, wiped the cake crumbs off the keyboard and put the computers back to work. Twenty is an exciting age for anyone - but 40 is always much more thought provoking. Assuming our silicon chums and ourselves are still here in 2021, it's impossible to resist wondering how we'll all look.

It's facile to extrapolate. Facile, yet irresistible. A PC then had around 500,000 transistors, while a plump example now has well over a billion. A rough calculation says that, once you've taken clock speed, cache improvements and other architectural innovation into account, a top-notch PC of today runs around 2000 to 3000 times faster than the original. It has roughly the same improvement in storage, and -- if you're lucky -- about the same increase in communications speed with online services. If only the rapidly ageing Goodwins could say the same: the one point of similarity is that an original PC took around 20 seconds to boot up while a modern one can easily take twice as long.

Assuming that the 1000 times per decade growth rate continues -- and there are sound economic reasons why it may not -- then the PC of 20 years hence will be in the same ballpark as the human brain. If our noble computers today showed even the robustness and intelligence of an earthworm, that might mean that we'd have the science-fiction dream of super-smart companions solving all our woes: as it is, I have no doubt we'll still be swearing at some futuristic descendent of the Windows registry and wondering where our files have gone.

Yes, we'll have working voice recognition. Our computers will be able to recognise us through cameras, and discern our intent and emotions from our gestures, expressions and body language. We'll have real-world graphics, and the estates of deceased actors will retain control over the synthetic images of the dear departed much as literary estates jealously guard the works of dead writers. It will be a much richer and stranger world, both for the computers and those who use them.

But the trends that will change the world are outside the PC.