The Future Of Computing Will Be Good Enough

http://www.pcworld.com/article/163607/the_future_of_computing_will_be_good_enough.html

by nreece • 17 years ago

10 5 17 years ago

This article is another approach to the same idea expressed in this article from a day or two ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=569131

These kinds of comments about how our technology is "good enough" and will thus slow its evolutionary pace seem eerily similar to proclamations from a few decades ago that there would only be need for a few computers in the world, no computer would ever need more than a few kilobytes of memory, etc.

Do you need a 50-core CPU with 512GB of memory to run Firefox? No. However, it's a mistake to assume that tomorrow's technology will be used for the same applications as today's technology. Faster, cheaper, smaller, cooler, more efficient hardware will enable entirely new uses for computing that we can't really see right now.

derefr• 17 years ago

We thought of [cheap, ubiquitous] video phones 50 years ago, and finally had the tech to pull them off [Skype] five years ago. What computer-related advances are we thinking of right now that we'll only have the tech for in another 45 years? I can't think of anything off-hand, and I haven't read any futurists thinking of them either. Apparently, technology is harder to predict than it used to be.

aka-• 17 years ago

autonomous (even flying) cars need HW and SW advances. People have been banging on about brain-computer interfaces and augumented reality for years, both of which needs some serious hardware and design advances to be really usable (and would people be happy with wearing an OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator? lol). Futurist Michio Kaku reckons we might be close to force fields and telepathy.

WalkingDead• 17 years ago

In any case that doesn't help us the programmers.

If HW gets better and better, software will get easier and easier to develop as it had been happening in the last decades. And masses will create application for themselves using the "So easy to use that your mom can build it" tools which they will consider "good enough".

Think about the progression, assembly -> C/C++ -> PHP -> Ruby. Ruby wasn't a viable solution 10 years back because of its speed. But thanks to HW advances, now it’s good enough. Next extrapolate this trend. I shall stop here because the discussion will surely get depressing from here on.

But if advancement in HW stops, programmers demand will slow down too, as all software libararies and applications for that target get written and optimized.

It's a two way sword.

The Future Of Computing Will Be Good Enough

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