A glimpse on an (unlikely) Future according to NYTimes readers

Just for fun, take a look at the crowd sourcing web site where  the New York Times is soliciting ideas on the Future, the far distant one!

You can get the timeline of computation going back to 1617 (the Napier’s Bone) to this day. And then you can sail on other people imagination into the Future of computation.

According to it we (our grand-grand-grand….children) should wait till 2,827 to have a working connection between the brain and the Internet…WiFi based!  I would be curious to know who formulated such a precise timeline! I am pretty sure that WiFi will have been disappeared already in the next century, imagine by 2,800!

Why not getting rid of the communications spectrum and just use telepathy for brain to brain communications? That should be possible (according to NYT readers) by 4,104! (Again a very precise estimate, that has been moved around 1,728 times…).

Quite frankly, I found most of the prediction based on very thin air, nevertheless it may be fun to look at them not to get some (speculative) information on the possible future, rather to get a glimpse on people’s expectation about science and technology. It actually shows how much misunderstanding there is in the lay person on science.

Personally I do not buy in most of those predictions but I have the feeling that in 4,104 there will be something far more spectacular than a trivial telepathic communications. A pity I won’t be there to check my prediction!