What will provide the next technological leap?

[hellokeith]

I am not speaking of something that necessarily happens overnight, but something that drastically changes conditions after that technology is widespread. For example: residential electricty, residential plumbing/water, air conditioning and refrigeration, cell phones, etc.

Personally I think the next *leap* will be wireless power transmission.

A close 2nd might be a leap in battery power and/or fuel-cell batteries that power an electronic device at full power for months or years.

EDIT: Aug 22 2008, update on page 3
Wireless power, I told you so AT naysayers!!!

 

[BrownTown]

Originally posted by: hellokeith
Personally I think the next *leap* will be wireless power transmission.

Well I can guarantee that will NOT be it

 

[herm0016]

Originally posted by: BrownTown

Originally posted by: hellokeith
Personally I think the next *leap* will be wireless power transmission.

Well I can guarantee that will NOT be it

this.

i don't know if there is anything really big on the horizon. hopefully cold fusion comes soon.

 

[bobsmith1492]

There was a whole article in one of IEEE's recent magazines. Based on historical trends, a big leap is forthcoming and I think one of the hypotheses was machines able to take over menial labor tasks via artificial semi-intelligence (cooking, cleaning, customer service, etc.). Similar to the Industrial Revolution, masses of people could be quickly supplanted in their day-to-day tasks leading to major upheaval in the social order followed by great leaps in overall knowledge and productivity (and lots of wars...).

That being said, there's no telling what will cause said phenomena.

Originally posted by: herm0016

Originally posted by: BrownTown

Originally posted by: hellokeith
Personally I think the next *leap* will be wireless power transmission.

Well I can guarantee that will NOT be it

this.

i don't know if there is anything really big on the horizon. hopefully cold fusion comes soon.

Cold fusion is a myth but I would generalize your comments to say that a portable, super-high energy density power source would bring dramatic changes to the tech world. Think Iron Man - laptops as powerful as a supercomputer that run for days, cell phones integrated into clothing (never recharge), electric cars that run for weeks, and so on, so forth ad nauseum, ad infinitum.

 

[NovaProspekt]

It depends on how big you consider a "leap" to be. The largest leap I can think of is the creation of true artificial intelligence. If we can do that then humanity will witness a revolution greater than any before it.

 

[PolymerTim]

Here's one interesting idea:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/07/15/bio.tech/index.html

 

[Cogman]

Originally posted by: BrownTown

Originally posted by: hellokeith
Personally I think the next *leap* will be wireless power transmission.

Well I can guarantee that will NOT be it

lol, that was exactly what went through my mind.

Battery power I think is due for a big jump. There have been many techs in battery power that have shown a lot of promise. However, not to the extent you are saying, more like from a 1 hour charge to a 5 hour charge (yes, still a big leap) with shorter charging times.

My next bet would say that mass acceptance of Nano tech of some sort. There have been TONS of things done with carbon nano-tubes and it has to be close to being a common household item (IE, it will be in everything)

 

[bwanaaa]

PolymerTim,

Absolutely agree. We are leaving the information age and entering the 'intelligence age'. As transistor counts dwarf neural synapse counts, intelligent machines will figure out how to manipulate our economic system and we will not even be aware of it. They will see us as pets in their zoo. They will not want to live in our world as robots because that is too limiting, just as we do not like to live underwater with the fish. Their electronic existence will give them far greater speed, freedom of mobility and interaction as well as instantaneous hive and herd behavior. Intelligent entities will wink into and out of existence in such great numbers and speed that we will not recognize it.

 

[Vee]

Computing capacity. That is still the basis for 'the next leap'. You ain't seen nothing yet. Moore's law is by no means finished and processing power will make a lot of mind boggling new things possible.

We're already entering that era with things like cell phones and GPS devices. You've already seen this era being born. So I sort of vagually agree with PolymerTim and bwanaaa, even if I may not exactly agree to their scenarios in detail .

Just one example of 'magic' things maybe emerging could be a new sort of view technology, synthetic view point space (or view space) and synthetic view angle. This as usually immediately has some military applications (most immediately for UAV piloting) but would also maybe be interesting for the entertainment industry. Just a brief description of what this would be: Imaging from a camera is not just simply displayed. Instead it's continually collected to build a 3D or 4D data representation of what it 'sees'. Parts not visible are remembered or guessed. As information continues to be collected by the camera the representation will be increasingly resolved. And it doesn't has to be just one camera. It can be many cameras connected by a network. And instead of viewing the scene through the camera from the camera's momentary position, a viewer can freely choose the viewpoint in a 3D space. The displayed image will of course be synthesized.

So instead of showing your friends and relatives pictures or videos from your vacation, you may instead take them on a virtual trip in a 3D world, even with stereo vision. Take them anywhere they want to go, as long as your cameras were there.

And that's just an example. I don't think we're able to imagine the things that will be possible.

As for wireless power, it's physically possible but by its very nature it is also dangerous, too dangerous. It's also inefficient and 'dirty' which goes completely against the demands of energy crisis and 'green' needs. So no. Absolutely not. Won't happen. Only wireless power you'll get is solar power.

 

[Paperdoc]

Neither of these is coming, AFAIK, but is badly needed:
1. Much higher efficiency in solar power collectors. Current tech gets about 5% of solar energy converted to electricity.
2. A way to send huge amounts of heat into space. As much as we are all beginning to realize the cost, and hence the limits, of our huge energy consumtion habit, the real limit will become its contribution to global warming. Virtually all the energy we consume ends up converted to low-grade heat that cannot escape our atmosphere, thereby increasing the earth's surface temperature. Getting rid of that heat will be at least as important as finding better ways to capture and use energy for our comfort.

 

[PowerEngineer]

Originally posted by: BrownTown

Originally posted by: hellokeith
Personally I think the next *leap* will be wireless power transmission.

Well I can guarantee that will NOT be it

Agreed.

I'm guessing that the next big leap will come from an area of science that hasn't contributed much to recent leaps (ruling out electronics/computing). Picking one, I'd go with biotech. Widespread application of breakthrough genetic techniques would completely change the way we live.

 

[firewolfsm]

Originally posted by: bwanaaa
Absolutely agree. We are leaving the information age and entering the 'intelligence age'. As transistor counts dwarf neural synapse counts, intelligent machines will figure out how to manipulate our economic system and we will not even be aware of it.

There are 10^15 synapses in the brain, and each neuron is much, much more flexible than a simple on or off transistor. It will be a long time before a computer can approach the complexity of the brain.

And as long as we write the programs, nothing sci-fi-ish should happen like that. I don't see why people fear the rise of "intelligent" machines so much. They are machines and if we don't teach them how to write their own programs they can't do much beyond what we want.


And I really think the next age of man, after the digital age, will be the biotech age.

 

[KIAman]

Quantum computing.

Want to finally know how far PI really goes? How about simulate every event you can possibly think of (no more weapons testing, medicinal testing, aerodynamics, chemical reactions, genetic recombination, etc.) How about storing every piece of information and knowledge known to mankind?

The possibilities are endless.

 

[Cogman]

Originally posted by: KIAman
Quantum computing.

Want to finally know how far PI really goes? How about simulate every event you can possibly think of (no more weapons testing, medicinal testing, aerodynamics, chemical reactions, genetic recombination, etc.) How about storing every piece of information and knowledge known to mankind?

The possibilities are endless.

How will quantum computing suddenly make an irrational number rational... Pi has no end, its like saying "Finally, we will see which number is biggest!" We don't even have a good programming paradigm for quantum computing, a lot of the power is designated to checking to make sure answers are correct.

Though, it does have a fair amount of potential, but it will be a long time (if ever) before these things will be in every house.

 

[bwanaaa]

a petabyte is 10^15 bytes. that's the number of synapses in the brain. isnt that the amount of information that google processes in a day? so if we used all of the synapses in our brain we would have the bandwidth of google. Clearly, the 'cloud' is upon us, and will soon eclipse our primitive cave man bodies. thankfully. colossus, o where are you to end the insanity that we call politics and war?

 

[NovaProspekt]

Originally posted by: firewolfsm
There are 10^15 synapses in the brain, and each neuron is much, much more flexible than a simple on or off transistor. It will be a long time before a computer can approach the complexity of the brain.

It will be about 20 years or so until computers have the computing capacity of the brain. That's also around the amount of time it will take to be able to perform a full scan of the human brain as well.

These predictions are based off of exponential trends of course but there isn't much reason to doubt them (the computing capacity trend has existed for decades). You could make the argument that we will reach hardware limits that will cause these trends to be inaccurate but this objection is not very strong in practice. It's true that we are nearing the limits of how small we can make current microprocessors but there is no reason to suspect that all progress will stop. The limits we have on current processor design are nowhere near the theoretical limits of how much computation we can get from a chunk of matter. Technology progresses.

Originally posted by: firewolfsm
And as long as we write the programs, nothing sci-fi-ish should happen like that. I don't see why people fear the rise of "intelligent" machines so much. They are machines and if we don't teach them how to write their own programs they can't do much beyond what we want.

If consciousness is a natural process then we can emulate it.

 

[PolymerTim]

Originally posted by: bwanaaa
a petabyte is 10^15 bytes. that's the number of synapses in the brain. isnt that the amount of information that google processes in a day? so if we used all of the synapses in our brain we would have the bandwidth of google. Clearly, the 'cloud' is upon us, and will soon eclipse our primitive cave man bodies. thankfully. colossus, o where are you to end the insanity that we call politics and war?

I don't claim to know much about this, but there does seem to be a common oversimplification when this gets brought up. Namely, a synapse is not a byte and a neuron is not a transistor. Just because we can create a CPU with the same number of transistors as the brain has neurons does not necessarily mean that it is of equal (or more or less) power. To make that correlation, you have to know how many transistors on average are needed to emulate a neuron or even a synapse. I would hazard the guess that it is much more than one.

I do believe we will probably get there eventually, just not as soon or in the same way as some think. I think consciousness is more of a philosophical term than a scientific one, but I imagine we can create something that is, to us, indistinguishable from a self-conscious, evolving program. Having the same thing be physically self-replicating (and evolving) with no assistance from humans is a much bigger step that I think is too far in the future for us to accurately predict.

 

[dorion]

I don't think a technological breakthough will give us our leap, it going to be some sort of cultural/environmetal change. War, famine, a new global presense. War has alway been a good motivator, and any kind of famine that affects a well developed country is going to bring a reaction. Somewhere in China and India are probably the equivalent of 10x the amount of Genuises we had driving our last leap. We're at a tipping point, one good theory, dust storm, or well placed shot can shoot us into the next stage of technology.

AIs, maybe, but what makes computers so important? Chemistry, biology, and physics have just as much revolutionary ideas.

 

[BladeVenom]

Genetic engineering. Engineered bacteria will fulfill the failed promises of nanomachines. The computer age will bring about the biologic age.

 

[RideFree]

The memristor or memory resistor.

 

[1prophet]

Originally posted by: NovaProspekt

Originally posted by: firewolfsm
There are 10^15 synapses in the brain, and each neuron is much, much more flexible than a simple on or off transistor. It will be a long time before a computer can approach the complexity of the brain.

It will be about 20 years or so until computers have the computing capacity of the brain. That's also around the amount of time it will take to be able to perform a full scan of the human brain as well.

These predictions are based off of exponential trends of course but there isn't much reason to doubt them (the computing capacity trend has existed for decades). You could make the argument that we will reach hardware limits that will cause these trends to be inaccurate but this objection is not very strong in practice. It's true that we are nearing the limits of how small we can make current microprocessors but there is no reason to suspect that all progress will stop. The limits we have on current processor design are nowhere near the theoretical limits of how much computation we can get from a chunk of matter. Technology progresses.

Originally posted by: firewolfsm
And as long as we write the programs, nothing sci-fi-ish should happen like that. I don't see why people fear the rise of "intelligent" machines so much. They are machines and if we don't teach them how to write their own programs they can't do much beyond what we want.

If consciousness is a natural process then we can emulate it.

Have computers reached insect level intelligence yet?

 

[Modelworks]

Biological computers or creations would be an amazing accomplishment. We can't even duplicate what a ant can do using current mechanical methods. If we can ever get to growing technology rather than building it, that will be a huge leap. Stuff like displays that are grown rather than built, with maybe something like the skin of a chameleon used to change color, controlled by a neural network. From what I read it would make a great display method

Chameleons have specialized cells, collectively called chromatophores, that lie in layers under their transparent outer skin. The cells in the upper layer, called xanthophores and erythrophores, contain yellow and red pigments respectively. Below these is another layer of cells called iridophores or guanophores, and they contain the colourless crystalline substance guanine. These reflect, among others, the blue part of incident light. If the upper layer of chromatophores appears mainly yellow, the reflected light becomes green (blue plus yellow). A layer of dark melanin containing melanophores is situated even deeper under the reflective iridophores. The melanophores influence the 'lightness' of the reflected light. All these pigment cells can rapidly relocate their pigments, thereby influencing the colour of the chameleon.

Wireless power transfer was done by Tesla many times. I hope he is vindicated in the future. He did so much to make the world we have now and yet towards the end of his life was judged to be a crackpot.

 

[Comdrpopnfresh]

room temperature or near-room temperature super conductors. Electronics, transportation, nearly everything would evolve technologically.
With that, we might also break through in superfluids, and planes like the f-22 could be made with a pilot in a superfluid gyro, experiencing very little g-forces. Planes could and trains could then be made where the limiting factor of the human(s) aboard is less of an issue.

 

[tomcat2200]

We already have a revolution comming down the pipe. It is the micro transducers. Not to be mixed up with the nanotech myth. These are real, and comming soon.

The applications are phenominal, and there have already been many successful lab tests to demonstrate feasibuility.

If you thought the breakthroughs with the precision stepping motors was big, this will be huge.

 

[designerfx]

My guess would actually be hauptics-integrated technologies.

Think....real world applications of control systems not involving wires.