Computing's low-cost, Cloud-centric future is not Science Fiction

Summary: The future of personal computing is one that is cloud-centric, and utilizes inexpensive, power-efficient and disposable mobile, desktop and set-top devices.

In early 2009 I wrote an article called "I've seen the future of computing: It's a screen." It was a an almost Sci-Fi sort of peice, projecting what I thought the personal computing experience might resemble ten years into the future, in 2019, based on the latest industry trends at the time. It was the second of such pieces, the first of which I wrote in 2008.

In May of 2011 I also wrote another speculative piece about what I thought personal computers would be likein the year 2019.

Late last year, I imagined another speculative and futuristic scene, portraying the shift towards ecommerce and the fall of brick and mortar retail shopping.

Futurist thought exercises such as these are always fun, but inevitably, with any sort of long-range predictions of the future, there are things which are very easy to miss and get so wrong that you fall flat on your face. Futurism never gets everything right, but sometimes it can also be dead-on and flat out uncanny in its accuracy.

Excellent examples of these complete miss and "holy crap, were they right!" type of predictions can be found in classic Sci-Fi movies like Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey(1968) and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982).

In 2001, Kubrick is way ahead of his time in his depictions of manned and commercial space travel and the colonization of the moon, as well as true artificial intelligence, things which are probably at least several decades away. Still, the technologies to accomplish such feats are definitely within our reach if the world's governments can cooperate and establish clear goals to achieve them.

But in 2001, Kubrick also shows working tablet computers as well as personal video conferencing, technologies which have only recently become more commonplace. In 1968, when the film was first released, the forerunner to the Internet, ARPANET was still being developed at the US Department of Defense, so the concept of a world wide connected computer network that was accessible to the average Joe, let alone the military or academia was not yet a part of the common Sci-Fi vernacular.

Scott's Blade Runner,like Kubrick's 2001, is also very much ahead of its time. Dystopian Futurism is one of the huge themes of the film, depicting flying cars, giant overpopulated and polluted cities with towering 100 story buildings, and genetic engineering gone out of control. 30 years after the film's release, it is still considered to be a SF masterpiece.

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Computing's low-cost, Cloud-centric future is not Science Fiction