Imagining The Future

Jessica has a end of semester project in her high school technology class.  She is supposed to describe what her every day computer will be like in the year 2030.

She learned all about Moore’s Law in her class and figured out that the PowerPC processor that runs her Powerbook G4 laptop will have more than 2 trillion transistors on it and process over 200 trillion operations per second (way faster than the current world champ the IBM BlueGene which does 70 terraflops).

So she sat down, armed with this information, and started to imagine what she could do with her computer.  She thought about all the logical things, smaller, lighter, smarter, etc.  But she was still stuck in the world she knows; monitors, keyboards, memory chips, wifi, CDs/DVDs, etc.

So I asked her if she thought she could talk to her machine and if it would talk back?

Would she need a keyboard and a mouse if she could do that?

Would she need a monitor if there were $20 flatpanels everywhere that she could use when she needed a monitor?

What if all data could be wirelessly sent in and out of her computer?  Would she need the CD/DVD, the memory?

Would her computer be her phone?

Mind bending stuff for sure.  And I am not sure she wanted her mind bent when she had a project to complete.