by Marshall Pauley

Created on: January 03, 2010

Not too long ago, big thinkers were stunning the world telling us that by the year 2000 we would all be driving flying cars which would zip along the roads on a cushion of air, which obviously didn't happen if you look at the cars we drive today. A few years back however, I was polled in a market research effort which inquired of me whether I thought I would use a hard drive larger than 500 gigabytes at any time in my life; they were trying to see if there was a market for such a large hard drive. Fast forward to the present day, and here I am with a full 1 terabyte external hard drive hooked up to my computer, and when I bought it 2 terabyte drives were also available. If nothing else, the future of technology is challenging to predict.

But while it may be chaotic and difficult to read, the future of technology can be seen and assessed, to a certain extent. Our main tool for looking into the future of technology are current trends, both trends in technology itself, and trends in society and the environment which will create windows for new technologies. One of the biggest and most omnipresent trends of the moment is miniaturization. Everything seems to be shrinking, phones have become narrower, laptops slimmer, even mechanical devices are reaching new heights of tininess. Before computers and electricity in everything, a man named Babbage created a device to process difficult mathematics, out of only mechanical parts. It was a huge creation with gears and linkages out the wazoo which was taller than most men and weighed a great deal. It was, arguably, an early computer, but that huge machine, with all of its intricacies and careful design, can't even be called a computer next to even the cheapest of today's personal computers. Whatever computer you are reading this on can almost undoubtedly perform those same calculations faster than Babbage's machine, and it your computer certainly doesn't take up as much room as that brass creation did.

Miniaturization is limited however, namely by our fingers, which aren't getting smaller. This clash of the trend with our anatomy is evident in many cell phones, where the engineers tried to shrink the device ever further, but found that people didn't like having to try and hit tiny keys with normal sized fingers, it tended to make people's hands cramp very quickly. The hardware could continue to shrink, but the external case had to remain sizable to be usable. This brings us to the other almost universal trend for technology

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