Alright, so this isn’t all about coding, but it’s in the same wheelhouse.
Because it’s that time of year, where our inboxes are getting clobbered with Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Widget Tuesday deals, it’s been hard to ignore how cheap technology has gotten since just a few years ago, nevermind 10+ years ago. Oh, I could go on and on about my first computer with the green CRT screen and the whopping 128K RAM card, but I risk putting you to sleep already.
Consider hard drives, for example. The technology is getting so much better and cheaper — and quickly! — that the “remember when 1TB drives cost a mint” was just back around the corner. Now 1.5TB drives are almost sub-$100, meaning you could build what was once a $10,000 RAID array incredibly cheaply … for your home!
The next thing that’s increasing in popularity is solid-state drives, and that’s what got me thinking about my own technology predictions. I remember back over 15 years ago that I predicted these spinning hard drives would die out and we’d instead use blocks of memory as storage. Alright, not exactly the same thing, but it’s darned close! And I know I’m not the only one who’d considered it, but it makes my chest puff out just a little bit when I see predictions come true … only, I never publicly made that one, with the exception of a few colleagues.
Just so I can have a place to point to when these things come to be, either for me to say “I told ya!” or for others to point to and laugh, here are a few other technology predictions I believe we’ll see, perhaps within the next ten years:
Nothing but solid-state storage. Alright, a no-brainer, but spinning hard drives will seem as antique to our children as 1MB hard drives the size of a refrigerator are to us today. We’ll continue this trend to “go green,” which will mean lower powered devices. That includes solid-state storage. Prices will drop considerably in the next couple of years, and then this is all anyone will buy. By the end of next year we should see 2TB or possibly 3TB traditional drives in the price range that 1TB drives are now, but people will move to solid-state drives in droves, much as people have done from CRT monitors to LCD.
On that note, no more CDs. Yep, this includes DVDs and Blu-ray — all of that. Remember, no spinning drives. Why the unnecessary spinning parts when you can have solid-state storage? Many laptops are coming out with memory card readers built in, including the new Apple MacBooks. That’s how you’ll be sharing your stuff, not on scratchable, silver platters.
For that matter, why tote around portable storage at all? More likely you’ll transfer data wirelessly from your cellphone, which will be sporting much more storage than they have today. Wireless will be faster, so you transfer data from one place to the next using your phone. Oh, many people do that now, but it will become the norm when people realize how silly it is to carry around something so insecure and easy to lose as a DVD or memory card.
An alternative to silicon: everything. Well, almost everything. Now this is going to sound really out there, and I’m going to say this is likely something we’ll see in 20-30 years rather than ten, but I believe technology will advance to such a state where you can store data on just about any material. Oh, some material will work better than others, but imagine simply being able to stick a piece of solid metal into a device for it to store data?
A step up from this would be that upgrading storage or replacing it would be unnecessary. Storage would simply grow as needed throughout whatever’s available, meaning everything. I know, sounds otherworldly, but I can’t shake the thought that it can and will happen some day.
The world will go into virtual hiding. Most people I know and follow on Twitter or Facebook are smart about what they publish there. Same goes with bloggers and what they write. However, there’s a sizable group of people who haven’t learned, posting incriminating and embarrassing photos and stories about themselves in all of these places. Oh, they don’t care NOW that they are easily searchable by anyone who wants to know about them, but the next time they look for a job or try to land a date with someone, all of that public information will irreparably hurt them.
So, what are they to do? They go into virtual hiding. No more publishing anything about themselves. Ever. No more discussions in chat rooms, Facebook, Twitter or, in extreme cases, email. Anything they say could damage their future, so why risk having it said? Companies are now obligated by law to keep copies of all email sent and received, for years. What could be dug up? Instead of what’s becoming a “We Live in Public” world, people will turn to becoming hermits, because they’d believe it’s safer that way.
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Other than that, anything else I’ve got buzzing around in my brain is stuff many have already predicted. Phones will become a suitable computer for most people. Wired networking will become obsolete. All home entertainment will be downloads and no media. So, are my predictions absurd or sound? Got any of your own?
Tags: 2010 predictions, solid state drives, Technology predictions, technology theories
