The Revolution Yet to Happen

Introduction By 2047 almost all information will be in cyber-space-including a large percentage of knowledge and creative works. All information about physical objects, including humans, buildings, processes, and organizations, will be online. This trend is both desirable and inevitable. Cyberspace will provide the basis for wonderfd new ways to inform, entertain, and educate people. The information and the corresponding systems will streamline commerce but will also provide new levels of personal service, health care, and automation. The most significant benefit will be a breakthrough in our ability to communicate remotely with one another using all our senses. The ACM and the transistor were invented in 1947. At that time, the stored-program computer was a revolutionary idea and the transistor was just a curiosity. Both ideas evolved rapidly. By the mid 1960s, integrated circuits appeared-allowing mass fabrication of transistors on silicon substrates. This allowed low-cost, mass-6 Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing produced computers. These technologies enabled extraordinary increases in processing speed and memory coupled with tremendous declines in price. The only form of processing and memory more easily, cheaply, and rapidly available is the human brain. Peter Cohrane6 estimates the brain to have a processing power of around one thousand million million operations per second (one petaops) and a memory of ten terabytes. If current trends continue, computers could have these capabilities by 2047. Such computers could be "on body" personal assistants able to recall everything one reads, hears, and sees. Ebr five decades, progress in computer technology has driven the evolution of computers. Now they are everywhere: from mainframes to pacemakers, fkom the telephone network to carburetors. These technologies have enabled computers to supplement and ofien supplant other information processors, including humans. In 1997, processor speed, storage capacity, and transmission rates are evolving at an annual rate of 60%, doubling every eighteen months, or 100 times per decade. It is safe to predict that computers in the year 2047 will be at least one hundred thousand times more powerful than those of today. * However, if processing speeds, storage capacities, and network bandwidths continue to evolve in accordance with Moore's Law,13 improving at the rate of 1.60 per year, then the computers in 2047 will be ten billion times more powerfid than those of today! A likely path, clearly visible in 1997, is the creation of thousands of essentially zero-cost, specialized, system-on-a-chip computers that we call Mi-crosystems. …