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The Future Technology: Our Wish List!

Future Technology

Where’s the future?  If we were to judge the 2000s based on the depictions in the books and movies, we are yet to live up to our reputation as the generation of the future. Where are all those flying cars and personal robots?  Where are the floating cities? Far, far away it seems.

You may call it over enthusiasm, but weren’t we told decades ago, that we could have all these things in the future?  It was as far back as 1967 that a book, “Here Comes Tomorrow!” predicted several new technologies by the twenty-first century, including flying cars and manned Mars landing.  In the mid-twentieth century, most of the science fiction novels and films showed flying cars by the twenty-first century. Where are they?

Remember the Jetsons? They lived in Skypad apartments and George commuted to work in a flying car that looked like a flying saucer, and all he had to do at work is press a computer button. A robot maid took care of the housekeeping. Despite having all those comforts, they still complained of hard labor.

What about us? Here we are, in 2010, still using a car or a public transport system to get to work. Forget about flying cars, the traffic on the roads makes it slower for us to get from one place to another.  Our lifestyles have become so hectic that we are in desperate need of such technology to help make life easier for us.

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Well, people did make robots that do the household work. But they remain nothing but overly expensive and useless toys.

The wish list is something like this – Replicators, Flying Cars, Transporters, Self-healing objects, Invisible men, etc.

Well! What’s happening with the future technology? We can live no longer without any of these….

A dream-come-true!

Think about this: a machine with the ability to replicate an inanimate object from nothing. Our 20th century minds can think of larger implications to a replicator; from tackling world hunger to fuel problems.  Make a replicator like the one in Star Trek for every home, and no one will ever be hungry! Worried about water shortage?  That’s what the replicator’s here for.

The food replicator in Star Trek stored 3D scans of the molecular structure of drinks and food.  Whenever needed, it assembled individual molecules into food within seconds. If only we were as lucky as Jean-Luc Picard of Starship Enterprise.

Such technology may be beyond our comprehension at the moment, but a NASA study is looking at creating a more viable option – a compact cooking machine with the capacity to create a variety of foods using just a few space-friendly ingredients.  For example, our astronauts could request a chocolate trifle on the computer. That request would then be translated into a series of mathematical instructions for the food processor, which will use unconventional ingredients to mix, heat and cool, to come up with a dessert that looks and tastes exactly like a chocolate trifle. This technology is something that’s expected to be of use to us earthlings too, by evolving recipes that we could all enjoy. Perhaps the food replicators of the future will not only understand speech but will read our minds too.

A group of scientists have also invented a way for robots to self-replicate. This advanced technology may in the future allow robots to repair themselves or self-heal; especially on robot-only space missions where there are no humans to repair them.  A frightening scenario of replicating robots is that of robots going out of control and taking over the world.   But scientists say that these robots were programmed to stop after replication of two generations.  This was done just to show that that concept of replication works, and scientists ensured there are several constraints in place to ensure things don’t go out of hand.

But what if replication technologies are used with computer viruses?  Replicators suddenly sound scary, don’t they?

Highways in the air!

If only we had highways in the air! Flying cars could solve our problem of dealing with dug-up roads and heavy traffic.  We will no longer have to worry about potholes. If you’re worried about parking spaces in the sky, just remember George Jetson’s car – How it used to transform into a briefcase.

But if you don’t happen to enjoy driving (flying a car, in this case), you could always use a transporter to “beam” you wherever you want to within a second.

Photo by RichSeattle

Looks like we don’t have to wait too long to see a flying car, or at least something similar. The Department of Defense has just given the go-ahead for a flying car.

Knowledge without learning!

We gain knowledge over a period of years.  Beginning with school and going to college, it takes many years to learn and store everything in our brains. How about the ability to learn whatever you wish to in a single day?  One fine day, you fancy learning how to fly a plane and on another day you’d like to learn how to make chocolate truffle. Why bother with all those tension-filled flying classes and failures with chocolate truffle?

All you got to do is plug your brain to your computer and program flying and cooking classes into your brain!  Kids will love this, as they no longer need to lug their heavy bags around. And the best part is – no exams!  The Borg is just around the corner!

If you think all this is just fiction and limited to The Matrix, look around you. Look at all those implants being inserted into our brains to bring back eyesight or hearing.  There are implants connected to your brain, to bring movement to an artificial limb. In 2009, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic, Jerry Shih, enabled patients with implanted chips to type words by just focusing on the desired letters.

This would have been just science fiction a few years back. But this is just the beginning and we may soon have implants of tiny chips into the brain to learn.  How’s that for a technological breakthrough?

Self-healing at its best!

This is a no-brainer for someone who keeps dropping their mobile phone. The screen gets cracked and you run around to get it fixed or worse still, get a new phone.  If you’re honest, It hurts when your new phone bites the dust.

Imagine, if your mobile had the technology to heal itself. It’s not just about being hurt but also affordability.  Imagine the amount of money that can be saved if the objects we buy have the power to self-heal and last years and years. In this economy, “getting bored” with something is acceptable.

Who’s behind the invisibility cloak?

H.G. Wells published a science fiction novel in 1897, titled The Invisible Man, and added to our growing wish-list – an invisibility cloak.

Some of the futuristic creatures on “Star Trek” could do it, and so can Harry Potter. All kids are influenced by movies like The Invisible Man, Predator and the more recent Harry Potter.

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It’s no wonder that each one of us wants to get our hands on one. Wouldn’t you want to be invisible and scare that girl you hate so much?  How I always wished I could take a sneak peak at the question papers before the exams. Imagine the pranks you could pull at school or at work on your horrible boss.

Despite knowing that such technology has the potential to cause more harm than good, we still want it.  A prototype of the world’s first invisibility cloak was created in 2006, using engineered materials (metamaterials), which are materials that don’t exist naturally.

Scientists across the globe are making progress with experiments on making things invisible.  A recent development is that of a three dimensional invisibility cloak.

Scientists say that in principle it is not entirely impossible to make things completely invisible, but such technology remains far off and it may take years before they perfect it.

Although, these technologies may seem too far-fetched at the moment, and no one can predict the future, there are reasonable arguments that can be made, based on the advances of technology in the past.  For instance, it is reasonable to predict that the invisibility cloaks and objects that heal themselves may become a possibility in the future.

As you read this, some of the technologies are actually being worked upon. Work is in progress to create materials that can fill out the cracks in objects, with the end goal of creating objects that can actually fix themselves. As we’ve seen above, scientists are busy working on the creation of invisibility cloaks.

These technological marvels may not be perfected in 2010, but the next decade might actually be the one where the future begins to live up to our expectations.

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Imagine a scenario where by the end of the century, humanity will no longer have the power it has today. The day-to-day world affairs will be carried out by ultra-intelligent machines, ultra-fast robots and other digital entities.

Here’s an interesting take by Fast Future Research on what you might be doing in the next 20 years, as a result of technological advances.

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Usha is currently a freelance writer and internet marketer. She has worked as a freelance writer for many years and has been an active internet marketer for six years. Having worked in the health-field for ten years in a senior management position, her interests are varied. She writes on a variety of topics, which include business, management, health, tech and a host of others. She is also the author of an e-book on internet marketing, which will be launched soon. Her future plans include publishing a non-fiction novel.

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