Top Ten Emerging Technology Areas
from the what's-next? dept
Technology Review has their predictions for what the 10 hottest emerging trends in technology will be. Not surprisingly (given their reputation and history), it’s a pretty good list. If you’re at all interested in where the future of technology is heading, you don’t need to believe these predictions, but you should at least read them. Update: When I originally posted this, I hadn’t noticed that they also list ten technology trends that never caught on.
Comments on “Top Ten Emerging Technology Areas”
WordStar
By 1984, WordStar International was the country’s largest software company, but WordStar2000, released in 1985, fared poorly against rival WordPerfect
Maybe it’s just as well that they didn’t live much past 1985 – what would they have done when the real 2000 came about?
No Subject Given
The second list isn’t of technologies that never caught on; it’s of technologies that have had their day. Certainly WordStar had caught on in the pre-Windows days, and certainly the slide rule had caught on in the days before pocket calculators.
As for the emerging technology list, I have so little faith in the technologies on this list that I should start a contrarian fund to invest in the opposite of everything listed. Brain-machine interfaces? Sure; any day now. Digital rights management? Yeah, end users just love that — it might have its day like software copy protection did in the 80s, but that will be a temporary phase. And data mining is the emperor’s new clothes: going over the same data looking for correlations is the same mistake poor researchers do when they keep sifting their experimental data until they find something that supposedly proves their result. 95% statistical significance sounds good unless you’ve done 20 experiments, then it’s just randomness.