I just want lower power devices and better batteries so I can run my house entirely on solar / wind. The rest will be what it is.

cheers, Paul

I was working for an electrical contracting & engineering company where my boss preferred to use his slide-rule over a calculator.  Computers came to this company in the mid 1980s and that’s where I first used a PC.

When the Jetsons came to TV in 1963, people were obviously very optimistic because of all the things being changed by space travel and semiconductors taking the place of vacuum tubes.  The Jetsons lifestyle was what things were predicted to be like in 2063.  I personally have always thought we would be very hard pressed to come close to that.  Rosie? Probably.  Flying cars – maybe, but they won’t take the family to Mars or even into orbit around the earth.  Condos that can adjust altitude to get above nasty weather – no.

Now back to current reality.  Sorry to have to say it, but based on what I’m seeing and experiencing currently, in 50 years we’ll be very lucky if planet earth is still habitable.  If so, mankind will be living a feudalistic lifestyle of serfs, peasants, and kings.  We are currently not going forward.  I can only hope somehow this changes!

I didn’t exist for another 9 years!

What technology do you predict for the next 50 years?

Smartphones that can be implanted into people’s heads.  Audio would connect to ears via Cochlear implants and video via contact lenses with little LCD or LED screens.

I was a high school freshman in the spring of 1975. Two years later my father got an OSI Challenger, one of the earliest 6502-processor-based microcomputers. At first he ran Tom Pittman’s Tiny BASIC on it. Sometime later he got the full-featured Microsoft BASIC for it, which is a distant ancestor to Visual Basic. My very first programming experience was first on Tiny BASIC, then on Microsoft BASIC. Such was my introduction to Microsoft.

As for my predictions for the future, I’m not much of a prognosticator. I never saw the sudden explosion of generative AI, and the mad rush to adopt it, coming. But I do think there will be advances in quantum computing that may eventually make today’s computing technology obsolete.

And while no one can be certain of the timing, it seems likely that the events described in the Book of Revelation will happen within the next 50 years. People will be required to take a mark in their right hand or forehead, or be killed. (WARNING: The Bible says that anyone who takes this mark will seal his eternal doom!) Computer technology will be used to enforce the prohibition of buying or selling without the mark.

steeviebops wrote:

I didn’t exist for another 9 years!

It’s always delightful to know that we have younger readers!

Would like quantum computing advances, but in general i think human tech advancement has stagnated and am not seeing progression in reaching moon, mars etc no progression in clean free energy. Alot of tech still seems a pipe dream or further out than my lifetime.

pine-apple II, spectrum z80, and byte mag….

In 1975 I was a university undergrad, learning BASIC (or FORTRAN – my memory that far back is a bit fuzzy)  programming on a PDP 11/75 mini computer.  I was actually an Art major at that time – but became fascinated with computers.

Around 1979 I got an Apple II+ and my course was set for an inevitable career path in computing.  A few years later, when I got my first job offer for a programmer position, I also had a hard won offer (which I had been waiting 3 years for) in hand for an electrician apprenticeship.  It was tough choosing between the two – but the chance for a computing career won out.  No complaints on that decision!

In 1975 I was an old-time computer guy, already working for my second employer. I started working on computers in 1965, and they were delivered in a full-sized tractor trailer and required riggers to move them into the raised floor air conditioned computer rooms! I was one of several on-site engineers who then hooked everything up and got them running, and stayed around permanently to keep them going. My first site was huge – two computers, one with 4K of core memory used literally as a printer controller for tape-to-print, and the other had 16K of memory, used for magnetic tape sorts. Those were all discrete component logic cards, so you could find the failure by smell! We used paper circuit diagrams and oscilloscopes to troubleshoot and soldering irons and solder extractors to make repairs. We even had a guy who re-threaded the wires through the memory cores. In the second company I worked for, the entire computer was the size of the 5 volt power supply used in the previous machines – miniaturization had arrived!!

For the next 50 years? I think AI will be a pivotal technology and enrich our lives in ways we can’t even begin to imagine. I think it will make huge inroads into solving medical, scientific and engineering problems that will change the world so we will hardly recognize it, and it will be needed desperately if the next generations are to solve the climate problems! I just hope we can control it wisely.

I got married in 1975, and all the invitations and thank you notes went in the proper mail, we hadn’t heard of emails and messaging back then! For me the first new technology to impact my work came a lot later in the form of electric typewriters (on which you could store a handful of letters and templates etc which seemed amazing at the time!) and then fax machines. By the time I retired at the end 0f 2014 all my new incoming instructions, outgoing reports and data records etc were routinely handled online and towards the end all of it was being done from home with no need for an office.

I’m sure the future will involve further advances, more immediately in the form of AI which I’m not convinced will be a good thing especially in the creative arts, but I hope we shall also row back on some of the existing technology. I worry that the younger generations are growing up unable or unwilling to communicate with real people. So far as my experience in the UK is concerned I hope there’s a reduction in the use of self-checkouts in supermarkets, the reopening of bank branches and a move away from the cashless society. How is my young grandson supposed to be able to learn the value of money and how to manage it (or even count it) when everything has to be paid for by his parents’ contactless card?

The earlier comments above about the Book of Revelations are truly depressing, and I hope that as we learn more about the universes and everything within them we shall be able to look more to science to inform our lives while retaining some form of spiritual element to guide our lives and behaviour.

There will be drug detectors in the water system and when it detects anything illegal you’ll be arrested.