John Breslin is a lecturer and researcher who co-founded the discussion forum boards.ie and publishing company New Tech Post. He discusses predictions about the future of technology from Mark Twain, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Kurzweil, and how emerging technologies will allow for augmented reality, brain uploading, and voice-controlled access to personalized digital content by 2040.
3. Lecturer at NUI Galway
Electrical and Electronic Engineering
School of Engineering and Informatics
4. Researcher at DERI
• World’s largest Semantic Web research institute
• Leader of the Unit for Social Software
5. Set up a games forum in ’98
(16;58) (dev) “why not do www.boards.ie and just
slowly build a site of general stuff”
6. Co-founder of boards.ie
Ireland’s largest
discussion forum site
2.25 million visitors/month 150000
Irish people seeking 112500
information, or just 75000
chatting about sports, TV, 37500
politics, finance, whatever 0
2005-11-15
2007-01-11
2008-03-08
2009-05-04
Majority shareholder: Daft 2010-06-30
7. Founder of New Tech Post
newtechpost.com
Galway-based publisher
of stories focused on
emerging, cutting-edge,
innovative technologies
Partners: Irish Innovation
Center (San Jose)
10. Mark Twain, “From the
London Times of 1904”, 1898
...and he now took the fancy that he would like to have the telelectroscope and divert
his mind with it. He had his wish. The connection was made with the international
telephone-station, and day by day, and night by night, he called up one corner of
the globe after another, and looked upon its life, and studied its strange
sights, and spoke with its people, and realized that by grace of this marvelous
instrument he was almost as free as the birds of the air, although a prisoner under lock
and bars.
He seldom spoke to me, and I never interrupted him when he was absorbed in his
amusement. I sat in his parlor and read and smoked, and the nights were very quiet
and reposefully sociable, and I found them pleasant. Now and then I would hear him
say, "Give me Yedo"; next, "Give me Hong Kong"; next, "Give me Melbourne." And I
smoked on, and read in comfort, while he wandered about the remote
underworld, where the sun was shining in the sky, and the people were at their
daily work. Sometimes the talk that came from those far regions through the
microphone attachment interested me, and I listened.
11. Arthur C. Clarke, “BBC
Horizon”, 1964
I am thinking of the incredible breakthrough which has been made possible by
developments in communications, particularly the transistor and - above all - the
communication satellite. These things will make possible a world in which we can be in
instant contact with each other, wherever we may be; where we can contact our
friends everywhere on earth even if we do not know their actual physical
location. It will be possible, in that age, perhaps only 50 years from now, for a man to
conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London. In fact, if
it proved worthwhile, almost any executive skill, any administrative skill, even many
physical skills could be made independent of distance.
I am perfectly serious when I suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in
Edinburgh operating in patients in New Zealand. When that time comes, the whole
world would have shrunk to a point and the traditional role of a city as the
meeting place for man would have ceased to make any sense. In fact, men will
no longer commute, they will communicate. They won’t have to travel distance any
more; they’d only travel for pleasure.
33. What the future will look like
Digital technologies will
be woven throughout
our daily lives to a level
where they are another
essential service, just
as electricity or clean
water are today
34. IDC, “Digital Universe
Study”, 2010
A study on the amount of digital information created
and replicated in the world
75% of our digital world is a copy (25% is unique)
2010: 1.2 zettabytes (1.2 trillion gigabytes)
A stack of DVDs stretching to the moon and back
2020: 35 zettabytes (35 trillion gigabytes)
A stack of DVDs reaching halfway to Mars
35. Researchers are creating systems
to help us to find the info we need
New search and discovery tools
Ways to add structure to unstructured content,
including images, audio and video content
Requires metadata (data about data), Semantic Web
New information management tools
Prioritisation, classification, automatic deletion
Better methods for trust, privacy, accountability
36. Finding meaning in masses
of data
Big data analytics
Data mining
Visualisation
Networked knowledge
37. Storage capacities
Latest memory storage drives can hold 2-3 terabytes
Every 15 years, capacity increases roughly by 1000
Paul Reber (Northwestern University) estimated the storage of a
human brain to be around 2500 terabytes in a 2010 Scientific
American piece
Other estimates vary this up or down by a factor of 1000
Would require 1000 x 2.5 terabyte drives to store a brain
Not unreasonable to imagine we could store a brain’s capacity on
a ‘memory’ drive by 2025
38. Processing capacities
Estimates for the brain are that it can carry out
anywhere from 1016 flops (floating point operations per
second) to 1019 flops
Current supercomputers operate at 2.5 x 1015 flops
Using Moore’s Law, we may have supercomputers
capable of human brain simulation by 2025 (1019 flops)
By 2040, this grows to 5 x 1022 flops (= 5000 people)
39. The brain is more than just storage
and processing: consciousness
Interesting article on
this topic in today’s
Guardian newspaper
http://bit.ly/
brainappleyard
Review of “The Brain is
Wider than the Sky” by
Bryan Appleyard
40. Ray Kurzweil, “By 2040 you will be able
to upload your brain...”, The
Independent, 2009
In 2040, by his
estimation, we will be
able to upload the
human brain to a
computer, capturing “a
person's entire
personality, memory,
skills and history”!
(And upload to brains?)
41. Voice-controlled holo access
Today’s web will feel like a messy second-hand bookshop when
compared to the orderly library of our personalised digital universe
42. Interested in more?
Georgia Tech FutureMedia Outlook
http://www.futuremediaga.com/
New Media Consortium Horizon
Report
http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2011-
Horizon-Report.pdf
New Tech Post
http://newtechpost.com/
Slides from this talk
http://www.slideshare.net/
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