A local group of artists and intellectuals, which meets every month in a Santander restaurant, asked me to contribute a talk. Apparantly everyone who attends the meetings of this group takes turns to present a talk on a topic of their choice, apart from occasionally inviting other deserving individuals who come to present interesting talks from time to time.
What could I talk about? I cannot claim to be an expert in many things, although I do have many interests. Arts, photography, music and mathematics fascinate me, but I could not do justice to any of these fields. After careful thought I considered travel, but what could one tell anyone about travel? Dont forget to take your passport and remember to get the required vaccinations and those sort of things or perhaps share ones travel photos? No, that would not appeal enough to anyone.
Finally, it appeared there was only one possibility and that was to present a summary of my experiences with computer technologies through the years of my working life. However if I thought that once I had found a topic that the rest was going to be easy, then I was wrong. I found that it was going to be hard to pin down. Unfortunately the pace of change in the realm of Information technologies meant that I would be chasing a moving goalpost.
To reduce the chance of missing the mark I decided to build the presentation around past, present and the future of IT from one point of view - mine. This had the advantage that if I only covered some areas of this vast field then I could hide behind my personal point of view.
The start was easy and I could spark some interest with my first encounter with a 'computer', a term I had not yet come across at the time, in the jungles of Africa. Not many people in Santander would have heard of Kumasi, and even less have any first hand experience of having been there. The current state of technology most would be familiar with. We are all using or walking around with a quantity of gadgets that would have been mind boggling a few years ago. I still remember 1995, when I was invited topresent some work I was doing at the time, at an international conference in San Jose in California. I was amazed to find that every advertisement in the local newspaper carried an email address with which anyone could contact the company advertising. At the time this was still only occasional in the UK press.
Much more interesting is the question proposed by this post, ie where is all this technology going in future. The members of the discussion group in Santander deserve a proposed future of technology that gives them the opportunity to sink their teeth in a discussion. Latest research is exploring bacterial processors, Quantum mechanics and new materials for molecular level storage. All that promises ever faster and unlimited storage using a minimal of energy.
However that still leaves a hole in the imaginative and visionary view of the state we might be in after another twenty or fifty years. I am tending towards a state in which the Information technology environment will be not dissimilar from the way that nature itself handles and processes information. This environment would have holographic storage systems interconnected by 'quantum' links and processing by biological processors. Sounds like science fiction but this is more or less what nature does. Cells contain all the information in each one of them, neural links connect all the cells in our biological processor - brain.
So that is the possible future and I hope this enthuses the audience and let the discussion begin..
What could I talk about? I cannot claim to be an expert in many things, although I do have many interests. Arts, photography, music and mathematics fascinate me, but I could not do justice to any of these fields. After careful thought I considered travel, but what could one tell anyone about travel? Dont forget to take your passport and remember to get the required vaccinations and those sort of things or perhaps share ones travel photos? No, that would not appeal enough to anyone.
Finally, it appeared there was only one possibility and that was to present a summary of my experiences with computer technologies through the years of my working life. However if I thought that once I had found a topic that the rest was going to be easy, then I was wrong. I found that it was going to be hard to pin down. Unfortunately the pace of change in the realm of Information technologies meant that I would be chasing a moving goalpost.
To reduce the chance of missing the mark I decided to build the presentation around past, present and the future of IT from one point of view - mine. This had the advantage that if I only covered some areas of this vast field then I could hide behind my personal point of view.
The start was easy and I could spark some interest with my first encounter with a 'computer', a term I had not yet come across at the time, in the jungles of Africa. Not many people in Santander would have heard of Kumasi, and even less have any first hand experience of having been there. The current state of technology most would be familiar with. We are all using or walking around with a quantity of gadgets that would have been mind boggling a few years ago. I still remember 1995, when I was invited topresent some work I was doing at the time, at an international conference in San Jose in California. I was amazed to find that every advertisement in the local newspaper carried an email address with which anyone could contact the company advertising. At the time this was still only occasional in the UK press.
Much more interesting is the question proposed by this post, ie where is all this technology going in future. The members of the discussion group in Santander deserve a proposed future of technology that gives them the opportunity to sink their teeth in a discussion. Latest research is exploring bacterial processors, Quantum mechanics and new materials for molecular level storage. All that promises ever faster and unlimited storage using a minimal of energy.
However that still leaves a hole in the imaginative and visionary view of the state we might be in after another twenty or fifty years. I am tending towards a state in which the Information technology environment will be not dissimilar from the way that nature itself handles and processes information. This environment would have holographic storage systems interconnected by 'quantum' links and processing by biological processors. Sounds like science fiction but this is more or less what nature does. Cells contain all the information in each one of them, neural links connect all the cells in our biological processor - brain.
So that is the possible future and I hope this enthuses the audience and let the discussion begin..
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