week4-Topic1 Forecast 2050

What can we imagine to the future? What will the blueprint be looked like? We human beings always love to dream, and because of the dream, we could keep going.

According to article “As We May Think” which was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, argued that as humans turned from war, scientific efforts should shift from increasing physical abilities to making all previous collected human knowledge more accessible.

Vannevar Bush’s view is awesome even in today! He predicted many kinds of technology invented after its publication, including hypertext, personal computers, the Internet, the World Wide Web, speech recognition, and online encyclopedias. Many of pictures in his mind came true today.

In my opinion, of course I have only limited view to predict digital trend in the coming 50 years. However, as Dr. Lau’s words “We are here to lead,” we should have some images in our minds.

Nowadays there are four main parts in home digital industry. May I mention in the beginning, I think the next main market in digital industry should be the digital at home. The four aspects might be entertainment, learning, communication, and life management. They can also extent into multimedia home video, learning online, in-time messenger and VOIP, and digital censorship and digital household appliances. Cable will no more only use in TV but the most important resource in every household.

What kind of ability should we qualify to face the rapid future? I think it would be “the ability to solve problems,” “the ability to join the group,” and “the ability to speak the tech-future language.” Let’s make the words simpler. People in the future should prepare more abilities of having interactions with other people and learning individual concepts rather than routine manipulations.

Then, what is the “tech-future language?” This is a language including everything “technology” and “future.” Between “Professional high-tech language” and “daily language,” it describes the whole timeline among the past, now and the future.

Take Japan as an example, as a “Robot Kingdom,” this country worked oout with many experts in robot industry through several decades. Citizens in Japan take the robots as a kind of common sense, but not mention the series famous comics that spread broadly in the world. In their high-tech policy, they even announce their goal to make robot industry a foundational industry, like automobile industry nowadays, in 2020.

Here in US, we also have great development in space adventures. NASA, NCC-1701, Apollo 11, Armstrong landed the moon… every single word contain a high level development and lead scientists a great dream.

As Bush mentioned in his article, we live in “a spider web of mental,” we involve into the high-tech, we try hard to keep up with them, and we should never forget the dream of progressing.