Description of What Life May Be Like in the Twenty-first Century

   Today's calculators calculate square roots in a fraction of time compared to ENIAC, one of the first computers. ENIAC was built in the 1940's, cost a fortune and was as big as a house. New technologies to increase capacity even more are already on their way. Copper allows ten times finer structures in microprocessors than today's used aluminum. Memory based on biological molecules has even bigger advantages. In fifty years, shoes and light bulbs will have the power of today's super-computers, if the latter are not replaced by energy-saving diodes.

   This tremendous power will hopefully be used to make electronics easier to use. A keyboard and the computer mouse will be gone. Small digital cameras will analyze facial expressions and gestures. Microphones will listen to what people say and find out their emotions in how they say it. All these devices will be networked, sharing information to understand people better. Even new forms of interfaces might come up between humans and electronics. Input and output might go directly into the brain, bypassing eyes and ears, mouth and hands. Direct connections between neurons and transistors are already possible on a laboratory basis.

   In the end, no difference if one interacts with a computer or a human may be or even if computers interact with one another. Then, the definition of life has to be rewritten: Computers will be as much alive as humans. And in a society where all information is shared, no real individuals exist. Like cells in the human body, humans and computers will join together to form one individual. An example for that would be the Borg community in Star Trek.

   All this may look very scary to the reader -- it certainly scares the author. On the other hand, mankind developed computers. They are like children; and always when children are around, things change. Children change their parents -- some spiders even eat them… -- but that is evolution. Cells joined together hundreds of millions of years ago; Columbus sailed over the Atlantic. It is always a risk, but it is worth taking it.

   The author believes that nothing of the above will come true. By the year 2050, the most intelligent life forms on earth will be mushrooms or something like that. Humans will have nuked each other with atomic bombs, and radiation will have destroyed every life form that we would consider intelligent. But that is all right, too. When an asteroid crashed on the earth millions of years ago, dinosaurs were wiped out. Without that change, human life, which we consider more intelligent that dinosaurs, would have never developed.