Futurologists

'Noted futurist Ray Kurzweil proclaimed during his keynote address at GDC on Thursday that information technology will completely drive our economy and that “games will have taken over the world” by 2020.
Speaking before a packed audience, Kurzweil explained that the “games of today are equivalent to the supercomputers of only a few years ago,” and that the industry is quickly becoming the “harbinger of what we do.”
He dislikes the word “game” in reference to the industry as he feels as though it makes the medium seem unreal and easy to dismiss, such as when people say, “it’s just a game.”
And while his statement about the industry taking over the world may have been nothing more than throwing red meat to a ravenous audience, the man who accurately predicted the growth of the Internet did make several key observations about trends we have seen in technology over the past four decades.
“We are now in a situation where the acceleration is so fast that things change very rapidly in just a matter of a few years,” Kurzweil said.
To demonstrate this, he reminded the crowd that the cell phones we carry with us today are vastly cheaper, smaller and more powerful than the computers he was using at MIT in the 1960s.
As a result, he expects that within the next 25 years, the price-to-performance ratio for computers will make another billion-fold increase just as it has over the last 40 years.
But in order to make these leaps in technology, software has to keep pace.
Kurzweil also believes that by 2020, we will have an accurate and complete map of the human brain.
This step will cause the lines to be blurred between what is artificial and what is real.
Should this be achieved, he feels as though it will not only drive gaming but also fuel the economy and education as well.'

full article: http://www.sddt.com/News/article.cfm?SourceCode=20080222cza

Ray Kurzweil: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil

Future predictions

2010
- Images written directly to retinas.
- Ubiquitous high handwidth connections to the internet at all times
- Electronics so tiny it’s embedded in the environment, our clothing, our eyeglasses
- Full immersion visual-auditory virtual reality
- Augmented real reality
- Interaction with virtual personalities as a primary interface
- Effective language technologies
2029
- $1,000 of computing will equal 1,000 times the human brain
- Reverse engineering of the human brain completed
- Computers pass the Turing test - Nonbiological intelligence combines the subtlety and pattern recognition strength of human intelligence with the speed, memory and knowledge sharing of machine intelligence.
- Non-biological inteligence will continue to grow exponentially whereas biological intelligence is effectively fixed.