The next 10,0002 years. I

Forecasts technological breakdowns and breakthroughs for the next 16 (10,000 to the base 2) years. Change has always been a part of recent history. Indeed, Earth-shaking change occurs about every 150-200 years. It takes about 50 years to make the transition from the old to the new, and we are nearing the end of just such a 50-year period. Change is caused by both technological breakthroughs and technological breakdowns. In the current 50-year transition, the breakthrough is in networking and software development, and the breakdown is in processor (VLSI) technology. Both forces will propel the high-tech world into a new model of computing by the year 2012. The new model will be based on a networked, global megacomputer that obeys the Gustafson-Barsis speedup law instead of the Amdahl law of parallelism. The next century's information superhighway will actually be a network of cable TV operators, not telephone companies. A new era of programming that eliminates traditional programming languages (and scolds the software engineering community for failure) will arise and lead to a software economy-an electronic commerce dominated by software artisans