Looking into future

During this age of rapid technological and social change, it is important for a profession to gaze into the future. Alvin Toffler has said that “as we advance into the terra incognita of tomorrow, it is better to have a general and incomplete map, subject to revision and correction, than to have no map at all." To put it another way, we cannot know the future, but we see trends happening now that can be projected forward. We only have to gaze five to ten years into the future to know that the profession of orientation and mobility as it is now understood will either be gone, or it will fundamentally change. These may seem like outrageous comments to those not following the communications and biotechnology revolutions. But the changes are here and now, and they will have profound impact on our professional lives.
In 1965, Gordon Moore, co-founder of chip maker Intel, put forth an axiom that became known as Moore's Law. Moore stated that every year since 1959 the number of components on a microchip had doubled. The law is now treated as a summary statement that every 18 months a new chip goes on the market that is twice as fast as its predecessor, has twice the memory, is cheaper, and more compact. The complexity of the software that takes advantage of the periodic doubling of computer chips also follows Moore's Law. Microsoft's word processing program had 27,000 lines of code when it was first released. By 1995 Microsoft Word had two million lines of code. The next version will have four million, then eight, sixteen, doubling every 12 to 18 months. The internet is doubling in size every year. World Wide Web pages are doubling every 50 days. The power of a computer network has been defined as the square of the number of users on the network. This means that the power of the World Wide Web is quadrupling every 50 days.
Raymond Kurzweil, inventor of the Kurzweil Reader (and numerous inventions for disabled people) told his audiences that the doubling power of computers had reached a critical threshold. Dr. Kurzweil tells the story of the Chinese Emperor who was so pleased with the game of chess that he granted the inventor any wish. The creator of chess asked the Emperor for one humble grain of rice to be placed on the first square of a chess board, two meagre grains of rice on the second square, four tiny grains on the third square, eight grains lined up neatly on the next square, and so forth until all 64 squares of the board were accounted for. The Emperor thought the inventor a humble man for asking so little, yet by the 32nd square the Emperor owed the inventor eight billion grains of rice, enough to cover a one acre field. Dramatic things happen on the second half of the chess board, from square 33 to the 64th square (at which point the inventor controls all the rice on the planet). According to Dr. Kurzweil, in 1995, we reached the 32nd doubling of computer power. Dramatic changes are underfoot. Computers are getting ready to listen, understand, translate languages in real time, and respond instantly with voice, video, animation, graphics, and text. Soon computers will immerse us in virtual worlds so strange and unusual we cannot yet imagine their composition. The reason these changes are no longer science fiction is because we now have (or will soon have) the computing power to make them happen. We crossed the threshold into the future. We are standing on the second half of the chess board. He tells that Moore's Law has passed the 32nd position of the chess board. Machine vision is not science fiction. It is about to happen. Now there are one billion transistors on a chip. This magnitude of power will make practical machine vision possible shortly after the turn of the century.
Although there is some development, the necessity of the society is not going to be fulfilled. And the necessity is the cause of invention. Now there are many researches undergoing to transform to nanotechnology from silicon fabrication which will take us to new world.
According to “10 ideas for next 10 years” article published in Times Magazine recently, Bandwidth will be the new black gold. Here black gold symbolize that there will be scarcity of the bandwidth. Some of the cause is already seen in America. The article tells us the unexpected, budget-breaking mobile-phone bill. Most aren't as bad as the $22,000 bill a California man received from Verizon Wireless for his teenager's Internet usage, or the New York family whose iPhones racked up nearly $4,800 by automatically checking for e-mails on a Mediterranean cruise. This shows us the growing internet appetite in America. In the U.S. in 2010, a family can easily spend hundreds of dollars a month on cable, mobile phones and Internet and telephone services. Some families already spend at least as much on bandwidth as they do on energy. Due to this there is scarcity of bandwidth in America and hence the price levels are increased for bandwidth control. Still there is no sign of decrease in use of bandwidth. It is not unlikely that the American appetite for bandwidth will diminish anytime soon, nor is it even clear that we want it to. But if we want the pleasure and convenience of a high-bandwidth society, someone will need to figure out a solution to the bandwidth dilemma soon. As already mentioned necessity is the cause of invention and observing the present trend of development in IT sector we can predict that there will be new invention in this field.