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Opening Arguments

Things to come

Predictions about the future are best taken with a grain of salt -- you've seen some of the ones from the past that have been spectacularly and sometimes hilariously wrong about what today would be like. Still, they're fun to read, and Michio Kaku is not someone to dismiss lightly:

By 2020, the word "computer" will have vanished from the English language, physicist Michio Kaku predicts. Every 18 months, computer power doubles, he notes, so in eight years, a microchip will cost only a penny. Instead of one chip inside a desktop, we'll have millions of chips in all our possessions: furniture, cars, appliances, clothes. Chips will become so ubiquitous that "we won't say the word 'computer,'" prophesies Mr. Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York. "We'll simply turn things on."

Mr. Kaku, who is 65, enjoys making predictions. In his latest book, "Physics of the Future," which Anchor released in paperback in February, he predicts driverless cars by 2020 and synthetic organs by 2030. If his forecasts sound strange, Mr. Kaku understands the skepticism. "If you could meet your grandkids as elderly citizens in the year 2100," he offers, "you would view them as being, basically, Greek gods." Nonetheless, he says, "that's where we're headed," —and he worries that the U.S. will fall behind in this technological onrush.

That's the most annoying thing about contemplating our own mortality -- all the fun stuff we're going to miss.

Comments

Harl Delos
Mon, 03/12/2012 - 11:18am

Speaking of which, RIP, Robert J. Caldwell.

littlejohn
Mon, 03/12/2012 - 1:33pm

I'm still waiting for my flying car. It was firmly promised no later than 1970 in My Weekly Reader in elementary school.

Leo Morris
Mon, 03/12/2012 - 2:14pm

Don't miss Time Wilson's "Where The F---- Is My Jetpack?"

bryanjbrown
Mon, 03/12/2012 - 3:13pm

How about this one, Leo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXHWDhk7Hok

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