New technology you are most looking forward to?

[Ian]

If you could pick one emerging technology that we might expect to see over the next 25 years, which are you most excited about? It could be anything from metamaterials to new power sources!

I'm probably most excited about the augmented reality developments, which we'll no doubt see lots of over the coming decades. I'm not really into MMPORG games, but I can imagine it will be amazing fun once technology advances enough so that we really feel like we are in another reality (be that a game, somewhere to relax or whatever).

... of course nuclear fusion would be pretty cool too

 

[olg207]

For me it has to be 2 technology pieces. 1st is going into space for the general public and the second is the next generation of consoles to come.

 

[Thrax]

Mass fiber deployment.

 

[spearace]

Some new form of energy generation. That would be quite exciting in itself, but if it was something where energy was cheap to produce and had lower environmental consequences than current power generation then there would be lots of other knock on effects. Lots of other technologies are expensive to produce or impractical because of the energy requirements.

I'd also love for the Large Hadron Collider to demonstrate the existence of the Higgs boson

Mass fiber deployment.

What's fibre deployment like in the USA at the moment? I know there are trials in the UK in major cities for residential 50Mbps and 100Mbps broadband via fibre optics, but none near where I live

 

[Thrax]

Using the word "terrible" could be considered a vast understatement. There's only one residential fiber ISP in the country, and they only have a few thousand subscribers. Old telecom competition regulations prevent them from servicing entire states.

 

[Ian]

1st is going into space for the general public

It doesn't look like that's going to be too far away now You can do it already at the moment if you've got a spare $20 million, but there are quite a few companies aiming to get people up there for around $250,000 in the next few years (and then that cost should drop quite a bit). I used to work for a company that is working on a rocket to do this when I was on a student placement - a very fun job

 

[clifford_cooley]

Im still waiting on the abandonment of DVD drives - Im not sure about everyone else but no scratches would be exciting to me

Renting a USB stick sounds good to me - If the drive could be locked somehow where it could not be over writen without the locking software and security code

 

[BetaMan]

Well, there are a few cool concept phones out there, like the Nokia 880 and I really can't wait till the Microsoft Surface releases to the public.

 

[draceena]

Nano-technology in the relm of healthcare. Like take x number of nano-robots programmed to only target cancer or aids and pop them in the blood stream.

 

[Kougar]

My biggest thing is fusion. Not fission, but fusion. Here's some detailed info on it:

Link (has a diagram of an upcoming fusion core) Link

Link (has some images of a "fusion core" experiment in operation) Link

Link (An even cooler image of a fusion chamber in action) Link

Only somewhat related to fusion, here's a proposed 100% clean option for nuclear power. Even this I would wish to see be developed as I consider nuclear power to be one of the best sources of energy. Solving the waste issue would make it literally perfect for wide adoption. Link

Im still waiting on the abandonment of DVD drives - Im not sure about everyone else but no scratches would be exciting to me

Renting a USB stick sounds good to me - If the drive could be locked somehow where it could not be over writen without the locking software and security code

A few places are experimenting with this. Sony tried selling games bundled onto flash memory, some music label tried selling music on them, but so far everything I've heard about required a gross price premium as compared to just buying the flash memory stick and buying the product separately, then loading it yourself. Oh well, maybe one day, but I agree.