Bill Gates tries his hand at ESP by predicting that powerful computer hardware will be so cheap in ten years that it’ll practically be free. Plus, the computers of the future will interact with you using plain speech and be able to recognize handwriting. Oh and programmers will be able to create programs using symbolic code rather than coding line by line.
Gates foresees ‘almost free’ hardware | CNET News.com
“Ten years out, in terms of actual hardware costs, you can almost think of hardware as being free--I’m not saying it will be absolutely free--but in terms of the power of the servers, the power of the network will not be a limiting factor,’’ Gates said Monday at a symposium in San Diego, referring to networked computers and advances in the Internet’s speed.
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“Many of the holy grails of computing that have been worked on over the last 30 years will be solved within this 10-year period, with speech being in every device and having a device that’s like a tablet that you just carry around,’’ Gates said at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo, sponsored by market researcher Gartner.
Not surprisingly Microsoft is already offering products that try to deliver on these predictions already such as Speech Server 2004 which could explain why he’s so bullish on his vision of the future.
I don’t know about all of that as I’m still disappointed that here we are in 2004 and I still don’t have either a flying car OR a laser death-ray. Dammit.
Posted on 03/30/2004 at 10:52 AM 
I’d like to have everything linked, like in the movies where the phone, internet, and everything else is hooked up everywhere. i could go for a laser death-ray too.