The future of techno-gadgets

"May you live in interesting times…"

So goes the ancient Chinese blessing/curse.

For technology buffs, these are certainly interesting times. The rate of advance of information technology is as out of control as Gus Sanchez in a room full of sorority girls…only IT is actually making some impressive progress. In this week’s column, I’ll report on some of the more interesting recent IT developments.

First, something that you can actually buy: the Digital-Card.

Digital-Cards are business cards with a twist—and, you might say, a turn; they contain a tiny CD-ROM. Despite being square, they work in any CD-ROM drive by nestling into the 3" indentation via four raised bumps.

From the front, the cards are identical to regular business cards, except they’re thicker and have a hole in the middle. Turn them over and you’ll see that the hole is actually in the middle of about a 1.5" CD that’s embedded in the card.

The card’s manufacturer, McI Technologies Inc. of Massachusetts, positions it as "the next generation business card" incorporating a "digital brochure." McI sells them as if they were business cards—albeit expensive ones, averaging around $2.50 a piece, depending on volume. McI prints your company info on the card and loads the CD with your data, which can be anything you might find on a regular PC CD: interactive multimedia presentations, webpages and/or links, order forms, audio, even up to 4 minutes of video.

What? Not bleeding-edge enough for you? Well let’s get a little more far out.

You might be aware that Moore’s law—which, unlike what some McKinsey partners would have you believe, actually states that semiconductor integration density doubles every 18 months—is said by some researchers to be running out of steam. Again, I’ll leave it to Leibrock to give you the gory details, but basically, the size of the devices etched into current integrated circuits is pretty close to the wavelength of the light that etches them there. When the two are equal, the devices stop shrinking, and density stops increasing.

A new Extreme UltraViolet (EUV) light source, developed by a University of Central Florida physicist and his doctoral students, is one attempt to prolong the shrinking. EUV light can produce features finer than .1 micron—that’s smaller than 1/1000th the diameter of a human hair, if that means anything to anyone. Chips produced using this process would be about 1000 times denser than current chips, breathing about another 15 years of life into Moore’s law. The implications this has for the power of the typical PC are almost disturbing—just think what Bill Gates might be dreaming up for that stupid little paper clip guy’s offspring.

Whatever it may be, he’ll be well fed, thanks to IBM’s research into holographic data storage.

Holographic storage may one day replace all traditional storage devices—both RAM and mass storage—with a tiny cube that holds thousands of times more data than today’s largest disk, and offers access times and bandwidths thousands of times better than today’s best RAM.

Visual holographs provide different views of an image depending on the viewing angle; holographic storage offers different data pages depending on the viewing angle, effectively using the entire volume of an optical storage cube to store data—offering densities not achievable with current surface-storage technologies. Current prototypes can hold up to 10,000 pages of 1 megabit of data each, and can deliver it at over a trillion bits per second.

Huh? You want farther out still?

Then consider a computer control device developed at Emory University that bypasses the keyboard…and the mouse…and the retinal scanner…and voice recognition…to offer thought control for computers!

The technology requires the implantation of tiny electrode-containing cones into the user’s motor cortex, where they basically are assimilated by nerve cells.

I Am Not Making This Up!

Once assimilated, they pick up signals from the nerves in which they are implanted. Through trial and error, current users (it’s already being tested) can learn to control a computer cursor by thinking about certain body movements. The process eventually becomes natural...and, considering the technology’s current infancy, you can imagine (no pun intended) its potential.

Finally, I’ll leave you with the most far-out scheme of all: teleportation.

Yep, it’s long been considered by physicists to be theoretically possible, due to the "entanglement" phenomenon of quantum physics. This means that under certain circumstances, particles or light beams can become entangled—a state in which altering one instantly alters the other, regardless of their physical separation.

Employing this principle, physicists at Caltech recently teleported a light beam a distance of one meter by using two separate beams of entangled light.

Whether this will ever be practically possible for solid objects—including humans—remains to be seen. However, the Caltech experiment confirms that quantum computers—which transmit data using teleportation rather than traditional techniques—are likely to emerge in the next 100 years. And these machines will compare to current computers like the atom bomb compared to a firecracker.