All I Know

Well, it’s 2012.

Hard to believe this year has finally arrived. It has a special place in my heart because I actually made quite a few predictions about it—back in 1987. I was in college at the time, and Honeywell was sponsoring an essay-writing competition. The task was to write two essays: one describing developments in some technology 25 years in the future, and the other describing the social impacts of those developments. The prize was substantial: $3000 in cash, a summer internship, and a trip to company headquarters to tour the facilities, meet the executives, and receive an award at a banquet in our honor. Ten winners would be chosen.

I chose computer technology and, after rewriting them several times, submitted my essays along with those of over 700 other college students. And I won. Or at least, was one of the 10 winners. I was attending the University of Washington at the time. My co-winners were from schools like Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne (where the first web browser was developed). I used the cash prize to buy my first computer (a Macintosh, naturally), and the summer internship became the start of my career as a software developer. And I made friends there that I have to this day.
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Twenty five years from now, it will be the year 2012. By that date, there will be many significant developments in the field of computer science, with societal impacts rivaling those of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. Fields of research now on the cutting edge will have blossomed and borne fruit. These research efforts will probably succeed in perpetuating the trend that has prevailed in computer science up until now: dramatic increases in the speed, quality, and quantity of information generation, manipulation, and transmission, both among humans and machines.
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