Where Will Your Computer Be in 2020?

Editor’s Note (2026): I wrote this back in October 2006, long before smartphones became part of everyday life, before cloud computing went mainstream, and before AI became something we could all use. I’ve lightly edited the grammar and readability, but left the ideas and humour largely untouched. Reading it now, it’s amusing to see which predictions were wildly optimistic… and which quietly came true.

Ever wondered what your computer will look like in twenty years?

Or perhaps a better question is this: will we even recognise it as a computer?

I’ve often wondered what life would’ve been like if I’d been born twenty years later. Many of today’s IT professionals grew up just as the personal computer revolution was taking off. Sometimes I think I arrived just a little too early.

Technology has advanced at an incredible pace over the past forty years. These days you can buy a brand-new computer, only to discover it’s already been superseded before you’ve finished installing the software. There’s another upgrade, another security patch, another operating system, and another reason to spend more money.

After watching Futurama a few nights back, I asked myself “What if I was cryogenic frozen for a thousand years – then awoken to find family, friends and everyone I loved and hated was dead?“. Maybe the thought wasn’t as thought out – but you can bet it was almost exactly those words!

And how far they have advanced my life-time thus far – and how much they will develop over the next twenty years.

According to Decan Butler on nature.com, there will be billions of tiny computers called ‘motes’, ‘nodes’ and ‘pods’.

Declan also says that those computers will “take the form of networks of sensors with data-processing and transmission facilities built in“. Hell, I can see that already! But Mr Butler goes onto say they “would be embedded into the fabric of the real world. They would act in concert, sharing the data that each of them gathers so as to process them into meaningful digital representations of the world.”

This theory I actually like.

A world whereby every human is inter-connected via neural-nodes, sharing knowledge simultaneously and where learning is attained via thought-processes rather than class-room based training. OK, so it sounds like a cube-load of Borgs! I am guessing that what’s Gene Rodenberry imagined!

Still, it would be a great step for a mankind if it were able to acquire knowledge through our genes. As in, when a child is born it carries all the knowledge its first-level parents acquired over their lifetime. The only downside to this method is that would take another four hundred years to breed out all the trailer-trash and Britney Spears fanatics.

The idea of having virtual-knowledge available at our finger-tips is closer to reality than anyone realizes. Through that article it is purported that the University of Washington in Seattle has detected that the availability of real-time data from the physical world to the internet is happening as we speak/type, and that at anytime anywhere on the planet anyone can obtain information – whatever it might be.

Remember the Twin-Tower incident in 2001?

Only minutes after the first tower fell, the falling of the second tower was being watched on the internet as it happened. In more recent years, information has become available with limited time-lag or waiting for the sound to catch-up: We have watched international warfare happen as the incendiary bombs were falling on middle-eastern cities, NASA was able to watch their mini-SUV’s move across the Mars landscape as they maneuvered them from within their Florida bunkers and we all watched Nick dump Jessica without either of them missing a “photopportunity“.

Declan has declared some amazing probabilities that appeal to my idea of the post-2000 world.

We already have five computers that have taken precedence in our household. Sarah and I have a laptop each. A main computer is attached to the modem purely for aesthetic purposes – it’s rarely used! There is a 486-paper-weight somewhere in the shed.

Oh, and there are to P2’s making the office live up to its purpose (other than where my lovely wife and partner Sarah Mitchell is putting together last years Birthday present: A 6,000 jigsaw puzzle!).

Plus the computer chip in the television, camera, mobile telephones, and under the bonnet of the car. Then there is the ionised strip in all the cards in my wallet. And the rice-sized GPS-chip in the cat’s necks.

Oh wow. And I had “fission chips” for dinner.

The future isn’t tomorrow or next year.

The computer age is here already. Someone get me the source for these chips, I gotta drown them before they find my stomach!

P.S. I wrote this in 2006. Reading it after 2020, I’m pleasantly surprised by how many of these ideas actually happened… and how many were overtaken by things I never saw coming.