2001: An Update.(Industry Trend or Event)

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with science-fiction stories about "The Future," especially those describing technologies so advanced they would be, as Arthur C. Clarke might say, "indistinguishable from magic." In fact, a favorite was Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like all his works, it was an extrapolation based on scientific principles, and, therefore, it seemed entirely plausible--even with respect to the notion that an intelligent computer, the HAL 9000, could become so delusional and paranoid that it would commit murder trying to protect itself.

Of course, now that 2001 has arrived, we find that computers do not have "minds of their own" as Clarke envisioned. But that's not to say science-fiction writers haven't predicted the future of computers with uncanny accuracy countless other times. Indeed, in 1968, when he wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke himself described e-mail and laptop computers.

In any case, as we step into this fabled new year, it seems fitting that last month's Comdex conference featured a panel of top science-fiction authors--Greg Bear, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle--who offered visions of where computing is headed from here. Here's an abridged and edited version of their predictions:

Greg Bear. The next big step is not to make faster computers; it's to make the step to real artificial intelligence. What I see over at Comdex is wonderful, but it's very old technology. And it's not as brilliant as technology far older than that--the human genome. My strong suspicion is that the genome is a natural language distributed network. Genes are social. They interact with hundreds of other genes, and they do so by teaching each other how to ...