Computers in 2034

I came across this very interesting article on News.com entitled “Thirty years with computers” by Jakob Nielsen. In the article Nielsen describes what he expects computers to look like in the year 2034 based on his experiences in the last thirty years:

Futurist Jakob Nielsen asserts that home computers will have microprocessors running at 3 petahertz (300,000 gigahertz) that have a petabyte’s worth of memory, a billion gigabytes of storage and a 250-gigabit broadband connection.

Sounds pretty good hey? There is a follow-up comment to the story that says Nielsen gets it wrong, and really, this will be how we define the future:

More importantly, Nielsen is stuck on the PC box paradigm. Looking back at the last 30 years of change in computers, I find it hard to believe that the computers of 30 years from now will even be describable within the paradigm of today’s machines. Chip speed? Gigabytes?

I am kind of in the middle of these two perspectives. Surely computers in thirty years will have some concept of speed, it probably just won’t be called petahertz. Already Intel and AMD are moving away from the GHz naming scheme. At the same time, I don’t think computers are going to get THAT much smaller. There reaches a point where too small becomes unusable by our clumsy human fingers.

We’ll probably get bigger displays and storage like Nielsen predicts, and computers will probably get smaller (slightly) and cheaper. However I think the biggest differences will come in interface. Handwriting, speech, and image recognition will be the dominant technologies. Your computer will recognize your signature, voice and face.

The two places I think we most need a revolution? Easy! Power and materials. Battery power today is absolutely terrible compared with the rest of technology, and it will more than likely undergo a breakthrough in the next 30 years. The second area that needs to drastically change are the materials used for building computers. Silicon? Copper? How about DNA and other nanomolecules! Infinitely more powerful, and most importantly, infinitely cheaper.