communication in 21th century 2012-14

2010 - An Improved Internet
The National Science Foundation is funding a program to develop a re-design of the next-generation Internet, creating a new network that will be suitable for years to come. It is called the Global Environment for Networking Investigations (GENI). The new Internet will focus on security as its main concern. It is expected to be able to handle the increase in Internet traffic expected as more people come online, and also be geared for the increase in content-delivery demands as more video and other large-scale projects are made available online.
The development got under way in August 2005 when the U.S. government provided six small planning grants to the National Science Foundation to begin the project. Internet pioneers support the NSF idea; Leonard Kleinrock said it must be built to handle the boom in internet demands from sources other than computers, such as cellular phones, GPS/RFID-type tracking and hand-held organizers; David Clark, a senior research scientist at the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT, said while the turn-of-the-century internet is operating at an acceptable level, "There are some things where you say, 'That doesn't work right.'" He said he expects this project will go beyond current efforts such as IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6), which would only incrementally improve the internet.
Goals for the GENI initiative include new naming, addressing and identity architectures for the internet; advanced security architecture; a design built to handle a great deal more material at faster rates; traffic documentation; and new applications and services. The NSF announcement said GENI will "enable the vision of pervasive computing and bridge the gap between the physical and virtual worlds by including mobile, wireless and sensor networks."
2010 - RFID/GPS Can Track Anything
Radio-frequency identification detectors are already in heavy use today, but by 2010 they will be even more ubiquitous, woven invisibly into everything everywhere. As of 2006 companies were using RFID in: ID cards to track employees at work; pre-paid passes that record usage and deduct payments at mass-transit systems and tollbooths; tags that monitor student attendance and location in some schools; tracking of shipments of goods and delivery of services.
Global positioning systems (GPS) allow the calculation of the exact position of anything anywhere in the world. By 2006, these were being incorporated in car-safety systems and in cellular phones, making the devices tools by which people can be tracked and located.
By 2010, you may be able to skip going through any sort of checkout and payment process when you shop or travel. You and all items you intend to purchase will have RFID tags; as you pass out of the door, you will be instantly billed for the items you carry. Passports are also being equipped with RFID tags. Hitachi introduced the tags above in 2005. They are tiny when compared with the tip of a pen.
Some humans and animals are already carrying RFID devices implanted under their skin for identification purposes. Lost pets can be found and returned more easily when they carry such tags. Humans tie their medical records to the RFID number, and emergency personnel can access their identity and medical history (blood type, allergies, pre-existing problems) by using an RFID reader and matching a code number to a patient's file.
This can also be tied to the idea of "IP on everything," which network engineers use to explain that nearly all material items will be networked in the future, from shoes to toasters.
The sort of continuous tracking enabled by GPS, RFID and IP on everything has some negative implications in regard to freedom and privacy. These tools can be used by criminals or others to exert control over people and track them. A debate will continue to rage over the negatives and positives of the use of these devices and their networking.
2010 - Interactive Guidebooks Educate
Innovators are developing interactive guidebooks tourists can use while traveling in vehicles or on foot, alone or in groups all over the world. These tools use GPS signals and allow travelers to hear a guided narration of what they are viewing along with related pictures and sound effects. Some of the places mapped to introduce the new guidebooks are Alcatraz in San Francisco, the Louvre in Paris, Edinburgh Castle and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. These types of guides will also be applied in other settings, including industrial training on special equipment, possibly even being used to train robots in future decades beyond this period of time.
2011 - SUPER Supercomputers
Computational capabilities are accelerating rapidly, as indicated by IBM's announcement in 2005 that it had doubled the performance of the world's fastest computer, named Blue Gene/L (pictured at left), from 136.8 trillion calculations per second (teraflops) to 280.6 trillion teraflops.
Supercomputer speed rankings are released every six months, and there is a healthy competition among top computer scientists. The United States has plans to create a supercomputer with petaflop capability by 2010. A petaflop - which equates to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second - is equal to 1,000 teraflops.
A supercomputer that will operate at a speed of 10 petaflops (or 10 quadrillion floating-point operations per second) is the 2011 goal of Japan's technology ministry. This would give it a capability close to the computational capacity of the human brain. High-speed computers are used to run simulations (for example, to study the formation of galaxies and to project the paths of hurricanes). Many scientists say they expect that computers will soon surpass the intelligence capacity of humans.
2012 - Food as Designer Medicine
Nearly everything we eat is derived from livestock, crops and microorganisms bred specifically as food. Humans have been modifying these products and redistributing the genes geographically for most of their history. Thanks to gene research, computer modeling and the sharing of new knowledge in science and technology through the internet, the positive attributes of modified foods will continue to be refined.
Crops will continue to be developed to be resistant to diseases, pests and herbicides; they will be developed to screen out allergens (such as the allergenic proteins found in nuts); vaccines will be bred into plants or possibly into livestock - for instance in milk in dairy herds. Fruit can be bred to carry additional essential vitamins and other medicines. People may be able to get necessary medical treatments just by eating.
2012 - Intelligent Fabrics, Materials
By 2012, clothing may be equipped with sensors that can detect body warmth and send a signal to the thermostat controlling the temperature of the room to automatically decrease or increase the temperature of the room based on your body temperature. The sensitive fabrics may also be able to sense your mood and can be set to automatically adjust the lighting in a room.
Clothes may eventually be able to sense and respond to the weather, monitor your vital signs, deliver medications, interface with information systems and automatically protect injuries.
E-ink and e-paper and flexible, foldable computer displays were already in testing stages in 2006 and by 2012 to 2015 they may be common. They can allow, for instance, the easy and instantaneous changing of the printed price tags on every item in a store; easy-to-change signage on trucks, inside and outside retail outlets and along highways; the constant updating of the stories and photos in a newspaper - with moving photos or video possible.