Thursday, May 5, 2005

The Google Future Top 10

There’s nothing I like to ponder upon quite as much as the future. Here are the top 10 collected tech futurism* posts from this weblog’s past – but keep in mind Niels Bohr’s words, “Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future.”

1. Froogle 2020
2. Browser buttons for the future
3. Google inventions of the future (also see II, III, IV, V)
4. The future history of movies
5. Google Brain (Video)
6. The New Google
7. Search engines: near and distant future
8. Preserving web content for the future
9. Inventions of the Google empire
10. The rise and fall of the Google empire (also available in German)

*Will Wright said something interesting in a podcast over at ITConversations: every futurism extrapolates present modern technologies. This means a culture will believe the future will mainly consist of whatever’s hot at the moment. For example in the 60s, space missions were the popular technology du jour, and people thought in 2000 or earlier we’d be living in Moon hotels. In the 40s, people were envisioning atomic trains and cars.
And today we are living the Internet Age. Thus, futurists extrapolate the internet and see it be built into a giant, all-encompassing Neuromancer/ Matrix mish-mash. I’d like to say this must be wrong because history told us so (where’s my personal jet pack?), but I too feel we’re on to something. That’s the one possibility. The other is that we actually reached the top, and where we’re at there’s only refinement (evolution, not revolution). This would mean wikis are actually the new light bulb, and blogs a sort of wheel – and that this is pretty much all there was to discover.

The Google Future Top 10 by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (0)

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