What technology is coming and how accurate are these predictions?

So what technology will power these changes? And why, when our hover car's didn't turn up in 2001, can we be confident that this "amazing" revolution lies just round the corner?

For writers like Ray Kurzweil and others, these crucial technologies are medical bio-scanning advances, nanotechnological research and the advance of computing power as described by Moore’s law. Already huge strides have been made in genetics and the biosciences.

Nanotechnology is hot on the heels of the biosciences. It is used on a daily basis in products like sunblock and catalysts. Nano scale medicine is rapidly advancing, especially in areas like cancer treatment where drugs are required to target a small group of cells. Nano technology’s ultimate promise will add to advances in nano scale medicine with the development over the next 20 years of nanoscale robotic devices to repair damage in our bodies. Technology of this sophistication could vastly lower the cost of consumables from computers to food; solve our energy requirements, help us to properly extend our culture into space; and stabilise and clean up our existing environment on earth. Organisations like the Foresight Institute "focus their public policy activities on maximising the benefits and minimising the downsides of nanotechnology" to ensure safeguards will keep up with advances.

One of the most exciting avenues of advancement is the exponential growth of computing power. This growth, coupled with the decreasing costs of increased power, will drive the advances in biomedical and nanotechnology revolutions. Thanks to the Internet, your desktop computer can contribute to distributed supercomputer simulators like The Grid, which are tackling vast problems such as the "Human Proteome Folding Project" that will go beyond even the advances that decoding our DNA is promising. In the field of supercomputers, the IBM Blue Brain is the most powerful on the planet. Its first objective is to create a detailed simulation of one of the functional units of the brain (a neocortical column).

H+ futurists like Ray Kurzweil say this will eventually lead to a fully conscious AI. Many computing technologists say this is impossible! When I think of all the other impossibilities that have come to pass, from space travel to computers beating chess champions, I for one would like to put some real research into the possibility. This is why I support an organisation like the Singularity Institute. They are planning for a conscious AI by defining how its initial design parameters have to start out to allow for a friendly and useful partner to humanity and the world.

Links to other pages on the net that
explain the coming technology.