Feature
Issue No. 12 - August/September 2003
Jellyfish on the Desktop
by Sally McLean
Warnings about the future, by writers like George Orwell and Alvin Toffler, are now an accepted part of our every day routine. We casually put our ‘number’ on every transaction we make without considering the cross—referenced pathways that take an image of us, piece by piece, and restores it somewhere we never care to think about; the battle to continually adjust and re—adjust to the latest way to do just about everything is no longer fought, we just do it; but are we ready for jellyfish on the desktop?
It was a recent treat to see Gartner’s Senior Vice President Asia Pacific, Bob Hayward, give a presentation on ‘future trends in technology’, in Adelaide. Always an entertaining and insightful speaker, Bob’s session was a great investment of two hours of my time.
I learned that we are in the Knowledge Age, moving from physical connectivity to logical connectivity with embedded connectivity touted as the norm by 2010, as we ride the hump of the bell curve of the Silicon Age. Between 1900 and the year 2000, processing power moved through the electromechanical era, to relay, vacuum tube, then transistor and on to integrated circuit. As the calculations per second grew exponentially upward, the cost per calculation did the same thing downward and our reliance upon smaller, faster technology permeated just about everything as we embraced 2001 celebrations.
So how much is enough, and what on earth does it have to do with jellyfish? Well, already the computers in our homes are more powerful than the most powerful supercomputer 10 years ago and, as the drive to increase power and decrease size continues, a major drawback continues to be power supply capacity. In the search for self—sustaining energy sources, science is looking to bio—materials for the answer. The pre—eminent Mr Hayward talked about using jellyfish to power the visual output of our future technology without batting an eyelid.
If you thought techno—spe...
