The Future Starts Now

Remember when 1999 sounded like the distant future? Now it is more like the distant past. In the last decade alone, we've witnessed stunning technological advances that are changing the world as the Internet makes distance disappear and wireless gives us the flexibility we need now in this always-connected age.And change isn't stopping any time soon. In a speech on present and future innovation at the annual CRN Industry Hall of Fame, technology pioneer Ray Kurzweil spoke of the technology revolution and what is yet to come. Among Kurzweil's predictions, the father of optical character recognition(OCR) says that by 2010 computers will start to vanish as we become more reliant on technology embedded in things like clothing and eyeglasses. Another 20 years beyond that and Kurzweil predicts that technology will be completely Web-centric with tiny devices communicating to nodes in clothing and the environment.

Hard to fathom? It really shouldn't be. Just look at how much faster the future seems to be coming at us now. And how much smaller the communications devices we depend on are these days.