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People in the 21st century will wear their telephones like jewelry, with microphones hidden in necklaces or lapel pins and miniature speakers tucked behind each ear, predicts Nobelist Penzias, vice president of research at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Every phone customer will have long since been issued a personal number that follows him everywhere -- home, the office, the beach. Thanks to a telecommunications system that will link phone networks, cable-TV systems, satellite broadcasts and multimedia libraries, getting connected to anything or anyone in the most remote parts of the world will be a simple matter. This easy access will spur the rapid growth of "virtual communities." If picture phones finally become widely accepted, people will begin to make network friends whom they may never meet in person. These communities will flourish as the cost of transmitting voices and images keeps falling.
COMPUTERS
The stand-alone machines that dominate office desktops today will eventually insinuate themselves into the walls and furniture, perhaps even into clothes. Exotic display devices will serve as windows onto great, interconnected networks. These windows could be as big as chalkboards or as small as Post-it notes, according to scientists pursuing "ubiquitous computing" technologies at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. Computer screens could even be etched onto the lenses of eyeglasses.
The networks of the future will become increasingly populated with new kinds of software entities known as personal assistants, or "agents." These agents will monitor the outside world, gleaning pertinent information, filtering out unwanted clutter, tracking appointments and offering advice. A travel "agent," for example, would be indispensable to a foreign traveler by doing simultaneous translations or pointing out sites of interest. A virtual lawyer could give expert legal opinions, a Wall Street agent timely investment tips.
HOME ENTERTAINMENT
The shift to digital entertainment media, which began with compact discs in the 1980s, will open up new dimensions in leisure. Nicholas Negroponte, director of M.I.T.'s Media Laboratory, predicts the availability, before the end of the next century, of "full-color, large-scale, holographic TV with force feedback and olfactory output," which is to say, home movies that can be seen, felt and smelled. The trend will be toward entertainment that is customized for the individual, including do-it-yourself multimedia fantasies as well as newspapers and magazines edited to suit each subcriber's interests.
As overpopulation makes the real world less congenial, artificial realities will become more attractive. Fifty years from now, the ability to put oneself in the shoes of another character in another place -- Rambo rafting down the Orinoco, say -- could be a metered commodity, like pay TV. Stewart Brand, creator of The Whole Earth Catalog, thinks these experiences might provide the kind of mind-expanding thrills people once got from psychedelic drugs, but without the mental and physical side effects.
ROBOTICS