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In the digital realm, the Next Big Advance will be voice recognition. The rudiments are already here but in primitive form. Ask a computer to "recognize speech," and it is likely to think you want it to "wreck a nice beach." But in a decade or so we'll be able to chat away and machines will soak it all in. Microchips will be truly embedded in our lives when we can talk to them. Not only to our computers; we'll also be able to chat with our automobile navigation systems, telephone consoles, browsers, thermostats, VCRs, microwaves and any other devices we want to boss around.
That will open the way to the next phase of the digital age: artificial intelligence. By our providing so many thoughts and preferences to our machines each day, they'll accumulate enough information about how we think so that they'll be able to mimic our minds and act as our agents. Scary, huh? But potentially quite useful. At least until they decide they don't need us anymore and start building even smarter machines they can boss around.
The law powering the digital age up until now has been Gordon Moore's: that microchips will double in power and halve in price every 18 months or so. Bill Gates rules because early on he acted on the assumption that computing power--the capacity of microprocessors and memory chips--would become nearly free; his company kept churning out more and more lines of complex software to make use of this cheap bounty. The law that will power the next few decades is that bandwidth (the capacity of fiber-optic and other pipelines to carry digital communications) will become nearly free.
Along with the recent advances in digital switching and storage technologies, this means a future in which all forms of content--movies, music, shows, books, data, magazines, newspapers, your aunt's recipes and home videos--will be instantly available anywhere on demand. Anyone will be able to be a producer of any content; you'll be able to create a movie or magazine, make it available to the world and charge for it, just like Time Warner!
The result will be a transition from a mass-market world to a personalized one. Instead of centralized factories and studios that distribute or broadcast the same product to millions, technology is already allowing products to be tailored to each user. You can subscribe to news sources that serve up only topics and opinions that fit your fancy. Everything from shoes to steel can be customized to meet individual wishes. What does that mean for the modernist revolt against conformity that dominated art and literature? Postmodernism, with its sense of irony, is more amused by connections and historical hyperlinks.
The digital revolution that burns so brightly today is likely to pale in comparison to the revolution in biotechnology that is just beginning. Physicist Stephen Hawking, speaking at the White House last month on science in the next millennium, pointed out that for the past 10,000 years there has been no significant change in our human DNA. But over the next hundred years, we will be able and tempted to tinker. No doubt we'll make some improvements and some mistakes. We'll encode our dreams and vanities and hubris. We'll clone ourselves, we'll custom-design our kids. By playing Dr. Frankenstein, we'll have the chance to make miracles or monsters. The challenges will be not scientific but moral.