Predictions: Paul Saffo on the Robot RevolutionPaul Saffo

Futurist Paul Saffo has more than two decades' experience observing technological change. He is director of the Institute for the Future and chairman of the Samsung Science Board.

What do you foresee happening to the Internet in the next ten years?

I absolutely think some of the Web 2.0 concepts have legs. The Web has just begun, and there's a lot more to come. The Web is increasingly going from 2D to 2.5D, and there will be lots of forays into 3D over the next ten years. Online environments like Second Life [a graphical city where users adopt avatars and socialize online] will become increasingly important. I would pay very close attention to the rapid growth Second Life is seeing and the growth of personal spaces on the Web.

How will computers and networks spread out into the environment?

There are vast arrays of network sensors out there doing science and monitoring things. We think of the Web as the window on cyberspace, but in ten years we will think of the Web as a window on the physical world, too. Through applications like Google Earth the public is getting access to satellite sensors. I think you're going to see applications that will let kids in high school get access to network sensors at the North Pole. There will be people making technologies available to the public that used to be available only to experts. Flight Aware tracks in real time all of the airplanes flying in the United States. They're basically just sucking down all the data in the air traffic control system, and you can put in the flight number of a jet and pull up a graphical map showing exactly where the jet is. This is where you see the big wins, when people exploit for public access data that is already being collected.

We haven't seen truly compelling new features in software for years. Will that change?

I don't think desktop applications are all going to migrate to the Web. There is no compelling reason why we're going to give up our desktop word processors. There will be new applications that were never possible on the desktop. Google Earth is a good case in point. You could buy it and use it on the desktop, but why bother?

What do you see in the future for speech recognition?

The big application for speech recognition isn't going to be for producing documents. Speech recognition will give us more ways to talk with machines. So we'll see robust speech recognition for making phone calls or getting travel information or accessing the Web when you can't look at a screen. But just having a voice-recognizing word processor is like paving the cow path. Sending instant messages you create with your voice sounds like a modest thing, but it will be a big change.

What else might the future hold for technology?

The biggest trend in the next ten years is going to be not the Web but robots. Every decade is shaped by a different technology: The 1980s were shaped by the advent of cheap microprocessors, and the poster child was the personal computer. The geeks whose faces appeared on the magazine covers were Jobs, Wozniak, and Gates. Along came the 1990s and its hot technology, cheap lasers, which gave us communications bandwidth, and the poster child was the World Wide Web. This time the geeks on the covers of the magazines were the Google twins and their ilk.

Cheap sensors are shaping this decade, and the poster child is going to be robots. The next big consumer revolution that everyone will ooh and aah over will be consumer robots. The huge popularity of Roomba is one indicator. We are poised right on the edge of a robotics revolution. We don't know who the leaders will be yet. But I guarantee that in the next ten years you'll see the latest set of pimply faced geeks smiling out from the magazines, and they'll be making robots while everyone says it's a revolution and nobody guessed it.