My 1994 Prophecy is indeed Coming True!

As we look forward to the completion of a decade into the 21st century, it is interesting to look at my article titled “Paperless World” published in the August 14th 1994 edition of Deccan Chronicle Daily scanned and posted at the following URL:

http://www.pendyala.net/dcPaperLessWorld.pdf

More than 15 years of its publication, the predictions in the article have or are quite coming true. Here are a few instances to substantiate this claim:

“The magic wand called computer” has indeed become “pivotal to the world” that is now.

“Knowledge Based Systems” are again back into the research labs, with the semantic technologies that web 3.0 is likely to be built on being akin to this concept. Key advantages of semantic technologies are deduction and reasoning, which are characteristics of Knowledge Based Systems.

The “happy marriage of computer science and genetic engineering” is indeed a big thing now.

“Computers with the speed of present day (1994) supercomputer” are indeed becoming household gadgets.

“Mobile Computing” indeed brought the computer into every sphere of activity. (Reference: [1] Vishnu S. Pendyala, Simon S.Y.Shim, Web as the Ubiquitous Computer, IEEE Computer, vol. 42, no. 9, pp. 90-92, Sept. 2009, doi:10.1109/MC.2009.302).

It is indeed a “global village” now with companies and teams spreading across nations.

Money indeed exists in computers now, with paper money accounting for just 5-6% of the total money supply in developed countries and 8-10% in developing countries. It is 18-20% in India (source: http://www.livemint.com/2009/08/11223656/Plastic-money-recommended-to-b.html )

The need for physical transit has indeed vanished significantly with the amazing connectivity of the Internet. We are indeed seeing and talking to our friends using video conferencing now.

Paper is on its way to become a thing of the past, with the growing popularity of reading devices like kindle, and increasing reliance on electronics for previously paper-based activities like tax-filing or form-filling.

As the sixth sense project indicates, people are soon going to “write into computer and read from it” using “speech, vision, and touch.”

The world is indeed getting speedier and people are doing things that were requiring a year previously, now in a month, a week, a day, or even a second. I still remember the days in early 90s when recognizing a spoken letter such as “ka” used to take close to a day. Now it happens in a micro-second or less.

If necessity is the mother of invention, intuition like expressed in the attached article could as well be called the father of invention :).

Enjoy,
Vishnu Pendyala