imagine if you could travel back in time and offer to show one of those Boeing engineers what air travel would look like in 2014, fifty years on.
What might he have expected to see? … Consider what that engineer had seen happen in his own lifetime. The first attempts at powered flight took place right around the time he was born.
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I submit to you that the last thing that Boeing engineer would expect to see in 2014 is what actually happened. … Unless you are an airplane nerd, you would be hard pressed to distinguish the 787 from its grandfather.
It’s not that the technology failed. … But it wasn’t worth it! Because the technologies we had were good enough.
Today I hope to persuade you that the same thing that happened to aviation is happening with the Internet. … the devices we use are becoming ‘good enough’, to the point where we can focus on making them cheaper, more efficient, and accessible to everyone.
So despite appearances, despite the feeling that things are accelerating and changing faster than ever, I want to make the shocking prediction that the Internet of 2060 is going to look recognizably the same as the Internet today.
We can store incredible amounts of information, but we can’t really move it around. So the world of the near future is one of power constrained devices in a bandwidth-constrained environment. It’s very different from the recent past, where hardware performance went up like clockwork, with more storage and faster CPUs every year.
Source: Web Design – The First 100 Years