The next Google

摘要

Ten years ago this month, Google's first employee turned up at the garage where the search engine was originally housed. What technology at a similar early stage today will have changed our world as much by 2018? Nature asked some researchers and business people to speculate - or lay out their wares. Their responses are wide ranging, but one common theme emerges: the integration of the worlds of matter and information, whether it be by the blurring of boundaries between online and real environments, touchy-feely feedback from a phone or chromosomes tucked away on databases. I subscribe to Melvin Kranzberg's second law of technology: invention is the mother of necessity. Although technologies are created to fulfil needs, each also creates them; the next generation of technologies will deliver the promises of what we already have.