Dave Evans is the Chief Futurist – Internet Business Solutions Group for Cisco.
He’s worked for Cisco for over 20 years. He was responsible for rolling out their first-ever web server. He’s held every job a technology professional could hold. He credits his prognostication skills to technology “street smarts”. Some of his past ideas are currently transforming the automotive industry.
Can he see the future?
Cisco thinks he can.
These are his predictions:
- By 2029, 11 petabytes of storage will be available for $100—equivalent to 600+ years of continuous, 24-hour-per-day, DVD-quality video.
- In the next 10 years, we will see a 20-time increase in home networking speeds.
- By 2013, wireless network traffic will reach 400 petabytes a month. Today, the entire global network transfers 9 exabytes per month.
- By the end of 2010, there will be a billion transistors per human—each costing one ten-millionth of a cent.
- The Internet will evolve to perform instantaneous communication, regardless of distance.
- The first commercial quantum computer will be available by mid-2020.
- By 2020, a $1,000 personal computer will have the raw processing power of a human brain.
- By 2030, it will take a village of human brains to match a $1,000 computer.
- By 2050 (assuming a global population of 9 billion), $1,000 worth of computing power will equal the processing power of all human brains on earth.
- Today, we know 5 percent of what we will know in 50 years. In other words, in 50 years, 95 percent of what we will know will have been discovered in the past 50 years.
- The world’s data will increase sixfold in each of the next two years, while corporate data will grow fiftyfold.
- By 2015, Google will index approximately 775 billion pages of content.
- By 2015, we will create the equivalent of 92.5 million Libraries of Congress in one year.
- By 2020 worldwide, the average person will maintain 130 terabytes of personal data (today it is128 gigabytes).
- By 2015, movie downloads and peer-to-peer file sharing will explode to 100 exabytes, equivalent to 5 million Libraries of Congress.
- By 2015, video calling will be pervasive, generating 400 exabytes of data—the equivalent of 20 million Libraries of Congress.
- By 2015, the phone, web, email, photos, and music will explode to generate 50 exabytes of data.
- Within two years, information on the Internet will double every 11 hours.
- By 2010, 35 billion devices will be connected to the Internet (nearly six devices per person on the planet).
- By 2020, there will be more devices than people online.
- With IPv6, there will be enough addresses for every star in the known universe to have 4.8 trillion addresses.
- By 2020, universal language translation will be commonplace in every device.
- In the next five years, any surface will become a display.
- By 2025, teleportation at the particle level will begin to occur.
- By 2030, artificial implants for the brain will take place.
