Screw the iPad and Wikileaks and Mel Gibson and health care reform.

It has begun.

Nothing else matters.  Everything else is secondary to this.  This is single-handedly the biggest breakthrough that mankind will see this century.  It is on par with the development of trigonometry, the theory of general relativity and the solid-state transistor.  This is bigger than the inception of the Internet with more important implications than the concept of genetic algorithms.

Man is learning the fundamentals of life.

Did last year's predictions hold up?  I made no predictions last year.  I had only hoped that 2010 would be better than 2009.  I believe this was.  This year saw me going to Japan and later on experiencing a renaissance of thought, so to speak.  Without using drugs!  Both experiences were quite a trip, pun intended.  2010 will see me writing about these thoughts.

General predictions for 2011?  Apple will do better.  They've done nothing but better since the first iPod, but this is like saying the sun will rise. 

I'm hoping 3D TVs will die, but it looks like Hollywood and the tech sector is willing to push this shit.  This is most likely a multi-year fad.  Gross sales should probably start declining by 2013 and the industry should give up by 2015 or 2016.

Chip makers are having trouble figuring out how carbon nanotubes (CNTs) fit into their plans.  2010 saw some significant advances in the manufacturing of CNTs but more hurdles lie ahead.  The first manufacturer to build a functional CNT-based chip and can manufacture en masse consumer-level hardware based on it is gonna light a fire under the ass of the industry, but I don't see this happening before 2014.  IBM made a functioning transistor, but there's architecture issues and scale of manufacturing problems to overcome, and it's the latter that academia seems to be obsessed with.

Nanotech will see more attention in 2011, and exponentially this decade.  We can create life from the ground up, we can direct viruses to build better batteries, we've developed gene-targeted treatments for cancers that have zero side effects.  All of these involve understanding genetics and manufacturing molecular-level structures to control sub-cellular objects.  This is critical to extending the life of Humankind several times over, and quite possibly can be done by 2030.  Down in the DNA is where the money is at, is where all the fun is.  It's gonna be tough to make calls on what exactly is going to happen in post-modern medicine, but I can guarantee it's gonna be exciting.

We are beginning to unfurl the neural tapestries of the brain.  This is beyond exciting.  Faster thinking.  Faster processing.  Integration with hardware.  More memory.  More precise memory.  The knowledge of the Internet, downloaded into your forebrain.  A whole new era of interactive entertainment, jacked directly into your spinal cord.  At first we will replace lost functionality with prosthetics that plug directly into the nervous system.  That will be the focus until maybe 2025.  At the same time, we will be learning how to augment peripheral systems like sight, sound, touch and smell.  Slowly, it will become less about extending our brains into our environments, and more about injecting our environments directly into our brains.  Then these environments will become digital.  A whole new era of entertainment, delivered directly to your spinal cord.  Entire digital worlds for us to touch, see, smell and taste.  Oh, and the moral and ethical implications of all this new technology.  If you love to just sit and think, the next decade is going to give you a lot of lovin'.

Right now it takes a supercomputer to simulate half a mouse brain.  In 15 years, desktops will be able to simulate fill mouse brains, and if CNT chips see daylight, that'll happen in half the time.

That damn FDA needs to get out of the way and let this happen at full tilt.

Commercialized space is fun and all, but other than drawing in super-rich tourists and specialized manufacturing, it will not garner much interest from the public at large.  Not this decade.  This is, however, the beginning of a multi-decade trend on par with the European migration to the New World.  Except this time, the New World will be the moon.  Right now, we just learned how to make space boats.  We'll get those boats to the moon and to Mars, but I have no idea when, but it will be pioneers who will go.

Personal predictions for 2011?  I believe it will be better than 2010.  This stance is surprising to those who know me since I am not one for optimism.

 - Ron

And I am the Lord of the Dance said He