my personal view of the next big innovation? transdermal electrical rechargers.. so batteries will be come obsolete.
we will charge our phones, our portable CD, our beepers just by walking and talking. and we will use even more electronic gadgets, because keeping them charged will be easier!
I so hope you're right on this. This carrying an extra battery business is far too irritating. It seems like such a natural extension, too. Maybe it would encourage Americans to be less lazy (I know I need all the encouragement I can get). [Frankly, though, we need to think of town designs that make it easier to walk and ride bikes, etc.]
I think Dr Seuss is going to end up being prophetic and that the days of GATTACA are not far away - and no laws can stop it. (No, I'm not being funny. I'm serious.) First stop genetic defects, then on to designer babies, then after-the-fact mods like breast augmentation, penis enlargement, no more male pattern baldness, etc. Then we'll have Sneetches, people striving to be like those who are considered their betters. Scary thing to me is designer germs (Ray Kurzweil writes about it in "The Age of Spiritual Machines" -- seems extremely far-fetched, but this guy seriously knows his stuff, so I'm reluctant to categorize him as a loon.) Imagine we take a highly infectious disease and make it hard to kill. (Seems *really* possible now with the recent news of the synthesized polio bug.)
k
