Labeled "Nostradamus II: Technology's Impact on the Next Millennium," the panel took a stab at predicting the future without the wherewithal of that venerable soothsayer of the last millennium. With many of yesterday's technologies and discoveries are now taken for granted, panelists were charged with identifying science fiction ideas of the past that have become reality today. With that, some panelists were bold enough to state that by 2050 we will have "perfectly imperfect machines" that will contain "human" components: memories that forget, visions that ignore, and logic that yields different results each time. "The human brain has 500 Tera-connections," said Shumpei Kawasaki, executive in charge of strategic alliances for Hitachi Semiconductor America (Los Altos Hills, Calif.). "And with the progression of Moore's Law pumping out transistors at a rate of 3,200 times every 26 years, there will be 64 trillion of them by 2050."

Better fly swatters

"Yes, and what are people going to do with those transistors, that's what I'd like to know," said Gene Frantz, a fellow at Texas Instruments Inc. (Stafford, Texas). Frantz was more conservative: "By 2010 we will have trillions of instructions per second in our DSPs. Maybe we can then predict the weather, swat flies a continent away, and even have speech recognition that works."

Jim Ebentier, director of technology partnerships, for AMCC (San Diego), admitted that it's hard to predict a millennium ahead, but concluded that it will be harder in the future to predict between virtual reality and the real thing.

Perhaps the telling remark among the panelists was by Kawasaki: "Bionic components will probably start at $6 million and will only be able to be afforded by executives."