A vision of technological and societal future
This article is a simple fictional projection of a possible future. It is only a reflection of my thoughts and is by no means an absolute truth. Predicting the future is not an exact science or an evidence derived from a clear-sighted mind. However, history has shown us that many times visionaries have been able to identify future trends in our modern society. They simply recounted the upcoming evolution, simply by observing what is happening around them. This vision should not be based on approximate assumptions but rather on facts about emerging new technologies. Although the course of events remains unpredictable, it is not so difficult to understand, or imagine, what might eventually appear in our future lives. I therefore invite you to take a step back in time to imagine together the computer technology of tomorrow.
The FPGA revolution
The hardware market is changing rapidly. Driven by growing consumer demand, swearing only by FPGAs and their ability to constantly renew themselves, historical manufacturers have no choice but to sell their technologies in software form in order to be incorporated into the countless reprogrammable logic circuits. AMD and Intel are reduced to being only developers of instruction sets for these new generation processors, both limited by the engraving that has reached its limits. Free and Open Source are more than popular because of their implications in this innovative way of building a machine, according to your needs and expectations.
The massive use of FPGAs is a major upheaval, allowing the user to build his own machine from A to Z. A little bit of RiscV here, SSE4 and 5 there and of course the last free instruction of X86_64 in order to ensure backward compatibility with all the software of the past. You no longer swear by a brand but rather by a list of components to be inserted into your chip ! The same applies to graphic cards that will follow this path towards excessive modularity. A simple update will thus provide a performance gain or the incorporation of any new technologies available.
A new way of playing
The historical actors of the video game world have all recycled themselves as content providers, like Netflix. From now on, the games will be completely dematerialized and available for streaming or downloading, for a monthly subscription. It will be possible to incorporate the latest Raspberry PI or a powerful FPGA on your TV to enjoy the services of these different platforms. Needless to say, each firm will have its own network. This will cause many problems since nothing is unified and totally proprietary. As a result, the independents will come together to create their own platform, much more lucrative and permissive than the big names of the genre.
Virtual reality has clearly not taken up and will be relegated as a professional or educational tool. The playful world will be more and more open to augmented reality, less expensive and with a greater power of interaction. The generalization of this new emerging gameplay will encourage the general public to equip themselves with additional screens that will be combined, in order to affirm this new way of playing. Board games will see a new golden age with this process.
Towards digital education
Faced with this debauchery of technology, which is gradually invading the public space, national education will propose a reform for the youngest among us. From the middle school onwards, it will be possible for any student to request the study of the programming language as an option. It will be integrated into the program as a living language. Gradually, it will spread to become a mandatory core subject. In addition to this specificity, civic education courses centred around the Internet will also be introduced.
The programming courses will offer a sixth generation Raspberry Pi, allowing students to practice both in the school and at home. Goodbye Microsoft and Apple ! All the tasks to be performed will be on GNU/Linux distribution and these will eventually become much more popular than today. Less austere than before, Linux will be an operating system of choice for computer beginners and aspiring developers.
A halfway progress !
The repressive laws concerning intellectual property and net neutrality, voted massively by ignorant politicians and at the end of their days, will provoke a massive refuge of Internet users towards decentralized networks, ensuring a certain anonymity. The traditional Internet will no longer be anything but a field of ruin, managed by the large multinational entertainment and media companies. In parallel to this disaster, alternative networks will therefore be created in order to free themselves from this control over fundamental freedoms.
Nothing can stop this phenomenon any more and many aberrations will emerge, as a result of the stupidity of a group of men in power. Specific routers will be released to operate as nodes and exceed ISP requirements. A new era then comes and a new wind of freedom approaches, since it will be the turn of this generation to take over power !