2011 Predictions: Curt Hopkins

Editor’s note: Every December the ReadWriteWeb team looks into the murky depths of the coming year and tries to predict the future. How did we do last year? Well, Facebook didn’t go public, Google Wave didn’t make a comeback, and Spotify didn’t make it to the U.S. But our forecasts for Google Chrome, cloud computing, Facebook and something we called the “iTablet” were spot on. What’s in store for 2011? All this week we’ll be posting our predictions. Let us know your prognostications in the comments.

1: Filtering, harassment, arrest and torture of bloggers and other users of social media will increase exponentially. There has been a geometric increase in the last several years, but I believe this coming years will see every traditional tyranny fully embracing the Chinese model: technical, legal, social oppression online. Most democracies will more closely travel the trail earlier blazed by Australia, sacrificing civil rights to a make-believe safety. The U.S., followed by many European democracies, have been traumatized first by terrorist attacks, and now by Wikileaks, into clamping down, and are edging, however hesitantly by comparison, toward the Chinese model.

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2: Access to both public and private collections, of documents, manuscripts and art, will increase. But compared to museums and libraries, universities will continue to drag their feet.

3: Non-profit projects like Worldreader will increase in number and penetration based on the above increase in access.

4: Breakthroughs in the qualitative nature of computing – metamaterials, quantum computing, etc. – will spark a new generation of computers whose end-result will be a definition of “computer” as different from what we have now, as what we have now is from the abacus.

5: Rampaging kill-bots will range across the landscape, snapping people in half with their merciless metal claws and spitting them on their liquid-metal handi-hands. They will be bested only when a rule-breaking space captain and a lovable rogue partner to destroy their logic circuits with the Epimenides paradox.

Discuss