My favorite 5 tech advancements.

1. Speed of the ethernet / internet.

   15 years ago, most people ran dial-up 56 Kilobit internet connections and 10 Megabit ethernet networks. 10 years ago, most people were just getting used to 768 Kilobit and 1.5 Megabit internet speeds and 100 Megabit ethernet. Today, FTTH delivers 50 Megabit internet speeds, and wired networks are running at 1 Gigabit. In another year or two, Google will be delivering 1 Gigabit internet, and wireless networks will be able to run at Gigabit speeds. In less than 5 years, we will be streaming high definition movies from the internet, and people will be buying less physical media. Some people already watch 720p/1080p content from Youtube, and Netflix is already delivering 720p content via set-top boxes.
   

2. Capacity of hard drives

   In the late 70s through the early 80s most people stored data and ran programs from 5 1/4" floppy drives with 720 kilobytes of storage. When IBM's first PC - the first PC/MS-DOS computer - was introduced (1981), it carried anywhere between 16 kilobytes to 256 kilobytes of onboard storage. By the early 90s, most of us were using 3 1/2" floppies storing 1.44 megabytes, and PCs with monochrome screens and 5~10 megabytes of hard drive storage. At the point that Windows 95 came out, we were using hard drives between 120 megabytes and 1 gigabyte of storage. By the time Windows 2000 came out, most computers were shipping with 20 to 40 gigabyte drives. Jump 10 years after Windows 2000, and even my netbook has 160 gigabytes of storage, and my workstation has over 1.5 terabytes of internal storage. Within a few years, densities of hard drives will exceed 5x what they are today. Forget the terabyte home networks of today; we'll be talking petabyte home networks in five years. By the end of the decade, we might see solid-state drives overtake traditional platter drives, and then another 10 years, optical drives.
   

3. Moore's Law

   It's not necessarily about speed, but specifically about the number of transistors within a CPU. In 1965, Gordon Moore first described the phenomenon of the number of transistors doubling every 18 months. Some people believe this trend will begin to hit the wall in 2015. I think not. At some point, quantum computing will become reality, and we will have a huge paradigm shift. (Maybe 25 years from now?)
   

4. The move away from a fossil fuel economy.

   Prior to the last huge and prolonged drop in oil prices, the US - under the Carter Administration - moved to create the first national energy code. Come 2010, we have LEED 3.0, and we're starting to see net-zero buildings. We're seeing commercialized photovoltaics with 20% efficiency, and there are 40% efficiency technologies in the lab right now. Along with LEDs gaining efficiencies and prices dropping fast, many new homes and buildings should find it easier to achieve net-zero within a decade.
   

5. Price.

   This isn't about technology per se, but about how the price of technology continuess to drop rapidly. In 1980, a personal computer would set you back $3000. In 2000, a laptop would set you back $2500. Today, you can get either one for less than $500. The refurbished netbook I'm working off of, cost me $215, and still has more transistors and storage capacity than a laptop from 2004, but for less than 1/3rd the cost.Along these lines, the next two books I'm reading,"Free" and "The Long Tail" by Chris Anderson, will hopefully provide entwined ribbons of thinking about the future of society, alongside what I've already read in Thomas Friedman's, "The World is Flat". I suggest people read Thomas Friedman's book, as it tends to suggest that we're stuck in the backside of a paradigm shift, as intellectual property is more valuable than production capacity.