Whoever is going to build such A.I. is going to try to control it, which is impossible by definition since a soon-to-be superhuman intelligence can't be outsmarted by dumber creatures. It will be of us what such A.I. is going to decide, it will be beyond everybody's will.

Actually, this is what advanced, strong A.I. is for: research into matters we don't have enough keenness to look into. As for energy, there's still a long way to go before we hit that plateau (and that indipendently from running out of fossil fuel), just think about solar satellites and nuclear fusion.

Congratulations. Excellent summary of the whole situation in just a few lines.

Exactly. Technology-induced unemployment is gaining pace. There's no point in struggling against it, we need a whole economy altogheter.

Galileo is much more precise than GPS. And that's just for starters.

For each one taking a driving license there are high stakes someone will hit a car sometime in his life. How do insurance companies handle that? They do. For being a better option self-driving cars just have to be better than us, they don't have to be perfect. Besides, technology improves rapidly, so in a short while they'll become almost perfect. We won't. No matter how long you wait for it to happen.

Anybody having a clue on what an incredible complex task space exploration truly is can't mind a little bit about such an issue. At the current state of things we can hope to explore our solar system at best. We have already started to do it by drones (Mars rover) and in the future, with the constant improvement of artificial intelligence and robotics, this will be the norm. Space travel to far aways planets such as Jupiter or even Mars are too long and risky for an human crew where drones don't need a round trip ticket. Besides, stars' exploration, in order to be feasible, requires much more advanced technology to be researched. It involves theories such as the Alcubierre's warp drive, which requires creation and manipulation of exotic energy at the highest levels. This is probably the last technological advancement to be accomplished. Any other advancement appears to be much more at hand: nanotechnology, advanced genetics, photonic CMOS, quantum computing, strong A.I. .... everything else is a joke compared to star exploration, which means that, by the time we'll be able to reach Proxima Centauri, such issues as "how to have sex in space" will be vastly irrelevant.

I've read the article (the WHOLE article) and the exaflop issue is generally posed in terms of power requirements in reference to current silicon technlogy and its most strictly related future advancements. The caveat of that is that not even IBM thinks exaflop computing can be achieved with current technology, that's why they are deeply involved with photonic CMOS, of which they have already made the first working prototype. Research into exaflop computing in IBM is largely based on that. You can't achieve the necessary power requirements without moving (at least in part) from electronic to photonic. This will decrease power requirements (and cooling requirements) by a large factor.

The oldest files I've recovered are some text files written with Vizawrite 64 (Commdore 64) dating back to 1985 and imported on PC through a still working Commodore 1541 disk drive and a custom-made USB interface for it. For the records: yes, these disks are still working perfectly after 25 years, and some of them were not even branded. Of course this stuff works through emulation. For not emulation stuff, the oldest things I have are word processing files created with the Cloanto C-1 Text on a Commodore Amiga in 1989. They were copied on DOS standard 3.5 disks when I switched to Macintosh using a software on the Amiga that read / wrote DOS disks, and since then they have been copied on every system I brought through the years. Open Office sneezes a bit at them but eventually loads them correctly.

I'm so amused at some comments pointing at overpopulation as the main argument against life extension. It's exactly like saying you aren't buying into Information Technology because you won't be doing the maths by yourself so you could fall of exercise! It's a stupid argument. Making people life forever is an hard task, making them sterile is way easier. Don't you think that, once biotechnologies become sophisticated enough to enable a sort of "genetic immortality" we'll all be asked to choose between that and breeding? Do you remember what's the point of having childs? Because we die. And we die so that our biology can improves through succeeding generations. We don't need that anymore. We can improve ourselves in other ways. We don't need to die. We don't need to bother about overpopulation. That's just an excuse to avoid real in-topic debating.

I'd like to ask Ecomotors how can by any means a petroleum engine burn less oil than an EV. This is clearly a research heavily biased toward oil companies as EVs can be recharged on fully renewable energy source such as solar panels or wind turbines, something that petroleum engines, no matter how little oil they burn, will never do. We have had petroleum cars for 100 years. That's enough. It's time for a change and we don't need any kind of alternate fuel engine. They are old and dated by now. If we really get engaged in this feat, lithium batteries will get less and less expensive while solar factories will grow larger and in number (not considering even further breakthrough on the way such as solar satellites). Oil is the past, let it be.

Looks who's talking. An institution living (and believing fully) a virtual reality since year 0. Even if I play Halo I know Master Chief won't come to rescue me, they still believe Jesus will. And, by the way, this comment is from Rome, Italy.

... and I believed this was about looking for a more powerful platform and new interactive concepts.....how naive... when you look into it, it's just lust for more money again... yaawwwwnnn.... booooring.... sure... subscription plans are exciting... at least to them... count me in... sure...

As a lifelong reader of IT mags, I have an experience of reviewers downplaying the role of new technologies. I may bring up uncountable examples: the CD-ROM, the Internet, flash memories, digital cameras and so on. Every time they test a starting technology here's the comment: "it's not a revolution". Sure. No technology is a revolution from the start, because no technology grows from nothing. There's always a previous technology and a following evolution. That's how mobile internet slowly evolved from GSM 9.600baud unstable and almost unusable connections to the current state of the art of 3G, HSPA+, which is a 3.5G technology to say the least. Also, the reviewer manage to look dumb when he says the only obvious improvements of 4G is latency at an ADSL line level. Geez.. that's what we were ACTUALLY AND BADLY IN NEED since the whole mobile internet began to take off! Latencies today make you want to die: what use can you make of a 7.2Mbps HSDPA line when it takes forever just for your mobile browser to begin transfers? And no way for a whole set of applications to ever appear on mobiles before this lag issue is worked out, on line multiplayer for example, which doesn't allow a mobile connection to be elegible as a replacement of ADSL lines. So, 4G really and by far improves what actually needed to be improved, it isn't just a fancy double digit transfer rate to stick on a mobile device. And we should wait 3 to 5 years, dying on our 3G laggy connections before adopting it?? Geeeez... And besides all this, the reviewer here takes for granted what 4G carriers will be advertising is WiMax. This is perhaps true in the United States, but here in Europe there's almost no plan for WiMax and all carriers are about to start upgrading from 3G directly to LTE. LTE is a more recent technology and is better than WiMax. If you really want to compare some 4G labeled technology to the most advanced blend of 3G you have to take LTE for a test.

ROTFL! So we have to print more?? Lovely!! Sure I'd never bet we would have ended up saying so when the whole information technology revolution starting from the 80s emphasized the "no paper at all" eco-compatible point of it. And, you know? Before the digital transition was complete, we already printed way too much, in the eighties and the nineties. Now, thanks to the ubiquity of our portable digital devices and the ease of accessing every document through the Internet, printed medias are finally becoming a thing of the past. Even State bureaucracy here in Italy has gone digital now, that's true progress and we don't absolutely need to go back. Printers' manufacturers should better resign themselves.