This may seem incredible, but all those things, discoveries and technologies of the future that will be discussed in this review already actually exist. The only thing holding back their widespread use is cost. We can only hope that everything will change soon enough. And then our world will become completely different.

1. Organ cultivation

This has already been done, although the technology is still being improved. To explain in a nutshell, stem cells are used.

2. Raising meat

With hunger in many parts of the world, the opportunity to grow meat in a lab shouldn't be downplayed. At the moment, scientists can already do this, but, unfortunately, this is still too expensive a process for mass production.

3. Ice collection

We are talking about the asteroid belt. There is a limited amount of fresh water on Earth, but the solar system has plenty of it. A similar capability is currently being developed by NASA.

4. Thermonuclear reaction

Unlike the fission reaction, the fusion reaction is much cleaner and much more powerful. This is how stars produce energy. When humanity is finally able to use nuclear fusion, oil will no longer be needed.

5. Superintelligence

On the one hand, this is quite scary, especially if you remember about SkyNet. But machines are actually starting to learn (i.e., reprogram themselves on their own). One can only guess where this will lead.

6. People “to order”

With the help of gene editing technologies such as CRISPR, this has long been possible. In some countries (most likely China, due to the lack of public backlash against genetic modification) “genetically modified” people will soon begin to be born.

7. Nuclear engine

Basically, the idea is to use nuclear explosions to propel a spaceship. The search for materials for the combustion chamber is currently underway.

8. Floating cities

They will be possible... on Venus. Although the surface of this planet is extremely inhospitable, at an altitude of about 50 km things become not so bad - here the pressure, temperature and gravity are almost the same as those on Earth. In fact, in many ways, Venus is a much better place to colonize than Mars.

9. Quantum computing

Simply put, computers will be unimaginably powerful. The reason for this is that quantum computing will allow the use of algorithms that can potentially solve problems faster. Particles at the quantum level do not follow the rules of physics that everyone takes for granted, since they can inhabit more than one state at the same time. Roughly speaking, they will be able to perform several computations simultaneously.

10. Real prosthetics

We are talking about prostheses that not only receive signals from the brain (for movement). They will also be able to send signals back (such as touch, temperature and pressure).

11. Artificial brain

This development continues the superintelligence project and consists of copying the human brain. In a sense, it involves "downloading" consciousness into a computer. Of course, this raises numerous ethical questions, but scientists are now creating such technology.

12. Health monitors

This technology is actually already used in some specific cases, but it basically now involves a computer that constantly monitors a person's health and sends status information to the smartphone. Potentially, with the development of technology, a bracelet worn on the arm will be able to diagnose and solve health problems.

13. Sunny roads

Similar roads are already being tested in Israel and France. They charge hybrid and electric cars that drive over them. If technology develops, there will be no need for gas stations.

14. Self-driving cars

It's no secret that they already exist. In this case we are talking about a complete transition to such cars. This will dramatically reduce road accidents.

15. Long lasting batteries

Despite all the advances, battery technology is clearly a century behind. So far, only experimental single developments of batteries that will last longer are being carried out.

Augmented Reality

Contact lenses may soon offer more than just vision correction. They may be able to provide just about everything that Google Glass does.

In the process of testing Windows gadgets, I once again thought about the fact that we are the first generation in the history of mankind in whose life a huge technological breakthrough occurred. I think sometimes it is useful for all of us to remember the past in order to fully appreciate what we have in the present.

For example, how much effort used to be required to call relatives in Ukraine. I had to go to the post office, order conversations, wait for the connection, and then, to the sound of the telephone operator shouting: “Kharkov, fifth!”, run to the cabin. Then shout into the phone (against the background of the screams of the same “subscribers”) and at the most inopportune moment hear the telephone operator with the message that “your time is coming to an end.” No matter how absurd it may seem now, thirty years ago this was an ordinary situation. And today Ukraine is just another prefix of numbers in the phone book. We easily call from mobile phone to mobile phone and are indignant when they don’t pick up the phone for a long time.

What about the phone: everyone who has Skype or Viber can easily talk and see each other anywhere in the world where there is Internet, by pressing two buttons. You can come to your parents in the village, connect a 3G modem to a simple netbook, set up Skype and call each other every day. My dad often plays chess with his youngest on Skype:

And with the eldest, they simultaneously edit documents in the new Office for submission to Rospatent. They already have several joint patents and are now preparing to file a new one. This time they invented an electromagnetic method for launching light satellites into low-Earth orbit.

If someone from the future had told us back in the 80s that cellular, Internet and video communications would be commonplace, we would hardly have believed it...

Remember how many generations of audio media have appeared and disappeared. Records, reels of film, then compact cassettes, then compact discs, then mini-discs and, finally, MP3 - a universal digital format on any storage device. Of course, to this day there are connoisseurs of vinyl (or flac format), but I’m not talking about them now. I'm talking about the average consumer. Previously, you had to find music, find equipment to transcribe from one medium to another, and only then, finally, listen to the recording. And remember that hiss? And today, sitting in a cafe, we hear an interesting melody, pick up the phone with Shazam turned on, identify the artist and immediately download it for ourselves. We can even choose to buy music legally or download it “for review.”

The same goes for cinema. At the dawn of VCRs, when the first models were just beginning to appear among the most advanced residents of the union, many went to visit each other to watch movies. Today we can start watching a movie at home, then download it to our phone or tablet and continue the “movie show” in the car or subway. And even if we don't go out, we can discuss the latest movie with friends on social networks.

Or games. In our childhood, there were not even the most primitive 8-bit consoles, but today games have acquired a kinect sensor and allow you not just to lie or sit at the screen with a joystick, but to move, jump and fight along with the heroes. My youngest son really liked these games on the Xbox 360:

How has your work become easier? Try to write a sheet of text without making a single typo or mistake. Difficult? Then remember how you used to work on typewriters. Electric typewriters replaced conventional ones, but even then it was impossible to imagine that the “typewriter” would become flat, light and could be carried with you. And today, with the help of a computer and cloud services, we can deploy an entire “work office” anywhere - in a cafe, at home, at the airport, etc.

What if a Soviet person were told that he could order goods from any stores abroad? Without queues and fuss: find out all the characteristics, opinions of experts, those who have already used it; put it aside, think and buy by entering only the 16-digit credit card code. Fantastic!

Technologies are developing rapidly and changing our lives radically. Of course, this development has its drawbacks - some people become immersed in virtual reality and begin to lose touch with real reality. But if you know a sense of proportion, do not forget that these are just tools, the quality of life will only improve. Technology makes work easier, brings people together and allows us to go beyond limitations.

Sometimes I think about what the future holds for us. Today there are many very real concepts and services that can turn our lives around again.

Artificial intelligence: Xbox, for example, is already easily controlled not only by gestures, but also by voice. Siri currently only speaks English and it takes a long time to choose words for the meaning to reach her correctly, but in the future it will be possible to easily and naturally communicate with any gadgets in your native language.

Mobile Internet: According to experts, in 2015 wireless Internet will overtake cable connections in terms of usage. We can endlessly fantasize about what permanent online access will give us, but it will definitely be very convenient.

High performance and energy saving: One of the biggest problems with modern gadgets is constant charging. In the future, everything will be different: we will charge our phones once a month and become even freer and more mobile. Intel specialists are already working on such projects.

Smart House: Today my phone is showing a broadcast from cameras installed in Dolcabar. In the future, my entire home or office will be accessible at any time. It will be possible not only to watch what is happening inside, but also, for example, to automatically order products that are out of stock in the refrigerator, draw a bath, regulate the climate, and so on.

Augmented Reality: Another amazing technology is augmenting physical objects with virtual elements in real time. A recent impressive example is the Bing Translator application, which supports 9 languages ​​and translates texts from voice, when pointing the camera, and even offline. The translation is displayed directly on the screen on top of the source. Very cool, a godsend for trips - and completely free, too.

Kinetic modules: Along with voice control, kinetics will develop. You can swipe the movie off the screen onto your smartphone, take it to the kitchen or another room, and play the video on another screen. Controlling with gestures is much more natural.

Medicine: Every technological breakthrough expands the capabilities of medicine. If earlier, in order to see what was happening inside a person, an autopsy was often necessary, now, magnetic waves and microscopic cameras can penetrate almost any part of the body. In the same Windows 8 there is an application where, in addition to a diet tracker, calorie counter, workouts, recipes and symptom checking, there is a detailed 3D model of the human body. By the way, mobile healthcare and the field of various wearable sensors that synchronize with smartphones and provide a complete report on well-being are developing extremely rapidly. In the near future, I am sure that the phrase “diagnosis via the Internet” will cease to be ironic.

Autonomous cars: it is a combine of technologies from sensors, artificial intelligence, GPS and much more. Undoubtedly, this will be a powerful breakthrough not only in the field of our comfortable and safe movement, but also in cargo transportation.

What technologies are you looking forward to and which of them, in your opinion, will radically change our lives in the near future?

P.S

The main feeling from experimenting with Windows is the expansion of horizons: it is interesting to get acquainted with new technologies. In general, it seemed to me that the technologies of both systems - Windows and Mac - are not inferior to each other. Everything that is presented in one system can be found in another; they differ largely in the “wrapper”. In a global sense, this competition and eternal holivars are beneficial to all of us, since they guarantee the development of new services and better offers.

Well, we have proven that a family of poppy growers can do without the usual system for a whole month. As a result, the eldest child remains on Windows, and I keep my phone as a second one for the Internet when traveling, and a laptop, since there are a number of programs and files that cannot be read on a Mac and a second laptop with Windows is sometimes necessary. My main laptop is still a Mac. I take it back out of the safe.

Just a couple of decades ago, we managed without the Internet and gadgets. A little over a hundred years ago, people traveled on horse-drawn carriages and never dreamed of a car. What if what seems unshakable now will very soon find a more perfect replacement? What awaits us in the coming years? An Inform Policy journalist learned something about this at the presentation of the rebranding of the IT company Rostelecom.

New look

Yes, yes, this is not a typo or an error. Rostelecom is an IT company, and not just a communications service operator. Now she has new priorities, products and many new cool services, which are reflected in a stylish and vibrant brand. Its presentation in 3D format took place recently in Moscow.

Top managers of the company spoke on the stage of the P. N. Fomenko Workshop theater, surrounded by pop-up diagrams, pictures and graphs. As Mikhail Oseevsky, President of Rostelecom PJSC, said, the new branding is a logical continuation of Rostelecom’s strategy, which will help the company become a leading operator of digital services in Russia. “It’s not enough for us to just hear - we show the world’s best content and produce our own, open up opportunities for education, give a sense of security, give time free from bureaucratic waste, help clients of any scale develop their business, and entire industries improve industry technologies,” Oseevsky emphasized .

So, the new company logo. From now on, this is not an “ear”, which has been the symbol of the brand since 2011, but a two-color ribbon folded in the shape of the letter “P”. The new visual style was developed in partnership with Bootleg agencies (BBDO group) and Saffron Brand Consultants.

The task of the new brand is to reflect the change in the company’s approach to products and customers,” emphasized Rostelecom Marketing Director Elena Dobrokhotova. - We focus not on technology, but on the needs of people. Therefore, the main characters of the new brand are people and their emotions. A variety of graphic solutions and colors helps us reflect the breadth of opportunities that the company creates for people, businesses and countries.

We want to emphasize that Rostelecom is becoming a modern digital company, capable of finding a common language with every client - from gamers to government agencies.

The development of the logo and corporate font cost 35 million rubles.

New services

We anticipate the wishes of our clients and take into account their needs in all areas of our activities. Rostelecom’s technological solutions will help make business more efficient, and life more comfortable and safer,” said Vladimir Kiriyenko, First Vice President of Rostelecom. - Our new line of tariffs and services allows you to assemble a package of services like a puzzle - to suit the needs of a specific family or company.

In the new tariff line of communication and TV services, for ease of choice, new service packages and tariffs are named based on the needs of the family - “For Internet”, “For peace of mind”, “For impressions”, “For everything”, “Game”.

And the most interesting thing is the company's new products. We'll tell you everything in order.

Wink multimedia platform- evolutionary stage of development of “Interactive TV”. It includes a mobile application, an Internet portal and an application for Smart TV. The platform has more than 200 TV channels, more than 12 thousand films and series episodes. Essentially, this is your personal online cinema. There is also a maximum range of additional services available - from pause and rewind to Parental Control. The service is affordable. Thanks to it, you will forget about downloading movies in poor quality from unknown sites, and about intrusive advertising while watching. You can use it from any gadget: TV, smartphone, computer.

Rostelecom Lyceum. Another new direction is online education. The lyceum from Rostelecom will primarily be useful to schoolchildren, although not only to them. The purpose of the platform is to make additional education high-quality, safe and accessible. For this purpose, the best content on the market has already been selected. English, mathematics, literature, whatever. Many courses have discounts, the first trial lesson is free. In any case, a personal curator will help you decide on a training system. He will select a child development program and answer parents’ questions. In the service’s personal account, you can track the student’s class schedule and progress.

Smart House. This service is already known to Rostelecom clients, but it has yet to become firmly established in our lives. Its essence is that a system of sensors and controllers will maintain safety and comfort in your home. The controller can support the operation of up to 300 devices and notifies about the appearance of smoke, water leakage, extraneous movements, and the opening of doors and windows. It sends a message to the application on your mobile phone, as well as e-mail and SMS. There is a basic Smart Home package, and there is an extended package, so the service is available to everyone.

"Be in the black" - an updated platform for entrepreneurs, which allows you to quickly get the high-speed Internet and mobile communications necessary for every business. And also “add on” additional services, such as virtual PBX, SMS advertising, Wi-Fi, video surveillance or TV for business, with a discount of up to 50%.

Transport of the future

And now futurism in its purest form. Imagine you need to get from home to work by public transport. You are walking along your usual route to the bus stop, and a shiny black minibus pulls up to you. It has a beautiful interior with leather-look seats, large windows, including those on the ceiling. It has a screen with a map and buttons for communicating with the dispatcher. There are USB ports to charge your phone. You look at all this in surprise and notice: “ah... where is the driver?” But he is not there. As well as the steering wheel and pedals. The car of the future after all.

“Shuttle.2.0” is the name of the first Russian drone. It was demonstrated to journalists on the territory of the Skolkovo innovation center. An experimental zone for an unmanned vehicle was launched here using the promising 5G communication network in the 3.4-3.8 GHz range. Developers of the car of the future: FSUE NAMI, KamAZ and Rostelecom.

While the electric bus is moving, all telemetry data, motion parameter data, and high-quality video recordings are transmitted via fifth-generation networks in real time to the monitoring command post. The electric bus has 12 seats, 6 of which are seats. Maximum speed - 110 km/h.

A fundamentally different data transfer rate, the ability to simultaneously connect more than a million devices and a few milliseconds for response make 5G an ideal “environment” for unmanned vehicles, noted Mikhail Oseevsky. “These characteristics of the network we have deployed allow us to achieve the main goal of all developers of drones - safety when driving autonomous vehicles along city streets.

So far the car looks like some kind of miracle far from real life. Although the electric bus is already transporting residents of out-of-town cities across the Skolkovo territory. It still takes time for unmanned public transport to appear in a big city. For the further development of the 5G network, preparation of the legislative and technical base. According to the developers' forecasts, in 7-10 years such shuttles will replace today's buses in cities with a population of over a million. Don't believe it? By the way, in Japan, an unmanned taxi was launched this year. The first appearance of drones on Russian roads as private transport is approximately 15 years away. These are the experts’ forecasts, but what do you think about this?

The greatest changes, of course, are associated with the development of the Internet, mobile technologies and wireless communications, which have radically changed the inclusion of a significant part of the world's population in a single information space. However, there has been impressive progress in other areas as well.

Access to the Internet

This may seem crazy, but in 2005, according to J"son & Partners, 95% of Internet users in Russia accessed the network at home via dial-up, that is, through a modem that dialed the telephone exchange and, with a characteristic hiss, established a slow and unstable connection.

Expensive broadband access at speeds of 10-100 Mbit/s was available to only a small part of users through home local networks, DSL and at work.

In 2015, in Russia, almost any more or less large populated area was connected to fiber-optic communication lines, providing Internet access at a speed of 1 Gbit/s.

In 2005, the dial-up modem was the means of accessing the Internet for many Russians

In mobile communications in the field of packet data transfer, that is, for access to the Internet, in 2005 the GPRS standard dominated, which at best provided a connection speed of 80-100 Kbps, and EDGE began to appear with data transfer speeds of up to 474 Kbps .

The Big Three received licenses for commercial operation of 3G with data transfer speeds above 1 Mbit/s only in 2009, and then with restrictions on the frequency spectrum from the military.

In 2015, in many regions of Russia, 4G standard communications are already available, that is, over 100 Mbit/s for moving objects and up to 1 Gbit/s for stationary objects, and “pilot” projects of 5G networks with speeds of up to 10 Gbit/s are being launched around the world. s, intended not only for “regular” Internet access, but also for the Internet of things, wearable gadgets, “smart” cars and virtual reality.

Cell Phones

In 2005, Nokia and Motorola were the most common cell phone brands. Screens with a resolution of 320x240 or 320x480 and no touch interfaces - navigation through the phone menu was carried out with a joystick.

Of course, from such a device, users could only view mail and WAP versions of sites; there was no talk of full-fledged surfing the Internet and social networks.

Cell phones from 2005

Now we have access to powerful smartphones with 4K screen resolution and full Internet access. According to Mail.Ru, from 25 to 35% of the audience of VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Moi Mir and mail use them exclusively from mobile devices.

But we must pay tribute to the mobile phone manufacturers of ten years ago. Almost every device that appeared on the market had a unique (and sometimes completely surprising) design. Today, the main shifts in device design revolve around sharp or rounded corners, as well as the location of the side keys.

Tablets

Attempts to provide business users with mobile devices that would not weigh several kilograms and would allow them to work comfortably even on the go, that is, tablet computers, were made back in the last century (Palm was a pioneer in this area), but before the iPad, all products were exclusively "for geeks."

Bill Gates: “Tablets are cool!”

In 2005, Intel collaborated with Microsoft on the UMPC platform, and even earlier, in 2002, Microsoft introduced a tablet version of Windows XP.

Devices produced by different manufacturers based on it allowed full use of the Microsoft office suite and input using a stylus.

More than a decade later... little has changed: iPad Pro lets you use Microsoft's office suite and type with the Apple Pen. However, touch technology has undoubtedly made the use of tablets more natural for humans. For the older generation, it was tablets that opened the Internet.

Web services

In 2005, when Facebook was still called theFacebook and was a project of two Harvard University students for their university audience, web services performed a very narrow set of functions.

Mail was just mail, a search engine was just a search engine, Messenger was just a messenger, and YouTube had just posted its first 18-second video of amateur footage from the San Diego Zoo.

At this time, the most popular instant messaging services were ICQ (in the world) and AIM (in the USA). By 2005, the number of ICQ users exceeded 100 million, and AIM by 2005 reached 500 million audiences and 3 billion messages per day.

In 2015, Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and other large Internet companies are trying to build comprehensive information systems using artificial intelligence based on their web services.

They collect information about the user and his behavior, communicate with him in “natural” language using voice personal assistants, tell him the latest news, recommend purchases, etc.

In this regard, messengers experienced a renaissance and gained an important place in the system, thanks to the rapid growth of the “mobile only” audience, and also sealed the fate of SMS, which are gradually disappearing from our lives.

Storage and transmission of information

In 2005, the leader in storing and transferring large amounts of information (from hand to hand) was rewritable optical disks.

If you could get content (movies, music, distributions of games and programs) overnight by downloading via torrents, then it was most convenient to store, transfer and exchange it using the good old “blanks”.

DVD blanks were an integral attribute of the Internet user

In 2015, not only blank drives are losing their relevance, but terabyte external hard drives are losing their relevance - storing and working with data for users and businesses is increasingly moving to the clouds. The distribution of music and video is moving into the legal segment through streaming services, which are looking for acceptable ways to monetize and ensure the quality of services. Games and software are distributed through online content stores.

Technologies are moving in the direction that downloading and installing applications will soon lose relevance - everything will happen in the cloud, and the user will see only the result on the screen.

A television

In 2005, television was doing well and was actively introducing digital broadcast formats. Plasma and LCD flat-screen TVs with a diagonal of 37 inches appeared in stores.

Today, a TV is more of a video panel with 4K resolution and support for stereo images, and broadcast television is giving way to Smart-TV in Russia. The Internet and streaming services are connected to the TV, and devices like Apple TV and Google Chromecast allow you to run mobile games on the big screen.

If in 2006 the Nintendo Wii became one of the most successful game consoles in the history of the Japanese company, today Nintendo is leaving this market and investing in the development of mobile games.

High tech companies

In 2004, Google went IPO (released its shares to the stock exchange) exclusively as a search engine. Even Google Maps came later. By 2015, IPOs of Internet companies are every time a big event for the market.

Some IPOs, such as Alibaba's listing on the New York Stock Exchange, set historical records.

Now the core Internet business of high-tech companies is viewed in conjunction with their innovative activities in the field of robotics, clean energy, smart cars, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and space.

Name the most important technological achievements of the past 350 and future 350 years

Stephen Fry: The future always laughs at those who try to predict it. We are not smart enough to foresee the future, and it always comes unexpectedly. And almost always it is not science that brings surprises, but humanity: our reaction to scientific discoveries can be surprising and unpredictable.

Tim Berners-Lee: About 350 years ago, what we call the “scientific approach” began to take shape: people began to put forward theories and then test them experimentally, that is, everything that is now explained to us in kindergarten appeared. It's amazing that today, 350 years later, many people have stopped trusting science.

As for the future, I don't want to predict anything, but I would like to see how technology will support democracy and science. In science, we deal with very complex systems, and one person is simply not able to cope with this, so we need technologies that will allow us to solve scientific problems together. And democracy is the principle of making collective decisions about what to do. And we need technology that allows people to make these decisions more effectively.

Bill Thompson: I think that in the future the interaction between biology and IT will become much closer. We will be able to enter data and control machines with our thoughts, and the visual signals emanating from the machines will be processed by our brain and accepted as real.

At what point does an unknown new technology suddenly become commonplace?

Stephen Fry: The most significant technological breakthrough of the last five years, in my opinion, is Twitter. When he appeared, it seemed like something completely banal and meaningless. And then one day I got stuck in the elevator. And then I wrote on Twitter: “Damn! I'm stuck in an elevator" and took a photo of myself and the people who were stuck with me. And literally a few days later all the newspapers wrote about this service. The Twitter boom has begun.

Tim Berners-Lee: Turning points in the history of technology can be different. For example, initially e-mail was used mainly by university departments. Gradually, more and more people started writing emails. Of course, business needed email, and eventually the restrictions on commercial use of the network previously imposed by the US National Science Foundation ceased to apply. And then a turning point came: people who had previously enjoyed using e-mail suddenly began to pick up the phone again - the fact is that they were fed up with spam flooding their mail.

What is the situation with new technologies outside developed countries?

Stephen Fry: People who do not have access to the Internet are in danger of being declassed due to digital illiteracy, just as they were 150 or 100 years ago due to conventional illiteracy. And yet in the UK alone, 10 million people have never used a computer.

Tim Berners-Lee: For about 20 years, my hacker friends and I wrote new protocols and created all sorts of amazing things for people who love technology. But when 20-25 percent of the planet’s inhabitants began to use the Internet, we realized that the rest should use it too. Why don't they do this? It turns out, not only because they do not have access to the network. Maybe they don’t have a phone with an Internet browser or software in their language? Or they have everything, but they don’t know what to do with it. The question arises: how to help them? After all, you can’t deal with the Internet instead of healthcare, vaccination or water supply. It's interesting how all these things are intertwined - and one cannot be separated from the other.

Bill Thompson: Of course, the spread of information technology is extremely important. But we are now beginning to understand that when the remaining 70-80 percent of the world's population comes online, their impact on the Internet will be colossal. And it’s unlikely that we are all ready for such changes: we built the Internet to suit our own needs - this is embedded in many of the protocols and systems that we use. Moving forward, we continue to cut people off from new resources: they cannot access them due to low Internet speeds. While we should, on the contrary, try to include them in our circle. After all, the Internet is simply all the computers connected to each other; Any computer connected to a network is as important as a server at Michigan Tech or a government server.

How much will new technologies change us and our lives?

Stephen Fry: Ultimately it will be determined by people, not abstract ideas. We cannot even imagine what consequences - both positive and negative - this will lead to. Humanity is generally characterized by change. Now many people complain that because of the Internet, people have stopped communicating as they used to. But our usual way of interaction between people appeared when we began to live in cities, and this happened only after the industrial revolution. In general, almost everything that seems natural to us actually came into our lives recently. For example, our great-grandfathers believed that beating children was normal.

Jim Haselof: Analogies to what you are talking about can be found in biology. As a result of constant selection, we have obtained crops and animals that are very different from those with which our ancestors dealt. Now we have learned to directly and much more meaningfully change the properties of cultures, but we have already become attached to existing cultures, and they seem natural to us. Meanwhile, they are completely unnatural. A man took them away.

How will new technologies affect culture?

Stephen Fry: Ever since the invention of the printing press, people have been afraid that the rapid spread of ideas will have a bad effect on culture and on the human mind: people will stop studying the seven liberal arts as they should and will start reading these stupid books. When the novels became widespread, many were horrified: they seemed vulgar and obscene. Then came pulp novels and detective stories, then cinema, then television, then video games. And all this was supposed to destroy the human brain.

What new technology are you dreaming about?

Dame Wendy Hall: I dream of teleportation. It will be great if we learn how to move atoms across the Internet. True, here you will need Internet protocols for transferring atoms, and then it is better not to get a 404 error.

Bill Thompson: I would like to see all technology disappear from view. Instead of technology, I just want to see other people.

Stephen Fry: I always liked the Holodeck holographic room in Star Trek: The Next Generation. There, on the walls, you could run a program simulating anything - for example, stories from the past. That is, to create other worlds with the help of imagination. But we have been able to do this since the moment we learned to speak and write: people tell stories, write poetry and penetrate into the thoughts of other people. So really, the only technology that matters is language: the ability to seduce, delight, intrigue, puzzle and deceive other people with words.