Craig R. Barrett

Photographer: Thomas Broening

CEO, Intel Corp.

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The commercialization of the transistor. Without the invention of the integrated circuit, the personal computer would have been the size of the Pentagon, and the cellphone the size of the Washington Monument.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Wireless.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The Internet.

"Russia, China, India, and Eastern Europe weren't playing in the world economic system a decade ago. Those countries are now full of well-educated people with state-of-the-art communications technology who can do just about any knowledge-based job that can be done in the United States. The U.S. is going to have much, much more competition in areas where we have historically been the leaders. We're not producing the students who are interested in or capable of taking the lead. We're not reinvesting.

"When people here talk about outsourcing, they talk about it in a terrible win-lose way. We can't go back to isolationism mode and slam other countries that have well-educated people. The United States has to decide to compete on the basis of investment in education and R and D and infrastructure. It's a long-term issue, not a 30-second sound-bite issue. A country's standard of living is dictated by the ability of the average citizen to contribute to the economy, which is directly related to education. How can we command the highest standard of living in the world if the average citizen cannot contribute at the highest level? There's a mismatch there, and it's a ticking time bomb."

David Chaum

Founder, DigiCash BV

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The automated processing of transactions between individuals and organizations. This began with direct-dial telephony, magnetic-stripe cards, bar codes in supermarkets. More recently we've seen the Web and computerized vote counting.

The infrastructure for managing these interactions is becoming ever larger, more interconnected, pervasive, and powerful. The problem is that there are few rules governing the control of information. Individuals, the "data subjects," become like cattle in a feed lot, monitored and controlled through these largely invisible systems.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade: These transaction-processing systems will have a dramatic impact one way or the other. One scenario is that the inadequacy of the current paradigm will lead to a meltdown, which will set individual autonomy, freedom, and dignity on an irreversibly erosive course.

The alternative scenario is that a new paradigm takes hold that will allow individuals to enforce a transparent set of rules governing the use of information. The technology exists to do that, but to be effective, it has to be adopted on a large scale.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

I'm a little surprised and disappointed in how difficult it has been to get significant adoption for the new paradigms.

Heinrich von Pierer

President and CEO, Siemens AG

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The development of the transistor.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

The Internet.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

Medical imaging technologies. With molecular imaging, we will one day be able to penetrate into even smaller areas—for instance, to measure tumor activity in individual cells.

"Technologies based on the IP [Internet Protocol] standard will penetrate into many other areas. In the future, a device may have just a single IP interface to the outside and several different modems working inside that understand the different transmission standards. In the "intelligent house" of tomorrow, an Internet gateway will serve as the mediator between the outside world and the house's internal networks. Internet technology is also making inroads into industry [toward] a uniform communications infrastructure that extends from production to office software—which will yield considerable productivity gains."

John J. Hopfield

Professor of Molecular Biology, Princeton University

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The integrated circuit.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Nanotechnology.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

Superconducting elements for computers—it just never went anywhere.

"To understand how you think, you have to describe what the brain is doing in mathematical and physical terms. Biology is doing some form of computing on some kind of hardware—we call it wetware, hardware made out of mushy stuff. That's how you understand how a computer works: you have to understand how the algorithms fit on the hardware. A psychologist is in some sense trying to understand how the nervous system carries out algorithms. One of the things that brings biology and engineering together is wanting to understand how things work and what parts are there because they have a function. Evolution and the cost-conscious engineer will both have the thought, 'I want to do this economically.' "

William A. Wulf

President, National Academy of Engineering

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The integrated circuit.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Smart, intercommunicating everything.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The World Wide Web.

"Over the life of a bridge, it costs more to check for corrosion than to build the bridge itself. So at the University of Virginia, we built a chip that had a small amount of computing power, a corrosion sensor, and a radio transceiver. The idea was to put a shovel-load of these chips in every mix of concrete, so that you'd be able to ask the sensors whether or not the reinforcing bars were corroding. It's hard to think of a more mundane product than a concrete bridge; yet we're talking about how to make it smart."

Colin Hill

Photographer: Blaise Hayward

CEO, President, and Cofounder, Gene Network Sciences Inc.

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The discovery of DNA, as well as advanced computing and the Internet.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Systems biology, which is the convergence of computing and genetic information, and the global sharing and processing of information.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The Internet.

"As a physicist, I studied phase transitions in physical systems. There's an emergence from all these interacting microscopic degrees of freedom—as with ice melting—that causes systems to transform, often in surprising ways. The analogies to biology were obvious: nonlinear interactions between all of these genes and proteins, which are dead components, somehow give rise to a living cell.

"When the Human Genome Project came along, we finally got the parts list, but it was not enough to make discoveries or to understand the system as an integrated whole. It was clear that to make use of all of the data for discovering new drugs, very sophisticated computational techniques were going to have to be employed.

"Our understanding of medicine is still incredibly crude. In the next three to five years, we will see a major transformation in our ability to predict and understand and modulate biological systems with drugs. This will derive from a predictive understanding of biological systems. Physics worked because it let us predict and understand properties from the micro level of the computer chip to the very large scale that allows us to send a satellite probe to Mars. This kind of understanding and control has not yet come to biology, but it is coming, and it will be the greatest revolution in the next century."

Raymond C. Kurzweil

Photographer: Steve Marsel

Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Kurzweil Technologies Inc.

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The computer.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Information technology.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

Things have progressed the way I expected.

"I used to have two different interests: computer technology and health. After developing Type 2 diabetes in my 30s, I developed a treatment and wrote a book about it. But I didn't attempt to link the book to my other interest. In my new health book [Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever], the two are integrated, because health and medicine are becoming deeply integrated with information technology. The whole biotech revolution is understanding biology in information terms: how the genome expresses itself mathematically, the information pathways, and how to reprogram the software programs in our bodies.

"Twenty-five years down the line we'll be seeing extensions of the nervous system using nanobots: blood-cell-sized robots. One scientist has already cured Type 1 diabetes in rats with a nanodevice that intelligently lets out insulin. If you plot out trends for what will be feasible in terms of size and computation and communication, nanobots in the late 2020s will provide radical life extension: they will be reversing atherosclerosis, getting rid of damaged cells, reversing the aging process, and repairing DNA errors. These nanobots will also be able to go into the brain through capillaries—it's not invasive, there's no surgery—and interact with our neurons.

"If you want to go into virtual reality, these nanobots will shut down the sensory input from your real senses and replace them with the senses from that virtual environment. You'll be able to pick a re-creation of an Earth environment (like a tropical beach or a cathedral) or a fantastic one, alone or with someone. The experience will be just as high-resolution, just as compelling, as real reality."

Federico Capasso

Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering, Harvard University

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

Quantum technology.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Quantum technology.

"In the last 40 years, there is a single encompassing theme: the impact that quantum technology—the application of quantum mechanics to devising novel semiconductor devices that rely on quantum effects in their operation—has had on information technologies such as photonics and electronics, which in turn have affected communications and could affect computing in the future. The other significant development is the invention of devices that use quantum effects for important applications.

"It's a fascinating combination of theory and novel design. Quantum engineering essentially means you can design new materials and devices with man-made mechanical and optical properties. Engineers are starting to play God a bit. We have been able to invent and implement novel materials and devices where we tell the materials how to behave. We create new properties.

"In the next 10 to 30 years, quantum mechanics will have an even more pervasive impact on technology, not only on communications and computing, but also on sensors. I would like to see the creation of new light sources that can generate new states of light to be used in quantum information processing."

John T. Chambers

President and CEO, Cisco Systems Inc.

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The Internet.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Affordable broadband Internet access in every home.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The inconsistent build-out of broadband. The United States originally led the world in broadband deployment but has fallen dramatically behind. Other countries—Japan, South Korea, China, the UK, Germany—are moving much faster than we are, with nationally sponsored broadband programs. It's really the technology, combined with educational opportunities and a supportive government, that ultimately fosters successful technology implementations. We've taken the first steps toward this, but we have a long way to go.

Phaedon Avouris

Manager, Nanometer Scale Science and Technology,IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The integrated circuit.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Protein engineering leading to new types of plants and animals.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

As long as a technology doesn't violate any fundamental physical laws, it's possible.

"In science, you can have a revelation overnight. But technology takes a long time to develop. Revolutionary technologies depend on people who have new ideas about what will be needed and accepted by society, rather than those who just come up with new technological concepts. When I worked at Bell Labs in the late 1970s, there was a visual phone that let you and a friend, who was in a separate booth, talk to and see each other. That capability existed all the way back then. Yet it still hasn't reached the market, because people aren't interested."

Aart J. de Geus

Chairman and CEO, Synopsys Inc.

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

Going digital. The immense growth in electronics happened because the paradigm has moved away from electricity to Boolean logic.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Using larger and larger building blocks to design a chip, and designing smaller and smaller devices and dealing with the resulting physics.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

How far chip sizes have been driven down. The surprise there is photolithography.

"In chip design, every 10 years or so we see a big step up, from transistors to gates to macros to IT blocks that are complete microprocessors. This allows people to design very complex systems without even knowing what's inside these blocks. But as device switches get smaller and smaller, many are not quite on or off. They become leaky.

"Over the last 40 years we've seen the development of independent point tools that perform all the steps it takes to create a chip. But one needs to go to a complete integrated design solution because the physics is trickling up and the complexity is trickling down. This allows you to be much more comprehensive about problems that used to be simple and now have so many more dimensions."

Kazuo Murano

President, Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd.

MOST IMPORTANT TECHNOLOGY OF THE LAST 40 YEARS:

Semiconductor technology.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

The robot will probably be the technology of the 21st century, as the automobile was the technology of the 20th century. It is expected to address many social issues in Japan and other developed nations—coping with rapid demographic change, providing security, and improving the convenience and comfort of daily life.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The cellphone. I thought that it would be used mainly by top executives, not that it would become affordable and indispensable to such a broad range of users. It has changed the lifestyle in Japan significantly.

Judy Estrin

Chairman, Packet Design Inc.

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The Internet.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Still the Internet.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

Cellphone usage: the number of people who use them instead of land-line telephones. Also surprising is that the quality is still as poor as it is, and how much we all tolerate it.

"We're talking about having ubiquitous broadband capability to all homes and mobile connectivity that is high-bandwidth as opposed to intermittent. So the ability to access information anywhere, anytime, and the way in which the Internet will bring people together, regardless of where they are, will really have a profound impact."

C. Gordon Bell

Senior Researcher, Microsoft Bay Area Research Center

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The integrated circuit and the Web—it's a tossup.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Wireless.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The longevity of Moore's Law.

"The actual statement of Moore's Law was important—saying we're going to have that massive doubling—because otherwise the development could have been helter-skelter. Instead it's become a way of behaving and investing and developing, and it continues to set targets of behavior. It is the overriding technological force, bar none.

"My current project is called MyLifeBits, a system that is your surrogate personal memory and archive, so you can go back in time, and it'll all just be there. This is something that everybody already is building, if they don't throw things on their computer away. With MyLifeBits, I could say, 'O.K., if you want an archive of me, here's a terabyte, and that's me. It's my brain and everything that went into it.' We're creating a wonderful Alexandrian library."

Francine D. Berman

Photographers: Mark Robert Halper

Director, University of California, San Diego, Supercomputer Center

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

Parallelism. Parallel technologies, algorithms, and applications are a fundamental part of virtually all modern technology, from computer design to storage to networking to communication.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Data software and hardware technologies.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

Cellphones and personal technology. The ability to step outside of our current boundaries via technology will have a fundamental effect on the evolution of society and culture. I don't think Alexander Graham Bell thought about this when he invented the phone.

"We're more dependent than ever before on our computers, on Internet access, on data storage to provide easy, always accessible information. I don't buy a newspaper to look up movie listings any more; I just look them up online. And infrastructure is the key enabler.

"We're grappling with how to push science to the next step and support a stable but evolutionary infrastructure. 'Cyberinfrastructure' is the term people are using to talk about deep integration of a vast array of technological resources like computers, data storage, networks, scientific instruments, visualization devices, sensors. It's not just having these resources available; it's really about a kind of integrating software glue and an integrating human infrastructure that knows how to use these things end to end.

"Data is currently the 'killer app' for technology, and it's increasing at an exponential rate. How do you make this data useful? Huge databases have evolved—and data applications along with them. These new data technologies really provide immense shoulders for us to stand on, in many fields: astronomy, the life sciences, the geological sciences. You can take a variety of related databases and ask some really complex and interesting questions. It's really transforming these fields."

George M. Whitesides

Photographer: Steve Marsel

Mallinckrodt Professor of Chemistry, Harvard University

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

Information technology and biology.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Information technology and biology.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The rise of globalization.

"There will be lots of pushes, from both commercial and national security points of view, as well as from basic science, to understand the behavior of groups of people in the same way that we now understand the behavior of atoms and molecules. We are moving from isolated information about individuals—your phone and credit card records, your DNA sequence—to a status in which collective behavior becomes more apparent. People will be working on going from data to information to understanding to action.

"We live in a world in which we are constantly surprised by what is happening. Could we have predicted the emergence of AIDS? Can we predict the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in Africa? Are we about to precipitate the next Ice Age? The problem is pretty well defined, but it is a complex system, and we don't have the information. Within the next 10 to 20 years, we will.

"Another area that will be interesting is the interface between living and nonliving systems. How do you plug your computer into your brain? We're a long way from that, but the question of how you build interfaces from the world of ion currents and proteins to the world of photons and electrons will be one we pay attention to. It is a key issue in augmenting human capabilities and in decision making. We will also begin to get a grip on what life is. How do you go from what we know is just chemical reactions—to you? These are deeply exciting problems."

Tsuneo Nakahara

Executive Adviser to CEO, Sumitomo Electric Industries Ltd.

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

Global communications networks.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

The fusion of information technology, biotechnology, and nanotechnology.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

New materials.

"The telephone has mainly been used for domestic communications by people who speak the same tongue. The Internet, on the other hand, is intrinsically an off-line communications tool that allows record keeping through personal computers. This mitigates time and language differences. The mass construction of long-distance optical-fiber communications networks, including advanced optical submarine cable, has greatly reduced the cost of this communication, which has also contributed to the Internet's rapid spread."

Frank H. Levinson

Chairman and CTO, Finisar Corp.

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The integrated circuit.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Keeping pace with Moore's Law.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The Internet.

"Networks today are based on Category 5 twisted-pair wires, a medium that has scaled at a factor of a hundred for more than 15 years. But Category 5 is done. The architecture should now probably go to a pair of single-mode fibers, which is what's been used exclusively between and inside cities for the last 20 years. If we bring it to the desktop, we'll have one medium from there to the world that can scale from one gigabit to at least a terabit per second.

"I picture Moore's Law as the drummer on a slave ship, and all of us are the rowers. Intel is starting to make chips with 90-nanometer geometries. But what happens if things don't scale along with faster processors? If we don't get faster programs, more network bandwidth, bigger hard drives, then the system can't give you the performance you need. If a few stop rowing, our oars crash into others'. If we all row together, magic happens."

Mark Bregman

Executive Vice President of Product Operations, Veritas Software Corp.

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The integrated circuit.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Embedded systems—putting intelligence into your phone or your doorknob.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

Biotechnology.

"Nobody gets excited about the fact that we can arrange atoms to make new hybrid materials. But if I went back in a time machine to the 1700s and tried explaining artificial materials to someone, he might get freaked out. In his mind, making plastic might be manipulating nature, just as biotechnology scares some people today. Ten or 20 years from now, this may not be an issue."

Lotfi A. Zadeh

Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley; Director, Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The integrated circuit.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Question-answering systems. I use the sample question, "How many Ph.D.s in computer science were granted by European universities in 1986?" The answer involves taking some information from here and some from there. No existing search engine can do that.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

Miniaturization.

"Humans do not use classical logic when they deal with perceptions. To deal with them, you need imprecise logic, fuzzy logic. This point has not as yet been recognized. Take driving a car in city traffic. We cannot automate that. But humans drive in heavy traffic without any measurements or computation; they use analogy. All problems have this complexity scale associated with them. We have programs that can translate language to some degree, but can we translate Shakespeare? There's also the problem of summarization, which is an order of magnitude more complex than machine translation because it requires 'world knowledge'—knowledge gained from experience and education—which is largely composed of perceptions. So this huge chunk of human reasoning is outside of what computers can do unless they apply fuzzy logic."

Mathukumalli Vidyasagar

Photographer: Satya Prabhu

Executive Vice President (Advanced Technology), Tata Consultancy Services

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The Internet.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Biology will surpass computing as the glamour field.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The Internet, again.

"Things like cable TV and desktop computing have taken a long time to make an impact on the Third World, but the spread of the Internet has been so dramatic that it has caught us also in its wake. The Internet has the potential to reduce the odds faced by poor people. For example, I can post a new paper on my Web site, where the whole world can see it, not just my friends. The Internet has tremendously equalized the access to information between the developed world and the majority.

"To use the cliche, the Internet turns geography into history. We Indians have always had great faith in education, but it didn't really promise a bright future until the Internet revolution came along. We have 2.5 million university graduates per year, every year—by far the largest number in the world. Now, suddenly, they are able to parlay that education into a fairly well-paying job because of the pervasiveness of the Internet. I did not foresee the migration of jobs to India.

"Wireless technology has the potential to eliminate the digital divide, but it won't happen automatically. Things like e-mail, text processing, database management, and data retrieval need to be in native languages. Once you do that, broadband networks with wireless connectivity for the last 25 kilometers can bring down the prices to a level where even poor people can afford it."

Nolan Bushnell

CEO and founder, uWink Inc.

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The Internet.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

The Internet. It permeates every facet of the knowledge-based economy. All the products we buy now cost 10 percent less than they used to, because we can go click, click and find all kinds of situations that were previously invisible.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The video game.

"I really expected the video game to make a major impact on education, and it just hasn't. There's no reason why, in order to save the princess, the player can't be required to learn physics along the way, and maybe even a little history. Park a kid with severe ADD [attention deficit disorder] in front of a video game, and he does it for an hour and a half.

"I see major convergences in video games in the future. You'll have what I call Megahappenings, [where] you'll pay a buck and compete against a million other guys and girls, and at the end of the evening someone will win a million dollars. The Roman amphitheater of conflict and vast rewards will start to happen on the Internet."

Sanjay Parekh

Chief Strategy Officer and Cofounder, Digital Envoy

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The Internet. Look at the SETI@home project. When researchers lack the resources to build a massively parallel supercomputer to analyze their data, people can donate free cycles on their PCs. Distributed computing is difficult unless you have a good medium that connects the whole thing.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Energy products.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

Wireless technology.

"For a long time I pooh-poohed wireless, because you can get higher speeds through a wire, and Wi-Fi had interference and bandwidth issues. Now, we're going to get cellphones that go Wi-Fi as well, which makes phenomenal sense. Why use a cellular network if you can use a data network and send voice over packets?"

Mildred S. Dresselhaus

Institute Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The integrated circuit. The transistor wouldn't have gone very far by itself, as just a single device. The integrated circuit made the whole thing happen.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Nano is one, and the other is bio.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

What surprised me is how fast a lot of things have happened. The high-energy physics community has been using the Internet for 30 or 40 years, and I used to think of it as something for aficionados, not something for grandmothers. Everything has exploded in recent years.

"In the last 20 years, the industry has been focusing mostly on software. Hardware hasn't been that important. Now things are turning around, as they always do, and we need better hardware all of a sudden, because we're reaching the brick wall, where things don't scale anymore. So nanolevel electronics has become important."

Alan C. Kay

President, Viewpoints Research Institute Inc.; Senior Fellow, HP Labs

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

Gene-sequencing technology.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

By definition, a technology is anything that is made, so we could reasonably consider the U.S. Constitution as a technology, and I do. The most pressing needs in the world currently are drinkable water and education, especially of women. If we were to add a third need, it would have to be a much better awareness and perspective on the human condition and what we can do with nature and learning to make things more civilized for all. We could certainly imagine "technologies" to accomplish all three of these needs. Ultimately, technologies that are like the printed book, but even more comprehensive and better in many ways—for example, they can teach the user how to be literate in them— will have the biggest impacts.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The nonappearance of the computer tutor, foretold in the 1960s, which would gently help a child to learn.

"There's been an amazing slowdown and viscosity induced by the commercialization of personal computing and networks into the mass market. [Marshall] McLuhan had ways to predict such things, but I didn't think that so much would be thrown away and so little progress would be made in the last 20 to 25 years.

"Most humans are instrumental reasoners—they judge new tools and new ideas by how well they contribute to their current goals. This leads to a low-pass filter that is quite numbing. But powerful new tools and containers for ideas have a way of winning out over decades, usually through children. I believe that computers can be used to amplify human potential—it's taking longer than one might hope, but it has a very high probability of happening."

Neil Gershenfeld

Director of the Center for Bits and Atoms, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

Threshold theorems. Claude Shannon is famous for proving that if you add extra information to a signal and then later remove it, you can have perfect communication. John von Neumann did the same for computing, though most everyone has forgotten his result because Intel hides it in the chip.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

The application of threshold theorems to the physical world.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

Personal fabrication.

"One of the grandest challenges is a threshold theorem in fabrication, to build with logic so you can make perfect things out of imperfect parts. This is how the ribosome makes proteins in the body. Digital manufacturing promises to do for the physical world what digitization has done for communication and computation.

"The kinds of things engineers do in their day jobs—like designing circuits and making machines—to an amazing extent can now be done with a few thousand dollars' worth of equipment on a desktop. You can engineer down to microns and microseconds and create modern technology.

"Right now, in a big company, functions are chopped up among many people and departments. But in the future, ownership of the means of manufacturing will no longer be a business model; just like the transition from mainframes to PCs, personal fabrication will lead to products developed by and for markets ranging from one to one billion."

Jim Blinn

Graphics Fellow, Microsoft Research Graphics Group

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The Web and mobile technology.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

The Web and mobile technology reaching those who haven't yet been touched. Maybe it won't revolutionize society, but a kind of tipping point occurs when something gets to be widespread enough.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

Computers.

"I remember listening 30 years ago to Alan Kay saying that in the future a PDP-10, the standard computer used by researchers at the time, would shrink from the size of two or three bunk beds to the size of a ring binder, and people would carry them around wherever they go. I thought, 'This guy's crazy.' The fact is that computers are now so cheap that the one inside my cellphone is probably more powerful than the one I've done most of my research on."

Priscilla P. Nelson

Photographer: Robert Severi

Senior Advisor, Directorate for Engineering, National Science Foundation

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

Computational capability—both greater power and its distributed nature.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Distributed sensing, which goes hand in hand with computational capability.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

Bottled water.

"Forty years ago, I never would have thought that we would be lugging bottled water around. We are a risk-averse society right now, so people will get rid of any risk they think they can, if they have the money. It's a new factor in trying to understand how people make sustainable decisions in their lives.

"The pace of technological change and the complexity of natural environmental change overwhelm our human and social systems' ability to deal with them. We need fundamental research that relates the sources of change to how humans and social systems react in order to manage, to live with, to perturb—whatever it is that we do with—these changes.

"Distributed sensing is about being able to observe freshly and innovatively the world around us, both the constructed and the natural environments, and indeed our own organizational and social environments. These systems are too complex to model explicitly, and we can now make more complex models than we can validate. So it's very important to build the observational capability through networked sensors, whether they're on satellite platforms, airborne devices, or ground-based. For example, the planet's water resource capacity will be newly observed, so we'll understand more about what's going on with our water balance and what role the oceans play in their vastness. Then we can change the models and make better decisions that are sustainable. We're right on the edge of what I think of as the Sensing Revolution, and it's very exciting."

Herwig Kogelnik

Adjunct Photonics Systems Research Vice President, Lucent Technologies Bell Laboratories

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

Photo/info: photonics and information.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Bio/info: biology and information technology.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The growth of the Internet.

"Computer power and optical transmission power have scaled up now, for 20 to 30 years, by about a factor of 100 every 10 years. Optical fiber now transmits two and a half terabits per fiber per second. That's 33 million digital voice connections. There is no other set of technologies where this has happened. And it would be foolish to predict that it will suddenly stop, although it will take amazing breakthroughs to keep it going."

Herve J. Gallaire

CTO, Xerox Corp.; President, Xerox Innovation Group

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

Microelectronics.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Nanotech and microelectromechanical systems.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

Chemical engineering.

"Work will change because we will have much more powerful systems for understanding documents. We will have algorithms, both for image recognition (whether faces or pure objects) and for text, that will enable us to be much more effective at searching, filing, and retrieving. Today these activities take an enormous amount of time, which is frustrating and which explains why we still keep paper around. To be able to index, search, and cross-reference for different types of objects will really enable significant improvements in the way we work.

"I think globalization will change engineering, together with new tools that enable virtual collaboration. For example, the time to market is much faster than if you were doing it on a conventional basis. It's not the outsourcing that counts, it's what you can do by working across a network and benefiting from the fact that some people wake up when others go to sleep. There are lots of positive ways to look at globalization."

Jack St. Clair Kilby

Co-inventor of the integrated circuit, Texas Instruments Inc. (retired)

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The Internet—just the fact that it exists and that it's broadly open to everyone. I don't think that was part of the original plan.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

The Internet.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The way that all of the electronics fields have continued to grow surprises me. But I don't think anyone can predict the future.

Wendy Hall

Professor of Computer Science, University of Southampton, England

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The Web.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Wireless embedded computing.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The Web again. When I saw Tim Berners-Lee demonstrate it in 1991, I saw an interesting system, but not what it was going to do—and honestly, I'm not sure he knew either.

"I'm fascinated by how computer scientists can learn from neuroscientists and vice versa. We're talking about building increasingly complex adaptive systems that need to evolve. We have models throughout nature for this. Neuroscientists understand bits of what goes on in the brain, but not how memory works. They know where memory is stored, but not how the brain lays down and recalls those memories. In computing we store loads and loads of information, and we write routines that will get that information back again. Add the dimension that we can video 70 years of someone's life and then, given the way the technology is advancing, store that information on a grain of sand. It's not just about recording one's life, but about helping people with memory problems and understanding better how the brain actually works."

Vinton G. Cerf

Photographer: Robert Severi

Senior Vice President of Technology Strategy, MCI

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The integrated circuit.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

The Internet. My prediction in 1977 that 32 bits of Internet address space would be sufficient was pretty stupid. We're now talking about IPv6 [Internet Protocol version 6], which uses 128 bits of address space—that's 10 to the 38th addresses. That should be enough till after I'm dead, and then it's somebody else's problem.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The rate at which people are contributing information to the World Wide Web.

"Nanotech will affect almost any arena, because with it you can construct new kinds of materials. The effect of our ability to manipulate atoms—for example, the use of DNA devices to assemble various kinds of structures for all kinds of purposes—is going to be dramatic.

"The other thing to watch is neuroelectronics: the ability to interface technology with our neural system. My wife, Sigrid, has had a cochlear implant since 1996. This once profoundly deaf person now uses the phone, recognizes accents, and listens to movies and recorded books. I also see the possibility of augmenting ordinary human senses. Imagine an optical implant that's sensitive to a broader range of light and that could be tuned to different wavelengths. I've been thinking about reprogramming Sigrid's speech processor so that it can take in VOIP [voice over IP], which would come in as electronic signals transduced into neural signals, bypassing the audio component entirely.

"I'm excited about the potential of quantum computing as well. We know that a small bit of brain tissue does a lot of processing in parallel, and it doesn't need transistors. But sometimes you don't need to emulate nature: planes don't flap their wings, though the shape is taken from nature."

Arthur C. Clarke

Science fiction writer

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The microchip.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Microtechnology.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The speed with which things have happened. The idea that you can put a whole movie on a little silver disc in the palm of your hand, that's magic!

"I still believe cold fusion could happen, and it's hard to believe that anything could be more important. There is evidence of tremendous energies at the quantum level. Maybe we could tap them.

"The space elevator will become a reality now that we have carbon-60. It will also raise lots of problems. We'll have to clean up the satellites below the elevator because sooner or later one would smash into it. But we won't need the satellites. Three elevator towers will cover the whole globe, and we can hang whatever we want to on them.

"The biggest technology in the future might be mind-to-mind contact, through some form of electronic headsets. We could talk to each other through our brains without speaking, from anywhere to anywhere, because it would be transmissible. It would change the world completely. People wouldn't be able to lie, which would put most politicians out of business."

Donald Christiansen

President, Informatica; Editor of IEEE Spectrum, 1972-1993

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

A tie: Digital Equipment Corp.'s PDP-8 (the first practical minicomputer) and the microprocessor.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

The Grand Challenge will be computer systems (computers and computer networks) having reliability and downtimes comparable to those of automobiles, television, and the traditional telephone network. Will we meet it? Don't bet on it. I expect that software patches and other virus/worm protection and recovery techniques will become a way of life. Improvements in computer speed, the proliferation of applications and databases, improvement in interoperability, ease of accessibility, and "malware" spread by software design flaws will exacerbate the problem.

Tsuyosh Yamamoto

Professor of Information Science and Technology, Hokkaido University

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The integrated circuit.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Computer-aided design and design automation, and also low-power technologies.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The Internet and the Web.

"It is clear that we cannot continue to consume more and more energy in our daily lives. And yet our appetite for a rich life will never decline. If we can decrease the power consumption of electronic systems by a factor of 0.5 every 1.5 years (the inverse of Moore's Law!), we will be able to sustain our way of life much longer."

Walden C. Rhines

CEO and Chairman, Mentor Graphics Corp.

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

Photolithography for semiconductors.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Radio frequency communications.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

Digital micromirror device technology, developed by Larry Hornbeck at Texas Instruments and now used in TI's Digital Light Processing components. In the mid-1970s, we were excited by the technology and thought it would be a short time before system designers began applying it broadly. Fifteen years later, we were still trying to find a business model [for it It was a nearly blind leap of faith that led Jerry Ray Junkins, then TI's CEO, to fund the enormous cost of manufacturing facilities and development that took the DLP to the next step and made high-volume display products possible.

David E. Liddle

Photographer: Thomas Broening

Partner, U.S. Venture Partners

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The integrated circuit microprocessor.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Wireless.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

Fiber-optic communications. First of all, that it became a medium for communications at all. Second, the huge increase in the amount of data carried by a single fiber—and how beautifully and with how little loss. It replaced microwave links and all this other crazy stuff and drove the cost of communications so low that everyone could go around running fiber—and, unfortunately, they did.

"In the past, in many industries, much of the economic value chain—the ultimate price paid for a product—was shared with all the intermediaries, like stores and distributors. Moving things online as quickly as is practical shortens this chain. Cisco, for example, does billions of dollars of business with no salesperson involved. The customer places the order and the computer causes the device to be built, or at least extracted from the warehouse and shipped. It's not just about distribution but also about eliminating intermediaries. It's about the wave of changes that occur when methods based on old technologies don't work in the modern world.

"It's now very easy to do things that were once hard. Take stealing text. In the past, you could get a copy of a textbook out of the library and photocopy every page. Now, copying it online is easy, and it's free, so everyone does it. It's not that more people have become wicked; it's just that theft has gotten easier."

Richard ("Rick") Rashid

Senior Vice President, Microsoft Research

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The microprocessor. When the steam engine started to get into significant use, it became the answer to every question that engineers had. I would put the microprocessor in the same camp. In the next few years, it won't just be visible devices that contain microprocessors. People are talking about putting computing components in paint.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Synergy between different disciplines. Fields are being pulled together by the ability to store dramatic amounts of data—the raw materials of these sciences—and to do data mining and manipulation, which is accelerating the rate at which we conduct research. People are beginning to share ideas and perspectives across disciplines, which is producing whole new sets of opportunities, whether in computation or biology or materials science.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The unintended consequences of technology. The touch-tone phone in Japan has reached a state where people can type faster on a little 12-digit keypad than they can type on a regular keyboard. You can now buy a device to input data into a PC that's a little 12-digit pad instead of a keyboard.

Nick Holonyak Jr.

John Bardeen Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The transistor and all that has come from it: ICs, power devices, LEDs, and now LED lamps, lasers, optoelectronics, and so on.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

The semiconductor. It is the fundamental, the universal substance, the primary building material of electronics.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The semiconductor—that is, its scale! Take away the semiconductor, and all of electronics—all of it!—collapses, along with all of the world's economies. Everything stops! Is anything else that big?