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My High-Tech Life in 2032

A dozen cameras and motion- and laser-guided distance sensors manage traffic and road signs, and GPS 2.0 does the navigating.

It's the year 2032, and I just received a gentle nudge from Galt, our telepresence android robot (and hear my wife's voice piping through it—I wish she wouldn't keep doing that). Roughly 5 feet tall and with the strength of a preteen, Galt has limited autonomy. It can navigate my home on a Segway-balanced body and use its telescoping arms to choose matching clothes for me to wear each day. Its vision system picks up infrared fabric codes on the backs of my pants and shirts to ensure a proper match-perfect for color-blind people like myself.

Galt has been programmed to know my morning routine, so it takes the OLED sheet ITV, an 8-by-10-foot, 3-millimeter-thick flexible screen that uses millions of organic light-emitting diodes, and quickly attaches it to the bedroom wall so I can watch ITV while I get dressed. Small eyelet hooks are on the walls of each room where I use the screen. I watch my favorite online morning shows in ultra-wideband high-def and start channel surfing by filling the entire screen with 48 different mini screens. In the upper left-hand corner, I note the tenth annual bionic arm-wrestling championship. The competitors use their natural-looking yet incredibly powerful robotic arms. It's amazing how many tournaments used to end in a draw before wrestlers started overclocking their arms. Ouch! That guy just blew an actuator.

My Most Unusual Commute

Shaved and fully dressed, I grab my briefcase and head for the door. I'm halfway to my Toyota AquaPrius when my wife calls me back. "You forgot something!" She hands me my trifold PC, which I quickly slip into my jacket pocket. Finally settled into the car, I have just decided to take a rare manual drive to the office when my chest starts vibrating-indicating an incoming call from the PC phone in my breast pocket.

I set the car to autopilot and begin cruising out of the driveway. Magnetic/electric guide wires embedded in the road keep my car on track. A dozen cameras and motion- and laser-guided distance sensors manage traffic and road signs, and GPS 2.0 does the navigating. A tap on the tiny Bluetooth receiver in my ear connects my PC phone. My boss needs third-quarter projection numbers now, so I pull out the trifold PC, fold down the sides, and pull the screen out from the base. EV-DO Revolution-Z securely connects me to my office network, and soon I'm working in Moho, Microsoft's Web-based spreadsheet app. The smartest thing Microsoft ever did was buying the Zoho online suite in 2012. I like how smoothly it runs on the Google OS.

I'm halfway through August projections when an instant message pops up. I pull out the flexible screen addition from the side of my 8-by-10-inch roll-out screen, which gives me a 2-by-2-inch extra bit of screen real estate, and dock the message window there. It's my buddy John, asking me how I'm feeling. Yesterday I had a little medical procedure: 16 computer-guided nanobots scrubbed their way through my 65 -percent-occluded arteries. (I only passed the final ones this morning-that was a bit uncomfortable.) I tell John I'm feeling fine and log off.

This Acer/Gateway/Lenovo (they merged in 2017) ThinkFold is running a bit slow today. It's not the memory; I have about 128GB of available RAM and the 2-terabyte, solid-state drive has more than enough room. Perhaps it's the remastered 1977 miniseries Roots I'm downloading in the background? I pause the download and the ultralight system speeds up.

I make an appointment to see Intel's latest CPU innovation. A few years ago, Intel partnered with HP to create the first printable CPU. Now they're printing out entire circuit boards. It should be a fascinating meeting

My Totally Biodegradable Gadgets

Ed from IT drops by with a new phone for me. It looks a bit like a pen but snaps apart into an earpiece and a section I can put in my pocket. There's no keypad; instead I "dial" it by tapping out mini codes. I program it to call my wife on two short taps. A tap, brush against the surface, and two more taps put through a call to my best friend. I take the new phone and drop my old one into the desktop grinder. All my gadgets are now totally biodegradable, so I expect it'll end up fertilizing someone's garden.

Just as I'm about to start transcribing that interview with Rory Gates (Bill's 33-year-old son and the CEO of Microsoft), I notice a red glow coming from my left arm. It's my RF chip. Red means my son, Daniel, is in the building and probably coming up for a surprise visit. He works in Broadway's VR Theater, playing 15 separate virtual characters on a 360-degree stage. The audience is both local—people who attend the show in person, putting on the VR goggles and Bose noise-canceling headsets—and global. I've seen 26 of his performances from the comfort of my desk. He's very good.

Daniel's visit is nicely timed, since an e-mail is just arriving from my daughter, Sophie. She's dumping her latest boyfriend. On my 180-degree, 3,048-by-1,028-pixel, curved ViewSonic screen is an alive mail, with a video of her and Brad walking on the beach. While we watch, Sophie uses Liquid Resize to remove Brad and seamlessly stitch the beach back together. It's as if he was never there. But wait, she's not done. She has another clip of her dog on the beach and, as Dan and I watch, she's added Scruffy to the shot so it looks as if he's walking alongside her. Nice.

Dan heads out, but before I can get back to work, another interruption: My wife's calling with the news that our new HP system arrived this morning. It's an all-in-one with a sleek, ultrathin-though bright-21-inch screen. The motherboard and 2-inch optical HD drive are in the base. I ask her if she needs help setting it up. "No, it's already running," she says. "This is so much easier than my old computer." I ask her how she likes Macintosh OS Ultimate. "It's great! I put my Epson photo printer, digitizing tablet, and Canon all-in-one printer within a couple of feet of it, and it instantly recognized everything and set it up for me."

My Total Lifecam

The day flies by and before I leave, I grab my iPod Roll off the charge desk. My portable gadgets have been resting on it all day, sucking power right through the veneered top. I forgot to put the iPod Roll within range of my PC, so now I shift it over about a foot and it syncs up, grabbing four HD ITV shows and some new music from KROC, the superstar singing duo comprising Rocco Ritchie (Madonna's son) and Kori Federline (Britney's stepdaughter). They're actually quite good. I think I'll stream their new song to my Facebook page and add another blog post about the future of computing. I've been thinking a lot lately about what the next 25 years will look like.

Lance Ulanoff

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2243716,00.asp