Microsoft tries to predict your future, no flying cars foreseen

It's that time of the year where predictions start flying. Most companies have a roadmap for what will really happen, but predictions about what's possible are always fun. It's shocking how many old science fiction books got it right with things like video phone calls and more. Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov did an especially good job nailing things down.

Now Microsoft is getting in on the action, with predictions for 2016 and beyond. These come from Microsoft's technology and research division, so it gets more attention, given these are the people working on these things.

Chris Bishop, managing director of Microsoft Research, writes "During 2016 we will see the emergence of new silicon architectures that are tuned to the intensive workloads of machine learning, offering a major performance boost over GPUs". Looking further ahead to 2026 Bishop foresees human-quality translation of all European languages.

Doug Burger, Director of Hardware, Devices, and Experiences at Microsoft Research NExT, sees 2016 bringing specialized compute acceleration in the cloud and 2026 will bring "a partial shift away from von Neumann computing for computation-intensive workloads, resulting in massive cost efficiencies and reduced latencies. This shift will enable many advances in deep personalization, such as intelligent computing assistants that can know you intimately and can serve you well, great productivity enhancers at work, and saving lives with highly personalized medicine".

Lili Cheng, of Microsoft NExT, expects more mediation in online chat, blurring the way we think of devices. In 2026 she envisions every school child to learn how to code -- perhaps a bit ambitious.

You can read all of the predictions here. Each person tried to envision both 2016 and the next ten years. There are some fascinating things, though likely nothing that will blow your mind.

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