ONE GADGET TO RULE THEM ALL:

The Gadgets of Your Dreams: Introducing a series on how technology will change over the next decade. (Farhad Manjoo, March 13, 2011, Slate)

One of the reasons I love writing about technology is that everything changes in a flash. One year we're waiting for some super-secret tablet from Apple. By the next year, 15 million have been sold, every other tech company is making something similar, and we're all wondering whether the age of the PC has come and gone. Five years ago, few people had even heard of Facebook; now everyone agrees it's taking over the Web.

As tech users, we've all seen massive changes over short periods of time. For the next few weeks, I'll be writing a series of articles on the next wave of transformations—the trends that will affect our lives over the next five or 10 years.

Having had reason to give this some thought lately, it strikes me that the fundamental trend of what we already call the Information or the Computer Age is the increasingly universal and instantaneous human access to data.

But one peculiarity of the moment we're in is that there is no uniform instrumentality for accessing and sharing said data. On a recent trip we took at least one netbook, kindle, ipod, cell phone, keyless car key, credit card, passport, etc., when there's no reason there shouldn't be one device capable of fulfilling the tasks of each of these tools.

The interesting question going forward would seem to be whether that device will be something we have to carry with us in our hands or whether it will actually be embedded in our bodies.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 13, 2011 8:02 AM