As seen in the film "Minority Report"

In a few years, we'll be using fingerprint, voice, iris, or retinal scans to log on to Web sites and make purchases. Sounds a lot better than storing passwords under your keyboard, right? But remember: Your body is your password--so don't lose it.

(Image copyright 20th Century Fox)

Our Computers, Ourselves
Ambient computing will extend from house walls to body cells. Verichip makes a pea-size radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip that can be injected under diabetes patients' skin to monitor glucose without a blood sample.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland are exploring how to spray computerized sensors into patients' chests during heart surgery, so the sensors can relay information to the hospital computer. The process could be commercially viable within 10 years.
Body computers will progress from monitoring health to delivering medical care and ultimately to augmenting reality by piping the Internet directly into the brain--if people can overcome their squeamishness about brain implants. "There's a very short leap between implanting a [cochlear] device and one that lets you receive data directly from the Net," Tucker says.
Researchers are moving ahead boldly. For three months in 2002, Kevin Warwick, a cybernetics professor at the University of Reading in England, lived with electrodes implanted in his arm. In one test, he wired them to an Internet-connected PC and then temporarily attached electrodes to his wife's arm as well. Warwick described this experiment in a 2006 interview with ITWales.com: "[W]hen she moved her hand three times, I felt in my brain three pulses, and my brain recognized that my wife was communicating with me. It was the world's first purely electronic communication from brain to brain, and therefore the basis for thought communication."
Bumps in the Road
But before we wire our bodies, we need a far more secure network than today's Internet and better privacy safeguards for the petabytes of consumer data that an always-connected world will generate, says Pradeep Khosla, co-director of CyLab, Carnegie Mellon University's computer security think tank.
Ari Juels, chief scientist for data security company RSA, says that biometrics and encryption will help with access security; but trouble may still arise when data reaches users' screens. Context-smart back-end systems will help. "They'll know that, if you are in San Francisco right now, someone in Thailand shouldn't be using your credit card number," Juels explains.
Khosla says that a combination of technology, education, and tough legislation against "the abuse and misuse of information" is the best way to surmount the privacy hurdles that remain. "I don't think we're quite there yet," he adds.
In Liebhold's view, the issue of privacy needs to be elevated. "I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that our privacy will be lost or that it will be protected. It's our fate. We have control over the future; we're not victims of it."
Remains of the Day: Life, Bit by Bit
We have met Big Brother, and he is us. Tiny cameras and wireless connections may herald an era of "sous-veillance"--observation from below--says Jamais Cascio, founder of Open the Future and a director at the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. Cameras and microphones in your glasses or shirt buttons will record every moment, upload it, and let you replay the good bits.
Steve Mann, a professor at the University of Toronto, has used wearable computers to record nearly all of his waking life since 1981 (see the video "nVidia GPU Computer Vision for Mediated Reality"). Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell has collected his life's work in his MyLifeBits project.
"Imagine recording every conversation you've ever had with your spouse," Cascio says. "That kind of enhanced, easily searchable memory will change what it means to be a person in a way that most technology doesn't."
A Factory on Your Desk
One day you might order a new coffeepot, or even a new laptop, and not have to wait for delivery. Instead, you'll use a printer-size factory to download and build it.
Already, 3D inkjet printers build prototypes for industry. Chemical giant BASF is developing inks that will enable ordinary printers to spit out paper or plastic circuit boards. For $2,400, you can buy a Fab@home desktop fabricator that lets you build objects out of acrylic; the company hopes to produce units that can build with multiple materials in the future.
The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology predicts that personal nanofactories will be in operation by 2020. Cascio says nanofactories will have a huge impact: "If it becomes cheaper and more efficient to have something printed out locally instead of made in China, it will have a big effect on things like trade balances, international labor, and...our national economy."

CONTENT by: PCWORLD