Toys can tell us a lot about the future of tech

"Twenty-five years ago this month I published a book called The Playful World that explored a simple idea: that the seeds of the future can be found in the present by considering the dazzling toys we started giving our children at the turn of the millennium. I considered three of those toys - LEGO's Mindstorms, Sony's PlayStation 2 and the Furby - as I made predictions about the future of the physical world, the virtual world, and artificial intelligence."

"LEGO's Mindstorms may no longer exist as a product, but the language created to program those little blocks - Scratch - has become the de facto first programming language for children around the world. My biggest miss was a confident prediction that nanoscale manufacturing would be a common technology within a generation. Early progress in nanotechnology seemed to indicate a future crowded with nanoscale machinery to build new materials, repair our cells, and much more besides."

"It seemed straightforward until we got stuck on the physics of the nanoscale, a weird mix of classical and quantum worlds that overlap uneasily. Scientists are still puzzling that out, and although we know far more than we did a quarter century ago, that understanding has yet to translate into much of consequence - with one notable exception: Semiconductor fabrication."

Three consumer toys — LEGO Mindstorms, Sony PlayStation 2 and the Furby — signaled potential directions in the physical world, virtual environments, and artificial intelligence. LEGO's Mindstorms inspired Scratch, which became the de facto first programming language for children worldwide. Early nanotechnology progress suggested ubiquitous nanoscale machinery, but development stalled because nanoscale physics mixes classical and quantum behaviors in hard-to-manage ways. Semiconductor fabrication became the main practical nanotechnology success, driving transistor counts past a billion and fueling decades of progress. Recent slowdowns in Moore's Law and manufacturing challenges reveal a powerful semiconductor industry constrained by fundamental physical limits.

Read at Theregister