I would describe the mood in the Internet community as puzzled yesterday afternoon when Amazon.com went down for two hours. When I found out that Amazon was down, I was amazed. Amazon is never down just like Google is never down! Then I started chuckling to myself because it’s almost laughable that only two hours of downtime could cause such a stir on the Internet. Pingdom reports that this is Amazon’s longest downtime since 2006, when Pingdom started monitoring Amazon. Other than a one hour, 44 minute outage in 2006 and today, the longest downtime, according to Pingdom, was 26 minutes in September 2006. Internet users expect a lot more than they used to.

There was a time when 56K modems were considered fast. Online shopping didn’t exist yet. AOL was the industry leader. Google was being run out of a garage. Those were the “good old days.” We didn’t expect webpages to load in a split second. Downloading a one gigabyte file (something like a movie) would take about 41 hours.

Today, we expect instant load time, so when a website doesn’t load at all and instead displays an error message, people tend to freak out. So if the 1990s and early 2000s are the “good old days” now, what will we think of 2008 in ten or twenty years? We imagine ourselves to be so advanced, and perhaps we are, but if there is no limit to just how advanced we can become, then we are just barely scratching the surface of technological development. I’m sure that one hundred years ago Americans considered themselves advanced with such modern marvels as the Eiffel tower (the tallest structure in the world at the time). The French, nor anyone else, could conceive of a time when people were building structures over two thousand feet tall. There is technology that we don’t know about yet and we can’t imagine that will be ubiquitous in another one hundred years.

The next “big thing” on the technological front will be robotics. Much as computers were just beginning to be developed in the 1950s and 1960s, robots are just beginning to be developed now. A lot of great robotic technology exists, but it is prohibitively expensive. The breakthrough will come when robots will be able to learn from behavior, not just programming, and make decisions for themselves. Artificial intelligence will develop alongside robotics and one day, a computer will pass the Turing test.

That’s only the beginning. Robotics and artificial intelligence are already “known.” With those two areas, it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. I’m interested in the technology that hasn’t even been dreamed of yet. As pointed out in an episode of the West Wing, we can’t limit scientific discovery based on what we think will be instantly useful. When Michael Faraday started conducting experiments into the nature of electricity, he could not possibly have know that his work would one day run our entire world. If we keep discovering new things, then we could have a world run on something entirely new. It’s crazy to think of the possibilities because the next revolutionary thing hasn’t been invented yet, but sometime soon, a new technology will do for the 21st century what electricity did for the 20th century.