-- "Technology's thinkers get daring at intellectual circus" BY DAN GILLMOR, Mercury News Technology Columnist, July 17, 1998, and others

Dig that wild new head gear of the early 21st century

Folks, get ready for some big changes in head wear coming in the new millennium. Computerized heads up displays mounted in prescription visors (or alternately a wire-like image projector that simply beams displays directly into the eyeball via laser and is less conspicuous than a visor), are coming. They'll be accompanied by or integrated into the same audio ear piece and microphone headgear that's becoming ubiquitous for musicians performing onstage and workers who need continuous hands-free telephone access today.

These things are going to become part of a realtime voice recognition and eye-flick interface for our personal computing and networking devices, over coming decades. Sure, they'll be crude at first, but they'll improve steadily. In only maybe 10-15 years they'll be de riguer in many settings (first, of course, among the young and trendy).

At the moment headsets are mainly being used as interfaces to public address systems or intercoms, house/office phones and car phones-- but their functionality will steadily increase as our in-car and on-person technologies expand.

-- "Headsets are suddenly ultra cool" BY LIZ STEVENS Knight Ridder Newspapers/Detroit Free Press, 11-3-98, and other sources

Some experts expect new $1000 PCs to process information as fast as the human brain by 2020.

-- ABCNEWS.com: Man and Machine Blur in Next Millennium By John Lang, Scripps Howard News Service, October 27 1999

Humanity will be suffering more stresses, not less, due to the pace of technological change in the future. People will be forced to endure near continuous re-education and training, among other things. An increasing frequency of mental breakdowns due to such an environment would seem likely.

-- The Year 2020, Explained ["http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,37117,00.html"] by Chris Oakes, Jul. 5, 2000, Wired Digital Inc.

-- Global life expectancy is expected to be around 73 by 2025.