Another innovation will make those hard-to-remember passwords obsolete. Soon, in order to access our e-mail or bank account, we’ll use a technology known as biometrics. A tiny sensor could confirm your identity by recognizing the unique patterns in the retina of your eye. “Imagine that things recognize you,” Meyerson says. “You walk up to an ATM. It takes one look at you and says, ‘Yep, you’re you.’” Within five years, it’s possible we’ll no longer be inundated with junk mail, because a new electronic device will delete it before we ever see it. “That device, as you act upon it, as you eliminate mail, you don’t read it, you just look at it and kill it,” Meyerson says, “after a while it learns your habits and works as your assistant by eliminating stuff you never wanted anyway. We anticipate that, in five years, better than 80 percent of coverage of the world populations by cellular phones and smart phones. At this point, imagine having, for instance, the ability to speak openly with anybody anywhere, anytime and in any language, real-time translation—literally the old Star Trek idea of a universal translator coming to be.”
