I would like to start by looking ahead a few years and examining what kinds of advances in technology we can realistically expect to see. A reasonable starting place is Joint Vision 2020. It provides some very well-thought-out ideas about the future requirements in the area of information technology and the need to achieve information dominance. However, it isn’t a recipe for how we are going to achieve information dominance and it doesn’t provide predictions of specific technologies that will get us there.
	We generally have a tendency to overestimate future technology progression. I remember when the movie 2001 came out in 1968 it didn’t seem totally unreasonable that within 30 years we might have spacecraft, and even computers like HAL, as depicted in the movie. Of course, now that we are in 2001 we can clearly see that technology has not advanced nearly so far.