Seth Weintraub, a blogger for 9 to 5 Google, who first wrote about the glasses project in December, and then discovered more information about them this month, also said the glasses would be Android-based and cited a source that described their look as that of a pair of Oakley Thumps.

They will also have a unique navigation system. “The navigation system currently used is a head tilting to scroll and click,” Mr. Weintraub wrote this month. “We are told it is very quick to learn and once the user is adept at navigation, it becomes second nature and almost indistinguishable to outside users.”

The glasses will have a low-resolution built-in camera that will be able to monitor the world in real time and overlay information about locations, surrounding buildings and friends who might be nearby, according to the Google employees. The glasses are not designed to be worn constantly — although Google expects some of the nerdiest users will wear them a lot — but will be more like smartphones, used when needed.

About time. Now where's my flying car?

Computer scientists and pathologists at Stanford University now have a computer system that can look a tissue sample and diagnose breast cancer more accurately than a human doctor.

Very few jobs are safe.

The most important technology for the next hundred years will be high speed Internet for ocean vessels. Once that technology becomes widely available, you'll see people abandoning their failed land-based countries and forming independent nations on the sea. Here are some floating island concepts to fuel your imaginations.

The rich will be the first to move to the sea to escape confiscatory levels of taxation in their countries of origin. The tax savings alone could be enough to pay for floating island homes for the wealthy.

Perhaps the most compelling reason for taking to the sea is climate change. It might someday become necessary to live on moveable ocean structures just to avoid hurricanes, floods, droughts, blizzards, earthquakes, and tsunamis.

I can imagine security being better at sea too. You'd have pirate problems, but that might seem manageable compared to the risk of nuclear war, traditional war, terror attacks, violent crime, and civil wars. Traditional armies and even terrorists rarely attack anyone without one of these reasons that wouldn't apply to floating islands:

1. Hey, you're on my land!
2. Hey, you're defiling my holy land!
3. I want your oil!
4. You're harboring terrorists!

In the first phase of human migration back to the sea, floating islands will be comprised of vacation condos and second homes. Over time, the island homes will be built larger until some are mansion estates. At that point, the islands will become primary residences for the wealthy, and they will abandon their bankrupt countries of origin, leaving the debt problems to the unfortunates who remain.

When professional cyclists were told they were racing against their own best times, they tended to match those times, even when the times were faster than they had ever raced. I wonder how useful that sort of influence would be if we applied it to other areas.

In a few years it will be feasible to create a CGI version of yourself - an avatar - that lives a better lifestyle in the digital world than you do in the real world. The avatar would have a healthier diet, exercises more, be less shy in social settings, more assertive at work, and perhaps have a more perfect golf game. If you spent a few minutes every day observing your avatar doing what you wished you could do, would the peer pressure motivate you to higher achievement? I think it might. In a way, this would be the high tech version of writing down your goals every day and visualizing success. The avatar would simply make the visualization easier.

About eight years ago I wrote a book called The Religion War. The main premise of the book is that terrorists would someday use cheap, home-made drones, packed with explosives and navigated by GPS, to reach almost any target above ground. The FBI recently thwarted a plot of that sort.

As predictions go, that was an easy one. With so many terrorists in the world, the odds are good that at least one of them is a model plane enthusiast. The technology to make your own tiny drone is fairly accessible and the idea itself would be somewhat obvious to any nerd terrorist. And terrorists are copycats, so any scheme that works well once will become the go-to plot of choice.

The rest of the The Religion War deals with what happens in a world in which terrorists can blow up pretty much anything so long as it is above ground. We're about five years away from that.

A robot/computer cannot possibly do what I do.

OK, it can do a lot, but it can't do everything I do.

OK, it can do everything I do, except it needs me when it breaks down, which is often.

OK, it operates without failure, but I need to train it for new tasks.

Whew, that was a job that no human was meant to do, but what about me?

My new job is more fun and pays more now that robots/computers are doing my old job.

I am so glad a robot cannot possibly do what I do.

Yep.

Twenty years ago if I had been paid to convince an audience of reasonable, educated people that in 20 years time we'd have street and satellite maps for the entire world on our personal hand held phone devices -- for free -- and with street views for many cities -- I would not be able to do it. I could not have made an economic case for how this could come about "for free." It was starkly impossible back then.

These supposed impossibilities keep happening with increased frequency. Everyone "knew" that people don't work for free, and if they did, they could not make something useful without a boss. But today entire sections of our economy run on software instruments created by volunteers working without pay or bosses. Everyone knew humans were innately private beings, yet the impossibility of total open round-the-clock sharing still occurred. Everyone knew that humans are basically lazy, and they would rather watch than create, and they would never get off their sofas to create their own TV. It would be impossible that millions of amateurs would produce billions of hours of video, or that anyone would watch any of it. Like Wikipedia, or Linux, YouTube is theoretically impossible. But here this impossibility is real in practice.

This list goes on, old impossibilities appearing as new possibilities daily. But why now? What is happening to disrupt the ancient impossible/possible boundary?

In a word: emergence. As far as I can tell the impossible things that happen now are in every case manifestations of a new, bigger level of organization. They are the result of large-scale collaboration, or immense collections of information, or global structures, or gigantic real-time social interactions. Just as a tissue is a new, bigger level of organization for a bunch of individual cells, these new social structures are a new bigger level for individual humans. And in both cases the new level breeds emergence. New behaviors emerge from the new level that were impossible at the lower level. Tissue can do things that cells can't. The collectivist organizations of wikipedia, Linux, the web can do things that industrialized humans could not.

Thoughtful.

It goes like this: Friedman wants to establish new sovereign nations built on oil-rig-type platforms anchored in international waters—free from the regulation, laws, and moral suasion of any landlocked country. They'd be small city-states at first, although the aim is to have tens of millions of seasteading residents by 2050. Architectural plans for a prototype involve a movable, diesel-powered, 12,000-ton structure with room for 270 residents, with the idea that dozens—perhaps even hundreds—of these could be linked together. Friedman hopes to launch a flotilla of offices off the San Francisco coast next year; full-time settlement, he predicts, will follow in about seven years; and full diplomatic recognition by the United Nations, well, that'll take some lawyers and time.