IBM have released their annual predictions for the future of technology, via the IBM “5 in 5” project, which looks at five innovations which they figure will transform modern life within the next five years; these include mind-reading computers, human-generated electricity, and biometric scanning replacing passwords.

I mean look, this isn’t just cool stuff that the guys over at IBM think would be neat – they’re initiatives that the company is actively involved in developing. So the 5 in 5 project isn’t so much an attempt at predicting the technology of the future as a guide to the kinds of technology IBM wants to have developed in the next five years or so.

Some of the stuff isn’t overly ambitious – the continual improvement of biometric scanning, for instance, is going to happen anyway so long as airport security does its thing, and the eventual adoption of biometric scanning for in-home use doesn’t seem unreasonable.

Somewhat fancier are their predictions about mind-controlled computers and human-powered energy; both are based on IBM’s research into brain activity and kinetic power harvesting, and could be a pretty huge deal.

They’re also figuring that the digital divide will cease to exist, and that junk mail will become priority mail – which the short video above does a better job of explaining.

IBM’s 5 in 5 project has had a couple of pretty spot-on guesses in the past few years, picking up developments in nanotechnology, speech-recognition and remote medical diagnosis a fair while before they started having commercial use.

So, you know. Yay future.

[Source: IBM]