Timing is crucial when exploring the future, writes Dr James Bellini. Breakthrough technologies invariably take a long time to reach maturity - I call it my 50-year rule. Gutenberg's printing press turned out mainly bibles for years - popular books came much later. The first rotary steam engine was patented in Britain in 1781, but the railway boom was still half a century away.

Vannevar Bush published his essay on memex - a prototype Internet - in 1945, five decades before the world wide web. Crick and Watson discovered the structure of DNA in 1953; the Human Genome Project, a definitive manual of human DNA, was not completed until 2003. The rule still holds today.

A technology that will play a crucial role in the future economy - radio frequency identification (RFID) - has its roots in friend/foe aircraft identification and eavesdropping systems from World War II.

After years lying dormant, RFID is now coming of age, powering near-field communication (NFC) networks that will transform business and social life: worldwide revenues for RFID devices are forecast to soar from 1 billion in 2006 to 15 billion by 2016. They will help drive huge changes in transport, production management, logistics and payments systems - from smart packages to mobile wallets and talking posters.

Quantum leap

Meanwhile, another step-change is on the way. As Ray Kurzweil said in a previous column in i-cio.com, the next 20 years will see huge advances in areas like nanotechnology and non-biological systems. But it is an equally revolutionary technology that will make those advances possible.

Quantum computing will literally bring a quantum leap in our processing capability, far removed from those cumbersome mainframes of 50 years ago. When it arrives - moving on from bits to qubits - it will manage vast, complex tasks that would defeat any machine currently available, on a time-scale of seconds.

How to manipulate an atom

Quantum computing applies the tools of physics to use individual atoms as substitutes for transistor circuits on microchips. The crunch challenge is how to manipulate an atom so it can perform this function. Progress is promising. Researchers at the University of California have now successfully measured the spin of an individual atom, a vital first step. Scientists who dream of shrinking computers to become invisible to the naked eye reckon atomic spin is the secret they have to crack.

But they face a major threat. Entanglement, a mysterious phenomenon where traditional laws of physics are broken, could lead to computer "sudden death", a kind of quantum Catch-22. The race is on to unravel the rules of entanglement and usher in the quantum age.

Perhaps my 50-year rule gives a clue: pioneering physicists like Charles H Bennet and David Deutsch were chasing quantum issues in the 1970s and 1980s. This would put us on course for a quantum future sometime after 2020. And the world will never be the same again.

Dr James Bellini is an award-winning broadcaster, writer and futures analyst who has worked for the BBC and Sky News. He has a masters degree in law and history from Cambridge and a PhD from the London School of Economics. His latest book, The Bullshit Factor: The Truth About Corporate Disguises, Lies and Denial is out now.