[someengineer]

Though everyone'll flame you about "the future", you're probably right.

If you read the PLOS One acceptance criteria:

http://www.plosone.org/static/publication

you'll notice that scientific merit doesn't show up in there. The official policy is that if the methods and analysis are sound, then it will be accepted regardless of how irrelevant the actual study is. This is well known in academia and has resulted in a generally negative opinion of the journal among publishing researchers.

edit: I'd also like to point out that this isn't the case for all PLOS publications.

[boxey]

Yeah, I touched a sensitive nerve. It seems "the future" is interpreted by some as "Moore's law applied to everything", with gross disregard to physics, no thermal or optical or energy limits etc.

Year 2000 has passed, and we're all still waiting for our flying cars.

[TeMPOraL]

The reason we don't have flying cars is economics, not physics.

Also, people tend to totally overestimate limits of possibility. We haven't explored a lot of things that are possible with our current level of technology (again, mostly because economics). Moreover, our image processing algorithms are very crude. We're nowhere near efficient use of information encoded in images (in a way a theoretical Bayesian superintelligence would). A lot of things thought impossible become possible when you start throwing more and more "compute" at it. You can't break the laws of physics, but those laws are quite lenient.