The greatest minds include Vint Cerf, vice president of Google and considered the "father of the Internet"; Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist George Smoot, who helped solidify the "big bang" theory of the universe; and Kim Dae-jung, former president of the Republic of Korea and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Other predictions: every job will involve information processing because intelligent or semi-intelligent machines will do all the manual labor, researchers will have discovered how to prevent breast cancer, and heart disease virtually will not exist.

Good grief

Are we dummies, or what?

The latest National Assessment of Education Progress was discussed on Capitol Hill this week — and for good reason, given that it finds elementary, middle, and high school students falling short on memory when it comes to American history, if they ever learned it in the first place.

But it gets worse, noted Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican, when students graduate high school and attend "what are considered our top universities and colleges."

He cites one recent survey of college freshmen and seniors revealing that many "are ignorant" of U.S. history.

"For instance, only 47 percent of freshmen knew that Yorktown brought the Revolutionary War to an end. Seniors did even worse — only 45 percent knew," he says. "Forty-two percent of college freshmen could not identify on a multiple-choice test the 25-year period during which Abraham Lincoln was elected president."