SAN FRANCISCO – Gadgetly speaking, the year 2020 is sure to be darned neat-o, but it will also be more than a little taxing on the human being.

"We will continue to live as we do today in an age of creative destruction – technologically induced creative destruction," said Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, where he studies long-term technology trends and their influences on society.

"The gales of creative destruction are blowing through every industry on the planet today, touched by the Internet and digital technology. Biology is the next thing to come," he said.

Saffo was among a quartet of future-thinkers gathered at San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts last week to offer their snapshots of the world come 2020. Such is the forward-looking purpose of the fourth annual Next Twenty Years discussion series.

The panel warned the future-wary that if the pace of change seems a nuisance now, you ain't seen nothing yet.

To keep up, humans are going to have to figure out how to keep their education nearly constant, panelists warned – and develop the wisdom to deal with a state of almost impossibly accelerated scientific advance.

The hardest trick could be to stay sane amid a snowstorm of paradigm shifts.

"People (being able) to learn throughout their lives is going to be absolutely crucial if we're going to keep abreast of this – and keep our mental health," said Stanley Williams, director of the quantum structures research initiative at Hewlett-Packard Labs.

Watch for struggles with human identity as machines on the other end of the phone acquire the thinking and responsive capacity of the human brain. Be prepared for a time when your doctor will be able to map your personal genome as fast as he draws blood.

And as far as our darling computer is concerned – well, you and your spanking new Pentium IV aren't so hot.

"I can safely say that the age of computing hasn't even begun yet," Williams said. "We're still playing around in essentially Stone Age times technologically."

Williams sees pathways in quantum research that will overcome the current physical limits of silicon chips. These paths will lead technology down a road where only the fundamental limits of electrons themselves will put a cap on information-processing capacity.

In 2020, "our electronics will be 10,000 times as capable as they are today," Williams said.

Overarching all this change will be the parallel progress of not one, but multiple industrial eras.

"At the beginning of this millennium, we're actually watching the birth of three great new technologies, all simultaneously," Williams said. "Those technologies are biotechnology, information technology, and nanotechnology."

Each technology alone would be classifiable as an industrial revolution. But having all three progressing simultaneously – sometimes competing, often complementing – "it's going to be completely beyond anything we've ever experienced before," Williams ventured.

As for the already-amazing here-and-now, it turns out we're only now at the very end of the information science era – not at the beginning of a new one.

Sage and cautionary futurist Saffo knows that to be true, because whenever he imagines the future, he simultaneously looks an equal distance back. His vantage point shows that over the last 150 years, major new scientific disciplines take center stage every three to five decades, with each setting the stage for the innovation to follow.

The age of chemistry was in full swing at 1900, spawning its own research, industry, and pivotal weapons of war. From play chemistry sets to mustard gas, chemistry was synonymous with the future. Next came the era of physics, taming electrons to make them for higher-order tasks like nuclear energy and again, unprecedented killing force.

Then about 50 years ago, information technology's era began with the invention of the transistor.

That era you thought had only just revved up is in fact just ending – with a burst of information "goodies" that is typical of scientific era-endings. "You always get the most presents at the end of the year," Saffo said. "Everything kind of piles up at Christmas, even though it takes all year to get there."

That means we're in the Christmas of the information age, with PCs and PDAs, the Internet and the Web being the presents under the tree. But all these gadgets are wonders that have actually been 50 years in the making.

Yet the flip side of the era coin is that each revolution fuels the next. "We're on the cusp of the next revolution, and ... a key indicator of that was the completion of the human genome," Saffo said.

That indicator heralds the current shift from a focus on information technology to biology, he said.

Rather than a gee-whiz tone, the discussion frequently raised the question of how society and its members would manage the massive change – change with extensive implications for poverty, politics, and the future of capitalism.

No one claimed to have answers, except to say that we'd better consider the questions with the same ferocity that we forge into technology's future.

"The road ahead is going to be messy and disorderly. It's going to have some downsides," Saffo said.

But we will "muddle" through, he predicted, invoking the words of Jonas Salk. The man who cured polio said that people faced with massive technological choice have an imperative to learn "how to become good ancestors."

If not, we won't be ready for the "dark sides" of progress's exponential advance.

A keen example for the technology age is the ever-present hacker, who throws a confounding wrench in the technology works – sometimes destructive, often useful.

"Think about what teenagers do," Saffo said. "In the 1960s, kids designed radios and played with stereos. In the '80s, they played with PCs, in the '90s they played with the Internet. We got viruses.

"Ask yourselves when are we going to see the first journal of bio-hacking oriented toward teenage males, so they can create molecules in their bedroom. Well, that journal came out in 1998. Be very afraid."