Bill Gates sees tech revolution without limits

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates gestures during The Microsoft Government Leaders Forum in Beijing April 19, 2007. Technology will keep getting better and better rather than plateauing out, with the humble keyboard making way for speech recognition software as standard, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said on Thursday.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Technology will keep getting better and better rather than plateauing out, with the humble keyboard making way for speech recognition software as standard, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said on Thursday.

"I'm often asked, is the technology revolution going to reach an end? Is the improvement in the chips and the software, will that start to slow down as we reach some limits?" he told a forum in Beijing.

"The answer is -- certainly in the decades ahead -- we don't see any limits. We see in fact the power will just get better and better."

In the future, students' textbooks would be replaced by individual electronic tablets that would be cheap, multimedia, and connected to the Internet, predicted Gates, the world's richest man with an estimated $56 billion fortune.

"We really see no limits in terms of bandwidth, connecting these systems together. New wireless approaches will let us reach out into rural areas, will let us have very good, high bandwidth without wired systems," Gates said.

And television would become fully wired.

"We see TV changing to use the Internet because now we have enough bandwidth to do not just normal video ... but also movies or business meetings -- video of any type. That's certainly new for the Internet," he said.

"Five years ago we talked about music on the Internet, we talked about photos on the Internet, but video was not a mainstream thing. Today, it's very mainstream. For all of these things we're just at the beginning of what technology can do."