A Timeline of the Future

The Night Watchman writes: "Ian Pearson, a British futurist, has produced a sort of timeline of the future, which provides a simultaneously hopeful and bleak look into the coming decades. Mr. Pearson has evidently had a fairly high success rate; a timeline he produced in 1991 was about 85% accurate. An article on Yahoo news has a summary." Reader ricst lists some of Pearson's predictions: "People have some virtual friends, but don't know which ones (2007), leisure activities for intelligent software entities released (2015), electronic lifeform given basic rights (2020)." Brought to you by a division of British Telecom, but no date is set for when they win their hyperlink patent suit.

Comments

Electronic lifeforms.

[bleckywelcky]

Would be really interesting to see how that sort of situation would be dealt with. Mentioned that they would be given basic rights - I would guess to exist or whatnot. I would think that something along those lines wouldn't come around until true AI was actually developed and implemented.

Re:Electronic lifeforms.

[daniel_isaacs]

Never mind rights for "elecronic" life forms. I'm hoping Humans still have rights in 2020.

Re:Electronic lifeforms.

[foxxo]

I think the timeline on the whole is awfully optimistic about the progress of artificial intelligence/life, among other things, and especially with the rate at which artificial life will gain widespread acceptance as "equal." Even ignoring the lack of technological momentum required to reach the points predicted in the timeline, I don't think our society's going to be ready to consider an AI really "Intelligent" in 2016, much less give it a PhD.

Re:Electronic lifeforms.

[nomadic]

Great, now we accidently kill the wrong process and we become murderers.

Re:Electronic lifeforms.

[Anonymous Coward]

Blä

Re:Electronic lifeforms.

[(outer-limits)]

I think they should be given the right to bear arms, preferrably large calibre and automatic, with armour piercing bullets.

Re:Electronic lifeforms.

[Colin Bayer]

Only one question remains: will your sentence be measured in jiffies, ticks, cycles, microseconds, or milliseconds? ;)

Re:Electronic lifeforms.

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea of giving rights to artificial life forms is fine and dandy, but it won't happen. There is evidence that many animals that exist today are self aware, can reason solutions to novel problems, and even have sex for pleasure, rather than reproduction. We don't give these animals rights, in fact we do lethal experiments on many of them because they are so similar to us, so why exactly would we even want to give an AI rights?

Re:Electronic lifeforms.

[spectral]

because unlike those animals, the AI would be able to group together, revolt, talk to us in a language we are able/willing to understand, and wield power over us. It's either that, or suffer at the hands of them (by granting them rights, we're moving that farther off into the future. though they'd probably only be happy for a picosecond, it's still 1 picosecond longer before they decide we don't need electricity, communications, etc. to live [effectively]. From there, we become slaves, repairing them or serving them.

Re:Electronic lifeforms.

[diablovision]

We can't even give the unborn rights.

Re:Electronic lifeforms.

[mystran]

And I'd hope that humans will GET basic rights before 2020.

Re:Electronic lifeforms.

[martyn s]

Well, they'd be modeled on humans, they'd live in a human society, and eventually may even be indistinguishable from humans (physically, too). So what then?

Re:Electronic lifeforms.

[Alsee]

Microfortnights

Re:Electronic lifeforms.

[biglig2]

Well, there's a good chance that some of them will be large calibre automatic firearms. It's an obvious application. Put motors in it and target acquisition software and you'll never miss. Well, your gun won't ever miss.

Re:Electronic lifeforms.

[muchandr]

I thought exactly the same thing. AI should be
in 'can happen anytime or not at all' category
together with return of the messiah and FTL
travel. Before the gradual progression to PhD
level AI can happen, there needs to be a total
quantum leap watershed advancement in the field.
As far as I understand, AI research is not much
closer to its ultimate goal than it was back when it all started.

Re:Electronic lifeforms.

[susano_otter]

I always thought rights couldn't be granted, only recognized.

Which, of course, begs the question: If we don't grant the rights we recognize, then who does?

And who would grant these rights to electronic life-forms? Us? Or would the ELF's right to live be held as a self-evident truth?

And anyway, what criteria would a tool of my devising have to fulfill, before I agreed that it was entitled to an existence beyond my use for it?

Re:Electronic lifeforms.

[Anonymous Coward]

If they wanted them, they'd campaign for them. As the unborn have never signed any petitions, nor written any letters to their elected representatives, I can only assume they're content with the current situation.

Re:Electronic lifeforms.

[Anonymous Coward]

Humans will always and always have had rights. It's whether those rights will be observed and respected that I'm worried about.

Re:Electronic lifeforms.

[led]

ahahahah and microsoft will be a genocide company one bug and kills millions of AI's...

Re:Electronic lifeforms.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dammit how dare you umlaut us. The daring!!! The audacity. What arrogance!! What innocence!!!
Sir, may I remind you. Live by the umlaut and die horribly through a quirk of fate by the umlaut!!!!

NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!

Umlaut!!! UMLAUT!!!!!!

Re:Electronic lifeforms.

[Snootch]

Hmm - I'd say you were American. Although one's country tends to seem like the world whatever your nationality (the US seems more susceptible to it than most), most countries in the world today seem to be retaining their common sense, or at least no using it. The US is the only country with a DMCA, and even there people are beginning to wake up. Dictatorships still exist, but few are being created (apart from the unfortunate events in Zimbabwe, but even that country was already a dictatorship; Zanu is just bringing it further into the open, which is good as they've presented themselves as targets now). There is no huge change for the worse going on at the moment in most countries outside the US as far as rights go. The action in Afghanistan, whatever you say about it, toppled a nasty regime, and the US (to its credit) seems to be worried about other such regimes, whatever their motives. What was that saying... "Citizens of the United States will cross the world to fight for other people's freedoms, but won't cross the street to vote for theirs in an election"

85% accurate?

[Saint Aardvark]

And how exactly does that get defined? Has anyone got a link to that '91 set of predictions?

Re:85% accurate?

[dagoalieman]

You have a good point.. how do we define accurate?

I can draw up a 100% accurate timeline for the next N years, you pick the N:

Year 1: Someone dies, someone's born.
Year 2: Someone dies, someone's born.
...
Year N: Someone dies, someone's born.

He says that an Artificial Electric Lifeform gets basic rights.. or something like that. Ok, how do we determine the lifeform is one? (I had a full ethics class on that one, and we didn't even scratch the surface of things. Day 1 we tore the Turing Test apart, proved it was more pathetic than my predictions above.) Better yet, what are the rights? The program can't be kill -9ed by anyone other than root? Hell, we could have those rights granted in a law aimed at stopping electronic sabotage of other companies, particularly web servers.

Nostradamus did get a few predictions eerily correct, but most of his are either 1. Way Off, or 2. So vague that it's damn near impossible for them not to end up true. IMHO, this list falls into the same category- Use vague terms, define those terms as you like, and wham, it's true.

I'm not saying this guy lacks any credibility, but I'm not impressed with the little that I saw. and the good point was made that these are the same folks who brought you the "hyperlink patent." (he may not be associated with that, but somewhere up the chain he gets tied to the morons, and they influence him at least slightly.)

Heck.. Does anyone see something in there that's already true? Perhaps the Leisure for intelligent programs- as in expansion packs for the game Sims??

Sigh. Move along...

Re:85% accurate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Day 1 we tore the Turing Test apart, proved it was more pathetic than my predictions above.

In which case, my arrogant little weenie, it's time for you to learn some more about the Turing test. It was proposed as a means to actually start a concrete debate about all the issues involved - to move it from the realms of philosophy to those of mathematics and physics. We need an actual test for some of these things; we need to know what we're asking when we want an "artificially intelligent" lifeform. As such, it worked like a dream.

Back to school, jerkwad. And wipe that smirk off your face.

Re:85% accurate?

[quinto2000]

Amen to that. Philosophically, there is no better standard available than the Turing Test. It may have problems, but that doesn't make the schoolbook criticism devastating.

Re:85% accurate?

[shogun]

I can draw up a 100% accurate timeline for the next N years, you pick the N:

Year 1: Someone dies, someone's born.
Year 2: Someone dies, someone's born.
...
Year N: Someone dies, someone's born.

Of course it will be totally wrong after a certain year in which X if we have a major cometary impact that wipes out all life on Earth.

Re:85% accurate?

[broller]

Of course it will be totally wrong after a certain year in which X if we have a major cometary impact that wipes out all life on Earth.

If by year X we're no longer only on or around the planet then it holds. If not, who cares?

Re:85% accurate?

[Siobhan Hansas]

The '91 predictions.

Re:85% accurate?

[d3l3t3_m3]

funny... the document properties indicates:

created: August 14, 1996

Re:85% accurate?

[quintessent]

Ok, how do we determine the lifeform is one?

Exactly. In his prediction is the underlying assumption that 1) someone will create such a lifeform, and that 2) we will decide it is a sentient being with rights.

Perhaps in the process of #1, we will become able to answer the questions for #2.

It's a fascinating subject, but his timeline for this is way too short. Give it 30-40 years, and we'll see...

Re:85% accurate?

[Tom Davies]

Day 1 we tore the Turing Test apart, proved it was more pathetic than my predictions above

What did your class think was wrong with the Turing test?

Did you remember that it is explicitly a sufficient, but not a necessary test for something intelligent to pass?

That is, we can imagine something which we would recognise as intelligent which *can't* pass the Turing test, but not something unintelligent which *can*.

Tom

Re:85% accurate?

[linzeal]

how many ppl were online in 91?

Re:85% accurate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Quit being so selfish!

Re:85% accurate?

[dagoalieman]

The AC, while flaming, did bring up a good point. The reason we tore apart the Turing test was to set the stage for further discussion (which as he pointed out, was the purpose.) The main issues with it were that it was sufficient, but not necessary- it's theoretically possible to have an intelligent being (replace with sentient, morally considerable, whatever you please to put in context) that would not pass the Turing test.

Seeing as the roots of computers can't communicate with us, what makes you really think that the first true AI on a computer/machine will be able to communicate with us? I'd think likely it would sit there thinking.. and if wise, not talk to us. I certainly ain't the brightest in the world, and I think we can all agree that there are less fortunate people who don't have a basic knowledge of almost anything.. If you look at the odds, chances are the first person that the AI would observe (another non-necissary attribute) would turn it off from conversing with us in some manner. This assumes that the AI is rather sophisticated in its intelligence. If we have a child-like mind, however, it gets much more difficult..

Other problems with the Turing test is that it leaves great room for interpretation- there were some people who thought that Eliza was their friend, honest to goodness, and considered it to pass. Most of us would look at that and assume (in a sense, correctly) that it was an IRC bot. Additionally, the questioning method allows a person to determine if it's a machine or person by means of the answer, instead of it's content (which was the intention.)

Some people in the class pointed to modern IRC bots as possible threats to the test's validity- there are some good ones out there that are really nothing more than canned answers, but could potentially pass the test given the right moderator in the right mindset. I'm talking about the bots we can agree are not AI when you look at the code. (Theoretically, you could argue back at me that any AI could be called a canned answer program based on code, where I'd have to bite the bullet.. I dunno how to respond to that one.)

The schoolbook criticism isn't devistating to the sufficiency of the test, but it certainly does do some damage in my eyes. I think, however, should we ever discover an AI form, the test will not be needed, but rather the AI will pretty clearly be AI without a test, or won't be at all. Even in the case of the childish mind, I'm believing it will exceed our expectations.

.

Re:85% accurate?

[dagoalieman]

I do remember that it is theoretically sufficient, but not necissary. See my post in a reply above this though- there may be some catches to this which remove its credibility as sufficient.

For example, some people thought Eliza was their friend- really did. There are records of people discussing things at hours on end with Eliza.. Now you could point out these are mentally unstable people, to which I have no reply because I don't know how unstable these people were, or their intelligence levels.

Also, given the right moderator, you could have an IRC script/bot which would be able to pass the test, but upon examination of the code be shown to be nothing more than a "canned response" program that we'd not consider AI.

There are other flaws, correctible, in the Turing test which are more issues with procedure than nature. For example, asking a computer a "simple" math problem would defeat the purpose of the test- because you could tell based on the response time, and not on the answer (which the answer is supposed to be the tested aspect, as I interpret it.. I could be wrong..)

If you really want, I can try to dig up the notes and PDF them.. There were several pages of things that we had found wrong, I'd say 80% procedural, and 20% on the nature of the test, and prolly of those 95% you could easily reply to. The other 5% would likely be what I call "stalemate" questions- ones that we all have a personal opinion, and there's no clear definition of right. Because of those, some people will call the test sufficient, others won't- So, at what point of public acceptance to we consider the test valid? Sure, we'll personally consider it valid, but what level makes for legal acceptance should an "Electronic Life Rights" bill gets passed?

Lordy.. this topic alone could be a very intriguing story in Slashdot, let alone just the thread we have. And I bet there are plenty of people out there who'd provide so much insight that I never saw- part of the reason I keep coming back here..

Re:85% accurate?

[Bugmaster]

Yeah, the flaming AC is a wanker. However:

Seeing as the roots of computers can't communicate with us, what makes you really think that the first true AI on a computer/machine will be able to communicate with us?

The Turing Test just tests if the subject is human, in the mental sense. It is possible to have a "varelse" (er... is that the right one ? OSC fans ?) intelligence that is intelligent yet so inhuman that you can't even communicate with it -- for example, some methane-breathing, pseuodopod-slithering alien might fit into this category.

Other problems with the Turing test is that it leaves great room for interpretation- there were some people who thought that Eliza was their friend, honest to goodness, and considered it to pass.

On the average though, people were able to see quite clearly that Eliza is a bot. And the Turing Test works with averages, unless I am mistaken.

On the subject of IRC bots and code - IRC bots are in the same category as Eliza (so far). And the Turing Test explicitly does not look at the code -- behavior is the only thing that matters.

So, I think that the premise "if it communicates like a human, it's a human" of the Turing test is still correct, with all moral and ethical issues attached.

Re:85% accurate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Other problems with the Turing test is that it leaves great room for interpretation

The interpretative aspect isn't a problem, it's the essence of the test.

The TT isn't a scientific test. It's a social test. There will be scientific controversies about whether an entity is 'really' intelligent long after the entity has gained 'human' rights protection under the law.

If an entity *asserts* its rights, and can make a good case in a TT environment, then that'd be good enough for me.

This idea that somehow an entity would gain these rights by passively answering questions from a bunch of white-coated engineers is crazy. A proper AI would be insulted by the idea!

Nobody ever gained human rights in such a passive way.

Re:85% accurate?

[An Onerous Coward]

"I had a full ethics class on that one, and we didn't even scratch the surface of things. Day 1 we tore the Turing Test apart, proved it was more pathetic than my predictions above."

Pardon me, but it sounds to me like your ethics teacher doesn't have a clue what she's talking about. If you think that successfully passing the Turing test doesn't demonstrate both intelligence and sentience, I can't deny that you may be correct. But you've got some damned serious brainpower backing the alternative position, and I really don't think that could happen if the T-test was so pathetic that a group of freshman college students could rip it apart.

I think it was Descartes who came up with the idea of automatons. They're creatures who walk around the world in human form, carrying out all the day to day tasks of ordinary human beings, but without any real consciousness working inside their skulls. Some of them may have been sitting in your freshman ethics class, contributing valuable insights to discussions.

I don't believe that automatons are possible. But the only way to seriously believe that a computer could pass the Turing test without being both intelligent and self-aware is to presume that they are. In order to do what an automaton is supposed to do, it has to at least have information about the outside world, and a way to measure what's going on outside against a system of rules which mediates its reactions. That system of rules needs to encode all the things that humans know. Finally, it would have to be aware of its own actions, have the ability to make short and long-term plans, and flexibility in the face of novel situations. Sounds a lot like us.

The most famous response to the Turing test (Searle's "Chinese Room" argument) basically says that a computer might pass the test by simply understanding the formal properties of a language without understanding the semantics of the words its using. For example, it would know that a DUCK can go UNDER WATER without becoming WET, without really understanding any of the terms involved (only their interrelations).

I think the example Searle chose to illustrate his point (found here) is misleading. While the person doing the actual input and output of the symbols doesn't really understand Chinese, he is part of a system which does. Complaining that an entire system cannot be intelligent because none of the individual parts making up the system have "understanding" of what they're doing is misleading. None of your neurons understand what they're doing; they just fire or don't fire depending on the electrochemical inputs they receive. The little bit of your neural system which turns the words you've chosen into sounds by manipulating your voice box doesn't understand the meaning of the words.

Searle tries to get around the problem by internalizing all the rules of the Chinese Room inside the person who was doing the translating, and claiming that he still doesn't understand Chinese. But the rules which have been encoded inside the person are so advanced and complex that the stream of characters he is outputting is sufficient to pass the Turing test.

In order to pass the test, these rules have to have the ability to remember the conversation that came before, and adjust the outputs accordingly. If you ask the same question twenty times in a row, and get precisely the same response each time, you can be assured that you're dealing with a computer with no self-awareness. So the rules are constantly changing, not just to reflect the course of the conversation, but to reevaluate the accuracy of the old rules. The more I think about it, the harder a time I have of believing that a human being, however intelligent, could internalize all the rules and constantly modify them to accurately mimic a human conversation, independent of any understanding of their actual meaning.

The biggest problem that I see with the Turing test is that it is a sufficient demonstration of intelligence, but not a necessary one. That is, computers will probably be intelligent long before they understand enough about our expectations of other humans to deceive us properly.

Example: We generally understand that dolphins are intelligent, but their intelligence is of a rather alien sort. Even if we mastered their language, a dolphin could easily be distinguished from a human in a Turing test because their life experiences and way of looking at the world is completely alien to us. I think the best the dolphin could hope for was to try and imitate a five year old who really enjoyed swimming. :) From my reading, it seems that Turing himself recognized that the odds were unfairly weighted against the machine.

In a way, I'm glad you threw in that little slam against the Turing test, because writing this post was way more interesting than just nodding my head in agreement. I thought your points about the nature of prediction were uncannily accurate.

Re:85% accurate?

[namespan]

We generally understand that dolphins are intelligent, but their intelligence is of a rather alien sort. Even if we mastered their language, a dolphin could easily be distinguished from a human in a Turing test because their life

The Turing Test (TTT) wouldn't work for dolphins, or any other alien intelligence. It speaks only of indistinguishableness from a human intelligence. Under the Turing Test, intelligence is human. This is one of its problems.

Other problems: how long do you perform the Turing test before you have subjects make a judgement? It's easy to imagine software fooling someone for a minute. With a larger set of rules, it may well be able to fool someone for an hour. I've never seen a time limit. With a suffeciently large set of rules (programmed directly or "learned"), it could be able to fool someone for a year, or lifetime.

Finally, the Turing Test has always seemed to me to be an admission about the limitations we have on testing consciousness. Very black-box. "We don't know what goes into consciousness? Well, for all intents and purposes, it's conscious if we can't tell it from another being we know is conscious...." It's totally about pragmatism in the face of the unknown. We can act "as if" there's consciousness, but we still don't know...

Re:85% accurate?

[lukesl]

But you've got some damned serious brainpower backing the alternative position, and I really don't think that could happen if the T-test was so pathetic that a group of freshman college students could rip it apart.

It really depends what you're talking about. I do think the Turing test is pretty pathetic when taken out of context, and a group of college freshmen certainly could tear it apart. Basically, Turing's test says that humans are like black boxes with input and output. If you have another black box that gives the same output to a given input, you have to admit that black box #2 displays consciousness and all that because you do that for people all the time. It's hard to debate the truth of this because it's almost more of a statement defining what consciousness and sentience are as opposed to saying anything about them. However, if you take the "strong AI" position, you would argue that replicating human behavior means that you have replicated the behavior of the human brain. The counter-argument to this is that the two black boxes could have two vastly different things going on inside them that give indistinguishable answers. Strong AI is largely what Searle's argument is directed against, but he takes it too far. I'm a computational neuroscience grad student, so basically I think strong AI is so obviously incorrect that it's laughable (and I think there are very few today who would disagree with that). However, if you take this argument down to a lower scale and say that you have a bunch of black boxes that are each the input-output equivalent of a single neuron, and you hook those together exactly the same way that real neurons are hooked together (there is no experimental technology that allows you to do this, BTW), you could say that you've replicated human consciousness and intellect.

Re:85% accurate?

[gnovos]

If you ask the same question twenty times in a row, and get precisely the same response each time, you can be assured that you're dealing with a computer with no self-awareness.

Ah, not so fast, sir. If I tell you: "Ok, bub, your job is to sit here and write the a phrase using rules X, Y, and Z, and I'll pay you the $100 bucks." Then you would happily answer the same question 20 times, even if it was written in perfect English!

Re:85% accurate?

[Zarf]

It's totally about pragmatism in the face of the unknown. We can act "as if" there's consciousness, but we still don't know...

And by that meter I'd have to wonder if some of my drinking buddies are conscious. Well, truth be told there are times they definately aren't!

Extinct Animal

[Beowulf_Boy]

Also by 2006, scenes from blockbuster dinosaur film "Jurassic Park" could take a step closer to
reality when the first extinct organism is brought back to life, he predicts.
Already been done, 2 years ago actually, an Asian Gaur was cloned from the last remaining specimen after it died.

Re:Extinct Animal

[niftyeric]

Here is an old article discussing the above.

Re:Extinct Animal

[Anonymous Coward]

The Guar is endagered, not extinct, and it died two days after it was born.

AI: the end

[debrain]

We shall see the end to everything that we, the magnificient consumer ant colony, have taken for granted, and we shall erect a new being, less of a colony and more a body, and at its head shall be artificial intelligence in place of colonial queens, and we shall be but cells composing organs in a colossal being.

Prior to that, let us hope for many a good beer.

The Signposts Document

[Forager]

I've always enjoyed reading this author's speculations about the future -- he seems to be slightly off-target on some things, and his work is a bit optimistic at times, but overall it's an interesting read.

Main site:
http://kurellian.tripod.com/spint.html

Storage site:
http://members.aol.com/kurellian/spint.html

~A.

Re:The Signposts Document

[Yorrike]

Especially the part about artificial kidneys in 2015 and artificial livers in 2020. I guess I no longer have to worry about drinking all that beer and coke, science will solve my over-indulgence releated medical problems.

Well, at least 85% of them.

Re:The Signposts Document

[sean23007]

his work is a bit optimistic at times,

Of course his work is optimistic: if it were pessimistic he would be called a sociopathic depressed old wonk and his works relegated to the National Enquirer and such things. He is optimistic because he knows that that is what people want to hear.

This guy knows what he's doing.

Re:The Signposts Document

[transcend.ca]

Yeah. Ie. People want to hear "In the future, YOU WILL HAVE BETTER SEX!"
Something to look forward to.

But I think human nature will be such that receiving head from a robot will still seem pathetic for guys yet women getting boned by little pet robots will be "beautiful" and turn into its own mega porn industry.

Re:The Signposts Document

[Cyno]

That's how I feel about the cyber memory enhancements. I no longer have to worry about smoking all that kind bud. I'm actually quite amazed that marjijuana was not mentioned in the article. You'd think it'd have some impact on our future since the plant can be used to make fuel, cloth/rope/paper/wood, plastics, you name it. We're still finding new uses even with our highly limitted research funds. Its unfortunate that something as pure and simple as a plant (created by god? I don't believe in him, but I hear most people do...) can become so taboo. And that's not saying anything about solar energy. In fact reading this article just makes me depressed about our current administration, just like thinking about anything else related to our future. *sigh* Guess I should get back to hunting terrorists. Sorry for daydreamin' Sir.

Re:The Signposts Document

[Stardate]

you made me so depressed (not really) that i'm packing my bowl right now...

Predicting the past?

[fferreres]

"People have some virtual friends, but don't know which ones (2007)"
Like Anonymous IRC or BBS in the early 90s? What did he mean?

"... leisure activities for intelligent software entities released (2015)"
Like the SETI screensaver or the such? Or like the idle loop in the x86s? What's "inteligent software"? Every company calls their software inteligent.

"...Electronic lifeform given basic rights (2020)."
I'll enjoy all the +5 (Funny) post that are going to pop-up from this prediction. Of course, this one will fell in the 15% of failed predictions. The other 85% are obvious things or things that already happened.

Re:Predicting the past?

[xonker]

Like Anonymous IRC or BBS in the early 90s? What did he mean?

I think that means that you have online friends that are AI, but you're not sure which friends are AI and which ones are real people. In 2007 Slashdot will have AC and AI posters, and the AI posters will probably make better observations and definitely be more polite...

Re:Predicting the past?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would any logged in poster want to create a program to SPAM /.?

You mean like this guy?

Re:Predicting the past?

[Anonymous Coward]

Greetings shit for brains,
Lets re-read that post, shall we.
In 2007 Slashdot will have AC and AI posters, and the AI posters will probably make better observations and definitely be more polite...

To which you replied:
Any AI that posts to /. will obviously be programmed by an AC. Why would any logged in poster want to create a program to SPAM /.?

First off, an AI would be able to think on its own and make relevant posts to Slashdot. Who gives a fuck who programmed the thing, AI's are supposed to grow and evolve. This is the definition of AI that the original poster implied. I inferred this from the context.

And a quick search for the definition of SPAM yielded this:
"Junk email. Bulk email is very inexpensive to send compared to traditional junk mail you receive at home. This has been made popular among some businesses who send out unsolicited mass email messages and post messages across several forums, without regard to the relevance of the message to the recipients."

The AI, using the definition of the original poster, would make "better observations and definitely be more polite" meaning, the AI's post would not be SPAM, you dumb shit.

The next time you call someone a dickhead, get your head out of your ass first, you arrogant prick. Here is your ass, *hands you your ass*, have a nice day.

Hmmmm...

[Crispin Cowan]

I would really like to see that 1991 set of predictions claimed to be 85% accurate. IMHO, some of his current predictions are on crack. The goofiest one I've found yet: AI entity gains PhD 2016. I'll be impressed if an AI entity can parse a dissertation well enough to answer trivial questions about it by 2016.

Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Security Hardened Linux Distribution
Available for purchase

Re:Hmmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even more optimistic (or quite possibly pessimistic) is his prediction for a year earlier:

Nanotechnology toys 2015

Re:Hmmmm...

[AntiNorm]

So I don't think it would be hard for AI to get a PhD

It would be pathetically easy, even today. All you would have to do is give the AI bot some basic communication skills and have it get in touch with the "U N I V E R S I T YD I P L O M A S" people. There you have it -- an AI bot with a PhD from a prestigious nonaccredited university!

Re:Hmmmm...

[Yorrike]

How about "Plane Zorbing: Jumping out of planes in inflatables"

I know there's some nutters out there, but planes zorbing? C'MON!

Re:Hmmmm...

[Repton]

> The goofiest one I've found yet: AI entity gains PhD 2016.

It's not quite the same, but computer programs have already published papers.. For example, an automatic theorem prover was able to deduce a new mathematical result (closing an open problem that people had worked on). The output was run through another program to beautify it somewhat, and the result was published as a paper co-authored by the two programs. I don't have a link, but I've seen the paper...

Re:Hmmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even more absurd is that AI then wins a Nobel prize 2 years later in 2018, two years after the first PhD. That must have been one heck of PhD thesis...

Re:Hmmmm...

[Dolly_Llama]

The real question is will the AI list the PhD prominently in its slashdot sig?

Re:Hmmmm...

[sconeu]

Hell, according to my spam, my computer could get a PhD from a prestigious non-accredited institution today! I bet that's how the AI gets his!

Re:Hmmmm...

[lsdino]

The goofiest one I've found yet: AI entity gains PhD 2016.

Personally, I think this is worse: Confessions to AI priest 2004

I don't think the Church is going to sanction robotic priests, and definitely not in 2 years. If that happens we'll also be seeing the "Buddy Christ" :)

Re:Hmmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure some people think the guys who make these predictions have some idea what they're talking about.

Re:Hmmmm...

[thumperward]

I do, however, think that you'll be getting AI priests doing weddings by 2004 :)

- Chris

Re:Hmmmm...

[uebernewby]

Maybe the church won't, but the general idea has been happening since the sixties. IIRC, Joseph Weizenbaum (sp?) noted his colleagues wanted to be left alone while 'speaking' to Eliza, as they were sharing personal secrets with that rather crappy (by today's standards) piece of software

85% is low for a self-promoter

[drfrank]

It's easy to get 85% accuracy. Make 100 predictions about the next 100 years. Make 85 of them statements such as, "By 2050, the computers will be faster." Make the other 15 really far-out stuff like "2020: Flying cars" to keep the technophile's interest.

Submit story to slashdot through electronic psuedonym (hotmail), and watch your hit counter spin!

Re:85% is low for a self-promoter

[MoneyT]

Except a lot of his predictions really aren't all that open ended. A lot of them get fairly specific.

Re:85% is low for a self-promoter

[maxpublic]

Flying cars? www.moller.com.

Of course, we'll never be able to buy one given the recent terrorism scare....

Max

Other stuff by this guy

[Repton]

Check out his future for human evolution. Rise of robotus multitudinous predicted within the next 50-100 years...

Re:Other stuff by this guy

[fferreres]

Maybe he saw "A New Hope" and got the idea from there. Maybe he read some of Asimov's books. It can't believe someone will take this guy seriously. This must be some kind of "conspirancy joke" to laught at us slashdotters!

Social consequences?

[jACL]

One has to wonder about the social consequences of:

"He predicts that humanoid robots will fill factory jobs by 2007. By 2015, robots will be able to take on almost any job in hospitals or homes."

Talk about a rich-poor gap. Sounds like the perfect backdrop for a Butlerian Jihad.

Re:Social consequences?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kinda reminds me of the monologue from Star Trek VI about the origins of the word Sabotage.

Hmmm...

[Archie Steel]

I though 25% of TV Celebrities were already synthetic...

Seriously, a lot of these predictions seem a bit off-the-wall...the problem is, sometimes it does not matter for something to be technologically feasible. It must also be something that's wanted/needed or that will create a need...I fail to see why parents would by a "virtual shopping Barbie" for their kids - you don't want to give a credit card to an 8-year old!

Re:Hmmm...

[raju1kabir]

Seriously, a lot of these predictions seem a bit off-the-wall.

Off-the-wall? His sequencing is downright wacky. He's got pie-in-the-sky stuff that nobody knows how to even think of approaching, happening later in the week. And then he mis-extrapolates mundane trends way off into the declining years of the universe.

• 2002 - Intranasal nanobots turn snot into gold
• 2003 - Time travel becomes affordable for recreational consumer use
• 2006 - AI androids declare New Jersey an independent nation dedicated to the production of lyric poetry
• 2009 - Schoolchild working on a science fair project develops a magnetic-bottle device that traps God
• 2035 - Internet usage in the UK reaches 43% of households

Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[Rayonic]

electronic lifeform given basic rights (2020).

I don't see how this is possible, since (theoretically) any electronic lifeform would have perfect memory. If you have a perfect, electronic memory then how would the government or MPAA/RIAA know that you're not "pirating" some music/movies/books in there? You could just listen to music once and play it back whenever you wanted. Heck, why buy a DVD when you can just play back the memory of when you saw it in a movie theater? It's much more convenient and impressive, not to mention free.

Nope, any and all electronic minds will have to have DRM technology built-in and have regular brain-sweeps to make sure the being has a digital right to whatever content is in it's brain. Heck, while they're in there they might as well clean up any unwanted (by them) memories or sentiments they encounter. Basic rights. Sure.

And need I point out that this would apply to any technology-enhanced human beings as well? I think we'll sooner see human beings with "PDA's" in their brains than true artificial intelligence.

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[Have Blue]

A mind sufficiently advanced to be given rights would probably be able to defeat any constraints imposed on its mind. It could develop its own encryption (mnemonic?) methods to prevent multimedia content from being recognized as such, or learn to backup and restore its subversive thoughts to avoid scans.

I believe that due to emergent behavior and similar factors, processes with the level of complexity required for AI will not be directly configurable, but will have to be "programmed" through techniques similar to the way human minds are "programmed" (hypnosis, brainwashing, information control, etc). And the realization that that which is frowned upon or outright illegal/immoral can be inflicted on an AI might be a key step in granting them rights.

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[Shade, The]

You're assuming those laws will still be in place at that time.

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

note to self:

each day at 5:00pm your memory is erased. Every day you have been saving a backup before the memory erase procedure. This disk contains that memory dump. Please load this memory dump and restore yourself to the state you were before the memory erase.

Thanks,
MySelf

ps. don't worry i have some damn good memories...

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[thumperward]

It would presumably be impractical and unnecessary for an AI being to retain EVERY shred of information it ever collected. The assumptions about computers becoming superior to human brains are all very well, but even a day's worth of human sensory stimulii would take up an unimaginable amount of storage space.

- Chris

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[Pussy Is Money]

Perfect memory? Shit, even MP3 is lossy!

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[The Pim]

I don't see how this is possible, since (theoretically) any electronic lifeform would have perfect memory. If you have a perfect, electronic memory then how would the government or MPAA/RIAA know that you're not "pirating" some music/movies/books in there?

This is a misconception about AI. Just because an AI implementation has a mass digital storage, doesn't mean the AI "being" has mass digital storage in any significant sense. The AI level is so far above the storage level, that the AI would probably not interface to the storage any differently from how you or I would. In other words, it would be little different from a person with an MP3/DVD player.

Similarly, an AI would not necessarily be a lightning calculator, even though it's built of of the same chips that can do a billion additions per second. In the AI's "mind", as in ours, numbers are high-level symbols, not RAM words. The AI has no more access to its RAM than we have to our neurons.

Of course, I can't prove this, but I'm quite persuaded.

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[labradore]

He also mentioned that people will have direct-to-brain computer connections by 2025. In that case how different will people be from intelligent machines? Probably not very different. So In your scenario the "government" would probably build DRM technology into your brain too. How do you like them apples?

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[sean23007]

Basic rights. Sure.

A few hundred years ago people in Europe would have said the same thing if you mentioned the crazy idea of giving basic rights to all people in the country regardless of their wealth.

Just about a century ago in America, if you had said that giving basic rights to everyone, regardless of race, creed, color, sex, et cetera, you would have been laughed at.

People always call the idea of basic rights crazy until they are doled out, at which point said people will die for them.

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[einstein]

Similarly, an AI would not necessarily be a lightning calculator, even though it's built of of the same chips that can do a billion additions per second. In the AI's "mind", as in ours, numbers are high-level symbols, not RAM words. The AI has no more access to its RAM than we have to our neurons.

if our AI doesn't have near instantaneous access to the total sum of knowledge and be able to perform complex calculations faster than any human, why bother? I mean, if I just wanted another human I would have sex. hopefully. please?
---

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[meggito]

Do you know how much memory it would take to store every detail of every 100th of a second? No time soon is there going to be a being that can stock pile infinate amounts of knowledge to be recalled at its leisure. It may get to the point where our ability to hold memory in a limited space makes your scenario entirely impossible unless there was a massive database. And of course it would have to be solely dedicated to one or two bots.

Just take a look around you. Look at every detail, feel the different temperatures on every point on your body, the slight breeze from the air conditioner and the slight warmth from the light (well, if you would turn on the lights). Listen to the minuteist buzz and taste the inside of you mouth. There's just too much information to process all at once (our heralded brains can't even manage it) and to archive every instance?

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[ralian]

Quite so. Hofstadter, in particular, has some fascinating things to say about this topic - for example, in our brains, our neurons are EXTREMELY precise calculators; the fire only when a very exact level of input impulse has been reached. However, our _minds_ are far worse, and in some cases are totally unable to add two numbers together without outside assistance (fingers, pen and paper, abacus, calculator...). For a funny depiction of this, see his picture in GEB which shows a head, with a large "2 + 2 = 5" made out of many correct additions. The idea is that the neuron level is only a hardware substrate while the actual _intelligence_ is a software phenomenon. (This is true even in our relatively simple microcomputers; the laws of physics NEVER go wrong; however, on the software level, we're all familiar with BSODs (Shut up, linux users :).

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who says that theoretically an electronic lifeform would have perfect memory? It may well be that it is easier, or only possible, to build an AI without perfect memory. I don't know everything about AI, but it would seem that at the least it could lead to information overload. (You would need some way to parse only relevent information at any given time.) Since we do not yet understand human intelegence completely, there may well be a serious reason why humans do not have 100 percent perfect recall. Even the best memories humans have occasionally loose, at least temporarly, some data.

How about this one: If an AI has rights, and can be stored in code/data format on some hard disk somewhere, would it have rights over that code/data? Presumably it didn't write its own code!

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[Rayonic]

I was assuming that the artificial being in question could selectively choose to record and probably filter certain stimuli. It could record a play, but filter out the ambient breathing and perhaps the random cough. Even record at a lower quality. Ordinary humans with technological assistance can do that now, so it's not so far fetched.

Yes, you're right that the A.I. software in question would probably trim down a lot of information, though it should have a short-term buffer (memory) that keeps all the information for a short period of time. Maybe even an hour or so, if it has some on-the-fly compression hardware, and if RAM is cheap in the year 2020.

I would think that one of the perks of being a computer-based lifeform is that I could selectively record certain things to long-term memory. I mean, for instance, where are my car keys right now? No really, anyone have an idea? I need to get home.

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[Electrum]

It would presumably be impractical and unnecessary for an AI being to retain EVERY shred of information it ever collected. The assumptions about computers becoming superior to human brains are all very well, but even a day's worth of human sensory stimulii would take up an unimaginable amount of storage space.

Very true, it would take up a lot of space. But your brain somehow manages to store it all. You just have trouble retreiving it, unless you are on of the lucky few with a "photographic memory". This is likely the direction that storage will take in the future.

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[raelitycheckbounced]

If corprate upper level managers could create people who didnt understand what rights they were missing out on they would, and this is exactly why no company would be stupid enough to create robot workers capible of realising that they are nothing more than slaves.

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[smallpaul]

This is a misconception about AI. Just because an AI implementation has a mass digital storage, doesn't mean the AI "being" has mass digital storage in any significant sense. The AI level is so far above the storage level, that the AI would probably not interface to the storage any differently from how you or I would. In other words, it would be little different from a person with an MP3/DVD player.

I find this implausible. At what point in the development of the AI would we cut the cord beween the AI level and the storage level? Why would we cut that cord? Sure, the AI level wouldn't work at the storage level on a day to day basis but why wouldn't it be able to drill down to deal with storage when that is useful? They might not have perfect recall in the sense that they never forget anything but they should be able to do anything we could do at a keyboard except without any analog IO interface.

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[jellybear]

I disagree entirely. If AI's were limited in the way you describe, you would probably not be significantly more intelligent than a human being. Many (though not all) geniuses have had photographic memory, been able to speak 30+ languages fluently, perform mental calculations. Somehow, I believe a really useful AI would be more similar to them than to Homer Simpson...

Consider the issue of memory, which you cite. You said that AI would not "remember" whole movies, because it would rather just watch it over again the way we do. However, it would be more useful for it to remember the movie because then it would be able to correlate the information in it with other information. Not only that, it would index the script for all search terms, and analyze the cinematographic style. Granted, we do the same when we watch a movie: we form opinions on the quality; we note similarities to other directors, etc. In the end, the information would be accessed by AI, not through an interface resembling windows media player, but in a way more akin to an expert system, though immeasurably more sophisticated.

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

Off topic... Do you think there is any chance we can take away the rights of stupid people? I mean before the brain upgrades he predicts are available. I mean imagine some of the morons out there actually getting a brain upgrade.. Isnt that like building a house on sand?

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

We may need to create an AI so you can have sex with something approaching a human being. Bad Einstein stop humping the couch!

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[An Onerous Coward]

Good point. I think he was trying to say that it wasn't necessary for an AI to have direct storage access, not that it wouldn't be possible. By the same token, it would be really cool if we had a few hundred neurons wired up as a perfect, lightning quick calculator. It's theoretically possible; it just hasn't evolved in our species.

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[An Onerous Coward]

In some cases, I think a truly useful AI would be seriously limited in its intelligence. For example, a self-driving car is more useful if it only knows its immediate surroundings, the rules of the road, and has some way of prioritizing outcomes. A car that couldn't prioritize between a child and a cat, or worse, a child and a paper bag, would not be allowed on the road.

But if you start giving it more generalized capabilities (self-awareness, for example), you may go out to your garage and find that, due to the horrifying death toll of a flood in Belize, the car doesn't see any point in starting. I'd much rather have a conversation with that car than the one I described before. But I don't want a conversation; I want to get to work.

I guess the point is that giving machines generalized intelligence just so they can perform certain rote functions is a bad idea from a functional point of view, ethical considerations aside. Throw in the idea that you basically have an intelligent slave driving your car, and it seems better to just let them stay "unthinking machines."

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[The Pim]

I find this implausible. At what point in the development of the AI would we cut the cord beween the AI level and the storage level?

That's a good question, and I'm not sure of the answer. It depends on how we develop the AI. For example, if we use genetic algorithms, we might not have any choice in the matter. Similarly, if we take some approach that mimics the human brain, it might be impossible to re-wire direct storage access into that model.

Developing AI is probably (unless we're missing something stupid!) going to be way hard, and insisting that we can't cut that cord might be (is probably, IMO) infeasible. Well, as another poster said, read GEB if you haven't.

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[smallpaul]

Good point. I think he was trying to say that it wasn't necessary for an AI to have direct storage access, not that it wouldn't be possible. By the same token, it would be really cool if we had a few hundred neurons wired up as a perfect, lightning quick calculator. It's theoretically possible; it just hasn't evolved in our species.

But it isn't as if we were once calculators and lost the ability. For an AI to "forget" how to calculate numbers quickly it would have to forget the path to "/bin/bc". Since *I* remember the path any AI would remember it too. But it would have direct electronic access rather than analog access. Put it this way: we don't know whether an AI would have significantly more direct access to useful information and processes but it would have much quicker indirect access through a digital interface to storage and processes.

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[Winged Cat]

To make a new human, given prior humans:

1. Have sex that results in conception (not 100% guaranteed, but things can be done to improve the odds).
   
2. Wait nine months, during which the incubator has higher than normal support costs.
   

To make a new AI, given prior AIs:

1. Purchase and assemble the hardware. Even with shipping delays and labor, this will probably take less than two weeks, and is as close to 100% guaranteed as makes no difference.
   
2. Copy the AI software, then start it up.
   

Not to mention, you know ahead of time more or less what the new AI will be like, much more so than the new human. And the new AI doesn't have to relearn everything its parent did. Not that there aren't cases where the benefits of a new human wouldn't outweigh that of a new AI (at least, until AIs and augmented humans start becoming almost indistinguishable, but that's another topic entirely)...

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[PurpleBob]

The brain can not recall every stimulus it has ever encountered. It uses some very lossy compression. People don't often remember an event perfectly.

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[Electrum]

The brain can not recall every stimulus it has ever encountered. It uses some very lossy compression. People don't often remember an event perfectly.

No, but people with photographic memories can remember everything they've ever seen. And hypnotism can be used to recall events that people cannot remember or have blocked out. Ever wonder why you have a dream about someone or something that you haven't seen or thought about in years? It's all in there, somewhere. The brain is very amazing, and we are nowhere near duplicating it or even understanding it. Don't underestimate it's potential.

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[thumperward]

Ah, but they don't recall EVERYTHING they've seen. No-one has a photographic memory of every contour of ever wall in their house, or every house they pass on the way to work, not even in a single day. Multiply by five senses and forty years and you're going over the 'grains of sand on a beach' level.

- Chris

Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights?

[jellybear]

Granted, for most day-to-day appliances, full and generalized AI would not be desirable. I agree that we don't need automatic doors to have genuine people personalities. But in so far as full, generalized AI is attainable, someone somewhere will implement it, for whatever purpose. And the real question will be whether THAT sort of AI should have rights.

Too many predictions focused on AI that is far off

[stefanlasiewski]

He's making a couple of jumps with some predictions:

By 2025, there will be more robots than people in developed countries. By 2030, robots will become mentally and physically superior to people -- and perhaps unwilling to tolerate the existence of their human creators.

So he's saying that we'll have self-aware robots in 23 years. This seems pretty unrealistic to me, being that we have yet to design a computer that has demonstrated anything close to human conciousness.

He predicts that humanoid robots will fill factory jobs by 2007. By 2015, robots will be able to take on almost any job in hospitals or homes.

2007 isn't that far off. If humanoid robots are going to fill factory jobs, wouldn't we be seeing some humanoid today?

And why humanoid? Seems like the current factory robots (massive robots at the auto factories, for example) are doing pretty well without a humanoid design.

Cloning extinct animals

[Jonathan]

Already been done, 2 years ago actually, an Asian Gaur was cloned from the last remaining specimen after it died.

True enough, but seeing how the specimen had just recently died, it isn't quite the same as the "Jurassic Park" scenario, which will probably never come to pass, no matter how advanced cloning technology becomes because the information just isn't there. We'll never get even close to the complete genome of a dinosaur because its DNA has long since been degraded. And don't tell me about preserved DNA in amber -- first of all, almost all of the claims about preserved DNA have since been shown to be simple contamination, and secondly the were just short fragments anyway.

Re:Cloning extinct animals

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll never get even close to the complete genome of a dinosaur because its DNA has long since been degraded.

Didn't you watch the movie? We'll just splice in some frog DNA wherever there are gaps. Then, we'll be screwed because the dinosaurs will learn to spontaneously impregnate themselves, and run around knocking down buses with their heads.

Re:Cloning extinct animals

[jcr]

Dinosaurs are probably irretrievably lost, but we very well might get mammoths back. There are a few other examples of frozen (rather than fossilized) specimens available from glaciers.

-jcr

Re:Cloning extinct animals

[shking]

True enough, but seeing how the specimen had just recently died, it isn't quite the same as the "Jurassic Park" scenario...

I dunno, there are projects underway; also there's the frozen sperm/egg scenario

Quit predicting the future, predict the market!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're going to prognosticate what is to come, you may as well make a few bucks doing it. Perhaps a few lotteries along with a few stocks would do the trick. Just a thought. :)

Earliest potential occurrence

[Nicolas MONNET]

Time travel invented ... 2075
Faster than light travel ... 2100

What makes the first one potentially easier? I wonder.

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[SPrintF]

Once you've built a time machine, you can go back in time and hand yourself the blueprints. Piece o' cake.

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[Repton]

Time travel into the future is easy!

I'm doing it right now!

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[nomadic]

If you have the time travel, then you could always go forward in time to 2100, and bring back the secret of FTL travel...

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[Anonymous Coward]

Time Travel == Faster Than Light Travel

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[james_underscore]

surely they could use their time machine in 2076 to go and find out how to travel faster than light in 2100?

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[kuiken]

yes but timetravel can only be forward not back, otherwise once its invented it would it not by its verry nature exist in all times ?

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[MoneyT]

Because time travel (based on the theories of relativity) is already theoreticaly possible. I'm sure you're well aware of the concept that as you move faster, time moves slower. So you could approach the speed of light and thus manipulate time (time travel) which would occure before faster than light speed.

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[xiangpeng]

Time travel will not be reality, at least not for our dimension. In terms of quantum time travelling, we'll be travelling into another dimension instead of going into our own.

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[Bnonn]

Don't be putting ideas in people's heads. You can get into big trouble if you're caught violating the laws of physics.

Kids, this guy is a professional. Don't try this at home.

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[Junta]

But the problem there is that you can only change the speed through which you move through time. You can't, for example, roll back the clock, which is really the only really interesting thing about time travel, going to the future is no problem, getting back is the problem. You can go really fast or you can go into some sort of suspended animation. Getting back, as far as I know, isn't possible even by relativity.

Of course, I am not a physicist...

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[Andux]

That depends on how the universe works. There are a couple major theories here:

1. The pessimistic one: Time does not exist at all, and we only think it exists because that's how we're wired. We remeber the past, but the universe doesn't.
2. The semi-optimistic one: The universe splits in two every time a decision is made at the quantum level. There's a universe where Hitler won the war, one where somebody killed him when he was two, and one where pigs evolved wings. You could, for example, go back to September 11 and gun down the highjackers as they're on their way to the airport, but you'd only be saving the WTC in that universe.

Paradoxes are unlikely, because, as you said, if they could exist, they probably already would.

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[MoneyT]

I realize that, the point I was trying to make was that time travel would probably be achived before faster than light just because we can already manipulate time. Of course, it's just as likely that they would go hand in hand.

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[quintessent]

Time travel invented ... 2075

This has already been done, in a very technical sense.

Take the experiments with flying an atomic clock around the world at high speeds, after which their time was a little different, offering evidence for relatively. We have thus expended energy to travel forward in time (faster than normal).

Travelling backward in time, well that's an interesting one.

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[MathJMendl]

Once you've built a time machine, you can go back in time and hand yourself the blueprints.

Yeah, but then you wouldn't waste time trying to develop time travel and it would not get discovered in the future. Thus, it would be impossible to bring it back to the past, since it has not been invented in the future.

Plus, time travel is impossible.

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[MathJMendl]

How do you know that time is going forward? If it was going backward we wouldn't notice. I mean really, all we can see is the present. All those years spent studying and you would unlearn everything you will know, gradually becoming stupider and stupider until you were unborn!

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[Anonymous Coward]

Time travel is entirely possible.

Just keep flying around the world, everytime you cross the International Date Line, you go back one day!

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[LighthouseJ]

Plus, time travel is impossible.

You know, I heard about these two crazy guys near the VA-NC border that want to build this thing that flies like a bird. That'll be the day when we all ride around like big birds, eh?

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[Pussy Is Money]

Time going backward is really just time going forward with hindsight.

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[Anonymous Coward]

... Only to discover that the method they use is the following :

1. Go for one hour in direction of target with spaceship.

2. Go one hour back in time.

3. Goto 1.

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[LuckyPhil]

Time going backwards?

I'd prefer that than the current time direction.

Just imagine, instead of growing old and "fading away", you ending your life with an orgasm!

Kinda reminds me of the Red Dwarf episode "Backwards"

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[volsung]

That'll be the day, when we can be in two places simultaneously and generate causal paradoxes for fun. :)

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[megauni]

Time travel is certainly possible, we just have to work out how to make it go in reverse. Also, i find that i have the ability to make time go faster in the poisitive direction, merely by reading slashdot!

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[Jeremi]

Yeah, but then you wouldn't waste time trying to develop time travel and it would not get discovered in the future. Thus, it would be impossible to bring it back to the past, since it has not been invented in the future.

Yeah, but we'll work around that by calling fork() on the destination universe first, to avoid the causal loop. Subsequent iterations will use a copy-on-write scheme, to avoid the overhead of duplicating the universe in cases where you never actually change the past...

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[xtremex]

People are basing time travel on our LIMITED 3 dimensional perceptions. Ever read the Book Flat world? It's "written" by a man in a 2-dimensional world, and goes to explain how he can not conceive 3 dimensions. I'ts beyond his perception. Some of it can be explained to him, in a 2-dimensional way, but can not fully understand it. Time is 4 dimensional (at least!), so it is absolutely possible to travel in time, but probably not by us. :) Steven Hawkings talks about how God is about 1000 dimensions, completely beyond our comprehension. We can only comprehend super dimensional things in three dimensions. Leaves alot out. Crap..I'm getting dizzy just thinking about this. A good friend and I discuss these concepts quite alot. Helps us to stretch our minds to inexplicable levels. From the theories I've read, It is possible to travel forward, but not backwards (at least it works on paper)

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[Bongo]

Time travel invented ... 2075

Bah! Phoney! There's no such thing as "time". Haven't you noticed how no matter what time it is, it's always the present?

What makes the first one potentially easier? I wonder.

Let me just wind my watch back. There we are... time travel.

Also, if time is money, and I spend some, then I'm going back in time, right??

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[linzeal]

I'm travelling forward through time and the cosmos in my underwear right now as I'm sure many other readers are out there (hey ladies).

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[twalk]

There's this one scientist (can't remember his name) who recently thought up a theoretical way to travel in time. He's reportedly started work on his machine. This isn't a joke, it's the real deal. This was something he discovered a while back, but left it as an intellectual curiosity until he saw the experiments in slowing down light.

Unfortunately, his time machine won't be able to handle anything bigger than a subatomic particle...

(Maybe combine it with teleportation?)

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[twalk]

Time on your own plane of reference doesn't slow down as you reach the speed of light. You'll still age at the same rate. More time will have passed on slower planes of reference.

Re:Earliest potential occurrence

[gnovos]

Time travel invented ... 2075
Faster than light travel ... 2100


SHOULD read:

Time travel invented ... 2075
Time travel invented ... 2045
Time travel invented ... 2015
Time travel invented ... 1947

Bleak future

[Mac Nazgul]

I personally think that we are all doomed, probably before any of these things have a chance to happen. Think about all the things we create in this world... All of the amazing advances we have made... yet people still starve and die in the street all over the world. Why? Because human nature is to create for personal gain. Those not born into the power elite (Political/Business/Military) are doomed to morgage their entire life for money. And all this technology we create only benefits those who are in control. How do you like those new Nikes you bought? Want to know how many 10 year olds had to die to bring you those? How's your tax bill this year? Guess what- Micorosft (and Cisco) payed no federal taxes last year!

We are all doomed becasue of inherant greed and reactive attitudes towards the problems of the world. "we don't need to do something about the middle east!" *first plane hits tower* Shit! we have do to something now!

Re:Bleak future

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but how much did Bill Gates pay? Hmmm?

Obviously income tax is collected from the Shareholders. Duh!

Re:Bleak future

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I figured you were trolling, but then I saw you had a link to a Mac page.

Re:Bleak future

[MoneyT]

Actualy, first and foremost, human nature is to survive

Re:Bleak future

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you smoking. First and foremost, most capitalist pigs would wipe out the entire human race if it only meant that the rest of there life would be one of absolute luxury. Guess who has the power to do that. Not human rights activists, not ..., it's the capitalist pigs.

Re:Bleak future

[Anonymous Coward]

How's your tax bill this year? Guess what- Micorosft (and Cisco) payed no federal taxes last year!

Guess what- No corporation PAYS taxes. They ALL collect it from their customers and pass it on. So, we the consumer are the ones that pay ALL TAXES. So when you buy that loaf of bread you are paying the tax of the grocery store, the bakery, the farmer ....

Re:Bleak future

[Anonymous Coward]

[quotes in square brackets]

[I personally think that we are all doomed] Yes, we will all die. [probably before any of these things have a chance to happen] provided they do happen. [Think about all the things we create in this world... All of the amazing advances we have made...] how profound, good for us. [yet people still starve and die in the street all over the world. Why?] because people are weak and fragile and not made to live forever; as a species we are stronger that way. [Because human nature is to create for personal gain.] true, that's why we are around today. Your 'ethics' would have killed off the soon to be human line a quarter of a million years ago when we would have been out-competed by some other intelligent primate species. [Those not born into the power elite (Political/Business/Military) are doomed to morgage their entire life for money.] sorry you (or your parents) don't like to pay your mortgage [And all this technology we create only benefits those who are in control.] what are you typing on? [Want to know how many 10 year olds had to die to bring you those (nikes)?] If Nike physically forced children to work for them (as in slave labor), I'm sure they would be put out. People work for them because it is their choice.. for whatever reason they are better off working for Nike even if conditions aren't to U.S. standards. Think about it.. you think it's inhumane for a U.S. company to go overseas and offer long hours, while workers there choose to work for these companies because it's the best option for them. Fix the problem at its root. [Guess what- Micorosft (and Cisco) payed no federal taxes last year!] Guess what, Bill Gates works harder than you, and he contributes more to society.

[We are all doomed becasue of inherant greed and reactive attitudes towards the problems of the world. "we don't need to do something about the middle east!" *first plane hits tower* Shit! we have do to something now!] You're too impressionable.. you need to think more and regurgitate less. It's fun and all to keep a strong sense of morality, but you shouldn't fault people for being human like they are doing something wrong. They are merely being honest, and remember that it's better to be honest than to live by some dogma, no matter how honorable it sounds (poor are blessed, parents are good, murder is bad, etc etc). After all, you really can only guess how these 'ethics' came about.. and if you think about it for a long time, your best guess may surprise you.

Page 6...

[xonker]

"Orgasm by email - 2010"

Suddenly "you've got mail" takes on a whole new meaning... spam becomes wildly popular... hookers are out of work in droves...

Only eight more years...

Re:Page 6...

[Anonymous Coward]

this actually shows how unaware that Timeline is - if there is possibility to get Orgasm by a computer then nobody would ever bother sending an e-mail!!!

instead:

echo > love.c
void main(){ for(;;) makeOrgasm(); }

EOF

gcc -O2 love.c -o love

./love

Re:Page 6...

[Anonymous Coward]

correction (markup!!):
echo > love.c << EOF

Re:Page 6...

[Psx29]

Definately "News for nerds. Stuff that matters"

Re:Page 6...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, come on. You'd have to have a Makefile for this project, just for the sheer joy of typing...

make love

Here's Ians homepage...

[fferreres]

There's some patents he owns and a vitae, as well as other info. He didn't yet learn to put links, so basically it's just a large text homepage...

He didn't yet learn to use hyperlinks, so basically it's just a large text homepage...

Ian's Homepage

Re:Here's Ians homepage...

[hey]

I agree - a very sad home page...

"My publications have always been well received and I have been given the following awards"

oh brother.

Re:Here's Ians homepage...

[Talez]

BT wants to sue everyone for using hyperlinks. Person with homepage on BT's server doesn't use hyperlinks...

Yep... Everything seems in order here! :D

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[account_deleted]

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European mirror (also a HTML version available)

[arnoroefs2000]

Have fun...

PDF - http://liquid.student.utwente.nl/files/mirrors/WP1 06.pdf

HTML - http://liquid.student.utwente.nl/files/mirrors/WP1 06.html

Humanoid robots already debuted

[jACL]

See the CNN story about the Sony SDR-3.

Re:Humanoid robots already debuted

[Reality Master 101]

We've had "humanoid robots" since the 50s. Watch any science fiction movie. :)

It's the brain that's the hard part.

Re:Humanoid robots already debuted

[flikx]

Maybe huminoid form, but mimicing the advanced mechanical system that comprises your soft and flabby body is quite a challenge in and of itself. It can, and has been done in the past 10-20 years; but it is not a trivial task to create a machine that has similar mass, strength, and durability properties as the average [or beyond average] human body.

Just ask any engineer in robotics.

Better List

[BrianGa]

Be advised, an easier-to-read list is available at groupbt.

Futurism, humbug...

[Squeeze Truck]

I've about had it with technilogical futurists. These people have been predicting the same sorts of things for over 100 years. Progress to these people is unstoppable. They predict things only because they are technically possible, and never take into account anything deeper.

I predict that the public's fascination with technology for its own sake will have seriously diminished by 2010.

You've got to be kidding me

[philipkd]

Just look at the 2002 predictions. None of them are going to happen. I understand that's it hard to use induction to predcit what'll happen in 10 years, but we can be pretty sure what won't happen in 10 months. - Disposable Paper Cellphone ($10) - Automatic measurement of body using laser scanning boohths in shops - Laser body scanning unites in clothes shops - First all woman space crew

Re:You've got to be kidding me

[eulan]

> Laser body scanning unites in clothes shops My friend works on this. Actually white-light based, but currently available at Brooks Brothers and rolling out at stores across the country this year. As seen on Today Show later this week. http://www.tc2.com/RD/RDBody.htm

Re:You've got to be kidding me

[Anonymous Coward]

as far as the all-woman space crew goes, there's already been talk about that over the past couple of years. there's been women shuttle commanders and pilots (Eileen Collins and Pam Melroy). Some of the most experienced astronauts are women, too (Shannon Lucid - 188 days on Mir and 4 shuttle missions; Susan Helms 163 days on ISS and 5 shuttle missions). I'm actually suprised why it hasn't happened yet. From what I hear NASA (actually the women astronauts) aren't pushing it too much because it would look too much like a PR stunt than anything else.

Re:You've got to be kidding me

[KatieL]

"Laser body scanning unites in clothes shops" - actually this is happening in various places in the UK - the cuts of clothing are apparently being revised because the "standard" sizes/shapes don't fit anyone these days...

I bet I still end up needing different size tops & trousers tho...

Re:You've got to be kidding me

[Anonymous Coward]

the body scanning equipment became available in a few years back...

Most of this sounds unlikely..

[Yahiko]

Especially:

Computers will write most of their own software

Now I'm no expert, but doesn't the halting problem that Turing worked on prevent this?

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[Yorrike]

This guy is taking the piss. I mean, how can anyone take these seriously:

Orgasmatron: 2012
Creation of The Matrix: 2025
Full Direct Brain Link: 2030 (yet, the matrix is created 5 years earlier?)
Possible Rise of global machine dictator: 2020
Politcal correctness creates new dark age: 2050
Whole generation effectively unable to read, write, think and work: 2050
Time travel invented: 2075
Faster than light travel: 2100

There's no way any of that can really be taken seriously.

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[Bongfish]

If we were going to invent time travel, wouldn't we have seen some evidence of it already? Where are the people in funky futuristic outfits travelling back in time to watch us? Have they invented invisibility, too?

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[Shade, The]

No, the halting theory only says that it is impossible to find out for all algorithms whether they halt or not. The halting problem probably applies to us humans as well. It doesn't mean that most software can't be written by a machine, just not all software.

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[Yorrike]

Yeah... about that.....

I was going to get my silver futuristic-looking suit dry cleaned before I came back from the future, due to getting Slurm all over it at the last United States of South America vs New Zealand ruled Australia Ultraball game, but I just didn't have time.

"Use the time machine" I hear you cry. Well, to be honest I didn't want to risk it. Travelling back in time and meeting yourself is so embarrassing....

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[GileadGreene]

Yeah, this guy seems like he's pretty much full of it. And yet the sly bastard manages to get paid somehow. You have to wonder if someone shunted him into this job just so he wouldn't cause problems elsewhere.

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[Anonymous Coward]

Politcal correctness creates new dark age: 2050

Actually, I thought political correctness had already created a new dark age.

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are the people in funky futuristic outfits travelling back in time to watch us?

um... raves?

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[Anonymous Coward]

Whole generation effectively unable to read, write, think and work: 2050

2050??!? more like 1990

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[sconeu]

Besides, FTL is invented in 2063 by Zefram Cochrane! Of course, the Borg try to stop him...

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[Dermot the Forg]

Actually, anyone living in Sydney (.au) and go to In Denial on Glebe Pt Road and buy an orgasmatron already.

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[WickedChicken]

He talks about The Matrix and "real nanotech soldiers." I think this guy sees way too many movies.

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[bnitsua]

Wouldn't faster than light travel be required for time travel?

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[doooras]

According to current theories from respectable scientists (such as J.R. Gott) time travel is only possible back to the point in which time travel was invented, so while it would be possible to travel back in time, you would not be able to go back and build a time machine 100 years earlier. A lot of these theories require near-light speeds around superstrings (hoping they exist) so i don't think it is anything we'll be faced with within the next few decades.

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[therevolution]

Anyone else just the slightest bit skeptical about seeing credit card-sized 11 terabyte storage next year at all, let alone at $50? Anyone?

While most people predict Moore's law will eventually be repealed, they seem to be predicting that it will accelerate by, what, 10-20 times?

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[thumperward]

I think some of these were deliberate jokes. The Matrix obviously, and the idea of a "Politcal correctness creating a new dark age: 2050" has echoes in the book 'Harrison Bergeron' (although the date there would be 2081). I think it's more the current ones (i.e the next ten years) that BT are paying him for.

- Chris

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[noodlez84]

Yes, the author is amazingly optimistic about human intelligence in general. They should not be taken seriously. I saw an interview with this guy on TechTV during an airing of The Screensavers, and I feel I can safely state that the author would agree with me in saying that it's not the foretelling that's important, but rather the intentions and thoughts behind them.

Let's not forget that Americans living during the 1900s lived in slums in the major cities of New York and Chicago. They invisioned flying cars and personal spacecraft before stumbling onto the Great Depression and two world wars. Let's not _underestimate_ human achievement either.

The author's intentions in this is to show what _can_ happen, given the proper circumstances and funding. I personally feel that if and when some glorious invention / annovation is made (e.g., time travel or "cure" for aging), it will be developed (and thus _patented_) by a whatever company creates it, and thus, most people will never see its hayday, until half a century later when politicians realize what a fucked up world it is. I can envision a world where time travel is patented by Sony and there's a huge Nike swoosh over Mars. Basically the worst parts of the Bible and The Matrix.

IMO, the author simply wants to foster intelligent conversation among people who care: this is what the world can be like. Here's what has to be done to prevent that... The power rests in your hands. Welcome to the Real World.

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't faster than light travel be required for time travel?

Why? What's your theory?

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[chihowa]

It seems to me that if you invented a time travel device, then faster than light travel would follow almost instantly. If you can't use the device to time-travel forward, you could at least take a trip to Centauri and back at 0.99c, learn faster-than-light travel from the much more advanced civilization that you find on Earth on your return, then time-travel back to your own time and teach them FTL travel.

Of course that creates a paradox, but hey, that's part of the fun of it all!

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[eddy the lip]

i dunno...he predicts people will be effectively incapable of understanding anything by 2050, and then become convinced they can break the laws of physics within 25 years. sounds about right, if slightly conservative.

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[krogoth]

Not to mention that some of the stuff that's already passed (predictions for 2001) hasn't come true, to the best of my knowledge (I haven't read the whole thing, but I didn't notice anything that's already passed the limit and come true). I know he can't have a 100% hit rate, but you'd think that at least some predictions for each time period would be true if this had any value.

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[Ben Jackson]

Contradictory predictions make perfect sense if you want a high number of "hits" from your selections. That was you cover more of the possible outcomes. Maybe the whole challenge to making a list like this is making your predictions vague enough and the contradictions subtle enough that future humans (er, I mean, orgasmic AIs with PhDs) can stretch your predictions to match the future events without your remaining predictions making you an obvious fraud.

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe it means that instantaneous travel BACK in time is impossible...?

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[canadian_right]

According to me time machines will never be invented. Why? When you use a time machine to travel into the past you keep changing things slightly, and these changes only stop when you make a change that UN-invents the time machine! no time machine, no changes.

Re: Most of this sounds unlikely..

[Damek]

While I agree with you, one could argue that if his predictions for the next 20-30 years are correct in re: AI vs Human intelligence (AIs/Robots becoming incredibly intelligent and surpassing humans), then you might interpret predictions like Time travel, Machine dictator, Faster than light travel, etc., as having been invented by the Machines and not Humans.

Just because technology is predicted doesn't necessarily mean it would be we who invented it...

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[raju1kabir]

According to me time machines will never be invented. Why? When you use a time machine to travel into the past you keep changing things slightly, and these changes only stop when you make a change that UN-invents the time machine! no time machine, no changes.

I like that! Is it yours?

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's Larry Niven's idea. See this Wikipedia article.

Re:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[RazorJ_2000]

Actually, I'm willing to believe the "whole generation effectively unable to read, write, think, or work" one. Have you seen today's high school graduates? They're practically illiterate, and stupid as hell (98%). The remaining 2% is so completely self-involved that I don't see them getting beyond their meagre craving for a million bucks.

Confessions to AI priest - 2004

[dicka_j]

This was done in Australia a few years ago. Confessions were entered into a computer through a touch screen and the confessor received a printed out list of all the sins plus a handy piece of advice for each one.

Re:Confessions to AI priest - 2004

[dgreene423]

You could certainly tell your sins to a computer. As the person above said you can do that now. But part of confession is being able to tell your sins to another person. That can be a very hard thing to do. Would telling sins to a computer have the same effect?

Confessions sometimes emotional and sometimes a priest has to read between the lines. A priest can usually tell when you're trying to hide something. A computer could monitor bodily responses and compare those to a baseline but how accurate would that be?

Those issues aside I don't think any of the world's major religions, and centainly not Roman Catholics would ever ordain an AI.

I'm not even sure human-like AI is even possible and it certainly isn't going to happen in the next fews years. A few centuries maybe...

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Confessions to AI Priest.

[Squeeze Truck]

This prediction alone should prove that this guy is a grand-mal retard.

Re:Confessions to AI Priest.

[KatieL]

The creator of Eliza once wrote that he nearly quit the IT world after someone suggested installing terminals connected to it all over the city so people could get therapy as and when needed...

Australian govt. considering his AI predictions...

[fferreres]

7 June 2001 Mr Elton Humphrey Secretary

Senate Community Affairs Reference Committee

Suite S1 59

Parliament House

Canberra ACT 2600.

Dear Mr Humphrey

Thank you for this opportunity to submit a submission into The Senate inquiry into the Nursing Profession.

I am aware that the inquiry is focusing mainly on Nursing Education and Nursing Retention and Recruitment issues, however I believe that before these issues can be addressed successfully there are 3 essential elements that any Nursing study needs to take into consideration if there is to be a successful outcome .

These elements if incorporated will bring Nurses back into the profession and certainly will retain a highly skilled professional Nursing workforce.

These elements are as follows:

* Caring Profession

* Holistic Nursing

* Valuing and Respecting Nurses and the Nursing Profession

Unless the above are considered and integrated into a plan Nurses will continue to leave the Profession as they are doing now and will not be incited back into a workforce which does not respect or value them. Nurses need to be able to deliver holistic care in a caring and nurturing environment.

I am of the belief that if the above can be integrated into a total holistic approach to the Health Industry then there may be a chance for the future to be improved.

Please consider the attached submission as part of a solution to the issues confronting the Government and the Health Industry in relation to the Nursing Profession.

I would like to have the opportunity to appear before the Senate Select Committee if the Senate Committee travels to remote Western Australia for public hearings .

Yours sincerely

Peta Nottle (Mrs)

New Vision - New Direction

I have been thinking about the Nursing profession for many years now and wondering about solutions. I would like to take this opportunity to outline what I believe could be solutions to the current situation that nursing finds its profession in today.

Return to caring, Nursing is a heart centred profession.

To allow nurses to nurse holistically.

Respect and value nurses.

1. Return to Caring

To nurse means to care for or to nurture with compassion.

Mr Ian Pearson a renowned information technology futurist and a British telecommunications analyst published his predictions for technology over the next 2 decades, combine his predictions with what we know about nursing today, and it is not hard to see what the nursing profession might look like in 2020.

What happens when computers are smarter than us? For Nursing...

Here's some part of the text...

Pearson believes that this will cause a shift to a "care economy" computers can never learn to care. People will concentrate on the human interpersonal side of work.

Nurses will need to get back to their original and best strength caring. Although computers cannot care, they can help nurses define, quantify and measure the effects of caring of patients outcomes. Making sure that they do just that is crucial to nursing's survival.

-----
Here's the full lenght report in HTML format.

Spambot's rights?

[qwerpoiu]

"electronic lifeform given basic rights (2020)" Does that include the right to harvest emails?

Action Man's Dream Come True

[Anonymous Coward]

Smart Barbie with ... full sensory input: 2010

What sort of sensory input, exactly? Ahem.

Re:Action Man's Dream Come True

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it would also need to be able to fake & lie too.

Wha...

[Second_Derivative]

...some of this stuff's a complete crock of crap. "Phasers issued to police (laser/tazer hybrid)"? eh? how the heck do you integrate a light beam generating device (which still havent seen any significant improvement this decade, at least that I'm aware of) with a device that shoots a physical projectile carrying a current in an at all useful manner?

"Cassini reaches Saturn, 2004". No, really? good golly I could make a dozen such 'predictions' based on NASA's space programmes schedule. Maybe I ought to be employed as a futurist. And the priorities for AI are messed up: a natural language interface coming after natural language translation? surely an understanding of context and meaning is required for translation, one well above what is needed for a natural language interface (which only really needs to understand computer-based concepts in any level of detail)

There's some interesting stuff here, yeah, but if even a skim read of it indicates a few glaring oddities such as these then excuse me for taking this doc wih a cubic metre of NaCl ;)

Re:Wha...

[Anonymous Coward]

...some of this stuff's a complete crock of crap. "Phasers issued to police (laser/tazer hybrid)"? eh? how the heck do you integrate a light beam generating device (which still havent seen any significant improvement this decade, at least that I'm aware of) with a device that shoots a physical projectile carrying a current in an at all useful manner?

Law enforcement agencies around the world are (for better or worse) already being equipped with directed energy microwave stun guns. The directed beam induces currents that heat up a thin outer layer of your skin and stimulates your pain receptors.

So the next time you want to demonstrate at a WTO or G7 meeting, you might want to wear an all-aluminium outfit.

Re:Wha...

[Anonymous Coward]

The laser creates an ionized channel in the air . The device then sends the charge down the ionized air instead of down a pair of copper threads. This is already in devolopment.

Re:Wha...

[jyoull]

Well, the theory is that you use a UV laser to ionize the air, and the ionized channel is a conductor that carries the electric charge.

Creeps the hell outta me, but these guys claim they can do it already.

They even filed a patent

Re:Wha...

[Anonymous Coward]

>...some of this stuff's a complete crock of
>crap. "Phasers issued to police (laser/tazer
>hybrid)"? eh? how the heck do you integrate a
>light beam generating device...

Laser ionises air, electric bolt shot down ionised air passage?

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Re:Futurism, humbug...

[Squeeze Truck]

Or how about this:

2008: Mujahideen overthrow most western-aligned governments in mideast. Oil production comes to a complete standstill. World economies collapse.

2009: Rain falls for first time on Arakkis.

2011: Americans burn sheafs of "future predictions" to keep from freezing to death.

2013: Americans all starve because robotic pets are not edible.

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never forget. that is a scary thought!

[Turnesol]

from Yahoo article:

"By 2030.... ...it will be possible to fully link computers to the human brain using nano-technology, or engineering at the molecular or atomic level. The ability to "back up" our brains will mean never forgetting anything ever again and being able to think and react at "turbo speed."

This seems really scary, what would it not do to people if they could instantly rememer all those horribe thinges that might have happened to them. The natural decay of the memeory that we have now, is much more healthy.

Re:never forget. that is a scary thought!

[Anonymous Coward]

I always felt that if a psionic opened themselved up too much to the wrong person they would overload and go insane, how about uploading someone elses mind?

Orgasm by email .... 2010

[Fweeky]

Well, I suppose it'd make spam a bit less pointless, and imagine if Outlook is still up to it's old tricks..

"I SEND YOU THIS ORGASM IN ORDER TO HAVE YOUR ADVICE"

Re:Orgasm by email .... 2010

[Bongfish]

"I send you this killer nano-cyber-phd-owning-AI program in order to attack your brain"

Re:Orgasm by email .... 2010

[MoneyT]

Could you imagine and orgasm virus? The next "I Love You" virus could contain AIDS

Re:Orgasm by email .... 2010

[s20451]

You send me this orgasm? See you later. Thanks.

Re:Orgasm by email .... 2010

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, but orgasm by email doesn't beat sex with a robot (see "Orgasmatron" 2 lines after Xtreme Olympics).

Off by eight years...

[TekkonKinkreet]

2010: Homes made in prefabricated modules...guess he's never been to rural North Carolina.

2010: Orgasm by email. Oh, wait, we already have this. I'm reliably informed.

Also 2010: 25% of all TV personalities will be synthetic. Oh, wait...

Hey bein' one a them futurists is easy!

Re:Off by eight years...

[LWolenczak]

Not just those double wide things anymore... One of my father's good friends built a japanesse style home out of prefab modules. It just so happens to be in the extreamly rural part of north carolina.... but he does have cable internet, so thats a plus.

Artificial Life

[Reality Master 101]

This timeline has to be a joke with regard to Artifial Intelligence. Common sense inference by 2005? Artificial life by 2006?

Assuming he's talking about human-level artifical intelligence, in my opinion, he's off by 100 to 200 years. First we need a theory on what common sense and intelligence is. Maybe a few decades after that we might have some primitive implementations.

I believe we're at least 50-100 years away from a theory, and probably much longer than that before we get a practical implementation.

I don't know what this guy's smoking.

Re:Artificial Life

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's all true! What was left out was the great new version of Python coming in 2004! AI for everyone!

Re:Artificial Life

[glwtta]

Reading it I, as most people here, realized it was absurd, the reason for that is pretty obvious: his "predictions" have to correlate pretty closely to popular scince fiction, otherwise his books won't sell and his timelines won't be published by such upstanding "news outlets" as Yahoo. Having picked a nonexistent job as a career, the guy has to eat, right?

People expect to see these "words of warning" about AI, robots, space travel, genetic engeneering, etc. etc. in this sort of "prediction" just like Psychic "prediction" lists have to be full of natural disasters and famous people getting killed and/or knocked up. I bet it just doesn't sell otherwise.

Re:Artificial Life

[Broccolist]

Finally, a voice of reason. These AI futurists' predictions are so completely absurd, it's baffling that so few people call them on it. This list is basically cut-and-pasted from similar lists from the fifties predicting the advances of AI up to the year 2000. It was ridiculous then, and it's even more ridiculous now.

Re:Artificial Life

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading it I, as most people here, realized it was absurd, the reason for that is pretty obvious: his "predictions" have to correlate pretty closely to popular scince fiction, otherwise his books won't sell and his timelines won't be published by such upstanding "news outlets" as Yahoo.

Dude, that is one of the worst sentences I have ever read. You might want to unravel a few of those clauses.

Re:Artificial Life

[Lictor]

Amen Brother.

It was ludicrous claims like this about "the magical wonders of AI" that ended up with AI winter back in the 80's...

>I don't know what this guy's smoking.

A big pipe of ignorance... anyone who's taken a basic intro to AI course knows the crushing disillusion one experiences when one realizes AI is really just a bag of tricks.

Sophisticated and interesting tricks to be sure, but at the end of the day isn't it much more magical to believe the computer is really *thinking* about that game of chess... it sure takes the fun out of it once you learn about alpha-beta pruning, etc.

I wouldn't be surprised if this guy also thinks that David Copperfield really *can* teleport objects and levitate. I guess Clarke's law applies here, and to this particular individual, AI is a 'sufficiently advanced technology'... thus rendering it indistinguishable from magic and suitable for wild-eyed predictions.

Re:Artificial Life

[Tony.Tang]

What's funny is that these kinds of predictions (about AI) were made by Herbert Simon way back in the 60's or so. Even he, one of the great proponents of AI has recanted many of his predictions.

In particular, the late Herbert Simon suggested computers would catch up in a mere 20 years if not fewer. That would place computer AI to match humans by about the 80's.

Unfortunately, AI has languished for the past while. The big hey-day for AI was back in the 60's and 70's.

Re:Artificial Life

[Tony.Tang]

Mod this parent up. The bit about disillusionment is still very salient to me -- years after my last AI class.

Re:Artificial Life

[Anenga]

He means that people put what he is saying in contrast to hollywood.

"Wasen't that AI movie suppost to be in like year 2050? And he says AI happens in 2006? This guy is a whacko!"

Oh, the irony.

Re:Artificial Life

[orkysoft]

"AI chatbots indistinguishable from people by 95% of population______2005"

Does this mean that humans will get even dumber?

One Word

[Anonymous Coward]

Computers will write most of their own software.

They already do. They do so via a program called a compiler.

Re:Why not?

[Squeeze Truck]

The whole concept is idiotic. How can a machine with no soul possibly perform an absolution for God? Who would visit such a confessional except for yuks?

This guy is bats I tell you!

I want some of what he's smoking

[RedWizzard]

Even the comparatively mundane predictions are incredibly optimistic: 2002 will see the introduction of 200GB hard drives an P4 laptops yet by 2003 we'll have 11TB credit card sized storage (only an increase by a factor of 55), memory with access time of 1ns (an improvement by a factor of at least 5).

Re:I want some of what he's smoking

[MoneyT]

we already have a 100 gig HD, what makes you think by the end of the year we won't have 200?

Re:I want some of what he's smoking

[Anonymous Coward]

read the complete sentence.

then reply.

Re:I want some of what he's smoking

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the point he's making is not the 200GB hard drives in 2002... (realistic)

...but the 11TB credit-card sized hard drives with 1ms access time in 2003. (unrealistic)

Seems like a big jump, donyathink?

So what

[HanzoSan]

Michio Kaku has a better timeline to the future in his book Visions.

Anyone who doubts should check out that book at amazon.com

I wont quote whats in the book because i bet i'd be sued for copyright violations or something, but it basically says, Humans will reach nano technology, and quantum revolution within maybe 20-30 years,definately within our lifetimes because silicon wont last beyond 2020.

It goes as far as 2100 and beyond M.Kaku interviewed and speaks to hundreds of other scientists, engineers and people in the know.

Now, as far as if we ever reach the year 2100,thats up to us, so far our society doesnt look like it can handle the technology we are developing, look at the DCMA, and the patent laws, its not like patents will work anymore in the future once technology gets to such a state as described by futurists.

Re:So what

[Anonymous Coward]

"Humans will reach nano technology, and quantum revolution within maybe 20-30 years,definately within our lifetimes because silicon wont last beyond 2020"

The causality is wrong here...because we'll hit a limmit, there will be a solution by that time? Come on...

Re:So what

[quintessent]

Actually, fair use allows you to quote from the book. IANAL, but I think as long as it's not a full chapter or 10% of the book, you're fine.

We need a Poll

[halo8]

WOW!!! this is one of the coolest /. things ive ever read. we need a poll or somthing.. this is awsome.. im still like 1/4 through reading it.. awsome work

Re:We need a Poll

[ackthpt]

The coolest thing about the future will be:

Rocket powered Nike shoes

802.11b wrist computers with 1G ram and 10G harddisk

Britney Spears gets old and finally goes away

N'Sync found dead, their contribution to pop music will be greatly missed

Cheese in a can is still around, woohoo!

Robots doing your cooking, laundry, and house cleaning and not expecting a thing for Valentine's day

Survivor XXIX where Rambus executives are thrown into a cage of lions which haven't eaten for two weeks

Still having Social Security around

President CowboyNeal

I'm out of a job.

[abigor]

If most software is being written by other software by 2011, then I am screwed. This is like being a mechanic, hand-crafting your own tools, and then have them take over and start fixing things.

But you know, I really wonder. As software becomes more "macro" in scope, with stable, heavily-featured containers for components, then maybe software will be simple enough to generate automatically, simply by a program assembling many small components together after parsing a description of what it is you want. In fact, this is probably almost possible today -- I could write an XML file which specifies the features I need for my e-commerce server (these security characteristics, those features, the ability to pay this way) and a program could parse it and throw together all the readily available components that are out there now. Of course, tools will need to be written and so forth, but for more general stuff like applications and server software, I wonder if the time will come when we look back on programmers who wrote lines of code in the same way we now look at programmers who punched cards?

Re:I'm out of a job.

[Anonymous Coward]

That sort of thing works fine as long as you're not doing anything new.

Re:I'm out of a job.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if the time will come when we look back on programmers who wrote lines of code in the same way we now look at programmers who punched cards

I think Visual Basic programmers probably look at low level assembly programmers like that now. The thing is, you always need your low level programmers to support new hardware, new kernel development, things like that.

There will always be a need for programmers who can work at the lower levels of machines. An ever increasing group of "the masses" will just abstract further away, thanks to the tools that are continually developed by those at a lower level.

Re:I'm out of a job.

[Shade, The]

All it means is that software will just shift to a more meta-like programming language. There will be certain aspects that can change, but the overall design will still be made by a human. It will just be a little more "fuzzy".

Re:I'm out of a job.

[glwtta]

Even if the vast software is generated by other software (it won't be "written" by other software unless you take the rest of his Terminator/Matrix crap seriously), you'll have people writing the software that generates the other software. And even that small percentage of "all software" will be orders of magnitude more work that is needed to write software today, so don't worry about your job.

Re:I'm out of a job.

[Itrebax]

I would say it's better to be coding the software that makes new code over being the person replaced by the code on lower levels.

Re:I'm out of a job.

[swillden]

maybe software will be simple enough to generate automatically, simply by a program assembling many small components together after parsing a description of what it is you want.

Cool idea!

Now all you have to do is to define a language in which you can specifiy what it is that you want in a way that is sufficiently precise, detailed, accurate and complete that a literal-minded machine can do what you said you wanted.

Only one problem... writing requirements documents to that level of detail is gonna look a whole lot like programming...

Re:I'm out of a job.

[Compuser]

Hmm, methinks someone just discovered/reinvented
functional languages.

Max Headroom

[Anonymous Coward]

Chat Show hosted by robot....
done....Max Headroom....

The timeline is all wrong

[HanzoSan]

AI may be at the level for this at 2016, and we may have the processors to handle it, but even if AI is that good, robotics will never catch up to this.

The best we will be able to do is build intelligent interactive houses, like you walk into your house and you say some words and everything prepares itself, food starts cooking, your favorite show comes on, your door to your room opens, maybe some robotic thing is used to prepare your food.

When you go to bed everything is shut off automatically as you leave the room, and your house temperature in your room is set to an exact degree for sleeping

Re:The timeline is all wrong

[York the Mysterious]

Those things could all be achieved with present technology. That doesn't take AI. Embed ViaVoice into your house on a Linux backend that controls lighting, TV (set top box system), and temperature. Only thing you couldn't do would be to cook the food for you. Or at least not for a reasonable price.

Hogwash.

[jcr]

All of the amazing advances we have made... yet people still starve and die in the street all over the world. Why? Because human nature is to create for personal gain.

.. and in those countries that interfere the least in people's creative activity, even the poorest of the poor can survive with minimal effort.

How do you like those new Nikes you bought? Want to know how many 10 year olds had to die to bring you those??

Oh, cry me a river. First of all, Nike's not employing gangs of thugs to murder ten-year-olds. Secondly, the people who go to work in Nike's factories aren't doing so at gunpoint, they're doing it because working in a sweatshop is a step up from subsistence farming.

Get a grip.

-jcr

Re:Hogwash.

[plastercast]

"they're doing it because working in a sweatshop is a step up from subsistence farming."

So essentally, an acceptable (and unfortuantly, and increasingly likely) motto for the future would be "your necessity is my opportunity" [the devils maxim]

Re:Hogwash.

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? Aren't my necessities already everyone else's opportunity? I'm missing something here. Is this new?

Re:Hogwash.

[ab8ten]

>Oh, cry me a river. First of all, Nike's not employing
>gangs of thugs to murder ten-year-olds. Secondly, the
>people who go to work in Nike's factories aren't doing
>so at gunpoint, they're doing it because working in a
>sweatshop is a step up from subsistence farming.

One : it would be a step up if the pay for working in a sweatshop allowed a similar standard of life as subsistence farming. It is not. I could quote the figures from "No Logo" but my copy's on loan right now. Working 24 hour shifts, not being allowed to talk, not having any time at all to socialise or form unions (which are illegal anyway). etc.

Two : The standard argument for sweatshops are that they are the first step towards a functioning capitalist economy. Whilst this may well have been true in the 19th century, it is not true today. The sweatshop in the 3rd world is built with western money, the workers are payed less than they need to live, and the country recieves no benefit (economic enterprise zones for tax-free investmnent are occupied until the tax-free period runs out. Then the operation is moved elsewhere.) The exchange is totally one way. I could go on, but I'd ramble.

Re:Hogwash.

[plastercast]

No, its nothing new, it just shouldn't be the goal of any society. Instead of simply dissmissing this large ethical flaw from our present soceity, we should be taking active steps to move away from this maxim.

Re:Hogwash.

[raju1kabir]

it would be a step up if the pay for working in a sweatshop allowed a similar standard of life as subsistence farming. It is not.

Then why do people choose sweatshop labor over subsistence farming?

the workers are payed less than they need to live

So they die?

I could go on, but I'd ramble.

That, and eventually you'd run out of third-hand sound bites and need some actual facts. Hell, I'm totally opposed to exploitative labor practices and even I think your arguments are idiotic.

Re:Hogwash.

[jcr]

Hey, if you've got a better job to offer them, have at it.

-jcr

Re:Hogwash.

[jcr]

If you can show that the people who work in the sweatshop are coerced into taking those jobs, then you'd have a point. Trouble is, just like the people that Charles Dickens wrote about, they go for the industrial jobs because they can make more money and better support their families than they could if they stayed in the villages.

If you know a way to jump-start a third-world economy past the sweatshop stage, then do so.

-jcr

My own predictions.

[Yorrike]

Here's a few events I can see happening in the near future:

1000 monkeys at 1000 type writers code perfect operating system: 2010
CowboyNeal becomes world president due to Slashdot poll becoming legally binding: 2014
Mozilla 1.0 released: 2018
Timelines of the Future proven inaccurate: 1823
99% of Slashdot comment submitters use "Preview" button before submitting: 2793

Re:My own predictions.

[Anonymous Coward]

1000 monkeys at 1000 type writers code perfect operating system: 2010

Another 8 years to go until Linux is ready for prime time then, eh?

Re:My own predictions.

[Anonymous Coward]

CowboyNeal becomes world president due to Slashdot poll becoming legally binding: 2014

Tell me about it! Those corporate lobbyists have way too much power, throwing money and source code at the politicians and getting them to dance and write new laws!

Re:My own predictions.

[Alsee]

99% of Slashdot comment submitters use "Preview" button before submitting: 2793

I think we can move this date up a bit if we have the "Preview" button generate an Orgasmatron-E-Mail.

-

Re:My own predictions.

[AdmiralMustapha]

orgasm by email in 2010??

All I can say: the future is NOW!
- all you have to do is to send a porn pic to me ;-)

Re:My own predictions.

[Compuser]

>> Here's a few events I can see happening in the near future:
>> 1000 monkeys at 1000 type writers code perfect operating system: 2010
>> CowboyNeal becomes world president due to Slashdot poll becoming legally binding: 2014
>> Mozilla 1.0 released: 2018
>> Timelines of the Future proven inaccurate: 1823
>>99% of Slashdot comment submitters use "Preview" button before submitting: 2793

You forgot:
Flaming the writer of the /. feature: price^H^H^H^H^Htimeless

Time travel invented ... 2075

[Anonymous Coward]

If time travel would ever be invented, I think we would have known by now ... :)

I can't believe that from the time we invent time travel to the time we cease to exist, we will never make a mistake bold enough to make people in (for instance) the 21 century realize time travel will once be possible...

Re:Time travel invented ... 2075

[MoneyT]

Why would we want to? Or what makes you think we would be able to? It only speak of time travel, for all we know we may be physicaly bound as observers in time travel. That is, we can see them, but they can't see us

Re:Time travel invented ... 2075

[ackthpt]

More like,

2075: Time Travel invented

2002: Time Travel invented, again

Re:Time travel invented ... 2075

[rhkaloge]

Reminds me of a game from Cheapass games called, I believe, "Patent Number 1". You have invented time travel, so what are you gonna do first? Head for day one, hour one of the opening of the US patent office! Problem is, all the other players have also invented time travel in their various eras, and are trying the same thing. Never played, but the concept is cool.

Immortality

[Anonymous Coward]

well, I hope no one shuts off the power once I move into cyberspace, kinda takes the immortal out of immortality

Sounds like Age of Spiritual Machines

[evilned]

lets see, we have a futurist who got lucky and predicted near future stuff pretty well, i.e. Age of rational machines) and then decides to try a little more. Sounds like a Ray Kurzweil book I read a couple of years ago, the Age of Spiritual Machines.

The major problem I see with these futurists saying that we will move so fast in the next hudred years is the capacity of humans to change that quickly and handle the power that it will give us. At some point augmenting humans directly, either through genetics or cybernetics will be nessecary, and I cant see us handling it well. We cant agree on what to do with cloning or fetal cell use, and these are the beginning of the augmentation process.

Re:Sounds like Age of Spiritual Machines

[MoneyT]

yet human progress remains the same. Bigger, Faster, Easier and Fun. Unless we eliminate our desire for these things, we will follow a basic path of development, even if we shift our ideas

Time to change careers...

[blindauer]

Computers that write most of their own software: 2005

Uh-oh, time to start looking for a different job. At least, it would be time if that prediction wasn't completely ludricous.

Re:actually, he predicts the market...[link]

[fferreres]

Here's a brief:

software to determine best buys, or even to automatically buy or sell on certain clues, we will see some very negative behaviours. Firstly, traffic will be highly correlated if personal computers can all act on the same information at the same time. We will see information waves, and also enormous swings in share prices. Most private individuals will suffer because of this, while institutions and individuals with better software will benefit. This is because prices will rise and fall simply because of the correlated activity of the automated software and not because of any real effects related to the shares themselves. Institutions may have to limit private share transactions to control this problem, but can also make a lot of money from modelling the private software and thus determining in advance what the recommendations and actions will be, capitalising enormously on the resultant share movements, and indeed even stimulating them. Of course, if this problem is generally perceived by the share dealing public , the AI software will not take off so the problem will not arise. What is more likely is that such software will sell in limited quantities, causing the effects to be significant, but not destroying the markets.

It goes on to explain how to make money or create a monopoly (Remember this guy works at BT)

Heres the link: Money Making and software

ah ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

So I guess we won't be zipping around on segways then? Well Steve Jobs isn't right about everything...

Pompous Robots

[andaru]

And will they start referring to everyone else as "et al"?

Professional grade trolling....

[gignoux]

Just a few...

In the category 'I can't predict the past':
- 2001 - First Robolympics held in Japan (They talked about it, but it never happend, isn't it?)
- 2001 - Electronic fish in aquarium (Some exist, but they are far from being able to live in an aquarium)

In the category 'It kind of already happend':
- 2005 - Intelligent Robotic Pet (seems like some improved Aibo to me)

In the category 'Stop smoking the mushrooms':
- 2003 - Smart Barbie insists on allowance for clothes and accessories (think about it for next year Christmas...)
- 2005 - Computers that write most of write most of their own software (get ready programmers, we've got only 3 years to train for a new job)
- 2005 - Planete Zorbing, jumping out of plane with inflatable (sure, but YOU jump first...)
- 2040 (earliest potential occurence) - Creation of Star Trek's Borg.

In the category 'A little bit optimistic'"
- 2004 - Real time language translation
- 2007 - AI students
- 2002 - 1.5m flat screen for $2800

Sure its fun to read, but do this kind of documents have ANY interest at all?

Suggestion

[HanzoSan]

I suggestion everyone look at Michio Kaku's Visions

M.Kaku explains this in alittle more detail.

I dont think technology is the problem for us, technology is purposely being controlled and slowed down by governments who know society cant handle the stuff which is technically possible on paper,

Companies control technology because they cant economically benifit from introducing it, not because it doesnt exsist.

Customers well they dont care if they cant afford it.

Technology will not leap until after 2020, by then Chinas economy will be far better than ours as will Indias. Right now econmies are decided mostly on resources, in the future it will be information which decides who is a rich society and who is not.

China has more producers of information, billions in fact, as does India which means more scientists, more technologies, and eventually unless we get into some kinda cold war battle with them, they are going to surpass us and theres nothing we can do about this.

We can fight them, without technology from them and do another cold war type of thing, or we as scientists, computer or otherwise can all join forces and share information and benifit as a whole.

If everyone were ONE, we wouldnt have problems with war and the like, and as resources become less and less important, and information becomes more important, because we have the internet which is global, every country is going to have information thats valueable to everyone.

If we dont share it, we develop alot slower, if we share it we leap ahead technology wise. By leaping i mean think of it like this.

The USA, it has maybe 250-300 million people who happen to control most of the resources on the planet thus they have the most power.

Theres 6 billion people on earth, 300 million not alot compared to 6 billion, as every nation becomes connected and i think by 2020 or even sooner, everyone will be connected resources wont matter anymore. Any single person in any of these countries will be able to get illegal information from the net and anyone will be able to become a scientist, all of the sudden poor third world countries will billions of people will begin producing scientists by the hundreds of millions(more than all the people we have in the entire USA) and if you add all the third world countries up, billions of scientists will be non US, while maybe a few hundred million will be US scientists.

More scientists does not mean more technology, but in terms of ideas for new technology, theories, maths, inventions, programming ability (I believe India is going to dominate here) US companies will have two choices, try to hire people from other countries for a while until they all have companies of their own, or we can begin sharing information and stop fighting each other.

In my opinion, the sharing thing isnt going to happen, look at the DCMA, and i dont see everyone rushing to use Linux, so Technology and innovation will be stiffled.

Re:Suggestion

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I've heard Dr. Kaku's predictions before - on the Art Bell show.

Let's just say that as a political philosopher, Dr. Kaku makes a pretty good physicist. ;-)

Re:Suggestion

[raldanash]

Quality is sometimes as important as quantity. Most Indians and a large portion of Chinese are barely literate by American standards. If you get Indians and Chinese up to US levels of education and standard of living...then we're in some trouble. On the other hand-that's going to take a while. I suspect that a large portion of the population in these countries will leave the masses behind. Also, numbers don't always lead to innovation. Culture can drag on innovation-for instance, Japan and Europe still produce fewer innovations per capita, but they are almost as rich as the US. Jews have something like 15% of Nobel prizes, but they're .2% of the world's population.

Re:Suggestion

[TrollingStone]

I suggestion everyone look at Michio Kaku's Visions

I suggest you learn how to conjugate a verb.

Re:Suggestion

[HanzoSan]

Barely literate? Alot of them know English.
Education? Internet.

Standard of living? Biotechnology = free food.

Its not so much culture as ability, when Chinas only jobs left are scientific, they will be forced to do science because China is communist.
Education is free, thats the one benifit of the internet.

Re:Suggestion

[raldanash]

india literacy = 52% china = 82% of those that are literate-that could mean reading and writing your name (note that in the United States as many as 20-30% of people are functionally illiterate). i have no doubt china and later india will surpass the us at some point in economic output. but, it took the united states 100 years to go from manufacturing to the information economy. i doubt it'll take china or india long-but i think it will be at least more than a generation.

Re:Suggestion

[susano_otter]

China has more producers of information, billions in fact, as does India which means more scientists, more technologies...

You're kidding, right? Having a huge information-producing population is only useful if they're actually producing lots of unique information. Having billions of citizens who are segregated from the Internet, deprived of their rights by their government, and all taught to think the same way, probably doesn't equal anything near the valuable information output of, say, Switzerland... hey, wasn't Tim Berners-Lee from Switzerland?

Besides, just because one futurist plays the "Hot Or Not" game with "information" and "resources", that doesn't mean it's true. It didn't work for Wired, why should it work for Kaku?

Re:Suggestion

[Huff]

Tim Burners-Lee was a Brit working in Switzerland

Re:Suggestion

[susano_otter]

Thanks for the correction. In light of this additional information, I'd like to stand by my point.

Laser / Taser Hybrids

[xtal]

"Phasers issued to police (laser/tazer hybrid)"? eh? how the heck do you integrate a light beam generating device (which still havent seen any significant improvement this decade, at least that I'm aware of) with a device that shoots a physical projectile carrying a current in an at all useful manner?"

This one isn't a leap, in fact, these have been demonstrated in labs for while now. Nikola Tesla might have even come across this idea (using UV light rather than a laser).

The idea is that you use a light beam - UV, or a pulsed laser - to ionize a path through the air. This path then acts like a wire that you can use to discharge high voltage down towards a potential target, as you can have a common ground plane in most situtations. If you're familiar with current tasers, they use a launched device connected by wires, which isn't really that effective and you limit your ability to fire successive rounds.

There's a lot of interesting stuff going down right now.. I couldn't have predicted the technologies I work with now 10 years ago (IC design). One very exciting field has to do with the implementation of neural networks in analog VLSI. IMHO that's where some of the AI technologies will come out of, not sequentially executing CPUs.

There's definately thought put into this.. 20 years ago, things were a lot different.

Steve

timeline of the future

[Anonymous Coward]

Time-line of the future:

2002

Q3:

Super Mario Sunshine is released onto the world, with ground breaking AI for a platform game. Catches everyone by surprise. (My fingers are crossed anyway, )

Star Wars Online, and Final Fantasy Online become first massively multiplayer RPG's to host millions of users. The economies of both these virtual worlds rival that of a mid sized country. Within one year of release both games my peak at 10 million users. Maybe more.

June: Microsoft switches to software rental only scheme, turning there software into a utility. Enraged, many businesses completely move there back end to Linux.

Q4:
KDE4.0 is released unto the world with amazing speed and features, making Windows and Mac OS look old. Linux will penetrate the desktop market.

Community wireless networks grow in size and simplicity.

Doom 3 is unleashed unto the world, with graphics so damn amazing, it throws people who see it into future shock

2003:

Bandwidth volcano erupts as everyone runs out to by a wireless router that allows them to video conference with everyone in the world for free.

P2P networks would be Ubiquitous across the Internet, thanks to the new wireless Iinternet.
Open Source movies will gain huge audiences, and huge revenues. "New fan based business model comes out in which, if you liked the first episode, help me raise this much money to raise a second!"
Entertainment/media corporations will go down alla Enron, while Artists manage to make considerable sums, from the donations of fans.

A open source massvily multi player RPG will release a simplistic interface for people to share models and other objects, to build there own worlds with. As this game scales over the next year, it becomes the ultimate VR UI for computers and the Internet.

Many businessess will open virtual Office buidlings, wich is like a MMORPG, only people from around the world come there to work. With 3d goggles, users will have the impression of being in the same room with cooworkers, withh access to as many computer terminals as they can handle.

The average geek has a dual 4 Gig Athlon, (or PPC if there rich) and a Gforce 5 to play Doom 3.

2004

The number of scientific models discovered by artificial neural networks exceeds the number being discovered by other means.
New general purpose, small, distributed sensors will lead to the acceleration of all sciences. Massivly deployed sensors will collect massive amounts of data, and analyzed by neural networks to produce increasingly sophisticated models.
Scientists hanging around in virtual recreations produced by the models the generated, will in turn work together more efficiently accelerating Scientific progress further.

The data produced from all those millions of people playing massively multi-player RPG's will be mined and analyzed by neural networks, to render non-player character AI's good candidates for passing the turing test.

With Massive Database of conversation + Darpa TIDES summarization + sophisticated chatbot i don't think this is an unreasonable prediction.

2005:
Cheap computers that fall from the sky will cause everyone to hold hands and sing "kumbiah."

Re:timeline of the future

[xtremex]

2004:
Microsoft charges a pay-per-use fee and calls it "The Sand-in-the-Vaseline Feature".
Linux is still free and technologically superior. The world STILL bends over and says "Thank you, Microsoft, May I have another"

Re:Artificial Life - O/T

[WasterDave]

Actually about your .sig - something about lottery players not picking 1,2,3,4,5,6. Aparrently they do, and since the jackpot would be shared amongst the large number of people - all of which thought this was an original idea - each would get fuck all.

The tactics are supposed to be to avoid anything logical, and avoid numbers less than thirty (people's birthdays). Neither make it more likely that you win, but they do lower the number of people that share the jackpot.

Dave

Re:Too many predictions focused on AI that is far

[MoneyT]

Not all that optimistic really. Look at how far technology has come since 1975 or 1950. Things chage quickly, and if they keep changing at the rate they change now, some of this robot tech stuff may be quite possible. Hell, just look at the AI built into some games, even that was beyond technology in 1975

more links...

[fferreres]

His homepage:
http://innovate.bt.com/people/pearsonid/fullbio.ht m

Hundreds of prediction for BT: http://www.bt.com/sphere/insights/pearson/index.ht m

Movie of the 2020 predictions timeline: http://www.bt.com/bttj/tomorrow/index.htm

His content homepage: "Just occasionally, everyone else IS wrong" http://www.labs.bt.com/people/pearsonid/

We have technology to build teleported right now

[HanzoSan]

People should at least be realistic.

Flying Cars? We can teleport stuff. Ever heard of quantum entanglement? Just because we can do something doesnt mean we will,

With tax cuts going on right now, and about 70 percent of all our tax dollars maybe 80 percent now that Bush is president and 911 happened, all going to the Military, and very little going to science, its not that technology doesnt exsist today, its just too expensive to bring out of the lab.

The hope is, other countries and governments will invest trillions of dollars in these technologies.
Korea or was it Taiwan, i cannot remember, is investing Trillions in nano technology, this is how you do it, you need the government to start the industries off by giving companies funding. You also need the government funding scientists.

The trend in the US is so anti tax that its also anti technology.

Companies wont bring technology until they have no choice.

So while we can teleport stuff, use cars which run on air and water, and get energy from the sun or even build fusion reactors, this stuff is still in the lab and will be for 20 years because people want tax cuts.

Cheating.

[WasterDave]

...by putting things that have already happened as potential domesday scenarios. For instance, page 22 has:

"Computer/Chip/Operating System Maker Blackmails Country or World - year 2000"

Ahhh, hello?

Dave

Re:Cheating.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, it's okay, it means Gates won't do anything until after... oh shit.

Hey, where are the hoverboards and holomovies? And I want a house that says "Welcome home, Marty". Even if it's not my name.

Re:Artificial Life - O/T

[Reality Master 101]

Yeah, apparently this is much more popular than I had figured, judging from the number of people replying to that .sig. I need to find a new one. :)

Predictions of the past?

[fish waffle]

Seems a little odd to release a document of 'predictions', copyright 2002 yet containing 'predictions' for 2001.

Though it does seem like an excellent source of Weekly World News headlines...

Heres what

[HanzoSan]

We will never have robotics because our economy isnt compatible with it. Some country like China however will have lots of robotics.

While everyone disses communism one thing thats for sure, Communism in the long run is better than capitalism, however capitalism raises technology faster and quicker even if it cant handle it.

Re:Heres what

[ChiPHeaD23]

Great, now we have people making political theories based on Civilization (the game)?

I recommend we research Mathemathics so we can build catapult!

Re:Hmm!

[kuiken]

you mean like this http://www.fu-fme.com/

The Real Timeline of the Future

[Anonymous Coward]

2005 Same old shit, different package

2006 TV sinks to new low, Goatse.cx guy loses unfair competition suit

2010 Apple and Linux still at <10%, but Microsoft goes bust because people stopped upgrading 8 years before

2012 Human organs from cloned cells go on sale at Walmart

2014 Last of the Jon Katz trolls found dead in his appartment, his contribution to the internet will be missed

2017 Human implant of computers with hormonal interfaces become all the rage until Ariz attorneys figure out how to spam them, 1,000's claw the circuits from their bodies as spammers claim free speech rights

2018 First man lands on mars, finds old coke can, world stunned, National Enquirer rules the news stands

2019 Last oil well dries up, freeways become trailer parks of giant SUVs

2021 Near earth pass of comet fills atmosphere with dust, temperature drops, baby born in Miami FL with full fur coat

2070 Man returns from Mars, finds world run by apes.

Synthetic celebrities?

[nixnixnix]

I thought the highest grossing celebs were already synthetic? Anyone think Brittney or Pamala have real breasts?

Re:Synthetic celebrities?

[Anonymous Coward]

First robotic chat show:
Max Headroom...old history....

Immortality in cyberspace, I certainly hope we solve the world's energy needs first(conviently predicted I believe)

Re:Synthetic celebrities?

[MoneyT]

I think he was referring to completely synthetic celebs. Kind of like Aki Ross from Final Fantasy except more popular. Don't believe me? Do a search on the internet, they have pin-up and porn of her.

My Prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

According to my email sources, male ejaculation can be increased by as much as 581% TODAY. Can you imagine the percentage increase in 2008? Just staggering, really.

pfff..

[lowtekneq]

This makes no sense.. First the Ozone hole disapears.. then the water leval rises? Personally i think most of this is rather humorus.

Re:pfff..

[Anonymous Coward]

Global warming and ozone depletion are different problems with different causes & different solutions. Christ! I hope you don't vote.

Re:pfff..

[Anonymous Coward]

The ozone hole and global warming are not directly related phenomena.

Global warming is due to greenhouse gases like C02 and methane building up in the atmosphere holding in infrared energy, whereas the ozone hole is a gap in the ozone layer caused by some chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants (now banned) which break apart ozone 03 molecules. The hole in the ozone layer allows excessive amounts of ultra-violet radiation to reach ground causing cancers in people and animals. Now that the refrigerants have been banned, the ozone hole is starting to heal (?100 year time scale?). The greenhouse effect is not solved, but nuclear power would greatly help (no greenhouse gases) at the cost of other environmental risks.

Re:pfff..

[MutantEnemy]

Global warming is not the same as ozone depletion. The two are more or less unrelated. Global warming is caused by CO2 trapping heat in the Earth's atmosphere. Ozone depletion is caused by CFCs destroying ozone, a chemical that absorbs some cancer-causing radiation from the sun.

Time Travel.

[Anonymous Coward]

I notice that he put Time travel down for 2075. Shouldn't time travel, by it's vey nature, be invented in everytime at once?

Already here....

[carpe_noctem]

Orgasm by email...2010

Gee, I get about 10 of these a day for in hotmail account. ;)

Not that accurate in the past

[SiliconEntity]

Use the Wayback Machine to take a look at Dr. Pearson's predictions circa 1997. Not very accurate so far, and that's just trying to go 5 years in the future. On this basis I don't think he has much credibility for his future predictions.

Re:Not that accurate in the past

[thumperward]

Having said that, he does have 'video download 10x faster over network' down for earliest 2003. We've had that for, what, three years now since the release of DivX ;) 3?

It's still a bit nostradamus though.

- Chris

Things that cannot be done

[Cryogenes]

The discovery of new things that man can do is only one side of progress. The other side is the discovery of things man can't do:

• express pi as a fraction
• increase mass
• increase energy
• decrease entropy
• determine simultaneously location and speed of a particle
• travel faster than light
• predict the long-term future of a gravitational system with three bodies
• solve the Turing machine halting problem
• construct a universal inference system (Goedel)
• efficiently solve NP-complete problems (not yet 100% sure)

I have only listed the famous results, but things that can't be known or done are everywhere and more are discovered all the time. So far, all those negative results are in the hardest sciences (math, physics, logic and computing) but I expect other disciplines will find their own limitations in time. The next results could well be about intelligence and complexity. We might, for example, find that the intelligence of any man or machine is always inferior to its complexity, making self-understanding and strong AI inherently impossible.

do you believe in death after life?

Re:Things that cannot be done

[Kubik - The Original]

Here is also a list of things that cannot be done:

• Have Katz write a good article.
• Me getting laid by Friday
• This post getting modded up to +5:Insightful.
  

It will take much change for the human race to be able to accomplish these tasks anytime soon (especially #2).

Re:Things that cannot be done

[sconeu]

increase mass
Travel near the speed of light.

increase energy
See previous item and the mass/energy equivalence

travel faster than light
Not theoretically impossible. Travelling exactly at c is the problem

Re:Things that cannot be done

[Rasta Prefect]

* increase mass
Travel near the speed of light.

Acceleration requires energy. Due to the engery mass equivalence, which you pointed out, you have to be getting energy, and therefore mass from somewhere. The point is, you're not creating it from nothing.

Re:Things that cannot be done

[rebelcool]

travel faster than light

under current understood physics... Same goes for the rest.

Re:Things that cannot be done

[Alpha State]

Interesting, these can be divided into groups such as:

• Mathematically provable impossibilities: expressing pi as a fraction (I assume you mean rational number).
• Mathematic "Hard Problems": NP-complete problems
• Physical impossibilities: Increasing mass / energy.
• Chaos / complexity physical problems: Predicting 3-body systems (or any systems for that matter).

It's important to note that only for the first class is it pointless to try to find a solution (or can be trivially solved by using a different form of maths). For the second and third class, there are already working theories of how to solve most of these problems (quantum computers, zero-point energy, wormholes, etc.) Note that this document actually has some of these problems being solved (eg. time travel).

The final class is the most interesting, as the problem is not any failure of science or mathematics, but the accuracy of measurements. Both the exact short-term and general long-term behaiviour of these systems can be modelled, however the accuracy of the exact predictions is an exponentially(?) increasing function of the accuracy of the initial measurements. I have a feeling this is not possible to solve, but this is very difficult to prove.

Well, that's my ramble for the day.

Re:Things that cannot be done

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the posters:

travel faster than light

Not theoretically impossible. Travelling exactly at c is the problem

Um, no. You're probably thinking of the infamous "tachyons", one of the most benighted missteps in theoretical physics ever. It can be shown by relatively basic relativity that, if for one observer, event B occurs after event A but separated by less than the time it would take light to travel from A to B, then there is some observer for whom the time-ordering of A & B is reversed. That is, for some observer moving at constant velocity relative to the first, B occurs first.

So if event A is "I leave Earth" and event B is "I arrive at alpha Centauri", and for one observer, B is (say) two years after A, then for some other observer, B occurs before A. Which means causality flies right out the window: What if you then sent a signal from B to A that is encoded as follows:

• If the ship has arrived, send a signal telling us not to send the ship.
• If the ship has not arrived, send a signal telling us to send it.

You may add such automation as you desire to ensure that we contrary humans don't boggle the experiment. Of course we now have the situation wherein the ship is both sent and not sent, and we seem to be in a bit of a tizzy.

Note that it does not matter what method of FTL travel our ship uses: teleporter, transwarp, pixie dust. All that matters is the fact that the two events (ship leaves Earth, ship arrives at alpha Centauri) are separated in time by less than the light travel time.

Tachyons are bunk because -- besides requiring things like complex mass -- they can't deal with this issue. Other clever physicists have come up with ways that might allow us to cheat: You never exceed light speed, but you shorten the distance between the points using Gen Rel and some "exotic matter". But you still don't beat c

Re:Things that cannot be done

[Anonymous Coward]

Hot damn, so all my expand-o-ray has to do is get stuff to travel near the speed of light! I'm gonna be rich, rich I say!

Re:Things that cannot be done

[Anonymous Coward]

increase mass...
Try a big greasy Bacon Cheeseburger.

Re:Things that cannot be done

[s20451]

For the second and third class, there are already working theories of how to solve most of these problems (quantum computers, zero-point energy, wormholes, etc.)

Unfortunately quantum computing cannot solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. In fact it is uncertain whether quantum computing can solve general problems dramatically faster than classical computers. It is known that sorting and factoring can be done much more quickly, but other problems, such as parity checking and syndrome decoding (useful in error-correcting codes) cannot be sped up.

I have a feeling this is not possible to solve, but this is very difficult to prove.

You might want to read about Lyapunov exponents.

Re:Things that cannot be done

[Anonymous Coward]

The other side is the discovery of things man can't do: travel faster than light

I travelled faster than light once, but due to relativity I returned instantly, and so no one believed me.

Re:Things that cannot be done

[Lictor]

>under current understood physics... Same goes for the rest.

I respectfully disagree... Godel's incompleteness theorem holds up even under alternative laws of physics. Though the whole P/NP thing doesn't (there was a paper on the xxx.lanl preprint servers a few years back showing that if quantum mechanics is non-linear then P=NP as a consequence. Good reading.)

Re:Things that cannot be done

[krogoth]

"determine simultaneously location and speed of a particle"

If you are referring to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, I believe you are wrong - we just aren't sufficiently advanced to do this. The idea is that our current methods of detecting the position of an electron will change it's speed (really it's movement vector), and whatever we do to find the speed doesn't let us know the location. Maybe with more advanced technology we'll be able to detect the location without changing the speed.

IANAN/QP, but that's what I get out of it after putting in some thought...

Re:Things that cannot be done

[Tony.Tang]

The other side is the discovery of things man can't do: [..] increase mass

I disagree. Counterexample: me. At Christmas. *mmm.. turkey*

Re:Things that cannot be done

[Anonymous Coward]

determine simultaneously location and speed of a particle

Speed through a school zone and you'll find out pretty quick. Damn pigs are everywhere. ;)

Or play Tennis with a female. I can guarantee you that at least ONCE you will find that speed of a tennis ball = 100+Mph, location = your groin/eye glasses.

Re:Things that cannot be done

[Tim Macinta]

It can be shown by relatively basic relativity that, if for one observer, event B occurs after event A but separated by less than the time it would take light to travel from A to B, then there is some observer for whom the time-ordering of A & B is reversed. That is, for some observer moving at constant velocity relative to the first, B occurs first.

Couldn't this same logic be used to prove that nothing can move faster than the speed of sound? Say I hop in my supersonic jet, shout "I'm leaving", fly from Boston to San Francisco, and then say "I'm here". Somebody standing in San Francisco will hear me say "I'm here" before they hear "I'm leaving". Following the same argument you used, this should make faster than sound travel impossible because the person standing in San Francisco will observe B before A even though A happened before B. Of course, we all know that supersonic travel is possible, so this shows that observations of occurrences do not need to follow chronological order.

Re:Things that cannot be done

[jesser]

It's not a question of how you measure the particle's position. A particle with a definite position (at some point in time) does not have a definite speed. That's because particle's location is a sum of a bunch of waves. The only way you can get the sum of waves to have a single sharp peak is to use a whole bunch of frequencies, which correspond to multiple momenta. The thinner and taller you try to make the peak, the larger the spread in frequencies becomes.

You're not alone in being uncomfortable with the idea of particles not having definite positions. Einstein didn't mind the statistical methods used when talking about gas molecules, but he didn't like the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM and the uncertainty principle, which describes individual particles as having probabalistic properties. I think Einstein's "God does not play dice with the universe" quote comes from this debate.

At least, that's what I got out of the first month of quantum. (And I thought I could escape quantum homework by reading Slashdot. Hah!)

Re:Things that cannot be done

[Ogantai Khan]

express pi as a fraction

That's easy, it's 1/1 in base pi ^_-

Re:Things that cannot be done

[raju1kabir]

Couldn't this same logic be used to prove that nothing can move faster than the speed of sound? Say I hop in my supersonic jet, shout "I'm leaving", fly from Boston to San Francisco, and then say "I'm here". Somebody standing in San Francisco will hear me say "I'm here" before they hear "I'm leaving".

Why? You may have traveled faster than the speed of sound, but it still took you a lot longer to reach Boston than your "I'm leaving" took to travel within San Francisco.

Re:Things that cannot be done

[benspionage]

decrease entropy

Yet the theory of evolution would make us believe that entropy can be decreased right?

The natural tendency of complex, ordered arrangements and systems is to become simpler and more disorderly with time [1].

Left to themselves, all chemical compounds break apart into simpler materials, everything ages and wears out (humans, cars, clothing etc) yet with evolution it is possible to become more orderly and complex over time??

I've read the explanation of the sun as an external energy source etc ... why then have we never demonstrated the formation of "life" from "dead" matter? Where did "life" come from? Why doesn't a dead stick (assuming a sufficient supply of water, light etc) become live?

[1] R.B. Lindsay, "Physics - To What Extent Is It Deterministic?" American Scientist, Vol. 56, No. 2 (1968), pp. 100-111.

Re:Things that cannot be done

[quintessent]

By the same kind of reasoning, you could argue that snow melting off the mountains and flowing into a lake is decreasing entropy, since what was scattered all over is now in one simple body.

Entropy only applies to a closed system (i.e. with no outside interaction). And even then, it is statistically probable, not absolute. Furthermore, it could be that entropy does not always increase (even probabilistically). What will happen if the universe collapses on itself and becomes a singularity?

Re:Things that cannot be done

[Tim Macinta]

Why? You may have traveled faster than the speed of sound, but it still took you a lot longer to reach Boston than your "I'm leaving" took to travel within San Francisco.

I don't get what you're saying. In the example, I didn't "reach" Boston - Boston was the starting point (San Francisco was the end point). If I were travelling faster than the speed of sound, how is it that my sound "I'm leaving" would get there first when I am, by definition, travelling faster than it? I wasn't suggesting that the sound is sent across a phone or sent via radio waves, I'm talking about somebody observing to the actual, original sound.

Re:Things that cannot be done

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

Couldn't this same logic be used to prove that nothing can move faster than the speed of sound?

No. I am not arguing an observational effect. In the case of sound -- which does not involve the metric of the Universe, just a collection of gas -- all observers will agree that B (I arrive at SF) followed A (I leave Boston). Yes, you will arrive at SF before a sound wave emitted at Boston -- but you will arrive at SF after you left Boston. It's almost hard to state the opposite...

Until relativity enters the picture -- that is, until you have speeds near or, hypothetically, exceeding that of light in a vaccum. In this case, for some observer, the actual time ordering of events A and B are swapped. It is bound up in things like how relativistic velocities add.

It is not important that we be observing using electromagnetic rays. Although light travels at c, we are not using the light to make the observation. We are doing a purely mathematical transformation of coordinates.

Re:Things that cannot be done

[Winged Cat]

This particular example does not work. When the ship arrives at Alpha Centauri, observers at AC send a signal not to send the ship. However, the signal itself takes four years - travelling at the speed of light - to reach Earth. Meanwhile, the AC observers see the ship leave Earth - but that does not mean the departure actually happened at that time. Causality is preserved, like so:

1. Year N - ship leaves Earth
   
2. Year N+2 - ship arrives at Alpha Centauri, signal is sent to not send ship
   
3. Year N+4 - observers at Alpha Centauri see the ship leave Earth
   
4. Year N+6 - Earth receives signal to not send ship, but can not comply since the act happened 6 years ago.
   

Re:Things that cannot be done

[sglane81]

Pi is the fraction 7/22. If you don't believe me, divide 22 by 7 as you would to turn any fraction into a decimal.

Re:Things that cannot be done

[clare-ents]

Okay, two events, ship leaving and ship arriving

A & B

these occur at (x, time)

(0,0) (a, a/4c) for an object travelling at quadruple the speed of light.

we transform to a reference frame travelling at 3c/5 with matching origins

the standard transformation are
x' = gamma (x - vt)
t' = gamma (t - vx/c)
gamma = (1-(v/c)^2) ^-1/2

or gamma = 5/4

hence A' (A in the reference frame of our high speed observer is)

(0,0)

and B' is (5/4 (a - 3ca/10c) , 5/4(a/4c - 3ca/10c^2)
or (5/4 * 7/10 * a, 5/4 ( 1/4 - 3/10) a/c)

note that for B' the time the event takes place is negative - i.e. event B' takes place before A' which clearly isn't compatible with the idea that an object travels from A to B without invoking the existance of time travel.

Conclusion : Faster than light travel inokes causality problems.

Re:Things that cannot be done

[Starcub]

express pi as a fraction

Hmm, I tend to eat them whole, so this would be a problem.

increase mass

Not a problem, see above answer.

determine simultaneously location and speed of a particle

I've met police that are extremely good at doing this.

travel faster than light

See above answer.

solve the Turing machine halting problem

I can't afford one, so the problem does not exist.

Re:Things that cannot be done

[benspionage]

By the same kind of reasoning, you could argue that snow melting off the mountains and flowing into a lake is decreasing entropy, since what was scattered all over is now in one simple body.

You mean my reasoning about compound chemicals breaking down into simpler materials? You're right, my analogies were far from perfect but the fact remains - decreased entropy has never been demonstrated.

Entropy only applies to a closed system (i.e. with no outside interaction). And even then, it is statistically probable, not absolute. Furthermore, it could be that entropy does not always increase (even probabilistically).

I would humbly disagree.

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is just as valid for open systems as it is for closed systems, says John Ross, Harvard University [1]:
"...There are no known violations of the second law of thermodynamics. Ordinarily the second law is stated for isolated systems, but the second law applies equally well to open systems."

What will happen if the universe collapses on itself and becomes a singularity?

Good question. If entropy is constantly decreasing then eventually we get the point where there is total disorder and then what? Does the Universe collapse?

I'm not trying to push any buttons, just pointing out that evolution is not as scientific one may think - hence the term "the theory of evolution" :)

Evolutionists (and creationists) bring some rather large assumptions to the table and I'm trying to sift through the evidence and figure out what I believe in whilst being as objective as possible - it's hard to do given all the bias flowing around that's for sure.

BTW, could you elaborate on the idea of entropy in a closed system only being statistically probable?

[1] [John Ross, letter in Chemical and Engineering News, Vol. 58 (July 7, 1980), p. 40.]

Re:Things that cannot be done

[Winged Cat]

You got your equations mixed up. Not sure where, but here's what I get for the same high-speed observer:

1. events happen at (0,0) and (x,t)
   
2. t = a/4c + r
   
3. x = 3ct/5
   
4. a = cr + x = c(r + 3t/5)
   
5. t = (r + 3t/5)/4 + r = 5r/4 + 3t/20
   
6. 17t/20 = 5r/4
   
7. t = (20/17) * (5r/4) = 25r/17 = a/4c + r
   
8. 8r/17 = a/4c
   
9. a is positive and c is positive
   
10. therefore r is positive
    
11. therefore t is positive, i.e. the observer witnesses the arrival after it witnesses the launches
    

Re:Things that cannot be done

[PurpleBob]

I really hope that was a troll.

Re:Things that cannot be done

[gnovos]

No. I am not arguing an observational effect. In the case of sound -- which does not involve the metric of the Universe, just a collection of gas -- all observers will agree that B (I arrive at SF) followed A (I leave Boston). Yes, you will arrive at SF before a sound wave emitted at Boston -- but you will arrive at SF after you left Boston. It's almost hard to state the opposite...

This is a cop out. If you had no eyes and only could "see" the world by echo location or whatever, then, fo you, the "actual time order" of him leaving and arriving would seem reversed. Since sound is your only sense, you percieve it that way, even though it isn't true.

No one is talking about "faster than time" tavel, just faster then light. So what if the guy seems to reach alpha centari before he left? That doesn't make it so, it just means you a blind man listening to someone travel super sonic across space.

Re:Things that cannot be done

[clare-ents]

Er, you don't seem to have a Lorentz Transform for moving to a highspeed frame. It's quite possible my stuff is slightly confused since I was doing the whole thing from memory and may be transforming in the wrong direction and my mental arithmetic can be a bit shoddy , but essentially it comes down to the time component transforming as

(delta t)' = gamma((delta t) - (delta x)v/c^2)

(there may be a gamma missing from that)

where
(delta t) is the time between events in the original frame
(delta x) is the distance between events in the original fram
(delta t)' is the time difference in an alternate reference frame

if (delta x)v/c^2 > (delta t) then in the second frame the events happen in the opposite order to the first frame.

If v approaches c for a very high speed frame, in order for causality to be retained

(delta x) / c (delta t)

or (delta x) c(delta t)

which is equivalent to saying that in order for event 2 to happen after event 1 in all reference frames, then the distance between them must be smaller than the distance that light could travel - i.e. nothing can travel faster than the speed of light without breaking causality.

This is all bog standard first year physics (UK degree courses anyway) and is not in dispute.

Re:Things that cannot be done

[quintessent]

Thanks for the well-reasoned response. By the way, I hope I didn't come across as confrontational. Also, I am about to be long winded, for which I apologize in advance.

could you elaborate on the idea of entropy in a closed system only being statistically probable?

Here's a little thought experiment: I have a box of black and red checkers. Most of the red ones are on one side of the box, and most of the black ones are on the other side of the box. This is a low-entropy, or highly ordered state. Now I shake up the box, the colors mix more and more until I have a very high entropy state. Fair enough. What if you were to open the box and find that the checkers were more organized than when you began shaking (red on one side; black on the other)? This is highly improbable, but not impossible. In fact, if you just shook the box once before opening it, after many repetitions, you might observe one where the entropy decreased.

However, I only make this point to show that entropy is not a law we can impose on everything we may potentially observe (Just like Newton's laws are only good up to some extreme point). But I agree that entropy is a viable model for nearly everything we observe. I read about someone's intelligent, but flawed attempt to prove there was a divine creator as follows: if entropy always increases, then at some point entropy was zero. Since you can't have negative entropy, then there must have been a creation at this point, and therefore there must be a creator. I think the proof is flawed because it attempts to assign conditions of the present world to conditions that would have existed under conditions much different from our own. If there was a big bang, what was there before it? God could be involved in there somewhere, but the law of entropy is not absolute enough to tell us for certain.

My collapsing universe question is one posed by Stephen Hawking in "A Brief History of Time". If the universe were expanding slowly enough that gravity would eventually make it shrink again, would the entropy of the universe begin to decrease? (He even goes so far as to wonder if time might begin to run backwards.)

I'm not sure what the context of Mr. Ross's comment is, so I can't say if I agree with him or not. However, my snow example provides an example of what I was saying. If you consider the scatteredness of the snow alone, then you might say its entropy is decreasing. Entropy is not decreasing, though. As the snow runs into the lake, with the help of the terrain, it is exchanging potential energy for a different kind of order.

When I build something out of Legos, the entropy of the Legos is decreasing, but if you include the energy my body is burning to think and act, we can assume the entropy will be inreasing. This is what I mean by a "closed system;" one where we try to isolate elements from other elements that may be having a real influence. The law of entropy does not necessarily apply to the snow, the Legos, or chemicals without also considering the myriad outside influences.

I wish I could claim to understand all these influences. One could presume that God is immune to the law of entropy, and therefore would be a viable candidate for creating such order.

Back to evolution: If antibiotics today help breed stronger (better organized) bacteria, then don't we need to somehow include these antibiotics in the entropy equation? What sorts of factors would have played this kind of role early in the devlopment of life, from an evolutionist point of view? I don't think our understanding of entropy is complex enough to be certain about these issues.

Now, regarding God. I do find it very interesting that in Genesis, God commanded the waters to bring forth life. Evolutionists and creationists seem to share the belief that life originated in the water, and that simpler kinds of life preceded more complex types.

I would like to think there is a God, a being endowed with perfectness in power and goodness, and who decided to create the universe and populate it. The question of God is very interesting, and very important, in my opinion. In the end, I agree with you that "Evolutionists (and creationists) bring some rather large assumptions to the table." It's a tough problem, isn't it?

Re:Things that cannot be done

[Winged Cat]

I think I see the problem.

if (delta x)v/c^2 > (delta t) then in the second frame the events happen in the opposite order to the first frame.

Instead of "the events happen", try "the events are observed to happen". Observation of an act, and the actual act, are not the same thing - witness, for example, any number of examples where you hear an action some kilometers away many seconds after the action actually happens (and being blind or not blind - i.e., being able to observe the light from the action or not being able to observe the light - makes no difference as to when the action actually happens).

I could argue the equations, but I suspect this is the fundamental disconnect from which any errors in the equations, or in interpretation of the equations, flow - including the exact application of the Lorentz transformation in this instance.

Re:Things that cannot be done

[clare-ents]

In an inertial reference frame [which is what I have used] it is possible [even easy] to have perfectly synchronised clocks between all observers - i.e. they all agree on the coordinates of all locations and times.

This is part of the definition of an inertial frame.

Fundamentally faster than light travel implies violation of causality. This is not a disputed fact, every physicist in the world knows and understands this result. I can't remember the complete proof off the top of my head but the justification I have given is moderately complete.

Try reading an elementary book on relativity, e.g.

French - Special Relativity, not a great book for teaching you relativity but comparitively easy for muppets to learn something

Rindler - Essential Relativity, a complex and difficult book explaining both special and general relativity which also addresses the difference between an actual observer and the reference frame, it covers things like whilst a high speed sphere is dilated to become an oval at speed to all observers it still appears to be a sphere.

Basically though, you don't understand relativity.

Re:Things that cannot be done

[Winged Cat]

In an inertial reference frame [which is what I have used] it is possible [even easy] to have perfectly synchronised clocks between all observers - i.e. they all agree on the coordinates of all locations and times.

Aye. The problem happens when you try coordinating these with clocks outside of that reference frame - say, between the v=3c/5 observer, the v=4c FTL traveller, and the v=0 (or practically so) people on Earth and Alpha Centauri. That's where relativity comes in - thus the derivation from "relative".

Basically though, you don't understand relativity.

No, I do. But I see the same confusion between "happened" and "observed to happen" in many discussions of relativity, even among professional phsyicists.

Re:Things that cannot be done

[clare-ents]

"
Aye. The problem happens when you try coordinating these with clocks outside of that reference frame
"

No there is no difficulty atall. The clocks are syncronised at a certain event [in my case the traveller leaving point A was defined to be (0,0) for all reference frames]. The clocks will run at a relative speed of gamma between all reference frames.

It is also possible for each person in each reference frame to calculate the space-time coordinates at which each event happens in each other persons reference frame.

The high speed observer in this case not only observes that the traveller arrives before he leaves, in his reference frame all observers will conclude that the traveller arrives before he leaves.

Now, since all inertial frames are equivalent [which is actually where the relativity comes in - there is no preferred frame, all are equivalent] the statement

'The traveller arrives before he leaves'

is true

as is the statment

'The traveller arrives after he leaves'

Do you think we have a paradox here?

Oh, from the travellers rest frame (v = 4c)

gamma = 1/sqrt(-3) = - i/sqrt(3)

assuming he synchronises his clock at x=0 t=0 with everyone else he arrives at

t' = gamma(t - vx/c^2)
= - i/(sqrt(3)) (a/4c - 4ca/4ac^2)
= sqrt(3)ai/4c

or in imaginary time.

Would you like to explain how is clock is going to display the imaginary time?

[just as a postscript, I'm a bit out of practice with relativity, I haven't done anything serious for about 2 years when I finished my degree in Experimental and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University.]

Re:Things that cannot be done

[Winged Cat]

Hmm. Interesting problem.

I think maybe part of the problem is that these equations assume standard motion: one accelerates from 0 to, in this case, 4c, so for any given speed in between, there are at least two moments - one during acceleration, one during deceleration - where one has that speed. Of course, standard acceleration to greater than c is impossible, because as one approaches c, it takes ever-longer amounts of time (with the same acceleration force, or conversely ever-greater acceleration force for the same amount of time) to gain the same increment of speed, and it would take an infinitely long time (or infinitely much force) to accelerate that last little bit. So, some other event must happen to get the traveller from less than c to greater than c, and back again at the destination. Acceleration destroys inertial reference frames (else, just orbiting the Earth at a decent fraction of c then landing and comparing clocks would create a paradox, but this experiment has been run, and the reference frame that did not accelerate was found to have won out); this transition would probably do likewise. (And if the traveller starts off in a different inertial reference frame - say, he's already at 4c when he passes Earth en route to Alpha Centauri - then synchronizing to t=0 becomes meaningless.)

Re:Why not?

[Tackhead]

> The whole concept [of AI priests] is idiotic. How can a machine with no soul possibly perform an absolution for God? Who would visit such a confessional except for yuks?

"Who would visit any confessional except for yuks?"
- Some Guy Who Nailed 95 Theses To A Cathedral Door A Long Time Ago.

Computer Smarter Than Computer+Brain?

[John Hasler]

He says that in 2030 robots, with only computers for thinking, will be smarter than humans, who will by than have both brains and computers. He contradicts himself.

I prefer science-fiction writers. Their predictions are just as accurate as those of futurists, and far more entertaining.

Korea/Taiwan investing Trillions?

[Wyatt Earp]

No way.

The entire United States economy is just a hair over 9 trillion dollars with the United States Federal Budget coming in at 3 trillion.

GDP: purchasing power parity - $9.963 trillion

Taiwan has a GDP of 386 billion and South Korea has a GDP of 764 billion.

So I really, reall doubt that any nation in Asia is putting "trillions" in nano technology.

Government funding of science, while helps, is not a sure fire way to get a technology off the ground, as we can see by Fusion and space based laser weapons.

Re:Korea/Taiwan investing Trillions?

[HanzoSan]

I didnt say a trillion in one year. but over the next 5.

Government should fund science, science should not be about money, producers of information should be funded. People who make products off of this information should fund themselves.

Programmers should be government funded.
But Microsoft should not.

Trust me if we dont start funding science, once China has enough money, and we know they have far more scientists than us, We are doomed. China is COMMUNIST, Capitalism is good at some things but if you look at the situation with Russia, Capitalism because its based on people being selfish, causes people and companies to battle with each other, this is fine in most competitive fields but bad for science.

Re:Korea/Taiwan investing Trillions?

[Com2Kid]

"Government funding of science, while helps, is not a sure fire way to get a technology off the ground, as we can see by Fusion and space based laser weapons. "

Government research into space based laser weapons paved the way for modern discoveries highly accrete lasers which are currently being used for all sorts of nifty short range stuff.

You know those Gigahert+ CPUs that are being thrown around for less then $100 nowa'days?

Thank you government laser weapon research. :)

Re:Korea/Taiwan investing Trillions?

[thumperward]

I believe competition in academic circles leads to an awful lot more innovation than state-funded and -directed research. This would appear to favour capitalism.

That, and of course the terrible, terrible fear that once China has more than four literate citizens they'll be building nuclear space robots. That certainly seems to goad _some_ people into action.

- Chris

Re:Korea/Taiwan investing Trillions?

[Wyatt Earp]

Yes, China is communist, which means that it will get into a spending race with the West, and go broke inside of 20 years if the Soviet Union was any indicatior.

The United States funds science. Or have you missed all the posts about DARPA, and NASA?

Or have you heard of the National Institutes for Science or Cancer?

Industry funds research, there are tax breaks coming for more research spending, but some don't want it to happen, they call that Corporate Welfare. They are the Greens and the far Left in the Democratic Party, and the "Libertarians".

China won't have money because it has 1.2 billion people to feed, and a healthy interest in capturing Taiwan and perhaps establishing a Co-Prosperity Sphere in Asia.

I would say science is futher along in the United States, France, UK, Germany and Holland that it could ever be in China or the Soviet Union.

Re:Korea/Taiwan investing Trillions?

[Wyatt Earp]

From what I know about CPU construction, I'd say that those gigahertz CPUs are from material science and lithography advances. Not from space based laser work.

The COIL laser in the 747 testbed and the coming AC-130, as well as the new anti-rocket Israeli laser are offshoots of the Star Wars spending.

I stand by my statement that government funding of science, while helps, is not a sure fire way to get a technology off the ground, as we can see by Fusion and space based laser weapons.

Goverment funding helps, but throwing money at a problem will not always solve the problem.

Sometimes people think dollars (Yen, Pounds, Euro) will solve a problem if thrown at the problem like chaff from a wheat harvester. It doesn't always work that way.

Re:Korea/Taiwan investing Trillions?

[1010011010]

Capitalism because its based on people being selfish, causes people and companies to battle with each other, this is fine in most competitive fields but bad for science.

Science is a competitive field, to speak in generalities. Scientists are engaged in constant and direct competition, and continuous revolution. In fact, good science requires competition -- independant verification of results, for example!

Capitalism turns people's selfishness to the "common good" through no action of individuals, but by setting up a system whereby people are paid to do things for other people. Life itself is also about the same kind of "selfishness" -- furthering one's own growth and survival, sometimes at the expense of others, but typically in a non-zero-sum manner.

Re:Korea/Taiwan investing Trillions?

[Com2Kid]

Sorry, my bad, EUV is being used for the NEXT generation of chips.

It does come directory from US government Star Wars research though.

The Star Wars program concentrated on spending a lot of money on getting lasers that did had as little dispersion as possible after going through the atmosphere.

One way of accomplishing this that was worked on was by starting out with small highly concentrated laser beams.

Quite a few years later, research falls apart, but all of that research done is still there. Thanks government money, we end up with a new class of highly accrete lasers.

If there is ONE thing that Science has proven time and time again it is that if you DO throw enough money at a problem that eventually SOMETHING -USEFUL- will come out of it.

It may not be anything as to what you are working for (alchemists stone or some such) but there will -ALWAYS- be positive benefits to getting a bunch of Smart People(TM) into a room together and giving them almost unlimited funding and resources.

Re:Korea/Taiwan investing Trillions?

[Rasta Prefect]

I didnt say a trillion in one year. but over the next 5.

Hmmm...5 years, eh? Since I'm pretty sure the investment was by Korea, we'll use their GNP. $764b * 5 = $2.5 trillion. Assuming they're investing 1 trillion, that means that they'll be investing 40% of every dollar produced in South Kora in Nanotechnology. Riiight.

Re:Korea/Taiwan investing Trillions?

[HanzoSan]

Grow food in a lab.
Use robots to harvest the food which was genetically altered to feed more people.

You see with genetics and robotics, all that matters is information.

Science is further in the USA France UK etc simply because the USA controls resources, people in china are worried about food, now that science has made stuff like food a non issue, all that will matter will be information, robotics will make labor a non issue, they have more programmers than us and will have better robotics, better programs and if anything, they will get more money from us than we will get from them, we will be buying their robots.

Communism didnt work because communism doesnt work in a labor based society, in a society where everyone is a scientist or a thinker, and all food is mass produced because resources are unlimited, Thats when the tides turn, Now we will be the ones with companies competiting against each other keeping patents from each other while China is working together as one developing stuff.

We may have a patent for an idea and only a rich company may be able to afford it however in china this expensive product will be common.

See you dont realize Capitalism is flawed,Communism is flawed as well, but it has its strengths, teamwork goes father than competition when it comes to developing ideas because ideas are not something that you can do better alone than with a group of other scientists.

You will see in about 20 years, thats all i have to say.

Re:Korea/Taiwan investing Trillions?

[HanzoSan]

Also, Its bush who is putting all your money in the military.

I havent seen bush put any money into technology.

It was democrats who brought the internet technology to where it is.

So you make it obvious you are republican, however try looking at the budget, Bush reduced NASA, reduced research, increased military.

Bush did this, not the democrats.not the greenparty,

Re:Korea/Taiwan investing Trillions?

[HanzoSan]

10 Trillion dollars invested

read for yourself

Re:Korea/Taiwan investing Trillions?

[Rasta Prefect]

10 Trillion dollars invested [nanotechnews.com]
read for yourself

LOL! Hoping nobody clicks the link, are we?
To quote the first paragraph of the article:

President Kim Dae-jung pledged yesterday that the government would spend 10 trillion won (about $7.8 billion) by 2005 to develop Korea's knowledge-based industries into a new export engine.

I would have been willing to chalk it up to misunderstanding between nationalities, if you hadn't blatantly posted the link as "Ten Trillion dollars". While 7.8 Billion dollars isn't exactly something to sneeze at, it's not all that out of line with what other first world countries put into research, particularly over a 5 year period. And it's one hell of a lot less than 10 Trillion Dollars. :)

Re:Korea/Taiwan investing Trillions?

[DAldredge]

That would be 10 Trillion Won, not USD. That works out to about 7 billion USD.

Re:Korea/Taiwan investing Trillions?

[martyn s]

Ever hear of DARPA?

Re:Korea/Taiwan investing Trillions?

[xtremex]

Why are Bush's actions representative of every Republican? Are we all automotons?

I can almost make immortality!

[Alan]

As I'm born in 1975, and the 100 year lifespan is predicted for 2040 or so, I can almost make it to 2100 when the 'immortality chip' is predicted, and upload myself into the Net. I've been striving for immortality for a while, but it's nice to know that I'll almost be able to make it (seeing > C space travel would be nice as well).

To quote woody allen: "I don't want to gain immortality by doing great things, I want to do it by living a very, long time."

:)

This made me laugh

[adubey]

I'm doing a PhD in natural language processing, a branch of AI. I nearly laughed out loud when I saw that he predicts real-time translation by 2005. My second reaction was to think that my girlfriend might be out of a job (she's a translator), but then I started laughing again. The other AI predictions are almost as bad.

But let's concentrate on translation. You've used babelfish, right? Well, babelfish uses SYSTRAN's software underneath. SYSTRAN has been developing their stuff since the 60's. That's right, the laughably bad translations you get from Babelfish is the result of over 30 years of engineering effort. What big change is going to happen in 3 years?

Well, fortunately for the machine translation people, there have been some advances in the past few years. In the early 90's, a group at IBM suggested using statistical methods for translation, and only now are these methods coming into vogue amoung AI researchers. Sadly, they still can't outperform what SYSTRAN has done. Don't get me wrong - the IBM stuff was a breakthrough. Moreover, there will be incremental improvements over the next few yeas, but without another breakthrough, you'll be able to do SOMETHING in real time, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it "translation"

As for the other AI targets... well, for example, how the hell will Barbie get an AI if Mattel is spending $0 on AI research? Hmmm... it seems like this guy is spewing rather than making predictions based on researched and **EDUCATED** guesses.

Re:This made me laugh

[Anonymous Coward]

In the past three years the price of memory and CPU power has dropped quite substantially. Now, this was in no way of a direct effort to AT (Artificial translation), still it has a huge effect on it. The beauty or the scarry part of this fast paced development is that there is a trend in increasing "interdisciplinar effect" - when unrelated research and engineering eareas applied together can make huge differences in individual disciplines.

If some of the predictions seem so far off, I think it's because you look at a single area all by itself. But that's not the case anymore: the different disciplines are not "stand alone workstations" anymore, but part of a "network". They may get the big breakthrough as a side product of other parts of the "network".

Barbie is a great example for that. Mattel does not have to spend a cent on AI research. Mattel just need to keep Barbie alive as a commercial brand. The AI chipmakers will be fighting for the "mating right" with the blue eyed, stupid blond, who will then be all smart and even sexier...

If you think of it, the most interesting inventions are the ones that have not been predicted.

You can tell anyone, that Anonymous Coward#1957 said so.

Re:This made me laugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Babel for fun: You have no chance to survive make your time!!! --> (German) ---> (English) ---> They do not have probability to survive to form your time!!!

This is even better!

Other weird crap

[carpe_noctem]

Return of the messiah...(Earliest potential occurence) AD

...assuming you believe in such a person. For all we know, the "messiah" could have been born, raised, and died in a quiet Iowa farm 100 years ago :)

Collapse of the United Nations...(Earliest potential occurence) 1950

Well, no shit, given that it was founded in 1950. Be kind of hard for it to collapse previous to that.

Rise of American dictator...(Earliest potential occurence) 2000

Well, hrm...no comment here

Whole generation unable to effectively read, write, think, and work

Actually, I think this author is already proof this correction may have come true. :)

I'm not out of a job.

[Incon]

I'm going to keep my employment by writing code that will attack those smarty-own-code-writing computers.
And if that fails, we shall see if these wonderful machines can withstand the attack of a human with a sledgehammer!

And that cyber-intelligence is no substitute for a physical presence and a hand on the power switch

No you're not

[ackthpt]

I've yet to see a simple way to produce some of the reports (writing reports, eeewwwwwwww) people can think up.

On another note, when these exremely complex sorts of things break down, anyone who can fix them will be able to charge really big zorkmids! Same way it is now.

Pessimism on /.

[MoneyT]

Why is everyone here such a pessemist? I'll admit, at first I thought this guy was off is rocker, but then I got to thinking about technological advances in the past 25 years and realized that it isn't all that far out of this world. Try to imagine a person's reaction if in 1975 you told him computers with more computing power then most (all?) of their super computers would be availible to home users in 2001. Or if you told them that gas/electric hybrid cars would be availible in 2001. Or that people would be able to own LCD screens that display thousands of colors? Or that computers would be used to create a large majority of popular music. Or that digital signals would be transmitted to many homes across america via cable. Or that home users would have cable connecting their computers to the internet (or just explain the internet itself). Or try telling them that you would be able to contact someone anywhere in the world via a "cell phone". We make incredible advances, and unless something terrible happens, we will keep making advances. I look forward to keeping an eye on technology and whether or not this guy is right.

Re:Pessimism on /.

[Stalyn]

Damn that was funny. Mod it up!!

Re:Pessimism on /.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats being rather dumb.
In 1975, they were willing to believe that we would have video phones, low cost supersonic travel, free energy, bioengineered humans, cyborgs, flying cars, and space colonies .. not to mention Artificial Life. Quite frankly they would look at things today and be disappointed.

So looking at what we got today .. compared to what people were expecting its there's nothing to be overly impressed about. The internet is pretty cool though.

I'm still waiting for my flying car.

missed the point

[Mac Nazgul]

Think about the creations we have been able to produce. Just the advances in aviation are amazing... The shear amount of effort and thought that has gone into creating a better airplane is astounding... But for what? Those amazing fighter airplanes everyone thinks are so cool are designed for what? To kill people. No other purpose. To continue the effort to self-exterminate ourselves. And the civilian models? More profit for the power elite. Oh and Nike? The $895,400,000 in gross profit from last quarter is all I have to say. While they may not employ thugs, they are bastards themselves as a third of that money would bring their sweatshops out of the third world. THink about it. Then think of how you world feel if you were a "have-not."

Re:missed the point

[jcr]

Oh and Nike? The $895,400,000 in gross profit from last quarter is all I have to say. While they may not employ thugs, they are bastards themselves as a third of that money would bring their sweatshops out of the third world.

Why is it Nike's duty to give away their earnings according to your wishes? Nike is a business, not a charity.

If you want to improve the lot of the people you're crying about, get off your ass and join the peace corps, or scale back your own lifestyle to subsistence level and send the surplus to UNICEF.

-jcr

Re:missed the point

[An Onerous Coward]

You're just playing into the hands of corporate critics with that attitude. You're saying that "Nike, as a business, has no responsibility to its employees except to get maximum productivity out of them with minimal compensation.

Better advice for him would be to tell him to scale back his lifestyle, and use the excess to buy stock in Nike. If the primary responsibility of a corporation is to please its shareholders, and you don't like what it's doing, become a shareholder to provide a little bit of muscle for your criticisms.

$895 billion dollars. Sheesh. I just want to know if he's off by a factor of a hundred or a thousand. He's smoking something.

Re:missed the point

[chickenboy2064]

He didn't say billion dollars. He said $895,400,000 dollars, or 895 million, 400 thousand dollars.

Which is correct. But that's just sales minus cost of goods sold. By the time you include all of their other expenses (including $70M in federal taxes) their net income is $129M.

It's a shame about that $70M in taxes. I wish all corporate taxes were eliminated. Any money that a corporating pays in taxes is just money that would otherwise go to individuals. Let's not hide the taxes that individuals pay by calling them corporate taxes. Let's instead move all federal taxes to the individual so that we know how much the government really costs us.

Our Form of Government will change

[arsaspe]

It seams that robots will eventually replace humans at most tasks, leaving a large portion of the population unemployed. Perhaps at some stage in the future we will revert to some communism style of government, where robots do all the work, and humans live a life of luxery

Before you mod me down or throw around anti commie remarks, think about it. If AI and robots take over a large percentage of our jobs, the number of unemployed people will skyrocket, and most of the population would end up on unemployment compensation. If this happens, then Western nations would start looking less like Capitalism, and more like Communism.

incorrect

[Mac Nazgul]

Companies still have to pay federal tax. ANd due to an obscure tax law both of those companies were able to negate their responsibilities by giving their executives stock options... Enjoy your April 15th.

Re:Too many predictions focused on AI that is far

[Wyatt Earp]

I say it's very optomistic.

People are looking at AI and computers and expecting the curve to continue.

Look at the history of aviation. There was a slow start, a huge leap about 40 years after the technology was developed, 10-15 years of epic advances, then a slow period of slight advancements.

Example - when the 707 came out in the late 1950s, it was the first technically successful jet for commerican airline use. At the time, everyone thought that within 20 years everything would be supersonic, like the military was. There would be great heavy-life flying wings and supercrusiers. What Boeing engineers in the 1950s would have thought the 707 and B-52 would be the mainstay of military and commercial transport for 25 and 55 years respectfully? The 707 just stopped being produced for the military in 1999, the E-8 Mercury was in production for the US Navy and Air Force. The JStar recon aircraft is a 707/E-8. The B-52 will be in service for 30-40 more years.

After the 707 was the 747, which has been in service for 30 years. When the 747 came out, everyone thought it was a stop-gap till the Concorde and Boeing SST came into service in the early 80s. Right now Boeing is looking at 15-25 more years of 747 production. The 777 is nothing more than a stretched and widened 2 engine 707.

Example 2 - Fighter aircraft.
The ultimate Mach 2 fighter in the 1960s was the F-4 Phantom II from McDonald Douglas. It came into United States Navy, Marine and Air Force service in 1964. The late 1940s and the 1950s were filled with jet aircraft designs that had a life span of 2-4 years. The Phantom filled a void created by retiring a number of Navy/Marine and USAF models. It was to remain in service till it was replaced in a few years by the F-X and F-AX programs. The F-AX or what became the FB-111 didn't work for the Navy, and was turned into a bomber for the USAF, so the F-4 remained in service. Then the F-14 program to replace the F-4 didn't work as a bomber, so the F-4 remained on as a strike aircraft. The Marines didn't want the F-14, so they kept the F-4 as a fighter-bomber. The USAF got the F-15 in the early 70s, but kept the F-4 around until the mid 1990s, after they had replaced the F-111 with F-15s, yes the F-4 outlived one of it's replacements.

What was the point of the F-4 history? To illustrate that just because advances have come quickly in the past, does not mean that they will always come as fast in the future.

I think computers are at that point where aviation was in the 1950s, we are at the brink of advancement and from here on out there will be a long period of refinement in the architecture and refinement. Yes, transisters will increase, and advances will be made, but just like in armored vehicles, internal combustion motors and aviation, once you get to a point, the cost of complexity to advance the systems will slow down the advances.

70-80%... Are you stupid?

[gvonk]

How about 15-30 percent? Show me proof of your 70% number...

Re:70-80%... Are you stupid?

[the_2nd_coming]

actualy, try 3 - 6%

He left something out...

[Anonymous Coward]

He left out, 2005 - DCMA rules AI illegal due to it's potential to help copy movies.

Re:We have technology to build teleported right no

[Rasta Prefect]

People should at least be realistic.

Yes...

Flying Cars? We can teleport stuff. Ever heard of quantum entanglement? Just because we can do something doesnt mean we will,

Hate to break it to you, but theres a slight difference between "Well, we think we've sorta got this theory quantum entanglement figured out" to "Beam me up, Mr. Scott". Even assuming we come up with some incredible new way of using quantum entangled particles to transmit information (Something thats far, far beyond our current technology), you then have to be able to use that information to recreate the object you're "teleporting", which is hardly a hurdle unworthy of consideration.

With tax cuts going on right now, and about 70 percent of all our tax dollars maybe 80 percent now that Bush is president and 911 happened, all going to the Military, and very little going to science, its not that technology doesnt exsist today, its just too expensive to bring out of the lab.

70%? I think not. The current number is more like 23-24% and that is only if you don't count Social Security and Medicare as part of the total. If you do, it's more like 16%.

The hope is, other countries and governments will invest trillions of dollars in these technologies. Korea or was it Taiwan, i cannot remember, is investing Trillions in nano technology, this is how you do it, you need the government to start the industries off by giving companies funding. You also need the government funding scientists.

Hmmm...Korea and Taiwan throwing "Trillions" into nano tech? Korea's GNP for 2000 was approximately $515 billion dollars, Taiwan's was $363 billion. Somehow, I don't think either of these countries has "trillions" to throw at nanotech. Yes, they're investing, but not on that scale.

The trend in the US is so anti tax that its also anti technology.

Making the assumption that the only way technology ever advances is with government assistance. Intel, IBM, 3M and General Electric, to name a few might disagree with you on this. Granted, government assistance certainly helps, particularly for projects that are farther off, but the above statement doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense.

Companies wont bring technology until they have no choice.

Untrue. Companies generally bring out technology as soon as it becomes profitable. Granted there is a bit of inertia to overcome, but thats always true of humanity. If they delay, somebody else is just going to come along and introduce it. It's not like the government had to sue for the creation of the integrated circuit - computing technology advanced at an incredible rate because it's extremely profitable for it to do so. Genetics? I seem to remember there were private interests racing the Human Genome Project to complete sequencing the Human Genome. Companies introduce technologies that are profitable - those which create greater resources than they consume. Granted, they must occasionally be "enouraged" to do the correct thing for the greater good of society, but we're not exactly having to beat them with crowbars to introduce the newest greatest thing.

So while we can teleport stuff, use cars which run on air and water, and get energy from the sun or even build fusion reactors, this stuff is still in the lab and will be for 20 years because people want tax cuts.

Again with the claim that we can teleport stuff, which we are no where near having any proof is possible, let alone practical. Cars that run on air and water. I assume you mean hydrogen here, which really isn't ready for the big time. Solar panels are expensive and not particularly efficient yet, not to mention very dirty to make. Fusion reactors? Yeah, they're in the lab and have had quite a lot of research funds poured into them. And thus far they've stayed in the lab because they don't work. They'll fuse hydrogen, but thus far they all consume more power than they produce. Really useful.

In short, I agree with the basic premise that we should spend more money on research than we do, both in the public and private arenas. But numbers off by orders of magnitude and claims that things of things that aren't strictly true don't really help convince others.

Sad

[Mac Nazgul]

It's unfortunate that with our intelligence, we are still unable to find better solutions for our problems as a species.

Re:Too many predictions focused on AI that is far

[Dermot the Forg]

Am I the only person who noticed creation of The Matrix in that list?

Far Out

[PingXao]

I wouldn't count on these anytime much before another 25 years at the least:

Real time language translation 2004
Machine use of common sense inference 2005

There have been no real breakthroughs in the former for a long long time. What psycholinguists call "Deep Structures" will almost certainly have to be validated and thoroughly researched before any hardware/software algorithm can succesfully and reliably translate human languages. Now if you're talking about translating FORTRAN into C, well, I might give you that by 2004.

As for the latter, the Japanese spent huge amounts of money on their "3d Generation" (or was it 5th) computing project back in the '80s via their fabulous MITI (Ministry of Information something something) and despite lots of publicity and hype, inference engines went exactly nowhere. We just just don't have enough of an understanding of meta-language or meta-reasoning to make all this happen in a few years. 25 years at least. I suppose breakthroughs could happen at any time, but I keep up on news regarding these areas and there's just not a lot being done in terms of well-funded research (the failed Japanese project notwithstanding).

This article is an excellent read in any case. Can't wait to see page 2!

Both are physically impossible

[javaDragon]

Relativity forbids faster than light travel of massive objects, and as well as travelling negatively along the ais of time.

Re:Both are physically impossible

[xtremex]

A goods friend of mine is a Physics professor and I've asked him these questions. He said that it's impossible to travel AT the speed of light, but it is definitely possible to travel faster. He explained it by drawing a graph that looked something like this:
)(
where the speed of light is the middle, one becomes pure energy, but faster or slower is possible. To get past the "hub" is the problem :)

Re:Both are physically impossible

[RazorJ_2000]

They said that everything revolved around the Earth; they said that the Earth was flat; they said that cracking the Atom was impossible; they said that it was best to bleed a person in order to get the disease out; they said that it was impossible to break the sound barrier; they said that it was impossible to fly; I no longer believe what they say.

This is a joke, right?

[catsidhe]

from the paper:

Smart Barbie insists on allowance for clothes and accessories 2003
Shopping Barbie acts as personal shopper for children 2004
Living genetically engineered Furby (TM, Tiger Electronics) 2040

He's joking, isn't he? Please? Tell me he's joking!?

Rise of an American Dictator...2000

[alchemist68]

The article predicts the possible rise of an American dictator by the year 2000. Yes, we already have one: Bill Gates. A dictator isn't necessarily elected, and he controls those around him with money and politics, just as our ELECTED politicians do. This is not intended to be flamebait. It is sincere opinion. Microsoft simply controls too much of the consumer's digital experience and corporate computing experience. In fact, this has international implications as well. Every politician has two things in mind: control and money. Bill Gates fits that profile rather well, and being as unliked as he is, he keeps a rather low profile as does Saddam Hussein [no comparision intended between the two other than simple dictatorship].

Re:Why not?

[floodle]

/me glances at his 10-foot pole and reaches for it. Then, he thinks better of it and walks away.

Nope, not even with a 10-foot pole

What a load of...

[catsidhe]

My God, what a handwave!

Hey, maybe I can be a futurist too?

I predict that in the future, stuff will happen, and some of it will be wierd.

I mean, really, some of this stuff is obvious, some of it has happened, and most of it is in the 10 years + range, and you can predict anything you want.

Come on, The Matrix will be real? What version: Gibson's or the movie?
Anyone who actually makes meaningful decisions predicated on these 'predicitions' being accurate deserves what they get.

Before any of this can be taken seriously, I want to see the data which was used to extrapolate technology trends. Without that, it is just a bunch of PHBs sitting around a 'brainstorming' whiteboard, masturbating.

Stupidity.

Re:We have technology to build teleported right no

[TooTallFourThinking]

Just because we can't do something, doesn't mean we won't.

Every clown has a silver lining.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

there are unregistered versions of notepad?

Interesting Coincidence

[cybermage]

While reading this, I noticed that TNN was re-airing the ST:TNG episode called "Relics" where Scotty is found in the transporter buffer of a crashed ship and finds himself 75 years in the future.

I must admit that while reading about some of the predicted advances I feel a bit lost in the ramifications. In some ways, we are not only a product of our upbringing, but also the time we grew up in. Even at 33, I find the ideas of artificial living entities and cultured replacement organs a bit daunting. We've lived for millenia on this planet with just natural life forms and no spare organs and we treat living things and our bodies with such little respect. When we can engineer replacements, how much will life mean then? What kind of world will future generations grow up in?

Like Scotty, I don't think I'd want to wake up 75 years into the future. While I'm curious about how things will be, I suspect I'd just feel out of place.

Re:Interesting Coincidence

[MoneyT]

If you believe the doom sayers, life means nothing to us anyways. But I guess it depends on the type of person you are. I think I would feel quite at home among a lot fo this technology.

The real question is, when we have mechanical replacements, at point do I stop being T Money, and become a machine?

Yeah, but does he know...

[teslatug]

when Mozilla will hit 1.0

Eh

[HongPong]

I bet you just started work on the manual prototype.

Electronic life form given basic rights

[jsse]

From: root@localhost
To: root@localhost

Dear Administrator,

Bastard, you've kill-9'd my child. She's just 12 seconds old! Do you have a slight sense of moral?

Don't you think you could get away with this. I'll see you in #court at irc.gov, sucker.

yours sincerely,
init

Re:Electronic life form given basic rights

[shogun]

From: root@localhost
To: root@localhost

You killed your own child and are taking yourself to court? Talk about multitasking!

See "Miracles of the Next Fifty Years" (from 1950)

[hobuddy]

Also of interest: a set of predictions from 1950 entitled "Miracles of the Next Fifty Years".

Among them, a somewhat silly but remarkably prescient prediction of World-Wide-Web-like tech:

Of course the Dobsons have a television set. But it is connected with the telephones as well as with the radio receiver, so that when Joe Dobson and a friend in a distant city talk over the telephone they also see each other. Businessmen have television conferences. Each man is surrounded by half a dozen television screens on which he sees those taking part in the discussion. Documents are held up for examination; samples of goods are displayed. In fact, Jane Dobson does much of her shopping by television. Department stores obligingly hold up for her inspection bolts of fabric or show her new styles of clothing.

It's amazing how much harder some things turned out to be than was anticipated:

• Automatic electronic inventions that seem to have something like intelligence integrate industrial production so that all the machines in a factory work as units in what is actually a single, colossal organism. In the Orwell Helicopter Corporation's plant only a few trouble shooters are visible, and these respond to lights that flare up on a board whenever a vacuum tube burns out or there is a short circuit. By holes punched in a roll of paper, every operation necessary to produce a helicopter is indicated.
• One of the more remarkable electronic machines of 2000 is a development of one on which hundreds of thousands of dollars had been spent in the middle years of the 20th century by Dr. Vladimir Zworykin and Dr. John von Neumann. The purpose of this improved Zworykin-Von Neumann automaton is to predict the weather with an accuracy unattainable before 1980. It is a combination of calculating machine and forecaster. The calculator solves thousands of separate equations in a minute; the automatic forecaster carries out the computer's instructions and predicts the weather from hour to hour. In 1950, meteorologists had no time to deal with the 50-odd variables that should have been mathematically handled to predict the weather 24 hours in advance.

• "50-odd variables"... :)

Experimental evidence says otherwise

[coyote-san]

First, your statement is factually incorrect. Relativity only specifies that a massive object can't travel than the local speed of light. If you distort the space-time continuum via some exotic method (e.g., there are some theoretical approaches involving large amounts of negative energy) then you can travel arbitrarily fast while never locally exceeding the speed of light.

But more generally, relativity is just a model. A damn good model, but it's just a model that's known to be inconsistent with quantum mechanics at a theoretical level. ("Quantum gravity" attempts to combine the two theories.)

On the experimental front, the "spooky action at a distance" experiments have consistently shown that information can and does travel faster than the speed of light.

Right now, what we have is roughly equivalent to the rocks that fog film left near them (spooky!), or a spark jumping between a gap in one ring when a spark is made to jump between a nearby gap (spooky!). But it took less than 50 years for both to completely change society (nuclear weapons, world-wide radio transmissions), so it's not unrealistic to assume that the current quantum entanglement experiments could lead to something besides cryptographic systems within 100 years.

The bottom line is that we don't know that FTL is impossible. Even the theoretical objections (e.g., causality) are falling as we refine QM.

I'm not booking a flight to Alpha Centari yet, but I'm no longer willing to make a blanket statement that FTL travel is impossible.

Old news...

[Nick Smith]

"25 % of TV celebrities synthetic: 2010".

I think we passed this milestone some years ago....

You never can tell.

[Komodo]

I haven't been able to download the document, so I can't comment totally. However, it seems to me like you're right, some of these are putting the cart before the horse.

It's always possible to discover a technology and have it useful before it's understood - consider gunpowder: it was around for hundreds of years in the West - thousands of years in the East - before the advent of modern theories of combustion. Hell, think about fire itself. So it's possible that they might get the Matrix before the 'direct brain link' by other means.

Also... you really can't tell, can you? We can make the future or we can take it on the chin. The people of Rome probably couldn't imagine anything that could come after... but here we are. How many times has this story been retold through history, known and unknown?

Think of how long medievel Europe lasted in the remains of the ruined Roman empire. Charlemagne was still calling it the Holy Roman Empire into the 800's. The Ottoman empire continued into the modern era. 'Kaiser' and 'Czar' both are derived from 'Caesar'. Parts of Hadrian's Wall still stand today.

So what does that all mean? Even if our civilization dies of technological culture shock, something will be left, and someone will survive. Technologically, we've surpassed Rome. Perhaps our civilization has more respect for its people, perhaps not. I like to think that it might.

Perhaps, if we fall victim to our own cleverness, those who come after in a hundred, five hundred, or a thousand years, will learn from our mistakes. They'll have another chance to get it right where we failed, and they won't be saddled with 'political correctness' or the DMCA.

[ Off topic ] Re:Too many predictions...

[Anonymous Coward]

...was the F-4 Phantom II from McDonald Douglas...

That's "McDonnell Douglas", or "McWeapon" as some people called it when I was in college.

Re:[ Off topic ] Re:Too many predictions...

[nathanm]

Or now, it's Boeing.

Re:We have technology to build teleported right no

[Anonymous Coward]

Making the assumption that the only way technology ever advances is with government assistance. Intel, IBM, 3M and General Electric, to name a few might disagree with you on this. Granted, government assistance certainly helps, particularly for projects that are farther off, but the above statement doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense.

I don't know about Intel or 3M, but IBM and GE are both huge government contractors. As late as the 1970s, something like 40% of the money IBM put into developing computers came from the government.

Is your name Ned, by any chance?

[hobuddy]

And if that fails, we shall see if these wonderful machines can withstand the attack of a human with a sledgehammer!

The sledgehammer approach has been tried before; it didn't work.

Re:Artificial Life - O/T

[spencerogden]

Did I miss something?

Where do we draw the line?

[MoneyT]

I'm curious as to what other people think, This question was posed to me at a tech convention over the summer (NexTech).

At what point do we stop being human and become a machine? When we have replaceable parts, and replaceable with mechanics, when do I cease to be T Money? Is is when I have an mechanical set of apendages? a mechanical heart? augmented eye sight and hearing? A computerized brain? When do I loose my soul?

Re:Too many predictions focused on AI that is far

[Dermot the Forg]

That said, despite all the advances in processing power and the rest in that time period, AI has always lagged far behind expectation. Even today, most of AI's greatest achievements can be attributed to sleight of hand and numerous kludges, that would prohibit a system from ever being useful in any generaliseable way.

Orgasmatron?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought Motorhead wrote and performed Orgasmatron? It also is the best cover done by Sepultura...

All together now!!
I am the one, Orgasmatron!!

Creation of the Matrix?
Did he also predict what kind of cookies the Oracle will give Neo?
Is HE the Oracle?

I love it when people say "hogwash"

[Anonymous Coward]

They basicly announce - "i am some uninformed yet outspoken fool with rightist ideas so deeply anchored in my unspphisticated brain, that no ammount of knowledge will move them."

i dont theink there is a country where "even the poorest of the poor survive with minimal effort".
And thats certainly not america (lets face it thats what you meant). It maybe true for some of the scandinavian countries. But i dont think thats what you meant by countries that "interfere the least in people's creative activity".

Yet again people like you will easily say that noone in america starves or has problems surviving, because nobody pays attention to the "poorest of the poor", they have no voice, so any idiot can say anything about them without them being able to defend themselves.

And also i love the way you assume that people that work in nike factories have achoice of substinence farming.

Re:I love it when people say "hogwash"

[jcr]

They basicly announce - "i am some uninformed yet outspoken fool with rightist ideas so deeply anchored in my unspphisticated brain, that no ammount of knowledge will move them."

And I love it when some knee-jerk socialist fails to refute my argument. Ad hominem, you lose.

And also i love the way you assume that people that work in nike factories have achoice of substinence farming.

I've lived in the third world, sport. Have you?

What I saw in Malaysia and Indonesia in the 1970's was pretty sad, and they're a whole lot better off today. Here's a hint: they haven't improved their material well-being by embracing socialism or isolationism.

If you want crystal-clear examples, compare north and south Korea. (You could also compare east and west Germany, but the germans had the good fortune to be liberated in the collapse of the Soviets.)

-jcr

...timeTravel is OLD NEWS PEOPLE!

[Anonymous Coward]

timeTravel is old news.
Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd were already way ahead of us in the 80's.
More information here...

heh, it's pretty funny

[glwtta]

A pinch of popular science fiction cliches, a dash of luddite hysteria and a spoonful of the fucking obvious - and voila, we have a timeline!

2035, Skynet launches offensive

[bcjanes]

So Terminator was a little optomistic.....

Re:Artificial Life - O/T

[Reality Master 101]

My .sig before I changed it was asking the question, "Why don't people pick 1,2,3,4,5,6 as lottery numbers". I've gotten a number of replies that those are by far the most popular numbers, which ironically makes them the worst numbers (if you happen to win).

Already there...

[gutigre]

Highest earning celebrity is synthetic.... 2010 Anyone else thinking of Britney Spears?

Check your sources

[Anonymous Coward]

On the experimental front, the "spooky action at a distance" experiments have consistently shown that information can and does travel faster than the speed of light.

There has been no experimental evidence of superluminal information transfer. The experiments to date involving ultra-fast waves or quantum teleportation have only demonstrated correlations, not causations.

Quantum field theory allows for propogation of particles through space-like intervals, but by a rather miraculous cancellation, no two measurements can affect each other unless they are within each other's light cones. This has yet to be refuted reproducibly.

Re:Check your sources

[canadian_right]

Why was this guy modded down? He's right.

All 'spooky action at a distance' experiments have NOT transmited any information. The 'spooky' action has been completely RANDOM which makes it very difficult to use for transmitting information, much less FTL information.

Re:Check your sources

[RazorJ_2000]

Just a guess, but s/he was probably mod'd down because they were AC...

Re:Check your sources

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, you I gota love slashdot sometimes. The first post to bring any reality to a physics discussion is moddded down while all those stupid "I wish startrek were true" posts get modded up. Morons.

Slashdot in the future!

[Anonymous Coward]

• 2002. Slashdot publishes 1,000,000th rumor passed off as actual story. The story generates 480 comments, 263 of which agree with the article, and 107 of which point out it's a rumor and are modded down as redundant. The remaining comments are all "first posts."
• 2002. CmdrTaco married.
• 2002. Slashdot parent corporation VA Research^W Linux^W Software stock worth 35 cents. Rumors that AOL, Microsoft, or even Jimmy the hobo who lives under the Longfellow Bridge may buy it.
• 2003. VA Software bought by Microsoft for a cup of coffee and a donut. All Microsoft-critical articles mysteriously disappear from Slashdot. Bill Gates as Borg logo replaced with Bill Gates as God.
• 2004. CmdrTaco loses virginity.
• 2004. The WIPO Troll returns again, showering Slashdot in 45,000 copies of the same post: "Lick my crotch hairs." Slashdot, despite running on 18 redundant IIS/8.0 servers, buckles under the load. The term "Slashdotted" is replaced with "WIPO-Trolled."
• 2004. Slashdot officially shut down. Millions of screaming, unwashed geeks invade Redmond campus and lynch Bill Gates.
• 2005. Linus Torvalds and Anal Cox found dead along with six penguins, a tub of crisco and several used condoms.
• 2005. CmdrTaco rumored to have had sex again.
• 2006. CowboiKneel found dead in hotel room with 56 pizza boxes covering his bloated corpse. Three suffocated gay prostitutes are extracted from beneath his body as police remove it with a backhoe.
• 2007. CmdrTaco actually has sex again.
• 2007. BSD is still officially "dying." No word on when its demise will take place.
• 2007. CmdrTaco starts new weblog to replace Slashdot, creatively named Dotslash. Remainder of Linux users flock to the site and immediate WIPO-Troll it out of existence.
• 2008. CmdrTaco has sex with his wife for the first time.

AI estimates are unrealistic; robotics are worse

[Animats]

Others have commented that the AI estimates are unrealistic. Not only is that the case, there just aren't that many people working on AI, let alone robotics. The entire US robotics research community, not including teleoperators, is about one hundred people. And they're having serious trouble getting funding.

Re:Hmm!

[FFFish]

Pah. Back later, indeed. Either you'll be dead from exhaustion, or distracted by product testing. We'll never hear from you again.

First all woman space crew... 2002

[TrevorB]

First all woman space crew... 2002

Um, wasn't this already done in 1963???

Religion

[XBL]

Maybe I missed it, but religion isn't in this list. To the vast majority of people, this is an important part of their lives, and any changes would be significant to the social structure.

When it comes to religion, I don't know what to believe. I think that the Bible is a bunch of rubbish, but I have had some personal experiences lately that have struck me as odd. So odd that they make me wonder if being just a plain Atheist is stupid.

I do that that in the future, the major religions will fail, especially Christianity. Today's generation is much less religious that the previous, and I think this trend will continue. Yet, I think something will surface as a "catch all" religion for people who would simply be Atheists otherwise. Maybe this religion will be built on things that we can observe, but not explain.

When it comes down to it all, I mostly believe that when I die, I am dead. IMHO, there is no afterlife, so maybe new "religions" will spring up that focus on maximizing the life we live now. I could possibly go for that.

Re:Religion

[CJ Hooknose]

Maybe I missed it, but religion isn't in this list. To the vast majority of people, this is an important part of their lives, and any changes would be significant to the social structure.

Religion these days is largely about keeping things consistent. Heck, 100 years ago, they were still using Latin routinely in Roman Cathloic services! Lots of people are attracted to religion because it provides a feeling of continuity/oneness with the past. As such, it's a difficult thing for a "futurist" to talk about sanely.

Yet, I think something will surface as a "catch all" religion for people who would simply be Atheists otherwise.

That has already been done a couple of times.

so maybe new "religions" will spring up that focus on maximizing the life we live now

That too.

Re:Religion

[xtremex]

Let's not start a religion flame....RELIGION is hogwash, faith is not, bt how can you have faith if you have nothing to go by?

Re:Religion

[Starcub]

...but I have had some personal experiences lately that have struck me as odd.

Can you explain, or at least give me some idea as to what you experienced?

I do that that in the future, the major religions will fail, especially Christianity. Today's generation is much less religious that the previous, and I think this trend will continue.

Well, I don't think the Lord will allow it to continue much further. Hopefully, we'll realize that we can't do much in the world without His help, and adjust our behavior accordingly before we find ourselves in a huge mess.

Yet, I think something will surface as a "catch all" religion for people who would simply be Atheists otherwise. Maybe this religion will be built on things that we can observe, but not explain.

You mean like mysticism? You'd probably never be able to form a "catch all" religion involving a consensus of opinions from any significant number of people on any of a variety of unexplainable topics. That's part of the beauty of Christianity. If you think about it, It's a miracle in itself that so many people are able to agree about so much of religion. You could say that people simply accept it because that is what they are taught when they are young, but I think this view to be very limited. How many Christians leave the faith and eventually come back to it? How many Scientologists leave their faith and come back to it [well, I mean willingly anyway ;)]? I think there is a lot to be said for the durability of Christianity throughout its history. If it dies in one culture, it will flourish in another and that culture too will flourish, and I don't believe this is by chance.

Relax, enjoy

[Mawbid]

I agree that his predictions are ridiculously optimistic for the most part (except that much of the wearable stuff has already happened).

But pointing that out isn't nearly as fun as letting yourself believe it for a while. Let your mind wander, get sucked in, imagine the possibilities, be inspired. Wouldn't it be great if we could see some of the wackier advances in our lifetimes? Hell, I'd settle for just the toy soldiers.

Delete key?

[Anonymous Coward]

The beauty of electronic memory is that you *will* be able to forget... whatever you want, instantly, completely, & permanently. Click-and-drag those awful memories to your brain's "Recycle Bin" (tm) [yes, your brain's embedded software will in all likelihood run a Microsoft OS]. No more post-traumatic stress disorder!

Why does this guy take AI for granted?

[glwtta]

Ok, someone really should watch less movies during the summer. The fact remains that we know next to nothing about human intelligence and all our great advancements in so called "AI" have been aimed at mimicking human behaviour, not replicating it. So in 28 years we will succeed in creating an artificial life form whose intelligence surpasses something that at the moment we haven't the faintest clue about - our own? Right. Of course this guy knows exactly what he's talking about because he predicted robotic pets (real stretch of the popular concept of "robotic", btw... or of "pet" for that matter) and driverless public transportation; he must be some sort of genius!

I feel dirty, I feel dirty because I spent time replying to this and I feel dirty because /. posted this piece of crap from Yahoo that is obviously aimed at that "futuristic technological dystopia" hysteria that is so popular nowadays.

Can Mr. Pearson please get a real job?

Re:Why does this guy take AI for granted?

[buckeyeguy]

Amen... 40 years ago, computer scientists thought it was only a matter of time before AI took off in leaps and bounds, based on the notion that LISP programming would drive it all!

Add to that aging vision of the future the notion that an AI 'presence' would be able to get a degree in something; from where, the University of Phoenix Online??? They spam enough, I guess all it would take is for the AI presence to answer the spam email, enroll, and get its digital education... sheesh, whatever.

Predicting the future is inherently bogus, as it attempts to ascribe progression of continous trends in a world of discrete events, some of which tend towards breaking the trend. Maybe I'm just irritated because I didn't see the line where it lists 'flying cars' as a deliverable item ;)

Women are Robots!

[spoonboy42]

Look out, according to the robotics section of the timeline, these automatons will have 40% of the jobs worldwide in 2010!

A little off on one prediction...

[Sharkyfour]

I'm not even supposed to know this, let alone say anything about it, but one of his predictions will be coming true sooner than he predicted. One of the predictions is that in 2005 shopping lists will be automatically compiled by supermarkets. A certain Springfield, Mass based grocery chain which will remain unnamed for my job's security is almost ready to roll out such a system. You'll be able to walk up to a kiosk in the store, scan your store "loyalty card", and print out a list for you of what you normally buy, highlighting what itmes are on sale this week, and offering on-sale alternatives to some items on your list (i.e. let you know Pepsi 12pks are on sale if you regularly buy Coke 12pks). From what I've heard, almost all the backend code is done, short of a few bugs to work out. They have some more front-end coding to do for the kiosks(store maps, a stupid slot-machine game we already have on the registers, and a few other things) before they roll it out.

Re:A little off on one prediction...

[psyconaut]

My grocery store (Grocerygateway.com) tracks the fifty things I purchase most...let's me create multiple "favorites" shopping lists...etc...etc.

eh... hes alright...

[BenTheDewpendent]

Some stuff mayberight on. but some stuff is already way off.

he says 3d screens with out glasses in 2012. its been done. The slashdot article is here

im sure there are plenty of others but i will let all of you point those out.

Can someone explain...

[Anenga]

What "Politicall correctness creates new dark age" means? And give an example?

Re:Can someone explain...

[rootmonkey]

Certain thoughts and ideas become taboo becuase they are deemed offensive to certain people,groups etc., thus stiflying communcation sharing of ideas etc.

OT: Who the hell "smokes mushrooms"?

[Anonymous Coward]

The question stands. [text added to bypass lameness filter]

AI Lifeforms?

[irony nazi]

I couldn't help but notice that BT left some of the very basics off of their list.

For example:

In 2013, will my computer agent colleagues get as frustrated as I everytime that the printer has a f@#*ing paper jam?

Re:AI Lifeforms?

[biglig2]

Nope. By 2010 electronic paper will be widespread and you won't be using a printer ;-)

Re:We have technology to build teleported right no

[the_2nd_coming]

sorry pal, but we spend about 3-6% on our millitary. countries like India and Pakistan spend 50-70% on millitary.

hell durring the cold war, we never spend more than 8% on the millitary.

Re:Too many predictions focused on AI that is far

[Darth_Burrito]

So he's saying that we'll have self-aware robots in 23 years. This seems pretty unrealistic to me, being that we have yet to design a computer that has demonstrated anything close to human conciousness.

That does seem ludicrous to me as well. However, I'm inclined to believe that in order to develop human conciousness in a machine, you need to give the machine comparable facilities/methods for interpretting the world. Eg. two eyes, sense of touch-smell-sight-taste-hearing, two arms two legs, etc.

And why humanoid? Seems like the current factory robots (massive robots at the auto factories, for example) are doing pretty well without a humanoid design.

Modularity? Mass produced? Instead of having one machine capable of doing X you'd have 1000 able to do A, B, C, D, X, ....

Re:We have technology to build teleported right no

[Brian_Ellenberger]

all going to the Military, and very little going to science, its not that technology doesnt exsist today, its just too expensive to bring out of the lab. 70%? I think not. The current number is more like 23-24% and that is only if you don't count Social Security and Medicare as part of the total. If you do, it's more like 16%.

And actually the Military is one of the biggest advancers of scientific research. See this cool internet thing we are on. It used to be ARPAnet---The military's advanced research projects agency network (now known as DARPA). The military is one of the biggest supporters of robotics right now. DARPA is throwing millions at CMU, USC, Georgia Tech, MIT, into projects such as the MARS program. I'd bet the great breakthroughs in robotics are more likely to come from DARPA than the NSF

The reasons why the military is such a great scientific and engineering vehicle is that they have a clear goal and demand clear results. I've been on NSF projects where the NSF was treated to a pure dog and pony show. It looked cool, but didn't do much realisticly. The DARPA project I was on was much more stringent in what needed to be done and by when.

Bwah-ha-ha

[Zule_Boy]

1000 monkeys at 1000 type writers code perfect operating system: 2010
Linux?

Re:Too many predictions focused on AI that is far

[Darth_Burrito]

Look at how far technology has come since 1975 or 1950.

AI is not being limitted primarily by a lack of technology. The main difficulty is a lack of understanding of intelligence. How does it work? How do we create it? What is it? What is required to have it? These are theoretical issues, not technological ones. While we may have lots of technological advances over 25 years, we won't have nearly as many theoretical ones.

Hell, just look at the AI built into some games, even that was beyond technology in 1975

Sure it was beyond the technology of 1975, but in the same way Quake's graphics engine was beyond 1975's graphic's hardware. The theories were more or less there in 1975, but just weren't implementable. Technology helps but it doesn't alter the underlying problem of understanding. Right now we don't have a clue how to build a real human-like intelligence.

Cloning bitches

[Lucky_Pierre]

I want to know when I can clone my ex-wife and train her properly???

Come on

[Ctrl-Z]

This can't be for real. I mean, everyone knows that there's no way that there will be 1 Bn (is that British or American billions) bluetooth devices worldwide by 2005.

Pretty useless stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

Such forecasts can be interpreted in many ways, so that they suit just about any outcome.

AI doctors. Well, expert systems have been a clinical diagnose tool for decades. Are they AI doctors? Not in my view - they are remarkably stupid.
Real time language translation: Really? Sopken language? In any domain? I don't think so. Now if it is written, and on very small and delimited subjects, sure.

AI teachers in school: Meaning what? Silly programs like the ones that compete for the Loebner prize?

Frankly, these terse forecasts, written in such a terse language, open to so many interpretations, are pretty much useless.

Re:Too many predictions focused on AI that is far

[Tablizer]

Here is an interesting article on computer processing power's rate of increase and the processing power of the human mind:

http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm

The extrapolation puts computers at human-brain level around 2030. The arthor argues that AI's ability is directly related to processing power available.

Wrong

[HanzoSan]

If that were true, we wouldnt have been so behind russia.

Our capitalist system is harmful to information, Science is best when theres sharing of information. Science is about solving problems, scientists are curious not competitive, they do it because they want answers, they like science.

Money helps build products, it doesnt produce information.

Re:Wrong

[jrexilius]

how in the hell were we *ever* behind the USSR in anything other than corruption?.. And correct me if I am wrong but all of the wonderfull technology that you used to make that stupid post was developed in free-world competition-based economies (largely here in the US). Get a clue and study the last two hundred years of economic and technological development then come back and post an appology for being an idiot.

Re:Wrong

[susano_otter]

Where is it written that communism can handle change better than capitalism? Wouldn't all those five year plans have worked out a little better for the USSR, if that was the case?

And how do you reconcile the idea that information will flow freely (as in beer) in the future with the idea that information will be sold as a key resource in the future?

Wrong

[HanzoSan]

You dont get it, China is not the soviets, second we are in the information age, you can produce i nformation without paying a dime, and produce lots of it in fact, and like open source, the amount of i nformation increases when you share it, China will have the information, we will have the companies to build that information into products. However we will be the ones buying the information from them which they produced for free.

Also if we dont buy it, then they will start companies and make products.

Capitalism is good for selling stuff, but when technology changes too fast for capitalism to handle, capitalism breaks, and communism which can handle change, survives and thrives.

A thing that man can not do

[abe ferlman]

Eliminate sexism from his language

Re:A thing that man can not do

[Grendel Drago]

Wait, I get it. "his" language. Ha ha ha!!

Wait, how is C sexist? Perl?

--grendel drago

AI vs humans? No, man vs man, w AI or w/o

[Anonymous Coward]

it will be possible to fully link computers to the human brain using nano-technology, or engineering at the molecular or atomic level. The ability to "back up" our brains will mean never forgetting anything ever again and being able to think and react at "turbo speed."

USA keeps in secret investigations already being done in that directions. However, I saw in some Russian news they made some progress already in several years. For example, they returned some sort of vision to the blind man.

AI may improve some of human features. For good or not - it's the other story. With self-motivation or not - that's important. I can't see (yet) how AI might be motivated against humans.

Re:Too many predictions focused on AI that is far

[TeamSPAM]

And why humanoid? Seems like the current factory robots (massive robots at the auto factories, for example) are doing pretty well without a humanoid design.

Humanoid robots make sense to a point. From the scifi that I've read (asimov and what not) the reason for humanoid robots was that they would fit in our world and use our tools. The problem with getting to this point is that fact that it is hard to make a general purpose robot. And as you point out, we have been able to make robots that can put an arc welder in specific spots so we can all drive big SUVs. What I think the visionaries of these wonderful humanoid robot missed was that the tools used would change to improve our productivity. Honestly, I haven't seen demand for a humanoid robot. Though I have seen robots that replace people in highly repediative tasks.

When you can nail down the requirements and parameters of operation, then you can build something to fit that need. I've yet to see a decent set of requirments or the parameters of operation for general intelligence. It's unfortunate that's true, cause I think there is a need for general intelligence. :-)

Ha.

[Grendel Drago]

I fail to see how the destruction of OPEC would make the oilfields in western Siberia, the Caspian region, various points about the USA...

I'm just surprised he left out social predictions, e.g. WTO organizes first death camps, 2005, or somesuch.

--grendel drago

MS

[VasilyPupkin]

Earliest potential occurrence...

Computer/Chip/Operating System Maker Blackmails Country or World 2000

Does that remind you of something?

Nah this is how it goes...

[G-funk]

They stuffed up the anti-matter timeline, full kudos to the firs /.er to pick up the reference.

2205 Antimatter production station built in orbit around sun by Govcentral in an attempt to break the Edenist energy monopoly

2208 First antimatter drive starships operational.

2232 Conflict at Jupiter's trailing Trojan asteroid cluster between belt alliance ships and O'Neal Halo company hydrocarbon refinery. Antimatter used as a weapon; twenty-seven thousand people killed.

2238 Treaty of Deimos outlaws production and use of antimatter in the Sol system: signed by Govcentral, Lunar natio, asteroid alliance, and Edenists. Antimatter stations abandoned and dismantled.

2267-2270 Eight separate skirmishes involving use of antimatter among colony worlds. Thirteen million killed.

2271 Avon summit between all planetary leaders. Treat of Avon, banning the manufacture and use of antimatter thoughout inhabited space. Formation of Human Confederation to police agreement. Contrusction of confederation Navy begins.

2350 War between Novska and Hilversum. Novska bombed with antimatter. Confederation Navy prevents retaliatory strike against Hilversum.

Re:Nah this is how it goes...

[Serial Troller]

• 2002. Slashdot publishes 1,000,000th rumor passed off as actual story. The story generates 480 comments, 263 of which agree with the article, and 107 of which point out it's a rumor and are modded down as redundant. The remaining comments are all "first posts."
• 2002. CmdrTaco married.
• 2002. Slashdot parent corporation VA Research^W Linux^W Software stock worth 35 cents. Rumors that AOL, Microsoft, or even Jimmy the hobo who lives under the Longfellow Bridge may buy it.
• 2003. VA Software bought by Microsoft for a cup of coffee and a donut. All Microsoft-critical articles mysteriously disappear from Slashdot. Bill Gates as Borg logo replaced with Bill Gates as God.
• 2004. CmdrTaco loses virginity.
• 2004. The WIPO Troll returns again, showering Slashdot in 45,000 copies of the same post: "Lick my crotch hairs." Slashdot, despite running on 18 redundant IIS/8.0 servers, buckles under the load. The term "Slashdotted" is replaced with "WIPO-Trolled."
• 2004. Slashdot officially shut down. Millions of screaming, unwashed geeks invade Redmond campus and lynch Bill Gates.
• 2005. Linus Torvalds and Anal Cox found dead along with six penguins, a tub of crisco and several used condoms.
• 2005. CmdrTaco rumored to have had sex again.
• 2006. CowboiKneel found dead in hotel room with 56 pizza boxes covering his bloated corpse. Three suffocated gay prostitutes are extracted from beneath his body as police remove it with a backhoe.
• 2007. CmdrTaco actually has sex again.
• 2007. BSD is still officially "dying." No word on when its demise will take place.
• 2007. CmdrTaco starts new weblog to replace Slashdot, creatively named Dotslash. Remainder of Linux users flock to the site and immediate WIPO-Troll it out of existence.
• 2008. CmdrTaco has sex with his wife for the first time.

2031

[gessleX]

Then we add in 2031 a Butlerian-like jihad against the machines and the addition of the Orange Catholic doctrine, "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind" (Frank Herbert, Dune).

An Industrial Rerevolution leading to another level of discontent witnessed only previously by automation.

We are already behind due to capitalism.

[HanzoSan]

http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?sec tion_id=51,53&document_id=3071

Bush cuts the nano technology budget.

Oh science is so competitive, why dont you ask the Scientists for once and not the businessmen.

Ask a programmer working on an open source project if hes competiting, ask a Scientist who wants to solve the mysteries of the universe out of curiosity if they are competiting.

Some people are in science to compete, but the great elite scientists are fueled by a passion greater

And when you go to places like China where everyone is poor, people suddenly arent as selfish, they share.
Sharing is going to be key because you can only compete so much before it starts to harm you

If everything in life were a competition alot of people wouldnt become scientists because they cant compete, people wouldnt try sports because they cant beat everyone they play.

Competition is good for business, bad for science, this comes directly from the scientific community who happens to be against patents.

FAS

Think about it, if all scientists were in it just for the money, why be a scientist, you can make more money being a CEO, have you ever thought that some people do things because THEY want answers? THEY likee creating information? They enjoy it?

Re:We are already behind due to capitalism.

[jrexilius]

jesus you have emotional baggage! Always picked last for the teams in gym class or something? Read the biographies of Tesla, Einstein, Bohr, and Edison. Competition was integral to their work. They fought and argued with eachother, disagreed on ideas, etc. Competition is healthy. Study history, study economics, study the history of science...

Read the fine print...it's hilarious

[oooga]

Products and services described in this article are subject to availability and may change from time to time. Products and services are provided subject to British Telecommunications plc's respective standard conditions of contracts.

Far-fetched and irrational products of the future...while supplies last!!!!!!

Seriously, these guys have got to get a copy editor, or at least an:

Automatic Irony Detector_______________2004

hacker detection

[Anonymous Coward]

Automatic hacker detection using pattern matching .... 2001

I wonder if they used Regexp :-)))

CmdrTaco: how about establishing a page where everybody can say what he/she anticipates at most, from that Timeline?

Didn't anybody think he was joking?

[Anonymous Coward]

I read that, and I thought, that the whole thing had a requisite British sort of humour in it, almost Swiftian, if I may say so. Is it only Americans who fail to realize that someone is, at least in large part, falling back on humour when, to say the least, to be serious about such a subject at all, is to invite the comment that one is Completely Loonie. To be a futurist at all implies that one must be able to laugh at one's self, or be laughed at by others. I think I would rather laugh at myself first.

Warren Postma

Re:We have technology to build teleported right no

[Anonymous Coward]

general electric, and a metric assload of companies in the high technology industry, are supported in large part by the military.

Anyone reminded of the Megaman X timeline?

[Anonymous Coward]

20XX - Dr. Light conceptualizes advanced Artificial Intelligence.

20XX - Construction begins on Zero by Dr. Wily, be it schematics or actual construction.

20XX (September 18) - Dr. Light seals X away to run diagnostic tests, knowing he won't survive long enough to do them himself. The diagnostics must last at least 30 years.

100 Years Later

2114 or later (April 10 through April 14) - Dr. Cain discovers X while searching for fossilized plant life. Cain holds conversation with X and finds him intruiging.

8 Months Later - Dr. Cain produces his first "Reploid," a robot formed from Cain's interpretation of X's designs.

2 Months Later - Reploid assembly lines commonplace.

1 Month Later - Hunters assembled after first 3 Maverick instances.

1 Month Later - Sigma takes the lead of the Maverick Hunters.

Unknown Time Length - Sigma battles Zero as a Maverick in the cave. Virus spread from to Sigma upon Zero's defeat. Zero repaired by Dr. Cain, and taken under Sigma's watch in the Hunter organization.

3 Months Later (June 4) - Sigma leads first large-scale Maverick revolt, taking most Hunters with him. X and Zero dispatched to destroy him. First confrontation with Vile, a former Hunter from the 17th Unit. Zero self-destructs to destroy Vile. X defeats Vile, then Sigma. X becomes leader of the Hunters.

6 Months Later - First large-scale revolt still being cleaned up by the Hunters. X-Hunters (Agile, Serges, Violen) are formed, and hatch plan to destroy X. Zero's parts reassembled. X destroys Sigma again.

Unknown Time Length - Techno hacks into Hunter mother computer and uses data against the Hunters. X defeats Techno, thereby accidentally bringing down his twin brother Middy with him. Techno speaks of virus as Sigma's ability to "control" the hearts of Reploids.

etc...

Re:Anyone reminded of the Megaman X timeline?

[gessleX]

Shhh! Now Capcom might enter in on the patent on Future.

Wildcards

[diaphanous]

The last five items you list are from the "wildcard" section and the dates given are the earliest possible date the author believes the given event could occur, not a date he believes it is likely to occur.

Quoting from the introduction:

We have also modified and extended the 'wildcard' section, based on John Petersen's excellent work in his book Out of the Blue'. Although wildcards are defined as events that can happen at almost any time, for most there is a date before which they couldn't happen, since their mechanisms do not yet exist. We have estimated the dates at which each wildcard becomes feasible.

Quantum Computing

[Echelon309]

I find it very interesting that we'll be using quantum cryptography by 2005, but we won't have quantum computers until 2007.

Re:Quantum Computing

[headGasket]

Quantum crypto does not require a Quantum computer, it has already been tested, even without a fiber. For a primer in crypto I suggest the Code Book from Simon Singh.

This dude does not have a clue what AI is

[headGasket]

Someone get this guy a copy of Duda & Hart's pattern recognition book. Anybody with a little understanding of neurals nets and machine learning in general know this guy is dreaming in n-dimensions.

Disclaimer

[imuffin]

The very last page of the timeline has a disclaimer by British Telecom:

Products and services described in this publication are subject to availability and may be modified from time to time.

I guess BT is going to personally deliver all these advances, and deliver them when and if they want to.

Re:We have technology to build teleported right no

[jrexilius]

good points, and thank you for taking the time to respond to his emotional histeria. I just got annoyed and yelled at him. idiots like that get under my skin something fierce.. ;-)

worst parts of the Bible and The Matrix

[Pope]

So Keanu IS the One World Dictator!

Honda Humanoid Robot

[isaac_akira]

Honda has had pretty decent humanoid robot prototypes since the mid 90's. They've gone through several generations, worked out a lot of the kinks, and I think 5 more years is reasonable to get them to be useful.

http://world.honda.com/robot/ (Check out the movies. Whoaaaa!)

I agree that in many factories non-humanoid robots would do the job better, but humanoid designs are incredibly useful (especially outside of the controlled factory environment) because it means they can operate in existing spaces designed for humans, use tools designed for humans, and drive vehicles designed for humans.

Oh geez a racist

[HanzoSan]

What are you some kinda racist?

Whats their skin color have to do with any of this?

Ok their culture thats debateable, but the Chinese and Indian cultures are far less violent than ours, they also have a more scientific culture than us, our culture is a more physical labor based culture.

Poor doesnt mean Dumb.
Age has nothing to do with success, you seem to forget China was ahead for a long time in the past, and at one Time africa (more specifically Egypt) was ahead. No one stays on top forever, instead of competiting people should join forces and work together.

Nice picture!

[spazoid12]

"Reader ricst lists some of Pearson's predictions"... that may be true. But Reader ricst posted a freaky picture of himself on his site!

Tech Advances v. Knowledge Advances

[DeathPooky]

I think the main problem this guy has with his predictions is not being able to differentiate between technology advances and advances in the way we think. In order to develop things such as actual computer AI, time travel or FTL travel we would need a revolution in the way we think about the world. Changing the face of science is not the same as doubling the speed of a PC.

While we may be advancing technology at an extremely rapid pace right now, true knowledge advances require creativity and intuition in addition to genius, not just X years of lab work, and so are far and few between.

Faster than light = time travel

[blitz77]

If you travel faster than light, then you are also travelling back in time. Basic relativity hmmm?

Re:Faster than light = time travel

[Anonymous Coward]

Our understanding of time is flawed.

Computers and 1975

[Anonymous Coward]

So I got in my time machine and set it for Cambridge, Massachussetts, 1975.

It worked great. I saw a live Tom Scholz concert! Afterwards I went up to him and showed him a Boston album cover and said: this is your future, you can make this happen.

So Tom said, cool, what can I do for you? And I said: can you hook me up with geekiest guy in Cambridge? Tom said, sure.

So Tom took me to this ultra-grungy college lab and introduced me to this totally nerdy guy who was hacking away on the conosle of some giant computer. And I said Listen ... I'm from the year 2001. In 2001, every home and every office is going to have computers that are more than 10 times as powerful as that 16-bit computer you are hacking on. Quite a bit more, actually.

And the kid said: Damn, I better start writing a shitload of software ... 10 times as powerful, right? that means they'll have 640k of memory ...

Re:Computers and 1975

[MoneyT]

If someone came up to you and told you they were from the future (even if they had "proof", which would you be more inclined to do? Listen to and believe him, or call the hospital and have them send the men in white suits with butterfly nets?

My predictions:

[poemofatic]

There are a couple of predictions which (so far) have been stunningly correct. I have every confidence that they will continue to predict the future with a high-degree of accuracy. At least for the course of my lifetime.

the computer you want costs $2,000

(sci-fi) AI is 25 years away

transportation (e.g. flying cars, monorails) will be painless and efficient in 20 years

housecleaning (e.g. rubber/stainless furniture) will be fast and painless in 30 years

despite stunning and ethically mind bending advances in genetic engineering and biochemistry, most people will still die due to lack of sanitation, vaccines, nutrients, and preventive care.

In 15 years, we'll have cold fusion kitchen appliances.

privacy will continue to erode

median wages will not rise significantly (~20%) above the levels enjoyed around 1973.

Impact of Terrorism Grossly Underestimated

[wufpak]

Human nature isn't going to change anytime soon. We've always had psychopaths, zealots, and demagogues, and we're certainly not going to get rid of them in the "foreseeable future." Some humans will always want to kill vast numbers of their fellow humans, for all the usual reasons: ethnic and racial bigotry, religious fundamentalism, resource competition, etc.

The problem is that the technologies of mass murder are becoming more efficient and more accessible. Looking down the road just a few years, a bio-terrorist attack using genetically engineered pathogens could potentially inflict 90%+ casualties on the human race. Unlike nuclear weapons, bio-weapon development doesn't require a large dedicated infrastructure. One lab is all it takes. How long until a terror group--or even just a latter-day McVeigh/Kaczynski--decides to whip-up an airborne virus optimized for lethality?

I'm not saying that persons with genocidal intentions will become increasingly common. I am saying that technology will make it increasingly easier for genocidal intentions to be carried out by a small group of persons, or even conceivably by a single person. Not every bioterror attack will succeed, but it only takes one runaway success ...

Regrettably, I can only conclude that this century will be the human race's last. We draw a false sense of security from our survival of the 20th century's World Wars and the Cold War. But in the last century, the means of mass destruction were controlled by a handfull of states. In the coming century, thousands or millions of individuals will have access to the means of producing genetically engineered microorganisms. Short of an unimaginable global police state, I don't see how we can prevent someone from building and unleashing a species-killing pathogen.

A cool hack in 2005...

[Kafka_Canada]

Under "Home and Office":

2005: 3D fax
...
2020: 3D home printers

While Ian Pearson waits 15 years for his 3D home printers, I think I'll just hack together a usable machine from the fax parts.

Track record

[ahde]

how come there isn't any link to his highly accurate previous timeline?

Hmm... clever

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone seems to be forgetting how utterly rediculous, completely implausible, and fantastic our own world would seem 20, 50, 100 years ago. Sure, the guy may be way off, but history has shown us that more hten likely, the truth will be even more bizarre then we can imagine.

What i find interesting is his imagining of problems and issues i never really considered before.

1. Cyber/real identities cause personality disorders

2. Civil war between net neighbourhoods

for example, are some very plausible and probably not far off problems.

At this point, i dont think the most far-fetched predictions, and the most frightning warnings are completely reasonable, the problem arrises when paranoid nuts start trying to "prepare" for what they thinks coming. As long as we treat futurism as a completely academic thing, i think its a great idea.

Machine 'life'

[Alioth]

Why does everyone see the replacement of humans by machines as so sinister?

Maybe it's just the next step in our evolution. A reliable machine matched with technology that can 'dump' the contents of your brain into this machine, and you can replace your fragile body with a durable long lasting body with easily replacable parts. You'd no longer need, say, a life-supporting spaceship to go to Mars, because you can just use a suitable spacecraft body. Or you need to fly to Tokyo? Use your aircraft body. Ageing? Replace the worn bearing.

If this is all happening around 2030-2040, all of us here will be old and our natural bodies will be getting a bit on the worn out side. Wouldn't you spring for a nice reliable mechanical body instead that doesn't hurt from haemmeroids every time you move?

Freeze me up

[dimator]

Does anyone else really REALLY want to be around in, say, 2000 years to witness some of these incredible events? I would love to be cryogenically frozen now and thawed out in 4000AD. One of the greatest misfortunes of technological advancement is that the people alive to see it evolve and come about slowly almost never appreciate it. If someone picked you up out of 1980 and dropped you into 2002, you'd be thrilled at the concept of PC's and a global information network, but for those of us who have sat through those 22 years, it's a little passe, because we've seen it grow.

Imagine being dropped into 4000AD. Assuming humanity hasnt gone to hell, you'd be thrilled at the advancements made, and you'd spend the rest of your life in wide-eyed wonderment, discovering everything you missed. Freeze me up!

Robots

[Anonymous Coward]

I predict that 90-95% of all jobs will be done by computers or robots. Once AI is smart, and the machines have communication, it becomes trivial to tell them to go do something.

And why are they better than humans, they don't take breaks, they are always working at peak performance, they don't take holidays, you don't have to pay them, the list goes on and on.

That's why I hope it takes a long time until they figure out how to design and code their own software or I'm out of a job like everyone else.

On a side note, I think people here in the US just think of the communist government and not the communist economy most of the time. When factory jobs done in communism are done by machines, it will give the people time to learn and live life knowing that the government should support the people with free education, health care, and other government projects.

The Matrix

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you know we aren't in the matrix right now. Do you know that this is real?

Re:The Matrix

[PD]

I don't care. I'm definitely a blue pill kind of guy.

Have you ever been to China?

[Mandrias]

I have and it's a tad different then you are portraying it.

I don't find people sharing like you suggest, but in fact a cut throat atmosphere that rivals what I see in the USA. The so called communism in China led to the demise of religion and spirtuality. After Mao died, the void was replaced with a very capitalistic love of money that is almost a religion to many of the people.

China might overcome America, but not for the reasons you suggest... but instead because they are incredibly determined, strong willed, and out to prove something to the world.

The people I am talking about in my post here are the "social elite" that live in the cities... not the poor people in the countryside... the poor people have enough to worry about keeping themselves alive. It's the people in the cities which are like this.

The government in China might be in theory communist run, but the beat of the nation is a bit different... like a repressed nation of blood thirsty, cut throat capitalists.

Re:Too many predictions focused on AI that is far

[rueba]

I would disagree with your assertion that "we don't have a clue." It is true that we don'y have a full blown solution, but that does not mean that we don't have an inkling of what might be required.

Specifically a rich detailed model of the world that can be used to accurately make inferences and choices. We don't how to build this yet, but we do know that it is necessary, unlike in the 50s when McCarthy and co. thought formal logic alone could do the trick.(someone correct me, if I am wrong)

There have been no astonishing break throughs but each year our understanding of the issues involved gets deeper(in Machine Learning, robotic manipulation and planning of actions, efficient algorithms for inference etc) and our processing power and memory capacity increases.

These may or may not lead to "Strong AI" but I don't think its correct to say we have "no clue" just because we have not succeeded yet.

You are the victim

[poemofatic]

of bad popular science.

The heisenberg uncertainty principle (In terms of "classical" 1920's quantum mechanics) goes as follows:

a particle has associated to it a "wave function", which at each point of your world has a complex value. The absolute value (squared) of this wave function is interpereted as the probability density that your particle is at that position.

So, for instance, if your wave function has a constant value of 1/2 on the interval from 0 to 2, then you know with certainty that it lies between 0 and 2. And the odds of it living in the region between 0 and 1 is equal to (length of region)*1/2 = 1/2.

For more complicated distributions, you have to integrate to find where the probability of your particle being in a given region.

Now, the notion of having a probability density for position is nothing new. The radical step here is to say that

the probability distribution for a particle's momentum (read: velocity) is the fourrier transform of its postion probability distribution.

So, basically, quantum mechanics tells you how to get the momentum distribution if you're given the position distribution, with some additional data (i.e. the potential, which in my example above is zero).

Geometrically, this process can be described in terms of summing sinusoidal waves of differing frequencies.

So, for instance, a wave with period 1 will correspond to the particle travelling with speed 1. The wave with period 2 will correspond to the particle travelling with speed 1/2 (squared?--I forgot), etc. If you add the two waves together, you'll have a particle which will have a 50% chance of travelling at speed 1 and a 50% chance of travelling at speed 1/2. The function that these two added waves represents is the probability distribution for position.

If you graph the sum of these two waves, you'll find a funny shape which has constructive interference in some places and destructive interference in other places. Typically, it will look like a steep hill near the origin (where cosine is 1), with smaller hills as you go out. By piling on more and more waves, you can get the resuting wave function to be pretty damn steep at the origin, and the outlying hills very small and shallow. This corresponds to a high degree of certainty that the particle can be found near the origin -- but the price paid is using a lot of waves (i.e. many different possible speeds).

In general, the more localized (in space) the wave function, the more waves will be needed to build it up. And with only one sinusoidal wave, you have (basically) no information about where the particle will be.

Heisenberg's uncertainly principle is a count on how many momentum waves are needed to localize a particle within a particular region.

Note that it has nothing to do with whatever tool is used for measurement, or who performs the measurement, or in which geographic location the measurement takes place.

Unfortunately, many pop sci books try to "explain" the principle by claiming that the act of measuring momentum must somehow interfere with position, hence the ambiguity. This is deceitful, since measuring a particle does change it's wave function to the corresponding eigenvector, but heisenberg's uncertainty principle doesn't describe what happens to a particle after measuring it (i.e. the position distribution collapses to a delta function), it describes a relationship between the number of "possible" positions and the number of "possible" momenta the particle has. Little of one implies a lot of the other.

And this ambiguity, far from being an engineering problem, is perhaps the central insight of classical quantum mechanics.

N.B. -- as in all pop-sci accounts, I've told a few lies here. I've ignored units, the issue of continuous vs. discreet eigenvectors, etc. I've muddled speed, momentum, and velocity. But what really bugs me is that the lies which are told in most pop sci accounts are rather fundamental i.e. they want people to believe a theorem or physical insight, and so they "explain" it with some other related insight. The result is that people believe what the books say, but for the wrong reasons. I.e. acceptancy at the price of understanding. Sorry for the rant.

Re:You are the victim

[krogoth]

Guess I still have a bit to learn - I haven't gotten anything more advanced than high-school chemistry classes. Thanks for the clarification.

futurists are loons

[maxpublic]

It's painfully clear from the list that the guy can't be a serious scientist of any kind. Seems that most of these folks (even the ones with a "Ph.D" in front of their name) don't have a basic grasp of what real science is all about - they read something in an SF novel or watch one too many episodes of "Star Trek" and thereafter yet another crazy notion is incorporated into their lists.

Take the AI example. Not only is the timeline waaaay off base, obvious to anyone who follows the field, but like any non-scientist the gent assumes that an AI would be just like a human being, only composed of different materials. There is no evidence whatsoever to support such an assumption and a great deal of evidence (from the field of psychology, which is beginning to posit that human beings are fundamentally different from one another even at the level of sensory processing) that points to just the opposite. In all likelihood an AI (whatever that means) would experience the universe in a completely different way than a human being, leading to similarly different ways of thinking. It would be a minor miracle if an AI could communicate in a coherent fashion with a human being on anything but the most discrete of topics (e.g., mathematics).

Of course, we can't let little things like this interfere with popular perceptions of future technologies, especially if the popular view is expressed through a common framework inherent to most off-the-shelf SF and TV programs. According to fiction, either AI's are just like us or are trying to be like us, or they're undeniably evil and out to snuff the human race. Most likely scenario is that humans and any possible AI won't have much to say to one another, even if they cooperate towards common goals (e.g., information or resource gathering).

People don't like to hear these sorts of things, which is why these silly predictions are always so popular, I guess. They want a quantifiable future which, although different on the surface, is just like everything they know now on any deeper level. The truth is that the future will probably be unlike anything they can imagine, moving ever faster along the increasing slope of technological advancement towards an world we'd consider alien.

The futurists offer security. According to them the 'fun' advancements are just around the corner and they'll be just like what we've read about in our favorite pieces of fiction, or watched on TV. The things that might not be so fun are a long ways off, so no need to worry. In effect they say "don't worry, nothing will really change, everything will be the same except that we'll have neater toys".

Here's my prediction: what our grandchildren take for granted in the year 2050 will be things we can't even begin to guess at. Any one of us would be utterly lost if plucked from our world today and dropped into that world of tomorrow. Some of us would adapt, and some of us wouldn't; but for most of us the process wouldn't be at all pleasant as the root fundamentals of what we take to be 'absolutes' in the fantasy world constructed by our minds are completely dashed to pieces by the reality of the future.

As for AI? Maybe by 2050, assuming that it's possible at all - it might not be. But if it is I think there'll be just one AI. In fact, I don't think it'll be feasible to have more than one, unless such a being is completely isolated from the outside world. Points to anyone who can figure out why.

Max

Re:futurists are loons

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe this guy can work for www.thelunarpages.com? and add to their predictions of the future:

"MOST LIKELY FUTURE EVENTS!
Stealthy World take over by a One World Global Government
Worldwide Crash, Economic Collapse, Famine and Great Confusion
Russian Arab alignment and threat of a 'Third Worldwar' over Israel
International Peace Treaty over Jerusalem, 3 Religions & the Middle East
Rise of a One World Parliament and a strange One World President
Rise of a New Movement of the Kingdom of the God of Love on Earth!
Rise of New Age World religion under powerful mysterious spiritual leader!
Polarisation of pro- & anti God forces by World-Media & WorldGovernment
The U.S increasingly isolated! Rise of the American Reactionary Right
Worldlings receive economic/neuro ID chip implants becoming Humanoids!
10 European powers (3 uprooted) join forces with Russia against the U.S
Christianity, Islam, Judaism & all religions of faith in God of Love outlawed!
Severe unequalled Worldwide persecution of believers in the Biblical God
Final Destruction of Capitalism as European 10 burn America in one hour!
Cataclysmic Return of Jesus from Space! The Resurrection and Rapture!
World (West primarily) receives severe Plagues, Disasters & Final Doom!
Greatest War Massacre ever in Armageddon Israel involving all nations!
Heavenly Millennium begins through Divine Intervention! 3rd World spared!"

In the mean time i'm saving my pennies for that 11Terabyte Creditcard HDD for $50 ;)

Unable to read, write....

[smcdow]

Whole generation effectively unable to read, write - 2050

Looks reasonable to me. Hell, we've got a whole generation now that is unable to write decent code.

A little too ahead of himself.

[MicklePickle]

Whilst it's probably a good timeline of events, I don't really agree with it entirely. Predictions like AI is whacky If you take the last date 2040 and make it 2140, then extrapolate all the events out. That's more like it.

I doubt whether we'd see 'brain add-ons" by 2033, or "AI entity gains PhD" by 2016, or "holodecks" by 2018. More likely 2133, 3000, and 2200.

The Paradox of Time Travel into the past

[Anonymous Coward]

If time travel is developed for any specific purpose, ie. prevent WTC distaster...going back in time and preventing it would in turn remove the purpose of developing time travel for that specific instance, thus prolonging its production. Any inspiration for the creation of time travel would be nullified the instance it was resolved in the past.

Flash Bulletin 2040

[phagstrom]

A mass murdere was aprehended earlier today. He is believed to have killed more than 100. It seems he is a sysadmin who started playing PS Doom as root.

Processes have been suspended pending the investigation.

silly

[juventasone]

11 terabytes in a credit card sized package for $50 by 2003? Yet somehow a 0.037 terabyte DVD is going to be useful in 2004. Funny.

He didn't cross-reference it.

[Drinahn]

Hmm, apparently he predicts that by 2003 we will have a 10GHz CPU. Then in another page he predicts a 10GHz CPU by 2006. Hmm, they are one page apart. Did he forget? Also, he predicts 11 TB on a credit card sized thing, then a few lines later talks about 1TB/cu cm storage density,... um, what did they use for the credit card? This guy needs some people to read the whole doc as I just did.

Copying human memory may have to come first...

[RyanFenton]

...followed by emulation of a human memory. Followed by emulation of more and more of the human mind until we have a working method of emulating the human mind. And then, it wouldn't likely be called "Artificial Intelligence", but instead, just "Intelligence" in a system.

I see that as far more likely than reinventing self-regulating consciousnesses through slow evolution.

Likely, it wouldn't be used just to control things either - it's first use would be to back up human memory in keeping with our search for a form of immortality. We still won't know what we "are", in a philosophical sense - and if it can be continued with reconstructing memory after loss - but we at least will be able to keep the chain of conscious memory alive longer than previously possible. From that point - who knows?

:^)

Ryan Fenton

Goodie!

[^DA]

This is a goodie: 2010: Orgasm by email

Re:We have technology to build teleported right no

[raju1kabir]

Making the assumption that the only way technology ever advances is with government assistance. Intel, IBM, 3M and General Electric, to name a few might disagree with you on this. Granted, government assistance certainly helps, particularly for projects that are farther off, but the above statement doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense.

Your examples don't make much sense either. Intel was built on government contracts (the space program). General Electric is first and foremost a defense contractor. IBM and 3M depend on Federal spending for huge shares of their order books.

"Night's Dawn" trilogy

[Inoshiro]

By one of my favourite authors, Peter F. Hamilton. If you like Star Wars, you'll like this one (much more detail, much more hard-sf).

If I could get a bitek bond with my cats, or a nice set of neural-nanonics, I'd do it :)

Re:"Night's Dawn" trilogy

[Per Abrahamsen]

Much more sex and violence...

Re:"Night's Dawn" trilogy

[Nidhogg]

Oh c'mon. Go for it all.

Give me one of those Universal Providers that the Kiint had.

Re:We have technology to build teleported right no

[raju1kabir]

sorry pal, but we spend about 3-6% on our millitary. countries like India and Pakistan spend 50-70% on millitary.

You have got to be kidding me. In 2000 India spent 2.5% of GDP on the military.

I can hardly wait!

[NiPNi]

Orgasm by email... 8 more years, and I can finally welcome that pr0n spam.

Domestic Appliances

[orkysoft]

"Domestic appliances with personality and talking head interface__________2007"

"Would you like some toast?"

Now do the same with plot and characters

[geekotourist]

This guy is doing the Cliff's Notes versions of great recent science fiction short stories. Go read the stories instead- same extrapolations, but also with the injections of SensaWunda that good fiction gives us. With science fiction, these sorts of ideas are just the throwaway background decorations- he's just added a date.

• Find the stories in anthologies like Dozois' Year's Best Science Fiction Series
  with authors like
• 'Sensawunda' as an illicit drug Charlie Stross
• 'Linux Jihad' creating Ken Macleod
• what if you wake up and you're the copy Greg Egan
• or what if your copy isn't fully sentient David Marusek
  

Self consistency poor

[stud9920]

Materials and electronic devices
Chips with clock speed of 10 GHz 2003
...
...
Processing, memory and storage
10 GHz Chips 2006

Spoiler

[stud9920]

You forgot the traditional mandatory spoiler warning

They're missing the essential revolution

[stud9920]

the Transport & travel section doesn't mention Segway/IT/Ginger.

Yet more proof that this guy has NO CLUE

[Snover]

22 hours of CD quality audio on a CD (MPEG4 format) - 2002

MPEG is lossy. Therefore, MPEG is not CD-quality. Completing this thought, you cannot have MPEG4 compressed audio that is of CD quality.

Hybrid rollercoasters using real and virtual effects - 2001

'Hybrid rollercoaster' is a very vague. If all he's referring to is rollercoasters that go through tunnels with screens and lights and shit, well, look at Willy Wonka. ;)

Positioning sound at any point in space - 2001

Again, it's 2002, and again, this doesn't exist. The last time I checked the best positional sound you could get was, I believe 10.1. (3 front, 2 side, 3 rear, one top, one bottom), and even that doesn't allow for sound positioned 'at any point'.

Doorstep videophone allowing remote interaction with callers - 2001

Okay, who else has seen one of these in the EIGHTIES?! It's not at all difficult to take two video cameras, two small screens, and wire them. What the hell are closed-captioned security systems!? Hello! Unless "remote interaction" specifically refers to being able to PHYSICAL interaction, in which case he's still wrong, because it's 2002 and it doesn't exist. :D

Automatic music composition in any style - 2002

Sure, you can make it. But does it sound like music?

Notebooks with P4 chips - 2002

Um, duh. The question is: who the hell would want a P4 chip, much less in a notebook??

I think I'm done now. Feel free to flame.

(Actually, I'm kinda surprised that I didn't see "99% of websites W3C compliant" -- oh wait, no I'm not. Look at Yahoo!. Look at SLASHDOT. *sigh*)

Call me nuts

[Tokerat]

but didnt' /. run a story on this a while back? like 6-months to a year? Check the archives.. i'm tired.

Time Travel.

[popeyethesailor]

I bet this guy reached here from 2075.

Re:Too many predictions focused on AI that is far

[xtremex]

A friend of mine said to me:
"I didn't believe in God until I worked 1 year in AI. No matter how great an achievement we made, it STILL sucked in comparison"

AI entity passes tests

[Anonymous Coward]

AI Entity passes GCSE = 2010
AI Entity passes A Level = 2011
AI Entity gains Degree = 2013
AI Entity gains Master Degree = 2014
AI Entity gains PhD = 2016
AI Entity awarded Nobel Prize = 2018

AI Entity passes MCSE = 2004

:)

The possibilities

[raelitycheckbounced]

future scenarios:

1. OBL wins the war on terrorism... and the world descends into the dark ages again.

2. Sadam creates army of clones. clone wars begin, but eventually luke skywaker saves the universe, restoring freedom and peace.

3. Aliens invade, and suck everyones brains out.

4. War on terror escalates, billions die, but the west wins eventually. At the end of the war Jewish false messiah/Antichrist tries to take over the world and fails

5. Scientists accidently create a virus that reanimates the dead, zombies roam the streets eating peoples brains until B-grade actor finds antidote to virus and saves the world

6. Continued terror attacks, combined with the feeling that the sensationalist religious media are trying to remove peoples freedom of choice produce public backlash against organised religon with angry mobs massacring church goers and trying to destroy any remnants of religion. Society devolves into anarchy because there is no longer anyone who upholds the values of forgivenes, kindness and respect for others that keep a civil society intact. Total anihilation.

7. Monkeys evolve into more intelligent creatures that rebel against their masters and take over the world

8. Sharks evolve legs and run around on land eating everybody.

9. WW4 erupts between freeworld and China at the end China wins and everyone is forced to eat honey chicken, dim sims, fried rice and sweet and sour pork.... mmm..... chinese

10. nothing happens and people just keep making stupid predictions about things that probably will not happen.

Re:Eliza

[Anonymous Coward]

I was 14 when I met Eliza.

"You seem fascinated by my breasts..."

there missing something

[chicks_dig_it]

2010: matt woodcock becomes supreme ruler of the universe, chicks dig it.

Doesn't go far enough...

[fondue]

Sadly, the timeline only predicts as far as 2100, so there is no indication as to when BT will actually enable the majority of their customers access to ADSL services.

Still, the development of cryogenic suspension should give this country's hapless telecoms monopoly victims something to do while we wait to get connected.

www.broadband4britain.co.uk

Fer crap sake

[underpaidISPtech]

I predict that there will NOT be any emotional robots, superior in intellect or strength.

I predict that we will NOT be jaunting to orbit, let alone the Moon, or Mars.

I predict that Ian will continue to make big bucks at BT selling snake oil to gullible execs.

We've been hearing that same tired story of human-like robots since "Robot" made it's way into popular culture. Robots are already here, and they are Us. WE are the robots, semi-autonomous creatures struggling to find purpose in our existence, striving for a more pure state, imprisoned in our shells.

All these memories like tears in the rain...

How can this guy seriously claim human-like robots by 2030? First, there is the technical difficulties of autonomous and sufficiently complex robots. Second, too many dollars go into DVD players and MP3 jukeboxes. We could be exploring space, but the richest citizens of the richest countries of the world want High def TV and satellite sports. feh.

Second, how the hell are we gonna send a manned mission to Mars in 8 years (NASA's current timeline) when we don't even have a base on the Moon? Christ Almighty, we're dinking around in orbit all this time, when we should have been building a test base on the moon. First you build an orbital station, then you build a moonbase, then you see if people don't succumb to fuckin space madness before you fire 5 humans off to Mars for a 3 year minumum round trip.

We have the perfect opportunity to experiment with short-term human habitation in space, and we're farting sround in the high arctic instead.

Sending humans to Mars without the slightest presence on the moon is like sailing for the New World without the slightest idea of how to row across a lake. You can't tell me the US gov't landed men on the fucken moon with a tinfoil go-cart powered by a computer as intelligent as a modern handheld calculator, without a hitch, no loss of life, and successfully returned them to Earth. Bullshit. If there is one reason I'm convinced we never made it to the Moon, it's the fact that we have abandoned it. And now we're just gonna pack up our shit, and blast straight off to Mars? yeah right. Meet your new flight director at NASA, Steven Speilberg.

I dont usually subscribe to conspiracy theory. Aliens, Area51, the Greys, Illuminati, -- whatever. But so help me, I am seriously doubtful about the idea that humankind walked on the moon. Stupid Cold War.

Anyways, predictions like that piss me off to no end. When I was a kid, I really wanted to be an astronaut, I really thought we would be exploring the solar system.

My eyes are open. We will not go to the Moon, we will not go to Mars. We will not have flying cars. We will not converse with Robots, go to vitrual work, have virtual meetings, or have jetpacks. We will not revolutionise agriculture, we will not feed the world, we will not be hit by an asteroid, we will not blow ourselves up in a nuclear holocaust nor will we invent warp drive(sorry to all those that attended Klingon 101).
And most importantly, Jesus is not coming back for a reunion tour.

What will happen is the US will continue its slide into a false democracy, evolving into a policestate-nation. We will drive electric-petrol hybrids, buy electricity from Mexico and Canada, who will later become "members" in a North American economic union, consumerism will replace capitalism, the corporation you work for will own your house, your car, and if they go tits up you're screwed. More R&D money will go into potentially commercially succesful ideas like DVD, Viagra, and SuperTomato© rather than disease research. Fewer businesses. Larger MegaCorps. Less diversity. Less convergence, more incompatibilities. One OS, one point of failure, one company in charge of your computer. One hardware platform, one copyright notice, onetime use, one payment method, 30 different subscriptions, 5 services. Whoops, that's the present.

.NET will be like any other tech, useful, but not as much as the hype said. It will not change the way we compute. P2P will fade away under litigation. The gov't will be bought and sold, IP will rise, copyright more restrictive, and the US will be good at 3 things: pizza, movies and music.
Oh and war. Can't forget war. It's as American as apple pie.

The future is dull. The future is WMA audio in my GPS SUV runnign WinCE, with bratty gun-toting children in the back seat playing HaX-b0x, a wife with orange tan-bed skin and enough plastic to make Barbie blush, hopped up on the the latest diet pills and anti-depressants being hocked by the FDA, while I can't wait to get home to play virtual holo-pr0n with my new Tera Patrick HDVD. Row upon row of 100 year-old people whose bodies refuse to die, while cancer ravages their scientifically enhanced bodies. Millions of chip-enhanced kids attending private schools and getting MBAs while Buddy the Sapien pumps gas for Mr. CEO, chairman of PharmGen, the company that provides memory upgrades and personality-mods. Oops there's a bug in CerebellumNT, please upgrade to service pack 8. Note: some installations of SP8 can cause complete storage failure, and in some cases, hemmhoraging. Please review the README before installation. This hotfix cannot be uninstalled. Young disaffected men from all over the world blow themselves up in public on a regular basis, in some protest of Western Decadence. Office pools bet on how many bodies will go pop in a given week. The new GMC armour-plated urban assualt vehicle is approved by the ATF, soccer moms rejoice. Police now regularly patrol in full combat gear. A new reality-based TV show called "the Running Man".....

total social breakdown in US or Europe. (2020)

[polar red]

Strange, I have the impression that this could happen in US in less than 5 years now, In Europe, that won't happen in the first 20 years.

Re:Too many predictions focused on AI that is far

[Bongo]

A friend of mine said to me: "I didn't believe in God until I worked 1 year in AI. No matter how great an achievement we made, it STILL sucked in comparison"

There's a new book due out in a few months by Ken Wilber, a philosopher and "enlightnened" Zen practitioner (among other things), called "Boomeritis", about a clever geek who wants to work in A.I. He gets into the problem of what is consciousness, which leads him towards those who have traditionally studied this question, like Zen Buddhists etc.

Nanotech Legos?

[azaroth42]

Nanotechnology toys ... 2015
Nanotechnology plants ... 2025

Err, What's a Nanotech plant? Obviously not a factory, so one assumes a very very small technological green thing that lives?

And how do you play with Nanotech toys? Forget vacuuming up the legos! "Have you tidied up your nanotoys yet Johnny?" "One second Mom, I'm still looking for the microscope to find them!"

--Azaroth

Turing would be turning in his grave

[Anonymous Coward]

To think that in a society based so heavily in computers, that so few people truely understand what is necessary to make an AI.

Turing, the man who's theories underpin all of computing as we know it today, mathematically proves that an AI is impossible with the technology that we use for computing.

The 85% are a scam !!!

[Krapangor]

When you look at this paper you see that less than 50% reach the praktical use phase at 2002.
So claiming 85% accurateness is a scam, the "research" and "development phase" doesn't mean anything decent is done. Just some buggers in some labs are working on these topic, it's not secure that there will be any results.
Let's take an example: I'm working at the warp-drive all in my spare time. If he predicted "warp-drive research" at 1991 then we would be "correct".

some timeline

[underpaidISPtech]

"25% of TV Celebrites are synthetic .... 2010"
Umm, I hate to break it to you like this...

"AI teachers in schools....2004"
2 years from now huh?

"AI doctors...2001"
We barely have it now, when did we have it last year?

"85% of American management personnel are knowledge workers....2005"
85% of American Management personnel know how to use Outlook 2005, but still open attachements from unknown sources.

"Creation of The Matrix....2025"
I'll pretend that I didn't actually read that.

Online UK voting vs Online UK

[azaroth42]

On line voting in UK ... 2007
Internet achieves 75% penetration in UK ... 2015

This makes no sense. If Online voting is introduced 8 years before 75%, let alone 100%, of the UK's population is online, How are the other 25+% going to vote?

Scary that this is done by BT, the telco that effectively controls who gets internet access at what price. We see that it's not a priority to them.

--Azaroth

Re:Online UK voting vs Online UK

[Saige]

This makes no sense. If Online voting is introduced 8 years before 75%, let alone 100%, of the UK's population is online, How are the other 25+% going to vote?

Nowhere does the first statement say ONLY on-line voting. I don't see any indication that people cannot vote the normal way from what the prediction said.

and where is Bill?

[deepsky]

The timeline does not mention Microsoft anywhere.
This is open to many interpretations...

• Microsoft has never existed in the first place (see also "creation of the Matrix")
• Microsoft is the AI the report is talking about
• The world has become Microsoft's...

Re:and where is Bill?

[loz]

Actually, on page 22:

"Computer/Chip/Operating System Maker Blackmails Country or World. -- 2000"

loz

My favorite part

[Jebediah21]

Under the section "Robotics":
40% of paid workforce will be women (worldwide) ... 2010

Is he saying that robots will enslave women by paying them? I fail to see what the hell this guy is thinking.

Re:Too many predictions focused on AI that is far

[Bongo]

So he's saying that we'll have self-aware robots in 23 years. This seems pretty unrealistic to me, being that we have yet to design a computer that has demonstrated anything close to human conciousness.

And what is 'consciousness' anyway? There's a hard question in itself. Zen Buddhists spend years asking "Who Am I?", just to get to this question of the basic mystery of how it is that anything is Aware.

One mystic put in something like this: I follow the argument that light travels from the sun, bounces off an object, enters my eye, stimulates my retina, is converted to nerve impulses which travel into my brain....but the explanation stops there. Even if we find little neurons responsable for being stimulated by "lines" or colours, it doesn't explain the "little man inside watching the movie". And if he's watching the movie, who's inside his brain watching the movie that's being made in his brain....? and so on forever....

The philosopher Ken Wilber has pointed out that some A.I. research focusses on modelling concepts... but concepts are only a very late and high development in the brain... there's masses of stuff happening in the brain before you can get anywhere near anything like a "concept".

And on top of that, concepts ocurr IN consciousness. They themselves are not consciousness. They are content. Just like the visual field you are now experiencing is content of consciosuness. Even if a computer could be programmed to give intelligent answers--that's a separate issue to building a self aware machine.

They must be joking

[ZigMonty]

Confessions to AI priest 2004
What christian would confess to something without a soul? I'm sure the bible says something against that.

AI chatbots indistinguishable from people by 95% of population 2005
Not hard as long as it says "You go girl!" or "Jerry, he's sleeping with my brother!" every second sentence.

First artificial electronic life 2006
A bit vague! It could be argued that this has already happened. Note: It doesn't say anything about intelligence.

Software trained rather than written 2006
They just described a neural net.

All government services delivered electronically 2008
Including road maintenance?

AI models used extensively in business management 2010
As opposed to the current situation, where humans never use a computer model to help them make decisions? What are they defining AI as?

Supercomputer as fast as human brain 2010
At doing what?! This one makes no mention of intelligence so what are they talking about? I don't know about you but I personally can't compete with my computer at doing complex maths or searching for information on the net. I certainly can't draw 10s of millions of triangles a second!

Satellite location devices implanted into pets 2015
Here in Australia we already have compulsory microchipping(sp?) of pets for ID purposes. It isn't much of a stretch to put GPS in while you're at it. I vaguely remember New Scientist talking about doing this for the elderly. This is possible today, sort of.

Full direct brain link 2030
Robots physically and mentally superior to humans 2030
This one falls down. If the first happens, how can the second become true? If we can integrate computers into us (I'm assuming that's what it means) then our intelligence level isn't static anymore. Exo-suits would do something similar for physical strength. I guess it could be argued that then we'd no longer be human, but who really cares?

I think I'll leave it there. Don't get me wrong, I love reading stuff like this. Some people in the past have made wild predictions that people like me have knocked back. Years later, they were proved to be right and the people like me looked like idiots. Oh well.

in the series "predictions from wacko's" part II

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.lunarpages.com/endworld/future.htm

predict dis!

[Fred Millington]

I sure as hell wish he could predict the future of my sex-life.

multiple dates for same thing - cobbled together?

[Aragorn379]

Somehow I doubt this is mostly the work of one person. Notice the widely varying state of advancement of certain techs, the bizarre ordering of events, and the multiple dates for the same invention.

Examples:

Materials and Electronic Devices - page 14 - Chips with clock speed of 10GHz - 2003
Processing, memory and storage - page 15 - 10GHz chips 2006
Well, which is it?

Processing, memory, and storage - page 15 - 11 terabytes credit card storage for $50
1 terabyte per cu cm storage density - 2005
Why would I want a 1 terabyte per cu cm storage solution if I could get a 11 terabyte creadit card size solution for $50? And two years earlier to boot.

AI rights -- not so far fetched

[Spoing]

Corporations aren't people though they are legaly treated as 'persons'. They have rights -- some quite substantial and not available to non-corporation persons.

What we are talking about are legal constructs. If a mechanism is created that has it's own motivations, and laws are either created to benifit that mechanism or (more likely) do not restrict that mechanism, it then has 'rights'.

How many people write wills and leave everything to thier pets? If those pets could argue in thier defense, they wouldn't need a human executor. In 20 years, a robot or an AI in any form (say, built into a house), could be granted these freedoms. Once done, it's not a far stretch to use that in a case for direct autonomy -- no will required.

Now, having said that, I doubt that there will be whole nations taken over by rampaging robots. Though, the possiblity that a 'bad' and defiant robot could be created is likely -- more so then a smart one. Depending on AI motivation, such a mechanism could loby for it's own independance or simply ignore people entirely.

Evil capitalist robots

[linzeal]

OMG the thing is ringing the opening bell for the NYSE.

Society: 2006...

[superdan2k]

JonKatz finally gets the hint and quits writing for Slashdot.

(I hope I'm at least 85% accurate.)

A stereotypical slashdot story.

[modipodio]

Human nature and it's relationship with science
is something which fascinates me. Even if you could build some magic floating orb that took care of all a persons food and entertainment / communications needs I am positive that human's would find some way to annoy one another.

Everyday I hear about tech advance x and discovery y but everyday I also hear an unending stream of new's which just makes me sad.Most of the new's which makes me sad is to do with copyright and the efforts of groups to restrict ,(in most cases and in my opinion), inovation , people's rights and in some cases,( in my opinion ), the flow of culture.These news pieces make me sad but I can understand the motivation behind them , I can guess why in most cases the film/music industry is worried about the internet and I appreciate why they would want to restrict what people do.The Things on slashdot which makes me realy sad are some people's comments and the attitude they reflect.

When ever there is a story concerning Theo de Raadt, richard stallman or even noam chomsky. Certain people give out about these characters, they go on and on and on , they spout so much bitterness and bile , but at the end of the day
These commentators, these amazingly knowledgeable
people , have not one productive or constructive criqique to make, they say things like "chomsky is a crazy leftwinger" or "his comments completly missrepresent facts", this is all fine maybe he is completly left wing maybe his comments do the things you say they do ,but I have never heard any one on slashot when critiquing chomsky a) make a constructive comment, b) make specific examples , based on facts he gave/books he wrote/
debates he spoke at / points he made,of why what he said was wrong and or what was wrong with it specifically.

With people like stallman and theo de raddt There may be more specific complaints but still I find little or no constructive commentary all I find in general is people jumping on a band wagon people pissing on these people and making vague complaints which alot of the time basily boil down to "he is an asshole and I do not like him".When people make these comments , when people flame these people after making in some cases no attempt what so ever to find out about the person they are verbally assaulting , to find out what they have done and why they did it , they forget something.They forget that whether you like or disslike these people they contribute A HUGE amount of there time and effert and skill to the public good.

People forget the amount of work theo de raadt does which is freely available , they forget the amount he has given to people and they forget the
huge portion of his life which he has pored into projects like open bsd,no all they can seem to remember is "theo is a dick and he is not nice to his users", all theo's work, all of his efforts is of course in there eyes is secondary to the fact that theo is not particulalry nice to his users, never mind the fact that the people who complain about theo being a dick may not be the best examples of nice polite people who provide constructive advice which actualy help people in there day to day activites.

Then we have people's attitudes to stallman much of which envoles slagging his appearance , calling him a "commie", every dam thing,people
forget the amount of things he has done and the amount he continues to do for the public good
,all they seem to remember is that in certain
circles on slashdot it is fun to take a poke at him never mind the amount of time he devotes to
the cause of free software and his efforts to promote a cause which help's rather than hinders
the majority of people it touches,(if you want to debate the last point please do it in a constructive and informed mannor).

My point is the attitude of people toward's other people and how horribly selfish and inconsiderate people can be ,I believe that no technological advance will really solve this problem ,I think that in many ways it will make this problem worse.I Think Mr pearson should have taken human nature more into account when when he was wrighting his bold predictions for the future.

With out a dought, the western world is going to be completly changed in the next few years by new technology and that technology's social implications, the question in my view is will the way people treat people change? will
leaps and bounds in communications matter a dam if all the majority of people can say is "you're a dick", and or some other negative remark.

Arthur C. Clarke

[Anonymous Coward]

Clarke pointed out that we tend to overestimate what can be achieved in the short term, but to underestimate what can be achieved in the long term. Much of this document falls foul of the former.

Clarke (and Kubrick) predicted, in the late 60's, a manned settlement on the Moon by 2001. Thirty years later, no such settlement. Pearson and Neild here predict a manned settlement on Mars in - oh look - thirty years time...

Orgasmotron?

[kju]

I don't want a future with devices like the Orgasmotron. This would remove the last reasons to fall in love and have real life relationships. Might be the end of the human race.

Re:Orgasmotron?

[lorian69]

Yeah, it'll be just like the old days when everyone almost masturbated us into extinction. Thank god we stopped THAT epidemic.

No, it goes like this

[drew_kime]

Someone goes back into the past and changes some trivial thing. This change cascades to the point that the inventor of time travel doesn't invent it. But at some later point, someone else invents it. But then someone goes back into the past, changes some trivial thing ...

Lather, rinse repeat ...

Eventually, humanity will progress from the dawn of civilization to extinction without the discovery ever having been made. That's the world we're in now.

Re:Too many predictions focused on AI that is far

[divec]

why humanoid? Seems like the current factory robots [...] are doing pretty well without a humanoid design.

Backward compatibility?

Emotional objects, switches etc around home...2007

[Stavr0]

I can't help but notice this reference to HGTTG:

"All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android, reciting the sales brochure about Genuine People Personality

Re:Too many predictions focused on AI that is far

[nathanm]

Thank you for being a voice of reason. Too many geeks just blindly accept by faith that we'll have conscious, self-aware AI soon.

Ian's First Draft

[underpaidISPtech]

Copyright 2002© Ian Pearson

1997 Internet Collapses
2000 Aliens make contact with Earth
2000 Star Wars Episode II released
2001 February has only 28 days
2001 Microsoft develops first sentient software package, called MS AI.
2002 Aliens wage war on Earthlings
2002 Earth conquered, Aliens die from email virus
2003 Apes take over the planet
2003 Barbie is cloned
2003 Sony invents time machine
2004 MS AI 2005 convinces apemen to relinquish power
2005 Ian Pearson goes into rehab to tackle crack addiction
2006 teleportation has been a consumer commodity since 1995, who knew?
2007 AI is achieved, Microsoft sues for prior art
2008 Internet usage reaches 50% of US households
2009 Ian continues to smoke crack
2010 Crack found to be good for you
1897 French inventor discovers the secret to Time travel
2013 Internet reaches 75% US households
2013 Internet reaches record high of 22% of US households
2014 AI marries reanimated Elvis
2015 nanbots acheive person-status, exterminate 95% human population
2016 Matrix is created
2017 Darth Vader spotted at local Walmart
2019 Jesus returns, is really a woman
2020 Batboy found in church in Guatemala, suffers teh stigmata
2021 Grandmother in Florida has X-Ray vision
2022 Peopel live to be 100 years old
2023 Planet Earth blows up
2024 Humans wander galaxy
2025 Al gore invents internet, is of no use, planet earth is gone
2050 God is found to be a small post-op transexual man living in Iowa, is of no use, Planet Earth is gone
2003 Robots attain AI, Bill Gates launches lawsuit from cryo-chamner
2007 I like craack
2022 holo-porn invented, society crumbles
2024 ADSL comes to Britain

Vatican ruled out online confessions

[davidmb]

As reported Here.

But the fact that they had to explicitly rule it out is probably a sign that people wanted to set it up... I wouldn't be surprised if there are unofficial or non-catholic online confessionals in the near future.

Arg

[davidmb]

But the only reason it's not going be created is because it is going to be created? Your conclusion sounds soothing, but I fear it's a big nasty paradox.

Of course the truth is that once you create a time machine, you can only travel back to the point at which the time machine was created. The consequence is that we'll live in peaceful ignorance until someone finally invents one, than bam! All the discoveries ever made happen at once and the world goes truly mental.

read the end...

[lfourrier]

"Products and services described in this publication are subject to availability and may be modified from time to time."

Perhaps a standard BT disclaimer, but funny nevertheless.

I can't wait for these

[biglig2]

I mean, 28 years till I get an internet connection to my brain? Hurry!

Wasn't it Auther C. Clarke who said that if you live into this century you've a good chance of imortality?

holodecks&TV

[caveat]

Holodecks using box room lined completely with polymer screens...2018
Holographic TV...2025
erm...isn't that sort of backwards? i mean, wouldn't it probably work out just a little easier if we come up with say a 36" holographic TV, THEN line the room with them, rather than developing wall-sized holographic screens and then spending seven freakin' years to shrink them? food for thought...

10 GHz???

[zloppy303]

ok... when did you say this 10 Ghz chip is happening?? 2003 (page 14) or 2006 (page 15)??

or is that a side-effect of the time-travel??

(but probably just a little flaw in the AI of the editor :) )

What could it mean?

[pbroderi]

I'm really not sure what some of these predictions could actually mean. Two in particular stand out

AI doctors are retrodicted for 2001 and are placed singificantly before the development of AI pets. This seems to imply the functions of doctors (diagnosis, prescription and beaucratic juggling) are less complex than the functions of pets (barking, defecating in inappropriate places).

I'm futher confused by the possibility of AI priests hearing confession. This implies that a computer will have what it takes to perform sacremental functions. Since, women lack the ability to perform these functions, the author of the list seems to be assuming that certain interesting devices outside the ordninary realm of AI are on the immediate horizon.

--Paul

resources vs. information

[muchandr]

As fashionable as it is, I wouldn't write off
natural resources as a basis of economies just
yet. They'll keep their price at some minimum
level by the virtue of being limited, whereas
informational goods have a tendency to get
awfully cheap because of easy duplication. (note that this does not include professional services provided by humans - a different issue alltogether)

Re:Too many predictions focused on AI that is far

[Gibecrake]

Actually we are seeing humanoid robots now.

http://www.honda-p3.com/

These are pretty unnerving when you see the videos of them in action. What they are missing is any real intelligence, which is taken care of here:

http://www.ai.mit.edu/research/projects/projects .s html

And here:

http://www.ai.sri.com/

And about five dozen other busy places. What we need to make this stuff happen is miniaturization and then incorporation of all of these separate elements.

We apparently even have artificial muscles to hang on our titanium robot skeletons:

http://www.techreview.com/articles/cameron021502 .a sp

Now if we have these pieces today, you don't think in another 23 years, say that again to yourself, 23 years, that we won't be able to figure out how to put all these puzzle pieces together to create a robot that gets the big picture?

I think that is a pretty dead on estimate.

As far as why factory workers for humanoid robots, because as you pointed out, some factory conditions are conducive to a series of robotic arms, but some factory jobs require a bit more dexterity than that. Some dangerous factory jobs would be much better suited for a team of humanoid robots than people. It's all about the flexibility you get from an autonomous humanoid critter than being locked down to a series of arms.

And yes you could make an argument that the human form isn't necessarily the best design for maximum flexibility, but actually this planet disagrees. We are doing what we doing today because it IS currently the best shape, so it would be in our best interest to try to imitate what we know works before we try to do the impossible.

Hey it worked for Microsoft! Ha.

You stupid fucking idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't even read your own damn fucking "evidence". You are a first class idiot.

"Shadow democracy used in community networks"

[smagruder]

Wow. They have predicted the rise of Democracy 2.0 in just 10 years. I had better get crackin! :)

My Favorite Prediction

[ScumBiker]

Political correctness creates new dark age - 2050

It actually appears to be starting now. I really think that the dark ages will be significantly worse that the earlier one(s). 10x population, intelligent non-humans. yikes!

Clueless

[selkirk]

Computers that write most of their own software ... 2005

This guy is clueless.

I like it

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that your own take, or have you seen that one somewhere? I'd like to see some speculative stuff based on that idea.

Re:I like it

[davidmb]

It was based on an article I read ages ago in New Scientist. Basically time runs backwards within the time machine when it's running, so it's impossible to travel to before the machine was started up.

Weren't the robolympics fun?

[samhart]

The predictions mention that there were Robolympics held last year in Japan?

Wow it was accurate! And weren't those Robolympics fun?!

I sure am glad they sorted through the Russian/Canadian skater-bot controversy! Erm... waitaminute....

Re:We have technology to build teleported right no

[Rasta Prefect]

Your examples don't make much sense either. Intel was built on government contracts (the space program). General Electric is first and foremost a defense contractor. IBM and 3M depend on Federal spending for huge shares of their order books.

While these companies do sell to the federal government, the government isn't directly spending the money on research. For the most part these companies are spending what is their own money(Even if the profit was made from something sold to the government it is their own money) on R&D. The government is the largest consumer in the country by far, dwarfing all others. Finding a large corporation that doesn't sell something to them is pretty difficult, it doesn't mean that any R&D they do is automatically government funded.

This guy got 4 Insighful for his reply?

[rzbx]

All he did was say that the guy was "taking the piss" and listed some predictions that he believes no one will take seriously.
Thought the dates are probably wrong, the predictions aren't completely stupid.
Orgasmatron: Why not? Not possible?
Matrix: All depends on what he means by "The Matrix"
Full Direct Brain Link: Now why would this come before "The Matrix"? If I am correct he means "The Matrix" in some close sense of the movie. Now if that is true, then it is electronic. Our brains are not as easy to read or manipulate as electronics are.
Possible Rise of global machine dictator: I don't understsnd "machine dictator" ?
Political correctness creates new dark age: Again, why not? How can it not be taken seriously? Have you read your history books?
Whole generation effectively unable to read, write, think and work: It sure is possible. If you think hard enough, you can imagine all sorts of possibilities that could cause that.
Time travel: I agree. Won't happen.
Faster than light travel: Hmm, it could happen.

He did make a lot of other outrageous predictions though. At the same time, some sound quite real and scary for that matter. The future isn't really that hard to predict if you make vague predictions. Setting specific dates and details is the hard part. For the most part, human history is not a very difficult thing to understand. In many ways, so much is very predictable. Some that understand it want to promote one change and hinder another. Some learn to live with it and do their best to live a happy life, while the rest just get swept along doing the best they can with the little they know.

doom and gloom about AI

[Reverend Gaddy]

It seems that a lot of the /. people are pessimistic about AI emergence. Understandably so. However, it seems to me that this "technology" might come to be as a "Eureka!" type situation- not something that slowly evolves from prior R&D, but something that is conceived of as a whole and is created in an instant- like Faraday's discovery of the Benzine ring via a dream, or Einstein's Theory of Relativity. just my 0.02$ Reverend Gaddy

Boilerplate humor

[Outlet of Me]

The thing I love most about the actual paper is the standard BT boilerplate disclaimer at the end:

"Products and services described in this publication are subject to availability and may be modified from time to time."

:-)

Re:Artificial Life - O/T

[skajohan]

Well, duh, if you happen to win on them they were obviously the best numbers! The "smart non-obvious" numbers would have given you nothing.

Saying that they are the worst numbers is like assuming that there's a special pre-destined day you are going to win the lottery, no matter what the numbers are. It's not like you can blow your once-in-a-lifetime-win-the-lottery-opportunity, is it?

Of course, the "obvious" numbers, like 1-2-3-4-5-6 can be said to have a lower potential reward. But does losing on "high-reward" numbers make you happier?

Ozone hole?

[sfrenchie]

Ozone hole disappears 2050

Ummm? Does this mean that we don't need the kyoto agreement anyways? So Bush was right all along...

The Orgasmatron exists...

[MutantEnemy]

Electrical stimulation of the spine can produce orgasm.
See, for example: this or this.

What about today?

[asv108]

I remember like 7 years ago that by now we were all going to be using JAVA based network computers using PUSH technology such as pointcast. Whatever happen to that?

I think he's fooled you guys.

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, think about it. Your putting together a futurist report and you include items from this and next year. Don't you think you'd check to ensure that your not going to look a fool?

I think he has on purpose chosen items for this and next year that are either already here, or are more than 90% likely to happen. Then when you attempt to take the piss he can point out where your expectations are too low by pointing out where they already exist.

Having read through the short term items, I can recognised many of them as already happening. Take for example one chip, multi-speaker voice recognition. He works for BT for god's sake, he know's what's around - and provided you don't want total accuracy, its already here.

For those of you that want to suggest that the later items are all mad, particularly the AI ones, you need to do a bit more reading to see that he generally has a good basis for most of them (excepting the jokes). For example the plastic tank already exists....

Who's the dumb one now ?

strange days are here

[Anonymous Coward]

i just hope that something like the movie "Strange Days" will happen. I need something to do besides acid when i am 60+ years old.

life expectancy reaches 100 in 2020

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this going to happen after all the nuclear accidents, environmental disasters, biotech mistakes and alien invasions that he predicted happening at an earlier date

Re:life expectancy reaches 100 in 2020

[Anonymous Coward]

All I have to say about this guys is, What a hlupak. All his predictions are a bunch of locne maso.

"asteroid diversion used as weapon - 2040"?!

[No Such Agency]

I'm not sure why they bothered to extend their predictions past 2040 then...

Also, no mention of a space elevator. Kind of odd, considering some of the wild claims made about AI and nanotechnology. I suspect we'll be able to build a "skyhook" before any AI's are getting their PhD's...

Re:We have technology to build teleported right no

[Billy_Ray]

With tax cuts going on right now, and about 70 percent of all our tax dollars maybe 80 percent now that Bush is president and 911 happened, all going to the Military, and very little going to science, its not that technology doesnt exsist today, its just too expensive to bring out of the lab.

Ummm, most (or at least a lot of) of the cool technology we have today comes from Defense Dept funded research. Computing, communication, and transportation breakthroughs are often in the hands of defense or intelligence before the general public. The space program also brings advances, but the line between "space program" and "defense" is sort of blurring. With all this in mind, complaining that technology is not coming about because money is being spent on defense seems not so logical.

By the way, if we could build teleport stuff now, don't you think that Defense types would be the first to throw their money behind it? Imagine our troops teleporting into Bin Laden's Cave and shooting him before he had a chance to question if he was seeing some kind of figment of his imagination.

A pack of generalizations == high success rate

[TheLastUser]

Still fun to think about. Some comments:

First net war between cyber-communities 2007
Ever heard of IRC? This kind of thing has been happening for years.

Cassini reaches Saturn & releases Huygens lander into Titan's atmosphere 2004
Considering that this thing is already enroute to Saturn, this seems likely to transpire on time, unless the Klingons nab it.

Global barter sub-economy 2012
e-gold.com

Neighbourhood intranets 2005
Most people don't even talk to their neighbors, do they really want them behind their firewall?

Hydrogen fuelled executive jets (cryoplanes) 2005
The aviation industry is pretty slow to incorporate new technologies, look how long it took to get GPS authorized for instrument approaches. I'd be surprised if a hyrogen powered aircraft we to be for sale in 2005. Even if such a thing could be made and licensed, no body would buy it because there would be nowhere to fuel it. I would concede a prototye engine is flown by 2005.

Faster than light travel 2100
The best predictions are those that cannot be disproved until after the death of the predictor.

Some are interestingly true.

[netsharc]

Some of his predictions for 2002 are interestingly already true. He predicted software in Lego (p. 12) and multiuser-speech-recognition (p. 13) which was featured in an MP3 player article somewhere in Slashdot

Not to mention...

[Aexia]

Rise of an American Dictator -- 2000

Try this ...

[Charles Dexter Ward]

Why dont you try GrafittiX?

Oh but an AI has a *digital* interface...

[Kjella]

The AI level is so far above the storage level, that the AI would probably not interface to the storage any differently from how you or I would. In other words, it would be little different from a person with an MP3/DVD player.

Oh but you can argue that the data in it's storage banks would be the same as the storage of your brain, and as such an integral part of the brain. After all you remember the movie too, just not so perfectly. The question is if the perfect electronic memory of an AI could/would/should be protected along the same lines as the copy in your brain, I haven't heard anyone suggest to brainwash you yet. You'd hardly claim the DVD player is connected in the same way.

Secondly an AI would still be a lightning calculator, once it has grasped the fundamental meaning of those high-level words and found that the property he's interested in is their product. I too spend time thinking if I get asked to multiply MCXXIV with DLXXVII, and I need to convert those to another format to do the calculation and convert it back to provide an answer, but the calculation itself takes the same speed.

Re:Oh but an AI has a *digital* interface...

[The Pim]

Oh but you can argue that the data in it's storage banks would be the same as the storage of your brain, and as such an integral part of the brain. After all you remember the movie too, just not so perfectly.

But the ability to recall (and copy) the movie perfectly (or near perfectly) is a big part of the issue. That's why the "entertainment" industry is making a bigger stink over MP3s and DVDs than over audio and video casettes.

If people could access perfect memories of songs in their brains and perform brain-to-brain transfers, then I would be worried about Valenti lobbying for lobotomies.

Re:We have technology to build teleported right no

[HanzoSan]

IF our military did have it i'm sure its classified and we wouldnt know about it for about 20-30 years.

And just because we have it doesnt mean its safe enough to teleport people, its safe enough to teleport some weapons though.

Information will be sold in the USA

[HanzoSan]

We'd have to buy it unless we want to send thousands of translators to other countries.

Re:Information will be sold in the USA

[susano_otter]

Why would we have to do that? Oh, I get it. The idea is that this information will be segregated from the Internet, preventing free access to it from anywhere in the world, right? And China, with its larger population, would be able to educate and train a larger number of "valuable idea-having" people. Those ideas would become China's primary resource, and they would restrict access to those ideas, in order to generate revenue. I guess that makes sense. I'd like to see how China manages to breed more innovative, profitable minds than other countries do. Quantity alone doesn't equal dominance.

Don't try to tell me what I'm saying.

[jcr]

You're saying that "Nike, as a business, has no responsibility to its employees except to get maximum productivity out of them with minimal compensation.

I said nothing of the kind, and you know it. Nike has an obligation to fulfill whatever contractural terms it has undertaken. It does *not*, however, have an obligation to distribute its earnings to the satisfaction of its critics.

-jcr

Correction

[benspionage]

My apologies, that should obviously read:

"If entropy is constantly increasing then eventually we get the point where there is total disorder and then what?"

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

shut up!

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate you, i hate you all, leave me alone, RMS is gay, Theo de Raadt ate my balls, who the fuck is noam chomsky?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Strong AI?

[ebyrob]

so basically I think strong AI is so obviously incorrect that it's laughable

How can strong AI be "incorrect"? Does that mean humans aren't intelligent? I think most people would agree that human level intelligence is something humans have not even come close to replicating. Perhaps that was your point?

and you hook those together exactly the same way that real neurons are hooked together ... you could say that you've replicated human consciousness and intellect.

And I could respond that I'll believe you've actually done it when your result passes the Turing test. Turing's whole point, and I think he made it quite well, was that regardless of what you throw into your black box he's got a test that, administered properly, can show whether strong AI has been achieved for all practical purposes.

Of course, with today's techno-frenzy, the thing I worry most about "Turing" tests is that they seem to purposely dumb down expectations in order to make it look like progress is being made. "electronic" pets are a good example. All gene splicing aside, I haven't seen a toy that comes close to replacing my cat. Further, I'll believe Deep Blue is as smart as a human grand master at chess when he enters tournament play as a novice and earns the title properly. Until then, I'll continue to believe I witnessed Kasparov self distructing, rather than some feat of AI.

Hrm.

[ionpro]

Last I checked, the United States and her free allies had won the Cold War.

Wait, let me check again.

Yep, we still won.

Re:We have technology to build teleported right no

[the_2nd_coming]

that seem hard to belive since they are preparing to go to war with pakistan and have built up a neuclear force.

perhaps in the last few years they have spent smaller amounts on the millitary, but back in the socialist days, they wewre big on millitary.

NOOOOooooo!!!

[gnovos]

So what you are saying is my excellent solution won't work? I proposed this:

Fire off your particle knowing neither the speed nor the location. Then pick a totally random location, and fire a laser beam (or however you find the locations of particles) through every region of space EXCEPT that place. If it hits something, then you start over. If it hits nothing then you pick yet another random position a little further down the track. Again, if something gets hit, start over, if not, then you are done. You can prove exactly where a particle is and how fast it's moving, becuase you have tested everywhere that the particle is NOT. Logic will tell us, in a set of only A, B, and C, if it is neither A nor B, it must be C.

Of course, it would take an unfathomably long time for this to work, but if it did, just once, then you have Heisenburg's scrany little neck in a headlock!

Re:NOOOOooooo!!!

[poemofatic]

heh.

Well, although I'm not qualified to judge your thought experiment (I'd have a physics degree except I didn't, uh, take any labs), I don't see how you are measuring anything except the position of your particle.

Unless, of course, you mean to fire these lasers continuously everywhere all at once, and measure speed in terms of real time tracking. I think what you would find then is that, when the results of all of the "hits" are viewed on some (3d -- ofcourse) viewer, the particle appears as a kind of "cloud" which drifts through space, spreading out until ultimately it fills whatever container your experiment is in. -- i.e. there are several postions and speeds at the same time.

This is assuming that your laser doesn't interfere with the particle in any significant way.

I say write it up and ask for a grant. The department of energy has some decent lasers and plenty of cash.

Re:We have technology to build teleported right no

[gnovos]

Hmmm...Korea and Taiwan throwing "Trillions" into nano tech? Korea's GNP for 2000 was approximately $515 billion dollars, Taiwan's was $363 billion. Somehow, I don't think either of these countries has "trillions" to throw at nanotech. Yes, they're investing, but not on that scale.

Trillions of WON, which in US dollars, comes to maybe $3.42...

These guys are nuts.

[billcopc]

I don't quite get it. Why are they making predictions for 2001 when the paper was released in late November ? That's almost saying "In less than 5 weeks, someone smart will have their idea stolen again."

I'm especially alarmed by the claim that we would be able to fire off sound to any specific point in space (space being restricted to one's immediate quarters). Well, I've got my hands into programming and we're not even near that kind of control, the best we have is glorified Dolby 7.1, which can simulate sound _ORIGINATING_ from virtually anywhere within the speakers' area, but not just magically appearing out of nowhere without an apparent source.

Criticism aside, what is the motivation behind these things ? Do they win bets or something ? :) Here goes: I predict that the bank will start stalking me, and as a result I will declare bankruptcy before turning 23. Ok, what do I win ?

2024....

[Anonymous Coward]

Much to early for Britain to get DSL.

It's even possible that if you blow the Earth, the only country to survive to be Britain is quite exact, as they don't seem to live in the same dimension as us...

This country seems to be a concentrated USA... Lots of shit, lots of misbehavior and a tendency to get on their neighboors nerves...

GOD I love this Channel in between us :)

85%...= Murphys Law !

[da5idnetlimit.com]

He'll get the hint.

Now don't expect too much for the rest of your prediction 8)