Slashdot Mirror
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.
Well, at least 85% of them.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
"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...
Once you've built a time machine, you can go back in time and hand yourself the blueprints. Piece o' cake.
Honesty. Loyalty. Kindness. Laughter. Generosity. Magic!
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!
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Great, now we accidently kill the wrong process and we become murderers.
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.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
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"
The real question is will the AI list the PhD prominently in its slashdot sig?
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
If you have the time travel, then you could always go forward in time to 2100, and bring back the secret of FTL travel...
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
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
2075: Time Travel invented
2002: Time Travel invented, again
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"25 % of TV celebrities synthetic: 2010".
I think we passed this milestone some years ago....
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.
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.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS