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

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...

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.

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

Earliest potential occurrence

[Nicolas MONNET]

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

What makes the first one potentially easier? I wonder.

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?

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

[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: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.