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

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.

Earliest potential occurrence

[Nicolas MONNET]

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

What makes the first one potentially easier? I wonder.

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: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.