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...

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?

[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?

[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?

[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!

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.

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:Electronic lifeforms.

[daniel_isaacs]

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

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...

[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...

[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...

[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

[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...

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.

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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

[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

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

[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

[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

[volsung]

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

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

[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!

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...

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.

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.

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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[account_deleted]

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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:Electronic lifeforms.

[nomadic]

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

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[account_deleted]

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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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[account_deleted]

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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"

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

[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

[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: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: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.

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

[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

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.

[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.

[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.

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

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.

[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.

[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.

[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

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.

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

[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?

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

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: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: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.

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

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!

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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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?

[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]

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. :)

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.

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

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: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:Most of this sounds unlikely..

[sconeu]

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

Re:Time travel invented ... 2075

[ackthpt]

More like,

2075: Time Travel invented

2002: Time Travel invented, again

Re:Electronic lifeforms.

[Colin Bayer]

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

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.

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.

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.

Old news...

[Nick Smith]

"25 % of TV celebrities synthetic: 2010".

I think we passed this milestone some years ago....

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!

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

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.

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???

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.

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.

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!

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: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.

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.

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

[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

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

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.

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: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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Track record

[ahde]

how come there isn't any link to his highly accurate previous timeline?

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!

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:Electronic lifeforms.

[mystran]

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

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:Electronic lifeforms.

[Alsee]

Microfortnights

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: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

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
  

Time Travel.

[popeyethesailor]

I bet this guy reached here from 2075.

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".....

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

Re:[ Off topic ] Re:Too many predictions...

[nathanm]

Or now, it's Boeing.

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.

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?

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.

[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: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.

"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!

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.

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?

"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...

Not to mention...

[Aexia]

Rise of an American Dictator -- 2000

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: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

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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...

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"