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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.
And how exactly does that get defined? Has anyone got a link to that '91 set of predictions?
Carousel is a lie!
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.
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.
student of animation and the fine arts
Never mind rights for "elecronic" life forms. I'm hoping Humans still have rights in 2020.
- Dan I.
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Security Hardened Linux Distribution
Available for purchase
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!
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.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
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.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Time travel invented ... 2075
... 2100
Faster than light travel
What makes the first one potentially easier? I wonder.
"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...
Have fun...
1 06.pdf
1 06.html
PDF - http://liquid.student.utwente.nl/files/mirrors/WP
HTML - http://liquid.student.utwente.nl/files/mirrors/WP
Be advised, an easier-to-read list is available at groupbt.
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.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Great, now we accidently kill the wrong process and we become murderers.
Or how about this:
2008: Mujahideen overthrow most western-aligned governments in mideast. Oil production comes to a complete standstill. World economies collapse.
2009: Rain falls for first time on Arakkis.
2011: Americans burn sheafs of "future predictions" to keep from freezing to death.
2013: Americans all starve because robotic pets are not edible.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Well, I suppose it'd make spam a bit less pointless, and imagine if Outlook is still up to it's old tricks..
"I SEND YOU THIS ORGASM IN ORDER TO HAVE YOUR ADVICE"
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.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
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.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
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?
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
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
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
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
1000 monkeys at 1000 type writers code perfect operating system: 2010
CowboyNeal becomes world president due to Slashdot poll becoming legally binding: 2014
Mozilla 1.0 released: 2018
Timelines of the Future proven inaccurate: 1823
99% of Slashdot comment submitters use "Preview" button before submitting: 2793
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
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
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
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?
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.
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.
Why?
2075: Time Travel invented
2002: Time Travel invented, again
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
"25 % of TV celebrities synthetic: 2010".
I think we passed this milestone some years ago....
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.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
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.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
Off-the-wall? His sequencing is downright wacky. He's got pie-in-the-sky stuff that nobody knows how to even think of approaching, happening later in the week. And then he mis-extrapolates mundane trends way off into the declining years of the universe.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
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
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."