Slashdot Mirror
Christmas in 2050
Makarand writes "A robotic kitchen assistant will help you with the Christmas
meal preparations while you recieve instructions and monitoring assistance in real time from information systems for the cooking.
Thanks to progress in biology and nanotechnology, the molecular processes
needed to convert raw materials into turkey will be understood sufficiently
well to make a good artificial turkey for the vegetarians.
This is what we
can expect this time in 2050 says Ian Pearson, BT's futurologist who is paid to dream,
in this BBC News article.
Absent family will join the celebrations
virtually. There might be technology allowing us to read each
others minds and being able to know what others are thinking may
not always add peace and harmony to the celebrations.
However on the upside, it will make charades a whole lot easier you will never get unwanted Christmas presents.
Lastly, just as this Christmas was hijacked by a consumption fever,
so too in 2050, Christmas will be all about presents."
We were hearing about this in the 1940's. Sooo where's our jet packs, personal helicopters, and automated kitchens?
Seriously, I think the people that dream up this stuff reduce the time to market by a factor of at least three. The dreams are great and all, but obviously not realistic.
funny munging
Will we even remember what half this crap is in 2050?
When I was a kid in the '50s, the futurists predicted routine space travel by now, commuting by flying automobiles, the hyrdrogen economy, copious nuclear power production, intelligent robots, oh - and the end of the world by nuclear war.
Hmmm...
And they missed the information age, microchips, the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, the air bag in cars, AIDS, velcro and genetic engineering.
So much for futurists.
The only good weather is bad weather.
New technology is far more likely to be very sensible, merely adding more "grunt" to what we have already, with a few sub-innovations here and ithere. As a people we are already discovering what we want; Fast data communications, medcine, digitalization, AI (a huge umbrella), time savers, entertainment etc.
Let's start being more specific, choose certain already established technology and predict where it will go. All tyhe best technology evolves from working with what we have. We should try and built the bridges before we try to cross them.
*sigh* I've began to sound like a whining, ranting Slashdotter more every day.
What makes a man want to be a mouse? (Python's Flying Circus)
It's amusing to see this sort of thing. Implicit are assumptions made about how current behavior will not change, but will itself be applied, or adopted wholesale, to new technology.
m l getting ready to give a hearty "heave-ho,ho'ho" to most of the predictions in the reported article.
This is, in fact, the reverse of what happens.
We saw this sort of thing in the 50's with predictions about vacuum cleaner robots, almost always accompanied by an image of a very happy woman (assumed to be a housewife). No one could imagine the Women's Movement just one decade hence.
We will (see Kurzweil) experience ever increasing rates of change in technology over the next 50 years; along with that will be slower (but faster than linear) changes in human behavior. The latter are the *really* hard predictions.
One nice change might be to find a way to do away with the compulsive consumption (the latter word used to mean both "using things up" and "deadly disease") that defines our most popular holiday (in the West), and turn it into something more functional, useful, and fulfilling. (btw, all the latter adjectives imply massive behavior change as well, which might happen as the developed world begins to learn the lesson about what 'enough' is).
In keeping with the season, here's 'Santabot' http://mywebpages.comcast.net/ctrevas/santabot.ht
In every example you gave, they all had a quantity that you are measuring, such as price or megahertz. It should be abundantly clear that innovation of new products doesn't fit this model, since there is no way to score it. Also you are only able to measure stable activities and innovation isn't stable, but veyr chaotic.
Sorry, I don't believe the future is going to be bright and rosy, and that all positive indicators will get better.
Realistic predictions...
The ozone hole gets significantly worse causing massive ecological changes. This causes social unrest in some countries and cities sparking several desperately fought wars.
Critical resources diminish. Technology has been developed to squeeze the dregs from old wells, but there are severe shortfalls. Nuclear energy is predominant energy source.
US continues to lose technological capability to east-asia.
Collapse of US educational establishment.
Violence in US streets becomes much worse. Police forces nationalized.
Honestly, what is the point of even mentioning a time so far ahead of us... obviously it has been proven that we aren't exactly realistic when describing the future... not to mention the only things that ever seem to get mentioned are the economic/technological aspects of the future... what about the arts, what about peoples' attitudes.. these things all change drastically in such a great amount of time.. which makes it nearly impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy what the future will be like.. so why not live for the moment instead?
You're nothing; like me.
Strangely enough, the Hindu far-right also talks of Hindu festivals such as Deepavali, Dussehra becoming extinct in the face of relentless evangelisation from the Christian far-right. And they, indeed, echo the Muslim far-right's concerns over young Muslim girls not wearing hijab, eating non-haleem meat, not celebrating Id-ul-Fitr with "proper" gaiety...
Face it; it's not just (underground real) Christians under "threat".
More than mere navel gazing.
...by feeding it to a small turkey, until said turkey is big enough to eat.
A real "advance" would be the growth of free range and organic farming -- doing away with industrial farming techniques that involve shutting animals into crates, cramming them with chemical- and antibiotic-laden feed, and generally turning them into objects instead of living beings.
Many people who now object to eating meat might change their minds, if they felt that the animals they consumed were raised in a healthy manner and treated humanely.
I eat some meat, but try to steer clear of the more factory-farmed stuff in favor of organic/free-range products. It's preferable in so many ways: hygeinically, nutritionally, ethically, etc.
That's right, all of the people of the world. FOr, while we don't have Russian communism anymore, there's still China. There's still nuclear-war style tension in the world, and now it's swept under the rug. At least during the cold war it was a fear the government couldn't avoid (so they exploited it). American Imperialism is at it's worst ever, and getting worse every day, and the American Police State is getting closer. As a result of American Imperialism, we now have a "war on terrorism" to replace the *lost* "war on drugs" (not that I'm saying we did the wrong thing and the terrorists are right, I just think that the war on terrorism is the same political ballgame that the war on drugs was, and may well be used in a catalystic fashion to bring on the police state) It won't be too long before Russa will be fighting us again in a cold war, and they'll be the ones fighting for freedom (or so the press will read, anyway).
Of course, my predictions have as much validity as the article's. :)
Like what I said? You might like my music
I found most of the projections timid.
The "kitchen assistant" stuff is largely available in component form (mixers, ovens, etc. that can sync to a recipe and will tell the chef what to put in when, monitor quantities of ingredients, turn the oven on to a defined time/temperature, etc.) NOW. Ambitious would be to project that we'll have fully automated kitchens. That can be done in today's technology, though not in a form that'll fit a household kitchen. In the 2050 fast food restaurant, you'll be able to get things ranging from the current menu to anything available at the 5 star restaurants of today, but fast food restaurants will have disappeared as a separate category whose memory will linger only in brand names. Restaurants with human cooks and service will be considered superpremium places and will have prices to match.
"there will be screens lining the wall."
The price of flat-panel display technology is dropping and the availability is increasing. OLED is screen-printed, not vacuum deposited.
Do you really think that videophones that can be attached to the network aren't going to be available for the price of a cheap one-piece deskphone now, and that the problems building a Net appliance that'll be secure and "Just Works" and of universal broadband availability won't be solved in 48 years?
With the exception of thought recording and transference hardware, everything discussed is in either research or early pre-alpha. It is hardly the author's fault you haven't been paying attention, most of what's in the article has been bloglinked from here.
The problem with this kind of futurism is that the futurist considers the future to be a linear extension of the present... while his predictions might be accurate, they look more like 2012 than 2050 to me.
The problems with a robotic household all-purpose servant that can use human tools will be solved by then, but people may be so used to intelligent point-solution household appliances (automated vacuum cleaners, etc.) that nobody will care.
The writer doesn't deal with space at all. One prediction I'm certain of. Either the human race will be exploiting the Solar System as a whole by then or nobody will have pleasant Xmases by then, people will be too busy suffering the kind of deprivations that go with cultures in a state of permanent war, in this case, over who gets enough of the Earth's dwindling resources of materials required to sustain technological society in order to keep one. I'm not talking about oil here, by then, we won't have a technological culture burning oil for fuel. That's why auto manufacturers are converting their assembly lines over to high-efficiency or fuel-cell vehicles. Even Toyota, who's going over to superefficient hybrid engines says that the vehicles are intended for easy conversion to fuel cells.
However, some dreams are less likely than others. The problem with a personal jet pack is sort of obvious, a device that has to provide all its lift as well as forward motion via reaction sucks up a hell of a lot of fuel.
Will we ever find the exceptions or reinterpetation of physical law that'll make a starship possible? I certainly don't know. Check the NASA "Warp Drive When" site for their Advanced Propulsion project for the latest.
Tech Public Policy stuff
"good artificial turkey for the vegetarians"
Good heavens, do you really think most vegetarians WANT artificial turkey? Maybe those who changed during their life "miss" meat, but those of us who have NEVER eaten it (not for the past 150 years in my case as a 4th generation vegetarian) it's not something we would ever contemplate.
The WORST sort of vegetarian food is that which is made to look, feel and taste like meat. Unfortunately, that seems to be what most people think of when they try to prepare vegetarian fare.