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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."
So what does all these Popular Science-like predictions have to do with AMD?
MAKE YOUR TIME
Zager Evans
....(fading...)
In The Year 2525
In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may find
In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do, and say
Is in the pill you took today
In the year 4545
Ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes
You won't find a thing chew
Nobody's gonna look at you
In the year 5555
Your arms are hanging limp at your sides
Your legs got not nothing to do
Some machine is doing that for you
In the year 6565
Ain't gonna need no husband, won't need no wife
You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube
In the year 7510
If God's a-comin' he ought to make it by then
Maybe he'll look around himself and say
Guess it's time for the Judgement day
In the year 8510
God is gonna shake his mighty head
He'll either say I'm pleased where man has been
Or tear it down and start again
In the year 9595
I'm kinda wondering if man is gonna be alive
He's taken everything this old earth can give
And he ain't put back nothing
Now it's been 10,000 years
Man has cried a billion tears
For what he never knew
Now man's reign is through
But through the eternal night
The twinkling of starlight
So very far away
Maybe it's only yesterday
In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may find
In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do or say
Is in the pill you took today
... but when i saw it, it was on a "Popular Science" short from 1960 about how we'd be living in 1990. :P
As I believe Scott Adams has pointed out, predictions of future technological advances usually miss the unintended side effects. For example, the growth of Internet and the World Wide Web has brought quick access to vast amounts of information and knowledge, but has also brought us junk e-mail, pop-ups, patent abuses (Amazon). So what will Christmas 2050 bring? Here are a couple of random thoughts...
Currently kids have to wait to open their presents while dad checks his digital camera|video camera. In 2050, they'll be waiting while he hooks up everyone's head-mounted stim-sim recorders - "to capture the moment."
There's been talk lately of "intelligent paper" and "flexible displays." Extrapolating this forward, I'd expect your Christmas presents in 2050 to require you to watch a commercial before you can open them.
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.
I thought a good chunk of vegetarians were that way more because of the health benefits of not eating meat. Creating a perfect artificial turkey would still come with all the side effects of eating real ones.
Guess this could possibly help out the extreme vegans though, who don't want anything that came from processed animal products at all - assuming these 'molecular processes' work on 100% non-animal products.
Oh well, futurists are always amusing.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Well, some scientists and engineers -are- vegetarian, for a start, but I think the technology is under development mostly for the increased efficiency it promises. Growing wheat to feed animals, no matter how callously you are prepared to treat them, nor how inventively you reclaim 'usable' parts, requires vast amounts of time, space, energy and cash compared to growing the nice parts of animals directly in tanks of goop.
And then there's the potential for creativity, such as chimeric meat, extinct meat, fictional meat, and, er, forbidden meat..
IMHO, the problem isn't labor losses through technological employment, it's the inability of society to catch up with technology. Or rather, technology has been improving so fast lately that the job market hasn't caught up with it yet.
First a new technology comes out, or an old technology becomes affordable to everyone (the internet). Next we see a bunch of hiring in that sector. Next we see a crash, and the previously fast growing sector is in a labor crunch, dumping staff left and right.
Also, overpopulation MUST be a contributing factor to the job shortages at this time. Our food methods are efficient enough to keep us all alive (for now, and I'm ignoring the countries that are still having serious hunger problems because many of them have become political balls in our own country and I'd prefer not to approach this subject at this time). Therefore, we do not need hunters. What do hunters do now? Well, they get diagnosed AD&D, er, ADHD, given drugs and spend the rest of their lives as losers living with their parents. But I digress.
When a robot does the work, someone gets paid to make the robot, somehow. Sure, a group of robots might push out cars faster than a group of people, but who builds the robots? Obviously another assembly line packed with robots. So "building" now becomes what "engineering" used to be, and the thug labor that would've done the job before has to do something else. But what?
Therein lies the problem. We don't have enough jobs to go around, but we definitely have too many people. I certainly don't wish suffering upon anybody, but perhaps some mass-killing machine would help. :)
Anyway, many of our labor problems would be solved if we entered a true state of space exploration. When overpopulation pressures hit Europe, they had the fortune of re-discovering America to relieve the pressure. Japan went to war in the '30's because of their overpopulation, and technology has helped to alleviate their problem. But there's literally no place left for us to go, unless we start building underwater or on Antarctica (problematic when the surface altitude changes seasonally, but possible).
So the magical solution to all of our problems is technology, but only insofar as technology helps us to enter either a new period of expansionism or a massively destructive war.
Which one do you *want* to have?
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When robots are doing all the menial & skilled labor, and your 'nanoreplicator' is producing all your food and any physical object you could desire, and AI has replaced your programming job :) , well, that'll be the day that WELFARE isn't a derogatory term....... (even though a WORK ETHIC will still be deeply ingrained in many people)....... oh, and we'll have to kill all the landlords so we can live rent-free and shit on each others free property.
--
Power to the Peaceful
Near as I can tell, it's a resource problem there. If we can get under the oceans safely we might have a shot at mining underneath the oceans, or something like that. The advantage to going to space is there's a reasonable chance we'll get raw materials there to continue our expansion. Going to the ocean's surface doesn't give us that, unfortunately. NOt that it won't help, but it will further sap existing resources.
After that point, yeah, there's space, but rockets probably can't cheaply blast people off Earth faster than they're being born
For this I refer you to Heinlein, but I forget which book he discusses this in (it might well be multiple books). It's not so important to save everybody on the earth right now, it's important to get some good minds and bodies off the planet in an autonomous fashion. The earth can kill itself, but the race will live on. This is something people tend to overlook when discussing these problems. It's just not important how many people leave compared to how many are being born, it's only important to get enough people out there that the race survives.
However, if the race survives but the earth still dies, we haven't prevented the suffering. But first let's deal with the survival problem, then we'll deal with the suffering problem. Can't end suffering, but with any luck we might well be able to prevent foreseeable suffering.
Like what I said? You might like my music