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?
So what does all these Popular Science-like predictions have to do with AMD?
MAKE YOUR TIME
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.
Why not be nice and give gifts to people who need/deserve them throughout the year?
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
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)
There might be technology allowing us to read each others minds...
Great... I can envision myself being bankrupted the first time I get a song stuck in my head for an entire day-- because I'm sure the RIAA will buy the laws to make them privy to my thoughts, and will demand a licensing fee for each separate instance that I thought about the song.
~Philly
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
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.
But will he look like Robin Williams?
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
Virtual Hot Grits will be the to-get gift of the season.
Linux will be ready for the desktop, but all the desktops will have shrunk to fit in a pill that you swallow.
The entire B*ush family will have died from a drug overdose.
Cheney's heart will continue beating in a small bell jar at the McDonalds Intel Smithsonian.
Michael Jackson will have transparent skin, and have Liz Taylors uterus 'installed' to give birth to an endless stream of monkeys.
Music will be beamed directly into your head, and tinfoil hats make a fashion comeback.
Steven Speilbergs 'Taken' will be on its final installment.
The music industry finally disposes with allusion and inference, and two new acts hit the stage: Britney Bigtits and the boy band "Humpin' Yer Daughters"
Slashdot's Karma will actually apply to real life, and trolls are forced to live underground, cracking human bones for the tasty marrow inside.
Reality shows will move into your own home, with prizes for the 'best'(dysfuntional) family.
The first frozen dead guy is revived, and by an incredible twist of fate, is named 'Fry'.
Dick Clark will be suspended in ammniotic fluid. Just for the hell of it.
The U.S., long since disbanded for mismanagement, will relocate to Kamchaka, and attempt to defend all those borders.
Steven King will be found dead in his home. Even if you didn't like his books, you have to admit the affect he had on late 20th century literature.
Cmdr Taco's daughter will run Slashdot, and in hopes of giving her a better life than he had, he will buy her a dictionary chip.
Go Carts will still be fun, but pale in comparison to GyroCarts which will be super strong, cool and powerful.
Soviet Russia will be a new Disney/AOL/TimeWarner/Microsoft/RedHat theme park, where the attractions ride YOU. Ok. It's a whorehouse.
Steve Balmer will live his dream, starring in "Gorillas in the Mist: Lard of the Jungle"
Grand Theft Auto 2050 is released. It's not a game anymore.
Duke Nukem (We Told Ya!) is finally released, and it like totally blows.
And there is good new for vegetarians, with turkey dinner being artificial, thanks to progress in biology and nanotechnology.
Apparently scientists will by then have understood the molecular processes needed to convert raw materials into turkey sufficiently well to make a good replica.
...does anybody care about vegetarians that much??
He so totally forgot to mention shamanic magic, orks, and the Matrix.
At least there will still be trolls, regardless of what happens.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
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.
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.
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.
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.