BT's Predictions for the Future

Saluton_Mondo writes "BT describes the future as looking "ever more exciting each year"... you won't be surprised if you read their white paper on a timeline of technological development in various aspects of human culture, running up to about 2100. It's a bit out of date, but still pretty funny. Some are reasonable predictions, like the introduction of ID cards in the UK by 2010, or the rise of an American dictator in 2000. Others are just funny, like an orgasm via e-mail in 2010, or a security Barbie which searches for lost offspring. I'll not even mention the emergence of the Borg in 2040... see what you think."

Comments

obligatory

[mOoZik]

Looks like they didn't predict it would be a good idea to upgrade their servers.

hello?

[_UnderTow_]

"I'll not even mention the emergence of the Borg in 2040."

Isn't that what you just did?

Re:hello?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about those of us who are GASP! non-religious? Doesn't this nation under stupid deity bullshit make anyone else sick?

Or when I go to a public event and they sing Stupid Deity Bless America. I want to puke. There is nothing more unpatriotic then lifting religious bullshit higher than our great country.

Now, as a responsible American, I accept that I'll have to hear this stupid bullshit at venues like Football games, etc. But, I do not want my children brainwashed by this stupid fucking pledge (slightly offtopic for the thread, but the same). And I don't want them pressured into putting their hands together (or whatever) and saying or thinking witch-doctor incontations (sp?) because their freinds' superstitious parents (and country for that matter) do. There will come a time when they can decide for themselves, but not in school non-religious people (like me) pay for too. I can't tell their kids what to do in school, so it's only logical to pursue the least offensive option, which is

"KEEP YOUR FUCKING SUPERSTITIONS TO YOURSELF".

I think our wacko president needs to heed that too.

Re:hello?

[Red Rocket]

...my children cannot exercise their 1st Amendment rights in a public school because they are Christians.

Bullshit. Your children are free to pray in school at any time as long as they don't interfere with school activity. What you really want is organized religious activity in school. That's using government to force your religion on others which is unconstitutional. Either deal with it or organize to excise the first amendment from the constitution.

Since Atheism is also a Faith lets outlaw the expressions of statements that support your philosophical position.

Using schools to promote atheism is already outlawed by the first amendment. What you're opposed to is actually called secularism which makes you a religious extremist, alligned with groups such as the Taliban and al Quaida who also oppose secular governments.

The Framers knew what they meant and they practiced what they meant...

The framers were primarily Deists, not Christians.

...as did everyone else for nearly 200 years, until the Extreme Left Wing judges started seeing Marxist ideology in the shadows of the penumbra of the Constitution.

You're a total extremist, dude. You have severe hardening of the ideologies and need immediate treatment by your psychiatrist.

WRT the U.K. ID cards

[The One KEA]

You can read about them here, at the Privacy International Web Site.

Orgasm via email

[mattjb0010]

So anyone wanna build 802.11 into this ??

google has it in html

[lydon]

In case of (already occured) slashdotting look here (try the 'View as HTML' link).

power? food?

[Bazman]

Do they say how we're going to power all this new technology when the oil and gas runs out in fifty years or so? Or how we're going to feed the billions and billions of people on this planet?

I'm hoping for cheap, clean fusion as a solution to the power problem, and soylent green as a solution to the food problem. Ah no. Not genetic engineering either. Population control? Maybe.

Server slashdotted so no, I haven't read the article..

Re:power? food?

[kinnell]

Or how we're going to feed the billions and billions of people on this planet?

They're won't be billions and billions of people on the planet if there's not enough food to feed them all.

Re:power? food?

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

"Or how we're going to feed the billions and billions of people on this planet?"

That question is based on out of date predictions of the population - in most countries the birth rate has declined significantly since the overcrowded earth scenarios became popular. The US is just about replacing its population, in Europe the native populations are decining (the worst case being Italy, where the birth rate has dropped well below replacement levels). Africa and the Middle East have expanding populations, but even there the rate has generally slowed. The last predictions I saw estimated that world population would peak around the middle of the century and then decline.

Re:power? food?

[Dave2 Wickham]

It's not always 50 years - A couple of years ago we were doing some work from a text book from the 70s or 80s, and it said words to the effect of "If we keep using fossil fuels at the rate we are now, the supply will be depleted by the year 2000" - see, that one was at maximum 20-30 years!

Unable to read or write?

[TheSpoom]

Whole generation unable to effectively read, write, think, and work ... 2050

Y do u h8 me?

Re:Unable to read or write?

[Discopete]

Congrats to the both of you for being part of the problem and not of the solution.

leet and the various "hacker-speak" dialects are doing nothing but pushing our ability to communicate with each other closer and closer to extinction.

Perhaps instead of making a joke of the current state of affairs, you'd be better off mentoring a child that has problems reading and writing, such as a dyslexic.

Re:Unable to read or write?

[ender81b]

One could argue, and I will, that internet speak is just like shorthand. Shorthand was used long ago (well think 1800-1900's) in letters to abbreviate things to make letter writing easier and quicker for people. Nowadays we have what you described which is really no different.

After all, despite you writing it like that any native english speaker would have little trouble understnading what you wrote, even if they had never seen internet shorthand before. People are still able to write effectively, for the most part, otherwise they just use shorthand when on the internet talking socially. Or, outside america, for text messaging. I cannot believe how many people here in europe text each other instead of calling and the dialect if you will that has grown out of this.

Personally I can't stand it but I understand why it is done and don't begrudge a person just because they do it. Well unless they do the whole I p0wnz0r j00 fagg0rtz!111 crap . :)

Re:Unable to read or write?

[grayrest]

Shorthand is decidedly different from the quick writing (as you've described). Shorthand was not really used to shorten written conversation but as a stopgap measure to accurately take dictation. There are several variants on both, as briefly covered here.

In brief, though, most shorthand systems do not look anything like longhand. They're phonetically based and each stroke generally represents a consonant sound. The consonants are then embellished with vowel digraphs because most words can be constructed with only consonants (same principle used in many spellcheck systems).

The idea is to be able to get all the details quickly and then to transcribe your notes to make a full reproduction of the original. To this end, most systems (gregg, teeline, quickwriting) are not capable of reproducing the full longhand vocabulary and are more or less used for transcribing exclusively. Almost every system was designed to be used by reporters, secretaries, clerks, and others who could be educated in the system. None that I know of were designed to make writing easier (the Korean system is, but that's not really a shorthand system).

Shorthand writing systems were obsoleted in practice by the stenography machines used in courtrooms today. I believe the machines operate under the same principle, but I haven't looked into it. The rise of electronic typewriters and computers, which allowed extremely fast typing has risen to somewhat fill the role shorthand played in secretarial work. Journalism schools rarely teach shorthand any more and they usually teach the Gregg system.

Someone without training would be completely unable to read shorthand. It looks absolutely foreign.

For Tolkien fans, the Tengwar system (flowing script used for decoration in the LOTR books) works similarly to many shorthand systems. It can be used to represent quite a few languages, including English.

Why write this? I am fascinated by writing systems, particularly neat looking ones. I've wanted my own secret writing system since childhood but never was motivated/creative enough to invent my own. I've taken up Pitman Shorthand (which can serve as a full writing systm) as an acceptable substitute. With only a few thousand writers in the world, and most of them over 60 at that, it's secret enough for me.

Re:maglevs and flying cars

[Anonymous Coward]

maglevs are moving people commercially in china, australia, germany, spain and the UK. Feasibility projects are underway in the US and much of europe.

Predictions?

[JegaPrime]

I wonder is people create these lists to try and guide the future course of technology. By trying to predict what will technologies will be created, those that actually create tend to think along these same lines and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Re:Predictions?

[Derkec]

I don't think these people have a huge impact. Very popular science fiction authors, on the other hand, have a huge impact. Their imagined toys move deeper into the geek conciousness and are more likely to be realized.

Re:Googled

[CaptainBaz]

and HTMLified.

In other news...

[pesc]

BT describes the future as looking "ever more exciting each year"

In other news, scientists have discovered that the future is nearer now than ever before.

Highest earning celebrity

[inc01]

Highest earning celebrity is synthetic ... 2010

The way I see it, Michael Jackson, Madonna and Britney Spears are synthetic already.

Oh, sure, you say that *now*..

[Channard]

You're just bitter because I won't give you a lift in my flying car after you drunk too much synthi-hol and puked up your food pills all over the back seat.

Re:Oh, sure, you say that *now*..

[Genghis9]

Actually, the reason I'm bitter is because you got modded to 4, and I'm still at 2. :)

Re:Question

[The One KEA]

Disclaimer: I am not a U.K. citizen.

As for their complaining, I think that network you describe has been successfully explained away as a method to protect people from crime. I.D. cards on the other hand can't be explained away so easily, which is way people are complaining about them.

The link I gave talks about it in greater detail.

Re:rise of an American dictator in 2000

[bain]

It's ironic that the tagline at the bottom of ./ was
"An American's a person who isn't afraid to criticize the president but is always polite to traffic cops."

And the subsequent..

[Channard]

.. crash of the Borg's OS after applying the latest MS patch, crippling the collective. The borg themselves are quickly 'rescued' by the Weyland-McDonalds corporation and put to worth behind fast food counters across the solar system. Meanwhile, the Borg Queen, deprived of her power base, becomes a cam-whore, running her own pay-per-view website.. slogan.. 'Come and watch me assimilate barely legal teens.'

Orgasm mails?

[marvin2k]

like an orgasm via e-mail in 2010

Right, and when the spammers get this the productivity of the internet-connected world will drop to zero.

Boss: Any important emails today?
Employee: (checks) AHH! MMH! OOHH! YESSS! ... nope, just spam.

Missed one...

[g_attrill]

2004: Slashdot posts 100,000th dupe

hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

AI chatbots indistinguishable from people by 95 % of population by 2005.....

Is that a statement on the development of AI or a statement about 95% of the population?

Re:hmmm

[vidarh]

I'm pretty sure it's a statement about 95% of the population. A few years ago I was discussing writing a dating chatterbot for irc with a guy I knew. We were both heavy irc'ers at the time, and used irc primarily to meet women (the shocking this is it worked very well) and we were struck by how easy and predictable it was - if what you were after were getting girls contact details what worked best was sticking to a few successful patterns, and just moving on if you didn't get anywhere (it's not as if I at the time was looking for a lasting relationship ;) )

So at some point I set up a few _really_ simple bots.

The first one only responded with the same line over and over again whenever it was msg'd. At least on person kept on messaging it regularly over a period of half an hour, getting more and more upset that it kept on saying the same thing, and after a while getting pissed off that it kept answering even when he asked it to shut up :)

The second one just cycled through 4-5 canned responses and started over. People kept talking to it, and pointing out that it had said the same things before, and started giving details about themselves.

The third one looked for a trigger word in the message it got, and chose a sequence of messages based on that, and then cycled through the sequence. If no trigger word was present, it would choose a random sequence. If a trigger word for a different sequence occured while cycling through a sequence, it would switch sequences.

All in all it had a grand total of 20-25 messages.

The record conversation (based on a run of a couple of days) was one and a half hours... At that point I became disillusioned and dropped the whole thing. I still think that a few weeks of work and I'd easily have a chatterbot capable of picking up real women and getting their phone numbers in droves...

Now, imagine how long people will speak to Eliza or a chatterbot that someone actually make an effort on.

The reason bots fail the Turing test is because the judges know there's a chance they are talking to a machine. In chat rooms, most users are clueless that a bot could be capable of actually engaging them in something that seems like a conversation, and most people make so many mistakes, evade questions, give weird answers, have problems with the language etc., that people are VERY forgiving of the answers they get.

From watching one of the girls I met on IRC years ago chatting, I first realized why that is so: The typical "normal" user often follow conversations very superficially. They switch a lot between different conversations, but often seem not to put any effort in keeping track of the overall flow of a specific conversation. So if your bot get into trouble, it can get itself right out of trouble by simply ignoring "difficult" messages and answering something completely unrelated and randomly changing subjects and a large part of the people it talks to won't react at all, because they do the same thing themselves all the time.

Exagurated usefulness more like.

[Channard]

Or also exagurate the usefulness of the items predicted - not this list specifically, but in general. Take flying cars, for example. The first person - or the first few early adoptors - to get a flying car would have fun for a while, then they'd end up being regulated, traffic lanes would be created, and it'd be like The Fifth Element.

Rise of an American Dictator...

[mdemeny]

I thought this was a joke by the moderator, but if you look at the Addendum they republish 'Wildcards' based on an original idea by John Petersen, The Arlington Institute. This includes Rise of an American Dictator in 2000 (where 2000 is the earliest possible occurence).

Or more curiously

[Channard]

Question: Why is it that many people in the UK are get so upset about the idea of national ID cards, when nobody seems to mind (or notice) other even more "big brother" things that go on in the UK, such as the national grid of video cameras on every street corner and road?

Or more curiously, why did none of the national press seize upon the fact that the London Council's webcams were mysteriously out of action wherever a war protest was taking place, either when the president visted recently or when the whole Iraq war thing started? And no, I'm not wearing a foil hat - check out http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/34062.html or http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/29883 .html

Re:*Yawn*

[Decaffeinated Jedi]

For a bit of future-gazing satire, I would highly recommend Scott Adams' The Dilbert Future. I guess it's about five years old now, but it's a great book of what amount to short essays predicting future trends with Dilbert comics interspersed throughout. Predictions include:

• Life in the future will not be like Star Trek.
• On average, Induhviduals (sic) who are alive today will experience 80 years of complaint-free living. Unfortunately, they'll live to 160.
• In the future, Internet capacity will increase indefinitely to keep up with the egos of the people using it. Cost will not be an issue.
• In the future, filty, perverted hobos will refer to themselves as telecommuters, until someone points out that they aren't being paid.
• In the future, kids won't have access to online pornography, because X-rated Internet sites will be clogged by horny adults who have more patience.
• In the future, computer-using men will be the sexiest males.

Okay, so maybe that last one is a bit far-fetched. ;)

Re:The submission IS flamebait. so are you.

[vidarh]

No, they are only holding members of terrorist groups.

*cough* Innocent until proven guilty *cough... *cough* fair trial *cough* *cough*...

They could have been holding people responsible for genocide and the treatment would still not be justified.

While Bush may not make use of it, through the laws passed after 9/11 combined with the legal precendent that Guantanamo Bay is not subject to US law, he has effectively created a situation where government agencies can seize anyone they want, prevent them access to lawyers, and move them to a location where they have no rights and no legal protection whatsoever.

Bush might not make full use of them, but having established the situation, a future president, or even lower level government officials can, giving a very strong incentive for people with aspirations to power for seeking out the "right" positions.

If not fascist by itself, it's certainly a gift package to anyone who wish to further limit peoples freedom.

Re:The submission IS flamebait. so are you.

[Pike65]

"You must not live in the U.S. Dissent is bigger than ever, and unstifled."

*cough*

Re:(Hello?)^2

[McWilde]

No, actually it's called paralepsis.

ObHomer

[sharkey]

...puked up your food pills all over the back seat.

Mmmmm, Soylent Green.

AIDS

[cybercuzco]

AIDS deaths peak at 1.7 million -2006

Um no. Aids deaths this year were 3 million people. Why is this not front page news every day in every country? When SARS killed like 200 people it was front page news for months. 3 frickin million people died last year from AIDS. There is no excuse that this should not be the single most important item on anyones agenda. If terrorists killed 3 million people last year what would the media do? Theyd be apoplectic. Tom Brokaw would have a seizure on screen. People need to get their priorities straight.

Re:AIDS

[HeghmoH]

Mostly because you can get SARS, and then die from it, simply from having been in the same room as someone who's infected. (Or at least can be transmitted through nothing more than casual contact; the popular image is that it takes practically nothing to hop from one person to another.) With AIDS, on the other hand, you have to actually share certain bodily fluids with someone who's infected. In other words, you can remain celibate and lead an otherwise normal life, and modulo infected blood or needles, you have no chance of contracting AIDS. And, of course, since the most AIDS cases happen because of consensual sex or drugs, lots of people have the attitude that it's their own damned fault.

SARS spread quickly and easily and killed a large proportion of its victims within weeks, which is a formula for rapid disaster. AIDS spreads slowly and difficultly and its victims continue living for years, which results in a much slower, calmer disaster. People don't worry about bad things if they take that long to happen.

The real problem with flying cars

[jacem]

Is that after you have an accident, stalls or run out of gas the vehicle still has to land on something. It will bring a whole new meaning to the phrase multi car pile up. Air travel is very restrictive about where one can and cannot fly for a reason.
The early adopters would fall under the FAA immediately because safety concerns are so great that flying cars would simply be regulated as private planes.


JACEM

Re:The submission IS flamebait. so are you.

[JohnnyCannuk]

Well, I see I have stirred a controversy and a good discussion thread (although I'm still a troll, apparently).

Consider this: As a Canadian, I have grown up never being out of reach of the American Media. Ever. Even when we only got 5 channels, 4 of them were American. I know quite a bit about the US and her culture (stop laughing Europeans). I have many friends and relatives in the US. I really feel I understand your country, being so close. Now, if, despite all of that, I can form a negative opinion about the conduct of the US government (as a large number of your own citizens have, by the looks of the news and this thread), imagine what kind of opinion a poor kid in a Palestinian refugee camp, or one that lived in a poor part of Africa or Malaysia would form. They don't know your country at all. While I can draw the difference between the American poeple and the American government, those people cannot (since most don't live under democratic regimes where the government can change on a regular basis). Thus, they hate all Americans.

They are very leery when the US speaks. Often because they espouse "freedom" and "democracy" on one hand, but support brutal dicators (remember Saddam in the 80's was our friend. Donald Rumsfeld thought so) or lock up people arbitrarily (as at Gitmo - an if they are all terrorists, shouldn't that be proven in a court of law?). So when you grow up with this and try to get out of your miserable life by joining a radical Islamic organization or the Shining Path or similar. Now, are you going to blame for all your troubles? Who's office buildings are you going to be willing to fly airplanes into?

If the US government REALLY wanted to win the war on terror, spend 1/10 of it's war budget in Iraq on medicine to wipe out polio around the world, or tb or any one of the hundreds of preventable, curable child hood diseases that our children never get anymore but kill millions in the rest of the world every year (yes, Bono's idea and I agree). Balance and consider the interests of everyone, not just your own.

Forgive loans to countries that the IMF ruined in the 80's with their "all-strings-attached" loans.

These people are more likely to admire and respect a country and a government that saves their lives with medicines and jobs rather than destroys their homes and infrastructures with bullets and bombs.

And if you want to go after Al-Queda, go after Al-Queda. Find OBL. Find Saddam. Finish the job. Don't do anyhting else until its done.

But don't pretend the war in Iraq has anything to do with freedom and democracy or weapons of mass destruction or support for terrorists. Nobody beleives it anymore. Come clean and move on.

I tried not to be preachy (I know, didn't work) but I genuinely care. The US has some great people and wonderful qualities that the rest of the world should know about. Right now they just see the only superpower running around acting like a bully, then getting upset when someone strikes back or dares question why.

See my sig:

Re:Decline of socialism

[Allen Varney]

The most famous famine in recent history, in Ethiopia, was engineered when it was a colony of the USSR. The USSR is gone, and so is socialism in Ethiopia. The famine there is long over as well.

Wow, the number of errors in these short sentences is astounding. Ethiopia has never been colonized. It is currently suffering another terrible famine that began in 2000. This calamity has less to do with government than with drought, like the famines currently gripping Zambia and Malawi.

Ethiopia did flirt with Marxist-Leninist ideas in the 1980s under the "Workers' Party of Ethiopia," but as I understand it, it was still just the same kind of top-down authoritarian big-man system as it was under Haile Selassie, as it still is today.

There are many better explanations for any African famine than politics: bad land use, bad weather, tribal rivalries, extortionate taxation, short-sighted local planning, and devouring corruption independent of political affiliation. To attribute any African country's troubles to socialism is to miss a really large forest by concentrating on one outlying tree.

Re:More fictions for the 2004 election.

[gobbo]

The 2004 landslide winner George W Bush is not REALLY elected because [/sarcasm]

OK I know that's a trollish post but it's a common /. sentiment. The key point is that he wasn't actually elected in the last election. Yes, there were numerous 'plausible deniability' reports in the US media about ballots that were confusingly designed, misdirections to the voting place, malfunctioning voting machines, meddled hand-counts, and other kinds of minor confusion all over Florida, but the really big buried story is the database of supposed felons that put around 22,000 (or more) legitimate citizens on a 'no vote' list. Most of those people were africanamerican, and a sure bet of a Gore victory. The database wasn't subject to quality control, came from sources associated with the former Texas governor, and subsequently turned out to be over 90% wrong.

These problems were never rectified or properly acknowledged, and many people were wrongly denied their right to vote. GW took power with less than 600 votes, according to the official count. Please, google this topic, then come back and complain about fictions. Or does the Bush Admin's ideological position justify their means of obtaining power? [Look, I don't think Gore would have been superior, OK? I just think the "we're so democratic" scales need to fall from american eyes.]