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SF Author Robert J. Sawyer Looks at 2014
Alex writes "Canadian science fiction author Robert J Sawyer takes a positive look at a typical day in 2014 for Backbone Magazine, looking at where both scientific and sociological advances of the next decade will take us. Sawyer is a multi-Aurora, Hugo, and Nebula award winner, and was one of the first major authors to use a website to promote his work. Readers might associate some of these innovations and ideas from his fiction."
He still hasn't received his pre-orderd copy of DNF! :)
And judging by the design of it, he hasn't updated it since then.
You know what?
Article text:
July 13, 2004 - 20:06
It's 2014, and life is the same. Only better
By Robert J. Sawyer
As a science-fiction writer, my job is predicting the future. And that's gotten harder with each passing year. Moore's law tells us that computing power doubles every 18 months. If that holds up -- and i believe it will, with breakthroughs in nanotechnology, new techniques of producing three-dimensional circuits, and new substrates for microprocessors -- then in 10 short years, we will have computers 128 times more powerful than those that exist today. Can anyone guess how that much computing muscle, widely available and inexpensively priced, will affect our day-to-day lives? Well, let's find out.
Here are some of my predictions for a typical day in late 2014; feel free to track me down in 10 years' time and tell me i'm wrong!
Our mornings will still begin with waking up. But forget the old-fashioned alarm-clock buzzer. Tomorrow's bedside clock will be a sophisticated brainwave monitor. It'll keep track of your sleep cycle, gently bringing up the room lights at precisely the right time so that you'll feel rested, not cardiac arrested, as you awake.
Today, your coffee can be brewed while you sleep; tomorrow's robokitchen will have an entire hot (but low carb!) breakfast waiting for you. Also waiting will be an electronic-ink newspaper, with stories geared to your particular interests culled from sources worldwide (with foreign-language news automatically translated into English).
Of course, you aren't the only one who has to get going in the morning. Your spouse and kids will be taken care of, too -- with smart toilets analyzing their urine and sensor-rich toothbrushes checking their saliva to make sure everything is ticketyboo; most health problems will be caught early and be trivial to correct.
Your spouse might telecommute -- perhaps half of all white-collar workers will do so in 2014 -- but you might still have to physically go to your office. Along the way you'll take your kids to school.
No point quizzing them on facts as you travel along, though. In a world in which any information can be easily accessed anywhere, mere memorization is no longer part of the curriculum. But analysis of information -- knowing how to think -- ah, that's the ticket!Naturally, your electric car will drive itself, communicating with millions of chips that have been steamrollered into the asphalt covering our roadways. No more traffic accidents; no more gridlock.
Once you've dropped the kids off -- yes, learning can be done online at home, but socialization still happens best in a real school and at a real playground -- you will use the rest of your commute time productively, catching up on full-motion-video e-mail and reading reports (or having them read to you by totally realistic voice synthesizers). You'll arrive at your office relaxed.
Throughout the day, your wristband -- a combination cellphone, PDA, camera, and e-book display, all controlled by spoken commands -- will be your lifeline.
You'll have just one phone number, good worldwide with no long-distance or roaming charges, and the wristband will screen calls for you, with a computer-generated avatar kicking in to deal with most routine matters.
Still, even 10 years from now, much business will require face-time. No problem. One major wall of your office in, say, Toronto, will be a vast flatscreen, showing you your company's Vancouver office. You'll be able to walk up to the wall and chat with whomever is depicted as casually as if you were both sharing the same water cooler.
Your cubicle will have a smart wall of its own, giving every worker the appearance of having a window; yours might show real-time footage of Lake Louise, assuming that global warming hasn't melted the adjacent glaciers and flooded everything. And no matter which office chair you sit on, it will adjust automatically to your body's proportions.
Of course, we'll all live in an enhanced reality. T
everyday is another shooter.
Stop whatever you're doing and get working on my flying car. Now. I'm not kidding.
As a science-fiction writer, my job is predicting the future. And that's gotten harder with each passing year. Moore's law tells us that computing power doubles every 18 months. If that holds up -- and i believe it will, with breakthroughs in nanotechnology, new techniques of producing three-dimensional circuits, and new substrates for microprocessors -- then in 10 short years, we will have computers 128 times more powerful than those that exist today. Can anyone guess how that much computing muscle, widely available and inexpensively priced, will affect our day-to-day lives? Well, let's find out.
Here are some of my predictions for a typical day in late 2014; feel free to track me down in 10 years' time and tell me i'm wrong!
Our mornings will still begin with waking up. But forget the old-fashioned alarm-clock buzzer. Tomorrow's bedside clock will be a sophisticated brainwave monitor. It'll keep track of your sleep cycle, gently bringing up the room lights at precisely the right time so that you'll feel rested, not cardiac arrested, as you awake.
Today, your coffee can be brewed while you sleep; tomorrow's robokitchen will have an entire hot (but low carb!) breakfast waiting for you. Also waiting will be an electronic-ink newspaper, with stories geared to your particular interests culled from sources worldwide (with foreign-language news automatically translated into English).
Of course, you aren't the only one who has to get going in the morning. Your spouse and kids will be taken care of, too -- with smart toilets analyzing their urine and sensor-rich toothbrushes checking their saliva to make sure everything is ticketyboo; most health problems will be caught early and be trivial to correct.
Your spouse might telecommute -- perhaps half of all white-collar workers will do so in 2014 -- but you might still have to physically go to your office. Along the way you'll take your kids to school.
No point quizzing them on facts as you travel along, though. In a world in which any information can be easily accessed anywhere, mere memorization is no longer part of the curriculum. But analysis of information -- knowing how to think -- ah, that's the ticket!Naturally, your electric car will drive itself, communicating with millions of chips that have been steamrollered into the asphalt covering our roadways. No more traffic accidents; no more gridlock.
Once you've dropped the kids off -- yes, learning can be done online at home, but socialization still happens best in a real school and at a real playground -- you will use the rest of your commute time productively, catching up on full-motion-video e-mail and reading reports (or having them read to you by totally realistic voice synthesizers). You'll arrive at your office relaxed.
Throughout the day, your wristband -- a combination cellphone, PDA, camera, and e-book display, all controlled by spoken commands -- will be your lifeline.
You'll have just one phone number, good worldwide with no long-distance or roaming charges, and the wristband will screen calls for you, with a computer-generated avatar kicking in to deal with most routine matters.
Still, even 10 years from now, much business will require face-time. No problem. One major wall of your office in, say, Toronto, will be a vast flatscreen, showing you your company's Vancouver office. You'll be able to walk up to the wall and chat with whomever is depicted as casually as if you were both sharing the same water cooler.
Your cubicle will have a smart wall of its own, giving every worker the appearance of having a window; yours might show real-time footage of Lake Louise, assuming that global warming hasn't melted the adjacent glaciers and flooded everything. And no matter which office chair you sit on, it will adjust automatically to your body's proportions.
Of course, we'll all live in an enhanced reality. Today's bulky virtual-reality goggles will have been replaced by contact lenses that overlay textual information on your vis
Very interesting article, but we've been hearing about "smart homes" for years now but invariably, they're out of reach for the typical middle-class family with 2.3 kids. The coffee-maker itself has stood the test of time and hasn't had any significant changes for many years. And smart toilets? Please.
No sexbots? No flying cars? What horrible vision of the future is this!?
Canadian science fiction author Robert J Sawyer takes a positive look at a typical day in 2014
For those who didn't RTFA, Sawyer predicts global hegemony under ruthless Canadian authority.
Residents of the former United States are chained to benches while being forced to eat poutine and watch curling competitions.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
Where's my backbacon in pill form, eh?
And he won awards huh. Pretty safe speculating even though most of it some what exist today!
I must say, I like a lot of the ideas - even if I think that many of them (such as the car driving itself) is about 10 years too early on his time table. Not because we technologically can't do it - but because of the politics.
;) ).
Take the urine testing/saliva testing devices. Personally, I wouldn't sweat over it. Car driving itself? Sure - go for it!
But there are those who will fear their loss of privacy (you can track where I go on the road through all the sensors! The Bible says that the Anti-Christ will put computer chips on our foreheads - cars are the first step!).
I love the wake-up system. I believe I read about something like that in Scientific American once - a column about a gentleman who created a hack that would open his blinds a little at a time based on the alarm clock, so that when he was suppose to be awake, he was being his full on the face with sunlight, a little at a time. Then he modified it to just lights, so you didn't need the blinds. But brain wave monitoring? Personally, that's fine with me, as long as my wife doesn't discover my secret dream involving her, Utena and Selfie Tilmitt in a hot tub full of green lime jello.
But a lot of people will balk at some things for reasons of fear. I still like a lot of the ideas, and who knows - a good chunk of them might come true. I personally hope the concepts of "data analyses and understanding over memorization" comes true. I get so frustrated when I hear the words "No open book tests". Last time I checked, my boss didn't tell me to make a program, then told me he'd fire me if I opened a book or looked up the data I needed through the newsgroups. Why? Because he knows that my ability to think through the data and see what's been done before is the reason he hired me, not to be able to rattle off information that might or might not apply at this second.
I mean, that's what we have MCSE's for. (And yes, I'm one of those too
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Assuming he's correct, does anyone else find it alarming how fucked we are in the event of a power outage or continual rise in fuel prices?
One that I would really like to see is the one phone number that is good world wide. Actually, I'd like to see it move away from a number, and use some sort of identification that is easier to remember, of course there is always stored numbers in your phone anyways. I don't see the toilet analyzing urine and your toothbrush analyzing saliva, but they are neat ideas.
I do like the idea of your car operating via biometrics though. No more car keys and such, just a thumb print scanner
Too late for that now. They have taken to long to deliver my Flying car, so now I want an ELECTRIC FLYING CAR!
"robokitchen will have an entire hot (but low carb!) breakfast waiting for you"
Sorry, but my prediction for the next few years is the quick demise of the Atkins diet. Nothing that has you excluding entire parts of your diet can be healthy. I can't wait for this idiotic craze to go away.
CC Licensed Serialized Story and Podcast: Ingenioustries
Why not implanted circuitry? I for one gave up a watch a long time ago. The way he describes this all-in-one-device reminds me of the talking watch calculators of the past.
As long as I get my flying car and a computer that can read my lips, I'll be as sound as a pound...
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
You stop by Super EB games to finally pick up the just released Duke Nukem Forever!
I happen to enjoy Sawyer's novels, so I can only conclude that this is a cleverly subtle satire of pollyanna-ish amateur futurology.
I think I'd of agreed with most of it if he'd said 25 years, but not 10 - I'd be very, very surprised.
Right now you could have rediculously complicated alarm clocks - but most people just need to get up, and any 5 buck alarm clock will do. Plus just about everyone I know uses their mobiles for alarm clocks anyways...
tom-george.comBecause geeks rate higher t
Sawyer predicts global hegemony under ruthless Canadian authority.
That's right! And here in Canada, "ruthless" means we won't even say "please!"
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Some science fiction writers promote their work, some promote... themselves.
I thought the job of a science fiction writer was to author stories that are of a certain genre, generally, but not exclusivly dealing with speculations about the future.
That is very much different than predicting the future.
Science Fiction can be good even if the predictions are "wrong".
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Sounds like he just watched the first thirty minutes of Logan's Run.
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
I admit, I thought Mr. Sawyer's vision of the future only a decade away wasn't very good. (What are the "enhanced reality contact lenses" powered by? Happy thoughts?) But I'd be interested to hear other Slashdotters attempts at describing the tech of a typcial day in 2014. Go for it.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
Sounds just like the stuff predicted in the '30's that would be in place by the '70s. Except they had flying cars to look forward to. We don't even get that any more.
BC
(if you haven't read the article, this won't make much sense or be too funny. If you have read the article it will make more sense, but still won't be that funny.)
Our mornings will still begin with waking up. But instead of the old-fashioned alarm clock buzzer it starts with the electrowhips of the alien overseers.
Today, your coffee can be brewed while you sleep; in 2014 coffee will only be a distant memory, as you quickly down some brackish water with your daily gruel allotment. No newspaper, but you can learn the latest gossip, such as who didn't survive the night, in hushed tones with your barrackmates.
Of course, you aren't the only one who has to get up. Your spouse and kids will have to labor in the mines as well.
So it's a one hour forced march to the work camps, where you're given your pick and sent underground. No need to quiz your children on facts as you march along; education is pointless when your day revolves around brutal forced labor, interrupted in the end only by a merciful death.
Throughout the day, your wristband--a combination manacle, stungun, and one-way communications device--will be your lifeline to your alien overlords, who will periodically issue orders through it and shock you when you don't obey fast enough.
I'm also extremely doubtful that nanomedicine will be that far along in only ten years. There will be some neat discoveries, and maybe even some gene therapy (just read about some mice with muscular dystrophy being almost cured by a genetically engineered virus - the micrograph pictures of their muscle are flatly amazing), but fully artificial medical nanobots are at least two decades away, IMHguesstimate.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Wow, why don't they have those gradual wake-up machines today? Waking up is soo painful for me, but i can't to sleep until noon every day! Are these under development? Most of the rest of this article seems pretty infeasable, except for the very rich.
Slartibartfast:"Is that your robot?"
Marvin:"No, I'm mine."
Maybe it's just because it's a projection just 10 years in the future...
But I think it's more because everything is based on computing, microchips, faster computers and resultant automation. He's not thinking "out of the box".
I bet if people from the 1920's see the world today, they would be alarmed by the technology and hitech gadgets (simple automatic doors for that matter) around them. I want to feel like that when I think of the future - not just some old computer capable of working really really fast.
I want us to live up to the Arthur C. Clarke's vision ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."). I think we've done pretty well upto this point (except ofcourse for all the -ve uses of technology (weapons) that we've figured out, but we need to get off our asses if we are to avoid Stagnation and other pitfalls that this "corporate society" averse to innovation, selfless contribution and *real* art is imposing upon us.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
There is no way that we are going to see some of the major infrastructure changes this guy envisions in only 10 years. He talks about roads with chips embedded in them allowing self driving cars. Will the technology be availabale? sure, it already is, will it be deployed in 10 years? no way. it takes governements 20-30 years to replace roads. He also talks about a lot of other things like smart toilets and smart kitchens, that may become available in new houses, but 95% of the houses out there will still not have them in only 10 years. I could go on, but I feel what this guy is showing, may be how bill gates lives in 10 years, but not your average citizen of Canada or the US.
Why Microsoft?
Maybe this is your first time reading Slashdot.... heh
My prediction that what we will actually do is make cell phones gaudier, some current technologies will get "streamlined", the cars will stay on the ground, and we'll remain technologically stagnant, using old technologies with more marketing annoyances like always.
(think about what's in our day to day lives that's actually new in the last 10 years or so. The more I learn about computer science, the more I realize that most of the time we are re-discoving solutions to problems that were solved decades ago)
Toto has already done a lot of work regarding this. PDF(html)
What a shitty website. Science Fiction Writer he may be, but obviously he hasn't kept his site up with the times... Er, the times 20 years from now.
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
their websites have enough bandwidth to stay up.
My problem with the article is not the feasibility of the various electronics incorporated into every day life. My problem with the article is the lack of energy discussion. For all of this electricity to be flowing around in our various appliances, including our toilets, in 10 years, something is going to have to change. With the massive fear of global warming being drummed into everyone's heads, the U.S. still hasn't built a nuclear power plant in a couple of decades. Coal and oil power kills at least 10,000 people a year, and although we need the power to continue living as we do, there are other ways to make that massive amount of energy without the cost to the environment in the form of pollution. I do not particularly ascribe to the notion that all hell is going to break loose because of CO2 emissions, but I do think that reducing our production of sulfer dioxides and spewing radioactive particles in the air by burning coals is something to move away from. There has never been a fatal nuclear power accident in the U.S., nuclear power produces no harmful emissions, and radioactive waste can be safely buried underground where it poses no harm to humans. If we seriously are looking forward to a day where everything is run by electronics, we will need to increase our power imput, and the best way, as I see it, is nuclear power.
Why, the lens' would be powered by the intense background electro-magnetic radiation spewed off by all the devices we'd be swimming in! QED.
Cancer, anyone?
I mean, contact lenses that act as video screens? I haven't seen the prototype yet. Let's assume we have some in three years. two years to design the production model. Tack on a couple of years to tool up a production facility. Add on a couple of years for FDA approval. That leaves us just a year for them to become commonplace in the market place. Hell, we haven't all moved over to flatpanel screens yet, and they've been out for *years*.
Oh, and someone's going to have to write software for these to make them do something useful. A large number of people are still running Windows 95 and that was developed...what fifteen years ago.
Of course I could just be horseless carriage thinking
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
Yeah, in 10 years we'll have magical auto-navigating cars, everyone will be hardwired to the internet so that memorizing things will be obsolete.
We have the technology to telecommute now. Why isn't it more popular? Because clients and most business is best conducted face-to-face. It's much easier to collaborate with your peers when you're all in the same room, than over some videoconfernce, and I dont care if said videoconference is in 1080p HDTV with dolby 5.1 surround sound. That wont change in 10, 20, 30, 500 years.
And the education system will be radically reinvented in a mere 10 years. Yeah, right. Here's my prediction, there will be no appreciable education system. "No Child Left Behind" will be the rallying cry then as it is now. They'll just hand out diplomas to everyone at birth so that noone will feel stupid or have their feelings hurt.
Sure. Can't wait for the future. Where's my jet pack and my three-course-meal-in-a-pill?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Nice ideas, and they will probably all come true, but no way in 2014, maybe 2050, more likely 2100+. Look at how far we have come since 1970, not that far. It would take a major breakthrough or event to leap technology wise to the point where he predicts, sort of like what happened 100 years or so ago.
Honestly, I've seen so many "visions of the future" by people that I've started to grow tired of them. They're always a mish-mash of ideas that will probably happen, but not as soon as the author says they will, ideas that have been used in visions of the future for decades (for example, the idea of taking all our foods in pill form) and ideas that are just plain too ridiculous to happen.
Remember folks, this guy is a Science Fiction author and his vision reflects that. Like all great science fiction, a lot of it has basis in fact, but also like most, there is a great deal of speculation, guesswork and just plain making shit up.
Yeah, sure, much of what he says COULD happen by 2014, but the funding just isn't there for the most part. Who is going to want to pay for the millions of computer chips in the roadways? Who is going to sponsor research on a smart toilet or saliva-testing toothbrush?
Very much agreed on the "data analyses and understanding over memorization." What people don't realize is this works even in current educational systems (well, except in Biology and, to a lesser extent, History). If you can remember a thought process which shows WHY something happens, it becomes far easier to remember that it happens (it doesn't happen in Biology because we don't KNOW why things happen yet, or in History because the people who write the books either don't know or want to hide it).
-Amalcon
The author doesn't mention the veracity of income that supports this lifestyle. Otherwise it sounds great, for a lazyass. I'm sorry, I mean a technically proficient knowledge worker.
At least, not to me. Maybe for the well-to-do, they'll have the fancy alarm system that monitors your brainwaves... but people like me will refuse to spend $5000 for such a system and prefer to rely on a $10 alarm from Target no matter what it does to our REM cycle. Besides, the cure for getting up cranky has been around for years, we call it "coffee"...
Electric cars that drive themselves- yeah, sure that'll happen. I can see all those angry SUV owners just thrilled about driving along *with* traffic. What about those who can't afford such cars? It'll be at least 10 years after such cars are introduced before the less affluent can buy them 2nd hand.
The flatscreen in your office... reminds me of "Spaceballs" and the bathroom monitor. "Sorry you cant see me boss, my video feed's broken. Yes, again..."
A humaniod robot to cook and clean... what are they giving them away free? Sigh... maybe Bill Gates will live like this in 10 years... but not me.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
That the person in the story was finally using Longhorn on his computer, because it had been released in 2013 (minus WinFS).
I mean really.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
His books may be about the future but his website looks like it was designed 5 years in the past./p.
And /. members stuck in the mid 1990's will still be crying "why can't I just have a phone that just makes calls?"
Whenever I drive to work here in the Toronto area the amount of smog that I see (and breathe) is pretty scary (I'm sure more-so in places like LA, but I've never been there). I wouldn't be suprised if eventually you'll have air conditioners in cars and homes (and offices and service-oriented companies) that boast (and quite possibly do) grade A purified air. "TIRED OF ALL THE SMOG ON YOUR WAY TO WORK? GETTING ASTHMA BUT YOU'RE AN OLYMPIC ATHLETE? ACT NOW, GET THE AIR-6000 PURIFICATION SYSTEM FOR YOUR CAR AND YOU'LL BE HEALTHIER AND LIVE LONGER - GUARANTEED!" So sooner or later, instead of taking a walk outside for granted, you'll have to buy a mask or something or live in a "air pollution free" residential complex. Just look at water as a prime example. Who the hell bought water just 10 years ago? Everyone drank from the tap. I don't remember the last time I drank from the tap (that went through a filter at least once). There you have it - paying for air, one way or another.
Is this a typical day in 2014? What a disaster!
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I think he's way too optimistic.
First, the alarm clock thing. Even if it were available and cheap a lot of people do not get up at the same time as their bed mate.
Then there's the issue with all these handy dandy devices remembering everything, operating using voice recognition, etc. The hardware will probably be available in ten years time, but the software won't be there yet except as some hacky prototype that works if you're a geek and willing to tinker.
Plus, there's the bleakness of not interacting with your kids because they're so busy being immersed in their VR homework that saddens me to think of.
Oh well, I do think he's close to being spot on with the RFID at least.
>>Your spouse and kids will be taken care of, too -- with smart toilets analyzing their urine...
Here's my prediction...
A chap had a very painful elbow. He went to see his own doctor, who told him to rest it: no treatment was required, it was just tennis elbow.
Rather dissatisfied, he decided to go to a new computer-based medical service that had just opened up. He went inside the building and found the terminal, but there were no people in sight. The instructions told him to slide his credit card through the slot, and that $150 would be debited. When he had done this, he was asked screen after screen of questions about himself, until eventually a specimen bottle appeared. The instructions on the screen said, "Produce urine specimen and pour into slot on left," so he did. A few seconds later, the screen read:
Diagnosis: Tennis elbow
Treatment: Rest
Well, he wasn't happy. $150 wasted just to be told the same thing again. He thinks, "I'm going to confuse the hell out of that smug machine." He went home, took a bottle and put a scooped-up turd from his dog, some of his daughter's and wife's urine, some crankcase oil from his car and some of his own semen into the bottle and mixed it thoroughly. Then he went back to the computer.
He waved his card through the slot, answered the questions again and poured his mixture through the slot when asked. There was a very long pause.
About half an hour later, the screen read:
Diagnosis:
1. Your dog has rabies
2. Your daughter is on heroin
3. Your wife is pregnant, and your not the father
4. Your car is going to throw a rod
5. If you don't stop wanking, your tennis elbow will never get better.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
socialization still happens best in a real school and at a real playground
This may not be a technology prediction (but hey, he started it!) but I predict just the opposite. There is a steadily increasing trend of homeschooling, that crosses all walks of life, not just hippies or the strongly religious.
It's actually rather unnatural to be confined with a big herd of people only your own age, with a few (too few) adults hovering overhead like police helicopters trying to see what is going on.
I've never been able to figure out what "socialization" is supposed to mean, unless it means "learning to deal with weird, artificial conditions that you are unlikely to live in for the rest of your life after school age".
By the way, there are playgrounds and parks everywhere; you don't need to go to public school for that. Not to mention plenty of group activities and learning experiences that you don't need to be confined in a government institution to enjoy.
We all know that by the year 2014 we will have flying cars, and garbage will fuel cars. Not to mention we will have ads will be holographic and jump out at us. Autodrying clothes, perfect weather forcasting. All in a short 10 years away.
Some of the predictions seem a little too ambitious, and many could easily have been predicted 10 years ago for now. It takes them 10s of years just to get around to putting a new layer of regular pavement down, much less some new e-pavement. All the bio-feeback stuff is probably more like 25+ years away, assuming people want that sort of thing. It might have been better if he had labeled it as stuff that might happen in the next 50 years.
In 2014, Slashdot will troll YOU -- but only in Japan.
-- I could tell right away that she was impressed with my HUGE Slashdot Karma.
Aside from the HD-DVR, all of that stuff existed (not quite as advanced) 10 years ago. I just didn't have it. So, where are the early adopters of urine analyzing toilets or seamless video conferencing on video walls or kitchens that can make a complete meal, set and clean the table.
Sorry, this may be Bill Gates' life in 10 years, but it won't be mine, and probably won't be anyone I know.
2014 is going to suck!
Here's the only one of his predictions for 2014 that seemed plausible to me:
On the way home, you'll stop to pick up a few things at the grocery store. No standing in line, though, to check out: you'll just waltz out the front door, as the Radio Frequency ID chips in the products you've bought allow their costs to be tallied and your account automatically debited.
The rest just have too many hurdles. Not just technological, but political, market-driven, etc.
cygnuhchur
All I see is black in both Firefox and Explorer. Clearly, Sawyer is predicting that by 2014 the Internet will have collapsed due to the overwhelming volume of Spam and viruses.
I tend to agree that these technologies could exist in ten years. In fact, I think many of them could be supported by current technology. However,"the future" (personified) doesn't spawn improvements to the human condition just because it is possible. Two arguments why this future won't happen (in the short term, i.e., 10 years):
Captialism: Just because you can build a better coffee maker doesn't mean there's a market for it. If it doesn't sell, it won't change the world in the short term. Companies will continue to produce the status quo until forced to advance.
Software: Software drives all of this processing and storage horsepower. The current state of software quality is wretched. All those chips in the concrete might work great, until the car's operating system (MS_AUTO - see capitalism) blue-screens (in a beautifully rendered virtual core dump). Unless people (developers and consumers) learn to care about software quality, these systems will never operate as elegantly as the author described.
Well, most of it just seems mostly realistic, but possibly not in 10 years time. By then, I would guess most of this tech will be availble, but probably not to most mid level consumers.
And, possibly, some people aren't going to want that much tech in their life. I mean, there are still those people who don't really like this whole "computer" thing.
And, I don't know about the self driving e-car. While it would be cool, it seems that it would genereate too many problems that would need to be worked out, and probably not in 10 years. Do you build new roads? Start off with one elane on the highway? What about rural areas? If there is a totally converted road, could an "analog" car still be allowed to drive on it? And who is going to maintain that? Goverment regulations with private contractors? so on and so forth.
And, I don't know that I want my watch to run everything. No mater how much you cram into it, to keep it watch sized, it still needs to have a small screen. I've been looking at the SPOT watches, and while they are pretty cool little gadget, nothing screams geek more than this huge hunking piece on your wrist. I would prefer more of a small PDA-ish device, to do such tasks, and using the watch as a secondary device to scroll alerts or incoming calls across, instead of doing everything
I get a black screen, and the damned page grabbed my back button..
Screw them for being annoying.
I say crush them into oblivion.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm not sure I like this. I mean, where is the data going? To my doctor? I think that would overload him, getting three piss tests per day from all of his patients. Or is the toilet so smart that it can do its own diagnosis?
How does the toilet know it's me? Do I have to swipe a smart card before I pee? (There's a joke here about "logging in" but I'm not going to make it.)
What happens when the dog drinks from the toilet?
What about someone who's been convicted of a drunk driving offense; would these become mandatory? What if they pissed in the sink instead?
Would I get a lecture from my toilet after a night of hard drinking? Would it complain if I ate too many jalapenos?
Seriously, I don't think we'll have self-cleaning toilets by 2014, much less Tommy the Talking Toilet.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I predict that by 2014 Robert J. Sawyer will have amassed enough bandwidth to survive a slashdotting - unless, of course, /. has morphed into some intergalactic uber-/. in which case all bets are off.
Oh, and I will have gotten laid by then.
it seems to be that this guy is just talking out of his ass. he basically threw in a bunch of buzzwords and did no research at all in giving his (clearly uninformed, imho) opinions. while undoubtedly some of these predictions will occur to some degree, to assume, for example, that the (basically nonexistent at present) nanomedicine field will be so ripe as to allow "clearing plaque out of your arteries, and getting rid of dangerous chemicals" is laughable The contact lenses feeding you Terminator-esque telemetry also strikes me as a bit silly. Now don't color me luddite just yet - i agree that many of his predictions will come eventually true, and wish for them as much as the next guy (nanotechnology could very well hold the key to "curing" aging, for example) - had this article been labeled "2054", i might have been a bit more on board. basically, you could pick any joe on slashdot and he would give you an equally accurate, or more so, prediction of near-future society in line with current technological trends (ew i sound like roland piquepaille). so if predicting the future is your day job, its a good thing you have that whole sci-fi writer thing to back you up :)
While it may seem redundant to have closed book exams in this day of fast access to information, there is some value in knowing things without having to look them up.
For really complex ideas sure have an open book test but people should know the basics without having to look them up. It's just plain laziness not knowing basic concepts in whatever field your exam is in.
By the time it takes a person to flip through a text book, read the relevant text, understand the concept, and correctly answer the question, the person who has this already in memory and already understands will have answered three questions.
Its about efficiency really. You could write your program faster if you already know what you need instead of wasting time looking it up on the web. And just because you have something memorized does not mean that you are not capable of analyzing the data.
On a side note: In my experience closed book exams are always easier than open book exams. I find that if the instructor says open book, I get lazy and don't bother studying and when it comes time to write the test I find that I spend 50% of my time fliping through pages trying to figure out what concepts to apply. On top of this instructors will deliberatly make the tests harder because "hey, it's open book, they should be able to look it up." Where as if the exam is closed book, I actually study for it and can finish the exam early so I could go do something else more enjoyable.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
New technology will be more connected. Home gadgets will start to talk to each other. They'll be multiple competing standards and even though they're meant to all work on IP for some reason they'll all be subtly different and not be able to communicate properly. Things that never used to be able to crash (like your fridge) will be able to crash. Consumers will be annoyed by this, but just like computers these days they'll suck it up. Hell, we're almost there now. But it'll be more commonplace.
They'll be viruses for this stuff too. People will be pissed off. But they'll still buy them.
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
Meanwhile, your kids will be off in their rooms, enjoying fully immersive virtual reality experiences -- who'd have thought homework could be such fun? Eventually, though, it'll be time for them to get ready for bed. Smart washcloths will make sure they clean everywhere, including behind their ears.
"Hey Mom, I'll be in my room uhh... doing my homework"
"Again? Please use your smart washcloth when you're finished this time. I don't want to have to clean up tomorrow when I'm uhh.. doing your laundry."
Oh boy. In the future we have OLED screens with no burn-in and long lifetime on all displays. MRAM will become the new king of memory.
We'll have cheap and simple fuel-cell electric cars/bikes/trucks that get filled up with alcohol, but some idiots will still have their sound system play roaring engine sounds because they want people to think there are plenty of horses in the stable.
Someone makes a breakthrough in solid state lighting technology. Diamonds are used in semiconductors.
We all finally switch over to IPv6.
PCs will no longer be shipped with goddamn aluminum philips screws. Or whatever soft metal they use. Only robertson screws that takes standard bit sizes.
Newspapers will still be printed for those who want something to read on the shitter.
After you wake up, you'll spend an hour checking out slashdot on your e-ink paper, you hacked your coffee-machine to boost the caffine to just under the lethal dose. You're alreadly late because you checked the "don't wake me if im having a dream" box on your alarm settings. Your getting ready for work and the toilet tells you that your young daughter has been busy with half the football team, her tooth brush confirms... off to work and to drop the kids off, the journey is silent, no-one says a word. There are some police cars outside the school - its been raided again by the MIA (Media Industry Ass. they are now global) good thing you taught your kids how to hide stuff properly. At work your boss is pissed off, apparently the new product infringes 165 patents but we're only budgeted to infringe 80. You need to find some loop-holes and get rid of 85 patented concepts by tuesday. After lunch theres a quick security search, apparently someone was spotted in the building wearing a t-shirt with a peace sign! The security search was sponsored by Pepsi and the vending machine had a one hour discount. On the way home you some girls getting a ticket for skirt-length violation (the cop has his ruler out) and you just hope your girl isnt getting into trouble. You get home and check slashdot, the news and your mail.
Oh and make sure you dont get mugged in 2014, they cut your hand off for the finger prints.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
His site seems to have gone down inexplicably.
... this guy is not Authur C Clarke.
/You will then watch the best pornography and get famous people to say naughty things to you using realistic speech synthesis.
o.O Alright who dunnit? Who clicked the link? You know who you are.
Oh its back.
"As a science-fiction writer, my job is predicting the future."
No your job is writting science fiction. Future predictors have the job of predicting the future.
"Moore's law tells us that computing power doubles every 18 months. If that holds up -- and i believe it will,"
*switches into listen to old man rumbling on about moores 'law'* Moores law tells us that Moore though, hang on, about a year and a half ago I bought this computer that was half as good, and I remember when I was a lad...
"Can anyone guess how that much computing muscle, widely available and inexpensively priced, will affect our day-to-day lives?"
Yes, the average survival rate of Window 2014 will be about 20 minutes/128. Or it'll die just before you remove it from the polystyrene.
"tomorrow's robokitchen will have an entire hot (but low carb!) breakfast waiting for you."
s/robokitchen/wife... loser scifi writer.
wife n. pl. wives (wvz)
A woman joined to a man in marriage; a female spouse.
"but you might still have to physically go to your office. Along the way you'll take your kids to school."
How does he know I'll have kids in 2014, and if I do, they can take to robo-school-bus.
"Naturally, your electric car will drive itself"
Yeah, not running windows 2014 I hope.
s/"you will use the rest of your commute time productively, catching up on full-motion-video e-mail and reading reports (or having them read to you by totally realistic voice synthesizers)"
The idea about the wall being a vast flatscreen, THAT is cool, except more cool for things like Doom 6. Unless the co-worker is hot.
"Recording your entire life will take a lot of storage, but the cost of data storage will be essentially zero by 2014, so that's no problem."
Aaaah I see GMails grand plan now.
"No standing in line, though, to check out: you'll just waltz out the front door, as the Radio Frequency ID chips in the products you've bought allow their costs to be tallied and your account automatically debited."
And if you haven't got an account chip? wooohoo utopian or orwellien?
"You might make dinner yourself, if you enjoy cooking. But if not, your automated kitchen will again take care of everything"
s/robokitchen/wife... loser scifi writer.
wife n. pl. wives (wvz)
A woman joined to a man in marriage; a female spouse.
He is slow on the uptake right?
"And you'll have a humanoid robot, too"
Aaaah for people without wives.
"your kids will be off in their rooms, enjoying fully immersive virtual reality experiences"
They are called drugs. And what happened to the jetsons utopian family life with that hot one with white hair? She was nice.
"So, have I got it right? Only time will tell. But, as I said at the outset, if I'm wrong, feel free to look me up in 2014 and let me know."
No, and you will be dead by then I hope. Sod off.
Sorry, had to, just had to.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
gently turning on the light...making me wake up more rested
last time I checked it was the number of hours of sleep, the confort level of your sleeping quarters, and your basic mental condition that are dominant factors on whether you are 'well rested'.
Besides that, I need something really freaken annoying to wake me up from sleep. It used to be a 'whining woman' telling me to get up and freaken do something. Now it is a basic alarm clock. Gently turning the lights on, all that will do is piss me off when I do happen to wake up.
Nuttles
Saved by Grace
But that might be too ambitious a prediction.
I'm going to go slashdot my toilet now.
...allow me to have any of those fancy gadgets.
Well...maybe the alarm clock with an employees discount.
This story sounds wonderful, but how will all this gadgets be powered? Not with cheap oil, I would venture to guess, not anymore in 2014. How will the planet cope with 8 or 10 billion people crowding it and depletng its resources? Will all these people live as nicely as described in the story?
I don't think so.
A lot of these ideas have almost zero chance of happening in 10 years, with 50 or 100 years being a better guess. Not for technological reasons, mostly, but just because people don't need this crap.
-Better alarm clock with brainwave monitoring: alarm clocks work fine.
-Robokitchen makes breakfast: why? You can get "instant" microwavable crap now.
-End of memorization: utter bullshit, it will always be vital to the educational process, or at least into the indefinite future.
-Car drives itself: technology is still far off, at which point there's still a huge infrustructural investment to be made.
-FMV email: we could do it now, but people don't want it. Ditto for voice synthesizers.
-Cellphone/PDA/camera/wristwatch: of course we'll have them, but we won't be so attached that we wear them to bed.
-Virtual wall: what is this, another term for video teleconferencing? Will remain a sci-fi movie staple with little real world use.
-Text-overlaying, face-recognizing contact lenses: come on, in 10 years? No way. It'll happen in a few decades or centuries, though.
And so on and so on. Simply the number of times he mentions "virtual reality" tells you what kind of 80's movie world he's living in.
Nothin like good old-fashioned animal-source-unknown smoked Meat!!! Except in 2014, genetically engineered and laboratory grown!
It does not exclude "entire parts" of your diet. The beginning steps exclude a large portion of what fat people normally eat. However as you go on it reintroduces many items back into the diet.
Is your bathroom and bedroom lined with newspapers?
No, then don't be a parrot.
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They thought the same thing in the 50's,60's,70's,80's,90's about the next generation.
Sorry to say, but automated roadways are a loooong way off and the sheer amount to re-pave all our roads is just insane.
Everytime they have come up with ideas to have governors in car's that could be updated in real time by way of speedlimit signs the car companies go nuts and the privacy advocates go nuts.
It is a nice dream, but we are going to be stuck with regular roads for a while still.
Basically, once we have to replace all these vehicles that are currently sucking down gas when it gets too pricey, maybe then.. but that is still quite a way's down the road.
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Where's the list from 1990 predicting what's to come in 2004?
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
socialization still happens best in a real school and at a real playground
Ahh, yes... segregated by age and ability level, this is definitly the best socialization!
Gotta keep those pesky parents out of the picture... and grandparents, my my - go back to the home!
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Maybe slightly offtopic since most of Sawyer's predictions don't require superduper powerful computers, but regarding Sawyer's first comment: isn't Moore's Law thought to come up against a physics brick wall with the current CMOS-based devices around this time (2010s)? I think alternatives are still only in the basic research phase. Photolithography might even be in trouble before 2014.
Probably the more likely advances that will make Sawyer's predictions come true are not more powerful computers, but less powerful ubiquitous computers - ones with moderate performance but are fabricated by printing versus photolithography so that they are extremely cheap and made/sold/used in extremely large numbers everywhere.
This might be a typical day for some ultra-rich CEO with nothing better to spend his money on. But a humanoid house-cleaning robot? A robo-kitchen? A self-driving car? Brainwave monitoring? Full-wall teleconferencing? Come on. And then there's all the time requered to write all the software that connects everything.
That stuff may be available in 10 years, but only someone with a ton of disposable income would ever be able to afford it. There's no way a mere programmer would ever be able to command that kind of money, unless he won the lottery.
Every paragraph should have ended with, "and the government will be wacthing you."
according to the Mayans and some of that funky ELS code stuff those uncanny guys get out of the old testament... oh, and Moby Dick... So a typical day in 2014 might be, sort of dull.
Backbone magazine can publish a page which will display in my browser (Mozilla 1.4 Windows).
electric cars in 10 years?!?!? we'll be lucky if a majority of cars on the road are gas/electric hybrids in 10 years. and forget about cars driving themselves within the next 50 years.
world wide phone? we can't even get a world wide standard for wireless phones. forget no roaming / long distance.
the contact lenses thing doesn't seem to have any sort of similar technology right now. where does this super technology come from? maybe this could happen in 100 years?
micropayments that work? and in 10 years?? now that's just crazytalk!
i don't have to wait 10 years. i know the author is wrong right now. and i think i'll pass on learning what insane impossiblities the author things will happen by 2024.
Sawyer is head and shoulders above the bulk of scifi authors in taking on predictions that will or will not come true within his lifetime. But he could even be head and shoulders above so called "futurists" who can't be bothered even to register their opinions on longbets and foresight exchange -- of course, that's if Sawyer actually does so.
Seastead this.
Lots of stuff told here is impractical and not viable economicaly in a 10-years timeframe. A 100-years, I would believe. See you in 2104.
Massa
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
and maybe i missed it, is what are the jobs of 2014? and i also wonder how medicine and the roles of physicians will be. i can imagine the script pad will be replaced by an encoded card which will have your information on it to hand to the pharmacist, or that the doctor's tablet will upload your pharmaceutical information directly to your pharmacist.
Is it 5:30 yet?
Sounds to me that, if you can afford it, you too can be a soft childlike Eloi in the future. Great, sign me up.
I think that some of these may come to pass, but 10 years is WAY too soon. What I mean here is, how different is today from ten years ago? Sure, the web and all, but they had BBSs and other similar tech since the 70s.
My car today isn't significantly different than a car bought in the 80s or early 90s, except its mileage is worse ( and my car's a small 2-door stickshift ).
My computer's essentially the same, just it's faster. Mac OS X is better than system 6, but really I use it for the same things: design & programming.
I hate the idea that we've plateau-ed technologically, but I think we have. We've reached a point of massive polishing and it might be decades before something new hits. And I don't mean computers... I mean something really new that changes everything, like free, infinite energy or anti-gravity or something.
The really big advances will be held back, possibly forever, because nobody will take liability when they ( inevitably ) fail in some way. Who is liable when two self-driving electric cars crash? The manufacturer? The city that lined the streets with sensors? The passengers, because they paid for the car and signed the EULA? For this reason flying cars won't happen, and pervasive nanotech will similarly be constrained.
I predict ten years from now won't be a whole lot different, except 3d graphics will be a lot better, my car will get worse mileage, and all consumer products will be built in china and will break in two years ( no offense to chinese, but man, quality control seems pretty lax there ).
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
Note that they never say "By 2014, nuclear war will have broken out, following rampant disease, economic collapse, rising world tensions, and local civil wars. A typical day might involve cowering in the remnants of your shanty, or travelling along backwoods roads, hoping that you or your family is not spotted by the local bandits. Mad cow disease won't be just for cows anymore, and computers will be largely superfluous due to the lowered standard of living, high energy prices, and disrupted power supply."
I really wish they would say that, just because they're so horrible at predicting the future--that's one future I'd be happy to see them get wrong.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I like Mr. Sawyer (he's an enthusiastic attender of conventions, willing to discuss his work with quite small rooms of readers) but this article made me shake my head. I read it the other day and tried to hit on Backbone's web site to respond. (Uh-uh. No forums.)
Virtually every single prediction is well over 10 years away, and not just because of politics. Self-driving cars interfacing with millions of chips buried in the road? Even if made workable tomorrow, and tested and proven six-sigma safe the day after (try 20 years for each) we only repave *major* roads once every 20 years. Accelerating the schedule would double local taxes! Sheesh.
And the rest of them run like that. I think I read this same stuff in 1994 at the height of the machines-of-loving-grace-will-run-the-world burbling from WIRED in its heyday. And always, always, this stuff is prefaced with Moore's Law. Because of Moore's Law, any prediction involving intelligence in machines is "OK", no matter how outlandish.
But we've had over 30 years of Moore's Law since the first microchips and we still have computers that are dumb as rocks, just 1M times faster at being dumb as rocks. They barely can parse words reliably, have no idea what a sentence means, and definitely can't *see*. So, sorry, no low-carb-cooking, kitchen wash-up robots in a lousy 10 years.
Some of it was at least techically possible; the "every TV show ever available" is obviously a political problem, if they can solve that, they can do the appliances and the networking. But anything involving, say, fiber to the home - i.e. more than ONE custom-download HDTV show at a time - will require over 10 years just to get the fiber strung.
Shit takes TIME.
I was around in 84. I was around in 94. And now I'm still around in 2004. And guess what? Not a god damn thing has changed. Sure we got the internet and cell phones. But 95% of our lives back then is still the same now.
We wiped our asses with toilet paper in 84 and 94, we do it now and we'll still be doing it in 2014.
we were driving around in our grounded internal combustion engine boxes in 84 & 94 and we still do it now. We'll still do it in 10 years.
Sure we have a *few* new things. We have cheaper and smaller cell phones, so some people have them. We have the internet and faster computers.
He's claiming faster computers will change our lives because they get 128 times faster every ten years. WOW that's incredible (/sarchasm). What has that brought us the last 2 decades?
weather reporters are not any more accurate than they used to be where I live.
He talks about how our toilets and toothbrushes will analyze our fluid samples and tell us if we're getting sick and what we have. Dream on buddy. I work as an R&D biochemist and let me tell you, product development in these areas take MAJOR time. Not 10 years. If we dont have working prototypes in peoples homes for trials right now, the ordinary person won't have diddly in 10 years. You can run into a snag (murphy's law, you WILL run into a snag) and take 5-10 years just to work out one detail so you can get back on track.
He talks about how roads in 10 years will have microchips embedded so they can drive your car for you. That one had me on the floor laughing. My city hasn't paved the roads with normal asphalt in 10 years. You think they're gonna repave all the roads with stuff that doesn't even exist right now and be done in 10 years? L O L. They've taken 6 months and counting just to redo a 500m strech of road outside my house. They're still not done.
Sure, I wont dispute that we'll have some of the technology to do some of the stuff this guy talks about in 10 years. But at most it will still be a pipe dream in somebody's laboratory. no way it will be a fully functional 100% coverage public infrastructure or cheap consumable.
Don't be fooled by this guy because he writes good sci-fi. That's exactly what he's written here, good sci-fi. Your life will still be the same in 2014.
I predict most of his predictions will fall through. What he needs to do, is look at areas that are already functional in laboratories and are already cheap to do. Certain kinds of gene therapy for example. The ones to do with enhancing muscle growth. Inserting broken myostatin genes, or extra IGF1 genes into muscle cells. These are things that are already working in animal models (ie. good enough for athletes to say fook it and try it) and are also cheap to do because you only need to prepare the material once and you can administer it at no cost and produce more very cheaply.
You want my prediction? in 8 years, watch for a shitload of olympic records to get thrashed.
Liberty.
Ha!
/. :-) transforming us into a fair society, where that lovely workday (?!) could describe the lives of EVERYONE, not that of the luckiest 1-2 billion or so humans.
Nice tho really cars and nanotechnology will not be around so soon IMHO.
What about social change? Do we still work all day? With virtual reality the cost of living will be so low, I'd expect a serious cut-back on that, with rabid capitalism out the window... Hello, benign socialism!
Besides, the media being what it is, you would expect someone to fill that void eventually. If it wouldn't be folks like Michael Moore, perhaps the blogs -- perhaps
[by filling the void I mean describing the EDUCATED ANGLE, yes?]
And what about mental change? Yoga masters hardly ever get confused, fail to remember anything, and HARDLY SLEEP. They spend a couple of hours a day meditating in Samadhi (the deepest yogic meditative state), and that's that. Yes, not knowing about yoga you WOULD doubt it, wouldn't you? Alas, there is now a 21-day course available to get into that state, perchance it would be available outside India some day (www.ssy.org).
Your thoughts?
Think about it, look at our lives now compared to, say, 100 years ago. What's changed except for some of the details? Go outside and watch people. You've got people on cellphones now, sure, but honestly, just look at what people are doing. It's really no different at all.
I could be wrong, too, I suppose. "Smart washcloths." Bah.
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
I would have to say that I completely disagree with this guy. Nope I don't think even one of these things will come to pass. The tech will probably be there, but It will not be a mainsty to the way life works
what?
Take a look at Heinlein's Expanded Universe predictions. Besides hitting a nice % for being correct, he correctly rationalized the science curve into the future.
As long as I get my flying car that I was promised back in... oh... 1954!!!!@!$#@!#$@
"You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic."
"Thank you, Master Control"
-Sark and the MCP
living in seattle, a simple 14 mile monorail system the public has all but demanded for the past five(+) years might be ready by 2009.
seeing as any major undertaking, such as the design and implementation of a self-driving car system would take the coordination of many major companies as well as local and federal governments, i'm quite positive that we'll still have our collective foot on the accelerator come 2014.
unless our 44th president decides that we should focus on efficently and easily getting 20 miles down the road, rather than worrying about how to get to mars.
So many of these are things that have been promised for a long time. And a lot of them are quite possible with today's technology. But it's not just the level of technology that makes these things happen, but the culture they exist in. Yes, we could have cars that drive themselves, but we won't have them in 10 years. Not when most people would rather drive their own car for any number of reasons.
We won't have a single worldwide phone number. We could do that now too, but it doesn't make financial sense for the oodles of company all trying to rip us off.
We'll still have hard to cure health problems. Cancer isn't going away. No matter how much wishing anyone does, we won't have nanonics that can hunt and seek cancer cells throughout our bodies- at least, not in 10 years.
I mean, what is so hard about looking into the past? People have been talking about computer controlled cars that drive themselves- solving gridlock- and "kitchen of the future"s for a very long time. They promised us these things in the 60s- we'd have them in 10, 20, 30 years. We still won't, and sure as hell won't have them in 10 years. Maybe in 20. More likely 50 or a 100.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
That's a joke. Most /. here are highly intelligent (Certainly more intelligent than the average population), and we well know about school and how well the highly intelligent "socialize" with everyone else. Mixing Gifted Kids and Avg Kids is not the way to go. The Problem is that schools segregate kids by age more often than not without recognition of intelligence levels (which vary so greatly as to be the difference between being of Avg IQ and being considered Mentally Retarded).
The most socialization highly intelligent kids get is maybe one day a week of "enrichment" activities in a "Gifted" Program, which is of course laughable.
The only system that would come close to meeting the needs of Highly Intelligent Kids would be a complete separation from avg and below avg IQ kids in special schools from Kindergarten on. Which would allow them to advance much faster, in real subjects such as Mathematics, Reading, and Science, than they would in school with the "normals."
Unfortunately though, no one on has the intestinal fortitude to put such a system in place.
A Good book for more info on this subject is Genius Denied
What happened to the other 2 hours?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I fail to see why everyone likes to predict these somewhat far fetched ideas. Sure, it's possible that we'll have toothbrushes that detect when we're sick, but are YOU going to spend 30 bucks on a toothbrush? me neither.
How many of you live in apartments? How exactly is your alarm clock going to interact and slowly turn on the lights? Will your management company be jumping to rewire the place so you can join the modern world?
It's all possible, but highly unlikely to make an impact on the majority of people. Think about what you're doing in 2004, that maybe your parents were doing in 1964. What's different? You still wake up with a typical alarm clock, you still watch TV, you still cook your own food (or go out). Pretty much the only difference is you now have a mobile phone, and a tivo, and a PC. While all of those are useful and deffinately something our parents didn't have, I wouldn't say our lives have really changed much in 40 years. So why would they change much in just 10 more?
I think SF authors are more optimistic than pragmatic.
Everything is essentially the same. I'll still have the same car I have today, if not another car that may have a Diesel engine (diesel being more efficient). I don't see any alternative energies getting such a boost in the next 10 years that we switch from useful gasoline. Gas will cost $6 per gallon however. Wasteful government construction crews will still repair potholes in roads. Computers will still be the same thing they are today, just faster. The internet might have some more technologies, and wireless "broadband" type speeds will have coverage pretty much across the US. You'll still check your e-mail by going to hotmail.com, you'll just be able to do it from your back yard instead. You'll still have to make your own damn coffee in the morning. Things like the Roomba floor vacuum robots might be more popular though. Cellphones will be able to play some pretty neat games, and will basically be what most people use for their day-to-day computing needs, checking mail, talking with friends, taking pictures. It'll just have better screens and keyboards, probably voice recognition that still mixes up words occasionally. The big corporations will be bigger, but resentment of that fact will also be larger; the underdogs will have a very secure foothold, and a bright future. The US government will have kept up the current trend of restricting certain freedoms in the name of preventing terror. We'll possibly all have ID cards, like what is used for special people at airports now. You have to be verified as a "good guy" first, instead of assumed.
Basically, just a bit more of what we have now, nothing radically different.
What do you guys think?
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
UV-filter contacts already exist and are a good idea. However, people will always wear shades (sunglasses) for two reasons: 1) they make you look cool and 2) they let you look at girl's legs on the street without them noticing.
http://www.bernsonline.com/
Future tech will be oriented more and more towards the needs of the elderly. AI that helps them keep track of their schedules and medication. Spoken interfaces to that AI because typing is very hard when your arthritis acts up. Always-on wireless communication so that "I've fallen and I can't get up" is not an issue. Appliances with sensors and network connections so the AI can remind you that you left the stove on or didn't turn on the washing machine. A shift towards smaller homes, all on one level, and the disappearance of bathtubs (bathtubs turn out to be incredibly hazardous for the elderly).
What's changed in 10 years?
In 1994 finding tech support for any gadget (not just computers!) usually meant calling the tech support number for the company. Now a tech support number is the method of last resort. Online docs, newsgroups, and Google are the way to go.
In 1994 my vision was 20/450 in each eye. It's 20/15 now -- BETTER than "normal".
In 1994 cell phones were heavy, expensive, and worked in miniscule service areas. My unlimited long distance now means that I've discontinued long distance service on my landline entirely. I'm seldom inaccessible now -- unless I CHOOSE to be.
Money? I live 90% of my financial life electronically. In 1994 I still made trips to the bank to hand a paper paycheck to a teller. I spent ages trying to reconcile my checkbook to a once-a-month bank statement. Paying bills meant getting back to that stack in the corner when you had money in your account. Now I schedule my bills for payment as soon as the arrive -- set to deliver after payday whenever necessary. A list of every transaction I've made is ALWAYS available to me. I can keep my financial program reconciled to my bank's records DAILY. I usually carry under $10 in cash these days since my debit card works almost anywhere. Oh, remember PRICE TAGS? Little stickers with numbers on them that had to be read and manually punched in to a cash register. Very few stores use them now.
As for computers -- I have a LAPTOP that substitutes for a whole table top covered in computer junk. The house is wireless -- I get the information I want when I want it and where I want it. For that matter, my wife's wi-fi enabled Palm Pilot is about as powerful as my 1994 desktop -- which ran WINDOWS 3.1 (shudder) and cost 4 times as much. I still don't know what to do with that big table, though...
In 1994 I had to drive to the video store to rent a movie. Now, I usually just pick one off iControl. When I do choose a movie, it's a DVD which I can play on my TV or my laptop if I'm traveling. Same thing for music. I'm either buying songs from iTunes (and ONLY paying for the songs I want instead of buying a whole album with only two decent offerings on it) or I'm listening to Virgin Radio streaming live from LONDON (I'm in North Carolina).
Speaking of traveling, when I'm driving in an unfamiliar area I connect my PowerBook to my GPS. My position is indicated in realtime overlaying a map of the area. No more getting lost!
While I'm typing this to an international gathering of techies, I'm also chatting with my mom who is alone today via instant messaging.
The changes since 94 have been HUGE.
Life is short: void the warranty.
I doubt that's ever going to be the case. Ever try looking up something you don't know the name of? -- "Yeah, that element on the periodic table, you know... it's silver in colour, or maybe grey. Umm... maybe it's a metal?" Good luck with that endeavour.
Also, the last thing I need is to have my doctor performing surgery on me, and having to google my anatomy during the operation.
No longer memorizing... this guy thinks we're going to phase out our brains or something.
Live forever, or die trying.
(What are the "enhanced reality contact lenses" powered by? Happy thoughts?)
Seriously, we've had prototypes of those for a very long time. They're referred to as "beer goggles".
His predictions are crazy. Not neccessarily because they are far fetched, but because he's predicting that they will occur withing just 10 years.
Think back to 1994. How have things changed since then?
We're still using the same alarm clocks, only now they have CD players. I predict future alarm clocks will have mp3 players built in.
"Today, your coffee can be brewed while you sleep; tomorrow's robokitchen will have an entire hot (but low carb!) breakfast waiting for you."
I don't even have a coffee machine. I doubt I'm going to have a breakfast machine.
"Your spouse and kids will be taken care of, too -- with smart toilets analyzing their urine and sensor-rich toothbrushes checking their saliva to make sure everything is ticketyboo; most health problems will be caught early and be trivial to correct."
Bullshit. We are way more than 10 years from that coming to pass. Especially the toothbrush thing. Though I suppose they might get those toilets in Japan in 10 years since they love technology. But Americans don't replace their toilets every five years.
"Your cubicle will have a smart wall of its own, giving every worker the appearance of having a window; yours might show real-time footage of Lake Louise"
So he's predicting that in ten years we will be able to create large, lightweight, flexible screens at such a low cost that our bosses will be willing to spend a little extra cash to make us a little more happy and a little more productive. Someone tell the TV manufacturers that they're not going to be in business in ten years, cause if I can get a screen I can roll up and hang on any wall, I'm not gonna bother with a TV set, and the profit margins on these things ain't gonna be near as good as they are for TV's!
"Of course, we'll all live in an enhanced reality."
Oh of COURSE!
"Today's bulky virtual-reality goggles will have been replaced by contact lenses that overlay textual information on your vision; the lens will be in constant communication with the computing powerhouse in your wristband. You'll never be in the embarrassing situation of not remembering the name of an acquaintance you happen to run into; facial-recognition technology will identify the person, and provide you with all pertinent details instantaneously."
So, not only will we have PC's more powerful than today's computers in a wristband, but we will have tiny displays powered by... what... heat our body generates? Sunlight? MEchanical energy derived from blinking? That fit inside a contact lens, and are therefore capable of being opaque or transparent, AND of displaying in such a way that we can focus on something that close to our eye, AND these devices will be fitted with tiny high resolution cameras which can transmit photos through... body conductance? At high rates of speed to our wirst computers so that they can analyze them and display the person's name on the screen? Assuming of course we have a way to, and bother to enter the name of every accuaintance we meet simply so we will not forget their name later!
"he microprocessors in your running shoes will keep track of your pace, telling you when to slow down or speed up for maximum effect"
Maybe.
"Meanwhile, nanotechnological probes will be working their way through your bloodstream, clearing plaque out of your arteries, and getting rid of dangerous chemicals."
Powered by WHAT? exactly? And how will we construct these tiny machines? Atoms take up space, and computer take up lots of space. You may be able to make a nanomachine, but what is it going to use for a brain? We can't make computers that tiny and still make them smart enough to recognize different atoms. Any "nanotechnology" we use to cleanse arteries is going to be biological and chemical. Not little robots.
"And naturally, your wristband will be recording everything you see and do, with software indexing it all as you go along."
Which will be illegal, as it is illegal to r
All that change in 10 years time?
Sounds more like 2114 than 2014.
include servers that don't get slashdotted?
Your spouse might telecommute -- perhaps half of all white-collar workers will do so in 2014 -- but you might still have to physically go to your office. Along the way you'll take your kids to school.
I doubt this very much. Prediction: We will have an AI breakthrough within a few years. In ten years, you and your spouse will be replaced by a machine and will join millions of others on the unemployment line. Unless, of course, the Big Brother government du jour steps in and bars intelligent machines from the work place. Lots of luck to them, because other nations will not follow suit. Interesting times ahead.
Seriously, and nothing to do with religion, if I ever have kids I will move heaven and earth to keep them out of anything resembling a public school. I am absolutely convinced the system I went through is the worst possible way to educate human beings. And the "socialization" is criminal. Seriously, people should be jailed for perpetuating it. The NEA and AFT have a lot to answer for.
Heh. Nice.
Personally, I think your prediction is, given current trends, more accurate and more likely than the typical masturbatory pseudotopian CRAP published Sci-Fi authors spew out whenever they try to predict the near-future.
I think that his brainwave alarmclock is more likely to be reality well before a phone system with no long distance charges...
Featured Articles
July 13, 2004 - 20:06
It's 2014, and life is the same. Only better
By Robert J. Sawyer
As a science-fiction writer, my job is predicting the future. And that's gotten harder with each passing year. Moore's law tells us that computing power doubles every 18 months. If that holds up -- and i believe it will, with breakthroughs in nanotechnology, new techniques of producing three-dimensional circuits, and new substrates for microprocessors -- then in 10 short years, we will have computers 128 times more powerful than those that exist today. Can anyone guess how that much computing muscle, widely available and inexpensively priced, will affect our day-to-day lives? Well, let's find out.
Here are some of my predictions for a typical day in late 2014; feel free to track me down in 10 years' time and tell me i'm wrong!
Our mornings will still begin with waking up. But forget the old-fashioned alarm-clock buzzer. Tomorrow's bedside clock will be a sophisticated brainwave monitor. It'll keep track of your sleep cycle, gently bringing up the room lights at precisely the right time so that you'll feel rested, not cardiac arrested, as you awake.
Today, your coffee can be brewed while you sleep; tomorrow's robokitchen will have an entire hot (but low carb!) breakfast waiting for you. Also waiting will be an electronic-ink newspaper, with stories geared to your particular interests culled from sources worldwide (with foreign-language news automatically translated into English).
Of course, you aren't the only one who has to get going in the morning. Your spouse and kids will be taken care of, too -- with smart toilets analyzing their urine and sensor-rich toothbrushes checking their saliva to make sure everything is ticketyboo; most health problems will be caught early and be trivial to correct.
Your spouse might telecommute -- perhaps half of all white-collar workers will do so in 2014 -- but you might still have to physically go to your office. Along the way you'll take your kids to school.
No point quizzing them on facts as you travel along, though. In a world in which any information can be easily accessed anywhere, mere memorization is no longer part of the curriculum. But analysis of information -- knowing how to think -- ah, that's the ticket!Naturally, your electric car will drive itself, communicating with millions of chips that have been steamrollered into the asphalt covering our roadways. No more traffic accidents; no more gridlock.
Once you've dropped the kids off -- yes, learning can be done online at home, but socialization still happens best in a real school and at a real playground -- you will use the rest of your commute time productively, catching up on full-motion-video e-mail and reading reports (or having them read to you by totally realistic voice synthesizers). You'll arrive at your office relaxed.
Throughout the day, your wristband -- a combination cellphone, PDA, camera, and e-book display, all controlled by spoken commands -- will be your lifeline.
You'll have just one phone number, good worldwide with no long-distance or roaming charges, and the wristband will screen calls for you, with a computer-generated avatar kicking in to deal with most routine matters.
Still, even 10 years from now, much business will require face-time. No problem. One major wall of your office in, say, Toronto, will be a vast flatscreen, showing you your company's Vancouver office. You'll be able to walk up to the wall and chat with whomever is depicted as casually as if you were both sharing the same water cooler.
Your cubicle will have a smart wall of its own, giving every worker the appearance of having a window; yours might show real-time footage of Lake Louise, assuming that global warming hasn't melted the adjacent glaciers and flooded everything. And no matter which office chair you sit on, it will adjust automatically to your body's proportions.
Of course, we'll all live in an enhanced realit
Straight up, if I slept until I was Fully Rested, I'd wake up at noon or one in the afternoon instead of ten, which is when the alarm goes off and when I get up and Go. Forget feeling "fresh"- that's what a cold shower and coffee are for, damnit. I'm awake enough by noon that it isn't a problem the rest of the day.
:) Nothing like painfully bright light to kick your ass out of bed in the morning.
I would, however, love a device I could attach to the alarm clock which would kick on the overheads.
Remember, if you can telecommute, that means you're job can go to India. So it will. The only people whom can telecommute will be the poorest lowest paid people in the entire world. So unless you live in Somalia or India or Bangladesh you are not going to be telecommuting any time soon.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
We'll see how my wife likes it...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I thought that pretty much any forward-looking predictive "LIFE IN THE YEAR $NOW+$TIME" was satire.... I mean, you know, flying cars, suborbital commutes... Joe Average having his bills paid and being able to eat well and put food on the table....
Sci-Fi authors have, in my experience, historically seen technology's potential, and neglected things like the economics of deployment, the size of the installed base, the fact that the vast majority aren't going to pull in enough to make frivolties like this monetarily feasable, and.... oh yeah, greed.
We'll get Weyland Yutani or the equivalent for sure. Starfleet and the Federation (aliens aside, I'm talking concept) are a frigging pipe dream.
That always irked me about concepts like intelligent contacts- the power source. I mean, you could hyothetically power an artificial retina by plugging some itty flywheels into the bloodstream and make up for it that way... eyephones could easily have their own internal power packs....
:)
And hey, people blink. A lot. With the right advances, the act if your eyelid passing over the contact might be enough to generate just enough juice to make it Go.
Something that size would, by design, have minimal power requirements... and they already have kinetically powered watches (last I heard...), so. That bit is at least possible.
Feasable's another matter.
When I was a little kid (1974) our grocery store got its first automatic door. It was amazing, just like Star Trek! I went in and out of it shouting "Scotty, give me more power!" and "Red alert!" while my mother shopped. How many of you (who are parents) would be separated from your six-year-old kid in a grocery store today? How many of your kids play pick-up games of street ball with their neighbors? How many of them roam around the neighborhood on bicycles, unsupervised, like we did in the 70's?
In the neighborhood where I live today, lawns are immaculately kept, and the streets are devoid of children. They live here. It's just that their parents never let them see the light of day, except during organized, structured activities that they drive to in their monster SUV's.
I, for one, would trade all my gadgets to give my neighborhood kids the freedoms we had then.
That is, in 2104 we will have gone 3 years without support for the Alpha platform, hence year 3 After Alpha.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Quantum crypto won't be used commercially to store the mundane details of our lives in 10 years. No need to crypto that!!! But seriously, IMHO, not gonna happen.
Think back to 10 years ago.. that's right 1994. AOL was still popular, the world wide web & ecommerce began to explode, the imminent release Windows 95 was all over the news, a 15" computer LCD screen cost more than $3000, Clinton was a first-term president, Monicagate & 9/11 haven't happened. No integrated home living systems, electric cars, fusion power, artificial intelligence, voice recognition, or anything else that was promised to me in 'Beyond 2000' has happened.
g 2004/tc20040813_1107_tc120.htm
The resulting litigation destabilizes the Linux migration. The open source community heeds the call to arms and rallies behind Torvalds and leads the development of a UNIX-, patent-, and copyright-free kernel. The new OS fills the void and all the people in the land are happy. Except when Microsoft lays off 25,000 programmers to refocus on office productivity and software development products.
How about learning from the past? My predictions for the next 10 years (I'm just a tech (MIT) student, not some fancy dancy science fiction writer):
++ Linux and Windows do not exist. As its desktop share plummets because of both increasing institutional adoption of Linux and persistent security issues (Longhorn looked like swiss cheese), Microsoft calls in its cards with its copyright and patent portfolio that Linux "infringes" upon. http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/au
++ Oil and Gas shortage because of continuing\spreading unrest in the middle east pummels global economy. Rather than investigating alternatives or renewables, vested interests ensure that countries revert to dirty methods like coal and new processes to extract vast tar oil reserves.
++ Integrated wireless-PDA, streaming audio-video iPod, VoIP cell phone are commonplace using HyperHiWiMaxExtreme4 Platinum Edition redux alpha.
++ Duke Nukem Forever and Team Fortress 2 are expected to go gold "sometime in fall." Quake 4 supports 6400x3600 resolution for the new 40" OLED Mac display.
++ James Webb Space Telescope 0w|\|3z Hubble. In conjunction with Terrestrial Planet Finder, scientists begin to resolve images of extrasolar planets.
++ Scaled Composites begins to offer weightless 30-minute, sub-orbital trips for $25,000.
++ ebooks still not popular. Something to do with people who stare at a computer screens all day don't like to relax by staring at computer screens.
++ George Lucas cashes in chips and has Wachowski brothers write Star Wars VII, VIII, and IX. Together, they cost $1 billion to produce.
++ Body odor remains an issue for programmers. Dweebs still have trouble with women.
And all that stuff will happen in your sleep.
Come on, do you think the Machines would change the Matrix like that for us? Nah, they spent to many hours developing the world the way it is now.
And when you wake up, you'll turn on the radio and hear about how this tech company is sueing this another company because they claim that 10 year old code was used to save time in the production of a newer product...Oh Wait, my bad, I just described today.
"People won't actually do work, they will just sue over the rights of work done 10 years ago..."
It'll be 2014, and you'll still be a virgin living in your parents basement!
I'm sure Mr. Sawyer is a fine writer and all, but really, this sort of over-optimistic drivel has been around since before SF even existed. The editor's "department" choice is ironic: we don't have flying cars because the "popular science" wonks of 40 years ago chose to ignore the realities of the world we live in.
Sawyer flat-out ignores many trends we all see in our lives right now, without justifying what would cause such drastic changes in course. Real change only comes from disruption; like, say the Internet.
Wanna get an idea how far things will progress in the next ten years? Look at what it's done in the LAST ten years...
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
Absolutely not. Last night I stood in an IKEA parking lot and watched a lady in an expensive volvo fail to turn and clear a concrete median. Whereupon she proceeds to get high centered, and sat there for several minutes revving the crap out of her engine, and moving in random directions trying to figure out how to disentangle herself from her predicament.
The poor kid who was outside marshalling up shopping carts stood there in disbelief saying outlout "that's a sixty-thousand dollar car, what the heck is she doing???".
Trust me, the flying car is right out if there is any operator input whatsoever other than stating destination. People can barely manage two-dimensional navigation.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The idea of 'enhanced reality' and the idea of happy thoughts reminded me of a short film about a fictional product 'Happy Product' which you may be interested in. Here's the url: http://www.happyproduct.com/more1.html
Somehow, I think this movie may be a better predictor of the future than the author mentioned in the write-up.
ok, here goes. This stuff will be here:
1. Speech recoginition will be common-place. It's nearly there now, only a little more processing power is needed. You'll talk to everything imaginable from your car to your toaster.
2. #1 will lead to universal translators. Well, not exactly, because there will still be babel-fish type problems with the translation, but I think it will work great for simple dialog. There will be a button you can press which marks the translation as bad, it gets sent in real-time to a human who does the translation the old fashioned way, then sends you back the right translation. The system remembers the fix so it doesn't make a mistake again.
3. Biometrics instead of pin codes and signatures. This will be done to fix the problem of identity theft which will get nothing but worse.
4. rfid tag checkout. they'll weigh your produce in the produce department and make a special tag, just like the meat department now. You'll need one of those stupid (rfid) cards to make this work. They'll charge you more for a manual checkout. All of this to prevent shoplifting and improve customer data collection.
5. More electric cars as battery technology improves, but it will be decades before the end of gasoline. You'll still have to drive.
6. Broadband Internet everywhere. People will start bringing their devices to work to use their connection instead of the one at work. This will cause privacy issues at work. Many places will jam/prohibit your own devices from being on in the workplace.
7. Real actual video phones, over ip.
8. Every surface imaginable will have an LCD displaying some sort of advertisement.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Even if half this stuff is not going to happen, just reading this article should make everybody realize how silly it is to worry about a few programming jobs going to India. With the hardware advances, the number of uses for a programmer is going to increase faster than even India and China and Rusia will be able to produce them. The thing to worry about is that China and India are both producing engineers and programmers faster than the US and Canada. That's going to make India and China the wealth creating nations of the future.
--- http://davidnehme.blogspot.com
- Record all verbal conversation around me and store it.
- Translate it into easily searchable format (txt would be fine).
- Let me search it W/ google++ or something.
- Do it all on my PDA or wristpad or something. Maybe display it on my HMD glasses.
"What was her phone number?"
"When was the party?"
"Could you repeat those directions?"
"What were we talking about?"
"Didn't I hear something about that the other day?"
Writing shit into your PDA is the biggest problem with it. I don't want to put info in, I want to get info out! The next step is a PDA that will listen to what is going on around you and take notes on it automatically.
I think he's forgetting something in all this.
... don't run it till SP3 though, or you might find your calls answered in most interesting ways.
Sure the computers will have fast enough processors to provide the simulacra to vet your calls, but who is writing the software?
- MS Call Manager (tm) automatically replies to your calls -
Or we'll be crawling out of the hovel to warm ourselves in the first rays of the morning sun and grab a few nightcrawlers..
PDA/Cell Phones will be powerful & cheap enough to meet the average consumers computing needs. The PDA/Phone will wirelessly interface with the user's monitor, keyboard, mouse and other devices back home and function as a home computer.
oh yeah, and Microsoft will embrace open source (is that any crazier than apple computers using IBM processors?)
Wasn't most of the stuff he mentions supposed to be here 4 years ago?
Sindri Traustason.
and that's how his prediction will remain , mere fiction.
The reason is he has simply not considered the cost of implementing these new technologies.
The author doesnt know how much it costs to lay a mile of tarmac,let alone one embedded with sensors.And normal working/middle class people arent looking for a super duper car with fancy tech but one which doesnt break the bank.
And most of the people i know either use their mobile phones or a £10 alarm clock,not the fancy £59.99 auto light up alarm from Argos.
While new technology is always exciting,it has to climb down a few magnitutes in price before it becomes omnipresent.An example is the microwave oven,it has been around,IIRC,since late sixties.But its only in the last 10 years that it has become ubiquitous.
Most people look for value for money and thats why low fare,no frills airlines are increasingly popular.And thats why people travel in coaches rather than in more comfortable trains.
And since we are making predictions let me make some of my own.
Consider the new Airbus 380.Instead of onboard massage parlours,shops etc,we will have maybe 800 seats stuck together for cheaper London - Sydney flights.
Our entertainment will be more and more online.Cheap(the operative word here is cheap)broadband will see more and more people coming online for their information/fun.TV/Movies/Music just wont be on the air/cable/satellite dish but all over.
Wanted : A Signature.
Smart washcloths?
The last 10 years has gotten us...
Nothing revolutionary that I can think of off the top of my head.
Every technological advance from the last 10 years that I can think of is evolutionary in nature (smaller, cheaper, faster, better) instead of revolutionary. I would refer to something as revolutionary if it involved improvements of two or more orders of magnitude in a single iteration (data storage, processing speed, reductions in manufacturing costs, display technology, energy production, etc) or, deity forbid, NEW technology. I want fusion, or cheap spaceflight, or total elimination of pervasive health problems like heart disease and cancer. I want cars that can run for a month on 50 cents worth of fuel, or a computer the size of my pinky that can store the equivalent of 300 motion pictures in high definition. I want the blind to see again, in full color. I want Christopher Reeves to stand up and walk around. I want sewage to be transformed into pure water AND generate electricity from the destruction of the impurities. I want ONE MILLION DOLLARS! Yeah, I know, I want a lot. But when I was growing up, the changes seemed more radical and impressive than they do today. Look at computers from 1984 (Commodore 16, Macintosh) compared to computers from 1994 (Intel Pentium 100). Look at computers from 1994 compared to computers 2004 (still called Pentium, just faster). I hate to use an overused and often abused word, but there's been no paradigm shifts.
Technology companies keep promising us the moon (and we see these promises posted on Slashdot (sometimes the same article on a yearly basis)) but none of the really big promises ever bear fruit.
If anyone can think of a really huge leap in some technology in the last 10 years, I'd like to hear it.
I think most of that article is crap for reasons expressed in my post, and in the posts of others. 10 years is not enough time to see most of those changes. 50 years maybe.
My Audi A6 had an air purification system in it.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
As far as storage costs being zero that's a laugh, every time someone comes up with a bigger harddrive everyone comes up with a way to fill it up. I currently have
The toilet is actually a good idea even though it sounds a little odd. Most diseases and medical conditions show up in the urine at the onset and can be delt with much easier if caught early. Of course little Timmy and his pothead friends are going to have a tougher time about it if the toilet rats you out everytime to Mom and Dad.
Why mod me funny? It may sound funny to you but I am as serious as can be.
my personal favorite is the contact lens display... a great theory, but isn't it obvious that the power cable for those might be an eye irritant?
He just forgot to mention the nano-assembled zero-point generators built into each of these things. (Moore's law suggests that these will be 1/128th the size by then.)
Carthago delenda est!
Maximum Leader Ashcroft announced that today's terrorism alert level is reddish-orange. Travel across state lines is prohibited.
Two tourists were accidently shot dead today near the White House when they pointed a camera at the limo of the Secretary for State Security.
The disposable bodysuits required for air travel will be available in new colors this fall. Toothpaste has been removed from the permitted carry-on items list due to a potential terrorist threat.
Gasoline isn't rationed, but it costs $21/gallon. It's tax deductable as a business expense.
The E-mail "security fee" is being raised from $0.50 to $0.75 per message, to cover the increased costs of reading and censorship by Homeland Security. Spam is down to 0.001% of all E-mail.
Homeland Security announced today that 96.3% of road intersections in the US were equipped with surveillance cameras, and that 100% coverage would be achieved within two years.
Information about behavior patterns as obtained from cell phone locators and surveillance cameras will now be made available to college admissions officers, employers, insurance companies, and military recruiters.
Cleanup of the wreckage of Seoul, after the nuclear war between North and South Korea, has been halted again due to higher than expected radioactivity.
Yesterday, Israel sent robot bulldozers into the Jenin refugee camp to crush the homes of "terrorist sympathizers".
China announced that their moon base personnel would have to serve longer tours due to budget cuts.
In 2014, the world would be seeing the extreme of the current trends in corperate culture. To put it into current buzzwords:
"The corperate structure will leverage contract supplied product from a series of providers to fill the order. This will produce a small stipend of profit while passing almost all of the risk on to the providers."
In other words. A person would wake up in the morning, figure out who is producing what widgets for them, and where they need to sell them to. The economy is more entrepenereal. Production happens in a contractual basis between small (possibly individual person) corperations, all in the same "assembly line".
Big corperations of the future would assume too much risk, considering the growth of litigation and punative judicial costs. The cost growth of per-person employment plans will continue to grow till employment of ANY "non-executive" employees will not be "economical".
Im not sure if this is a grim depiction, or a optimistic one. Granted the world economics would organize into "family corperations", and benefits would be only what you could provide for yourself. We will have new litigation problems for definition of "child labor". We will also see more "freedom" in labor practices as we will only be responsible to ourselves (the ole' 9-5 becomes something like "on-call 24 hours, but needed XX hours a week, acording to contract". The world will have to shrug off the "Free Lunch" idealisms
(people will starve trying to adapt to the new economy, not wanting to go into it for themselves).
It is at least something to think about. Think of your own IT consultancy or programming "firm".
Your children will become CPA's by neccessity. I think it would be likely that certification would be a graduation requirement for high school.
Kei
The world in the article is too good to be true... parent post's is too evil to be false. :-/
Not one mention of flying cars? I've been waiting for those damn things for 30 years! I'm glad this prediction did not mention it. I think in many ways these predictions will come true in my lifetime (next 40 years), but not as many will happen in 10 years.
I was quite amused with sleeping with the all-in-wonder wristband. Does that enhance the sex life as well?
Smart washcloths, like smart towells, will say the same thing all the time.
"Ya wanna get high?"
He missed one prediction by a mile: Home schooling is one of the most important large-scale trends. It is the only way to scale-up a large change in education. Private schools and charter schools can't grow fast enough. Group activities will be bought a la carte: Sports clubs rather than school sports, etc.
In 10 years, some universities will start to specialize in home-schooled students.
I wrote parts of this stuff
From the article: "After dinner, you'll have your pick of any TV show or movie ever made, available instantly on your wall-screen TV. (Micropayments will work flawlessly: you'll be able to access any premium information off the expanded, full-motion-video Web, with the creator compensated automatically.)" Any payments to the creators of intellectual property may be micro, but you can predict that corresponding payments to the RIAA, MPAA, or their descendents will be MACRO. There will be even more lawyers than our society is burdened with today, and the gatekeepers will be even more militant about taking their pound of flesh first. Starving artists, raped consumers, fat corporations -- nothing is likely to change for the better.
I didn't desert Windows; Windows deserted me: BSOD
Some of the unluckly ones of us will still be driving exactly the same cars we're driving today. It's only ten years away right?
Unlucky? I have a brand new car, that's completely paid off, so that could be ten years without having a monthly car payment. The car after that could well be a hybrid though, if they can drive the costs down a bit more. I expect that even in the US, gasoline will cost 50% more then today (maybe adjusted for inflation... shrug). That might be enough economic incentive to drive folks towards fuel efficiency over vehicle size.
(Short-term price spikes in gasoline prices can/will be shrugged off, it will take 24+ months of high prices before people will seriously consider switching to something more efficient.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I bet if people from the 1920's see the world today, they would be alarmed by the technology and hitech gadgets (simple automatic doors for that matter) around them. I want to feel like that when I think of the future - not just some old computer capable of working really really fast.
My grandmother is from the 1920's, and if she is alarmed by automatic doors, she has never shown any sign of it. I suspect she doesn't know how motion sensors work, but then, she doesn't care. She is perplexed by the blinking 12:00 on her VCR, but that appears to be common in people from the 1970's as well. Mostly, she is alarmed that you can say "bitch" on TV and that her bursitis is acting up again.
She couldn't care less about computers, as she has no need for them. Her TV provides her with all of her "stories", and when she wants to contact someone in a hurry, she talks into a telephone, which she regards as a better use of energy than learning to type, buying an expensive computer, and paying for an ISP.
As near as I can tell, the only pieces of post-WW2 technology she uses are modern dentistry and insulin. Strangely, she seems more content than I am, so I have a feeling that when I'm her age, my disinterest in the latest gadgets will probably be minimal, too.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Pfft... half the road-works projects going on right now have been _going on_ for the past XX years. They'd have to start about 5years ago with placing chips in the asphalt to have any prayer of being done by the time 2014 rolls around. Wait, maybe this is why 'The Dig' is taking so long to complete! They are backordered on driving chips!
Heh. I went to a real school and played on a real playground. I got made fun of, beat up, harassed, tortured, lacerated... nevermind the physchological treatment lavished on me by my so-called "peers."
Homeschooling wouldn't have been much better- my mom was a die-hard christian and I never was. Took her until I was twelve for her to start listening. I got shit on and beat up more at church than I did at school.
I've had my nose rubbed in the worst of human sociology for the majority of my life. The public school system is not the answer.
(Saying basically the same thing as the parent, with a "I've been there and that shit is responsible for neo-nazis, rednecks, thugs, gangsters, columbine, teen pregnancy and hemmerhoids" spin. Been there. Hated every. Single. Second.)
Again we see lofty ideals of what is to come in the future. I'm sorry but I call bullshit on most of his ideas.
The world will change and it will change a lot in ten years, but much will also stay the same. Again here we see another sci-fi author telling us about how goo the future will be and how much better man kind will be. I got news for you, people suck.
If we use the last 20 years of society's evolution as a guideline, we will see that the number one driver in technology has been pr0n. (VHS vs Beta and whiz bang multimedia for computers).
Ask yourself this; What life changing devices have entered in your life without making you feel better or feel happier? pr0n is an example of this, but what about the ability to steal music right and left, or adrenaline pumping games, or anything that glorifies ME ME ME!
Lets stop trying to see how wonderful society will be in the future, if the past is any indication of the future, we're going to stay a bunch of self gratifying savages and any technological advancement is going to reflect that ever so clearly.
Not that theres anything wrong with us being savages --as long as we admit it.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
There's just too many parts, and too much effort, required to produce just *one* of the "miraculous future inventions* that people have been promoting since the birth of sci-fi.
Really...is that a fact? I'm glad not everyone is like you and discounts everything in sci-fi because they didn't get their personal robot or flying car as predicted. Remember the "fi" in si-fi is FICTION--it is MADE UP in the minds of those imagining what the future will bring, and in the case of sci-fi dramaticised to fit with the story.
As for "miraculous future inventions" being economically infeasable, I'd say your blanket statment is quite inaccurate:
You don't pay much attention to the old Star Trek episodes do ya? Don't know bout you, but the flip-open communicators sure look like the cellphone I carry with me today. Today's flat-panel monitors also look a lot like the screens sitting on the conference tables in many of those episodes too. Even though we don't all strap our gagets to our wrist like Dick Tracey did our radios, music players, pagers, phones and so on could certainly be made small enough to wear on our wrists if we wanted to. Electronic newspapers bed by radio waves--well I already read the news online, and we have tablet PCs with 802.11x *radio* communication, and there has been a lot of advancement in display technology that allows for flexible, reflective electronic display AND flexible ICs.
Even as recently as ten years ago someone like you probably would've said "a drive smaller than a pen that holds hundreds of megabytes? That would cost a fortune and would be too easy to lose! Nobody needs to carry that much data anyways!" Well, today I carry a keychain around that holds 256 MB and I can tell you it comes in very handy when you have to (re-)install WinXP or 2k on-site and need the security updates/firewall/etc to keep it from puking 30 seconds after getting on a network. If you aren't a techie its great for carrying photos and movie clips around so you can just plug in at a friends and show off your kids, garden, pets, etc. Step back and think about that...sounds a bit "sci-fi" if you remember life in the 80s eh?
Smallpox used to mean certain death...now a "trivially easy" vaccination prevents infection and the disease is basically extinct. That's one pathogen that rolled over and died in the face of a "miracle cure" scenario. Diabetes also meant certain premature death, and is now "trivially" treatable and in some cases curable. Cancer survival rates have also dramatically risen even within my own lifetime (and I'm not that old). Cyctic Fibrosis used to kill all its sufferers before they reached adulthood, and now they can expect to live far longer.
I'd argue with you about telecommuting--it's true that far less than half of people telecommute exclusively, but I'd say there are a LOT of people who do so part-time at least--and I did full-time for awhile. Even so, technology has completely changed business culture. How often does the secretary do dictation in short-hand anymore? How many typewriters are in your office? How often do you get an inter-office memo on PAPER anymore?
When did you last set foot in a school? "Rote memorisation" is already all but gone. Kids barely learn how to add, subtract, multiply and divide and then they are given calculators--I didn't get to use one until ninth grade, now elementary kids have them! High school kids all get graphic scientific calculators--it's pretty close to mandatory now. In high school we only used computers in business-ed courses and after class to do homework, now they're all over the place.
Electric cars in all the streets--HELLO, we are already heading there, I'm starting to see more and more Toyota Prius and Honda Insight cars out there, and more hybrid models are cropping up (even SUVs), and with oil heading to $50/barrel I don't think the trend towards electric power will slow--the economics are shifting.
You might want to re-think your opinion about "just plain dumb" and 2-5% accuracy. The details and timing might be off in sci-fi but an amazing amount af this stuff does indeed show up in the future.
This guys predictions for the year 2014 are a joke.
I predict that in 2014 things won't be changed all that much. Change happens but the kind of change that this guy is talking about will take a hell of a lot longer than ten years. I'd say that 2024 at the earliest for most of his predictions, but realistically I think that most of them won't come about untill 2034 and some not until even later than that. The infrastructure is just not there for most of what he talks about.
This future sounds similar to the Jetsons, but with living in the air.
Man he missed those. I mean every time I've read this article (Since the early 60's for me but My Mom tells me that she's seen this since the 40's) I mean come on. This isn't even good Sci Fi. Frankly I'd get a better prediction from a Republican Intelligence Agent than from this guy *grin* In 2014 We will still have.
/.r's bleating about the latest M$ patent on code that allows a graphical display of computer generated images.
1. Politicians telling us how they have a plan to get back the Jobs that left the US for India.
2. Americans drooling over the latest Micro whatever that is only available in Japan and Korea.
3. The RIAA whining about why no one is buying the newest DRM protected 40 dollar CD's
4. Biometric Technology that doesn't work, is easy to defeat and Senators from California and Utah trying to create laws making having the wrong BioMetrics Illegal.
5. The latest preview of Longhorn being traded on the P2P networks.
6. People talking about how telecommuting is the business model of the future.
7. The decendents of Thomas Jefferson banding together to sue souvenier stands all over Washington DC and Philidelphia for selling "illegal" copies of the Constitution, thereby denying them their inherited rights under the latest copyright act. (Betsy Ross's decendents will be waiting in the wings to sue the flag manufacturers.)
8. Talk about how this is the year of the Linux desktop.
9.
10. The McDonalds law in full affect (they own the patents on fast food, but the China Town contingent is claiming prior art.)
11. The latest trend in business will be Micro Hotels so that airplane travelers have someplace to sleep at the airport due to the now manditory 48 hour, prior to flight, checkin rule at airports.
11. While the rest of the world is beginning to enjoy the benifits of wireless broadband the US will still be in a quagmire caused by the requirement to have a home phone and a cable connection to use it. Broadband usage in US homes will hit an all time high of 22% (But still not be available in most areas of the Silicon Valley or New York City.)
12. Ted Kennedy will finally be able to get on an airplane without a hassle.
These are just a few of the things I think we have to look forward to... how about you?
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
But anyways, as I just wrote in the Singularity vs SF thread, SF is almost never about prediction. Its about showing how people will react to major changes in science or society. Sure, there've been some lucky hits, and there are SF writers who enjoy extended infodumps, but that's not the point / not the goal.
With SF you're trying to capture the feel of ordinary life under new (to us) circumstances. The best SF ( short stories or novels, or award nominees) often read like ordinary books, just from very far away. As an example, the Handmaid's Tale wasn't predicting the future of the US. But look how well it captured the look and feel of a country taken over by religious fundies (i.e. the Taliban).
For a much better take on what life might be like in the 2010's, read Stross's award nominated first story in his Accelerando set. At peak density one of his paragraphs contain more predictions than all of Sawyer's article, yet Lobsters also includes sensawunda. (sensawunda: hard to define, but its analogous to Chesterton's quote (my paraphrase): we shouldn't treat 'we can go to the moon' as being just as ordinary and boring as a telephone call. We should realize that being able to call anyone, anywhere in the world is as amazing as being able to go to the moon.)
Hard to capture a single quote, but for example (and this crowd):
I'll probably get modded to Troll for this but I was disappointed. Instead of insight, I got a re-run of portions of his (relatively interesting) Hominids and Humans book.
...ank
And he didn't even mention the books -- which could have been classed as a shameless plug, so it was perhaps better that he didn't. Still I was hoping for more than what he dished.
and so I dis'd (just not very strongly)
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
A Cherry 2000 model to be precise =)
"Insert Sig Here"
That's right! And here in Canada, "ruthless" means we won't even say "please!"
aka, america today. Ha, i always thought Canada was America Jr.
Oh, and I will have gotten laid by then.
With phrases like "intergalactic uber-/." in your vocabulary? Not likely.
The creators of the Jetsons postulated that by the year 2000 we'd be buzzing around the skies in flying bubbles that fold up into suitcases and living on highrise platforms above the clouds. Vidphones and sentient robotic assistants would be abound. That's what this guy's predictions sound like.
Some stuff holds water though.
What will probably happen:
-Wrist PDA/Cell phone responsing to voice commands
-Universal phone number good around the world with no per-minute charges, but a flat fee.
-RFID checkout at grocery/retail stores
-Video/movies on demand
-Electronic ink
-Expanded applications for biometrics
What will not happen:
-Toilets and toothbruses that monitor your bodily fluids for problems. Besides being high on the spooky factor, I think people would opt for less expensive toilets and toothbrushes.
-An alarm clock that analyzes your brainwaves. Just make sure the electrodes don't fall off while you're sleeping. If they do, you'd better hope it doesn't synchronize itself to your husband/wife's jacked up sleeping patterns.
-Nanites running around your body fixing problems. Also a decent spooky factor. Imagine a software bug causes them to think that every living cell in your body is a cancer cell. Oops.
-Self driving cars. With 160,000 miles of highway in the US (not counting side streets) who, praytell, will put forth the cost to repave all of it with thousands of sensors for a tiny percentage of cars that will be able to take advantage of them? A lot of good your self piloting car will do against gridlock when 99% of the other cars on the road are still driver controlled.
-Automated kitchen complete with robot assistant. This guy IS a science fiction writer. Your fridge might be able to tell you you're running out of milk, but I just don't see a practical scenario where a kitchen can cook breakfast on its own, barring Star Trek food replicators. And besides, is it really that hard to turn on a stove and crack open two eggs onto a frying pan?
-Low carb breakfast. The Atkins of today is the pet rock of yesterday. Move along, nothing to see here.
-Virtual/augmented reality - Ah the great promise of virtual reality. I can buy into having a device that "writes" details about objects in your field of vision, but that technology packed into contact lenses and being able to do facial recognition within 10 years is a bit hard to swallow.
-A "smart window" for every cubicle. When most people are lucky to get four walls?
The article definitely has more against it than going for it. I'll make sure to ring him up on his universal number in 10 years and tell him how full of BS he is.
-R
World of the future...
The world of the future has a lot to look forward too...maybe. Advances in the myriad disciplines of science have and will continue to lead the planet into a future where improved technology will make life easier, but holistically this might not be the utopian life of the future that many science fiction writers, and myopic visionaries foresee. You see, even with all of our hi-tech gadgetry and luxury 'systems' we are undeniably connected to one source of energy--fossil fuel.
Many scientists have predicted that world oil production will be reduced to almost nil by this date or that date, and many are often looked at as quacks by the governments and even the popular media of the world. The fact is that no matter what date these scientists come up with, it doesn't take a mathematician to realize that the supply of fossil fuels is a finite supply, and the demand for these increases every year. There will be a point in the future...whether it is ten years from now or 10 hundred years, that's not the point...the point is that it will run out. The oil crisis in the 1970's is an example of how dependent we are on this stuff and what happens when supply can not meet demand! So, with this in mind, what will the future be like? We can only guess...
Perhaps in the future when because of the decreased production the government controls fossil fuels and only make it available to select groups or organizations, a culture will develop that is somewhat communal. University campuses may become the central local for people to take up residence, and whole communities will develop with the campus as the center. There will be science, learning, a supply of energy and water, young people eager to learn and older people eager to pass on the knowledge. These centers of living will chronicle the past and the memories of the citizens in an intricate web that hopes to preserve our human history. Bicycles and alternate means of transportation will be encouraged, and universities will become more than centers of learning, they will become mega-corporations in control of science, technology, and the last hope of mankind. Already, many scientific universities make money off of discoveries and patents. Already, many universities harbor the hopes and future of mankind. Perhaps a social structure will evolve around universities similar to this.
Perhaps we'll devolve into a Mad Max style of culture on the fringes of society with pockets of "civilization" gathering around agricultural areas or wind/ solar power farms. Perhaps the elite will have the money to move to countries where they still haven't forgotten how to life well without the dependence on petroleum. Maybe those countries will have disappeared by this time. I'm more of an optimistic realist so I'm not going to really believe this is a possibility.
Maybe nuclear power, hydrogen fuel cells, wind power, solar power, and maybe other alternate methods of storing energy will have developed to the point that a severe decline in world oil production will just not matter much at all and our civilization will react to nothing more than a slight blip on radar but otherwise continue on into the unforeseeable future. Then again, maybe the burgeoning population will nullify these possible advances in technology so that we are ineffective in combating the strain put on the energy supply.
What happens to a world that runs out of oil when it not only depends on petroleum for transporting food and medicine from place to place, but also depends on petroleum for fertilizing food crops? Depends on petroleum for the manufacture of safety equipment, and even depends on petroleum for the manufacture of necessary medical equipment and apparatus? Will the world jump into a huge conservation craze? Recycling every little thing with plastic in it? Will our society implode and fall into anarchy? Will we lynch our leaders or the leaders of the past and blame them until we feel better about ourselves but haven't improv
If you are reading this, then you are one of those people whom I just can't take seriously.
Lots of scary things on the horizon that could have more of an effect than faster computers---
(1) Baby boomers become a drag on the economy after they retire, instead of a productive force: Imagine all of these boomers selling their retirement stocks to live rather than saving money. Europe and China had a postwar baby boom too.
(2) Cheap tech ends: You can only shrink circuits a few more times before hitting atoms. However, we've already had a preview of tech decline comparing the 2000's to the 1990's.
(3) Cheap energy ends: People think we'll run out of cheap petroleum sometime. It could be this year or twenty years from now. Then then stagfation of the 1970s may repeat.
(4) Escalation of the terror war: Perhaps they may succeed killing or maiming hundreds of thousands of Americans next time. This will drastically change laws and the economy.
(5) All of the above! I dont event want to think of it.
Article is BS cause he never mention the sharks we'll have with frickin lasers on their heads
The future is not yet but anything like what I have read happens. I'm going to get in my BIG TRUCK or SUV or my Shelby Cobra running a 427 with 600HP which gets 3 miles to the gallon turn on the Nitrous, Drive down to local bell tower with my M-249 and M107 having up close suppressive fire power and long distance kill range up to 1000 yards and go POSTAL
Oh, I get it now. Absolutely nothing in his vision of the future 10 years from now (that is different from things as they are today) will be correct. It's all stuff people talk about today, but none of it will really take off. I'm not sure why he didn't include flying cars, cheap electricity from fusion, omnipresent fuel cells, and a space elevator. His full-wall TV prediction was risky; that might actually happen.
Today we have hand-held PDAs that run in the 100 to 400MHz range without active cooling. I had a 90MHz pentium with 32MB ram in 1994 and I have a 140MHz PDA with 256MB of memory today. I don't think too many people would argue that PDAs are about equal to or more powerful than the fastest desktop PCs of 10 years ago (despite different architectures, IPCs, etc).
If we use that as a guide, in 10 years we should expect the equivalent of a 2 to 3GHz Athlon and 2 to 500GB of memory/storage onboard our PDAs. From a power standpoint this seems ludicrous. Today we use 300 to 500W of power to run a PC, where we used 150 to 200W in 1994. Can that be scaled down to 3W or less in 10 years?
Assuming that the power requirements are met one way or another, can a portable device running with slightly more computing power than today's desktop do some of the things this Robert Sawyer talks about? Speech recognition seems possible. Translation seems possible. Lots of other interesting things may be possible, but I don't see it fitting into a wristwatch.
The funny thing about change is how little people notice it happening - like how if you drop a frog in a pot and crank the temperature up slowly enough, you can boil him and he'll never know.
Let's look at some of you statements:
"Sure we got the internet and cell phones."
Way to trivialize a couple of the most important recent developments there Skippy.
Thanks to the Internet, specifically the WWW and decent search engines, a HUGE amount of human knowledge is now recorded in a manner that is easy and cheap to find. That's not a computer on your desk; it's a "knowledge box" that can answer almost any question you can pose.
In 2014, that'll still exist - except that it'll be bigger, faster, and (one assumes) even simpler to parse/search.
Now add in cell phones, and you've got a device that allows one to communicate with any other person from anywhere in the world, at any time, immediately. PLUS you get access to that same "knowledge box".
If you want an example of cell phones changing the world, you only need look at 9/11:
It used to be that the best strategy for surviving a plane hijacking was to lay low, keep cool, and not draw attention to yourself. Hijackers wanted to use passengers as a lever; specifically, they wanted to use THREATS against those passengers as a lever. It was not in their best interests to actually hurt anyone, and once they started down that road, it was in their best interests to string out their supply of hostages as long as possible. Most hostages got out alive - ergo, keep quiet and let the situation play itself out.
9/11 changed that. The 9/11 hijackers did not care at all about the "hostages" - they were after the plane; specifically, the potential damage from the kinetic energy of the aircraft and the chemical energy of its fuel load. The passengers on the plane were incidental.
In this situation, the survival strategy changes. Your best chance for survival as a 9/11 hostage is to do everything you can to wrest control back from the hijackers. There is a high liklihood that individual passengers may be injured or killed, but given that everybody aboard is dead already anyway, you might as well see if you can't make the long shot pay off.
Thanks to cellphones, this change in anti-hijacker strategy propegated so quickly that it nullified one of the attacks WHILE THE PLANE WAS STILL IN THE AIR.
Think about that for a second. 4 hijacker crews boarded planes expecting the passengers to act like sheep - as was the normal and proper survival tactic when faced with a hijacking to that point. One of those crews failed, because the news that 1) their plane had been hijacked and 2) that hijacked planes were being crashed into buildings was communicated via cellphone.
Chew on THAT for a while and tell me "Sure we got the internet and cell phones"
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Who cares about chapped lips! There wont be a cure for oral herpes in 2014!? Come on, already! I'm living in a cave till this shit goes away.
Damn. I guess I'll have to wait another ten years...
There will not be a Hilton in space
I dunno about that...Paris Hilton already comes across as a space cadet to me--I don't recall a single time I've seen her with her feet firmly planted on Earth.
On a more general note, I've heard a lot of people say the near future will be the same as they are now only more of it (you paint a slightly pessimistic picture, but whatever). It makes me wonder how far out you have to go before it changes from "more of the same" to "new and different". I can only imagine if this was the 1970s and you were predicting the 2000s using the same logic for example:
"Computers will be better but Moores new-fangled law won't last--it'll be too expensive to keep up. We'll have 16-bit computers with maybe a whole megabyte of RAM if we're lucky, but they'll only cost like $50 and even the starving children in Africa will have them. They will be powerful enough that they can be much more useful stand-alone and time-sharing, multi-user and networking stuff will be mostly obsolete"
"Ditch the 8-track, these new cassettes will be all the rage--by then they might hold 8 hours of music. Might be tough to afford a new deck to play them though with all these layoffs"
"Computer lab geeks will be playing with cool new toys--probably UNIX on million-dollar hardware, but CP/M and the Digital Research company will still dominate on small systems..by then they'll be up to version 10 or more I'm sure. A lot of companies like MITS, ProcTech, IMSAI and Cromemco are designing around the S100 bus and can use each others cards--I bet a standard around S100 will evolve and these new upstarts like Apple will die quick deaths"
"World unrest will increase, not decrease. The Soviets will prove to be an everlasting red menace--they along with China will catch up and maybe surpass us technologically. We'll get used to ducking and covering and keeping our bomb shelters stocked."
"We'll keep going to the moon and build a base there, but we'll lose interest. Too expensive to reach mars at all. We won't manage to develop a reusable spacecraft by then but we'll send up quite a few Apollo missions."
"Gas prices will be $5.00 per gallon, electric cars are still a novelty but bull size cars and vans will be non-existant. By far the most popular cars will be smaller ones with small 6 or 4 cylinder engines like the Ford Pinto, AMC Pacer and Plymouth Volare. The imports like the VW Rabbit and the Honda Civic will be popular but their tendancy to rust prematurely in our climate might limit their success a bit"
"Textile technology will improve, giving us lighter, breathable, more exiting nylon, rayon and polyesters. Day-glo colours, sparkles and new textures will be all the rage. Cosmetics allows for wild makeup jobs and attention-getting afro sculptures"
"Things will be calm in Vietnam for awhile then slowly revert back to instability--the emboldened Commies will take over all of south Asia and Carter and the USA public will still be politically hurting too much from the last "conflict" to do anything to stop it"
Hmmm...sounds bizarre. I guess either the asumption of "more of the same" is flawed or a 25-30 year timeframe breaks down that approach, or some combination of both.
While the article paints a picture of some kind of Uptopia, frankly it scares the shit out of me. I want technology to progress, but I don't want it part of every aspect of my life. I don't want the toilet to know more about my own health than I do. I don't want my car to drive itself. I want the technology to exist, but I want control.
There are too many things to go wrong here. What happens if there's some catastrophic failure (i.e., BSOD)? How will everyone continue to go about their lives? What if someone cracks the system (whcih can and will happen, if this is really what our future is like) and starts monitoring my every move, if the government doesn't do it already?
Not my idea of a bright future...
Saying "I'll probably get modded down for this" in a post is the best way to get it modded up.
I completely agree. Atkins is one of the most risky and stupid diets I've ever heard of. As I've said before Japanese diets are about 70% carbs.
Despite this, Japanese people live longer than any other people in the world. They are a heck of a lot skinnier than westerners, too. I live in Taiwan, and I can say the Chinese diet isn't too much different. More than half of the calories come from JUST rice and noodles. After counting fruits, veggies, and snacks, more than 70% of the calories come from carbohydrates.
If carbohydrates are so terrible as Atkins said, then why is it that nearly half the world lives on rice, and that half isn't so fat as westerners? I would bet that it's because here we don't eat so damn much, and we actually walk and ride bikes instead of driving everywhere.
I'm a gnu world man.
Your parents and grandparents cant teach you how to interact with peers. They may be able to prepare you for a life in a strictly hierachical society though.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.