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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."
"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
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 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 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
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.
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)
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.
I think it's more of a problem of "not enough technology" combined with "not gonna replace the current infrastructure". Your average home is extremely "feature complete" and has very little need of advanced computers controlling it. Thus you'd need to create a true breakthrough in technology to make people WANT to put these in their homes. What does that mean?
:-)
For one, we'd need voice recognition that WORKS. Forget walking to the nearest wall like Captain Kirk, we need it Picard style! "Computer, play some Mozart" or "Lights, 70 percent". Even more than that, we need the home to do things that make our lives easier. e.g. "Computer, vacuum the living room." or "Computer, make some coffee." These are things that are currently beyond our ability to deliver in a consumer product (no matter how much the consumer is willing to pay).
Where do I think we'll be in 2014? Much like we are today. We'll still drive cars, but hydrogen will have begun to replace gasoline. Broadband internet access will permeate the airwaves, allowing us to surf the net, listen to our favorite radio, and watch television on demand anywhere. Public schools will continue to suck as they always have, and people in general will finally get over their irrational fears of all thing nuclear. With those fears out of the way, private corporations will profit from various space expeditions to mine precious materials, tourism, military space-cruiser contracts, and offers to build equipment for Mars settlers. Yep, the future looks bright to me.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
...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.
Its not just that, but the mere transition period for something like 'cars driving themselves' would probably take 25 years. Think about it. You have to line EVERY ROAD IN THE NATION with electric devices for the vehicle, then 'self driving' cars will be expensive, so people won't be buying them exclusively. Hell, if selfdriving (that are efficient and 100% safe) came out today, people not worrying about gridlock and accidents (basically everything setup and everyone having selfdriving cars) probably wouldn't happen until at least 2020 IMHO.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
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!!!!
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.
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.
The only way that his predictions can become a reality in the next ten years is for a super efficient and extremely inexpensive means for manufacturing these products comes into use.
Hollywood: The place good stories go to die.
Sorry, but you can't completely eliminate gridlock with computers. There is a maximum capacity for any road and when there are too many cars traffic slows down. Computer control could increase this capacity but not infinitely.
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
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
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.
Surely that's the case in a ten year time frame? I mean, think about what is mainstream now (eg mobile phones, mp3s, internet shopping, etc). There isn't much ubiquitous technology about now that wasn't basically the realm of the geek and the early adopter ten or more years ago.
Looking ahead ten years is really about sorting the fads from the trends in todays cutting edge.
Anyway, I'm not trying to beat this guy's ideas to death. After all, if these predictions of the future that show up all the time have taught us anything, it's that we have absolutely no clue what the future is going to be like. But it's still fun to guess.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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
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.
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.
Do you really want soccer moms in Expeditions (which will probably be upwards of sixty feet long in ten years) talking on their 'wristbands', putting on makeup, and screaming at their children while driving in THREE dimensions?
Every paragraph should have ended with, "and the government will be wacthing you."
One of the things he's forecasting is that 50% of white-collar workers will telecommute. While I think that percentage is high, there are a number of forces pushing us in that direction. One of them is the likely continual rise in fuel prices, at least petroleum-based fuels. Another will be that roads (at least in the US) will continue to be less and less usable during commuting hours -- local governments will finally be forced to realize that they simply can't build enough new roads to deal with population growth, so long as the population keeps commuting.
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
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.
Yeah, but this guy is a nutcase. What he describes isn't the world of the future. It's a world of fairy elf magic.
;)
The things he describes are quite possible, but not *economically feasable*. Why don't we all have robot butlers and maids cleaning up after us now? Is it because we don't have the technology? Of course not - it is because of economic feasability. 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.
A brain wave monitor alarm clock? Hello, an alarm clock is designed to *Wake You Up At A Given Time*. People get frustrated enough with those "slowly wake you up" alarm clocks, and now we're supposed to get an EEG involved here?
A robokitchen? Aparently noone ever told him that the price of robotics doesn't follow Moore's laws. We've had robots building cars for ages, but you still don't see them in peoples' homes. And, since this would require changes of an integral part of the house, it would require modernization of housing design, something that's hardly been done in a hundred years.
An electronic ink newspaper? Yeah, I saw that in a copy of "Amazing Stories!" from the 1940s - it worked by radio waves. Noone used them then, noone's going to use them now. The closest you see? The internet, of course
Smart toilets and sensor toothbrushes are going to give us digital readouts (of non-ridiculous price) of what is wrong with us, and health problems will be "Trivially Easy to Correct"? Sounds like what people said when the first antibiotics and disease tests were developed. Sorry, but pathogens don't play along with our "miracle cure" scenarios.
Half of people telecommuting? Yeah, telecommuting really took off, didn't it? Rote memorization out of schools? Yeah, that's really happened. Electric cars in all of the streets? That notion's been around since the 60s, and it is little closer to reality (again, thanks to *economics*).
I could keep going, but I won't bother you. This sort of stuff is just plain dumb, and at best 2-5% of what he says will happen (perhaps, say, Cell/PDA/camera/E-books, although not on your wrist, because that would be awkward).
No matter how kind you are, German children are kinder.
"Yeah, but this guy is a nutcase. What he describes isn't the world of the future. It's a world of fairy elf magic."
The man is a science fiction writer, what do you expect? If you're stupid enough to actually take the article as an accurate description of 10 years from now, then You Just Don't Get It(tm).
In fact, Sawyer is one of the more brilliant and creative SF writers of our decade... go to his site and read some of the premises of his novels. I've read a few of his and throughly enjoyed them, and have a few more of his books on the way.
Give the man a break: he writes fake stuff for a living, you cannot honestly expect him to try to extrapolate perfectly the world 10 years from now.
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.
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.
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.
"but isn't it obvious that the power cable for those might be an eye irritant?"
We already have inductance loop connections for transmitting power. The EV1 electric car had them. Some medical implants use them too.
The world in the article is too good to be true... parent post's is too evil to be false. :-/
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.
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
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.