Slashdot Mirror
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."
This seems to be pretty standard with Science Fiction authors (although I can't fathom why). Try navigating Baen's website sometime for a perfect example of a functional but aesthetically poor website.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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
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.
Some science fiction writers promote their work, some promote... themselves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
2014. A new report from the NIH conclusively proves the dangers of low-carbohydrate diets. Popular around the turn of the century, these diets promised long term weight loss while allowing you to eat what you want. The research study on 2,000 individuals reveals that dieters who had participated have higher incidences of heart disease, diabetes, and fatty liver disease or cirrhosis. The high-fat diets, nutritional deficiencies, and rebounding undermetabolization of sugars are cited as probable causes. President Obama called on the Food and Drug Administration to issue warning labels for foods that don't have carbohydrates.
In other news, former President George W. Bush chopped his arm off while clearing brush on his ranch. He is calling for a national program to track and profile all bushes.
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.
Check this out, dude. Twas on slashdot a bit ago.
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.
In ten years, computers will be 128 times "Moore powerful." However, Microsoft, now involved in world government (now simply called, "gummint"), has continued to develop, and use, higher and higher level languages to write the (only remaining legal) operating system in, and the operating system and its native applications are now 256 times larger and slower - so computers will do things for us as 1/2 the rate they do today.
Our mornings will still begin with waking up. Mornings will still suck, and you still won't like them.
Today, your coffee can be brewed while you sleep. Tomorrow's robokitchen won't allow you to have coffee, because in doses roughly equivalant to pouring the Black Sea down their little throats, it causes cancer in laboratory mice (who now have been specially bred to have no immune system at all.)
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. One morning you'll get up, and find that your children have been permanently taken to a "re-education facility" because the "smart toilet" reported to the Federal government that they had marijuana in their system from the junior prom, the night before. Your spouse is presently at the lawyers, suing for divorce (in 2014, 3 out of 4 people in the world are now lawyers.)
Your spouse might telecommute - but for the lawyer, she has to be there in person. You won't have to take the kids to school, because they've been taken away from you by the gummint. School based education and socialization - Cliquing 101, pre-teen sexual activity, learning to crib, mandatory studies of how God(tm) created the earth in 4000 B.C. and the gummint in 2008 A.D. - that's all over for now. Your kids will be learning how to hack the universal credit machine at the mall from the other kids in gummint custody.
Although you have an advanced degree, you work at McDonalds because the gummint doesn't like your attitude. So you drive to work. On your bicycle, because that's all you can afford. You'll arrive at work windblown and very sweaty. No one will want to venture very close to you. You won't have to worry about car keys, because you (and 99% of the rest of the population, which is huge because the pope, now a cabinet level post in the gummint, has told everyone to have plenty of children, bless you, bless you) can't afford a car.
Throughout the day, your non-removable wristband, a mandated citizen ID technology, will keep the gummint apprised of your wearabouts, alert to report any transaction upon which you fail to pay taxes, any jaywalking event, or use/consumption of banned substances such as coffee or pornography.
Recording your entire life will take a lot of storage, but the cost of gummint data storage will be entirely paid by your taxes, so that's no problem. The images of your life will be beamed through the air to an archive that only the gummint can access. Step over the line just once, and you'll automatically be tried, convicted and punished, all without the intervention of a human being.
Your McDonald's sales kiosk will have a smart wall of its own, giving every worker a chemical and hormonal scan for banned substances. And no matter which chair you sit on anywhere, the chair will monitor your nervous system for anti-gummint reactions to gummint infomercials, which are projected in the air 22 hours a day from your gummint wristband. The chair is networked to the gummint, of course.
On the way home from work, 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 highly inflated costs to be tallied and your account automatically debited. You won't have enough credit left to pay for heating again next January. Your personality profile will be analyzed as you walk out the door to see if you
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Your sleep cycle is approximately 4 hours long and during that time you go through 4 states from drowsyness to REM.
If you are woken by your alarm clock during REM (the deepest) then you feel the worst. If you are woken during the lightest, then you feel the best. This is why sometimes you can have 4 hours of sleep and feel better than if you have 10.
I would guess that the band would monitor how "deep" you are and wake you up at the nearest time when you are at the lightest.
If I have to be awake at 7am, I'd rather be woken up at 5 and feel good, than wake up bang on 7 and feel crap all day.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
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).
Right, like your boss is going to let you waltz in at 10:30 because your brain-wave monitor didn't deem you rested until after 9. (And if you've had enough rest, don't you wake up naturally? Why use a device to do it for you?)
Sure, why not. You just have to stay late. Why pay people to sit around half-asleep in the morning? For that matter, the office will probably be half empty until noon Toronto time when the people in Vancouver start getting there. I've already worked for an east-coast company with a west-coast customer, and I was the one working the customer's hours.
I personally wake up much better with an alarm clock than without. I have a tendency to get too much sleep and not be alert during the day if nothing tells me to get up.
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
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 ;)
What is interesting is that the electronic newspapers were early forms of fax machines, using radio modems instead of telephone modems. These were actually invented in the 1930's and there were successful demonstrations of the technology at the time.
The idea was that the newspaper publishers would use existing AM broadcast stations to fax newspapers directly to subscribers during the wee hours of the morning while the stations were off the air. Sounds like a great idea, even now. I think the reason it never caught on was that it was simply too expensive to operate at the time for both the newspaper and the subscriber.
Just goes to show you how some of the coolest inventions either take years to catch on, if ever.
Of course, in my future, I would like some sort of computer that directly augments the brain by being like a coprocessor, so that when you reach back into your memory for who this person is or what is the capital of Lithuania, the computer will google for it and you will just know. But I'm not even sure that is a good idea...
Nor I. Look what Google has to say about:
[Alice in Wonderland was] the first feature length animated film. based on the story of the Volsungs AND NIBLUNGS Translated by Eirikr magnusson and William Morris.
[Martina Navratilova is] A nine- hole, course at the UNIVERSITY of Wisconsin...
erm... and
[Sex is not for] everyone, By any means. but it s not always easy to find what you Need in the Bluetooth Spec.
Google Talk:
http://douweosinga.com/projects/googletalk
What you're doing is much closer to the south beach diet; which I, even as a vegetarian, approve of. The atkins diet simply has too much saturated fat in it to be healthy. That's the one thing the low fat diets have gotten right. Saturated fats are bad. However, most people replaced them with partially hydrogenated vegetable oil which is probably worse.
I believe if partially hydrogenated vegetable oil and high fructose corn syrup where outlawed today, much of our problems with obesity would slowly dissapear.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Well, like I said at the end of my post, the timing or details might be off but my point was it was much less "bunk" than you think.
a) You made my point exactly: sci-fi not only attempts to predict the future, it also influences future invention and design. I never argued around a ten-year timeframe, but if you insist: in 1994 cellphones were more than twice the size and weight, were analogue and had a fraction of the battery life. Their displays were typically monochrome seven-segment, numeric-only vacuum-flourescent or LCD. Now we have very small, digital, high-resolution phones that play music, video games, store our contact and schedules, get our email, surf the 'net, play music and take pictures. (oh and BTW, the origianl star trek never had badge communicators--they were belt-mounted flip-open just like a cellphone)
b) You're right--a wristwatch is not practical for any device requiring a user interface. We do, however, have watches that wirelessly transmit and store data, monitor heart rate etc. IBM even demonstrated a Linux-powered computer/PDA watch They are not wild commercial successes but they DID come into being as predicted.
c) Don't be foolish--reading news online or downloding it from the 'net into the "paper device" waiting in the kitchen was the POINT of the "electronic paper" in Sawyer's article! What did you think--a paperboy dropped a new one on the doorstep every morning like the dead tree version? The reason for "electronic paper" is that is is non-disposable, portable, light-weight and durable--perfect for reading at the table with your toast and tea.
d) If you are aware of Moore's law then why scoff at predictions based on it? In 1994 a 486/66 with 8 MB RAM and 240MB HD would've been a higher-end machine--now multiply all those performance numbers by FIFTY and you have something that is mostly a BUDGET machine today. I certainly couldn't fathom EVERYTHING that might have been done with that technology, although we can make a lot of guesses.
e) Hey, don't rag on the sci-fi toilets, ok? The first versions have been commercially available for more than two years. Who's to say the price won't come down to afforable levels and features improve in 10 years. Look at what happened with the price and quality of colour laser printers and big-screen TVs in that time
f) I did a job search last a little more than a year ago. There weren't a LOT of telecommuting jobs but there were a few. Quite a number of companies allow flex hours and partial telecommuting (including my own employer). About 5-10% of our sales and support people already telecommute. Sawyer predicted 50% in ten years...who knows? Doesn't sound that far out. I tend to think it won't be that big, but I do see a trend towards it. If location really mattered than we wouldn't have call centres in India serving customers in the USA would we?
g) I didn't say rote memorisation was completely gone nor that it was a good idea all the time. That said, if your poly-sci course (or language or chem for that matter) relied very heavily on rote memorisation rather than learning concepts and critical thinking than it is a pretty crappy course. Since you finished college in 2001 it might be safe to assume you have been out of grade school for five or more years. I'm a few years older still (but not by much), but I've had the chance to see what kids experience in grade school now. My kids will certainly be using calulators by grade six (some grade FOUR teachers introduce them, to my chagrin). Children use PCs right from grade one and may use them for "real" school work by third grade. By grade seven they may be researching for reports on the 'net regularly. Graphing scientific calculators are a REQUIREMENT by high school, and many, if not most seniors in the academic stream bring notebook PCs to school. I went to a rural school, and was one of the first to take a distance education course in high school 11 years ago
Really ? I could have sworn I saw my washing machine just a few minutes ago... Not to mention my oven (stays automatically at the same temperature) and my refrigerator and freezer (same thing).
A robot is not (neccessarily) something that walks on two feet or swings a lifting arm around; a robot is an automated machine.
Why would it need changing house design ? There's at least two ways to do a robokitchen without changing house design:
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.