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Experts Fear Future Will be Like Sci-Fi Movies
segphault writes "In the year 2020, Luddite terrorists attack technology infrastructure and artificial intelligences dominate earth! Or at least that's what 700 experts predict in the latest poll conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project (pdf). Is the future really going to be like a science fiction movie? Ars Technica provides a humorous overview of the survey results. From the article: 'Are these scenarios really indicative of future trends? Given the prevalence of many of these concepts in science fiction content, it is obvious that the ideas themselves are at least relevant enough to warrant consideration. That said, the nature of the survey and the way that the scenarios are presented makes the entire thing seem less plausible. In looking at classic science fiction films of the past, from Blade Runner to Soylent Green, one realizes that few of them really predict with any accuracy the world we live in today. Culture and technology can change in radically unpredictable ways, and today's experts may lack the foresight to perceive the future with the clarity of Hari Seldon.'"
hejdig.
/OF
I would say that The Running Man makes quite a good foreseing of the television future. Everything that is in the film has been aired, on different stations though.
- wierd costumes, spandex, bling: any show with a host. think oscar, music competitions
- people making a fool of themselves: many shows there are
- people dying, deadly outcome: wasn't an execution aired in Texas or something
Wait, which is it? The people left behind will self-segretate but not all of them do so my choice? My prediction is that in the year 2020, pulp will be written by lousy artificial intelligence. What do you think, George?
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I more fear that it will be like 1984. Cameras everywhere, mass surveillance, no criticism of the rulers allowed.
Aren't we pretty near the 1984 society already? This would no longer be news today.
The one author who just about nailed his terrifying vision of the future is George Orwell. His time frame was off by 25-30 years, but that was his only big error.
Sure, nobody can know for certain what the future will bring specifically, but one incontrovertable observation is that since the beginning of time overall progress has been accelerating exponentially.
The closest real-world parallel to Hari Seldon's "Future History" would be Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns (a generalized "Moore's Law"), which makes the point that all evolutionary processes building on past progress accelerate exponentially, and it's only towards the knee-end of the curve -- like now -- that you notice the most change.
Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics/AI (GNR) will play a huge part in the coming decades; the only question is how well we'll be able to guide how it all unfolds. Take for example just one implication of advanced nanotech: The Molecular Manufacturing "replicator" in every home -- at the same time such a device creates vast "wealth without money" for the poorest of people, it also removes concentrated power from the former elite, which in of itself isn't a bad thing except that we're... only human, so the primitive-reaction could be bad.
It's my opinion that it's actually in our best interest to make sure that we either merge with AI, or that benevolent AI "take over" before our selfish monkey-brain fucks everything up with the increasingly powerful tech at our disposal.
Power to the Peaceful
It has been written the year North Korea government was formed. There, War is Peace (they are still technically at war with S. Korea and US), Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Apart from the 'caring for the elderly' bit (family structures were different back then) that sounds a bit like a description of the last century or so of Roman rule in the Western Empire. The Romans (my ancestors) were essentially out-bred and then overrun by the 'barbarians' (also my ancestors
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
There is no doubt that more and more people are getting access to technology faster and cheaper as technology gets more advanced. It's been possible for a while to have Internet access everywhere via mobi (mobile phone). Now companies are making it even easier to buy mobile-phone components and data plans that facilitate laptop internet connections at half broad band speeds (I was sort impressed by Verizon when I went to the mall the other day). No plug intended.
Some fear that computers will run rampant and try to destroy us after 2020. It just may happen that computers (if they think and have feelings) may treat us like gods or parents. After all, we are the creators.
One thing is certain. People will not stop embracing and exploring technology. Humans by nature are explorers. There was a push to explore America. There was a push to go to outer space. The same push drives us to create our own Holodeck or Matrix.
I am not totally sure what is so significant about 2020. What will everyone be doing in April - (4:20 4/20/2020)? Will everyone have perfect vision?
From TFA: [...] and 42 percent believe that "English will displace other languages" by 2020.
How?!? There'll still be a geographical spread and there'll sure as hell still be 3rd world countries that won't get an invitation for the great globalization party. Even if - by magic - English replaced all other languages in a split second and everybody became fluent English speakers instantly, people would soon start to develop regional dialects (e.g. cockney vs. some Texan redneck's dialect) and the more isolated groups' dialects (e.g. the less globalized regions of the world) wouldn't take too long to become unintelligeble to other "English" speakers.
A more plausible scenario could be, that even more people will become bilingual with English as their 2nd language, but still keep their mother tongue. English wouldn't displace or replace much, just supplement it.
Besides, with approx. 7000 languages in the world it will probably take a little more than 14 years before English can be said to have "displaced other languages".
"Live free or don't."
The infrastructure required to supervise everyone is much greater than any reasonable bureaucracy could hold. Eventually, you get so many people involved in the watching that you have to watch them, or they'll start to stray, and then you have to watch those meta-watchers, and then you have to kill the urge to make a Watchmen joke.
Public surveillance will, eventually, get to the point that almost any information about anyone is accessible to everyone else. We'll then enter a sort of mutually-assured destruction phase, where there's very little that you can criticize someone else for without their being able to pull up a similar incident about yourself. For my part, I think that once we all realize just how sordid everyone else's lives are, it'll be beautifully impossible to pretend to be a moral authority just by complaining about the state of the world. It's already difficult, because the press inevitably scrutinizes such wankers, and they inevitably do exactly what they complain about.
1984, it ain't. Try Jerry Springer, 24/7.
if you shout "tyranny" now, what words will you use when it gets worse?
Revolution.
(I really liked your post btw)
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
Happens to me all the time. Leaves me feeling like Worf in that episode "Parallels" in Star Trek (hey, don't call me a geek, I'm on /. aren't I?).
Just the other day I stumbled across the Wikipedia bio for Andy Gibb (don't ask). It said he died in 1988 of heart disease. I distinctly remembered him dying from a drug overdose in 1982 (I even remember Entertainment Tonight doing a special on it at the time, something like "The Tragedy of Andy Gibb"). It also mentioned a bunch of stuff he did after 1982 that I don't remember (Broadway, wtf?!?!?). That's a pretty significant difference between how I remember something and how it supposedly actually happened.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's funny, but I recently worked with a prison system where they had introduced a new program called "TruThought" that was so Orwellian it was fucking creepy. The sad thing is that I was apparently the only one who noticed this. It was all I could do not to laugh (and, perhaps, cry) as the Truthought "trainers" rattled off points that could have been written by Orwell himself (it was literally "Newspeak" with a different name). Makes me wonder if the entire program didn't start off as a sick joke (some guy writing it as a riff on his boss, only to have it taken seriously).
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
My diarrhea is your shampoo.
Yeah, you are between the step 1 and 2 of the Kübler-Ross model.
Dont worry, you will get to acceptance someday =o)
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
The "Future" is popular enteraintment at Disney theme parks. The vision changed three times. When disney opened Tommorrowland was all about spoace ships, supercars, and the house of tommorrow. A couple decades later, post-Earth Day Epcot had more ecological friendly vision of the future. Finnaly, the future is now all about digital entertainment gizmos- fancy TVs, phones, the InterNet.
Who guessed that they'd still be stupid, 50 years later, but so small and so cheap that they run coke machines?
Isaac Asimov.
Yes, Asimov wrote about supercomputers, but he also had pocket calculators in the '50s.
The real place to look for small and cheap computers in science fiction of the fifties and sixties are Star Trek's automatic doors and everyone's autopiloted cars.
For SciFi that gets things right, the key is to look for SciFi without Sci. Orwell, for instance: 1984 is amazingly prescient.
Orwell was writing about what was already happening in 1948. Which is why people have been saying "1984 is already coming true" since, well, it was written.
E. E. Smith.
Yes, he wrote horrid space opera, but the computers in Skylark were tremendously fast and powerful, small and cheap enough to throw away, and completely stupid. There's one scene in the Skylark series where Seaton (the hero, brilliant, handsome, caring, monogamous) and a super-intelligent humanoid are working on the control system for a new space ship. Seaton sits down and designs a control module, then another only slightly different, and another, marvelling at the ability of the alien force-based technology to aid his design... and when he finishes the first row he looks up to see his alien partner leaning back as row after row of controls are built automatically.
In that scene... written before computers even had a name... you have computers that are cheap, dumb, fast, small, and completely capable of being misused because they're dumb and fast. Of course at the same time the "brain" of the ship was single huge machine, but even there it was purely a tool. It wasn't a thinking machine, it was a control system.
Go and read his work, PowerShift.
....Now, go check the copyright date.
'Nuff said.
Regards;