BT Futurologist On Smart Yogurt and the $7 PC

WelshBint writes, "BT's futurologist, Ian Pearson, has been speaking to itwales.com. He has some scary predictions, including the real rise of the Terminator, smart yogurt, and the $7 PC." Ian Pearson is definitely a proponent of strong AI — along with, he estimates, 30%-40% of the AI community. He believes we will see the first computers as smart as people by 2015. As to smart yogurt — linkable electronics in bacteria such as E. Coli — he figures that means the end of security. "So how do you manage security in that sort of a world? I would say that there will not be any security from 2025 onwards."

Comments

Right.

[PHAEDRU5]

And New York was going to need 100,000,000 telephone operators by the middle of the 20th century.

Get a grip, for God's sake.

Witch Doctors, Futurologists, and Cranks

[aldheorte]

Please stop posting predictions of "futurologists". They are the modern era's form of witch doctors, shamans, medicine men, and other self-proclaimed prognosticators. Since BT apparently actually employs one, I am reminded of another article I read a long time ago which proposed today's corporations and brands as substitutes for an innate desire for membership in parallel to the tribes and clans of yore, replete with those who attempt to hold positions of power by their somehow unique predictions of the future that have no more or less probability of coming true than any random statement of anyone in the group, but dress it up in some sort of mysticism, whether spiritual, or false intellectualism, to make it sound divinely guided or erudite.

I predict that in 2015, this guy will still be making predictions. His track record will be no better than random probability would have resolved. The time you have spent reading his predictions and even this response is time out of your life that you will never recover, and reading it will not put you to any better advantage than if you had not.