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The City of the Future
Ponca City, We Love You writes "One century ago, many Americans still had not seen a movie or ridden in an automobile. The New York World greeted its readers on January 1, 1908 with a stirring rumination about the past and future of America: 'We may have gyroscopic trains as broad as houses swinging at 200 miles an hour up steep grades and around dizzying curves,' the newspaper said. 'We may have aeroplanes winging the once inconquerable air. The tides that ebb and flow to waste may take the place of our spent coal and flash their strength by wire to every point of need.' Today the NY Times asked ten knowledgeable New Yorkers to imagine New York City a century from today. Their visions include archaeological excavations at the Fresh Kills landfill, the waterfront at Third Avenue and Seventh Avenue, a dome over Central Park, and a virtual reality grid superimposed over the city."
From Ken Perlin, professor of computer science at New York University "... everyone's eyes will be implanted with tiny displays. All the information we need about the city will be accessible to us without conscious effort: where to go, what to buy ... how to hook up with friends."
... will be heroes"
;-)
And not surprisingly, Robin Nagle from the New York City Department of Sanitation predicts "Sanitation workers
On a lighter note for the holiday season, here are the Christmas Lights of the Future!
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
All that link leads to is a registration page.
Sorry to put a damper on things, but, in the nuclear war of 2072, New York City will be incinerated. In the year 2108, there's only going to be a bunch of glassy craters inhabited by trash and rats.
This is my sig.
I've come to really respect scientists who tell reporters to shove off when they ask about the world of the future. So much of future technology has to do with culture, and so little actual science, that it's like asking what color of clothing will be 'in' on 2106.
Everything will be taken away from you.
New York in 100 years? It will continue to be a maximum security prison.
That wouldn't happen to be a pun, now would it?
This has nothing to do with TFA per se, but if you're into this stuff you should check out the excellent blog Paleo-Future, which is dedicated to "the future that never was" -- how people in various times over the last 140 years or so have thought the future would look.
Read my blog.
I really so hope you are wrong but I can't find much fault with it, some of this stuff is well under way.
MP3 Search Engine
New York will be under water, owned for foreigners and be infested with alligators with huge advertisements covering entire buildings with lights.
I don't think we can really 'predict' the future, of course. We might have truly artificial intelligence, brain-machine interfaces and very advanced cybernetics along with genetic engineering *really* advancing. Nuclear power is going to be really used and not just feared... and we'll have new problems that we can only dimly see like losses of personal freedoms due to corporate greed, an out of touch government and seemingly out of control costs.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
Most probably the population of Earth will be greatly reduced due to the shortage of energy. That means hundreds of millions people will die unless something miraculous happens. Do not forget that our civilization depends on cheap energy and energy will be much more expensive in the future.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
December 30, 2007
The World of Tomorrow
By JIM RASENBERGER
ON Jan. 1, 1908 -- New Year's Day one century ago -- The New York World greeted readers with a stirring rumination about the past and future of America. The title of the article was simply "1808 -- 1908 -- 2008." The World began by marveling at how far America had come since 1808, then turned to the question of the future: "What will the year 2008 bring us? What marvels of development await the youth of tomorrow?"
The essay's visions were not timid. "We may have gyroscopic trains as broad as houses swinging at 200 miles an hour up steep grades and around dizzying curves," the newspaper went on. "We may have aeroplanes winging the once inconquerable air. The tides that ebb and flow to waste may take the place of our spent coal and flash their strength by wire to every point of need. Who can say?"
Predictions about the future were a staple of New York journalism in the early 20th century. Newspapers, including this one, frequently solicited prominent citizens for their thoughts on the future of the world, of America and, most urgent, of New York.
The city was vaulting into the 20th century with a haste that almost demanded prediction-making. As the population grew by 130,000 a year, New York's infrastructure exploded.
Within the 12 months of 1908 alone, New Yorkers would see the cantilevers of the Queensboro Bridge joined and the cables of the Manhattan Bridge spun. They would see one tunnel open under the East River and another tunnel open under the Hudson. They would see the tallest inhabited building in the world, the 612-foot Singer Building, completed on lower Broadway, only to be immediately overtaken by the steel skeleton of the 700-foot Metropolitan Life tower on Madison Square.
What next? New Yorkers were besotted with the possibilities. Architects and visionaries imagined a "cosmopolis of the future" with thousand-foot towers connected by webs of tall bridges and served by aircraft. Meanwhile, the very air seemed to buzz with the infant technology of wireless communication.
"When the expectations of wireless experts are realized, everyone will have his own pocket telephone and may be called wherever he happens to be," one magazine predicted in 1908. Equally farsighted was a prediction made by Dr. Simon Flexner, the first director of the Rockefeller Institute. The same New Year's Day that The World was conjuring gyroscopic trains, Dr. Flexner declared that human organ transplants would someday be common.
The point of such predictions was not necessarily that they were accurate but that people cared enough about the future to bother thinking about it. With that in mind, 10 knowledgeable New Yorkers, from the Nobel laureate Paul Nurse (Simon Flexner's successor) to a 12-year-old girl named Kate, were asked to imagine the city a century from now.
Whether their visions turn out to be right or wrong, whether they are bleak or tongue-in-cheek, all are generous efforts to wonder about the lives of New Yorkers of 2108, as those New Yorkers of 1908 once wondered about ours.
KEN PERLIN
Inventor; professor of computer science at New York University
In the same way we now have enhancements like pacemakers, it's reasonable to suppose that in a hundred years everyone's eyes will be implanted with tiny displays. All the information we need about the city will be accessible to us without conscious effort: where to go, what to buy, when the next subway will arrive, how to hook up with friends. We'll be able to see a virtual reality superimposed over the physical grid.
This city is all about intensity of purpose and connections, and technology will only make it more efficient and more fluid. And in a city that is so multicultural, communication will be easier. A hundred years from now, you and I could be having a conversation in two languages and translation would be automatic. I could look at a newspaper written in any language and have the translation superimposed on my vision
No. The New York City of tomorrow is here right now. Most of the building that will be here then are built already. More then you may think were already there in 1908. New York is physically highly resistant to change. There will be some differences yes. Fresh Kills is well on the way to being a major park. (No really) If anything the radical changes will be occurring in Hoboken and Jersey City. They are the natural extensions of the city and with the Access to Regions Core project, future PATH tunnels, Cross Harbor Tunnel and likely increased ferry service the west shore of the Hudson will become just another borough except that they'll be independent cities in another state. Oh and the Mets may have won a World Series by then (We can't give up hope!)
Ubiquitously - A Ubiquity Developer Community
None of them predicted a radioactive hole in the water.
I find it funny how these predictions are always based on current trends. Nothing going on today will have anything to do with 100 years from now apart from maybe the trend of smaller and smaller electronic devices. These predictions are pointless when a dozen other factors such as the economy, politics, the environment, and security are equally powerful influences on the outcome of the future. A hundred years from now, California could fall into the ocean, terrorist could set off a biological catastrophy, or a meteor could fall from the sky and kill most of the world population (I'm looking at you 2012).
Having visited Shanghai just last month and I must say I was very very impressed. Traffic lights, the weather, the transport system were all on track to be more modern as compared to what we have here in New York.
Sadly, the status quo here in New York will not change anytime soon, and that will seal our fate mainly because of corruption.
Ken Perlin will probably be close to the mark. 100 years from now you'll be able to get regular injections that contain millions of nano tech devices. These devices will travel through the blood to parts of the body they need to work on (e.g. the brain) and then construct interfaces that link wireless information networks directly into your consciousness.
I don't think there will be implanted displays as such. Rather, you'll just received the information you request and the display will be superimposed on your eye sight via nano circuitry where the optic nerves connect to the brain. That way you can still 'see' the information you want without distractions by just closing your eyes. This scenario may sound far fetched, but it has a much greater chance of gaining traction in society if all it involves is a simple injection. No painful surgery, no mess, no fuss.
The RIAA tracks your DNA and listens to everything you hear through implanted microphones, extracting micropayments wirelessly for everything you hear.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
I would hope that the nanobots would be under one's direct control. So if you decide that you want a new appendage, you can set them to it.
Accelerating? Perhaps, perhaps not. When the Wright brothers first took the Wright Flyer up at Kitty Hawk in 1903, I don't know if either of them could have imagined 11 years later a world war that would include dogfights and ace fighter pilots such as the Red Baron and Captain Rickenbacker.
its not gonna be all that shiny and new. it probably gonna be pretty dirty. Trust me, i live in New York. Also, the story said some "knowledgeable" and intelligent New Yorkers, and not many intelligent people go to School of the Future (the brains are at The Salk School of Science!)
Scotty thats not funny! Beam down my clothes RIGHT NOW!-Capt. Kirk
Ancient city ship. Make it happen.
Funny, I think we will try nano-bots. The initial results on test animals will probably be too horrific to guarantee future funding, but it won't matter, because the knowledge of the human machine will outpace the need for such devices.
the singularity? grow up.
Very good multimedia presentation of what New York will look like in the near and far future if we would just leave it alone.
http://www.worldwithoutus.com/multimedia.html
My rights don't need management.
> consumer VoIP was non-existent and unforeseen 10 years ago
Not true... I know AOL (believe it or not) had this on target at least 10 years ago. It just stayed on the shelf for unspecified reasons. (read: couldn't figure out how to make it simple enough for the consumer, and couldn't figure out how to market it appropriately)
But they did foresee it, and I'm sure many other companies did as well.
I think that is the most relevant/topical myminicity link yet. I was just about to make a Budgieton joke myself.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
All of those things, with the possible exception of Google, were predicted 10 years ago. People have been talking about things like VoIP (which is really just a re-invention of digital phone networks that already exist), broadband video on demand, multi-core CPUs etc way longer than ten years ago. It was predicted by many people that clock speeds would hit a wall due to physical constraints, and would have to go multi-core, back in the 80s.
Google is a more interesting case. I think the value of a "universal answering machine" is obvious and people were dreaming about such things back in the 50s. The fact that these things are actually called "search engines" and don't work by knowing everything but by sorting and ranking documents that contain the information you need, was less well predicted. And the fact that it'd be supported by contextual advertising wasn't really predicted at all.
Actually, if you want to extrapolate trends, I have a few for you to consider. Unlike your sensationalistic and inflamatory extrapolations, mine are based on actual, statitisically verifiable trends: - Children raised by one parent will be the norm. Two parent households will be rare.
- America will be a mainly Spanish speaking country
- Marriage will be almost non-existent
- Government will be "responsible" for all the care-and-feeding of the large majority of the population,
and will meet these responsibilities through ever-increasing taxation of the ever-shrinking productive members of society
- The military will be a small shadow of its former self
All of these trends are very evident today, have been gaining momentum in the past 20 years, and show no sign of abating. No serious person can say with any validity that the America of today (2008) is more religious than the America of 1908, and to imply that religion is ascendent in American society today is pure BS. In fact, the opposite is demonstrably true. The military is undeniably in decline, as is the "nuclear family". And demographics clearly point towards a majority Spanish speaking population mid-next century. None of these points is really arguable.
Welcome to the future of America.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Will it become a place where Latin American and African Christians live in tense coexistence with Moslems, while absentee landlords from Asia own everything? Will whites become so rare that New Yorkers will stare in fascination at white people? Jews will have long since have converted to Buddhism or intermarried with others, that they are a regarded as a mysterious ancient people like the Druids or Manicheans. The world's economic center of gravity will have long since shifted South and East, so New York will be a historical curiosity like Philadelphia or Pittsburgh today. (In their time, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh were the apex of American culture and technology.) At the request of France's Islamic government, the Statue of Liberty will be replaced with a statue of Sayyid Qutb, every schoolkid will take museum trips to the "Palestinian Holocaust Museum", Chinese financiers will turn Central Park into a replica of the Forbidden City, while trendy New Yorkers will receive cosmetic gene therapy to look more Arab, African, or Hispanic.
More likely enlarge an existing appendage
The appendix being a natural candidate for enlargement -- especially if you don't pay your taxes on time!
I expect a huge statue to be erected in honor of Snake Plisken in the New York of the future. Fictitious character or not, it's the only decent thing to do.
I think Robert A. Heinlein wrote this better. :)
Technology is the wild card that throws predictions to the wind. It's what differentiates modern civilization from the ancient Greeks, Romans, Sumerians, and every other now-dead civilization.
The cheapest form of Energy widely available today is coal, providing the majority of electrical power in the United States. It produces power as cheaply as $0.05 per watt, a rate that has now been matched by Solar power. Nicely enough, solar power is at its peak right at the same time that energy use is at its peak, (during hot, sunny days!) so the usual complaints about "peak load" are largely mitigated.
Combine that with our improved efficiencies of everything from lights to household heating, and the effect is magnified.
I predict that energy will be cheaper in 2050 per KWH than today. Nonetheless, technologies that save power will be in far greater use than they are today, simply because the cost of being efficient is also dropping. We're moving from an economy of scarcity to an economy of plenty, and one of the first industries to be hit by this is the recording industry.
Technology is advancing, and is continuing to advance, driven by the combination of cheap resources, a highly refined economic / capital investment system, and a generally well-educated population. Now, the interconnectedness of internet-based technologies takes the whole dynamic of education and technology and kicks it into hyperdrive.
There will be many challenges, of that I am certain. But I'm equally certain that we'll face the challenges faster than they accumulate. Technology continues to advance the power of the able, and meet the needs of the weak.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Futurama? New New York? Ain't youse guys been watchin' it?
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
One hundred years from now New York Times will ask its reader to imagine how NYC will look like in the year 2208.
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
New New York rocks! NYC will look like what Old New York loks like in futurama!
Scotty thats not funny! Beam down my clothes RIGHT NOW!-Capt. Kirk
Wow. Someone who still believes in the Singularity. Awesome. I'd suggest you go read the Commonwealth series of books by Peter F. Hamilton, but they're probably a bit heavy for you. Suffice to say, the nature of super-intelligences is that they are only dangerous if you let them get out of control.. and it takes an abundance of investment to get a proto-intelligence to the stage where it can improve itself at any significant rate, and by then you'll have so many possible applications of the technology that there simply won't be the economic need to develop it to a threatening level.
How we know is more important than what we know.
under one's direct control...
Yes and no. Yes, they'll do what we want them to (in a sense). No, because they'll be running MS Windows 2112 with "RIAA & MPAA & Disney compliance enforcement kits". So, between the daily reboots, the slowing to a crawl as you try to cross a busy street, and having your body force you to turn yourself in to the IP Police every time you mention a trademarked or copyrighted word without a license... yes, there should still be a few seconds remaining each day for the bots to do what you want (assuming you have a proper subscription for the thing you wish them to do).
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
I'm working on a little surprise for the minicity jerks.
stay tuned.
MP3 Search Engine
can it involve dynamite? please let it involve dynamite.
Makes me wonder if I would get a noodly appendage...
Freedom is strength, Ignorance is peace, War is slavery.
1) A moderately frequent detail in science-fiction stories was lights that would automatically turn themselves on when someone entered a room and turn themselves off when there was nobody in it.
I remember thinking this was utter nonsense, because, based on the price of photocells, relays, iconoscope tubes, or whatever it would have taken to do this circa 1950 or 1960, it didn't seem within the range of credibility that this would be economically feasible... especially given the low cost of electricity (and the expectation that nuclear power plants would soon make electricity "too cheap to meter.")
2) Google is not really equivalent to Isaac Asimov's Multivac, but it is a recognizable approximation. You do type in questions... in natural language if you like, Google is smart enough to ignore the extra words!--and it does draw on a huge worldwide base of human knowledge and present "answers" in direct, human readable form.
3) Flat TV you can hang on a wall. For a good five decades, Popular Science and the like were trumpeting invention after invention that was going to make it possible to have "flat TV you can hang on a wall." (One was a very shallow CRT, only a few inches deep, with an electron gun that fired in from the side and electromagnetic fields that deflected the beam toward the phosphor...) This hung fire for so long I thought I would never see it in my lifetime.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Honest question... what's your source for those stats? I don't disagree with any point except the military one. Spending would need to drop for that to happen, unless you're counting active duty population, which continues a relative decline. Spanish speakers will continue to increase, especially in southern areas, but I see it plateauing as the largest minority.
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
Why go to such lengths as nano-tech? Contact lenses, man! (Credit to Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge)
[clever sig]
Or Godzilla! That would be fun!
I agree that we will probably see at some point a virtual world overlaid on the real one. You will wear something that let's you see the virtual layer, and by so doing allow the virtual layer to see you. People will be able to walk through the city from their computers (or whatever they have) and interact with other virtual people or with real life people who are wearing the device that lets them see the virtual world.
Everybody will absolutely be connected to everything at all times. You think the cell phone is neat? You think it's cool that I can hop on my phone and access the internet? This is only the beginning. Connectivity will become as ubiquitous as air. Information that is at our fingertips today will be readily and instantly accessible by our brains in the future.
If we don't blow ourselves up by then.
or else!
For example, the United States is now entering the most severe recession since the Great Depression. Hispanics migrants never really wanted to leave their home countries; economic necessity made them head north. Due to the recession there's less work, they're sending less money home, and a few have started heading back to where they came from.
Mexicans sending less money home, studies find
More indications that money flow slowing to Mexico
Mexicans Miss Money From Relatives Up North: "Like Mr. Rivera, some of the men who went to work in the United States illegally have returned discouraged. And less work means less money to send home -- particularly from the southern United States and other areas where Mexican migrants are a more recent presence."
You're right about the military being 'a small shadow of its former self', though.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
I for one welcome our future Spanish speaking, bastard, unwed, government teat sucking non-militaristic overlords...
Kudos for linking to the printer version...
Recruiting levels are going down because there's a war going on and most people don't like it. Once the war ends they'll bounce up again.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Actually, Wikipedia has a nice graph regarding the military - it depicts a steady drop both in enlistment and percent of GDP; both have dropped by 50% since 1950 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United_States)Note, there is a small uptick in expenditures in 2006 due to the Iraq war, though the enlistments are not higher.
As regards a majority Spanish-speaking population, this is the best reference I could track down. It doesn't explicitly validate my claim since it only looks ahead 50 years, but I strongly suspect if you do the math based on the growth numbers provided it will prove my projection accurate. http://www.census.gov/population/www/pop-profile/natproj.html
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
See my comment and a source elsewhere in this thread. It shows that recruiting rates have been steadily dropping for the past 60 years.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
This doesn't mean disaster - it just means "poorer" by our standards. People will still live rich colourful lives. But they'll do it on 2000 calories a day, if that.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
And that will piss us all off enough to construct a giant cube shaped ship and destroy (oops, I mean assimilate) other cultures and planets.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Do you have any facts to back up your statements?? One and two probably have some factual merit, but the rest are just completely out of wack with reality. - Children raised by one parent will be the norm. Two parent households will be rare. So? - America will be a mainly Spanish speaking country No problemo. Diversity is good. - Marriage will be almost non-existent Good riddance. - The military will be a small shadow of its former self Also good riddance. - Government will be "responsible" for all the care-and-feeding of the large majority of the population, Seriously, you already pay farmers NOT to grow food, why not pay them to grow the food then give it away? "Luxury" food items will still be available for those who want them. Housing projects have a bad reputation, but there's no fundamental reason why cheap, commodity housing couldn't be made available. Habitat for Humanity has a really good program for building affordable home and setting people up with fair mortgages. I see no reason why programs like that couldn't be extended. Welcome to the future of America. Doesn't look bad to me.
It was supposed to be 100 years from now, not next year.
rd
How on earth is your shrinking US army based on ANY current trends ? Extrapolating from what we have now, everyone will be involved in the military to one extent or another.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
"- The military will be a small shadow of its former self"
Yup, the largest military budget in the world, a bigger budget than the rest of the world combined will have to shrink, or our entire economy will be directed towards the military.
The big NYC financial houses are already selling themselves to Arab and Chinese investors. This trend will continue. NYC will become a UN of finance, a place where the various world financial powers can meet and make deals. There will be no middle class in NYC. The population will be the uber-wealthy and the low paid service workers they employ. America will still be the place where the rest of the world sells their stuff, but they won't be selling it for US dollars. Americans will be on the dole or working in foreign owned sweatshops, and buying shit on credit. You won't retire, you'll work till you die, if you work at all.
Ex-president Chelsea Clinton's granddaughter will be running for president against a Saudi prince whose last name is Bush. American Idol will still have more voters and generate more interest than the presidential election. Canada and Mexico will complain about US citizens illegaly immigrating to their countries.
The New England Patriots will be working on a 1900 game winning streak, and Bill Belichek's head will be in a jar on the sidelines. Athletes will be grown in axoltl tanks. A new Slashdot ID will be a very large number. Windows 2108 will be late, bloated and buggy. The Linux kernel will still be licensed as GPL v2, and will be at version 2.6.something.
Apple will issue an update to the iPhone that breaks the hacks that let people install third party applications. Time Machine will let you restore files you haven't created yet. My iMac will be getting its 2000th logic board replacement.
This post will have been moderated into oblivion, but my clone will still think it was funny.
I'm glad you are so encouraged by these predictions. Perhaps you mistook my projections as judgemental. I don't think you will find a single word in my post that indicates whether I approve or disapprove of those trends. I was merely presenting a plausible picture of America in 100 years based on long-standing trends in today's America. This was meant to refute the silly projections of the AC/OP, which were not based on any demonstrable long term trends, but rather were merely lame political posturing.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
no, I'm going to 'help' them a bit and get them kicked off minicity. The weak point is they give us a link... so the beneficiary is known, even if not by name. It seems they're desperate to get some traffic to those links, ok, I'm game.
MP3 Search Engine
Hopefully you are able to read and understand a simple graph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United_States
If not, let me interpret it for you. It shows that military spending as a percent of GDP has dropped over 100% in the last 50 years. There is a brief uptick in 2005-2006 due to the Iraq war, but the longterm trend is steadily and undeniably down. Any fool half paying attention would easily notice that our military even in the last 20 years has shrunk dramatically. If you don't believe me, do some googling. You will find a dramatically smaller army, navy, and air force. Were you sleeping while all those bases were closed during the last decade? Do you remember "the peace dividend"?
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
That graph is ridiculous, after every American war spending and enlistment returned to normal levels, except after WWII. Scary.
That's a relief. I guess I'm just used to seeing similar lists of predictions with implicit negative connotations and I responded reflexively.
I also doubt you'd be looking at any newspaper if technology were at that level (it's already getting fairly rare where I live). That sort of prediction reminds me of the person who creating an automobile that looked like a carriage, complete with a fake horse head thinking of using technology to advance something not overly different to today.. I also wonder about the necessary intervention between the senses and reality that would be required for real time audio conversations, I think it more likely that two people coming face to face without a common language would use some sort of text input to converse, but I wonder to what extent the possibility of no absolutely ubiquitous language would still be there. They will be heroes because people will recognize how sanitation workers are keeping the city alive. I doubt sanitation workers would be recognized as heroes, despite the fact that reality will match what was described (reuse to the nth degree). I don't know if an archaeological dig would be seen as informative about their past (our current age). After all, in our age, we don't need to resort to such methods to understand the world of the 1800s, and our record keeping is as meticulous as it ever were. I know about the Ford Model-T, without ever having seen one in person, I know about the emergence of repeat-fire rifles in the 1860s, that the weapons commonly in use in the 1700s were not rifled. I know about the beginnings of heavier-than-air flight in the early 20th century. Archeology doesn't come into play until record/artifact keeping is poor or inhibited by the collapse of a civilization. To say they will study our current age through archaeological means to me implies a really dramatically bad set of circumstances between now and then.
Mostly they keep to realistic projections, a lot of dystopian features abound, and it's hard to say without knowing the external forces whether the optimists or pessimists will be right.
I think the seventh grader is the most insightful (well, except the Jetson's style toilet..) "The Empire State Building will no longer be New York's largest building; it will probably be replaced by a giant Starbucks." Yeah, that about sums it up...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
None of these points is really arguable.
Of course not. It's hard to argue with "statistically verifiable trends" you've pulled straight out of your ass.
If we don't find a new energy source to replace fossil fuels, industrial civilization won't last another century.
Since the Industrial Revolution, there's been a new major power source at least once every fifty years. Until the last fifty.
Think about it. In 1800, everything was human or animal powered, except for a windmill or waterwheel here and there, and a few wood-burning Newcomen steam engines pumping away. By 1850, the European countries and the United States had substantial railroad systems, and coal and steam powered factories. By 1900, most major cities had electric lights and street cars, and gasoline engine powered cars were starting to appear. By 1950, petroleum powered everything mobile, gas turbines powered aircraft, and nuclear power was just starting to work.
So what do we have now that we didn't have fifty years ago? Solar cells were demonstrated in 1954. The first commercial nuclear reactor started up in December 1957. Sputnik I had been launched. Megawatt-scale windmills had been tried (1941), but weren't worth the trouble in an era of cheap oil. Oil had been found in the Middle East. Natural gas was being moved through long pipelines. Even ethanol from corn had been tried. Every major energy source we have today was working in 1957. Nothing new and big enough to matter has come along since.
In the 1970s, there was hope that Government spending via the Department of Energy would yield something. Didn't work. In the 1980s, there was hope that the free market would yield some solution. Didn't happen.
What's actually happening is that all the old ideas that used to be too expensive are now competitive with oil. There's oil from tar sands. Deep offshore drilling. Ethanol from corn. Wind farms. Solar panels. At $100/bbl, these all look good. But energy is expensive from here on.
I keep seeing people claiming that China will own everything, Or all the cultural center will move to China, In this thread. As an old timer, I was hearing the same thing in the 80's but instead of China it was Japan. The same shrieks of fear of the yellow peril were cried. Americans business was told to learn Japanese. Books on how to emulate the successful Japanese companies were all the rage. People were terrified that the Japanese were buying up all are assets. No I am not making this up. Just watch some of the movies from that time and look at the setting or back drop "Rising Sun", "Die Hard","Gung Ho" to name a few. 1/3 of Shadowrun and RPG that was developed in that time period has Japanese takeover of Corporate America as a major back drop. Everyone was afraid in the 80's that Japan would own everything by the year 2000. (OK they own the Manga and cute Catgirl Market here). The reality is quite a bit different. I predict in 2107 that we will be running around talking about how the Martian colonies are buying everything, and soon we will be just a little backwater country with everything owned by them damn Mars Colonists.
You bring up a good point. Nanobot Enlargement Spam...
Is unabated pessimism.
In 1908, the sky seemed the limit and the predictions tended to focus on new, marvelous machines and how they would make life better for all.
In 2008, it's not so much about the technology or science but about how so few are wealthy and the general feeling is that we are on the edge of a long hard decline. The only upshot beeing that we'll somehow continue to have cutting edge tech.
Is it just me or are people genuinely very worried, frightened and so deeply unhappy with world affairs to the point that they think it's just crap from here on out and we should welcome an age of mechanized oppression?
To say no US Citizen would be able to afford to live in NYC while Oil Barons owned entire burroughs is complete and utter BS in my book.
It reeks of weakness and apathy. The same weakness and apathy that brings us all the people who whine and cry about Bush and his administration yet fail to do anything about it. The same weakness and apathy that has Americans crying about Global Warming, but they all shut their faces about it when they go home to waste several hundred kilowatts watching Survivor and American Idol.
This was supposed to be a dreamy piece, about "what if" and where "anything" could happen. What do we get? Hit over the head with "FAIL FAIL FAIL" again and again throughout the article. Not one prediciton was positive, each was somehow foreseeing a darker future where we are all worse off except the monied elite. From these predictions, it seems people have given up and the future they are grateful to accept is one where Asia leads and we just consume their tech and get whatever kind of living they give us.
Pretty sad if you ask me.
... at computer stores as people wait to purchase the first copies of Duke Nukem Forever.
Actually, if you want to extrapolate trends, I have a few for you to consider. Unlike your sensationalistic and inflamatory extrapolations, mine are based on actual, statitisically verifiable trends ...because we all know that trends continue indefinitely, that nothing unforeseen halts, or reverses them, and that none of these are self-limiting.
None of these points is really arguable.
True, but only if you refuse to have a rational argument.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I suppose I am a fool, but I notice you had to include the qualification "as a percentage of GDP" in your claim. That suggests that the military has in fact been growing, just not as fast as the country's GDP has. Is that what you meant? Because if so, growing != shrinking.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
There was a common theme of 'global warming will destroy NYC'. There also was society losing all freedom for the sake of security, and pining for the days of freedom. There was even the prediction of the largest building being a Starbucks, for god's sake, how much more pessimism do you need.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Godzilla sounded fun to me :(
If they had the 3 seashells, even your bleak future wouldn't be all that bad. Oh yeah, and Taco Bell wins the war.
You have to normalize expenditures or the comparison is meaningless. Obviously, if you spent $100,000 on the military in 1776, that would buy you a far larger army than $100,000 does today.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Does Bizarro Superman post on backslash dot?
-Dave
kinda hard without a physical location, but yes, I agree with you that would be a nicer solution alltogether.
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Here's a short primer. You take some data samples over a period of time (say, for example, percent of GDP spent on the military). You plot those points on a graph and connect them with lines. Really advanced people then apply some sort of smoothing function called a moving average to eliminate local peaks and valleys. Then you do this really tricky operation where you fit a function to the points. The slope of the function allows you to predict future data points even before they happen!
Then if I extrapolate the trend for the Pets.com stock I purchased in 1997, my shares are now worth... Holy shit! I'm rich!
Doubt that will happen. We'll automate labor markets before there's an influx of foreigners who might want to influence the country their own way. We'll put pressure on neighboring countries to meet certain international standards especially when a big heaping pile of real responsibility hits their laps. They won't have anywhere to turn except for our expertise and experience in those areas. We'll hold out on the deal until we will know that they will comply to our demands all the while helping their advisories. We've done this a lot.
Relationships will change but they will go back and forth over the period of several decades with each change. Different motivating factors will prompt these changes. Homosexuality will be redefined while heterosexuality will be reinforced.
Bioengineering of food will improve over the course of the next hundred years. You never know that they might create Replication technology like they have in Star Trek. They've been working on this for a while using a soup of atoms. It doesn't work but with the developments of processing technology, that will probably change within the next 50 to 100 years. Housing will force people to relocate into skyscrapers in a given area. Apartments will be bigger and more private. Home ownership will be for the wealthy.
For the productive members of society, they will focus efforts elsewhere on just maintaining a society. Space travel will become a more pertinent issue, not because of resources or any other form of competition, mainly because of the flexibility technology has provided for the human race. Of course there will be wars. Some that might wipe out the entire race but regardless of how bad it is, the technology will always remain. If it's wiped out one way or another, there will always be interest in order to bring it back. The steps taken to preserve that information have been extreme.
I hate to disappoint you but the military is stronger than it has ever been in the history of humanity. New technologies have been made which makes soldiers and artillery practically invisible. Weapons have been improved. Really the list of all the improvements in arsenal and training is really long. It would be very easy for the military to police the states in a matter of hours if needs be. If properly equipped the military would only need a handful of dedicated soldiers to take on a medium sized army. Why we don't do this with Iraq is because Iraq is a good place to work on training.
The point of my reply is that everything is arguable. You can make baseless claims as good as the next guy. There is a lot about the present most people don't know or refuse to realize. People with agendas think they have an answer to help themselves but the reality is that most people have already thought of it before. What's the old saying, "There isn't anything in the world that hasn't been thought up already." It's sounds like you have a very pessimistic and limited view of the world you live in. Religious movements come and go and have done that for the past several thousand years. There are think tanks that spend time and money on all of this.
The dream of America will change. The 1950's idea will not exist. It never has, it never will. People are too human to create something like that to exist. People will always create mistakes, they will always let you down and they will surprise you from time to time. They will make breakthroughs, they wi
Ok, myminicity .com assholes. Playtime is over.
.com people hopefully more traffic than they were bargaining for.
I've really had it with the myminicity.com crowd, and to put a stop to this nonsense I've set up a little website.
Stop posting your myminicity links here and elsewhere, if myminicity.com wants to grow they can surely find a way to do it without inconveniencing others.
If you don't then I'm calling on the rest of the audience here to report those links to the site above and if they want to help a little further to place a 1 pixel image tag on their website which will give the myminicity
For starters I've placed a tag on the http://ww.com/ homepage, feel free to come and help.
This is just another spam wave and if this doesn't get stopped now then it will be seen as a vindication of the principle and before long there will be 100's of sites doing this.
Rewarding your users for bad behaviour has to be one of the most annoying marketing tactics that has ever been devised.
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You might normalize expenditures to inflation, but normalizing to GDP only makes sense if you think their's some value in spending a particular fraction of income on the military. That would mean you'd be advocating a military budget increase for no reason that's at all related to defense.
Play Command HQ online
- America will be a mainly Spanish speaking country
...until the baby boomers die.
Awesome! For those that don't want their mother tongue encroached upon, I hope we form an American Quebec somewhere where they can go and be happy.
- Marriage will be almost non-existent
If Marriage is useful for Americans, it will stick around no matter the trend. I suspect that married couples have more, healthier kids with better prospects, so this trend is probably self correcting.
- Government will be "responsible" for all the care-and-feeding of the large majority of the population,
and will meet these responsibilities through ever-increasing taxation of the ever-shrinking productive members of society
- The military will be a small shadow of its former self
The military is still at cold war levels, is a political colossus that towers over all other interests and has it's toes dug into everything, and is so powerful and effective it entices idiots to start wars. I can't wait for this trend to kick into high gear.
Play Command HQ online
IMHO, the nanobots will only work for a certain type of mentalities. Most of them will go insane, harm themselves or other people because they won't be able to handle it. To manually control aspects of the body using the mind through nanobots means you have to change how the brain processes time and a persons relationship to their body as an object. Today's psychology is very limited. There is a lot of conflict concerning the validity and political motives behind the fields true effectiveness. Nanobubbles, I think that's what they are called, would be a better solution. It's simple, practical and much more realistic. They can contain medicine and can be deployed with extreme precision. It's been on one of those 2050 shows some time back. Nanomachines can be tricky and it will take years, maybe decades for anyone to create a realistic model that will be safe for general human use.
Now that this roadkill they made is about picked clean, they'll be moving on to other carcasses. They couldn't care less about everyone else in the US, so why should we care about them or their total exploitative parasitic "culture"?
Exactly. Your first paragraph made it sound like they were going down with the ship they helped to sink, but these guys don't care for America more than any other place, and aren't tied to it anymore than a flea is tied to a dead dog.
But this story is as old as time: work hard, build up some wealth, then some asshole comes along and takes it, and you should be thankful he doesn't kill you and rape your wife for his trouble.
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You wish!
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It all depends on how you read that graph. It would be far too simplistic to just say that military spending has been on the decline all along. The graph shows that US military expenditures and recruitment have historically been quite low except for large spikes during wartime. In fact it shows three huge spikes -- the Civil War, World War I, and World War II -- each followed by huge drops in military spending and recruitment. But the most interesting thing is that despite the steady decline in military spending following WWII, the trend reverses itself several times -- during the Korean and Vietnamese wars. After that, we see military steadily drop until the '80s which coincide with president Reagan's military build-up while recruitment remains flat because despite the build-up, there is no draft and we are not fighting any major wars. Military recruitment remains at about the same low level throughout the late '90s and early '00s until the Iraq war when it declines for obvious reasons -- no draft coupled with an unpopular war leads to low recruitment. I don't think you can read any trend from this graph except that when the US needs to fight a war, it spends a lot more money on the military. Also, notice that despite the steady decline in military spending and recruitment, neither number drops to levels anywhere near what they were before WWII.
The words "Spanish" and "speaking" do not appear anywhere on this page. It merely projects that an increasingly large portion (22.5% by 2050) of the population will be of Hispanic origin. While this may come as a huge surprise to you, a person of Hispanic descent is just as willing and able to learn the English language as anyone else. Some of us even grow up speaking English!
Does this
We have always been at war with Eastasia.
Are you describing "Demolition Man" with sylvester stallone?
You might want to take a closer look at that graph. It shows that the military spending and recruitment has historically been very low during peacetime. In a time of war, military spending and recruitment grows dramatically and rapidly. Despite the downward trend of the past fifty years, military spending and recruitment today remains much higher than it was before World War II. In fact even after cashing in the "peace dividend," both statistics remained higher than they were before WWII. I'm also reluctant to call the Iraq War uptick "brief." I'm guessing that when the 2007 data is all in, military spending will have gone up, not down -- again due to the Iraq War. And even if the next president abruptly ends the Iraq War, problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan will probably continue to keep our military busy and well-funded through the rest of the decade.
Unless, the United States suffers a huge reversal of fortune (or someone brings about world peace) over the next 100 years, it is a sure bet that the size of our military will be dictated by our status as a world power and will continue to expand and contract to meet our strategic needs -- just as it has for the past two hundred years.
Does this
I think for a completely human-free economy you don't need replicators, just robots that can work without outside intervention, i.e. they can handle maintenance and production of further robots as well. Once we have those the issue will be that noone will have money other than the robot owners so something must be done to deal with the large numkber of people without food. But when the robots don't need human interaction to keep replicating and doing their job why should we reward any human for their work? Just let the robots run the economy and provide everything everyone wants, they won't need money if they can get their own resources. Basically a host economy between robots and a leech population consisting of humans. (cue the obligatory "and then they decide they don't need us" post) I don't believe there's any job a human can do that can't be replaced by a robot, if necessary just make that robot a modified human who is reprogrammed to enjoy being a slave and provide for the leeches (think of worker bees).
Stanislaw Lem's star diaries have a chapter like that, about an alien population that reached the point where the robots could do everything but they insist on keeping capitalism alive (because they see it as a basic freedom) even though capitalism ran into a deadlock there (the consumer has no money anymore, all money is owned by the factory owners but without consumers there's noone to buy their stuff).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I can read (no need to be a jerk about it). And I am open to new evidence, so allow me to admit I was wrong and you seem to be right, the US economy is not moving to a military one, that seems to be my mistake. I would like to know what counts as a military expenditure in the graph but I am satisfied we won't all be working for the military in the future. I took offense with the grandparent post that our military will be a shadow of its former self, implying that it will be ineffective. The US military is the most powerful force in the history of the world, and better funded then the rest the world combined. Any implication the US military is becoming "weak" is only fear mongering. No military force in the world would dare attack the United States (China may want to but they need our consumers).
who the hell wants to be alive in 2108? People already are willing to f*** a hole in a stall with their eyes closed and not care whats on the other end, what makes you think they give two s***s about improving the general quality of life for Humanity, now let alone in the future?
Computers already automate what used to take a practical army of humans to do. Humans will always find other things to do and facilitate the flow of wealth. There will always be things to do no matter how useless it is practically speaking (I'm looking at you interior decorators). Once people are free from the burdens of the basic necessities, they will invariably seek luxuries which is a market in and of itself. Then there's the stock market. Really, no one in the stock market contributes to society per se. A day-trader or a stock broker doesn't produce anything. He/she is simply a facilitator of the flow of wealth and a gambler. I suspect that as less and less practical needs are met by human labor, we'll all begin to just spend our days betting each other on what price Google will be at tomorrow. Money will still flow back and forth.
is taxation higher now in america than it was 100 years ago? how about 50 years ago?
Unless they put all the garbage out to sea on a barge, or maybe send it into space on a rocket from the Mafia.
I am continually amazed at how many people don't understand how something that has "fallen 100%" is now zero, much less "fallen over 100%"...
I would have expected both without the military becoming weaker (indeed, I expect both happening at a time when the military is getting stronger.)
Growth in GDP has generally massively out-paced inflation throughout most of the last 50 years. And the draft has been replaced by a volunteer army. The latter means higher quality men, and less of them, meaning less expenditure on troop levels while maintaining a consistently higher standard.
To extrapolate from either statistic that the military has gotten weaker strikes me as extraordinary. Both compared to its former self, and to its position in the world, the US military is unarguably the strongest it's ever been. There are good cases for actually cutting it at this stage, as it's strength has encouraged some of the nuttier elements in politics to involve this country in conflicts - or even start wars - where we can only, as a nation, ultimately lose credibility and goodwill.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
What? You didn't like MY vision of the future but Saudi Arabian New York and underwater New York are OK?
Or the feudal New York where dance is the king?
Or did my guess strike too close to home?
I did base it on current economic and global trends.
Dollar going down, oil running out, US military spending gajilions of dollars on projects like that energy satellite or MF-in lasers on the MF-in planes.
Yeah... a regular troll-fest there.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The first big change will be devolution from Manhattan-centricity. No one in the city or state has the political will to upgrade public transportation to accommodate the jump in ridership to work in Manhattan, so people will look to work closer to home. The devolution has already begun, with Jersey City in the lead (yes, technically not part of NYC, but for all practical intents and purposes it is), with Brooklyn not far behind it, and with Queens (Long-Island City) bringing up the rear.
The second big change will see the decline of automobile use in the city. Bikes will reclaim lanes, and pedestrian-only areas will be created in locations like Times Square, Midtown-east, Herald's Square, and around the WTC site. Also, tolls on the bridges and tunnels and reduction of parking opportunities will make it too expensive and inconvenient for 90% of car commuters.
The third big change will be an overall increase in greenery in the form of trees, planters, and green roofs. They'll be implemented to reduce energy usage and improve air quality, and consequently bring down the sky-high asthma rates for children in the city.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
None of them mentioned the imminent release of Duke Nukem Forever...
Insert witty comment *here*. I'm fresh out of wit...
Actually, sounds a lot more like "Escape from L.A."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
... in a matter of a couple of generations.
Palestinians were expelled and colonized in a matter of a few years.
Jews were almost exterminated in Europe in less than a decade.
Native Americans in all the American continent were obliterated in 5 generations or less.
Lots of things can happen in 100 years.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Implying that people that disagree with you are unintelligent, assuming the premise? Sounds like I'm not the one lacking in verbal intelligence...
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Bwahaha! I never thought about it but yes, the Borg will most likely be born from angry /. readers of the future.
Moderation: +1 pwnage
Try to imagine a city of the future? A century from now, or a few years from now - either way it doesn't really matter, we won't be here to see it. According to the all-knowing Nostradamus, the Mayan calendar, etc, the world is going to end by Dec 21, 2012.
See http://www.2012endofdays.org/general/Predictions-for-2012.php
People are doing their best to make sure that we ruin whatever natural resources we set our grubby little hands on. So even if the world doesn't implode in 2012, there won't be much left to enjoy. Think of the Matrix-esque "Desert of the Real."
--- "To ignore race and sex is racist and sexist!" -- Jesse Jackson
Grammar Nazi
That would make it less than zero.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.