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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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
I for one welcome our future Spanish speaking, bastard, unwed, government teat sucking non-militaristic overlords...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Does Bizarro Superman post on backslash dot?
-Dave
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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