Slashdot Mirror
Steve Wozniak Predicts The Future (usatoday.com)
USA Today asked Steve Wozniak to predict what the world will look like in 2075 -- one hundred years after the founding of Apple. An anonymous reader writes:
"He's convinced Apple, Google and Facebook will be bigger in 2075," according to the article -- just like IBM, which endured long past its founding in 1911. Pointing to Apple's $246.1 billion in cash and marketable securities, Wozniak says Apple "can invest in anything. It would be ridiculous to not expect them to be around... The same goes for Google and Facebook."
Woz predicted portable laptops back in 1982, and now says that by 2075, we could also see new cities built from scratch in the deserts, with people wearing special suits to protect them from the heat. AI will be ubiquitous in all cities, as consumers interact with smart walls to communicate -- and to shop -- while home medical devices will allow self-diagnosis and doctor-free prescriptions. And according to the article, Woz "is convinced a colony will exist on the Red Planet. Echoing the sentiments of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, whose Blue Origin start-up has designs on traveling to Mars, Wozniak envisions Earth zoned for residential use and Mars for heavy industry." (Though he doesn't have high hopes that we'll ever meet aliens.)
Woz is promoting the Silicon Valley Comic Con next weekend. (Not coincidentally, its theme is "The Future of Humanity: Where Will We Be in 2075?") During the interview, Woz pointed at a colleague's iPhone, smiled broadly and said it "shows you how exciting the future can be."
Woz predicted portable laptops back in 1982, and now says that by 2075, we could also see new cities built from scratch in the deserts, with people wearing special suits to protect them from the heat. AI will be ubiquitous in all cities, as consumers interact with smart walls to communicate -- and to shop -- while home medical devices will allow self-diagnosis and doctor-free prescriptions. And according to the article, Woz "is convinced a colony will exist on the Red Planet. Echoing the sentiments of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, whose Blue Origin start-up has designs on traveling to Mars, Wozniak envisions Earth zoned for residential use and Mars for heavy industry." (Though he doesn't have high hopes that we'll ever meet aliens.)
Woz is promoting the Silicon Valley Comic Con next weekend. (Not coincidentally, its theme is "The Future of Humanity: Where Will We Be in 2075?") During the interview, Woz pointed at a colleague's iPhone, smiled broadly and said it "shows you how exciting the future can be."
In 1911, it could have been predicted that 106 years later the Tsarist and Austro-Hungarian empires would be around and stronger than ever. There was no reason at that time not to predict that.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
I'm surprised anyone would bother trying to make such sweeping predictions of "the world of tomorrow". I guess Mr. Wozniak felt that future generations will need something to giggle at in 58 years. I know I get an amused chuckle from reading all those outlandish predictions of what the year 2000 was supposed to be like, as envisioned by futurists of the 1930's. Where's my flying car! LOL! :-)
Avatar of the God(s) Random
.. because there would be little point in showing us how morally, spiritually, and technologically primitive we are.
In 100 years people who were successful in one field will continue to try and predict the future in areas that they have no expertise in and still be wrong.
America will be run by a collection of drooling morons who make Trump look like a genius.
"He's convinced Apple, Google and Facebook will be bigger in 2075,"
I'm sure everyone in 1975 thought IBM was going to be ruling the playground right now. The truth is that new companies get too big, bureaucratic or unfocused which makes them slow to respond to new technologies while new companies emerge and displace them which happens about every generation or two. It's been my experience that 10 years is about as far as you can see in terms of the technology industry if you're lucky but that doesn't even account for societal changes.
Here's my prediction: some old fart is going to complain about how the current generation behaves and give their account about how things used to be better.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
That's the question to be asked when you want to know whether something will happen. Can it be monetized? Can someone make money off it? That is the pivotal question.
Why don't we have colonies on the moon, as a lot of people thought in the 60s? No profit. Why don't we have flying cars? No profit. Why don't we live in one of the many utopias that were promised to us? No profit.
Socially, the 20xx years will probably be closer to the 18xx years than the 19xx years, without a Soviet Union that forces us to look like we're the good guys, there is exactly no reason that cutthroat capitalism shouldn't be employed to the full extent that we had in the 1800s. Only far, far more efficiently.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Woz will be dead. Predicted. You heard it here.
The next generation don't think Facebook is "cool". And Facebook's push for monetization is annoying existing users. It's getting by on momentum and critical mass, but I can see a new pretender overtaking it within the next 10 years.
the year of the Linux desktop
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
No catgirls?!
#DeleteFacebook
I predict it will be more like Idiocracy. In fact it's already begun.
#DeleteFacebook
I was hoping for sex robots. :-/
that the future will be weirder and more disappointing than we can currently imagine.
Makes perfect sense to me. It may just be a matter of economics:
In the past, cities tended to grow at strategic locations, or where it is relatively easy (read: cheap) to support a city. Like near a choke point between land masses. Or a river delta (easy transport up river). Or in the middle of an area with fertile agricultural land.
In a technological advanced society, it should be possible to recycle most raw materials (including water). Most food could be grown in 10-story greenhouses where crops don't even need soil. This only takes space, and energy. So 'cheap' may then gravitate to non-agricultural land where energy is abundant. A desert could be one of such places. Floating cities on the open ocean another option.
Of course this may depend on how much more the world's population grows. Maybe that will stabilize at a number where there isn't much need to build new cities from scratch.
I predict the islamization of the West and the return of slavery.
...Woz predicted portable laptops back in 1982,...
And what else did he predict that hasn't come true?
Laptops? In 1982? That really wasn't a stretch.
I predict Facebook will be long gone by 2075. Chances are, Google and Apple will be gone too.
Pretty sure he will be remembered and talked about for a lot longer than you and most of us. In the end that's all there is.
Past performance is no indication of present or future performance. This applies to companies, as well as prognosticators. The idea that we'd use Mars for *heavy* industry seems particularly far-fetched since getting things off Mars and to Earth adds a lot of cost to anything. Off-Earth locations make more sense for *toxic* industry, but not something with a gravity well as deep as Mars. Asteroids or comets seem like a better location.
A world market crash as rogue agents from various countries manipulate high speed trading markets for immediate gains, destabilizing the currently in-place market balance agreements between the top trading organizations around the globe. Apple shares will plummet to $1 per share, at which point Apple will be bought out by Costco, and the iPhone will be marketed in bulk packs of 25 and as a loss leader for Costco Internet Services. Costco Internet Services will actually be a division of Amazon run on the AmeriNet network, the internet no longer being what it is today but more like AOL once more.
We'll have flying cars, but only the elite and shipping & transport companies will be able to afford or use them. They'll also be fully autonomous with security programs backed by massive AI complexes that actively defend themselves from hacking, usually by taking down an entire countries internet structure for a short time. Its simply more efficient that way.
Home computers will no longer be a thing in the US, as cardboard boxes won't have electrical outlets. The good news is that Apple and others don't accept rat pelts and grass clipping as currency anyways. Rednecks will be extinct as well, having been replaced by literally everyone else in the US and out-competed for food.
The maker community will have been completely bought out by the Corporations, and their projects all promptly shelved in an effort to prevent the Third Corporate IP sueball war.
Generation of power at home will be flat out illegal in every country. You will buy your electricity and heating gas and like it, or die.
Laser weapons will finally come into their own, and Trump's descendants will carve his name in 30 mile high letters on the face of the moon, in homage to Chairface Chippendale. The use of laser weaponry will then be banned in all countries by mutual agreement treaty.
We won't make it to Mars. We'll have had our first contact with advanced alien species before 2075, and they'll have established a cordon around our planet to keep us all here until we die off naturally, thus preventing the spread of our insanity to the universe at large. They will however rebroadcast our sitcoms, removing the laugh tracks and billing them as documentaries, as a warning to other species not to interact with us.
Russian empire is still here, ruled by an emperor. Only difference is that he's not oficially called that. Still invading and conquering neighbors and killing political rivals.
I would say accuracy of such predictions are pretty bad. We don't have any ideal the variables that change over time. None of these companies could be around which would probably have as much chance of happening as any other prediction. How about focusing on the here and now?
People are spoiled. They saw the amazing progress of digital electronics in the early-mid 1900s until now, and extrapolate that the future will show the same progress. Guess what? It won't. The digital revolution is coming to an end. We are hitting physical limits we cannot progress beyond. And we certainly cannot live on Mars, because, you know, evolution and biology and stuff. Just because someone has an iPhone doesn't mean anything at all.
Large players currently can grow, buy, or merge without any oversight. If that continues the prediction might be right. But there are many unknowns. Facebook and Google rely on advertisement. If the technology for blocking or removing or filtering adds gets better and more wide spread, that revenue might dry out. On the other hand these players are so large (similarly like Amazon, Microsoft or Oracle) that they can diversify and buy up new technology, surviving in other sectors , even so the original sectors dry out.One has learned from the lessons of the past. Its very hard to predict the future in technology. Most experts in the past were dead wrong. examples.
Of FB, Google, and Apple, I'd say Facebook is most likely to fail.
I remember when Disney and others predicted people would drive flying cars.
Can you imagine the unwashed masses piloting flying cars without any lanes? They drive shitty enough with land-based vehicles.
None of the large companies, Apple, Google, facebook or Microsoft are certain to be around. facebook especially. They all spend very large amounts of money on R&D alone without the costs of products, staff and marketing. IT really only takes a few bad product releases for any of them or someone out competing them to turn any of them into a fraction of their size. of those Microsoft probably has the most diverse portfolio and hence is the most secure, Facebook the least secure as they are completely reliant on something better not becoming popular.
yes he will be, but not for his prophetic predictions of the future. He was/is an incredible engineer that was ahead of his time 3 decades ago and will be remembered for that. Predicting laptops was obvious back in 82 as they already had a heap of people working on them for fucks sack, that is the equivalent of predicting a smartphone that will have longer battery life in a few years time.
You know we split the atom right? You know im essentially transmitting thought to you effortlessly for almost no cost, right? For all our faults, we are still almost gods.
Good-bye
Woz predicted portable laptops back in 1982
Laptops were predicted in the September 1977 Scientific American article Microelectronics and the Personal Computer by Alan C. Kay. That's just one prediction I happened to know, there may be earlier ones.
Maybe he should eat an apple rather than predict one. No amount of tech is gonna save him from death's door within a decade. That's my prediction.
How soon people forget that it was less than a decade ago that everyone was convinced MySpace was going to be around forever, Windows was going to be killed off by "desktop Linux", the demise of Blockbuster meant DVD's-by-mail was the future of home video viewing, Amazon's business model was destined to fail, Blackberry was the future of smartphones, and everyone would be driving hydrogen cars.
Alternatively, our society will have exhausted a key resource required for the next technological revolution required to get rid of it. Everything will collapse, and nothing the Woz describe will happen.
Apple, Google and Facebook will be bigger in 2075
-Apple: Possibly. I wouldn't put money on it.
-Google: Almost certainly.
-Facebook: Unlikely. If they are still around, it will be in a form we wouldn't recognize.
new cities built from scratch in the deserts, with people wearing special suits to protect them from the heat.
Ha! No.
AI will be ubiquitous in all cities, as consumers interact with smart walls to communicate -- and to shop
Well duh, that's a no-brainer. Of course, does he mean 'true AI' or the advertising algorithms that get called AI today? I fully expect the latter to be ubiquitous in only 10 years. We'll create true AI about the same time we discover fusion power, intelligent extra-terrestrials, and the highest prime number.
home medical devices will allow self-diagnosis and doctor-free prescriptions.
The devices (assuming they could even plausibly pass FDA) for unsupervised home use by untrained individulas would be one of those "what could possibly go wrong" things. Additionally, doctors will never give up the (arguably justifiable) sole power to write scripts.
Woz "is convinced a colony will exist on the Red Planet.
...maybe by 2275, if we live that long. We'd better start with a colony on the moon, and that will take at least 15 years if we start yesterday. And a 'colony' at either place won't be viable probably ever. Something more like the ISS, sure, that would be a great thing, and even possible. In 200 years from now.
(Though he doesn't have high hopes that we'll ever meet aliens.)
Nice(?) to know we agree on something.
You act as if they're going to be any different.
Technological development is not coupled with any scale of morality in any way, shape, or form. If we were waiting for morality to develop before advancing technology, we'd be sitting in a cave debating whether or not rocks were edible.
They could be very similar to us, they could be very different in an altruistic way, they could be very different in a malevolent way, they could be completely incomprehensible. Plus, a super-altruistic species may have its own quirks and problems. For instance, they may have solved aging by compulsory euthanasia at the age of 50. They may enforce morality through radical brain alteration and mind control. Anticipating some sort of moral perfection from an alien race is making a lot of assumptions, both about the aliens and about us, plus what a "morally superior" civilization might actually look like.
The same could be said about spirituality. Technology is the one thing that I think they'd have an obvious and clear edge on, simply because interstellar travel is so difficult to the best of our knowledge.
You heard it here first. Microsoft will be the first trillion dollar company. Welcome to the future.
"Technological development is not coupled with any scale of morality in any way, shape, or form. If we were waiting for morality to develop before advancing technology, we'd be sitting in a cave debating whether or not rocks were edible.
'
At any given time in human history, moral codes are largely an emergent property of the many adjustments in social etiquette we have to make as new technologies become available. Nineteenth-century Britain had to deal with child labor moving from the farm, where it had always peacefully existed, to factories, where the changed environment made it an abomination. Right at the moment we are fretting about our sudden ability to use personal privacy as an asset that we can exchange for goods and services.
In 1982, Woz saw the future as having portable laptops; they duly came out several years later. He was deeply involved in the microcomputing field, and the ever constant miniaturization was readily apparent to any observer. Not to mention adults during 1982 would have likely experience the transition from desk calculators to handheld calculators. Woz's prediction may have been a rarer one (I don't know on this), but it was in the very-near-future and rather obvious to anyone with a hint of imagination. Accurately predicting fifty-eight years into the future? Yeah, no, I don't think so.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
1. Batteries that are 5x better than what we have today.
2. Artificial muscle to replace bulky inefficient motors.
3. Solar cells that are 3x cheaper than today's lowest cost.
4. Fusion energy (current viable path exists via MagLIF or ITER).
5. Cure stage IV cancer and autoimmune diseases reliably.
Frankly by 2075 I think we may only be able to tackle #5 to some extent. Fusion energy, while technologically viable, is not going to happen due to the fact that politicians keep trying to pull funding. I doubt we'll be able to improve batteries or solar cells much by 2075. There is hardly any materials scientists that care about artificial muscle .. so that one's not gonna happen either.
Gods? Gods wouldn't send 99.999% of what humans communicate with each other every day. We are using the tools of greatness to propagate trash. We are the mold growing from the cracks beneath the God machines, and one day we will be scraped off and washed away, never to be heard from again.
There were three laptops already available in 1981. So... not much of a prediction really.
1. Batteries 5x better. I think that is the most realistic of the list. Li-air certainly but maybe zinc-air might dwarf that. 2. Mech Muscles. I think that is reasonable but may not be widely deployed. 3. Solar is already pretty damn cheap at $1/watt. Couple with 5x batteries and today's tech is fine. 4. Fusion will be just 50 years away. Modular fission will be all the rage. 5. Probably but it doesn't really matter.
.. because there would be little point in showing us how morally, spiritually, and technologically primitive we are.
calm down there, Neil D Tyson.
http://sciencevibe.com/2017/01...
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
> He's convinced Apple, Google and Facebook will be bigger in 2075,"
He's convinced Apple that Google and Facebook will be bigger? How did he do that? And why did Apple need to be convinced?
And yet,
* Consciousness doesn't exist according to Physics
* The Big Bang is joke with many unsolved problems
* We STILL don't know what Electricity is
* Or what causes Gravity
* Or how to calculate how long a magnet will stay on a fridge
* We haven't discovered that Space is relative (i.e. teleportation)
* We haven't discovered that Time is relative (i.e. time travel)
So yeah, our current tech is a total joke compared to other advanced civilizations.
I see you're not terribly familiar with most of the ancient mythologies. I could totally believe zeus would spend most of his time surfing porn.
colonies on the moon? travelling to other planets? flying cars? jetpacks? biodomes?
It'll take way more than 2075 for a colony on mars. It takes a decade to build a highway 100km long.
It took thirty years for cellphones to get a touchscreen.
People have been diagnosing themselves at home for millenia. The advancement was the doctor, not the diagnosis.
Doctor-free prescriptions are called illicit drugs.
Civilization doesn't move that fast, nor that way. Makes for a nice book though.
People just won't admit there isn't anything on Mars worth colonizing it for, will they? I mean, it sounds cool, but other than "Woohoo! I'm on Mars!" it's kind of a hell hole. You don't see people rushing to colonize Antarctica, and that's far more hospitable, closer, and cheaper to do.
Back in 1000AD you could pretty safely predict your grandson would pretty much be living the same daily life as yourself. Generational changes in technology werent really apparent until the 1700s.
An interesting question is whether some dystopia could halt further progress- massive world war, reactionary governments, ecological collapse, human boredom, etc.
Most merged into others for economic reasons.
And a few died because their businesses no longer made sense.
We may be seeing the ending of retail department stores this decade. Ironically it was the USPS 'network' that connect mostly rural customers to retail catalogs and delivery. You could even order a house building kit for a few thousand dollars (Nixon birth home example). Another network supplanted department stores.
No one will be around to prove that humans existed.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
A lot of things will be different in the future... On a more serious note, I won't be here in 2075, unless they figure out how to keep a 130 year old person alive. Personally, I don't want to live that long. I see the world (if they don't blow themselves up), being dominated by a super muslim majority simply because the rest of the worlds birth rate is not enough to sustain their populations. ALL ethnic groups except for the super breeding muslims, are in a negative rate. With the so called refugees being spread all over the non muslim world, they will eventually be the majority populations globally.
If the likes of Google, and especially Facebook, would not only still be around but 'bigger than ever', then I'm glad I'll be long since dead by that point, since that sounds like a pretty shitty world to have to live in.
Personally I think he's mostly full of crap. Apple may still be around in 60 years, but Google and Facebook? LOL, no, especially not any sort of so-called 'social media' nonsense. I think 'social media' is just a fad that'll eventually pass, or at the very least the face of it will change enough that monstrosities like Facebook will go the way of it's predecessors. People are already showing signs of getting tired of this whole 'sharing everything' nonsense, and there are small sparks here and there I see of privacy being valued again, especially in the face of there being more and more intrusions into it that people just can't ignore anymore.
Why does he think that shopping will be around in 2075?
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Illuminati will have access to more useful information than ever before.
Invisible hands will continue to improve at steering the population.
The population will be so busy absorbing the incredible entertainment options that they will never notice their own prisons.
The newer generations will not know how the world works both politically and technically.
Artificial Intelligence will provide hilarious companionship.
Body modification will expand well beyond piercing and tattooing.
The worth of human organs will decrease; the value of human life will decrease.
58 years is roughly the time frame that machines become truly intelligent. Certainly much smarter than they are now. Robots everywhere.
Most futuristic predictions completely miss that fact. It is just beyond our human emotional comprehension.
See below for some ideas on what this might really mean.
http://www.comptuersthink.com/
2022 is only 5 years from now, we'll all be able to verify if the predictions were true.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...