fRy hooked us up with a cool
story on MSNBC (originally on Feed) about what we can anticipate coming in the future. Covering everything from nanotechnology
[?] to toys, genetics to espionage, it's a fun read with loads of interviews with smart people.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting as the Dream Machine invention sounds....
How about actually raising your own kids instead of placing that responsibility on the anonymous world, and than placing blame on it for failing to do it well?
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
In my humble opinion, I don't understand why everyone sees the future as a dead filled one. Sure we'll get old and die, but why are some people convinced the entire world will end?
-PovRayMan
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The technology that I think is most promising and -gasp- practical and affordable today that might be a staple of the future, instead of most high-tech throwaway toys, are the Mind Machines. They're devices that combine sound and light at specific frequencies to cause electro-checmical shifts in the brain, sometimes known as entrainment, usually to produce alpha, theta, or delta waves.
Unfortunatly they're clumped together with New Age crap like orgone fields and psycho-magnets, but there's studies that show their effectiveness.
For more info consult your local library or goto http://www.us-shamanics.com/mm-faq.html
In reading the article on nanotech I was dismayed about the potential uses attributed to the research at NASA Ames. Are they really thinking that small and are only working on robotic sensors. They should be thinking big and thinking about the logical use for nanotech on a hostile world like Mars. Gray Goo could in fact be green goo and would be the the most obvious approach for terraforming Mars into a habitable planet. Assuming the atomic components are present they could presumably produce water and oxygen and dispose of the the toxic components of the atomosphere. They could produce a green house effect to warm the environment. They could potentially produce a habitable world. Hopefully they would also design in safe gaurds to kill the nanobots once the work was done. I've always thought the "Genesis Effect" in Star Trek was simply a wave of nanobots.
@de_machina
This special issue of the magazine is devoted to the topic of "What Science Will Know in 2050," and includes viewpoints from many prominent names in biology, cosmology, mathematics and physics.
Sir John Maddox opens the section with his article entitled "The Unexpected Science of the Future" in which he posits that "the questions we do not yet have the wit to ask will be a growing preoccupation of science in the next 50 years." For support, he analyzes several 50-year periods in the past. In each analysis he contends that science, at the beginning of the period was unable to predict the upcoming advances.
For example, who in 1950 could have imagined the e-commerce explosion of the late 1990's? Even as late as 1980, the upcoming prominence of the personal computer was widely doubted. Or who could have reasonably imagined that we would clone a sheep? DNA had not yet been discovered!
And, if this were not enough evidence, consider that the rate of technical innovation and discovery is accelerating!
In the next 50 years, could we see the dawn of artificial intelligence? Will that intelligence petition for civil rights? Will it be vastly more intelligent than us? If so, will it share its discoveries with humanity? What new directions might they take us?
Will we unify physics? What will the completion of the human genome project yield? Will we drastically alter our climate? Will we discover life outside Earth?
I believe that we might be able to reasonably predict discovery 10-15 years out, with rapidly decreasing success beyond that.
dp
I'll have to dissagree, albeit only on certain parts. Yes, it is almost impossible to predict what will happend in 100 years time. But it is possible to say which direction the world is most likely to take.
About a year ago Swedish television showed a rerun of a documetary series from the 60s, about what the world would be like at the turn of the millenium. Sure, it had it's share of the wildly optimistic futurists who predicted everything from private spacecraft to meeting god. But most of those asked had a relatively sane, and in retrospect true, view of what would happend.
One of the subjects, a nuclear scientist, analyzed how technology was developing trough the 40s, 50s and early 60s. He predicted that it would continue in the same direction, with increased minimization, increased availability and increased usage of technology. He also predicted that communications would explode, allowing people to communicate cheap and fast across the entire globe (internet & iridium anyone?).
There were lots of scientists expressing their opinons, and mostly they have come true. Families have become less solid and divorce rates have climbed. People have become more mobile and we are moving around more than ever, to study, to work and for pure recreation. Airtravel is safe and relatively fast. Computers have shrunk and are available to the common man (although the CS professor that spoke of computers had the modest vision of them taking up the space of a small table).
So it is possible to predict the future in broad strokes, although anyone predicting model ZK-33 neural interfaces should stick to writting SF.
Phase 1: Where do you want to go today? Phase 2: This is where you want to go today. Phase 3: You're not going any
The problem is that these people speculate based on what they want to happen... like the whole stupid flying cars thing.
They dont take into account things like market pressures and horde magnetism. The only reason that some bad products succeed over good products in marketing. And when something looks better than something else, no matter if it really is, hordes of peope will be drawn to it (ie MSWindows).
Bah.
I don't like so-called "Futurists" who make all sorts of wild predictions about the future.
The early days of "Wired" and "Mondo 2000" magazines were full of these pundits, trying to convince us that the internet was some fabulous egalitarian anarchistic collection of like-minded individuals, that the 'net would allow virtual sex and avatars and the whole shebang. Not one of them mentioned consumer-priced broadband, or mass censorship like what's happening in Australia these days.
Mondo 2000 was particularly bad at this, saying how the online world would replace real life and everything would be a massive technohippy psychedelic wonderland where everything would be free.
Wired promised much the same thing, except that we'd all get fabulously rich selling the aforementioned wonderland.
Now, after I've brought everybody down with my ramblings, a positive note:
I've seen the LEGO 2000 catalogue, and the new X-Wing is pretty sweet! So there is hope for the future.
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Read Neal Stephonson's book The Diamond Age, its fiction to be sure, but it explores some of the cool ideas of nanotechnology and the efect they would have on life.
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In Heinlein's Expanded Universe, there is an essay written in 1950 called "Pandora's Box" in which he predicts what the year 2000 will be like. (He also updated it in 1965 and 1980 and kept track of how he did.) Anyone wanting to predict the future of technology should read this. If nothing else, it shows how hard it is to write something that doesn't seem silly in fifty years.
The cake is a pie
The Cyberette sounds like a digital hallucinogen that leaves the user completely functional, except for certain parts of certain senses are replaced to the users specifications.
I know of one co-worker that I'de like to 'dial-out' of my day. It would make me a lot more productive.
Now only if we could teach 'Cheech and Chong' to hack a bit ;)
1.) When Woz took the Apple I into work to see if they were going to hold him to his IP contract with them, they laughed at the notion of a Personal Computer.
2.) There's the famous Bill Gates "640k should be enough for anybody." quote from '81.
3.) "...There are no significant threats to the Intel or Microsoft desktop PC franchises through 2003," -Chris Goodhue, PC analyst with the Gartner Group, 1998
4.) The Titanic was deemed unsinkable by the press and media because of the technological achievement of the watertight compartments. (As a matter of fact, White Star Line never advertised it as unsinkable. An article in in an engineering magazine during the period was quoted as saying the Titanic was "virtually unsinkable" which started the hype.
5.) According to Xerox, paper usage is growing 7% annually. We were supposed to have a paperless society by now.
6.) In 1899, Charles Duell, the director of the U.S. Patent office stated "Everything that can be invented already has been." (GASP! Exactly 100 years ago!)
Plus, about 50 years ago, computer companies scoffed at the idea of any kind of portable computer. Shall I go on?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
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How can anyone think that they can predict what will happen in 100 years? It would be tough to even guess which technologies will shape the next century, let alone what their effects will be. Anything that actually comes true will be pure luck. The only prediction I am going to make is that we will still be here, and even that isnt definete. Im just content with taking it one day at a time.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Futurists are just never right. I mean, never. The only spot-on predictions I can think of offhand came from people who were just grotting over the facts and came up with something - they were labeled 'futurists' after the fact.
/. recently, is a prime example. Many of the arguments against it, why it's a failure, etc., are arguments against it, not as an example of successful or failed futurism, but against the vision of the future that it represents: that there are fundamental flaws in that vision, which we need to scramble to avoid in building the real future. Similarly, Buckminster Fuller's designs arent universal today. We have no Dymaxion Cars, geodesic domes are prevalent only in certain specific arenas, such as highway equipment maintenance huts. Nevertheless, his way of looking at the world, and the principles behind his designs, have influenced a generation not just of futurists, but of actual designers.
What futurists come up with sounds plausible because their scenarios allow for the interplay of a few more factors than we generally allow ourselves to play with when we daydream. This air of verisimilitude breaks down when confronted with the real world's blizzard of interacting effects.
Take personal fliers. When you read about it in Popular Science it sounds reasonable enough: you avoid poky ground traffic and zip from here to there. Economies of scale would allow anyone to afford one, just like a car.
We still don't have 'em. The energy budget just isn't there - they still cost too much to fly - and besides, The Vision doesn't allow for what will happen when one comes crashing down into a neighborhood. At least autos mostly only crash into other autos. Only extraordinarily do they crash into living rooms. Not so personal fliers.
This makes it sound like futurism is a useless occupation. Not so. It at least provokes valuable discussion. Epcot Center, the subject of a bunch of use and abuse on
It isn't the confection that's important, but the flavor is.