Predictions for the World in 2030
ilookforwardto.com
ilookforwardto.com
In 2005 (14 years later), autonomous robotics cars successfully navigated a course in the desert. Two years later, they did the same in a city, with no traffic violations.
In 2007 (16 years later), for a few hundred bucks you could carry several orders of magnitude more computing power in your pocket, with remote access to the sum of all human knowledge.
Today, we have affordable 3D printing and are on the cusp of quantum computing. Cryogenic preservation is offered at feasible prices by multiple companies. Political revolutions happen with live commentary which is beamed through space into my pocket. Several new nanotech-based products are released to market every week. If you don't stop and look around, it's easy to miss the fact that we live in the freaking future.
That said, I'm not sure I buy that space tourism will be that big in 20 years, nor that poverty rates will be so low. But the rest don't seem outrageous at all.
Its easy to say now how it was bound to happen but as the recent Katie couric and gumbel clip shows they didn’t even know what the internet was in 1994! In 1990 most people didn't even have computers. Cell phones didn't even start becoming commonplace in the US until less than 10 years ago. As we move through life gradually we don’t notice as much the continuous change that occurs all around us everyday. But if I transported you directly from 1990 to today, you better believe you would be astonished.
Humanity in general progresses at an exponential rate. More change happened in the 20th century than all of previous history. More change will probably occur in the first 25-30 years of the 21st century than the entire 20th century.
So yes, a lot of these things are possible. And other , much more interesting things we can't imagine or even comprehend now will be around in 2030, too.
Nowadays, it's accessible from a computer I can fit into my pocket, and it affects pretty much everyone on the planet.
I think people underestimate how much change has happened in the last 20 years.
The thing that consistently doesn't get predicted is where the next big tech spike will occur. In 1990 wired house phones were still common. The iPhone would be crazy to see.
No one can predict these things, but my guess is that the next big jump will be in medicine. People will say, "can you believe 20 years that people went to the doctor to diagnose things? This device you stand in front of (and can talk to) is about 20X more accurate than the best human doctor".
Early 2000s
. Translating telephones allow people to speak to each other in different languages.
. Machines designed to transcribe speech into computer text allow deaf people to understand spoken words.
. Exoskeletal, robotic leg prostheses allow the paraplegic to walk.
. Telephone calls are routinely screened by intelligent answering machines that ask questions to determine the call's nature and priority.
. "Cybernetic chauffeurs" can drive cars for humans and can be retrofitted into existing cars. They work by communicating with other vehicles and with sensors embedded along the roads.
Early 21st century
. The classroom is dominated by computers. Intelligent courseware that can tailor itself to each student by recognizing their strengths and weaknesses. Media technology allows students to manipulate and interact with virtual depictions of the systems and personalities they are studying.
. A small number of highly skilled people dominates the entire production sector. Tailoring of products for individuals is common.
. Drugs are designed and tested in simulations that mimic the human body.
. Blind people navigate and read text using machines that can visually recognize features of their environment.
2010
. PCs are capable of answering queries by accessing information wirelessly via the Internet.
2020-2050
. Phone calls entail three-dimensional holographic images of both people.
. By 2020, there will be a new World government.
2020-2070
. A computer passes the Turing Test, becoming the first true Artificial Intelligence.
taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwei...
1. The Internet will grow.
2. Computers will become more common.
3. Computers will become smaller.
Of course I'm sure there would have been a ton of dumb predictions as well, but I think it's easier to predict 20 years in the future than 50 years in the future.
Urbanization and rising out of poverty drastically reduces population growth, often times below the replacement rate. It will be interesting to see what happens if/when for the first time in human history, the number of people on the planet goes down.
The black death in the 14th century made the number of people on the planet go down quite dramatically, as did the plague of Justinian in the 6th–7th.
If you’re willing to look at geographic regions smaller than the whole world, populations have been quite frequently ravaged by disease and invasion.
http://longnow.org/seminars/02004/aug/13/the-depopulation-pr...
It is full of rethink-the-news sentences like: “Notice that Japan’s lengthening recession began just as continuously falling fertility rates at last caused its working-age population to begin shrinking in relative size.”
“People a century from now will have so few blood relatives I think it could be very lonely.” The audience, convinced by then, was utterly still.
1. Machine translation already exists and is getting better. Will it be ubiquitous? Unlikely. Only tourists and those interacting with them will normally carry them.
2. No way. We cant even see the way to go. Cure a disease and another pops up to take its place. By 2030 we may know enough to start.
3. Another no. If people have the freedom to make bad choices, there will always be extreme poverty. Will the police do daily roundups to force people into shelter, into mental helth facilities? Singapore maybe.
4. No, except for a few exceptions, like pot. It's economics. Who is going to grow wheat in Manhattan?
5. Of course. Google already has the prototypes.
6. Yes, but somewhere along the line technology will enable the trend to reverse,
7. I dont think so, even if the technology. We wont see flying cars because of cost and liability issues and the publicity of even infrequent crashes. Airliners will still have pilots because of public confidence. It's possible that cargo planes will perhaps have ground based pilots/monitors. In the military, of course.
8. No way. The economics arent there, except for a few hundred rich people per year. The experimental technology doesnt exist today.
9. Yes for low budget films and a lot of TV. Blockbusters will use actors, because stars sell films. We still have theater, opera, and concerts an films will still have actors.
10. Probably so.
11. If large numbers means several of your friends, even hackers, the answer is no. I dont think having a robot, can compare to having a real girl tell you she loves you. And I dont think a real girl will put up with the competition.
I think peak oil, the rising cost of energy, and increasing urbanization might actually increase the usage of mass transit compared to any type of car. What cars remain, however, very much may be driverless.
9. By 2030, most film actors will be out of work due to competition from cheap computer animated actors.
11. By 2030, a large number of people will have robot lovers.
I'm sure robot lovers and CGI actors will exist, but I can't see them entirely displacing their human counterparts. Those are two places where most people will want an actual flesh and blood human, even if the alternative is indistinguishable.
I remember when in the 90s most people preferred POP3 (for mail transfer), because for privacy reasons they didn't want their provider to have access to their mails. And quite a large number of people used encryption, even if they weren't technically inclined.
Today almost no one cares about privacy anymore. Expectations have completly changed within a century. Today it's, e.g., common for most people to store all of their chat logs on Google's server, without regularly deleting them. Or another example: Today we have much more advanced surveillance systems used against the general population than the techniques used in the DDR. For most people back in the DDR those surveillance systems where not acceptable. Today most people accept them if it helps the government "to find terrorists and criminals".
If privacy expectations can change within a century, why shouldn't the expectations on one's car change?
> And quite a large number of people used encryption, even
> if they weren't technically inclined.
The eradication of extreme poverty will happen in our lifetime. In 1990, 42% of the world’s population lived on less than $1.25 (constant 2000 dollars, PPP). In 2005, that number had fallen to 25%. The UN estimates that by 2020, only 10% of world citizens will live in absolute poverty. My bold estimate is that by 2030, only one in 50 will.
Would be awesome, but it won't happen if the world population keeps increasing at the rate it is increasing. We've already surpassed 7 billion people, which wasn't originally projected to happen for at least a couple more years.
1. IMHO learning a second language will largely be no longer necessary because English will increasingly be the lingua franca. That being said, on the fly translation will clearly continue to get better.
2. 150 year life expectancy? This one I don't buy. Medicine here has to be differentiated in two areas: curing and preventing the causes of "premature" death (eg disease) that stop us reaching a "natural" age when we die. That lone won't get us to 150 years. We're probably not far off that limit now. To get to 150 we need to extend the age to which humans can live, which is getting into some fairly serious genetics. I can see such technology coming about but IMHO will be the province of the wealthy for some time and will probably take longer than expected (again IMHO).
3. I disagree with this. Despite all the efforts to stop poverty, even in developed nations, there is a segment of the population who remain poor. It might be controversial but a certain segment (IMHO) are poor and remain poor because they make poor choices.
Also, the definition of "poor" constantly changes. Poverty in the developing world is lack of access to basic health care, food and clean drinking water. In the developed world, poverty seems to mean your iPhone is two generations old.
And yes I realize there is true poverty in the developed world. There are people who are homeless but the scope of "poverty" in such discussions extends way beyond those when we're discussing social policy.
4. Possible. Food production will need to change.
5. Agreed. I think future generations will look back on this age of manually driven cars as being somewhat barbaric, especially considering the number of people who die on the roads.
6. I also agree that the world's will become increasingly urbanized and you will see "mega-cities" as a result. There are efficiency advantages in concentrating populations in such cities.
7. I was just having a conversation with a colleague at work on Friday about flying cars. My position was (and is) that personal flying vehicles won't happen before driverless cars. Humans won't simply be able to reliably fly such vehicles. Also, the energy costs I believe will possibly scupper such plans so we need to find a far cheaper source of energy for this to happen, especially considering we've probably passed peak oil production.
8. This too is dependent on finding a new, cheaper energy source. Without that space travel will (IMHO) still be too expensive.
9. I think this will be partially true but human labour is extraordinarily cheap and will be incredibly hard to completely displace. It's the same reason we still have humans doing incredibly menial work even when such work could be done by robots, that are comparatively much more expensive.
10. Probably true.
Predicting the future is hard. 1900 to 2000 had a massive amount of change, unparalleled in human history. Think about it: we went from the birth of the automobile to handheld computers, putting a man on the Moon, the global Internet and cheap, almost ubiquitous air travel. How much of that could've been predicted?
What's more, how much of that is on the back of cheap non-renewable energy that is ultimately unsustainable? Not just energy, but other resources like metals. The rate at which the world population is growing and using resources is unsustainable so something has to change: whether it be new energy sources are found or the population problem corrects itself.
I seriously urge you to watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
if you haven't already.
If you think of sci-fi as a predictor of the future (which it has been in many ways), we've vastly exceeded predictions in some fields (eg computers) and vastly underperformed in others (eg space travel). I heard Jerry Pournelle talking abot this with the predictions from the Mote in God's Eye. The handheld computers exist now, being smartphones, less than 40 years after the book was published. But in space travel terms, we're, if anything, behind what we were in the 20th century.
To me the predictable aspects of the future are:
1. Urbanization;
2. Ubiquity of computing and networking;
3. Genetic engineering.
Other things depend on the big question mark that is cheap and abundant energy. We may not find anything, in which case the future will be bleak. If we find something however the world will change beyond recognition.
3. He gave an objective definition of "poor" he was using in his prediction, and while I agree that completely eliminating poverty might be impossible getting it down to 1 in 50 seems doable.
EDIT: Edited for clarity.
To begin with, the companies providing them will have to reach break-even and, in a field like biotech with huge up-front costs, that means making a lot of money from the first clients. Rich people have a lot of money.
> Something expensive, but that should be covered by most health insurance.
Then we're talking about different things. How often does health insurance pay for treatments that are still somewhat unproven in the real world?
> He gave an objective definition of "poor" he was using in his prediction
Right, and everyone seems to ignore the fact that, as measured on an objective scale, how a culture defines 'poverty' creeps up that absolute wealth scale as the culture's wealth grows. For example, at one time kings and rich industrialists could die of appendicitis; now, only the most desperately poor are so deprived of healthcare that having an inflamed appendix is a death sentence.
I don't know. I have a condition with a life expectancy of 36 or 37 and I'm 45. I nearly died at age 35 1/2, then was finally diagnosed shortly thereafter and have spent the last almost ten years reversing the damage. I'm currently healthier than I have ever been. I'm not wealthy and never have been.
I think the information is already available to do amazing things in that regard. Most people just don't believe it and don't pursue it.
Economically China will have surpassed the US and Europe and will therefore also have a higher standard of living than US/Europe (but still a lower standard than today's standard in US/Europe).
How does that follow? Do you expect China to surpass the US and Europe not just in absolute terms but also in per capita income by 2030?
After a few generations of "one child per family" (by law or by choice), most kids won't have siblings or aunts or uncles!
IOW: By 2030, we'll have single Farmvilles producing more food than the entire world today, and CityVilles bigger than New York, sucking up most people's times faster than any other diversion in history of mankind
I'm beginning to think that IE6 is the new COBOL -- something that's locked into irrevocably locked into business practices. I'm working on a B2B site that is less than 10% IE6 in its day to day traffic, but when a major marketing event brought a flood of potential investors and customers, IE6's share spiked to 25%.
Our only hope is that companies will at least install an additional browser, and train their employees that IE6 should be used only for the legacy apps.