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Future Timeline

futuretimeline.net

117 pointsdrKarl45 comments

Psych research is starting to suggest that the organization of the human brain makes it especially bad at predicting the future. That is, we make more mistakes building timelines like this than can be explained by a simple lack of information. You could call it the Eloi-Morlock bias:

Regarding distant futures, however, we’ll be too confident, focus too much on unlikely global events, rely too much on trends, theories, and loose abstractions, while neglecting details and variation. We’ll assume the main events take place far away (e.g., space), and uniformly across large regions. We’ll focus on untrustworthy consistently-behaving globally-organized social-others. And we’ll neglect feasibility, taking chances to achieve core grand symbolic values, rather than ordinary muddled values. Sound familiar?

More bluntly, we seem primed to confidently see history as an inevitable march toward a theory-predicted global conflict with an alien united them determined to oppose our core symbolic values, making infeasible overly-risky overconfident plans to oppose them. We seem primed to neglect the value and prospect of trillions of quirky future creatures not fundamentally that different from us, focused on their simple day-to-day pleasures, mostly getting along peacefully in vastly-varied uncoordinated and hard-to-predict local cultures and life-styles.

The original paper in Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/322/5905/1201.full.pdf

The quote is from here, with more explanation: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/11/abstractdistant.html

And here's more on the implications for evolutionary game theory: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/a-tale-of-two-tradeoff...

The last two are great reads, with one caveat. The author specializes in asking uncomfortable questions, so it's best to take them as a challenge to your sense of open-mindedness. If you find yourself getting angry or thinking "this can't possibly be true," you might want to think about it some more.

those rooted firmly in the present are more or less likely to push progression?

In case someone doesn't know, Eloi and Morlock are two races descended from man in H.G. Wells' classic 1895 novel 'The Time Machine'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine

PS: Stephen Baxter has a new sequel novel based TTT called 'The Time Ships', I just started reading it, it's great!

diverging paths for humans and transhumans

lol, try replacing humans with middle-class and transhumans with ultra-wealthy

sometime in the 22nd century the USA will pass the 10 percent mark for it's population in jail/prison as government prisons are defunded, private-prisons become even more profitable as inmates are forced to pay for their incarceration with labor for pennies per hour, and lawmakers are paid by prison-industry lobbyists to make more offenders - the supreme court rules that judges may own stock in prisons, etc. - TSA will be allowed to collect DNA samples during random roadblocks, etc.

Humanity spreads throughout the local stellar neighbourhood, as Earth is restored to its former beauty

Wouldn't a better name for this site have been "future fantasy" ?

I mean I love the ideas but it's complete fantasy. The earth is going to be a pile of people trying to climb over each other economically, only to feed the ultra-weathly on top. Law-enforcement is going to be a multi-trillion dollar a year industry because it will be the only way to keep the masses at their jobs and not protesting.

One of the stories in Cory Doctorow's "With a Little Help" is based on the problem of what do you sell to an "immortal, sovereign quadrillionaire living in a vat"

http://craphound.com/walh/

[Edit: The whole of "With a Little Help" is available for free as a podcast, with the stories being read by some interesting folks:

http://www.archive.org/details/WithALittleHelpPodcasts

]

what do you sell to an "immortal, sovereign quadrillionaire living in a vat"

that's easy - you arrest them and make them buy their freedom

corporations buy their way out of law-breaking every other day by paying fines, not one day served

you arrest them and make them buy their freedom

In the context of singularity sci-fi literature, the important question here is "How do you convince them to let you do that?", because a sufficiently advanced intelligence doesn't need your permission to do anything. It's like ants versus Toyota: you lack the mental capacity to see the breadth of the system which you're enmeshed in -- your moving around little grains of dirt doesn't even register at the smallest scales of operation of a multinational company. If you're thinking "the government could regulate the fleshy-AI-corporation-thingee to bits", you're playing the game so many levels below the AI that you very might well be one of his pieces and just not know it.

Some people would argue that is the status quo in the political system regarding regulation of megacorps. I'm close to agnostic on that.

The word "sovereign" in that description was not extraneous. In the story, these being tend to literally be countries, in the manner that a King used to be the country. You can't arrest them. They are the ones doing the arresting.

Some of humanity's best toys have come from a bit of harmless science fantasy, so I'm all for it here. Speculation tends to break down when dealing with anything beyond a decade, anyway.

Extrapolation doesn't predict the future.

Sure it does. I've also extrapolated to figure out that by the time 10% of the US population is in prison, the other 90% will all be Elvis impersonators.

A prediction like that based on current social fears as as accurate as the prediction that by 2000 the world would be destroyed by The (nucelar) Bomb

Or the Y2K bug.

Given how close we came to all our nuclear war on at least two occasions I don't think that was necessarily a bad prediction.

Edit: the two occasions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis

Indeed. Nuclear proliferation is an increasing problem, and while we now lack the superpower standoff where a war could destroy most of humanity, many states are now capable of blowing up a large chunk of the world.

It's probably only a matter of time.

It's more like the prediction that by 1950 there would be so many horses and buggies that the streets of London will be knee-deep in horse poop.

Also it's not a prediction, it's more of a soapbox.

sometime in the 22nd century the USA will pass the 10 percent mark for it's population in jail

Most of the rise in prison population is down to the US government's war on drugs, as crime rates in general have been falling for some time now. However, there are global signs that drug laws are starting to be relaxed, so prison populations in a generation's time may be much smaller than they are today.

I mean I love the ideas but it's complete fantasy. The earth is going to be a pile of people trying to climb over each other economically, only to feed the ultra-weathly on top.

Your version of the future sounds just as much a fantasy, just in the other direction.

I find it odd that people tend to fixate upon dystopian futures, when all trends point toward the opposite direction. Crime has been steadily decreasing, people are becoming more tolerant of others, most people are wealthier, less people are dying of disease and war, environmental damage is starting to be reversed by first world economies, more renewable energy sources are being used, etc., etc.

I guess in some respects its good that people tend to fixate on the negatives, as otherwise nothing would ever be fixed.

I love this kind of thing, and I'm going to disagree with this one:

2016, Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) replaces Blu-Ray

This isn't going to happen. In fact Blu-Ray will never even replace the DVD. DVDs will be replaced by digital downloads and streaming. Consumers are driven by convenience, and the most convenient way to move bits to your home is not via a disc.

In 2000, Super Audio CD was in a format war with DVD-audio. Who won? The MP3 did. It completely baffles me that the movie industry goes ahead to repeat history with HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray. Neither of them will win.

But Blu-ray did win.

I understand your point, however, I'm sure the introduction of Blu-ray HD-DVD made sense from a business standpoint for the entertainment industry, it will take a while before bandwidth/storage makes them irrelevant on a worldwide basis. So while HVDs might be made irrelevant before they even reach the public on a wide scale, I doubt you can say the same for Blu-ray.

  > But Blu-ray did win.

For interesting values of "win." It's the format that's being distributed (as opposed to HD-DVD), but DVDs are still the more common format. (No statistics, just comparisons of DVD and Blu-ray sections at local retailers. DVD's always bigger.)

Meanwhile, the only people I know who've bought any Blu-ray discs are those who own a PS3 and essentially got the player for free with the game console they were buying.

Sure, I agree with you. (When I say win, I was referring to HD-DVD vs Blu-ray). But what I'm saying is that it's too early to call Blu-ray a failure. It may well serve it's purpose quite well before streaming HD video inevitably becomes ubiquitous throughout the world.

I think the difference of opinion here is that some posters are evaluating Blu-ray against DVD, whereas I'm mainly viewing it as a transition format until bandwidth catches up, rather than the jump which was VHS->DVD.

Blu-Ray won the battle between HDDVD and Blu-ray, but it will lose the war of next-gen format.

> But Blu-ray did win.

How so? If I'm reading [1] right, the share between DVD and Blu-Ray is 80%-20%, in favor of the DVD.

[1] http://www.blu-raystats.com/MarketShare/index.php

For those who did not get the xkcd reference either:

http://xkcd.com/887/

The environment has been steadily improving for the last 40 years. Less vehicle pollution, less industrial pollution, more conscientious consumers. Why not extrapolate in that direction?

Extrapolate in any old direction you like, it's equally likely to be true.

> 2013 - Iran carries out its first nuclear test

Then...

> This nuclear test is viewed in the West as the most significant world event since 9/11

Yet this is the last time in the 21st century that Iran is mentioned.

I suggest everyone move to the hi quality stuff and start reading some Greg Egan, Vernor Vinge, or Charles Stross rather than this piddle.

EDIT: I find it extremely ignorant that people believe conditions on earth will significantly deteriorate in the next century. Earth has been around for 4.6 billion years. It's appealing to say that humans are destroying the Earth, but it also incredibly arrogant. We have been a a flicker in the bigger picture. Disease or weaponry will kill us long before climate change does.

That doesn't mean I don't enjoy this timeline!

Timewise, we have been a flicker. But nothing else in Earth's history has become industrialized like humans have in the past ~100 years.

You can't say that a handful of volcanoes and dinosaur farts 70 million years ago is anything close to the CO2 we put out every day from 7 billion people, billions of cars, millions of factories, etc etc.

Too be honest. I just don't know that industrial carbon emissions rival those of a super-volcanoes or that of an apocalyptic asteroid slamming into Earth. 100 years isn't a lot of time to measure our affect on the grander scheme. Not saying our recent environmental efforts are for naught, but I do believe that when all is said and done and humans are extinct, our impact on Earth will have been negligible.

If anyone cares, I imported a bunch of the futuretimeline.net predictions into http://predictionbook.com/ which lets you register your own probabilities and tracks expirations: http://www.google.com/search?q=futuretimeline.net%20site%3Ap...

I love how the emergence of human-like AI, something I wouldn't expect my great-grandchildren to see, is placed before the USA declining as a world power, something which is happening since the beginning of the century and will probably accelerate during the next decade (I mean the 2010s). Also, I hope I won't have to wait 30 years to see the end of the EU.

What don't you like about the EU?

It's making my country poor, it allowed its industries to be outsourced, and it is now robbing people from their sovereignty. It's not providing any kind of protection against the outside world, but it is destroying all of its members previous protection (such as tolls). I don't think it's the cause of all the problems in Europe, but it certainly prevents its members from solving them.

We're definitely going off-topic here but I just have to ask: I heard that there is a strong anti-EU sentiment in many member states precisely because people feel the same way you do about EU. But obviously, EU worked out quite well for the majority of citizens of those countries.

Why am I saying that? Well, it seems to me that if the majority was genuinely dissatisfied with their country being a part of the union, they'd petition for a referendum, the government would be obliged to hold the referendum if enough people petitioned for it (certainly if the majority wanted it), then once the referendum is held, the people would vote against staying in the union and presto - they're no longer a member.

So why didn't something like this happen in any of the member countries? There are countries trying desperately to get into the union, but I don't know of any country that desparately wants to get out.

Not yet at least. The dissatisfaction is growing, but it's not yet the opinion of the majority. Unless there are drastic changes, it will be. The last treaty (TCE and its ersatz), was rejected by all the referendums. None of the countries who ratified them used referendum.

But it's a bit naïve to say that petitioning the government for a referendum would oblige the government to hold it.

But obviously, EU worked out quite well for the majority of citizens of those countries.

As a matter of fact, it's still working out well for the newcomers. But for founding members, especially France, my country, it hasn't been the case for the past twenty years.

Is there any part of the EU you'd want to keep? I ask because whilst I could do without some parts of the EU (the European Commission, for instance), other parts like the single market and the ability to travel freely between countries seems like rather good ideas.

Yes. Obviously, it's not completely bad or good. It is my opinion that it's mostly bad, but in theory, it could be changed to something that'd work better.

What I think will actually happen, though, is that it will collapse.

They clearly don't understand teleportation!

Real teleportation in the style of quantum controlled dynamics is the transportation of the state of a particle. By definition it is impossible to "transport" more than a single qubit.

It would be nice if this were more web 2.0. With commenting, voting, and collective stupidity, who knows what time lines would bubble up? The site would also warrant a return visit.

There goes my morning. 15 minutes in and I'm barely at the 2020s.

Quick reply to myself, just finished reading the whole thing. So yeah, morning gone.

I avoided this problem by skimming the headlines then only reading 3 or 4 articles per section.

GO HUMANS.

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