We lament progress, but few of us would choose 1922 over 2022 (I mean, the sanitation and medical care alone makes the decision trivial on my end). Even fewer would choose 2022 in 2122.
We lament progress, but few of us would choose 1922 over 2022 (I mean, the sanitation and medical care alone makes the decision trivial on my end). Even fewer would choose 2022 in 2122.
"Just what form the future telephone will take is, of course, pure speculation. Here is my prophecy: In its final development, the telephone will be carried about by the individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today. It probably will require no dial or equivalent and I think the users will be able to see each other, if they want, as they talk. Who knows but it may actually translate from one language to another?" - Mark Sullivan, April 9, 1953
We are analog.
It's also telling that older SciFi gets this all wrong. In Asimov's Lucky Starr the protagonist had a space ship that can travel through the outer layers of the sun and someone had a dwelling on an hollowed out asteroid. Tables use energy fields for easier cleaning. Yet, the ships board computer doesn't even have a display and needs to print everything.
The reality is that we do not know. Some things may be out of our reach forever, but contemporary world has by far the highest count of scientists ever and the talent pool is widening as countries such as Bangladesh escape their previous crushing poverty. To this comes politics. A second Cold War with China may be terrifying and yet enormously scientifically productive, much like WWII and the previous Cold War was.
I am personally not willing to make any technical/scientific predictions beyond 2030. Political even less so.
> The reality is that we do not know
Yeah, but it works both ways, I see a lot of people on reddit claiming aging will be solved in X years (usually in their lifetime) and it does not sound any smarter.
We aren't anywhere close to, say, solving cancer, but we are conquering new territory inch by inch, with a massive difference of outcomes in last 50 years or so.
I suspect the same is going to happen in the longevity field. Dr. Gregory Fahy managed to rejuvenate the thymus in several individuals (TRIIM and TRIIM-X trials) and lower their epigenetic age. It might have well been the first baby step on that journey.
I routinely saw similarly outlandish claims about AI in general.
I mean, Jules Verne suggested trips to the Moon earlier than that in 1965 via cannon (from the coast of Florida!). Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903, rejecting cannons on technical grounds (the speed of gunpowder's gases too slow to break from Earth's gravity as well as the impractical extremes in acceleration), proposed using liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen in a multistage rocket for reaching the Moon... Which is what 2 of the 3 stages of the Saturn V used, so he was pretty accurate. He also suggested the need for oxygen, CO2 scrubbers, automatic machine guidance, thrust vector control using both external fins and fins in the flow of the gases (both methods became used on rockets for early spaceflight) as well as suggesting the use of a sun sensor (star tracker) and gyroscopes for guidance. It's remarkable how many critical features of spaceflight were invented by Tsiolkovsky in that document. Granted, I don't remember an actual forecasted date for these predictions, but he foresaw most of the technical features of spaceflight correctly.
https://spacemedicineassociation.org/download/history/histor...
Projections from Nikola Tesla suggested similar things to the smartphone around that timeline.
If you look at technical pioneers using logical consequences of actual known physics and engineering, they can make pretty remarkably prescient predictions.
Yes. It was called a communicator in fiction of the day. Did they get the exact details right, or every use case (e.g. replacing flashlights and music players)? No. Some of them used holograms from watches or big old handsets with a screen instead of a keypad but still big ear cups. But a portable device that could be used for voice calls, video calls, information lookup, note taking, certainly existed in fiction prior to the 90s.
https://dicktracy.fandom.com/wiki/2-Way_Wrist_Radio
and the video in 1964:
https://dicktracy.fandom.com/wiki/2-Way_Wrist_TV
More or less both are (fictional) "miniaturization" of existing, known technologies.
Will you have AR displays that hide the information an make a room otherwise appear devoid of technology? Yes...because normal people don't fetishize technology and HGTV tells me it should be hidden from sight.
Will it be a display projected on your contact lenses, a mist excreted from a rod with lasers shined upon it, or a projector with a funky short throw lens? Man, I've got no clue...but all the fiction I've seen with fantastic display technology shows: We'll will it into existence.
Either is is done to make the scenes relatable to the contemporary audience, or human beings really lack the abiltiy to imagine things they have no empirical experience with.
It's very obvious with modern scifi where controls are usually holographic projections with cyan grids and twirly animations. After a while these designs become lazy tropes - like villains who wear chunky black leather.
Compare with something like Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, which is far more adventurous about possible futures.
The background problem is that the 20th century was set up for an explosion of invention by the late 19th, with Maxwell/Heaviside leading the charge and eventually leading to game changer developments like relativity and quantum theory. In math Boolean algebra fell out almost by accident from attempts to find a theory of computability which eventually led to modern computing.
These were all bedrock insights which completely changed what was possible in the physical world.
Where's the modern equivalent? There isn't one. Insights at that level more or less stopped happening after the discovery of DNA and the creation of Shannon's Information Theory.
Quantum Gravity might be the next game changer, but it also might not, and in any case it's an unknown distance away. The rest is detail work, not ground breaking transformation.
I think Machine Learning today is equivalent in magnitude to the other scientific breakthroughs you mentioned. I don't know if you're overlooking it because it's mainly engineering-led.
I'm not actually very confident about that last part...
It's getting increasingly difficult. The world of 1600 would be easily understandable to someone from 1500 or 1400. When I was born, no human eyes had seen the far side of the Moon (although it was reasonably sure someone would, shortly, as happened in december that year) and the closest thing to a cellphone was a prop being used by Captain Kirk on the 23rd century.
> the world of technology will increase at an exponential rate
There are physical limits to that, so the exponential factor may be reduced for a while. There is also a limit on how fast we can develop new things that will give us a hard time (at least until we develop a general enough AI, at which point all bets are off - because we are literally not smart enough to predict what happens next).
BTW, a couple years ago I had an accident that, if it happened in 1900, I'd lose my leg.
So, yeah, 2022 is good for me, but I wouldn't turn down a chance to last until 2122.
Yes
I do agree that whatever complaints we might have about the present though, it's better than any time in history save for possibly the very recent past. And I think it's a good bet that 2122 will indeed be better. I just wouldn't call it a certainty.