Tomorrow’s world: A guide to the next 150 years | Hacker News Reader

Tomorrow’s world: A guide to the next 150 years

bbc.com

34 pointsfwdbureau49 comments

Where is the mention of millions of drones being used to watch the people by every police force around the world?

In the USA this will happen by 2020 guaranteed.

These predictions are way too "everything is going to be great".

They are also missing the listing for "there is now an anniversary of a mass murder by guns for every day of the year in the USA" which is far more likely in about a decade.

Also missing a marker for when 1% of the world population has more wealth than the remaining 99%.

My biggest fear of the future is right after they figure out how to make cheap, unlimited power is going to a massive number of wars. People like to imagine it will bring world peace but that's not human tendency. We seem to always go towards killing people.

Also the impact of environmental change and new energy technologies is largely omitted

The number of mass shootings per year in the US has not significantly changed in decades. Nor has the number of people killed in mass shootings.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/1...

I guess we are just quibbling about the word "mass"

If you're interested in total homicides take a look at the homicides rates for the past 60 years: http://i.imgur.com/3bFjZu4.png

2010 was about the same as it was in 1963. Homicides are not a growing problem in the US. Homicide rates have been dropping for years.

I got that chart from the Bureau of Justice statistics. http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=2221

>> We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK

-__-

The raw content of the page is basically just this image: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc.com/future/img/tomorrows_world.jpg

Thanks. :D

So clearly some of the license fee payers money is going towards this article, since that picture is hosted on the bbc.co.uk domain.

Except they probably have an internal hosting arrangement in place. Pushing funny money around isn't limited to multinationals.

Likewise. This is the rationale:

> We have an unusual requirement when it comes to developing the BBC website – it carries advertising internationally but not in the UK, and we have to build and design for both these situations simultaneously. The site carries advertising internationally so that UK licence fee payers don’t cover international costs.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/help/site_versions.shtml

So essentially the reason that we cannot view the page is because we would see adverts when we have already paid for the content. What a Kafkaesque situation.

I would rather see adverts than nothing...

Given that they can already determine the country of origin by the IP quite effectively, I don't see why they don't just hide the adverts for UK viewers. This is a good example of well-intentioned insanity.

I disagree on "quite effectively"; they don't let me see quite a lot of content from work because they think I'm not in the UK, even though I physically am a licence payer in London.

To add to the insanity though, I can't see this article either.

I'd like to see their budgetary proof that not a penny of license-payer money was used on this. What about overheads (Light, Heat, Power, Rent)? Do they partition those out? I doubt it.

Do you have to pay separately to see the adverts? :-P

Orwell learned about Big Brother when he worked at the BBC, that's where the phrase "Big Brother" came from.

http://www.corbettreport.com/episode-253-the-bbc-exposed/

I think it's that the BBC is actually precluded by charter from carrying advertising in the UK, so they don't have any choice in the matter.

So, the article misses one important prediction:

By 2015, IP and ads have divided the internet in seperate, national/corperate-defined segments ;)

Although the list is nice I thinks it's a pity there isn't much out-of-the-box thinking in there. And maybe that's because it will be totally different from what we ever could imagine.

My grandma is 93 years old. I don't think anyone could ever imagine a wireless-telephone-phonograph-motionpicture-talktoeveryone-device around the time she was born.

Sure they could. What they perhaps missed is that this magic device would be used to look at funny cat pictures and share what you had for breakfast with the world. And that people would tune in to that.

http://realdanlyons.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/futureman...

33/1 in the 2060s for "first cloned human" seems conservative, unless it's merely because of current laws. There was a failed attempt in 2004 with a cloned embryo but it doesn't seem as if the process and technology is particularly beyond reach. I'd be more surprised if we don't have Star Trek-style transporters by the 2060s.

Similarly conservative, I think, is that it will be the year 2150 before a human lives to 150. Considering the pace of advancement in the fields of genetics, pharmaceuticals, and organ-replacement, I would expect this much sooner.

Maybe the thinking there is someone who's 150 in 2150 would have been born in 2000 and even with advances in genetics, maybe it's only likely to work if the technology reaches someone currently in the prime of life.

(That is, if we have the means in 2050, it might simply not work on a then 100 year old.)

I agree. It's ethics, not science, that will stop us from cloning people. If society and government actually wanted to clone people there wouldn't be many barriers in the way.

When will I be able to get on a supersonic flight and fly at twice the speed of sound from NYC to Tokyo ? How about a 300mph maglev from SF to LA? I'd like to commute from LA to SF every day.

Moore's law is great but we really seem to have stalled with moving people and goods from point A to point B.

Not long now.

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

How do you read the odds numbers? Is 8/1 likely or not likely?

In UK gambling conventions, 8/1 means you win £8 on a £1 bet. So 12.5% chance, if the bookie is a non profit.

Close :). You receive £9 on a £1 bet (you get your outlay back), so it's 1/9 ~ 11.1%

http://www.isfa.com/odds-probability-chart.php

you're right. oops.

I didn't get this either. Some numbers are 1/25, which seems like 1 in 25 chance = 1/25 = 4% Yet other numbers are 6/1, which is 600%.

to get the probability out of a/b calculate (b/(a+b))*100

I'm missing links to the specific sources and more background details in many cases.

You might also be interested in this: http://www.futuretimeline.net/ (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2458521)

likely < 2018 - your computer has a sense of smell / Arctic free of summer ice / immortal mouse /

likely > 2040 - Cars purely automated & driver free by.

Looking at this article is seems that although we might be able to take good guesses at whats coming, we have got no idea when.

Why would we want a computer that can smell?

Might make an interesting authentication mechanism....

Diagnosing some diseases , detecting landmines , detecting food safety, detecting tracks(like dogs), analysis of biocompatiblity of couples(through pheromons),improved robotic chefs can all achieved by smelling.

In general , smelling , i.e. analyzing the volatile compounds materials emit can teach us some things about those materials and what processes they are going through.Those seem like usefull capabilities for many industries.

"Pizza is ready" ( Throw away badly burned pizza) ( Fix constants in script) ( Put new pizza in oven.) Repeat from top.

I really can not see why anyone does not want a computer with a sense of smell.

I don't know about PCs, but for mobiles it seems like any sensor you can put in it, someone will figure out an app that can use it.

Immortal mice in 2015? Tax abolished in the USA?

Some of these are very reasonable, like the driving car in 2030, but some of them are pretty far fetched and I don't understand the reasoning behind them. Why would we abolish tax in the USA in 2090? How would that even work?

I think the tax idea is interesting. They have it 55 years after the singularity. I've heard (singularity advocates) say that once the singularity occurs our economy will double every few months. That means that after 55 years the average person would earn 9 figure salaries. At that point the government could probably pretty easily run on donations versus taxes. If thats the case I think 55 years after the singularity is a conservative estimate. I'd bet it will happen less than 5 years after the singularity. Assuming the singularity occurs of course.

The odds seem to be all over the place. 8:1 for a superintelligence in 2045 but 100:1 for a mere corporation-status AI in 2112? Unless they mean that it's highly unlikely that the concept of a "corporation" has any meaning in a hundred years...

On the contrary, "corporation" in a hundred years will mean exactly what it means today: "person." Ergo, this is how robots will get around the Turing test.

I would love to see a 3rd-party candidate as president before 2025.

They forgot one event...

2013 - Pigs Fly

One year for a digital currency to be accepted as US tender and two years for Facebook to beaten by (assumably) Google+ ?

Seems just a tad optimistic there.

Me thinks Facebook will be eclipsed by a Chinese "social network". Maybe one with compulsory membership or something.

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