Who killed the futurist in you? School or you?
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The correct reaction to the world being awful is not to seek the help of a bronze age deus ex machina. The problem is not that we are too smart or too dumb for deities to help us, it's that they can't really help us on account of being fictional.
The premise of futurism being dead seems conveniently modern because there is a lot of perceived (and actual) downturn economically. But the conviction that we can design a better future for ourselves is not coupled to that.
At the core of our desire to improve ourselves as both a civilization and a collection of individuals is still the one big revelation from the Age of Enlightenment: that in the absence of the supernatural the universe is ours to discover and understand and that we can by virtue of our intellect become vastly more than what we are today.
Nobody killed the futurist in me, although school and society at large certainly tried. Life is already better in the Western world than it used to be. All we have to do is to go forward. There are times when progress seems to be in serious danger but I'm still hopeful that we can and do find the motivation to keep marching. Which, again, is really all we have to do. Even at our current glacial pace, we'll get there.
Of course, it's easier to believe this when I'm not part of the 40% of young unemployment in my country.
On average, yes. The standard deviation doesn't look as promising.
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction.
On the other hand, in some ways, life today isn't much different than life 30 years ago. Or even 100 years ago. Or since the advent of the Industrial Revolution at least. People wake up, go to work, come home, eat, sleep. In between they go to church, seek mates, sing songs, drink, etc. The details change, but the basics don't.
When I try to think about the future, I usually start from the idea that tomorrow will actually be more like today than we expect. Even the wildest advances in technology (to date) don't change human nature or basic patterns of human behaviour. So ask yourself how technology and change will affect out ability to go out, seek mates, drink, seek spiritual enlightenment, find food, earn income, etc.
If you believe the evolutionary psychologists, a lot of our basic psychological responses evolved 30,000+ years ago, and we - as humans - are fairly poorly adapted to the world we live in. Human nature may be fundamentally at odds with an urbanized, technology driven, fast-paced society. I find myself wondering if we can "fix" most of the problems we have in our world anytime soon.
So I guess I think we can make incremental improvements, but I'm not convinced we can, for example, "end war" across the board, etc.
Waking Up and Sleep go together: Neural implants that reduce the amount of sleep needed drastically by stimulating the brain into REM sleep immediately, or by outright replacing parts of the brain (or body) that need the recuperation time. I don't think it will be healthy for a while to avoid sleep (unless you replace a significant portion of the human body or endocrine system), but we should be much better at letting people do it.
Work: Since we are moving to post-scarcity, I easily see us having automated transportation of goods, automated farming (or even better, molecular printing that fabricates food from carbon and friends), automated mining - and we should be able to easily automate construction to just taking an input design and having a machine crew do the work. Robots that can maintain their peers and themselves, communicating their defects so they can be serviced. No human involvement. People could then commit themselves to either constant leisure, artistic pursuits, or the sciences, and only if they want to, since they would no longer have to.
Eat: Soylent and its ilk are even right now aiming to change this, and if the above considerations happen, you don't need to work to feed yourself, and can print any food you want. Though it will be some time before humans start replacing their digestive tract with 3d fabricators so they just plug themselves in to electricity to "eat".
Church: Already dying in the newer generations, due to the pervasiveness of knowledge and freely available information. If anything is the death knell for religion, it is the Internet and its ability to distribute knowledge anywhere instantly. It makes rationalizing the unknown less about guesswork and superstition and more about googling it.
Seek Mates: I think this will be around because human beings are stubborn and set in their ways, but beyond 50 years I expect us to transition away from sexually partnered couples with children to a system where everyone is sterilized and children are grown (with perfect genetics) as needed and raised in public institutions where (through rigorous study) we (collectively) have figured out how to best promote creativity and open minds. It is one of the greatest weaknesses in modern society that because everyone is in their developmental years bound to the behavior of their parents they can have vastly different advantages and disadvantages throughout life.
In the absence of the superficial need to spawn being bound to romantic relationships, I expect people to be more fluid and have sex with various acquaintances. I also have a feeling that, biologically, humans are inherently much more bisexual than anyone wants to admit, and we are culturally driven into a singular sexual preference (usually the straight one - I'm asexual, and I feel it was because I was never pressured into having relationships I didn't want), but I have no idea how true it is. Just an intuition.
Sing Songs: I hope so!
Drink: Would be nice if people weren't so depressed and sad they needed to lose their ability to cognitively reason and lose their ability to recall what is happening.
I'm all for changing the basics. But I agree, we have this culture that is very resilient to change that will take fundamental changes to bend to something more fulfilling for people.
Sleep routines like polyphasic sleep seem to work because it increases the percentage of time spent in REM, IIRC. The biggest downside is that you have to sleep about every four hours, which can get awkward for most peoples schedule.
We may have the capability to do all of these things within 50 years, and some of them much earlier. But I'm skeptical of whether these sorts of cultural "innovations" will see widespread adoption if they don't improve quality of life.
We've had the ability as a species to have sex without physical consequences for more than half a century now, and yet most people, once they reach a certain age, still seem to derive more satisfaction from a stable, monogamous relationship than any other arrangement. Maybe we're just wired that way.
You still aren't accounting for societal and cultural pervasiveness of monogamous relationships. It is so historic and traditional it is, if not taught, experienced from the earliest years of life. I feel like in a society with plenty people would be more generous and "risky" in their interactions with others. So I think we are culturally wired that way, but I'm not sold that we are physically wired for monogamy, and I'd site foreign cultures like the Persians where polygamy was common, even when the primary goal was still rapid population expansion.
Polygamous relationships are, roughly, O(n^2). You may not want to go there. ;-)
Also, "polyamory" doesn't have the notion of marriage in it. Maybe that could be a useful distinction.
The thing is that virtually all polygamy that has existed in the real world is polygyny, so the distinction between that gender-specific form and the general form (as well as any reference to polyandry) is of almost entirely of theoretical/technical/specialist interest.
> Also, "polyamory" doesn't have the notion of marriage in it. Maybe that could be a useful distinction.
I think it is.
The idea of unnecessary surgery for some perceived health benefit is not a new one. In the late 19th and early 20th century, many people had their tonsils and appendicies even when they were perfectly functional. Some people on HN commented that their grandmothers had all of their teeth removed before they were married so that their future husband would not have to pay for dental work.
> Work: Since we are moving to post-scarcity, I easily see us having automated transportation of goods, automated farming (or even better, molecular printing that fabricates food from carbon and friends), automated mining - and we should be able to easily automate construction to just taking an input design and having a machine crew do the work. Robots that can maintain their peers and themselves, communicating their defects so they can be serviced. No human involvement. People could then commit themselves to either constant leisure, artistic pursuits, or the sciences, and only if they want to, since they would no longer have to.
There are a lot of advances that need to be made before anything like this can happen. Even if it does, goods will not become free and people will still need to work to make a living. Some people need the structure of work to keep them happy.
>Eat: Soylent and its ilk are even right now aiming to change this, and if the above considerations happen, you don't need to work to feed yourself, and can print any food you want. Though it will be some time before humans start replacing their digestive tract with 3d fabricators so they just plug themselves in to electricity to "eat".
The chemical reactions that occur when cooking food are far more complex than you realize. Even if 3D printing of food become widespread, you will still need to prepare it. Putting a 3d fab in your digestive tract does not make much sense. A current 3d fab needs raw material (various plastics, etc), not just electricity. So you would still have the problem of getting the food inside your body in the first place.
> Church: Already dying in the newer generations, due to the pervasiveness of knowledge and freely available information. If anything is the death knell for religion, it is the Internet and its ability to distribute knowledge anywhere instantly. It makes rationalizing the unknown less about guesswork and superstition and more about googling it.
This is a common misunderstanding of why religion is successful. Science and religion are not incompatible, because they don't answer the same questions, and shouldn't. You don't need to take Scripture literally to be religious.
Information has become easier to obtain thanks to the Internet, but only because governments have allowed this to happen. The structure of the Internet allows central authorities to control the flow of information very easily.
>Seek Mates: I think this will be around because human beings are stubborn and set in their ways, but beyond 50 years I expect us to transition away from sexually partnered couples with children to a system where everyone is sterilized and children are grown (with perfect genetics) as needed and raised in public institutions where (through rigorous study) we (collectively) have figured out how to best promote creativity and open minds. It is one of the greatest weaknesses in modern society that because everyone is in their developmental years bound to the behavior of their parents they can have vastly different advantages and disadvantages throughout life.
Sterilization is not a logical consequent of selective genetics. There is no way a truly democratic government will ever have sterilization as a social policy. Even countries like China that limit the amount of children that you can have have exceptions for the rich.
>In the absence of the superficial need to spawn being bound to romantic relationships, I expect people to be more fluid and have sex with various acquaintances
This already happened. That's what the "Sexual Revolution" was all about, which evolved into today's "hookup culture". The AIDS epidemic totally changed the way people thought about casual sex. Before AIDS, casual sex had a risk of VD (and pregnancy, although "the pill" is what really accelerated the sexual revolution). After AIDS, you could DIE from having unprotected sex.
Stable relationships aren't as glamorous as young romances, but nevertheless have enormous benefits. There are many people who marry and don't have children.
> It is one of the greatest weaknesses in modern society that because everyone is in their developmental years bound to the behavior of their parents they can have vastly different advantages and disadvantages throughout life.
Having parents love and care for you (whether they are your biological parents or not) provides tremendous benefits to children's emotion growth. Taking this away because some children are unfortunate enough not to have it is the wrong solution.
What about "Is there a God"? Religion says there is one, and science says it hasn't found any meaningful shred of evidence just yet. And basic epistemology says that "poof magic" explanations such as a supernatural being aren't good explanations, and as such should not be trusted.
Compare God and UFOs: there are UFOs or there are none. It's a cold, hard fact about our world. Therefore, science is set out to find out. It may not know yet, but we do hope it will. If you believe in UFOs, and there are not, you're wrong as a simple matter of fact. Ditto if you do not believe in them, and there are UFOs. As for whether you should believe in them or not, that's for the evidence you know of to decide. It's not a question of faith, or choice: you can't for instance believe in UFOs by sheer force of will if in fact you don't believe in them.
Likewise, the presence in our world of supernatural anything is a cold, hard fact about our world. [Repeat last paragraph, with "God" instead of "UFO".]
Even morality may soon enter the domain of science, once (and if) we know enough about how the human brain works.
> You don't need to take Scripture literally to be religious.
Still, you have to stick to a given interpretation of said scriptures. That interpretation still says a lot of things about our world in most cases.
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Now, if religion is successful despite the massive amount of evidence against it, it's probably because it's damned good at building communities. Just being part of a community and chanting pretty songs once in a while feels good. I still remember the lasting tingling I felt when that priest touched my head to bless me, and I didn't even believe back then.
However, when I look back 50 or 100 years I think life was vastly different. Coincidentally, Ford "invented" the assembly line 100 years ago, but let's not limit ourselves to technology, consider that 100 years ago people in the US may have sat around and thought less than 50 years ago it was lawful to own another human, that human flesh was the number 1 commodity in Virginia, ect...
The reality is that these types of injustices, not necessarily slavery, but a legal system that codified the inequality of humans based on skin color and sex continued in the US from that time until about 50 years ago. I do not want to limit the discussion to the US either, because colonialism created second class citizenry across the globe and other examples exist such as apartheid in South Africa. Down that road it was 1930 when Ghandi broke the British Salt Tax, which made it illegal to produce salt - essential to this day, but even more important before refrigeration ("salt is worth it's weight in gold"). On many fronts, not just technology, the World has slowly moved forward, it is likely technology - especially instantaneous communication - shall demand the World continue moving in that direction.
So what will the future be? Depending on how far ahead you project, we'll presumably still be seeking food, sex, shelter, sleep, and what-not. It'll be the same as today, but with more labor saving contraptions, faster communications, etc.
What excites me are the technological advances that stand to make the world better for the "bottom third" or whatever. What can we do to improve the lives of people in 3rd world countries? What do they need? Better access to fresh water, wholesome food, proper sanitation, modern medicines, and what not. So finding ways to make, say, water desalination / purification cheaper, lighter, and faster, would be an aspect of the future that would be very exciting. It wouldn't be groundbreaking in a certain sense (not like the star trek transporter or the Holodeck), but it would be significant in improving the standard of living for a large number of people.
I learned that the nature of technology is rapid development, followed by plateau. Thus, while new things might surprise us, the basics are pretty much here to stay. I don't foresee that, 50 years from now, the existing mature fields will be all that different. E.g. I doubt medical technology will advance meaningfully for the median person. I plan to live a healthy life of 75-80 years, just as my grandfathers did in Bangladesh who were born early in the 20th century. I will almost certainly be living in a house that looks more or less like houses do today. My car might drive itself, but as an urban dweller the only meaningful difference will be not having to make smalltalk with a cab driver.
Medical technology is advancing. A lot is about preventing death, which is not always good. But a lot is about improving life, which is always good. Hip surgeries are amazing.
One way that I see meaningful medical change (which we probably have the technology for right now) is in any kind of visual test (such as x-rays, CT scans, various types of blood tests) basically anywhere you have a highly paid human who uses their eyes to scan an image/microscope for a pattern that determines if you have some disease, fracture, something in your blood work is off, etc.
At the moment, these test are time consuming (days minimum, often weeks or months) and very expensive because those highly paid humans can only scan so many samples in a lab every day. Once we turn computer vision algorithms onto the task (trained to spot visual clues for disease over thousands or millions of positive and negative samples, similar to how Google trained an AI neural net to recognise pictures of cats[1]), the time & costs of any type of visual medical scan will fall dramatically. Imagine getting the results of an x-ray back in seconds, with a result accurate to 99.99% certainty of a fracture.
Of course, that main obstacle to widespread adoption of this type of technology will be political. Radiologists and other professionals won't take too kindly to being displaced.
And of course then you will have AI technologies like Watson, which should allow doctors to get much more productive, so they get to see more patients in less time and reach a diagnosis with great accuracy than before. This will mean you need less doctors (lowering medical costs) but you get better outcomes.
I think AI tech like Watson and computer vision will have a dramatic impact on medicine in the near future.
[1] http://www.dailytech.com/Googles+Unsupervised+SelfLearning+N...
We can, right now, use stem cells and extra-cellular matrices to regenerate parts of our bodies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracellular_matrix_protein#M...
Now combine the two, and you see that significant partial rejuvenating procedures are not far. Depending on how fast this goes, people alive right now may very well double their life span using technology from 20 to 50 years in the future.
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You probably won't own a self driving car. Most likely, you will rent them for less than the cost of public transportation. The car you commute with will likely have one seat and a small trunk. There may not be any traffic jam any more. Parking space will move out of the cities, and shrink. Public transportation and individual transportation may blend. You can expect some changes to the way packages are delivered.
And of course, cars aren't the only things that are allowed to drive themselves. Self piloting utility drones could serve a host of purposes (I can think of surveillance, monitoring, and package delivery).
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We may have recursively self-improving AI before the end of the century. Unless it destroys us all by accident (we are made of atoms the AI could use to fulfil its pre-programmed goals, if we're not really really careful), the world beyond will quickly overshoot current science fiction. (We may have other ways of creating smarter-than-current-human-intelligence, AI just looks like the more probable one) http://intelligenceexplosion.com/
This is a consequence of the financial world, but in the world of science it's a different story. Many, many long-term projects are in progress and it will be like that for a long time.
One of the things overlooked in this article is that we live in periods of time where certain things dominate the world we live in. The 1500s, 1600s, and 1700s were periods of European settlement in the Americas, the 1800s and early 1900s were focused on developing modes of transportation (trains, planes, and automobiles), and the past 50 or so years has been centred around the computer which has pretty much transformed the world from typewriters and paper to devices that were only thought to be in the world of Star Trek just 30-years ago.
Just because every day you and I still go to work more or less the same way we did decades ago does not mean that we're stagnating. Human behaviour hasn't caught up with technology fully and we're still trying to get used to what we have in front of us.
I think that the author in the article is thinking too short-term really.
The computer revolution came about because of many, many people working on slightly improving transistor technology, whilst others built compilers that were slightly better than their predecessors, whilst others still were working on very basic computer graphics, and so on. Added up over 50 years, those ‘short-sighted’ individuals’ accomplishments added up.
I guess I’m trying to say maybe the future will happen as a result of typical human behavior, not despite it.
So, yeah, prices. Right now, I'm eyeing a Physical Random Number Generator from ID Quantique for mathematical experiments, but those are like $1500 dollars. Nuts.
I think the big plus in technology is that yesterday's expensive impossible is today's affordable plausible. I remember tiny remote control helicopters going for $20 recently.
It was all very well for Turner, he was painting from the vantage point of an empire on the ascendancy.
Is anyone else here terrified by the feeling of geopolitics shifting under their feet? I think it's a bit too specific for a support group...
Hopefully in the near future when I've calmed down a bit, I'll be able to be more useful and work towards changing the path of the world, at least in some small way.
What gives me nightmares is what a competent authoritarian state, corporation or network could do with present technology. Think Stalin with the capabilities of the NSA or Hitler with a first rate human genomics and sequencing program. Such a power could actually accomplish their insane ideas of racial (kill everyone that has these three SNPs) or ideological purity (kill everyone that thinks the government is doing a bad job).
This is what I'm actually talking about. Of course I don't begrudge china their time at the top (not that they haven't been there before...) but rather I'm scared by the uncertainty. Of course the future is uncertain by definition, but it particularly uncertain now. I'm not sure that even makes sense... As you can tell I'm very confused.
This kind of rambling 24/7 in my head was basically what caused me to stop thinking about it.
"The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or a radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely more stuff... Upon arriving in the capital-F future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now."
- William Gibson, 2010 Book Expo speech
For the most part I'm positive about the future, excited by it. Jealous of people in the future. Sometimes I'm fearful of it, focusing on scary trends and consequences of a technological world. I worry that our cultures can't adapt fast enough. I see strain on our social/familial institutions. The loneliness of so many people, living outside of these institutions. The fear that future totalitarianism will have more tools at its disposal. The mental health and depression trends. Obesity. The fact that the world is so competitive and many people clearly lose the competition. The resilience of religion and the worst ideas contained within it.
If I were an artist, I think I would be depicting these ideas in some way. I don't know how though. I guess that's what makes me not an artist.
Who said the futurist in me ever died?
Really, I don't get how any kind of establishment can block that kind of research. It's somewhat cheap (at most at semiconductors level price, not at astronomy or high energy physics level), enough to lots of companies to afford and maybe individuals (there is only a ceiling estimative to costs, there is no floor). And it has a huge potential for short term revenue.
If there is nobody researching that, I'm willing to bet that it's because nobody knows where to start. Not because anybody is blocking them.
The way they could block direct progress on it was to make sure it got no government funding, which also influences industrial and private funding (see how NASA blocked private space efforts for decades because their people, or people in big companies that supplied them, were the only ones who could vet alternatives; that private space is finally getting somewhere is only due to the (early) retirement of the Space shuttle). So they claimed a lot of their projects were nanotechnology and since they by definition control the purse strings....
If you want some hard evidence, if you're familiar enough with Drexler's proposals, look at the first round or two of Nobelest Richard Smalley's "debate" with Drexler. Smalley was making strawman arguments, a very good sign he didn't want to debate what Drexler was actually proposing.
Anyway, it needs government or Bell Labs style "pie in the sky" funding right now because it is "hellish hard to create" and a lot of basic R&D remains to be done. Although as Drexler pointed out in Engines of Creation it's going to happen sooner or later, natural progress in various fields such a semiconductors and molecular biology will keep pushing the state of the art closer to what's needed to execute his vision.
I came to your era to bring you this detergent.
[taken with a large pinch of salt...]
Humans are not trying to save the Giant Panda. They are using the fluffy harmless critter as a convenient smokescreen for the development and testing of large-scale genetic engineering to implement the (inevitable) eugenics program that will create the stratification required for a colonial species.
Systems incorporated into our world on the basis of "security", "healthcare" and "culture" will be used to analyse the population for weaknesses using social media databases, soft-tissue scanners, genetic screening and routine psychological testing. And as this conscious stratification continues, the human species will fracture and contract upon a few very highly advanced/specialised branches.
Essentially humans have gone from voracious, highly specialised, hunter, to a doe-eyed herd, to a full scale hive. The Internet is the persistent storage medium that humans use to transmit colonial orders, like ants use pheromones, and various testing grounds exist the world over to develop the next generation of technologies that will internalise our virtual world and extend our senses so that humans no longer understand a world without it.
Priority is being given to nano- and quantum-technology as this will allow humans to harness their genetic inheritance and use the natural world as they see fit - taking solutions developed over many millions of years through trial-and-error evolution and implementing them for intelligence driven engineering, improving on them and turning them to situations never before experienced in the physical universe.
This will begin with the advent of the Techological Conflagration, a war to make all previous aggression look like a fart in a hurricane. In this battle, nation states will effectively dissolve as they will be unable to adjust to the rapid pace of development of those super rich individuals capable of amassing a small private army with a weapons infrastructure built on intense iteration (I call this The Batman Hypothesis). I suspect the testing grounds for this future are already well known: places like North Korea and Afghanistan offer a sandbox environment where the powerful can play.
But the chilling part of this is that you have long ago sold yourselves down this river as Plutocracy has taken over the entire world and created a global hegemony that amorally seeks it's own stability and advancement. International consortia offer fronts for the production of infrastructure that will support the transition to this bleak view of our future (modern airports and stadiums are little more than vast crowd management systems and prisons are gulags in all but name) and people are constantly fed subliminal media that prepares them for the changes that are to come. It will begin with your military, but soon things will begin to be outsourced as more and more private entities flex their muscles.
More than likely Homo Sapiens will not survive and if it does it will be as an augmented slave species to the Meta Sapiens (no longer affiliating with the branch of humanity) that will have attained god-like powers...