Charles Stross on the future (and gaming) in 2030 | Hacker News Reader

Charles Stross on the future (and gaming) in 2030

antipope.org

28 pointsbkudria5 comments

Sigh.

One problem with futurism is that the size of the subject requires you to pass over all the little throwaway projects (like the ARPAnet in the late 1960s) that are two or three incarnations away from being world-shaking.

For example, although heat dissipation and power requirements make it impractical to run whole processors faster than a few GHz, it's possible to get amazing analog performance out of 20-nm MOSFETs. Ubiquitous Millimeter-wave radar is one obvious application, but IR-frequency amplifiers and sampling aren't out of the question. As anybody who's taken an undergraduate organic chemistry course can tell you, an IR photon has roughly the same energy as a quantum of vibrational energy in an organic molecule.

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

In other words, imagine a camera that can tell you the chemical composition of anything it photographs...

Yes, the article is quite conservative, but on the upside, you can clearly tell he's talking not only to the people listening to his speech today, but also directly to readers who may be revisiting this speech in 2032.

As you know, we seem to have a fascination with reading long ago predictions of the "future" that is now today... and we really like to laugh at them.

I believe his tone is one of "I know you're reading this in 2032, so I'm going to try my best not to be silly."

An interesting, if somewhat pessimistic, speech. One quibble: he states the size of "an atom" as being around 1nm. I thought it was more like 0.4nm, if he's talking about silicon anyway. Not a game-changing difference, but still.

And he also seems to dismiss rather perfunctorily the promise of upcoming technology and techniques - the most egregious example being the scorn he pours on the potential of 3D computers, which he seems to think is merely stacking a few photolithographed dies on top of each other. I think this is somewhat misguided; most of what I've read on the subject talks about building, via nanotechnological (or even biological) assembly, true three-dimensional structures, with the massive increase in connectivity this allows. I'm by no means an expert on the topic but if you want a hint of evidence that this technique might be useful, I'd ask you to consider that treasure trove of as-yet unattainable computing technology: the human brain.

Good talk though, thought-provoking, although what it really provokes me to do is argue with the author ...

(edit: oops, I was thinking of the radius of Si. Now I have even less of a point; oh well)

What exactly do you call pessimistic? The assumption that Moore's law will hit a hard wall and soon we won't be able to ride it's back any longer? I, for one, would be glad if the days of "extensive agriculture" in computing, and games in particular, will be over; maybe game designers will then have time to seek the better form of the game, instead of producing cliche-ridden sequels beefed with the current technology. But the article doesn't seem to promise anything like that: if anything, advances in mobile devices, bandwith, changes of national and age demographics promise us even more of a wild ride we experienced previously!

Or, do you call pessimistic (conservative, I would call it) the assumption that by 2030, kids won't be growing their "pocket-sized dragons" or the Singularity won't happen?

So, what exactly do you call pessimistic?

When the author himself labels the assumptions pessimistic (more or less, I think it's a fair word), I think it's fair to say they are "pessimistic":

"I have short-sightedly ignored the possibility that we're going to come up with a true human-equivalent artificial intelligence, or some other enabling mechanism that constitutes a breakthrough on the software or content creation side and lets us offload all the hard work. No HAL-9000s here, in other words: no singularity (beyond which our current baseline for predictions breaks down). Which means, in the absence of such an AI, that the most interesting thing in the games of 2030 will be, as they are today, the other human players.

"I am assuming that nothing better comes along. This is the most questionable assumption of all. Here in the world of human beings — call it monkeyspace — we are all primates who respond well to certain types of psychological stimulus. We're always dreaming up new ways to push our in-built reward buttons, and new media to deliver the message. Television came along within fifty years of cinema and grabbed a large chunk of that particular field's lunch. Cinema had previously robbed theatre's pocket. And so on. Today, MMO gaming is the new kid on the block, growing ferociously and attracting media consumers from older fields. I can't speculate on what might eat the computer games field's lunch -- most likely it'll be some new kind of game that we don't have a name for yet. But one thing's for sure: by 2030, MMOs will be seen as being as cutting edge as 2D platform games are in 2009.

"In fact, I'm making a bunch of really conservative assumptions that are almost certainly laughable. For all I know, the kids of 2030 won't be playing with computers any more — as such — rather they'll be playing with their nanotechnology labs and biotech in a box startups, growing pocket-sized dragons and triffids and suchlike. Nothing is going to look quite the way we expect, and in a world where the computing and IT revolution has run its course, some new and revolutionary technology sector is probably going to replace it as the focus of public attention."

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