A Timeline of the Future 696
The Night Watchman writes: "Ian Pearson, a British futurist, has produced a sort of timeline of the future, which provides a simultaneously hopeful and bleak look into the coming decades. Mr. Pearson has evidently had a fairly high success rate; a timeline he produced in 1991 was about 85% accurate. An article on Yahoo news has a summary." Reader ricst lists some of Pearson's predictions: "People have some virtual friends, but don't know which ones (2007), leisure activities for intelligent software entities released (2015), electronic lifeform given basic rights (2020)." Brought to you by a division of British Telecom, but no date is set for when they win their hyperlink patent suit.
85% accurate? (Score:4, Interesting)
Extinct Animal (Score:5, Interesting)
reality when the first extinct organism is brought back to life, he predicts.
Already been done, 2 years ago actually, an Asian Gaur was cloned from the last remaining specimen after it died.
Hmmmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc. [wirex.com]
Immunix: [immunix.org] Security Hardened Linux Distribution
Available for purchase [wirex.com]
Earliest potential occurrence (Score:5, Interesting)
Faster than light travel
What makes the first one potentially easier? I wonder.
Re:85% accurate? (Score:4, Interesting)
I can draw up a 100% accurate timeline for the next N years, you pick the N:
Year 1: Someone dies, someone's born.
Year 2: Someone dies, someone's born.
...
Year N: Someone dies, someone's born.
He says that an Artificial Electric Lifeform gets basic rights.. or something like that. Ok, how do we determine the lifeform is one? (I had a full ethics class on that one, and we didn't even scratch the surface of things. Day 1 we tore the Turing Test apart, proved it was more pathetic than my predictions above.) Better yet, what are the rights? The program can't be kill -9ed by anyone other than root? Hell, we could have those rights granted in a law aimed at stopping electronic sabotage of other companies, particularly web servers.
Nostradamus did get a few predictions eerily correct, but most of his are either 1. Way Off, or 2. So vague that it's damn near impossible for them not to end up true. IMHO, this list falls into the same category- Use vague terms, define those terms as you like, and wham, it's true.
I'm not saying this guy lacks any credibility, but I'm not impressed with the little that I saw. and the good point was made that these are the same folks who brought you the "hyperlink patent." (he may not be associated with that, but somewhere up the chain he gets tied to the morons, and they influence him at least slightly.)
Heck.. Does anyone see something in there that's already true? Perhaps the Leisure for intelligent programs- as in expansion packs for the game Sims??
Sigh. Move along...
Futurism, humbug... (Score:3, Interesting)
I predict that the public's fascination with technology for its own sake will have seriously diminished by 2010.
Confessions to AI priest - 2004 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hmmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not quite the same, but computer programs have already published papers.. For example, an automatic theorem prover was able to deduce a new mathematical result (closing an open problem that people had worked on). The output was run through another program to beautify it somewhat, and the result was published as a paper co-authored by the two programs. I don't have a link, but I've seen the paper...
I'm out of a job. (Score:4, Interesting)
But you know, I really wonder. As software becomes more "macro" in scope, with stable, heavily-featured containers for components, then maybe software will be simple enough to generate automatically, simply by a program assembling many small components together after parsing a description of what it is you want. In fact, this is probably almost possible today -- I could write an XML file which specifies the features I need for my e-commerce server (these security characteristics, those features, the ability to pay this way) and a program could parse it and throw together all the readily available components that are out there now. Of course, tools will need to be written and so forth, but for more general stuff like applications and server software, I wonder if the time will come when we look back on programmers who wrote lines of code in the same way we now look at programmers who punched cards?
The timeline is all wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
AI may be at the level for this at 2016, and we may have the processors to handle it, but even if AI is that good, robotics will never catch up to this.
The best we will be able to do is build intelligent interactive houses, like you walk into your house and you say some words and everything prepares itself, food starts cooking, your favorite show comes on, your door to your room opens, maybe some robotic thing is used to prepare your food.
When you go to bed everything is shut off automatically as you leave the room, and your house temperature in your room is set to an exact degree for sleeping
Suggestion (Score:3, Interesting)
M.Kaku explains this in alittle more detail.
I dont think technology is the problem for us, technology is purposely being controlled and slowed down by governments who know society cant handle the stuff which is technically possible on paper,
Companies control technology because they cant economically benifit from introducing it, not because it doesnt exsist.
Customers well they dont care if they cant afford it.
Technology will not leap until after 2020, by then Chinas economy will be far better than ours as will Indias. Right now econmies are decided mostly on resources, in the future it will be information which decides who is a rich society and who is not.
China has more producers of information, billions in fact, as does India which means more scientists, more technologies, and eventually unless we get into some kinda cold war battle with them, they are going to surpass us and theres nothing we can do about this.
We can fight them, without technology from them and do another cold war type of thing, or we as scientists, computer or otherwise can all join forces and share information and benifit as a whole.
If everyone were ONE, we wouldnt have problems with war and the like, and as resources become less and less important, and information becomes more important, because we have the internet which is global, every country is going to have information thats valueable to everyone.
If we dont share it, we develop alot slower, if we share it we leap ahead technology wise. By leaping i mean think of it like this.
The USA, it has maybe 250-300 million people who happen to control most of the resources on the planet thus they have the most power.
Theres 6 billion people on earth, 300 million not alot compared to 6 billion, as every nation becomes connected and i think by 2020 or even sooner, everyone will be connected resources wont matter anymore. Any single person in any of these countries will be able to get illegal information from the net and anyone will be able to become a scientist, all of the sudden poor third world countries will billions of people will begin producing scientists by the hundreds of millions(more than all the people we have in the entire USA) and if you add all the third world countries up, billions of scientists will be non US, while maybe a few hundred million will be US scientists.
More scientists does not mean more technology, but in terms of ideas for new technology, theories, maths, inventions, programming ability (I believe India is going to dominate here) US companies will have two choices, try to hire people from other countries for a while until they all have companies of their own, or we can begin sharing information and stop fighting each other.
In my opinion, the sharing thing isnt going to happen, look at the DCMA, and i dont see everyone rushing to use Linux, so Technology and innovation will be stiffled.
Re:Most of this sounds unlikely.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Things that cannot be done (Score:5, Interesting)
I have only listed the famous results, but things that can't be known or done are everywhere and more are discovered all the time. So far, all those negative results are in the hardest sciences (math, physics, logic and computing) but I expect other disciplines will find their own limitations in time. The next results could well be about intelligence and complexity. We might, for example, find that the intelligence of any man or machine is always inferior to its complexity, making self-understanding and strong AI inherently impossible.
do you believe in death after life?
Re:Too many predictions focused on AI that is far (Score:3, Interesting)
People are looking at AI and computers and expecting the curve to continue.
Look at the history of aviation. There was a slow start, a huge leap about 40 years after the technology was developed, 10-15 years of epic advances, then a slow period of slight advancements.
Example - when the 707 came out in the late 1950s, it was the first technically successful jet for commerican airline use. At the time, everyone thought that within 20 years everything would be supersonic, like the military was. There would be great heavy-life flying wings and supercrusiers. What Boeing engineers in the 1950s would have thought the 707 and B-52 would be the mainstay of military and commercial transport for 25 and 55 years respectfully? The 707 just stopped being produced for the military in 1999, the E-8 Mercury was in production for the US Navy and Air Force. The JStar recon aircraft is a 707/E-8. The B-52 will be in service for 30-40 more years.
After the 707 was the 747, which has been in service for 30 years. When the 747 came out, everyone thought it was a stop-gap till the Concorde and Boeing SST came into service in the early 80s. Right now Boeing is looking at 15-25 more years of 747 production. The 777 is nothing more than a stretched and widened 2 engine 707.
Example 2 - Fighter aircraft.
The ultimate Mach 2 fighter in the 1960s was the F-4 Phantom II from McDonald Douglas. It came into United States Navy, Marine and Air Force service in 1964. The late 1940s and the 1950s were filled with jet aircraft designs that had a life span of 2-4 years. The Phantom filled a void created by retiring a number of Navy/Marine and USAF models. It was to remain in service till it was replaced in a few years by the F-X and F-AX programs. The F-AX or what became the FB-111 didn't work for the Navy, and was turned into a bomber for the USAF, so the F-4 remained in service. Then the F-14 program to replace the F-4 didn't work as a bomber, so the F-4 remained on as a strike aircraft. The Marines didn't want the F-14, so they kept the F-4 as a fighter-bomber. The USAF got the F-15 in the early 70s, but kept the F-4 around until the mid 1990s, after they had replaced the F-111 with F-15s, yes the F-4 outlived one of it's replacements.
What was the point of the F-4 history? To illustrate that just because advances have come quickly in the past, does not mean that they will always come as fast in the future.
I think computers are at that point where aviation was in the 1950s, we are at the brink of advancement and from here on out there will be a long period of refinement in the architecture and refinement. Yes, transisters will increase, and advances will be made, but just like in armored vehicles, internal combustion motors and aviation, once you get to a point, the cost of complexity to advance the systems will slow down the advances.
See "Miracles of the Next Fifty Years" (from 1950) (Score:2, Interesting)
Also of interest: a set of predictions from 1950 entitled "Miracles of the Next Fifty Years" [mit.edu].
Among them, a somewhat silly but remarkably prescient prediction of World-Wide-Web-like tech:
Of course the Dobsons have a television set. But it is connected with the telephones as well as with the radio receiver, so that when Joe Dobson and a friend in a distant city talk over the telephone they also see each other. Businessmen have television conferences. Each man is surrounded by half a dozen television screens on which he sees those taking part in the discussion. Documents are held up for examination; samples of goods are displayed. In fact, Jane Dobson does much of her shopping by television. Department stores obligingly hold up for her inspection bolts of fabric or show her new styles of clothing.
It's amazing how much harder some things turned out to be than was anticipated:
"50-odd variables"... :)
Check your sources (Score:2, Interesting)
On the experimental front, the "spooky action at a distance" experiments have consistently shown that information can and does travel faster than the speed of light.
There has been no experimental evidence of superluminal information transfer. The experiments to date involving ultra-fast waves or quantum teleportation have only demonstrated correlations, not causations.
Quantum field theory allows for propogation of particles through space-like intervals, but by a rather miraculous cancellation, no two measurements can affect each other unless they are within each other's light cones. This has yet to be refuted reproducibly.
Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a misconception about AI. Just because an AI implementation has a mass digital storage, doesn't mean the AI "being" has mass digital storage in any significant sense. The AI level is so far above the storage level, that the AI would probably not interface to the storage any differently from how you or I would. In other words, it would be little different from a person with an MP3/DVD player.
Similarly, an AI would not necessarily be a lightning calculator, even though it's built of of the same chips that can do a billion additions per second. In the AI's "mind", as in ours, numbers are high-level symbols, not RAM words. The AI has no more access to its RAM than we have to our neurons.
Of course, I can't prove this, but I'm quite persuaded.
Re:Things that cannot be done (Score:4, Interesting)
Couldn't this same logic be used to prove that nothing can move faster than the speed of sound? Say I hop in my supersonic jet, shout "I'm leaving", fly from Boston to San Francisco, and then say "I'm here". Somebody standing in San Francisco will hear me say "I'm here" before they hear "I'm leaving". Following the same argument you used, this should make faster than sound travel impossible because the person standing in San Francisco will observe B before A even though A happened before B. Of course, we all know that supersonic travel is possible, so this shows that observations of occurrences do not need to follow chronological order.
Re:Too many predictions focused on AI that is far (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.honda-p3.com/
These are pretty unnerving when you see the videos of them in action. What they are missing is any real intelligence, which is taken care of here:
http://www.ai.mit.edu/research/projects/project
And here:
http://www.ai.sri.com/
And about five dozen other busy places. What we need to make this stuff happen is miniaturization and then incorporation of all of these separate elements.
We apparently even have artificial muscles to hang on our titanium robot skeletons:
http://www.techreview.com/articles/cameron02150
Now if we have these pieces today, you don't think in another 23 years, say that again to yourself, 23 years, that we won't be able to figure out how to put all these puzzle pieces together to create a robot that gets the big picture?
I think that is a pretty dead on estimate.
As far as why factory workers for humanoid robots, because as you pointed out, some factory conditions are conducive to a series of robotic arms, but some factory jobs require a bit more dexterity than that. Some dangerous factory jobs would be much better suited for a team of humanoid robots than people. It's all about the flexibility you get from an autonomous humanoid critter than being locked down to a series of arms.
And yes you could make an argument that the human form isn't necessarily the best design for maximum flexibility, but actually this planet disagrees. We are doing what we doing today because it IS currently the best shape, so it would be in our best interest to try to imitate what we know works before we try to do the impossible.
Hey it worked for Microsoft! Ha.