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)
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...
Re:85% accurate? (Score:3, Funny)
Year 1: Someone dies, someone's born.
Year 2: Someone dies, someone's born.
...
Year N: Someone dies, someone's born.
Of course it will be totally wrong after a certain year in which X if we have a major cometary impact that wipes out all life on Earth.
Re:85% accurate? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pardon me, but it sounds to me like your ethics teacher doesn't have a clue what she's talking about. If you think that successfully passing the Turing test doesn't demonstrate both intelligence and sentience, I can't deny that you may be correct. But you've got some damned serious brainpower backing the alternative position, and I really don't think that could happen if the T-test was so pathetic that a group of freshman college students could rip it apart.
I think it was Descartes who came up with the idea of automatons. They're creatures who walk around the world in human form, carrying out all the day to day tasks of ordinary human beings, but without any real consciousness working inside their skulls. Some of them may have been sitting in your freshman ethics class, contributing valuable insights to discussions.
I don't believe that automatons are possible. But the only way to seriously believe that a computer could pass the Turing test without being both intelligent and self-aware is to presume that they are. In order to do what an automaton is supposed to do, it has to at least have information about the outside world, and a way to measure what's going on outside against a system of rules which mediates its reactions. That system of rules needs to encode all the things that humans know. Finally, it would have to be aware of its own actions, have the ability to make short and long-term plans, and flexibility in the face of novel situations. Sounds a lot like us.
The most famous response to the Turing test (Searle's "Chinese Room" argument) basically says that a computer might pass the test by simply understanding the formal properties of a language without understanding the semantics of the words its using. For example, it would know that a DUCK can go UNDER WATER without becoming WET, without really understanding any of the terms involved (only their interrelations).
I think the example Searle chose to illustrate his point (found here [ilstu.edu]) is misleading. While the person doing the actual input and output of the symbols doesn't really understand Chinese, he is part of a system which does. Complaining that an entire system cannot be intelligent because none of the individual parts making up the system have "understanding" of what they're doing is misleading. None of your neurons understand what they're doing; they just fire or don't fire depending on the electrochemical inputs they receive. The little bit of your neural system which turns the words you've chosen into sounds by manipulating your voice box doesn't understand the meaning of the words.
Searle tries to get around the problem by internalizing all the rules of the Chinese Room inside the person who was doing the translating, and claiming that he still doesn't understand Chinese. But the rules which have been encoded inside the person are so advanced and complex that the stream of characters he is outputting is sufficient to pass the Turing test.
In order to pass the test, these rules have to have the ability to remember the conversation that came before, and adjust the outputs accordingly. If you ask the same question twenty times in a row, and get precisely the same response each time, you can be assured that you're dealing with a computer with no self-awareness. So the rules are constantly changing, not just to reflect the course of the conversation, but to reevaluate the accuracy of the old rules. The more I think about it, the harder a time I have of believing that a human being, however intelligent, could internalize all the rules and constantly modify them to accurately mimic a human conversation, independent of any understanding of their actual meaning.
The biggest problem that I see with the Turing test is that it is a sufficient demonstration of intelligence, but not a necessary one. That is, computers will probably be intelligent long before they understand enough about our expectations of other humans to deceive us properly.
Example: We generally understand that dolphins are intelligent, but their intelligence is of a rather alien sort. Even if we mastered their language, a dolphin could easily be distinguished from a human in a Turing test because their life experiences and way of looking at the world is completely alien to us. I think the best the dolphin could hope for was to try and imitate a five year old who really enjoyed swimming.
In a way, I'm glad you threw in that little slam against the Turing test, because writing this post was way more interesting than just nodding my head in agreement. I thought your points about the nature of prediction were uncannily accurate.
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.
Re:Extinct Animal (Score:2, Informative)
Cloning extinct animals (Score:2)
True enough, but seeing how the specimen had just recently died, it isn't quite the same as the "Jurassic Park" scenario, which will probably never come to pass, no matter how advanced cloning technology becomes because the information just isn't there. We'll never get even close to the complete genome of a dinosaur because its DNA has long since been degraded. And don't tell me about preserved DNA in amber -- first of all, almost all of the claims about preserved DNA have since been shown to be simple contamination, and secondly the were just short fragments anyway.
Re: (Score:3)
AI: the end (Score:2)
Prior to that, let us hope for many a good beer.
The Signposts Document (Score:5, Informative)
Main site:
http://kurellian.tripod.com/spint.html [tripod.com]
Storage site:
http://members.aol.com/kurellian/spint.html [aol.com]
~A.
Re:The Signposts Document (Score:3, Funny)
Well, at least 85% of them.
Re:The Signposts Document (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course his work is optimistic: if it were pessimistic he would be called a sociopathic depressed old wonk and his works relegated to the National Enquirer and such things. He is optimistic because he knows that that is what people want to hear.
This guy knows what he's doing.
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]
Re:Hmmmm... (Score:2)
I know there's some nutters out there, but planes zorbing? C'MON!
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...
Re:Hmmmm... (Score:2)
Re:Hmmmm... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hmmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
It would be pathetically easy, even today. All you would have to do is give the AI bot some basic communication skills and have it get in touch with the "U N I V E R S I T YD I P L O M A S" people. There you have it -- an AI bot with a PhD from a prestigious nonaccredited university!
85% is low for a self-promoter (Score:3, Insightful)
Submit story to slashdot through electronic psuedonym (hotmail), and watch your hit counter spin!
We have technology to build teleported right now (Score:2, Insightful)
Flying Cars? We can teleport stuff. Ever heard of quantum entanglement? Just because we can do something doesnt mean we will,
With tax cuts going on right now, and about 70 percent of all our tax dollars maybe 80 percent now that Bush is president and 911 happened, all going to the Military, and very little going to science, its not that technology doesnt exsist today, its just too expensive to bring out of the lab.
The hope is, other countries and governments will invest trillions of dollars in these technologies.
Korea or was it Taiwan, i cannot remember, is investing Trillions in nano technology, this is how you do it, you need the government to start the industries off by giving companies funding. You also need the government funding scientists.
The trend in the US is so anti tax that its also anti technology.
Companies wont bring technology until they have no choice.
So while we can teleport stuff, use cars which run on air and water, and get energy from the sun or even build fusion reactors, this stuff is still in the lab and will be for 20 years because people want tax cuts.
Korea/Taiwan investing Trillions? (Score:2, Informative)
The entire United States economy is just a hair over 9 trillion dollars with the United States Federal Budget coming in at 3 trillion.
GDP: purchasing power parity - $9.963 trillion
Taiwan has a GDP of 386 billion and South Korea has a GDP of 764 billion.
So I really, reall doubt that any nation in Asia is putting "trillions" in nano technology.
Government funding of science, while helps, is not a sure fire way to get a technology off the ground, as we can see by Fusion and space based laser weapons.
Re:Korea/Taiwan investing Trillions? (Score:2)
I didnt say a trillion in one year. but over the next 5.
Government should fund science, science should not be about money, producers of information should be funded. People who make products off of this information should fund themselves.
Programmers should be government funded.
But Microsoft should not.
Trust me if we dont start funding science, once China has enough money, and we know they have far more scientists than us, We are doomed. China is COMMUNIST, Capitalism is good at some things but if you look at the situation with Russia, Capitalism because its based on people being selfish, causes people and companies to battle with each other, this is fine in most competitive fields but bad for science.
Re:Korea/Taiwan investing Trillions? (Score:2)
Government research into space based laser weapons paved the way for modern discoveries highly accrete lasers which are currently being used for all sorts of nifty short range stuff.
You know those Gigahert+ CPUs that are being thrown around for less then $100 nowa'days?
Thank you government laser weapon research.
70-80%... Are you stupid? (Score:2)
Re:We have technology to build teleported right no (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes...
Flying Cars? We can teleport stuff. Ever heard of quantum entanglement? Just because we can do something doesnt mean we will,
Hate to break it to you, but theres a slight difference between "Well, we think we've sorta got this theory quantum entanglement figured out" to "Beam me up, Mr. Scott". Even assuming we come up with some incredible new way of using quantum entangled particles to transmit information (Something thats far, far beyond our current technology), you then have to be able to use that information to recreate the object you're "teleporting", which is hardly a hurdle unworthy of consideration.
With tax cuts going on right now, and about 70 percent of all our tax dollars maybe 80 percent now that Bush is president and 911 happened, all going to the Military, and very little going to science, its not that technology doesnt exsist today, its just too expensive to bring out of the lab.
70%? I think not. The current number is more like 23-24% and that is only if you don't count Social Security and Medicare as part of the total. If you do, it's more like 16%.
The hope is, other countries and governments will invest trillions of dollars in these technologies. Korea or was it Taiwan, i cannot remember, is investing Trillions in nano technology, this is how you do it, you need the government to start the industries off by giving companies funding. You also need the government funding scientists.
Hmmm...Korea and Taiwan throwing "Trillions" into nano tech? Korea's GNP for 2000 was approximately $515 billion dollars, Taiwan's was $363 billion. Somehow, I don't think either of these countries has "trillions" to throw at nanotech. Yes, they're investing, but not on that scale.
The trend in the US is so anti tax that its also anti technology.
Making the assumption that the only way technology ever advances is with government assistance. Intel, IBM, 3M and General Electric, to name a few might disagree with you on this. Granted, government assistance certainly helps, particularly for projects that are farther off, but the above statement doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense.
Companies wont bring technology until they have no choice.
Untrue. Companies generally bring out technology as soon as it becomes profitable. Granted there is a bit of inertia to overcome, but thats always true of humanity. If they delay, somebody else is just going to come along and introduce it. It's not like the government had to sue for the creation of the integrated circuit - computing technology advanced at an incredible rate because it's extremely profitable for it to do so. Genetics? I seem to remember there were private interests racing the Human Genome Project to complete sequencing the Human Genome. Companies introduce technologies that are profitable - those which create greater resources than they consume. Granted, they must occasionally be "enouraged" to do the correct thing for the greater good of society, but we're not exactly having to beat them with crowbars to introduce the newest greatest thing.
So while we can teleport stuff, use cars which run on air and water, and get energy from the sun or even build fusion reactors, this stuff is still in the lab and will be for 20 years because people want tax cuts.
Again with the claim that we can teleport stuff, which we are no where near having any proof is possible, let alone practical. Cars that run on air and water. I assume you mean hydrogen here, which really isn't ready for the big time. Solar panels are expensive and not particularly efficient yet, not to mention very dirty to make. Fusion reactors? Yeah, they're in the lab and have had quite a lot of research funds poured into them. And thus far they've stayed in the lab because they don't work. They'll fuse hydrogen, but thus far they all consume more power than they produce. Really useful.
In short, I agree with the basic premise that we should spend more money on research than we do, both in the public and private arenas. But numbers off by orders of magnitude and claims that things of things that aren't strictly true don't really help convince others.
Other stuff by this guy (Score:2, Informative)
Social consequences? (Score:2, Insightful)
"He predicts that humanoid robots will fill factory jobs by 2007. By 2015, robots will be able to take on almost any job in hospitals or homes."
Talk about a rich-poor gap. Sounds like the perfect backdrop for a Butlerian Jihad.
Heres what (Score:2)
We will never have robotics because our economy isnt compatible with it. Some country like China however will have lots of robotics.
While everyone disses communism one thing thats for sure, Communism in the long run is better than capitalism, however capitalism raises technology faster and quicker even if it cant handle it.
Re:Heres what (Score:2, Funny)
I recommend we research Mathemathics so we can build catapult!
Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't see how this is possible, since (theoretically) any electronic lifeform would have perfect memory. If you have a perfect, electronic memory then how would the government or MPAA/RIAA know that you're not "pirating" some music/movies/books in there? You could just listen to music once and play it back whenever you wanted. Heck, why buy a DVD when you can just play back the memory of when you saw it in a movie theater? It's much more convenient and impressive, not to mention free.
Nope, any and all electronic minds will have to have DRM technology built-in and have regular brain-sweeps to make sure the being has a digital right to whatever content is in it's brain. Heck, while they're in there they might as well clean up any unwanted (by them) memories or sentiments they encounter. Basic rights. Sure.
And need I point out that this would apply to any technology-enhanced human beings as well? I think we'll sooner see human beings with "PDA's" in their brains than true artificial intelligence.
Re:Copyright-Friendly Basic Rights? (Score:2)
I believe that due to emergent behavior and similar factors, processes with the level of complexity required for AI will not be directly configurable, but will have to be "programmed" through techniques similar to the way human minds are "programmed" (hypnosis, brainwashing, information control, etc). And the realization that that which is frowned upon or outright illegal/immoral can be inflicted on an AI might be a key step in granting them rights.
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.
Too many predictions focused on AI that is far off (Score:5, Insightful)
By 2025, there will be more robots than people in developed countries. By 2030, robots will become mentally and physically superior to people -- and perhaps unwilling to tolerate the existence of their human creators.
So he's saying that we'll have self-aware robots in 23 years. This seems pretty unrealistic to me, being that we have yet to design a computer that has demonstrated anything close to human conciousness.
He predicts that humanoid robots will fill factory jobs by 2007. By 2015, robots will be able to take on almost any job in hospitals or homes.
2007 isn't that far off. If humanoid robots are going to fill factory jobs, wouldn't we be seeing some humanoid today?
And why humanoid? Seems like the current factory robots (massive robots at the auto factories, for example) are doing pretty well without a humanoid design.
Humanoid robots already debuted (Score:2)
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.
Earliest potential occurrence (Score:5, Interesting)
Faster than light travel
What makes the first one potentially easier? I wonder.
Re:Earliest potential occurrence (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Earliest potential occurrence (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Earliest potential occurrence (Score:2, Funny)
Time travel into the future is easy!
I'm doing it right now!
Bleak future (Score:2, Flamebait)
We are all doomed becasue of inherant greed and reactive attitudes towards the problems of the world. "we don't need to do something about the middle east!" *first plane hits tower* Shit! we have do to something now!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
missed the point (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
incorrect (Score:2)
Sad (Score:2)
Page 6... (Score:3, Funny)
Suddenly "you've got mail" takes on a whole new meaning... spam becomes wildly popular... hookers are out of work in droves...
Only eight more years...
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
European mirror (also a HTML version available) (Score:3, Informative)
PDF - http://liquid.student.utwente.nl/files/mirrors/WP
HTML - http://liquid.student.utwente.nl/files/mirrors/WP
Better List (Score:3, Informative)
Futurism, humbug... (Score:3, Interesting)
I predict that the public's fascination with technology for its own sake will have seriously diminished by 2010.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Futurism, humbug... (Score:5, Funny)
2008: Mujahideen overthrow most western-aligned governments in mideast. Oil production comes to a complete standstill. World economies collapse.
2009: Rain falls for first time on Arakkis.
2011: Americans burn sheafs of "future predictions" to keep from freezing to death.
2013: Americans all starve because robotic pets are not edible.
Confessions to AI priest - 2004 (Score:2, Interesting)
Flying Cars? (Score:2)
uk internet at 75% in 2015? (Score:2, Insightful)
this seems very un-optimistic. especially compared to his other statements.
Re:uk internet at 75% in 2015? (Score:2)
|:
Funny... (Score:2)
Working Spellchecker: 2060 (Score:3, Funny)
Hehe.
Orgasm by email .... 2010 (Score:4, Funny)
"I SEND YOU THIS ORGASM IN ORDER TO HAVE YOUR ADVICE"
Off by eight years... (Score:2, Funny)
2010: Orgasm by email. Oh, wait, we already have this. I'm reliably informed.
Also 2010: 25% of all TV personalities will be synthetic. Oh, wait...
Hey bein' one a them futurists is easy!
Re:Off by eight years... (Score:2)
Artificial Life (Score:4, Insightful)
This timeline has to be a joke with regard to Artifial Intelligence. Common sense inference by 2005? Artificial life by 2006?
Assuming he's talking about human-level artifical intelligence, in my opinion, he's off by 100 to 200 years. First we need a theory on what common sense and intelligence is. Maybe a few decades after that we might have some primitive implementations.
I believe we're at least 50-100 years away from a theory, and probably much longer than that before we get a practical implementation.
I don't know what this guy's smoking.
Re:Artificial Life - O/T (Score:2)
The tactics are supposed to be to avoid anything logical, and avoid numbers less than thirty (people's birthdays). Neither make it more likely that you win, but they do lower the number of people that share the jackpot.
Dave
I want some of what he's smoking (Score:2)
So what (Score:3, Informative)
Michio Kaku has a better timeline to the future in his book Visions.
Anyone who doubts should check out that book at amazon.com
I wont quote whats in the book because i bet i'd be sued for copyright violations or something, but it basically says, Humans will reach nano technology, and quantum revolution within maybe 20-30 years,definately within our lifetimes because silicon wont last beyond 2020.
It goes as far as 2100 and beyond M.Kaku interviewed and speaks to hundreds of other scientists, engineers and people in the know.
Now, as far as if we ever reach the year 2100,thats up to us, so far our society doesnt look like it can handle the technology we are developing, look at the DCMA, and the patent laws, its not like patents will work anymore in the future once technology gets to such a state as described by futurists.
We need a Poll (Score:2)
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?
My own predictions. (Score:5, Funny)
1000 monkeys at 1000 type writers code perfect operating system: 2010
CowboyNeal becomes world president due to Slashdot poll becoming legally binding: 2014
Mozilla 1.0 released: 2018
Timelines of the Future proven inaccurate: 1823
99% of Slashdot comment submitters use "Preview" button before submitting: 2793
Re:My own predictions. (Score:3, Funny)
I think we can move this date up a bit if we have the "Preview" button generate an Orgasmatron-E-Mail.
-
Sounds like Age of Spiritual Machines (Score:2)
The major problem I see with these futurists saying that we will move so fast in the next hudred years is the capacity of humans to change that quickly and handle the power that it will give us. At some point augmenting humans directly, either through genetics or cybernetics will be nessecary, and I cant see us handling it well. We cant agree on what to do with cloning or fetal cell use, and these are the beginning of the augmentation process.
Cheating. (Score:2)
"Computer/Chip/Operating System Maker Blackmails Country or World - year 2000"
Ahhh, hello?
Dave
The Real Timeline of the Future (Score:2, Funny)
2005 Same old shit, different package
2006 TV sinks to new low, Goatse.cx guy loses unfair competition suit
2010 Apple and Linux still at <10%, but Microsoft goes bust because people stopped upgrading 8 years before
2012 Human organs from cloned cells go on sale at Walmart
2014 Last of the Jon Katz trolls found dead in his appartment, his contribution to the internet will be missed
2017 Human implant of computers with hormonal interfaces become all the rage until Ariz attorneys figure out how to spam them, 1,000's claw the circuits from their bodies as spammers claim free speech rights
2018 First man lands on mars, finds old coke can, world stunned, National Enquirer rules the news stands
2019 Last oil well dries up, freeways become trailer parks of giant SUVs
2021 Near earth pass of comet fills atmosphere with dust, temperature drops, baby born in Miami FL with full fur coat
2070 Man returns from Mars, finds world run by apes.
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:Things that cannot be done (Score:2)
increase mass
Travel near the speed of light.
increase energy
See previous item and the mass/energy equivalence
travel faster than light
Not theoretically impossible. Travelling exactly at c is the problem
Re:Things that cannot be done (Score:2)
Travel near the speed of light.
Acceleration requires energy. Due to the engery mass equivalence, which you pointed out, you have to be getting energy, and therefore mass from somewhere. The point is, you're not creating it from nothing.
Re:Things that cannot be done (Score:3, Informative)
Um, no. You're probably thinking of the infamous "tachyons", one of the most benighted missteps in theoretical physics ever. It can be shown by relatively basic relativity that, if for one observer, event B occurs after event A but separated by less than the time it would take light to travel from A to B, then there is some observer for whom the time-ordering of A & B is reversed. That is, for some observer moving at constant velocity relative to the first, B occurs first.
So if event A is "I leave Earth" and event B is "I arrive at alpha Centauri", and for one observer, B is (say) two years after A, then for some other observer, B occurs before A. Which means causality flies right out the window: What if you then sent a signal from B to A that is encoded as follows:
You may add such automation as you desire to ensure that we contrary humans don't boggle the experiment. Of course we now have the situation wherein the ship is both sent and not sent, and we seem to be in a bit of a tizzy.
Note that it does not matter what method of FTL travel our ship uses: teleporter, transwarp, pixie dust. All that matters is the fact that the two events (ship leaves Earth, ship arrives at alpha Centauri) are separated in time by less than the light travel time.
Tachyons are bunk because -- besides requiring things like complex mass -- they can't deal with this issue. Other clever physicists have come up with ways that might allow us to cheat: You never exceed light speed, but you shorten the distance between the points using Gen Rel and some "exotic matter". But you still don't beat c
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.
You are the victim (Score:3, Informative)
The heisenberg uncertainty principle (In terms of "classical" 1920's quantum mechanics) goes as follows:
a particle has associated to it a "wave function", which at each point of your world has a complex value. The absolute value (squared) of this wave function is interpereted as the probability density that your particle is at that position.
So, for instance, if your wave function has a constant value of 1/2 on the interval from 0 to 2, then you know with certainty that it lies between 0 and 2. And the odds of it living in the region between 0 and 1 is equal to (length of region)*1/2 = 1/2.
For more complicated distributions, you have to integrate to find where the probability of your particle being in a given region.
Now, the notion of having a probability density for position is nothing new. The radical step here is to say that
the probability distribution for a particle's momentum (read: velocity) is the fourrier transform of its postion probability distribution.
So, basically, quantum mechanics tells you how to get the momentum distribution if you're given the position distribution, with some additional data (i.e. the potential, which in my example above is zero).
Geometrically, this process can be described in terms of summing sinusoidal waves of differing frequencies.
So, for instance, a wave with period 1 will correspond to the particle travelling with speed 1. The wave with period 2 will correspond to the particle travelling with speed 1/2 (squared?--I forgot), etc. If you add the two waves together, you'll have a particle which will have a 50% chance of travelling at speed 1 and a 50% chance of travelling at speed 1/2. The function that these two added waves represents is the probability distribution for position.
If you graph the sum of these two waves, you'll find a funny shape which has constructive interference in some places and destructive interference in other places. Typically, it will look like a steep hill near the origin (where cosine is 1), with smaller hills as you go out. By piling on more and more waves, you can get the resuting wave function to be pretty damn steep at the origin, and the outlying hills very small and shallow. This corresponds to a high degree of certainty that the particle can be found near the origin -- but the price paid is using a lot of waves (i.e. many different possible speeds).
In general, the more localized (in space) the wave function, the more waves will be needed to build it up. And with only one sinusoidal wave, you have (basically) no information about where the particle will be.
Heisenberg's uncertainly principle is a count on how many momentum waves are needed to localize a particle within a particular region.
Note that it has nothing to do with whatever tool is used for measurement, or who performs the measurement, or in which geographic location the measurement takes place.
Unfortunately, many pop sci books try to "explain" the principle by claiming that the act of measuring momentum must somehow interfere with position, hence the ambiguity. This is deceitful, since measuring a particle does change it's wave function to the corresponding eigenvector, but heisenberg's uncertainty principle doesn't describe what happens to a particle after measuring it (i.e. the position distribution collapses to a delta function), it describes a relationship between the number of "possible" positions and the number of "possible" momenta the particle has. Little of one implies a lot of the other.
And this ambiguity, far from being an engineering problem, is perhaps the central insight of classical quantum mechanics.
N.B. -- as in all pop-sci accounts, I've told a few lies here. I've ignored units, the issue of continuous vs. discreet eigenvectors, etc. I've muddled speed, momentum, and velocity. But what really bugs me is that the lies which are told in most pop sci accounts are rather fundamental i.e. they want people to believe a theorem or physical insight, and so they "explain" it with some other related insight. The result is that people believe what the books say, but for the wrong reasons. I.e. acceptancy at the price of understanding. Sorry for the rant.
I can almost make immortality! (Score:2)
To quote woody allen: "I don't want to gain immortality by doing great things, I want to do it by living a very, long time."
:)
This made me laugh (Score:2)
But let's concentrate on translation. You've used babelfish, right? Well, babelfish uses SYSTRAN's software underneath. SYSTRAN has been developing their stuff since the 60's. That's right, the laughably bad translations you get from Babelfish is the result of over 30 years of engineering effort. What big change is going to happen in 3 years?
Well, fortunately for the machine translation people, there have been some advances in the past few years. In the early 90's, a group at IBM suggested using statistical methods for translation, and only now are these methods coming into vogue amoung AI researchers. Sadly, they still can't outperform what SYSTRAN has done. Don't get me wrong - the IBM stuff was a breakthrough. Moreover, there will be incremental improvements over the next few yeas, but without another breakthrough, you'll be able to do SOMETHING in real time, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it "translation"
As for the other AI targets... well, for example, how the hell will Barbie get an AI if Mattel is spending $0 on AI research? Hmmm... it seems like this guy is spewing rather than making predictions based on researched and **EDUCATED** guesses.
Our Form of Government will change (Score:2)
Before you mod me down or throw around anti commie remarks, think about it. If AI and robots take over a large percentage of our jobs, the number of unemployed people will skyrocket, and most of the population would end up on unemployment compensation. If this happens, then Western nations would start looking less like Capitalism, and more like Communism.
Interesting Coincidence (Score:4, Insightful)
I must admit that while reading about some of the predicted advances I feel a bit lost in the ramifications. In some ways, we are not only a product of our upbringing, but also the time we grew up in. Even at 33, I find the ideas of artificial living entities and cultured replacement organs a bit daunting. We've lived for millenia on this planet with just natural life forms and no spare organs and we treat living things and our bodies with such little respect. When we can engineer replacements, how much will life mean then? What kind of world will future generations grow up in?
Like Scotty, I don't think I'd want to wake up 75 years into the future. While I'm curious about how things will be, I suspect I'd just feel out of place.
Old news... (Score:5, Funny)
I think we passed this milestone some years ago....
Missing predictions? (Score:3, Funny)
Linux as a mainstream Desktop OS? No date
Microsoft launching their own space program? No date
PPA, the girl next door
Nah this is how it goes... (Score:3, Insightful)
2205 Antimatter production station built in orbit around sun by Govcentral in an attempt to break the Edenist energy monopoly
2208 First antimatter drive starships operational.
2232 Conflict at Jupiter's trailing Trojan asteroid cluster between belt alliance ships and O'Neal Halo company hydrocarbon refinery. Antimatter used as a weapon; twenty-seven thousand people killed.
2238 Treaty of Deimos outlaws production and use of antimatter in the Sol system: signed by Govcentral, Lunar natio, asteroid alliance, and Edenists. Antimatter stations abandoned and dismantled.
2267-2270 Eight separate skirmishes involving use of antimatter among colony worlds. Thirteen million killed.
2271 Avon summit between all planetary leaders. Treat of Avon, banning the manufacture and use of antimatter thoughout inhabited space. Formation of Human Confederation to police agreement. Contrusction of confederation Navy begins.
2350 War between Novska and Hilversum. Novska bombed with antimatter. Confederation Navy prevents retaliatory strike against Hilversum.
Re:Electronic lifeforms. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Electronic lifeforms. (Score:5, Funny)
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:Electronic lifeforms. (Score:2, Funny)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Predicting the past? (Score:2, Insightful)
I think that means that you have online friends that are AI, but you're not sure which friends are AI and which ones are real people. In 2007 Slashdot will have AC and AI posters, and the AI posters will probably make better observations and definitely be more polite...
Re:Why not? (Score:2)
This guy is bats I tell you!
Re:Why not? (Score:2)
"Who would visit any confessional except for yuks?"
- Some Guy Who Nailed 95 Theses To A Cathedral Door A Long Time Ago.
Re:Most of this sounds unlikely.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Orgasmatron: 2012
Creation of The Matrix: 2025
Full Direct Brain Link: 2030 (yet, the matrix is created 5 years earlier?)
Possible Rise of global machine dictator: 2020
Politcal correctness creates new dark age: 2050
Whole generation effectively unable to read, write, think and work: 2050
Time travel invented: 2075
Faster than light travel: 2100
There's no way any of that can really be taken seriously.
Re:Most of this sounds unlikely.. (Score:2)
Re:Most of this sounds unlikely.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Laser / Taser Hybrids (Score:2)
This one isn't a leap, in fact, these have been demonstrated in labs for while now. Nikola Tesla might have even come across this idea (using UV light rather than a laser).
The idea is that you use a light beam - UV, or a pulsed laser - to ionize a path through the air. This path then acts like a wire that you can use to discharge high voltage down towards a potential target, as you can have a common ground plane in most situtations. If you're familiar with current tasers, they use a launched device connected by wires, which isn't really that effective and you limit your ability to fire successive rounds.
There's a lot of interesting stuff going down right now.. I couldn't have predicted the technologies I work with now 10 years ago (IC design). One very exciting field has to do with the implementation of neural networks in analog VLSI. IMHO that's where some of the AI technologies will come out of, not sequentially executing CPUs.
There's definately thought put into this.. 20 years ago, things were a lot different.
Steve
Re:Time travel invented ... 2075 (Score:5, Funny)
2075: Time Travel invented
2002: Time Travel invented, again
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Funny)
Off-the-wall? His sequencing is downright wacky. He's got pie-in-the-sky stuff that nobody knows how to even think of approaching, happening later in the week. And then he mis-extrapolates mundane trends way off into the declining years of the universe.