…when it came to subjects outside of his expertise?
That is the question. I ask it because, in the aftermath of Stephen Hawking’s death, I’ve seen several news articles about alarmist predictions he made towards the end of his life. This article is actually one of the less sensational ones I read: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43408961
Stephen Hawking was literally a genius and one of the world’s greatest minds, but his education and professional expertise were in theoretical physics and cosmology (the study of how our universe was created and how it evolved). Moreover, his most important contributions pertained to black holes, an interesting yet extremely esoteric subject. Put simply, though Stephen Hawking was unquestionably brilliant, his brilliance was narrowly focused and didn’t equip him to make pronouncements about topics like global warming and killer robots. While everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, I disliked how Hawking’s opinions always carried special weight and attracted public attention, even when those opinions were about things far outside his expertise.
As I said in my past blog entry Rules for good futurism, predictions always be analyzed systematically, and the first step in the analysis is to ensure that the person who made the prediction actually has relevant academic or professional credentials. In several instances, Hawking failed this basic test.
In 2017, he predicted:
“We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump’s [decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement] could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid.”
Stephen Hawking had no education in climatology and contributed nothing to the field. Moreover, his words suggest that he may not even have understood the Paris Climate Agreement, which has been criticized as weak to the point of being almost meaningless (countries can make up whatever pollution goals they want–including goals to increase their emissions–and there’s no punishment for failing to meet them). To that end, consider that even though President Trump effectively withdrew the U.S. from the Agreement in mid-2017, U.S. carbon emissions for that year still fell, whereas China–one of the Agreement’s signatories–saw its carbon emissions grow. Both of those trends are continuing well into 2018.
Hawking’s gloomy vision of a Venus-like future Earth is also unsupported by reputable climate models. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) most extreme estimates of future global warming fall well below 250 degrees (Celsius or Fahrenheit), and there is still considerable doubt over whether the catastrophic climate “tipping points” Hawking appears to be referencing exist, and if so, whether we are nearing any of them. Finally, Venus’ sulfuric acid rain was caused by volcanic activity, and not by global warming. Even if the Earth gets much hotter in the future, that won’t make volcanoes erupt more.
Stephen Hawking also made predictions about intelligent aliens in 2010:
“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans…We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.”
Though Stephen Hawking spent his life studying “space stuff” like black holes and the expansion of the universe, that left him scarcely better-equipped than an average person to speculate about aliens. While it’s possible that advanced aliens could come here with hostile intent, his apparent certainty in this outcome–made clear through his use of the definite “would be”–is unsupported by any facts. We have no clue what advanced aliens would be like, so we can’t even assign gross probabilities to how they would behave towards us (hostile, helpful, indifferent).
While I agree with Hawking that we should err on the side of caution and minimize humanity’s “leakage” of radio signals into space to hide from any hostile aliens that might be listening, I think it’s very important to realize that this is just a prudent course of action any person would settle upon if they thought hard about the problem. Stephen Hawking’s superior intellect did not let him go any farther, and the insight didn’t become any more valid once he made it known he shared it. To be clear, Hawking was not the first to advocate such a cautious course of action: three years before his aforementioned prediction, an American diplomat and science writer named “Michael Michaud” said the same thing in his book Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears about Encountering Extraterrestrials. I suspect the idea actually predates Michaud by many years, but I didn’t have enough time to research its origins further.
In 2014, Hawking also shared thoughts about home-grown threats to humanity, in the form of hostile A.I.:
“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race…It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”
Again, Stephen Hawking’s prediction is nothing new, nor does he appear credentialed to speak on this matter with real authority. The idea of a robot uprising destroying the human race dates back to the famous 1920 Czech play Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the theory that intelligent machines could enter a cycle of runaway self-improvement was first postulated by the British mathematician I.J. Good in 1965, and the observation that computers are getting smarter at a faster rate than humans are should be obvious to anyone who compares their cell phone to the one they had ten years ago. There’s nothing insightful about Hawking restating a few, closely related ideas that have been embedded in the popular consciousness in one way or another for decades (mostly thanks to science fiction films).
And even though Stephen Hawking famously used computers and a robotic wheelchair to overcome his speech- and motor impairments, he had no experience working on artificial intelligence, which is a sub-field of computer science (his education was instead in physics and math). Similarly, I depend on my car for daily transportation and am proficient at using it, but that doesn’t mean I know anything about automotive engineering.
And in 2016, he issued this dire (depending on your time horizon I guess) warning:
“I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet…Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years. By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.”
From past comments, it’s likely Hawking saw extreme climate change, nuclear or biological war, alien invasion, hostile A.I. uprising, and extinction-level natural events like asteroid impacts as the potential causes of that epic “disaster,” but he never explained how he calculated that one or more of them would happen for sure by his 1,000 to 10,000 year deadline, meaning his prediction runs afoul of another step in my analysis: “Be skeptical of predictions that are unsupported by independently verifiable data.” In truth, the probabilities of any of those misfortunes happening are unknown, making a future risk assessment impossible. For example, it’s entirely likely that a planet- or even continent-killing asteroid isn’t on course to hit Earth for another 20,000 years, by which time we’ll have space weapons that can easily deflect it.
In closing, Stephen Hawking’s discoveries in theoretical physics and cosmology changed our view of the universe itself, but his doomsday predictions added nothing new. Let me be clear: I didn’t write this to denigrate Hawking or to make myself sound smarter than he was, but rather, I wrote it as a reminder that no one knows everything, and future predictions should always be carefully scrutinized, regardless of how famous, smart, or seemingly benevolent the person making them may be. As a scientist, I think he would have actually appreciated these precepts, even if they worked against him in the handful of instances I’ve highlighted.
Microsoft’s “Bing Predicts” algorithm correctly guessed 21 out of 24 Academy Award winners this year, making it as accurate as the best human experts and more accurate than guesses obtained from polls of thousands of human non-experts.
Wikipedia describes Bing Predicts as “a prediction engine developed by Microsoft that uses machine learning from data on trending social media topics (and sentiment towards those topics), along with trending searches on Bing. It predicts the outcomes of political elections, popular reality shows, and major sporting events.”
Bing Predicts did better than 29 out of 30 professional film critics who posted their 2018 Oscar guesses on the prediction website www.goldderby.com. The highest-performing human expert, sports host and film critic Adnan Virk, tied Bing Predicts by correctly guessing 21 of the Award winners.
Moreover, Bing Predicts’ accuracy rate of 87.5% (21/24) surpassed the 85.7% accuracy rate (6/7) derived from a large survey of human non-experts. New Scientist magazine conducted the survey to test the value of the “wisdom of the crowd” for predicting future events, and over 6,000 people participated.
Bing Predicts’ accuracy has been high for previous Academy Awards, though this year was one of its best:
2017 Oscars: 17/24
2016 Oscars: 17/24
2015 Oscars: 20/24
2014 Oscars: 21/24
Bing also excels at predicting outcomes of elections, sports games, and other major competitions. A few examples include:
Bing Predicts made nearly perfect guesses about the outcomes of soccer matches at the 2014 World Cup.
Bing Predicts correctly guessed Scotland would vote to stay in the U.K. in the 2014 referendum
Bing Predicts guessed the outcomes of the U.S. 2014 Midterm elections with 95% accuracy.
I have to wonder, if machines continue improving their powers of prediction and their intelligence, will they someday suck the fun, risk and mystery out of every aspect of life?
For example, what would be the fun in watching sports if the outcome of every event were known with 99% certainty beforehand? How would our lives change if AIs constantly calculated and told us of the odds of success for every action–big (career choice or marriage) or small (where to eat lunch)–that we were contemplating? Taken to an even greater extreme, what would it be like if machines intervened to prevent us from making self-destructive or even just sub-optimal choices, and always impelled us towards the safe course of action?
As constraining and un-free as such a future might sound, what if it were demonstrably superior in terms of allocating human labor, and achieving some optimal balance between maximized productivity, maximized average happiness, and minimization of extreme human suffering? It would certainly be in keeping with the long-running historical trend for things overall to improve with time, while narrower aspects of life (such as overcrowding or certain types of pollution) worsen.
“These observations suggest that despite the overall ability of reviewers to discriminate between extremely strong grant applications and the remainder, they have limited ability to accurately predict future productivity of meritorious applications in the range relevant to current paylines.” https://elifesciences.org/articles/13323v1
But the benefits of superior intellect are clear: Long-term studies of people in the top 1% of math ability suggest that there is no known “ceiling” to IQ, and that the benefits of IQ never plateau: All other things being equal, a person with an IQ of 200 should be able to do more complex cognitive tasks, and is likelier to have a better job and more money, than someone with an IQ of 180. https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/01/DoingPsychScience2006.pdf
Human IQ is heritable, but also tends to regress towards the population mean of 100 across generations (see the “Your Kids and Regression” slide). This means two parents with IQs of 80 are likely to have children that are smarter, and two parents with IQs of 120 are likely to have children that are dumber. http://particle.physics.ucdavis.edu/seminars/data/media/2012/feb/hsu.pdf
‘According to the political scientist Charles Murray, meritocracy inevitably leads to a genetically-based caste system. Why? Because the traits selected for by the meritocratic sorting principle are genetically-based and, as such, likely to be passed on from parents to their children. Genetic variation means some highly able children will be born to people of average and below average intelligence, but the children of the meritocratic elite will, in aggregate, always have a competitive advantage and over several generations that leads to social ossification.’ https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-rise-and-fall-of-meritocracy-bbc.html
I saw this episode of Black Mirror last night. It’s completely right that killer robots will probably be small (though not necessarily dog-like), expendable, and able to function in spite of massive damage. The only inconsistencies in the depiction are: 1) The robot would have called for backup early on. 2) There would have been flying robots that could have zapped the woman out of the tree. Modern militaries don’t do it all with one type of weapon, and neither will future militaries made of robots. https://youtu.be/OQFoyeCiMBE
Amazon should combine the wristwatches with the “Jennifer Unit.” And then they should start calling their workers “Borg drones.” (And come to think of it, Amazon warehouses are giant cubes) https://youtu.be/oC-ReBX0icU
It’s said that WWII played a major role in strengthening our sense of shared national identity because millions of Americans went through the homogenizing institution that was the U.S. military. But look at what happened to Yugoslavia when when it conscripted its citizens into regional militias dominated by different ethic groups. http://warisboring.com/yugoslav-military-doctrine-hastened-the-countrys-collapse/
Armored vehicles can only fit on cargo planes if the vehicles are small and light. To be small and light, armor must be sacrificed. Thin armor means the vehicles are easy to blow up in combat. The U.S. Army will never wish away this basic, physical reality. http://www.dote.osd.mil/pub/reports/FY2009/pdf/army/2009strykermgs.pdf
On the night of February 7-8, about 500 Russian mercenaries ignored repeated warnings from the U.S. military, and attacked an oil refinery in Syria that was held by American forces and American-friendly Syrian rebels. At least 100 and perhaps over 200 Russians died in the one-sided battle, in which they were torn apart by highly accurate U.S. artillery and ground attack aircraft and then ran away. The Kremlin has comically downplayed the scope of the defeat. https://www.polygraph.info/a/us-wagner-russia-syria-scores-killed/29044339.html
The scientific evidence for the “nuclear winter” theory is surprisingly weak, and may have been clandestinely encouraged by the USSR in the 1980s to strengthen anti-nuclear activists in the West. http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/nuclear-winter/
‘This major upgrade is part of a series of upgrades—which include a new digital countermeasures suite, infrared search and track system, new cockpit, among other enhancements—that are slated to allow the F-15C/D fleet to soldier on till 2040 AND POSSIBLY BEYOND. The aircraft that receive these upgrades are called “Golden Eagles.”‘ http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/18259/its-back-to-the-future-for-u-s-f-15c-eagles-and-conformal-fuel-tanks
Here’s an interesting argument that America’s costly aircraft carriers would be useless in a war with an advanced enemy (China or Russia), and are just expensive tools for beating up weak countries. http://cimsec.org/age-strike-carrier/30906
Here’s a fascinating trove of declassified U.S. intelligence analyses of captured Soviet weapons. The recurring theme is that the Soviet scientists and engineers were about as smart as ours, but they had to make weapons that were less advanced and more conventional thanks to the inefficiencies and lagging technology of their factories. This philosophy led the Soviets to favor proven weapon designs and incremental upgrades to them. They preferred having an older, less efficient weapon they knew would work to having a higher-tech, more efficient weapon that hadn’t been put through its paces yet. The artificially low cost of factory labor in the USSR also manifested itself in some of their weapon components, which were obviously made by hand and to standards of precision that would be cost-prohibitive in the U.S. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence/2018-01-31/scavenging-intelligence-us-governments-secret-search-foreign
The differences in design philosophies carry over to the present day: ‘A sociological truth has emerged from the international effort: American engineers are more likely to try to finesse a structure, to make it as lightweight and as efficient as possible, while Russians build things stout.’ https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/us-weighing-future-of-international-space-station/
He makes a great point at the end: A particular star system might be completely unsuited for the rise of organic life, but could still be riddled with non-indigenous aliens that used technology to get there. This weakens the case for focusing SETI’s surveillance efforts on stars that seem to have the “right” conditions for organic life. https://youtu.be/j2AfvkQi7qI
In a future Los Angeles society, people are genetically modified to stop aging at 25 and after that a biological clock is activated granting one more year of life to each person. Everyone has a digital clock on the inside of one of their forearms that displays how much remaining time they have (the display characters are bioluminescent and are visible through the skin), and people can trade time by shaking hands. Time that can be added to or subtracted from one’s personal biological clock is the new currency: Working-class people are paid extra hours of life in exchange for their labor, everyday goods and services are bought using time, and rich people make money off of businesses that loan time to borrowers. When a person’s time runs out, they instantly die of a heart attack. People can also die from physical injury.
The inside of a person’s forearm displays their remaining lifespan
Poorer people commonly live on the edge of survival, with less than 24 hours of time remaining on their biological clocks each day. Rich people can have eons of time, making them effectively immortal. The rich are completely parasitic upon the poor and there’s no evidence of a democratic government, social programs or human rights. Rich people control all of the businesses and use a combination of low wages, deliberate price inflation, usurious time lending companies, and police violence to keep the masses too poor to think about anything but clocking in to the widget factory to make enough time to not die that day. The rich also occasionally turn those screws tight enough to kill off poor people when the ghettos get overpopulated.
The ultra-stratified socioeconomic order is further cemented by legal housing segregation, with walls separating rich and poor neighborhoods, which are referred to as different “Time Zones” (this movie is full of “time”-related puns like that). Tolls to pass through the gates are set too high for the poor to afford it.
Toll booth at a Time Zone border crossing
In other words, this is liberal Hollywood’s vision of how the world works, taken to a comical extreme.
Justin Timberlake plays a typical wage slave named “Will Salas.” His dad is dead, he lives in a run-down apartment with his mom, and he works on a dreary factory assembly line. One day, he’s hanging out at a local bar when he meets a depressed and suicidal rich guy named “Henry Hamilton.” Timberlake saves him from getting robbed of his 100 years of time, and the two hide from the roving ghetto criminals in an abandoned building overnight. While waiting for daylight, they talk, and Henry Hamilton (who looks 25 years old like everyone else) reveals that he is 105 and sick of living. He also tells Timberlake–who apparently is uneducated and never questioned his bad lot in life–that society is setup in a fundamentally unfair way, and that there’s no reason why time can’t be distributed more evenly throughout the population.
Timberlake’s own life story and personality inspire Henry, so while Timberlake is asleep on the couch, Henry grabs his hand and transfers 100 years of time to him. Henry then jumps off a bridge.
Rather than indulge in a life of luxury for once, Timberlake’s fortunes nosedive immediately: After the police find Henry’s dead body and see surveillance camera footage of Timberlake in the area right after, they assume it was a murder-theft and Timberlake becomes a wanted man, with a stereotypical cold, obsessed detective (played by Cillian Murphy) leading a squad to chase him down. His first day as a rich guy gets worse after he donates 10 years of time to his best friend, who promptly uses it to drink himself to death at a bar, and then even worse that night when Timberlake’s mom runs out of time and dies a few seconds before he can grab her hand and do a time transfer.
A broken man with nothing to lose anymore and a new awareness of the exploitative structure of society, Timberlake sets out to take revenge on the evil rich people. Once he gets into the rich Time Zone, called “New Greenwich,” he sets his sights the tycoon “Philippe Weis,” who made a fortune from a chain of usurious time-lending businesses in the ghettos, and on his beautiful daughter Sylvia.
I won’t totally ruin the ending, but unsurprisingly for a simplistic movie like this, good beats evil and the underdog hero gets the girl at the end. Watch it or not. This is no Citizen Kane.
I thought In Time was a superficial movie that made me a little sick with its moralizing. Its deathism also made my eyes roll, with Timberlake and other characters spouting out epic-sounding lines like “No one should be immortal.” That bravado sounds great until you realize that the same rhetoric could be used to justify denying life saving medical technologies to dying people today. Like a fool who likes to watch boxing matches while yelling at the TV set that he could easily beat up one of the professional fighters, everyone is stoic and tough-talking about death until they have to face it, in which case 99% of people plead for God, weep like babies, and will use any technology to live just one more day. I expected nothing better from this film, but it disappointed me nonetheless.
Also, the movie should have been at least 20 minutes shorter. During the last half of it, I felt stuck in a time loop (pun intended) where Timberlake, Sylvia, and the police played an aimless and repetitive game of cat-and-mouse. The acting was “OK,” but there clearly wasn’t much of a budget since they used the same L.A. River stretch and film studio back lot for shooting most of the movie’s scenes.
A year isn’t given for the movie’s events, and I doubt the filmmakers intended for it to be an accurate depiction of the future (e.g. – humans are still working in factories and no attempt was made to put futuristic technology in the film, except electric cars), so it’s hard for me to gauge the film’s probable accuracy. This is social commentary about capitalism’s exploitation of the poor in the present day. However, let me do a calculation so we’ll have something to go on: I think medical immortality–which is a “close enough” stand-in for an end to aging once you hit 25–will exist in the year 2100. The character Henry Hamilton is 105, making him the oldest person in the movie that we know of. Making the assumption he was 25 in the year 2100 when the cure for aging was discovered, In Time is set in 2180.
For that year, In Time actually depicts the future accurately where it tries to.
Medical immortality will create a world full of young, beautiful people. All of the actors and extras look to be in their 20s and are physically attractive. There wasn’t one obese person in the whole movie. I agree that the overwhelming majority of humans alive in 2180 will look young and attractive thanks to technology.
Where are the ugly people?
Medical immortality, technologies that can halt or reverse the aging process, and advanced plastic surgery techniques should be commonly available by then. In addition, ordinary people will be the beneficiaries of several successive generations of human genetic engineering, meaning congenital health defects and even cosmetic imperfections (baldness, abnormally tall or short height, small breasts, etc.) will be almost entirely excised from the human gene pool. Prices for all of these things should also be very low thanks to patent expirations, free machine labor, and government reimbursement (e.g. – Medicaid pays for genetically engineering your children).
However, just as there are Amish people today, I think in 2180 there will be humans who eschew such technologies for various reasons, meaning there will still be some old-looking and ugly people. There very well could have been such people in the film universe, but they just weren’t shown because the movie only focused on what was happening to a relatively small group of people in Los Angeles.
I’d also imagine the already existing trend for people to generally become more courteous and respectful as they age would continue, even if their looks stayed youthful. The good manners displayed by the rich people in the movie are probably an accurate depiction of how people will act in the distant future, when the average person has over 100 years of life experiences, mistakes, relationships, and hard knocks.
Parents will look and act the same age as their kids. The “ageless” nature of society is hit home early in the movie when Timberlake is first shown in his apartment with a beautiful young woman he startlingly calls “Mom.” She’s actually in her 40s and Timberlake is 28. Even 105-year-old people like Henry Hamilton look to be in their 20s. This would definitely be the consequence of age-manipulation technologies, and in 2180, it will be common for parents, children, and even grandparents/children to look the same age.
Also, radical extensions to human lifespan will upend the natural familial and generational relationships between parents and offspring as the initial maturity and life experience advantages held by the parent get vanishingly small over time. For example, if you’re 10 and your mom is 40, she is definitely wiser than you. But what if you’re 110 and she’s 140? How much of an edge does her extra 30 years of life give her over you at that point? Could you have even caught up to or surpassed her if you spent your adult years being more active and doing more enriching things?
Once we end aging, we will invariably end up in a world where parents and children converge to the same physical and mental state in the long run. It’s likely we’ll come to think of our parents and children more like siblings.
At least two generations of the same family are shown here.
Also, the film highlights a funny consequence of this in a scene where the bad guy tycoon Philippe Weis is at a fancy party with three young beautiful woman at his side, and Timberlake can’t tell at first glance how they’re related to him (Mother? Wife? Daughter? Granddaughter?), which complicates his strategy for approaching them. I actually don’t think this will be a problem in 2180 because humans will have cybernetic enhancements that will automatically scan and identify the people around them.
Eternal life might make people more risk-averse. When Timberlake goes to New Greenwich, he falls in love with Philippe Weis’ daughter, Sylvia. She’s a fusion of the classic Hollywood “forbidden fruit” and “rebellious princess” tropes, and waxes about her boredom with rich life and her uninformed belief that the poor get more out of life since they’re always on the verge of running out of time and dying. To show what a romantic badass he is, Timberlake dares her to go swimming in the ocean at night, which she initially refuses to do because she’s been conditioned to avoid dangerous activities. Medical immortality will indeed make people more risk-averse since they’ll have more to lose in a sense, but I doubt it will get so bad the people won’t want to do common things like swim in the ocean anymore.
By 2180, our bodies and the world around us will be infused with intelligent technology, which will go a long way towards mitigating risks to human life. An average human in that year will probably have cybernetic implants and wearable devices that continuously monitor their environment, calculate risk probabilities, and warn them of unsafe conditions or bad decisions they seem to be contemplating. There will also be robots everywhere that can rescue humans or render medical aid. This might get the point where every human has to be followed around by a helper robot and/or can have their actions canceled out by remote signals sent to their cybernetic implants (think of a technological nanny state where the government can make you instantly pass out if you start acting stupid). Given all the safeguards that will be in place, humans might be able to take more “risks” each day than you might think.
By 2180, humans might also make periodic “backups” of their minds using some kind of brain scanning technology. AIs will definitely back themselves up constantly, along with taking other measures to protect their lives, like distributing their consciousness among many different servers in different locations, which each server heavily protected against physical attack and computer viruses. Even if one server were destroyed, a duplicate could be instantly created and added to the network using a backup of the destroyed server’s data. By the same token, if one of your brain cells dies, your remaining brain cells can quickly do some neural re-wiring to compensate, and your consciousness does not die.
People will be able to transfer things by holding hands. In the movie, people can trade time by holding hands. As one person’s time decreases, the other person’s increases by the same amount, and their forearm digital clocks rapidly change to reflect this. I think by 2180, it will be common for humans to have cybernetic implants, organs, and body parts, and those artificial systems will allow people to transfer electricity, data, nanomachines, and maybe their thoughts and feelings through physical contact (just imagine all humans having the equivalent of a USB plug built into the palms of their hands). Wireless transmission of data and maybe even electricity will also be possible.
In a way, it might be possible to transfer “life” to a dying person in the future by holding their hand and transferring electricity to recharge their batteries, nanomachines to repair their tissue damage, or data to fix some malfunction in their computer implants.
There will still be poor people and human factory workers. Absolutely not. The poorest person in 2180 will have a much better life in most ways than the richest person today, mostly thanks to better technology. Wealth and income disparities could still exist, and purely biological humans will probably find themselves in the lowest socioeconomic stratum, but poverty as we know it will be a distant memory. Factories will also be completely automated.
On the 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive, it’s worth looking back at the weapons of the Vietnam War, and considering the handful of them that are still not obsolete (most notably, the AK-47 rifle). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_the_Vietnam_War
Iraq plans to slap on some upgrades to keep their junker T-55 and Type 69 tanks running. The Type 69 is a Chinese copy of the Soviet T-62, which was an evolutionary upgrade of the T-55, which was an evolutionary upgrade of the T-54. If countries like Iraq keep cheapskating their militaries, will we someday have robot crews driving around 100-year-old tanks? http://warisboring.com/iraq-learned-tank-lessons-in-the-war-with-islamic-state/
Bill Gates and Steven Pinker agree that the state of humankind is continuing to improve, but only seems to be getting worse thanks to information technology and to an increasing williness of long-marginalized people to speak out, making us hyper-aware of what problems remain. https://Fmobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/business/mind-meld-bill-gates-steven-pinker.html
Someone has been photoshopping faces of female celebrities onto nude performers in porn videos. This is only the beginning: It’s only a matter of time before computers can easily make highly accurate, 3-D models of people just by looking at photos and video footage of them. As an intermediate step, the data could be used to find porn stars whose body types best matched each celebrity’s and to digitally graft the celebrity’s face onto each nude doppelganger, but ultimately, it will be possible to make fully lifelike, CGI porn movies starring any person. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjye8a/reddit-fake-porn-app-daisy-ridley
Chinese geneticists have cloned monkeys, but the failure rate was extremely high: Out of 79 clone embryos they created and implanted into female monkeys, only two were born healthy. All the rest either spontaneously aborted or died shortly after being born. The technique or a slight modification of it could probably be used to clone humans. http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)30057-6
In the early 1800s, Iceland got its first non-white immigrant: a half black, half white man named “Hans Jonathan.” He had two kids with a white woman, and today, his DNA is found in 788 Icelanders. By sequencing the genomes of 182 of these descendants and cross-referencing them, geneticists were able to reconstruct 19% of Hans’ genome. The task was made easy by the fact that African DNA easily stood out, and by Iceland’s highly detailed genealogical records, but in principle, the same method could be used to reconstruct any ancestor’s DNA. With advanced enough technology, we could make “clones” of long-dead people. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-017-0031-6
Genealogy is kind of meaningless since ultimately, we all share the same ancestors and are from the same place. Stopping your research at one point in the past is an arbitrary choice, and having an ancestor that was famous or royal doesn’t make you special.
http://nautil.us/issue/56/perspective/youre-descended-from-royalty-and-so-is-everybody-else http://livingstingy.blogspot.com/2010/10/why-genealogy-is-bunk.html
The amino acids and three-unit codons that form the basis of all genetics might be optimally evolved in form and function. Whenever we find organic alien life, its DNA will look and work almost identically to our own. There is, however, a small chance that a clean-sheet genome consisting of more types of amino acids and longer codons might be superior, but there’s no plausible way natural selection could bring it about (we have settled into a local optimum when the global optimum still lurks far off). Ultimately, optimizing biological life forms from the molecular level up is probably a task that only intelligent machines will be able to do in the distant future. All multicellular life forms are so finely-tuned to use the existing genetic alphabet that testing the hypothesis by changing things at the margins probably impossible. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/01/expanding-the-genetic-alphabet/549620/
Stephen Spielberg thinks “Ready Player One” is an accurate representation of the future…everyone is unemployed and spends their lives playing virtual reality games. https://youtu.be/aWz6d1Z6bnU
Google Glass may have failed, but I’ve always thought augmented reality (AR) glasses were a worthy tech concept that would return in an improved form. The “Vuzix Blade,” which reviewers have described as being an improved version of Google Glass that also makes use of the Alexa voice-activated AI assistant, could herald that return. https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/9/16869174/vuzix-blade-ar-glasses-augmented-reality-amazon-alexa-ai-ces-2018
I really like the prediction about the future “on-demand economy.” Someone puts out a gig announcement, and AIs instantly figure out which human can do the gig the best, and they notify the person. If robots are constantly telling you to do one gig after another, it will kind of add up to something like a job. https://msblob.blob.core.windows.net/ncmedia/2018/01/The-Future-Computed.pdf
Guillermo del Toro saw a UFO: ‘The UFO, says del Toro, “Went from 1,000 meters away [to much closer] in less than a second — and it was so crappy. It was a flying saucer, so clichéd, with lights [blinking]. It’s so sad: I wish I could reveal they’re not what you think they are. They are what you think they are. And the fear we felt was so primal. I have never been that scared in my life.’ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/guillermo-del-toro-seeing-a-ufo-hearing-ghosts-shaping-water-1068754
An argument against “geoengineering” turned on its head: Whale feces contains high levels of iron, iron dumped in seawater causes plankton blooms, and plankton blooms sequester CO2. Whale populations are about 70% lower now thanks to human predation than they were in pre-Industrial times. If we dumped iron powder in the oceans, we’d be restoring the natural carbon sequestration mechanism of the ocean rather than doing something unnatural. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/01/iron-fertilization-of-the-ocean-is-as-natural-as-whale-poop-and-it-can-save-the-planet.html
Like any futurist worth his salt, I’m going to put my credibility on the line by publishing a list of my future predictions. I won’t modify or delete this particular blog entry once it is published, and if my thinking about anything on the list changes, I’ll instead create a new, revised blog entry. Furthermore, as the deadlines for my predictions pass, I’ll reexamine them.
I’ve broken down my predictions by the decade. Any prediction listed under a specific decade will happen by the end of that decade, unless I specify some other date (e.g. – “X will happen early in this decade.”).
2020s
Better, cheaper solar panels and batteries (for grid power storage and cars) will make clean energy as cheap and as reliable as fossil fuel power for entire regions of the world, including some temperate zones. As cost “tipping points” are reached, it will make financial sense for tens of millions of private homeowners and electricity utility companies to install solar panels on their rooftops and on ground installations, respectively. This will be the case even after government clean energy subsidies are inevitably retracted. However, a 100% transition to clean energy won’t finish in rich countries until the middle of the century, and poor countries will use dirty energy well into the second half of the century.
Fracking and the exploitation of tar sands in the U.S. and Canada will together ensure growth in global oil production until around 2030, at which time the installed base of clean energy and batteries will be big enough to take up the slack. There will be no global energy crisis.
Vastly improved VR goggles with better graphics and no need to be plugged into desktop PCs will hit the market. Augmented reality (AR) glasses that are much cheaper and better than the original Google Glass will also make their market debuts.
“Full-immersion” audiovisual VR will be commercially available by the end of the decade. However, the tactile, olfactory, and physical movement/interaction aspects of the experience will remain underdeveloped.
LED light bulbs will become as cheap as CFL and even incandescent bulbs. It won’t make economic sense NOT to buy LEDs, and they will establish market dominance.
“Smart home”/”Wired home” technology will become mature and widespread in developed countries.
Video gaming will dispense with physical media, and games will be completely streamed from the internet or digitally downloaded. Business that exist just to sell game discs (Gamestop) will shut down.
Instead of a typical home entertainment system having a whole bunch of media discs, different media players and cable boxes, there will be one small, multipurpose box that, among other things, boosts WiFi to ensure the TV and all nearby devices can get signals at multi-Gb/s speeds.
Self-driving vehicles will start hitting the roads in large numbers in rich countries. The vehicles won’t drive as efficiently as humans (a lot of hesitation and slowing down for little or no reason), but they’ll be as safe as human drivers. Long-haul trucks that ply simple highway routes will be the first category of vehicles to be fully automated. The transition will be heralded by a big company like Wal-Mart buying 5,000 self-driving tractor trailers to move goods between its distribution centers and stores. Last-mile delivery–involving weaving through side streets, cities and neighborhoods, and physically carrying packages to peoples’ doors–won’t be automated until after this decade. Self-driving, privately owned passenger cars will stay few in number and will be owned by technophiles, rich people, and taxi cab companies.
A machine will pass the Turing Test by the end of this decade. The milestone will attract enormous amounts of attention and will lead to several retests, some of which the machine will fail, proving that it lacks the full range of human intelligence. It will lead to debate over the Turing Test’s validity as a measure of true intelligence (Ray Kurzweil actually talked about this phenomenon of “moving the goalposts” whenever we think about how smart computers are), and many AI experts will point out the existence of decades-long skepticism in the Turing Test in their community.
The best AIs circa 2029 won’t be able to understand and upgrade their own source codes. They will still be narrow AIs, albeit an order of magnitude better than the ones we have today.
Machines will become better than humans at the vast majority of computer, card, and board games. The only exceptions will be very obscure games or recently created games that no one has bothered to program an AI to play yet. But even for those games, there will be AIs with general intelligence and learning abilities that will be “good enough” to play as well as average humans by reading the instruction manuals and teaching themselves through simulated self-play.
The cost of getting your genome sequenced and expertly interpreted will drop below $1,000, and enough about the human genome will have been deciphered to make the cost worth the benefit. By the end of the decade, it will be common for newborns in rich countries to have their genomes sequenced.
At-home medical testing kits and diagnostic devices like swallowable camera-pills will become vastly better and more common.
China’s GDP will surpass America’s, India’s population will surpass China’s, and China will never claim the glorious title of being both the richest and most populous country.
2030s
VR and AR goggles will become refined technologies and probably merge into a single type of lightweight device. Like smartphones today, anyone who wants the glasses in 2030 will have them. Even poor people in Africa will be able to buy them.
Augmented reality contact lenses will be invented, though they won’t be as good as AR glasses and they might need remotely linked, body-worn hardware to provide them with power and data.
Wall-sized, thin, 8K or even 16K TVs will become common in homes in rich countries, and the TVs will be able to display 3D picture without the use of glasses. A sort of virtual reality chamber could be created at moderate cost by installing those TVs on all the walls of a room to create a single, wraparound screen.
The video game industry will be bigger than ever and considered high art.
Loneliness, social isolation, and other problems caused by overuse of technology and the atomized structure of modern life will be, ironically, cured to a large extent by technology. Chatbots that can hold friendly conversations with humans for extended periods, diagnose and treat mental illnesses as well as human therapists, and customize themselves to meet the needs of humans will become ubiquitous. The AIs will become adept at analyzing human personalities and matching lonely people with friends and lovers, and at recommending daily activities that will satisfy them, hour-by-hour. Machines will come to understand that constant technology use is antithetical to human nature, so in order to promote human wellness, they find ways to impel humans to get out of their houses, interact with other humans, and be in nature.
House robots will start becoming common in rich countries. They will be slower at doing household tasks than humans, but will still save people hours of labor per week. They may or may not be humanoid. For the sake of safety and minimizing annoyance, most robots will do their work when humans aren’t around. As in, you would come home from work every day and find the floors vacuumed, the lawn mowed, and your laundered clothes in your dresser, with nary a robot in sight since it will have gone back into its closet to recharge. You would never hear the commotion of a clothes washing machine, a vacuum cleaner or a lawnmower. All the work would get done when you were away, as if by magic.
Chatbots will steadily improve their “humanness” over the decade. The instances when AIs say or do something nonsensical will get less and less frequent. Dumber people, children, and people with some types of mental illness will be the first ones to start insisting their AIs are intelligent like humans. Later, average people will start claiming the same. By the end of the decade, a personal assistant AI like “Samantha” from the movie Her will be commercially available.
People will start having genuine personal relationships with AIs and robots. For example, people will resist upgrading to new personal assistant AIs because they will have emotional attachments to their old ones. The destruction of a helper robot or AI might be as emotionally traumatic to some people as the death of a human relative.
Thanks to improvements in battery energy density and cost, and in fast-charging technology, electric cars become cost-competitive with gas-powered cars this decade without government subsidies, leading to their rapid adoption. Electric cars are mechanically simpler and more reliable than gas-powered ones, which will hurt the car repair industry. Many gas stations will also go bankrupt or convert to fast charging stations.
Self-driving cars will become cheap enough and practical enough for average income people to buy, and their driving behavior will become as efficient as an average human. Over the course of this decade, there will be rapid adoption of self-driving cars in rich countries. Freed from driving, people will switch to doing things like watching movies/TV and eating. Car interiors will change accordingly. Road fatalities, and the concomitant demands for traffic police, paramedics, E.R. doctors, car mechanics, and lawyers will sharply decrease. The car insurance industry will shrivel, forcing consolidation. (Humans in those occupations will also face increasing levels of direct job competition from machines over the course of the decade.)
The “big box” business model will start taking over the transportation and car repair industry thanks to the rise of electric, self-driving vehicles and autonomous taxis in place of personal car ownership. The multitudes of small, scattered car repair shops will be replaced by large, centralized car repair facilities that themselves resemble factory assembly lines. Self-driving vehicles will drive to them to have their problems diagnosed and fixed, sparing their human owners from having to waste their time sitting in waiting rooms.
Car ownership won’t die out because it will still be a status symbol, and having a car ready in your driveway will always be more convenient than having to wait even just two minutes for an Uber cab to arrive at the curb. People are lazy.
The ad hoc car rental model exemplified by autonomous Uber cabs and private people renting out their autonomous cars when not in use faces a challenge since daily demand for cars peaks during morning rush hour and afternoon rush hour. In other words, everyone needs a car at the same time each day, so the ratio of cars : people can’t deviate much from, say, 1:2. Of course, if more people telecommuted (almost certain in the future thanks to better VR, faster broadband, and tech-savvy Millennials reaching middle age and taking over the workplace), and if flexible schedules became more widespread (also likely, but within certain limits since most offices can’t function efficiently unless they have “all hands on deck” for at least a few hours each day), the ratio could go even lower. However, there’s still a bottom limit to how few cars a country will need to provide adequate daily transportation for its people.
Automation will start having a major impact on the global economy. Machines will compensate for the shrinkage of the working-age human population in the developed world. Countries with “graying” populations like Japan and Germany will experience a new wave of economic growth. Demand for immigrant laborers will decrease across the world because of machines.
There will be a worldwide increase in the structural unemployment rate thanks to better and cheaper narrow AIs and robots. A plausible scenario would be for the U.S. unemployment rate to be 10%–which was last the case at the nadir of the Great Recession–but for every other economic indicator to be strong. The clear message would be that human labor is becoming decoupled from the economy.
Combining all the best AI and robotics technologies, it will be possible to create general-purpose androids that could function better in the real world (e.g. – perform in the workplace, learn new things, interact with humans, navigate public spaces, manage personal affairs) than the bottom 10% of humans (e.g. – elderly people, the disabled, criminals, the mentally ill, people with poor language abilities or low IQs), and in some narrow domains, the androids will be superhuman (e.g. – physical strength, memory, math abilities). Note that businesses will still find it better to employ task-specific, non-human-looking robots instead of general purpose androids.
By the end of this decade, only poor people, lazy people, and conspiracy theorists (like anti-vaxxers) won’t have their genomes sequenced. It will be trivially cheap, and in fact free for many people (some socialized health care systems will fully subsidize it), and enough will be known about the human genome to make it worthwhile to have the information.
Markets will become brutally competitive and efficient thanks to AIs. Companies will sharply grasp consumer demand through real-time surveillance, and consumers will be alerted to bargains by their personal AIs and devices (e.g. – your AR glasses will visually highlight good deals as you walk through the aisles of a store). Your personal assistant AIs and robots will look out for your self-interest by countering the efforts of other AIs to sway your spending habits in ways that benefit companies and not you.
“Digital immortality” will become possible for average people. Personal assistant AIs, robot servants, and other monitoring devices will be able, through observation alone, to create highly accurate personality profiles of individual humans, and to anticipate their behavior with high fidelity. Voices and mannerisms will be digitally reproducible without any hint of error. Digital simulacra of individual humans will be further refined by having them take voluntary personality tests, and by uploading their genomes, brain scans and other body scans. Even if all of the genetic and biological data couldn’t be made sense of at the moment it was uploaded to an individual’s digital profile, there will be value in saving it since it might be decipherable in the future.
Life expectancy will have increased by a few years thanks to pills and therapies that slightly extend human lifespan. Like, you take a $20 pill each day starting at age 20 and you end up dying at age 87 instead of age 84.
Global oil consumption will peak as people continue switching to other power sources.
Earliest possible date for the first manned Mars mission.
2040s
The world and peoples’ outlooks and priorities will be very different than they were in 2018. Cheap renewable energy will have become widespread and totally negated any worries about an “energy crisis” ever happening, except in exotic, hypothetical scenarios about the distant future. There will be little need for immigration thanks to machine labor and cross-border telecommuting. Moreover, there will be a strong sense in most Western countries that they’re already “diverse enough,” and that there are no further cultural benefits to letting in more foreigners since large communities of most foreign ethnic groups will already exist within their borders. There will be more need than ever for strong social safety nets and entitlement programs thanks to technological unemployment. AI will be a central political and social issue. It won’t be the borderline sci-fi, fringe issue it was in 2018.
Automation, mass unemployment, wealth inequalities between the owners of capital and everyone else, and differential access to expensive human augmentation technologies (such as genetic engineering) will produce overwhelming political pressure for some kind of wealth redistribution and social safety net expansion. Countries that have diligently made small, additive reforms as necessary over the preceding decades will be untroubled. However, countries that failed to adapt their political and economic systems will face upheaval.
2045 will pass without the Technological Singularity happening. Ray Kurzweil will either celebrate his 97th birthday in a wheelchair, or as a popsicle frozen at the Alcor Foundation.
With robots running the economy, it will be common for businesses to operate 24/7: restaurants never close, online orders made at 3:00 am are packed in boxes by 3:10 am, and autonomous delivery trucks only stop to refuel.
Advanced energy technology, robot servants, 3D printers, telepresence, and other technologies will allow people to live largely “off-grid” if they choose, while still enjoying a level of comfort that 2018 people would envy.
It will be common for cities, towns and states to heavily restrict or ban human-driven vehicles within their boundaries. A sea change in thinking happens as autonomous cars become accepted as “the norm,” and human-driven cars are thought of as unusual and dangerous.
2050s
This is the earliest possible time that AGI/SAI will be invented. It will not be able to instantly change everything in the world or to initiate a Singularity, but it will rapidly grow in intelligence, wealth, and power.
Humans will be heavily dependent upon their machines for almost everything (e.g. – friendship, planning the day, random questions to be answered, career advice, legal counseling, medical checkups, driving cars), and the dependency will be so ingrained that humans will reflexively assume that “The Machines are always right.” Consciously and unconsciously, people will yield more and more of their decision-making and opinion-forming to machines, and find that they and the world writ large are better off for it.
The doomsaying about Global Warming will start to quiet down as the world’s transition to clean energy hits full stride and predictions about catastrophes from people like Al Gore fail to pan out by their deadlines. Sadly, people will just switch to worrying about and arguing about some new set of doomsday prophecies about something else.
By almost all measures, standards of living will be better in 2050 than today. People will commonly have all types of wonderful consumer devices and appliances that we can’t even fathom. However, some narrow aspects of daily life are likely to worsen, such as overcrowding and further erosion of the human character. Just as people today have short memories and take too many things for granted, so shall people in the 2050s fail to appreciate how much the standard of living has risen since today, and they will ignore all the steady triumphs humanity has made over its problems, and by default, people will still believe the world is constantly on the verge of collapsing and that things are always getting worse.
Cities and their suburbs across the world will have experienced massive growth since 2018. Telepresence, relatively easy off-grid living, and technological unemployment will not, on balance, have driven more people out of metro areas than have migrated into them. Farming areas full of flat, boring land will have been depopulated, and many farms will be 100% automated. The people who choose to leave the metro areas for the “wilderness” will concentrate in rural areas (including national parks) where the climate is good, the natural scenery is nice, and there are opportunities for outdoor recreation.
Therapeutic cloning and stem cell therapies will become useful and will effectively extend human lifespan. For example, a 70-year-old with a failing heart will be able to have a new one grown in a lab using his own DNA, and then implanted into his chest to replace the failing original organ. The new heart will be equivalent to what he had when at age 18 years, so it will last another 52 years before it too fails. In a sense, this will represent age reversal to one part of his body.
Many factories, farms, and supply chains will be 100% automated, and it will be common for goods to not be touched by a human being’s hands until they reach their buyers. Robots will deliver Amazon packages to your doorstep or even carry them into your house.
2060s
China will effectively close the technological, military, and standard of living gaps with other developed countries. Aside from the unpleasantness of being a more crowded place, life in China won’t be worse overall than life in Japan or the average European country.
House robots and human-sized worker robots will be as strong, agile, and dexterous as most humans, and their batteries will be energy-dense enough to power them for most of the day. A typical American family might have multiple robot servants that physically follow around the humans each day to help with tasks.
If a manned Mars mission hasn’t happened yet, then there’s intense pressure to do so by the centennial of the first Moon landing (1969).
2100
Latest possible time that AGI/SAI will be invented. By this point, computer hardware will so powerful that we could do 1:1 digital simulations of human brains. If our AI still falls far short of human-like general intelligence and creativity, then it might be that only organic substrates have the necessary properties to support them.
Worst case scenario is that AGI/Strong AI hasn’t been invented yet, but thousands of different types of highly efficient, task-specific Narrow AIs have (often coupled to robot bodies), and they fill almost every labor niche better than human workers ever could (“Death by a Thousand Cuts” job automation scenario). Humans grow up in a world where no one has to work, and the notion of drudge work, suffering through a daily commute, and involuntarily waking up at 6:00 am five days a week is unfathomable. Every human will have machines that constantly monitor them or follow them around, and meet practically all their needs.
The world could in many ways resemble Ray Kurzweil’s predicted Post-Singularity world. However, the improvements and changes will have accrued thanks to decades of AGI/Strong AI steady effort. Everything will not instantly change on DD/MM/2045 as Kurzweil suggests it will.
Life expectancy escape velocity and perhaps medical immortality will be achieved. It will come not from magical, all-purpose nanomachines that fix all your body’s cells and DNA, but from a combination of technologies, including therapeutic cloning of human organs, cybernetic replacements for organs and limbs, and stem cell therapies that regenerate ageing tissues and organs inside the patient’s body. The treatments will be affordable in large part thanks to robot doctors and surgeons who work almost for free, and to medical patents expiring.
All other aspects of medicine and healthcare will have radically advanced. There will be vaccines and cures for almost all contagious diseases. We will be masters of human genetic engineering and know exactly how to produce people that today represent the top 1% of the human race (holistically combining IQ, genetic health, physical attractiveness, and likable/prosocial personality traits). However, the value of even a genius-IQ human will be questionable since intelligent machines will be so much smarter.
Augmentative cybernetics (including direct brain-to-computer links) will exist and be in common use.
FIVR exists wherein AI game masters constantly tailor environments, NPCs and events to suit each player’s needs and to keep them entertained. Every human has his own virtual game universe where he’s #1. With no jobs in the real world to occupy them, it’s quite possible that a large fraction of the human race will willingly choose to live in FIVR.
Unaugmented human beings will no longer be assets that can invent things and do useful work: they will be liabilities that do (almost) everything worse than intelligent machines and augmented humans. Ergo, the size of a nation’s human population will subtract from its economic and military power, and radical shifts in geopolitics are possible. Geographically large but sparsely populated countries like Russia, Australia and Canada might become very strong.
The transition to green energy sources will be complete, and humans will no longer be net emitters of greenhouse gases. The means will exist to start reducing global temperatures to restore the Earth to its pre-industrial state, but people will resist because they will have gotten used to the warmer climate. People living in Canada and Russia won’t want their countries to get cold again.
The means to radical alter human bodies, alter memories, and alter brain structures will be available.
Brain implants will make “telepathy” possible between humans, machines and animals.
Flying cars designed to carry humans could be common, but they will be flown by machines, not humans. Ground vehicles will retain many important advantages (fuel efficiency, cargo capacity, safety, noise level, and more) and won’t become obsolete.
Advanced nanomachines could exist.
Relatively cheap interplanetary travel (probably just to Mars and to space stations and moons that are about as far as Mars) will exist.
Androids that are outwardly indistinguishable from humans will exist, and humans will hold no advantages over them (e.g. – physical dexterity, fine motor control, appropriateness of facial expressions, capacity for creative thought).
Skip the first 15 minutes. Greg Brockman believes deep learning isn’t close to hitting the limits of what it can do, and its capabilities will continue radically improving thanks to better, faster hardware. By the end of 2018, he thinks machines will be able to generate artificial audio and video (like imitations of human voices and totally fake video footage) that humans won’t be able to distinguish from reality. Within five years, he thinks a breakthrough will happen in robotics, making them much more capable and practical for use. https://twimlai.com/twiml-talk-74-towards-artificial-general-intelligence-greg-brockman/
An article appeared on the front page of the NYT exposing a secret Pentagon program devoted to studying UFOs. It has evidence of UFOs doing impossible aerial maneuvers and anomalous physical materials recovered at UFO land/crash sites. As of the date of me writing this blog post, the Pentagon has not denied anything in the story. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html
Videos leaked from that UFO program’s trove, showing a 2004 encounter between U.S. fighter planes and a strange object off the coast of California. The pilots could see it with their eyes and it also showed up on their visioning sensors. https://www.yahoo.com/news/tom-delonge-takes-alien-research-215651746.html\
Humans are genetically programmed to believe bad news over good news, and are likelier to remember bad things. In opinion polls, this expresses itself as overestimation of metrics like the crime rate, incidence of terrorism, and incidence of poor health. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42329014
‘Public Health England says there is a large amount of evidence that shows e-cigarettes are much less harmful than smoking – at least 95%.’ http://www.bbc.com/news/health-42328236
What bad futurism looks like:
Article title: ‘2018 is when something finally gives on North Korea’
At the end of article: ‘It’s possible that a year from now not much will have changed: no war, no talks, no significant results from sanctions.’ https://qz.com/1157919/2018-is-when-something-finally-gives-on-north-korea/
‘“It is beyond me why we think an enemy [like North Korea] would waste a perfectly good nuclear weapon to experiment with a hypothetical EMP when they could destroy an actual city…EMP is a loony idea. Once an enemy uses a nuclear weapon — for any reason — it crosses the nuclear threshold and invites a nuclear response.”’ http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/expert-emp-weapons-are-loony-idea-23695
Bulgaria has to send its fighter planes to Russia for maintenance, even though the country is in NATO and would have to use those same aircraft to fight Russia someday. The underfunding and failure to get rid of Soviet-era hardware could be a disaster in a war. http://www.janes.com/article/76391/bulgaria-turns-to-russia-for-mig-29-logistics
Flying drones that are indistinguishable from birds would have great reconnaissance value to militaries. ‘Robirds use flapping wing flight as a means of propulsion, with a flight performance comparable to real birds.’ https://youtu.be/-gc8kBmzOOI
Google Maps has so comprehensively mapped the Earth’s surface that it’s moving on to cataloging the exact locations of exterior building doors and mailboxes. https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat
‘If you asked experts a few years ago when they expected this to happen, they’d have been likely to say in one or two decades. Earlier this year, some experts I polled had revised their forecast to within two to five years. But Martinis’s team at Google recently announced that they hope to achieve quantum supremacy by the end of this year.’ https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/technology/2017/12/how-quantum-computing-will-change-world
In the distant future, Earth prospers under a global, quasi-fascist oligarchy where only military veterans are allowed to vote or have political power. Earth’s military is enormous and is based around a fleet of large space warships that carry expeditionary soldiers called the “Mobile Infantry.” This force defends the expanding sphere of human civilization against a race of large, insect aliens nicknamed “the Arachnids.” After human colonists try to settle on an Arachnid planet, they retaliate by destroying the settlement and flinging an asteroid at Earth, destroying Buenos Aires and leading to all-out war between the two species.
The film focuses on the wartime experiences of Rico and his three friends, who all enroll in the military right after high school and quickly lose their innocence in the ensuing war. It is a classic bildungsroman tale, and though panned by most critics, is held in esteem for its entertainment value and satirical take on the fascist elements of American culture.
A date for the film’s events is not given, though we do have one clue. During the high school graduation dance party, a band performs a variation of David Bowie’s song “I’ve not been to Oxford Town.” The original song was released in 1995 and contained this stanza:
“But I have not been to Oxford Town
(All’s well)
But I have not been to Oxford Town
Toll the bell
Pay the private eye
(All’s well)
20th century dies”
The final line is understood to reference the rapidly approaching end of the 20th century.
The band performing at the high school graduation
The variant of the song we hear in Starship Troopers (which is entitled “I have not been to Paradise” and is on YouTube) has slightly modified that stanza:
“But I have not been to Paradise
(All’s well)
No I have not been to Paradise
Toll the bell
Pay the private eye
(All’s well)
23rd century dies”
Assuming the final line retains its significance, we can conclude that the movie’s events are set in the late 23rd century. For the sake of consistency, I’m going to say it happens in 2295, exactly 300 years after Bowie’s original song came out.
There will be megastuctures in space. During some of the space ship scenes, we see a manmade “ring” built around the Moon, which looks to serve as a giant military base and probably also a shipyard, and we also see a space fortress called “Fort Ticonderoga” whose width and height are measurable in miles considering how much it dwarfs the space ships. By 2295, it’s very possible we could have built megastructures in space like these. The key will be establishing self-sufficient space infrastructure first, along with the means to obtain raw materials from asteroids and low-gravity moons.
While building a 6,800-mile circumference ring around the Moon would be wasteful, a large space station or several smaller ones would make sense and could perform the same military and space ship dockyard functions at much lower cost. The Moon’s low gravity and nearly nonexistent atmosphere also make it well-suited for a space elevator, which could be used to cheaply transport raw materials mined from the surface into space, where they could be fashioned into space stations and ships.
Currently, we lack the infrastructure in space to build things there, and so we have to manufacture all of our satellites, space ships, and space stations on the Earth’s surface and then use rockets to put them in orbit, which is incredibly expensive (it costs $2,000 – $13,000 to get one kilogram of cargo into low Earth orbit, which is where the International Space Station is). Once we’re able to build things in space, from materials we find floating around in space, manufacture costs will sharply decrease, and we’ll be able to pay for things like huge space stations.
There will be many large space ships. The movie is filled with special effects shots of giant space warships flying around and attacking alien planets. As before, this is entirely plausible for 2295, and will be made possible by the same space-based manufacturing infrastructure that we’ll use to make space stations.
There will be space ships that can travel faster than the speed of light. The space ships in the film use something called a “Star Drive” to travel faster than light. This technology allows humans to spread outside our Solar System and to come into contact with the Arachnids. As I discussed in my review of the film Prometheus, the laws of physics say this is impossible, and I don’t think it’s useful to assume we’ll be able to figure out a way around them.
The military will still use human infantrymen. The film focuses on main character Juan Rico’s experiences in the “Mobile Infantry,” an expeditionary, ground fighting force similar to the U.S. Marines. Aside from their ability to move between planets on space ships and their access to nuclear bazookas, the Mobile Infantry’s technology, capabilities and tactics are stuck in the 20th century. In fact, their lack of armored vehicles, artillery, and close air support actually make their fighting force more rifleman-centric than most armies were in WWII, and some of the battles shown in the film are reminiscent of the high-casualty, “human wave” fighting of WWI.
This is a completely ridiculous vision of what the military and warfare will be like in 2295. Even making conservative assumptions about the rate of A.I. progress, human infantrymen will have been long replaced by machines, along with probably ALL other military positions, such as piloting space warships and doing logistical support. A fully automated or 95% automated military force could exist as early as 2095.
Guns will be big and clunky. The standard small arm of the Mobile Infantry is a large, boxy, gray rifle nicknamed the “Morita” (this was probably the name of its inventor or is a contrived military acronym that clumsily describes what it is), and it makes absolutely no sense as a weapon.
The Morita combines a bullpup layout (meaning the magazine is behind the hand grip) with an ultra-long barrel and extended fore-end, infusing the weapon with worst qualities of the bullpup and traditional rifle layouts and none of their strengths. The comically long barrel’s accuracy potential could have been a redeeming trait were it not completely wasted thanks to the guns lacking even simple iron sights. And instead of being sleek and skeletonized, the guns’ outer casings are blocky and thick. For example, the carry handles are completely solid slabs of metal, which is an egregious design flaw since a simple U-beam design would have cut weight without hurting the weapon in any meaningful way.
When your guns don’t even have BB gun iron sights, all you can do is spray and pray.
The Morita is an intimidating and vaguely futuristic-looking weapon that is actually inferior to most military rifles that were in use at the time Starship Troopers was filmed. It’s an interesting time capsule that depicts what people in the 1990s thought future guns would look like. In fact, the weapon that the Morita seems to have been based on, the French FAMAS assault rifle, is being removed from service and could be replaced by a derivative of the American AR-15, which was invented in the 1950s.
In the 20 years since Starship Troopers was released, gun design has in many ways gone in the opposite direction the filmmakers envisioned it would: Various militaries have discovered that the bullpup rifle layout is not better than the traditional layout overall (there are tradeoffs that cancel each other out) so bullpup rifles didn’t become more popular; gun designers focused on trimming weight and clumsy features like carry handles from existing models; and they redesigned the weapons to be sleeker and more customizable with accessories like flashlights and combat sights. And over that last 20 years, those accessories have miniaturized thanks to better technology and the demand to cut weight. In short, gun designs have converged on a handful of layouts that are mechanically optimal, and all of the R&D effort is now focused on tweaking them in small ways to wring out the last bit of efficiency and performance.
It wouldn’t make sense for people in the future to abandon the principles of good engineering by making highly inefficient guns like the Morita. To the contrary, future guns will, just like every other type of manufactured object, be even more highly optimized for their functions thanks to AI: Just create a computer simulation that exactly duplicates conditions in the real world (e.g. – gravity, all laws of physics, air pressure, physical characteristics of all metals and plastics the device could be built from), let “AI engineers” experiment with all possible designs, and then see which ones come out on top after a few billion simulation cycles. I strongly suspect the winners will be very similar to guns we’ve already built, but sleeker and lighter thanks to the deletion of unnecessary mass and to the use of materials with better strength-to-weight ratios.
Projectile weapons will still be used in combat. It’s 2295…SO WHERE THE HELL ARE THE RAY GUNS? I’m no expert in lasers or particle weapons, but I imagine that the technology will become practical for routine military use in the next 278 years. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll make kinetic energy weapons obsolete, particularly for close-range combat with lightly armored or unarmored opponents. A weapon that can kill a horse-sized, frenzied opponent by propelling a few tiny pieces of metal into its brain in under a second might be a better tool for the job than a laser.
Projectile weapons also have important, inherent advantages that militate against them ever becoming obsolete: Projectiles like bullets are minimally affected by atmospheric conditions (lasers can’t penetrate clouds or fog), can follow curved trajectories to hit targets hiding behind solid objects (lasers only travel in straight lines), and can carry payloads (explosives, poison) that render some secondary, specialized destructive effect to the target. And unless the laws of physics change in the future, smashing solid objects into other things at high speed will be a reliable way of destroying them until the end of time.
Moreover, while I think the average human being in 2295 will be heavily enhanced through genetics and artificial technologies, I doubt we’ll find ways to upgrade their skin and flesh to be bullet proof. Bullets, knives, baseball bats, and fists will still hurt them. Also, I don’t see how wild animals made of organic tissue like the Arachnids could have bulletproof bodies: no animals on Earth have shells, bones, or skulls that are too hard for our bullets to penetrate, and even if the Arachnids had exoskeletons that were twice as hard as, say, elephant skulls, we could pierce them by using larger bullets.
So, even in 2295, I think it’s plausible that projectile weapons will still be used in combat, alongside more advanced weapons like lasers. Handheld weapons that shoot out bullets could still be the weapons of choice for killing humans and other organic life forms in many circumstances. However, it’s possible the guns of the future might use something aside from gunpowder–such as electromagnetism–to propel their bullets, which wouldn’t make them “firearms.”
Some people will have missing limbs. Rico’s high school teacher and later, his unit commander, is a middle-aged man who is missing one of his arms and sometimes wears a mechanical prosthesis. Another man working a military desk job is also missing his arm and both legs. It’s strongly implied that the missing limbs were war wounds both men suffered during earlier military service.
This is completely unrealistic. By 2295, it should be possible to regrow human limbs and organs through therapeutic cloning, and to surgically graft them into people, with no chance of rejection. Seeing a physically disabled person who had a missing limb or was confined to a wheelchair will be as rare and as strange to people in 2295 as seeing someone trapped in an iron lung is to us today.
Some people will have advanced mechanical prostheses. As stated, Rico’s high school teacher sometimes wears a mechanical arm over his stump. It is clearly artificial, being made of articulated metal segments, but it somehow interfaces with his nervous and musculoskeletal system well enough to give him the same level of fine motor control over it that he has over his biological arm.
ARMed and dangerous!
Cybernetic limbs like this should be available by 2295, but due to human aesthetics, I doubt many people will want to get ones that are mechanical in appearance. People will prefer artificial parts that are warm, supple, and natural in appearance (recall Will Smith’s fake arm in I, Robot). I imagine some people would want to take this preference “all the way” by getting truly natural, 100% biological replacement limbs made through therapeutic cloning.
There will be bald people. Rico’s teacher, his basic training camp commandant, and several extras in the film had male-pattern baldness. A combination of things will have completely eradicated hair loss well before 2295, such as widespread genetic engineering, and cloning of hair follicles for implantation on balding parts of the scalp. Seeing a bald person in 2295 will be like seeing a person with cleft palate today: the presence of such an easily correctable condition will signal the person was deprived of access to medical care, or that they chose to live with the condition to visibly set themselves apart from the mainstream, possibly to adhere to arcane personal values.
Loud, low flying aircraft will fly around cities. Early in the film, there’s a brief moment where we see the futuristic skyline of Buenos Aires, and two fast-moving aircraft fly by at the same height as the skyscrapers, making jet-like roaring noises.
On the one hand, having loud aircraft fly low over crowded cities is a fly in the ointment for Starship Troopers’ portrayal of an orderly and comfortable future. Loud noises–whether from aircraft or anything else–disturb people, so it would stand to reason that, by 2295, more laws would be in place against them. NIMBYism only gets stronger as people get richer and get more free time to focus on less critical things.
But on the other hand, that is based on the assumption that future cities will be full of human beings. Intelligent machines wouldn’t have the same finicky senses that we do, so loud noises wouldn’t bother them, and low-flying aircraft might be far more common than today. In fact, machines could be perfectly comfortable in a wide variety of environments that humans would find intolerable, like an Earth saturated with toxic air pollution, a 20-degree hotter Earth ravaged by global warming, a pitch black Earth as featured in The Matrix, an Earth covered in piles of skulls and sad ruined buildings as shown in The Terminator, or an extraterrestrial environment where humans couldn’t survive for multiple reasons.
I don’t think intelligent machines are definitely going to kill off the human race, or even probably going to, but for sure it’s a possible outcome we could face by 2295. Another scenario is a hostile machine takeover of Earth that stops short of exterminating our species: Once defeated on the battlefield, disarmed, forced to sign the surrender papers, and evicted from the best places, the machines would ignore us unless we got in their way, and we’d scrape out some kind of existence on the margins. This is analogous to how humans today treat wild animals: we rarely think of them even though they’re all around us, we don’t help them even though we could make their lives much better at low cost, we don’t kill them unless they get in our way, and we don’t bother to consider how our activities affect them. If a property developer plans to bulldoze some woods to make a strip mall, he doesn’t first count the number of ant hills or squirrels that are there and try to recompense them.
In that “Second Class Citizen” future scenario (or maybe “Machine Dictatorship” scenario), it would be common for intelligent machines to do careless things that humans considered obnoxious, like flying loud aircraft low over human areas.
We will use nuclear weapons in wars against aliens. One of the Mobile Infantry’s weapons is a small nuclear missile launched out of a bazooka. In one instance, we see such a weapon used to blow up a crowd of Arachnids in an open area, and in two others scenes it is used to collapse the Arachnids’ underground tunnels.
In a real war with aliens, particularly if we felt our species’ survival was at stake, I have no doubt we would use nuclear weapons or any other type of weapon of mass destruction like germs and poison gas. Unless we had prior diplomatic dealings with them, there wouldn’t be any treaties like the Geneva Conventions to stop us. Moreover, if the fighting were happening in space and other planets, we could use WMDs without fear of contaminating our own biosphere or exposing our civilian populations to collateral damage. These factors would impel us to use other weapons and tactics that are today banned under international law, such as exploding bullets, and torture of prisoners.
Whether or not shoulder-launched, mini-nuclear missiles will come into common use by 2295 is unanswerable, though let me point out that it’s technically feasible. In fact, the U.S. first built these types of weapons, called “Davy Crockett Weapon Systems,” in the late 1950s. While those weapons were too big for anyone but a professional bodybuilder to fire from the shoulder, it’s likely they could be miniaturized with better technology without sacrificing their explosive yield.
The Davy Crockett nuclear launcher
If we actually fought with aliens like the Arachnids in 2295, we would be smart enough to recognize the gross inefficiency of sending in humans equipped with relatively weak guns, and we’d pick weapons and tactics better-suited for the task. Biological weapons that the Arachnids would spread among themselves, heavier-than-air poison gas that would sink down their tunnel networks, and combat drones that the Arachnids wouldn’t be able to effectively fight back against (e.g. – fast, pigeon-sized flying drone programmed to land on an Arachnid head and then detonate a shaped charge into its brain/nerve bundle) seem like the best ways of doing it, and don’t require us to make any leaps in our thinking about military technology. The same iterative process of optimizing guns in computer simulations that I described earlier would be used to quickly develop weapons, tactics, and strategies best suited for defeating the Arachnids.
Human colonies will exist on Earth-like planets outside our solar system. Early in the film, a news broadcast announces that a colony of Mormons living on an Arachnid planet were all killed by the aliens. Gory footage of a small, walled town full of mutilated bodies follows. It’s possible human colonies could exist on Earth-like planets outside our solar system by 2295.
Consider that the “Project Longshot” analysis make a semi-credible case that a fusion-powered spacecraft could be built, could accelerate to 12% of the speed of light, and could reach our closest celestial neighbor, Alpha Centauri, in 100 years. Astronomers haven’t spotted Earth-like planets in the Alpha Centauri system yet, but there’s no reason to rule out the possibility of their existence.
Working backwards, if we assume a small human colony is established on an Earth-like planet in Alpha Centauri in 2295, and the journey took 100 years, then we will have acquired the ability to make large, fusion-powered space ships by 2195. That’s not an unreasonable prediction.
We will have encountered non-microscopic, non-technological aliens. The antagonists in Starship Troopers are “the Arachnids,” a society of large, ferocious, alien insects of different species that live together in hives and are led by small numbers of intelligent “Brain Bugs.”
I don’t think anything remotely resembling the Arachnids exists in our Solar System, but it’s possible they could in other star systems. By 2295, we’ll have extremely powerful space telescopes that will have identified all of the exoplanets around our neighboring stars, and we’ll have received even better imagery from our interstellar probes.
Again, assuming that Arachnids live within seven light years of us, and we get advanced enough to build space ships that can reach 12% of the speed of light by the late 2100s, then Earth could know about the Arachnids’ existence by 2295. Enough time would have passed for our interstellar probes to reach the Arachnid planet and transmit a report back to Earth.
Humans will be telepathic. A minor element in the film is the existence of telepathy in a small minority of humans. One of Rico’s friends, Carl, is a telepath, and late in the film he uses his special ability to implant a thought in Rico’s mind, and to read the thoughts of a captured Brain Bug. People will have telepathic abilities like these by 2295, though they will exist thanks to computer brain implants and not to natural ability.
Government commercial encouraging psychics to come forward
Science has proven that psychic abilities such as telepathy, clairvoyance (seeing the future), and telekinesis (moving objects through thought alone) don’t exist. However, there’s no scientific barrier to creating devices like brain implants or hats that could monitor the brain’s activity to decipher a person’s thoughts or emotions. Furthermore, there’s no barrier to giving such devices wireless communication capabilities, thus allowing people to communicate with each other through thought alone. I discussed this in some depth in my Prometheus review (“Machines will be able to read human thoughts…”), and as such won’t go into more depth.
Without getting too sappy, let me say that widespread use of this kind of technology could have profound consequences for our civilization, as it could bridge the man-machine divide and inaugurate an age of close empathy between humans and even animals. Linking the thoughts, emotions, and sensations of individual beings would make misunderstandings and miscommunications much rarer, and might make cruelty and dishonesty impossible. Using technology to create such a world might be a greater accomplishment than going to other star systems.
Death figures from natural disasters will be immediately known. One of the film’s pivotal events is Buenos Aires being destroyed by an asteroid purportedly hurled at Earth by the Arachnids. The main character, Juan Rico, is a native of that city and is speaking with his parents (who still live there) via videoconference from a different location at the moment of impact. Rico doesn’t understand why the video feed suddenly goes black, but less than two minutes later, he sees a TV news broadcast showing live footage of the flaming city, along with banner text that says over 8.7 million people were killed. The personal tragedy is a pivotal event in Rico’s young life, and it convinces him to complete his military training and to swear revenge against the aliens.
Today, when a natural disaster happens, it takes days or even weeks to account for the dead, but by 2295, I think the tallies could be compiled within minutes, as happened in the film. By 2295, every structure on our planet will be cataloged in great detail in something like a hyperrealistic “Google Maps,” almost every corner of the planet will be under constant surveillance of some sort (video, audio, seismic, etc.), and almost everybody will wear or have implanted in them devices that track their locations and life signs. All of the different data sources will be cobbled together to make a nearly 1:1 digital simulation of the entire planet, where every building and every person was accurately represented, in real time. Most “blind spots” in the data could be inferred with high accuracy. Without a doubt, artificial intelligences would be monitoring the network and rapidly analyzing the data.
As such, if a meteor hit a city, or if any other type of sudden disaster happened, the physical and human destruction could be determined almost instantly.
Helicopter-sized craft will be able to fly back and forth between the Earth’s surface and space. The Mobile Infantry use relatively small “drop ships” to ferry soldiers between the massive space warships and the surfaces of the different Arachnid planets. The drop ships are faintly aircraft-like in appearance and have layouts reminiscent of the Sikorsky CH-54 helicopters: the fuselage is a minimalist “spine” that connects the cockpit to the drive systems and landing gear, and it has mounting points for detachable cargo containers. There are large drop ships that can carry detachable cargo containers full of 30 – 40 people, and smaller drop ships that can only carry 10 people. They appear the roughly the same size as today’s CH-47 and UH-60 helicopters, respectively. All of the alien planets the drop ships are shown flying in and out of appear to have gravity very close to Earth’s (e.g. – dropped objects fall at the normal speed and humans can’t jump way in the air). Ergo, the movie posits that, by the year 2295, helicopter-sized craft that are mostly full of empty space and stuff other than fuel and engine components, will be able to take off from the Earth’s surface, reach space, and achieve at least a medium Earth orbit.
One of the smaller drop ships
I doubt this will happen because it’s impossible to cram enough chemical rocket fuel into a helicopter-sized craft to propel it into space. Let’s assume that the larger Starship Troopers drop ship weighs the same as a CH-47, which is 40,000 lbs. Today, it would take a Delta IV Heavy rocket to get a payload of that weight into medium Earth orbit. The launch vehicle is 236 feet high and contains 1 MILLION lbs of rocket fuel. Additionally, the Delta IV Heavy uses liquid hydrogen (H2), which is the most energy-dense type of chemical fuel known to exist. It’s implausible to assume we’ve overlooked some kind of superfuel that is, say, 20 times as energy-dense as H2, so there’s no way the drop ships could fly into space using any kind of combustible propellant in their internal fuel tanks.
A much larger drop ship–perhaps the size of the Prometheus space ship–might be able to fly off the Earth’s surface on its own using chemical rocket power, simply thanks to having more internal volume for fuel storage. Of course, this would make for weirder action scenes, with each drop ship being as big as a mansion but only carrying ten men.
A CH-47 can hold up to 33 troops, which looked to be the same capacity as the larger Starship Troopers drop ships
The only way a helicopter-sized, single-stage craft MIGHT be able to reach space is if it had miniaturized, nuclear fusion-powered rockets, which is one of those things that is on the very edge of the edge of what scientists think might be possible to build someday. The perennial comeback to skeptics of fusion power is that the Sun is proof of concept, but the perennial comeback to that is that fusion power has been 50 years away and always will be. No one can say at this point, so I think it’s safer to say helicopter-sized drop ships won’t exist in 2295, but mansion-sized ones will.
“Compounding the pain for the N.S.A. is the attackers’ regular online public taunts, written in ersatz broken English. Their posts are a peculiar mash-up of immaturity and sophistication, laced with profane jokes but also savvy cultural and political references. They suggest that their author — if not an American — knows the United States well.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/us/nsa-shadow-brokers.html
“The archives were found by veteran security breach hunter UpGuard’s Chris Vickery during a routine scan of open Amazon-hosted data silos, and these ones weren’t exactly hidden. The buckets were named centcom-backup, centcom-archive, and pacom-archive.” https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/17/us_military_spying_archive_exposed/
Getting you genome sequenced now costs less than $2,000, but prices haven’t dropped in several years. It still isn’t worth the money for most people since we can’t make sense of what it means. https://www.genome.gov/sequencingcostsdata/
The ethical concerns about cloning are almost entirely baseless.
FYI, some mammal species are harder to clone than others because of their reproductive cycles and chromosome structures. Sheep and cats are easy, but apes and humans are very hard. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42066629
An excellent lecture. Deep learning is being overhyped, and by itself will never lead to artificial general intelligence. A.I. research probably needs ten times as much funding as it is getting, spread out across different labs approaching the problem from totally different directions. https://youtu.be/7dnN3P2bCJo
Humans still reign supreme over machines in Starcraft 2. I couldn’t find videos of any of the matches, but I suspect most of the Norwegian AI’s astonishing-sounding 19,000 actions per minute (a world-class human player might do 200 actions per minute) were thanks to the machine ordering its units to do useless things like run around in random, constantly changing patterns. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609242/humans-are-still-better-than-ai-at-starcraftfor-now/
‘The twin challenges of too much quantity and too little quality are rooted in the finite neurological capacity of the human mind. Scientists are deriving hypotheses from a smaller and smaller fraction of our collective knowledge and consequently, more and more, asking the wrong questions, or asking ones that have already been answered.’ https://aeon.co/ideas/science-has-outgrown-the-human-mind-and-its-limited-capacities
Say what you will about Tulsa, Oklahoma, but they’ve enacted outstanding land use laws to minimize the occurrence and damage caused by flooding. Basically, no one can build houses in flood-prone areas, and the city instead builds things like public parks and soccer fields there. Higher sea levels and more frequent floods does not have to mean more deaths. https://www.npr.org/2017/11/20/564317854/how-tulsa-became-a-model-for-preventing-floods
Human adaptation to biodiversity loss is also feasible: “Thirty to 40 percent of species may be threatened with extinction in the near future, and their loss may be inevitable. But both the planet and humanity can probably survive or even thrive in a world with fewer species. We don’t depend on polar bears for our survival, and even if their eradication has a domino effect that eventually affects us, we will find a way to adapt. The species that we rely on for food and shelter are a tiny proportion of total biodiversity, and most humans live in — and rely on — areas of only moderate biodiversity, not the Amazon or the Congo Basin.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/we-dont-need-to-save-endangered-species-extinction-is-part-of-evolution/2017/11/21/57fc5658-cdb4-11e7-a1a3-0d1e45a6de3d_story.html
An environmentalist professor, Mark Jacobson, who published an absurd article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claiming that the U.S. could switch to 100% clean energy by 2050 is suing other professors that wrote a joint rebuttal article. His actions are not going over well in the scientific community. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/11/03/when-scientists-sue-scientists/
An interesting idea. And if Bitcoin goes extinct, you could rent your server to anyone who needed to do computation (for stuff like protein folding, processing computer game graphics, etc). Two problems though: 1) The economics of this idea are murky since the server would need to be replaced at significant expense every few years as its hardware became obsolete and 2) if everyone had a computer server space heater, then the global supply of server capacity for rent would wildly fluctuate with the seasons. Since most people live in temperate parts of the Northern Hemisphere, available server capacity would spike in the winter and shrivel away in the summer. http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2017/11/08/bitcoin-mining-space-heater/
The smartest type of smart home might have only a few smart, centralized components monitoring many dumb ones. Trying to make every appliance and feature in a house smart is actually dumb.
“The level of detail smart breakers look at is impressive. Mr Holmquist says that his can, for example, measure the revolutions-per-minute of the compressor in a refrigerator. Not only would this let an app monitor how hard the appliance is working, it could also give warning if that appliance was about to break down.” https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21731610-old-fuse-box-gets-new-lease-life-smart-circuit-breakers
Bird tracking devices weighing only a gram will exist soon, allowing smaller birds to be tagged. What happens someday when we have pellet-sized tracking implants that cost almost nothing, and robots that can do the work of implanting them in animals for free? https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/11/where-the-birds-go/545945/
From my “Rules for good futurism”: A prediction can be wrong in its specifics, but right in principle. “But if Second Life promised a future in which people would spend hours each day inhabiting their online identity, haven’t we found ourselves inside it? Only it’s come to pass on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter instead.” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/second-life-leslie-jamison/544149/
He’s totally right that 1) most “news” content is garbage designed to be consumed instantly and forgotten within days, 2) reading news articles that are several months old is an invaluable tool for seeing just how much garbage is really garbage, and 3) it takes time and a trained mind to recognize garbage without the benefit of hindsight. https://qz.com/1117962/advice-on-how-to-read-from-a-professor-whose-job-is-to-predict-the-future/
Some rare, creative thinking. “Perhaps hyper-advanced life isn’t just external. Perhaps it’s already all around. It is embedded in what we perceive to be physics itself, from the root behavior of particles and fields to the phenomena of complexity and emergence.” http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/is-physical-law-an-alien-intelligence
I just figured out how robots are going to kill us all in the future. “A baby-aspirin-size amount of powdered toxin is enough to make the global supply of Botox for a year…The LD50 for it in humans is estimated at about 2 nanograms/kilo i.v., 10 nanograms/kilo by inhalation.” http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/11/06/theres-toxicity-and-theres-toxicity
Stephen Hawking doesn’t think he’s the smartest person alive, and he thinks people who boast about their high IQs are “losers.” https://youtu.be/4lwFK1ImzcA
Do a YouTube search for “how to set a mouse trap”. The earliest video I found was uploaded in 2006–only two years after YouTube was invented–and is perfectly clear. Since then, probably hundreds more instructional videos of this simple task have also been uploaded to the service, the most recent appearing a week ago. What’s the value-add to the videos made after 2006? How much of the ongoing “exponential growth in digital content” is totally redundant?
The Original: https://youtu.be/QBVOFY7SDOg
The (latest) Reboot: https://youtu.be/0xriqCJKgYM
I’ve decided to make a detailed list of rules for judging the credibility of futurists and their predictions. You might notice it re-uses some content from past blog posts of mine. For obvious reasons, I think it’s better to have it all in one place.
From now on, I intend to follow these rules when making my own predictions or when judging those made by others. Having a strong process for this is important enough to me that, if I ever make changes to it, I will dedicate a new blog entry to it, and I’ll repost the entire list just to keep it at the forefront. Remember, I am a “Militant” futurist because I’m a stickler for rigor and process.
Never unquestioningly believe anyone else’s predictions, even if the person making them is famous, smart and seems to know what they’re talking about. Always be skeptical and do the following:
Ensure that the person’s education and professional credentials are relevant to their predictions. A useful measure of a scientist’s area of and level of expertise is the quantity and quality of the peer-reviewed papers they have produced. Example: A scientist with a Nobel prize for work in human biochemistry predicts a nuclear war will happen within ten years. His C.V. shows he lacks any training or accomplishments in fields relevant to the prediction, like foreign policy or nuclear proliferation.
Be suspicious when experts have conflicts of interest that may bias their opinions and predictions. Example: A tech tycoon claims at an open shareholders meeting that his company’s electric car output will increase 500% over the next year. The tycoon owns most of his company’s stock and will profit if people believe his prediction and bid up the stock price.
Remember that experts whose theories fall far outside the scientific mainstream are usually (but not always) wrong. Example: A well-credentialed government climatologist writes an academic journal paper predicting the Earth will soon start cooling down because his newly-developed climate model shows that a “negative feedback loop” is triggered once the Earth’s surface temperatures rise to a certain level. Debates within the scientific community about the accuracy of his model are too complex for non-experts to understand and judge for themselves. Only a small minority of his colleagues say it is accurate.
Be very suspicious of scientists and other experts who feel aggrieved or persecuted by the mainstream of their professions. If an expert with an outlier theory or prediction also believes there is a conspiracy against him or her, it should raise a red flag in your mind. Example: An economist who became a multimillionaire through skillful investing and by starting his own financial companies claims on the internet that the banking system is about to collapse, that officials in the government and Wall Street are colluding to conceal the impeding disaster, and that some of his recent business setbacks are due to clandestine retaliation from the powerful men he’s been trying to expose.
Be skeptical of predictions that are unsupported by independently verifiable data. Example: A trained geneticist and retired head of the world’s biggest fertility clinic says that Gattaca-level human genetic engineering will exist in five years thanks to rapid growth in our knowledge of genetics and in the power of our gene editing tools. He provides no documentation that either is improving at the necessary rates (perhaps he claims to have seen secret, proprietary data). Other experts who are familiar with the germane scientific literature and technology say the prediction is far too optimistic, and that it’s implausible any private group could have secret research and technology so far beyond what is publicly available.
Be very skeptical of predictions that hinge on future discoveries that fundamentally change the laws of science. Example: A visionary director makes a film set in the future where people have flying cars that float thanks to some kind of anti-gravity technology as opposed to helicopter rotors or some other device that blows air downward. During promotional interviews, he proudly says that he thinks his movie will prove accurate. When the film is released, all theories and observations about gravity and its mechanics suggest that it can’t be manipulated using any kind of technology, and that no anti-gravity force exists.
While you’re free to listen to and analyze predictions made by anyone, it’s a better use of time to focus on predictions made by people who have made accurate forecasts in the past. Having such a track record also helps satisfy the“[relevant] education and professional credentials” requirement mentioned earlier.However, determining how accurately a person has predicted the future can be a more complex task than it sounds, and I recommend keeping these pointers in mind:
You can be right thanks to luck alone, and “a stopped clock is right twice a day.” Example: An economist who has written several bestselling books about real estate investing correctly predicted in 2005 that the U.S. real estate market was about to peak in value and would then crash a year later. However, in earlier books, articles, and public comments, he made the same predictions for 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004. He is now hailed by some as an “expert” in real estate market trends thanks to his correct 2005 prediction and is routinely interviewed on financial news shows.
A prediction can be wrong in its specifics, but right in principle. Example: In 1998, a futurist predicts that, by the year 2009, average people will commonly wear small computers and sensors that will be integrated into their jewelry, clothing, wallets, and other worn accessories, and that those devices will work together through LANs. 2009 comes to an end without this materializing, but not because the devices proved too expensive or technologically infeasible to build: Rather, consumers opted to buy single devices–smartphones–that performed all of the same functions.
Don’t penalize futurists for the disruptive effects of Black Swan events. Example: A well-regarded historian and political scientist writes a book in the late 1990s predicting that the prosperity and global dominance America enjoyed that decade will last about another 20 years, when China will get strong enough to challenge it. Shortly after that, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and a peculiarly inept U.S. administration plunge the U.S. into a series of costly military campaigns that hurt its economy, morale and global influence, and distract it from China.
