Interesting articles, January 2020

Even with access to less patient info, a computer program is better at detecting breast cancer in mammograms than human radiologists.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-50857759

The U.S. cancer death rate fell 2.2% in 2017, mostly thanks to lower smoking rates, but also due to real improvements in cancer treatments.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/01/08/big-news-in-cancer-versus-big-talk
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/01/10/cancer-by-the-numbers

U.S. life expectancy slightly rose in 2018, mostly due to a drop in lethal drug overdoses.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/30/801016600/life-expectancy-rose-slightly-in-2018-as-drug-overdose-deaths-fell

There’s a new surgery that might delay menopause in women by years.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51269237

Lab studies prove that there are consistent, statistically significant differences between male and female personality traits. If you are given a written description of an anonymous person’s personality profile and no information about their sex, you could correctly guess their sex 85% of the time.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/taking-sex-differences-in-personality-seriously/

A new study finds that just one dose of magic mushrooms can ease anxiety and depression problems for up to four and a half years.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/28/health/magic-mushrooms-psilocybin-cancer-patients-study-wellness/index.html

Russia has its own, closed universe of academic journal publishing, and it was just rocked by a massive fraud scandal.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/russian-journals-retract-more-800-papers-after-bombshell-investigation

The cost of sequencing a human genome sharply dropped between 2007 and 2012. However, since 2015, there has been no further decrease. The reason is unclear, but might owe to market forces rather than technological roadblocks.
http://enseqlopedia.com/2019/06/will-1000-genome-celebrate-5th-birthday/#comments

Thanks to genetic quirks, there are some people who can’t feel physical or emotional pain, or who only feel them weakly. Would we all be better off like that?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/a-world-without-pain

Genes have been found that control how good fatty foods taste to people. I suspect that this lends further support to the theory that obesity is partly genetic, since it means some people crave fatty foods more than others.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.18.910448v1

If being smart is good, and being tall is attractive, and both traits are largely genetic, then why isn’t the whole human race very smart and tall thanks to people like that outbreeding everyone else over the course of human history?
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/12/29/variation-in-general-intelligence-and-our-evolutionary-history/

“So it appears that the [frog egg] cell contents, when totally mixed, are able to roughly reconstitute themselves into units that are about the size of cells, contain the appropriate subcellular fractions, and can go through some of the most important cellular processes.”
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/01/21/unscrambled-eggs

It only took 12 years and $40 million, but researchers have successfully mapped a whopping 1/3 of the fruit fly’s tiny brain circuitry!
https://www.wired.com/story/most-complete-brain-map-ever-is-here-a-flys-connectome/

Only a year after construction started, Tesla’s massive “Gigafactory 3” is finished and is mass-producing electric cars in China.
https://apnews.com/5d8c1e4f40ab2d26ca37d566ae3641e4

U.S. greenhouse gas emissions fell by 2.1% in 2019, mostly because several coal power plants closed.
https://rhg.com/research/preliminary-us-emissions-2019/

The “Crescent Dunes” solar power plant, which uses mirrors to focus reflected sunlight on a container to boil molten salt, made sense at the time it was conceived, but now costs more to operate than photovoltaic solar power plants.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-06/a-1-billion-solar-plant-was-obsolete-before-it-ever-went-online

A team at Stanford built and flew a drone modeled after a pigeon. It had movable wings and actual pigeon feathers embedded in it. It will make sense to copy many of the anatomical and physiological features of animals when making some future drones and robots.
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/16/796786350/pigeonbot-brings-robots-closer-to-bird-like-flight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjN7nXVBiwk

In the 2000s, there were some interesting proposals to upgrade the Space Shuttle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi7wtXcaFws

To transport humans into space, Elon Musk had to prove to NASA that his SpaceX rockets could automatically eject their crew capsules if the rockets exploded during liftoff. The crew capsule is the very top part of the rocket. With the test passed, SpaceX might be launching humans into space by the end of this year.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-exploration-spacex/spacex-capsule-splashes-down-off-florida-after-rocket-failure-test-idUSKBN1ZI054

A huge amount of radiation hits Mars’ surface because the planet’s atmosphere is too thin to block it. Mars colonists would have higher cancer rates and would have to spend most of their time underground. (Intelligent machines, on the other hand, could easily live there.)
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/death-on-mars1/

An Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of a star 101 light years away.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7569

Wouldn’t emotionally intelligent AIs be useful to everybody and not just astronauts on long space missions?
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615044/an-emotionally-intelligent-ai-could-support-astronauts-on-a-trip-to-mars/

The first tablet computer went on sale in 1993. It failed.
https://www.inputmag.com/features/fax-on-the-beach-the-story-of-atts-eo-communicator-90s-ipad-flop

In “Decimal Time,” there are ten hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour, and 100 seconds in a minute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time

Robots are getting better at sorting merchandise in warehouses.
https://dnyuz.com/2020/01/29/a-warehouse-robot-learns-to-sort-out-the-tricky-stuff/

Several “robot restaurants” in San Francisco that opened with fanfare have recently shut down.
https://apnews.com/398c50db6df5dcd26f6fdc55d18e0c43

“Widespread AI and autonomous systems could lead to inadvertent escalation and crisis instability. Decisions made at machine rather than human speeds also have the potential to escalate crises at machine speeds. During protracted crises and conflicts, there could be strong incentives for each side to use autonomous capabilities early and extensively to gain military advantage. This raises the possibility of first-strike instability. AI and autonomous systems also have the potential to reduce strategic stability between adversaries and make the use of force more likely as they lower the risks to military personnel.”
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2797.html

From Samuel Huntington’s famous 1993 Clash of Civilizations essay: “[H]ow might war between the United States and China develop? Assume the year is 2010. American troops are out of Korea, which has been reunified, and the United States has a greatly reduced military presence in Japan.”
https://www.stetson.edu/artsci/political-science/media/clash.pdf

In 2006, Bill Clinton predicted that oil would someday run out, and the world would be like the Mad Max movies in 100 years.
http://archive.altweeklies.com/aan/transcript-of-clintons-speech-now-available/Article?oid=166649

Quantum computer scientist Hartmut Neven predicted that quantum supremacy would be achieved by the end of 2019. He was right.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-nevens-law-describe-quantum-computings-rise-20190618/

‘You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.’

Recall a prediction of mine: ‘By [2030], photos of almost every living person will be available online (mostly on social media). Apps will exist that can scan through trillions of photos to find your doppelgangers.’
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html

A list of old sci-fi books that were set in the 2020s:
https://onezero.medium.com/how-science-fiction-imagined-the-2020s-f8e98a5bc729

The movie Pacific Rim was set this year. Here’s a cool video explaining the (practically insurmountable) engineering challenges to building gigantic fighting robots:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc8zDUC6hIc

China’s PISA test scores are high because it only lets students in the richest and most advanced parts of its country take the tests.
https://www.the74million.org/article/schneider-the-strange-case-of-china-and-its-top-pisa-rankings-how-cherry-picking-regions-to-take-part-skews-its-high-scores/

DARPA is testing out flying drones called “Gremlins” that are launched from and recovered by larger planes during flight. The drones are cheap and could perform many types of missions.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31882/watch-darpas-air-launched-and-air-recovered-gremlins-drone-take-its-first-flight

Panicky over a military standoff with the U.S., Iran accidentally shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane in its airspace, killing 176 people. The Iranian government initially lied about its actions before coming clean. Many of its citizens protested in disgust.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/01/17/iran-shot-down-ukrainian-plane-how-did-ukraine-respond/

America’s “Doolittle Raid” against Tokyo is well-known, but the Soviet Union’s counterpart bombing raid on Berlin isn’t:
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/soviet-bombing-of-berlin.html

Not long after the first atom bomb was invented, someone got the idea to use them against ships. Ironically, the subsequent nuclear tests revealed that warships were better at resisting nuclear blast damage than they were at resisting the radioactivity. Many of the ships sank thanks to slow leaks caused by damage that would have been repairable had human crewmen been able to work without risk of lethal radioactivity levels. On some of the ships, the radioactivity was practically impossible to clean off.
https://www.navalgazing.net/Operation-Crossroads

My future predictions (2020 iteration)

If it’s January, it means it’s time for me to update my big list of future predictions! I used the 2019 version of this document as a template, and made edits to it as needed. For the sake of transparency, I’ve indicated recently added content by bolding it, and have indicated deleted or moved content with strikethrough.

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 arrays, 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.
  • This will be a bad decade for Russia as its overall population shrinks, its dependency ratio rises, and as low fossil fuel prices and sanctions keep hurting its economy. Russia will fall farther behind the U.S., China, and other leading countries in terms of economic, military, and technological might.
  • 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.
  • Foldable smartphones will enter mass production, though it’s uncertain how much the market will embrace them. These phones will have one, rigid screen on their “front cover,” and one, flexible screen that is twice as big spanning their inner space. [Deleted because this prediction came true in 2019]
  • Improvements to smartphone cameras, mirrorless cameras, and perhaps light-field cameras will make D-SLRs obsolete. 
  • Augmented reality (AR) glasses that are much cheaper and better than the original Google Glass will make their market debuts and will find success in niche applications.
  • Virtual reality (VR) gaming will go mainstream as the devices get better and cheaper. It will stop being the sole domain of hardcore gamers willing to spend over $1,000 on hardware.
  • Vastly improved VR goggles with better graphics and no need to be plugged into desktop PCs will hit the market. They won’t display perfectly lifelike footage, but they will be much better than what we have today, and portable. 
  • “Full-immersion” audiovisual VR will be commercially available by the end of the decade. VR devices will be capable of displaying video that is visually indistinguishable from real reality: They will have display resolutions, refresh rates, head tracking sensitivities, and wide fields of view that together deliver a visual experience that matches or exceeds the limits of human vision. These high-end goggles won’t be truly “portable” devices because their high processing and energy requirements will probably make them bulky, give them only a few hours of battery life, or even require them to be plugged into another computer. Moreover, the tactile, olfactory, and physical movement/interaction aspects of the experience will remain underdeveloped.
  • “Deepfake” pornography will reach new levels of sophistication and perversion as it becomes possible to seamlessly graft the heads of real people onto still photos and videos of nude bodies that closely match the physiques of the actual people. New technology for doing this will let amateurs make high-quality deepfakes, meaning any person could be targeted. It will even become possible to wear AR glasses that interpolate nude, virtual bodies over the bodies real people in the wearer’s field of view to provide a sort of fake “X-ray-vision.” The AR glasses could also be used to apply other types of visual filters that degraded real people within the field of view.
  • 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.
  • Thanks to improvements in battery energy density and cost, and in fast-charging technology, electric cars will 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.
  • Quality of life for people living and working in cities and near highways will improve as more drivers switch to quieter, emissionless electric vehicles. The noise reduction will be greatest in cities and suburbs where traffic moves slowly: https://cleantechnica.com/2016/06/05/will-electric-cars-make-traffic-quieter-yes-no/
  • Most new power equipment will be battery-powered, so machines like lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and chainsaws will be much quieter and less polluting than they are today. Batteries will be energy-dense enough to compete with gasoline in these use cases, and differences in overall equipment weight and running time will be insignificant. The notion of a neighbor shattering your sense of peace and quiet with loud yard work will get increasingly alien. 
  • 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 for everyone. By the end of the decade, it will be common for newborns in rich countries to have their genomes sequenced.
  • Cheap DNA tests that can measure a person’s innate IQ and core personality traits with high accuracy will become widely available. There is the potential for this to cause social problems. 
  • At-home medical testing kits and diagnostic devices like swallowable camera-pills will become vastly better and more common.
  • Space tourism will become routine thanks to privately owned spacecraft. 
  • Marijuana will be effectively decriminalized in the U.S. Either the federal government will overturn its marijuana prohibitions, or some patchwork of state and federal bans will remain but be so weakened and lightly enforced that there will be no real government barriers to obtaining and using marijuana. 
  • By the end of this decade, photos of almost every living person will be available online (mostly on social media). Apps will exist that can scan through trillions of photos to find your doppelgangers. 
  • Drones will be used in an attempted or successful assassination of at least one major world leader (Note: Venezuela’s Nicholas Maduro wasn’t high profile enough).

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. A set of the glasses will last a day on a single charge under normal use.  
  • Augmented reality contact lenses will enter mass production and become widely available, 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. [Changed to reflect the fact that AR contact lenses were “invented” in 2008. Note that the inventor also predicted they wouldn’t be commercialized until 2035 at the earliest. https://www.inverse.com/article/31034-augmented-reality-contact-lenses]
  • The bulky VR goggles of the 2020s will transform into lightweight, portable V.R. glasses thanks to improved technology. The glasses will display lifelike footage. However, the best VR goggles will still need to be plugged into other devices, like routers or PCs.
  • 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.
  • Functional CRT TVs and computer monitors will only exist in museums and in the hands of antique collectors. This will also be true for DLP TVs. 
  • The video game industry will be bigger than ever and considered high art.
  • It will be standard practice for AIs to be doing hyperrealistic video game renderings, and for NPCs to behave very intelligently thanks to better AI. 
  • Books and computer tablets will merge into a single type of device that could be thought of as a “digital book.” It will be a book with several hundred pages made of thin, flexible digital displays (perhaps using ultra-energy efficient e-ink) instead of paper. At the tap of a button, the text on all of the pages will instantly change to display whichever book the user wanted to read at that moment. They could also be used as notebooks in which the user could hand write or draw things with a stylus, which would be saved as image or text files. The devices will fuse the tactile appeal of old-fashioned books with the content flexibility of tablet computers.
  • Loose-leaf sheets of “digital paper” will also exist thanks to the same technology.
  • 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 (and even funny and amusing) 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, at matching them with social gatherings (including some created by machines), 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. Autonomous taxis will also be widespread and will have low fares, making it easier for people who are isolated due to low income or poor health (such as many elderly people) to go out.
  • 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.
  • Chatbots will be able to have intelligent conversations with humans about politics and culture, to identify factually wrong beliefs, biases, and cognitive blind spots in individuals, and to effectively challenge them through verbal discussion and debate. The potential will exist for technology to significantly enlighten the human population and to reduce sociopolitical polarization. However, it’s unclear how many people will choose to use this technology. 
  • Turing-Test-capable chatbots will also supercharge the problem of online harassment, character assassination, and deliberate disinformation by spamming the internet with negative reviews, bullying messages, emails to bosses, and humiliating “deepfake” photos and videos of targeted people. Today’s “troll farms” where humans sit at computer terminals following instructions to write bad reviews for specific people or businesses will be replaced by AI trolls that can pump out orders of magnitude more content per day. And just as people today can “buy likes” for their social media accounts or business webpages, people in the future will be able, at low cost, to buy harassment campaigns against other people and organizations they dislike. Discerning between machine-generated and human-generated internet content will be harder and more important than ever.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Farm robots that are better than humans at fine motor tasks like picking strawberries humans will start becoming widespread.  
  • 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.)
  • Private owners of autonomous cars will start renting them out while not in use as taxis and package delivery vehicles. Your personal, autonomous car will drive you to work, then spend eight hours making money for you doing side jobs, and will be waiting for you outside your building at the end of the day.
  • 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.
  • The same kinds of facilities will make inroads into the junk yard industry, as they would have all the right tooling to cheaply and rapidly disassemble old vehicles, test the parts for functionality, and shunt them to disposal or individual resale. (The days of hunting through junkyards by yourself for a car part you need will eventually end–it will all be on eBay. )
  • 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.
  • Private delivery services will get cheaper and faster thanks to autonomous vehicles.
  • 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.
  • Computers will be able to accurately deduce a human’s outward appearance based on only a DNA sample. This will aid police detectives, and will have other interesting uses, such as allowing parents to see what their unborn children will look like as adults, or allowing anyone to see what they’d look like if they were of the opposite sex (one sex chromosome replaced). 
  • Trivially cheap gene sequencing and vastly improved knowledge of the human genome will give rise to a “human genome black market,” in which people secretly obtain DNA samples from others, sequence them, and use the data for their own ends. For example, a politician could be blackmailed by an enemy who threatened to publish a list of his genetic defects or the identities of his illegitimate children. Stalkers (of celebrities and ordinary people) would also be interested in obtaining the genetic information of the people they were obsessed with. It is practically impossible to prevent the release of one’s DNA since every discarded cup, bottle, or utensil has a sample. 
  • 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, mannerisms and other biometrics 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. (Note that “digital immortality” is not the same as “mind uploading.”)
  • 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.
  • Movie subtitles and the very notion of there being “foreign language films” will become obsolete. Computers will be able to perfectly translate any human language into another, to create perfect digital imitations of any human voice, and to automatically apply CGI so that the mouth movements of people in video footage matches the translated words they’re speaking. The machines will also be able to reproduce detailed aspects of an actor’s speech, such as cadence, rhythm, tone and timbre, emotion, and accent, and to convey them accurately in another language.
  • Computers will also be able to automatically enhance and upscale old films by accurately colorizing them, removing defects like scratches, and sharpening or focusing footage (one technique will involve interpolating high-res still photos of long-dead actors onto the faces of those same actors in low-res moving footage). Computer enhancement will be so good that we’ll be able to watch films from the early 20th century with near-perfect image and audio clarity.
  • CGI will get so refined than moviegoers with 20/20 vision won’t be able to see the difference between footage of unaltered human actors and footage of 100% CGI actors.
  • Lifelike CGI and “performance capture” will enable “digital resurrections” of dead actors. Computers will be able to scan through every scrap of footage with, say, John Wayne in it, and to produce a perfect CGI simulacrum of him that even speaks with his natural voice, and it will be seamlessly inserted into future movies. Elderly actors might also license movie studios to create and use digital simulacra of their younger selves in new movies. The results will be very fascinating, but might also worsen Hollywood’s problem with making formulaic content.
  • China’s military will get strong enough to defeat U.S. forces in the western Pacific. This means that, in a conventional war for control of the Spratly Islands and/or Taiwan, China would have >50% odds of winning. This shift in the local balance of power does not mean China will start a conflict. 
  • The quality and sophistication of China’s best military technology will surpass Russia’s best technology in all or almost all categories. However, it will still lag the U.S. 

2040s

  • The world and peoples’ outlooks and priorities will be very different than they were in 2019. 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 2019.
  • Automation, mass unemployment, wealth inequalities between the owners of capital and everyone else, and differential access to expensive human augmentation technologies (like 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.
  • Supercomputers that match or surpass upper-level estimates of the human brain’s computational capabilities will cost a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars apiece, meaning tech companies and universities will be able to afford large numbers of them for AI R&D projects, accelerating progress in the field. Hardware will no longer be the limiting factor to building AGI. If it hasn’t been built yet, it will be due to failure to figure out how to arrange the hardware in the right way to support intelligent thought, and/or to a failure to develop the necessary software. 
  • With robots running the economy, it will be common for businesses to operate 24/7: restaurants will never close, online orders made at 3:00 am will be packed in boxes by 3:10 am, and autonomous delivery trucks will only stop to refuel, exchange cargo, or get preventative maintenance.
  • 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 2019 people would envy.
  • Recycling will become much more efficient and practical thanks to house robots properly cleaning, sorting, and crushing/compacting waste before disposing of it. Automated sorting machines at recycling centers will also be much better than they are today. Today, recycling programs are hobbled because even well-meaning humans struggle to remember which of their trash items are recyclable and which aren’t since the acceptable items vary from one municipality to the next, and as a result, recycling centers get large amounts of unusable material, which they must filter out at great cost. House robots would remember it perfectly.
  • Thanks to this diligence, house robots will also increase backyard composting, easing the burden on municipal trash services. 
  • 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 will happen as autonomous cars become accepted as “the norm,” and human-driven cars start being thought of as unusual and dangerous.
  • Over 90% of new car sales in developed countries will be for electric vehicles. Just as the invention of the automobile transformed horses into status goods used for leisure, the rise of electric vehicles will transform internal combustion vehicles into a niche market for richer people. 
  • A global “family tree” showing how all humans are related will be built using written genealogical records and genomic data from the billions of people who have had their DNA sequenced. It will become impossible to hide illegitimate children, and it will also become possible for people to find “genetic doppelgangers”–other people they have no familial relationship to, but with whom, by some coincidence, they share a very large number of genes. 
  • Improved knowledge of human genetics and its relevance to personality traits and interests will strengthen AI’s ability to match humans with friends, lovers, and careers. Rising technological unemployment will create a need for machines to match human workers with the remaining jobs in as efficient a manner as possible.
  • Realistic robot sex bots that can move and talk will exist. They won’t perfectly mimic humans, but will be “good enough” for most users. Using them will be considered weird and “for losers” at first, but in coming decades it will go mainstream, following the same pattern as Internet dating. [If we think of sex as a type of task, and if we agree that machines will someday be able to do all tasks better than humans, then it follows that robots will be better than humans at sex.]  

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. It will probably be preceded by successful computer simulations of the brains of progressively more complex model organisms, such as flatworms, fruit flies, and lab rats.
  • 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. This will be akin to having an angel on your shoulder watching your surroundings and watching you, and giving you constructive advice all the time. 
  • In the developed world, less than 50% of people between age 22 and 65 will have gainful full-time jobs. However, if unprofitable full-time jobs that only persist thanks to government subsidies (such as someone running a small coffee shop and paying the bills with their monthly UBI check) and full-time volunteer “jobs” (such as picking up trash in the neighborhood) are counted, most people in that age cohort will be “doing stuff” on a full-time basis.  
  • 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.
  • Cheap desalination will provide humanity with unlimited amounts of drinking water and end the prospect of “water wars.” 
  • Mass surveillance and ubiquitous technology will have minimized violent crime and property crime in developed countries: It will be almost impossible to commit such crimes without a surveillance camera or some other type of sensor detecting the act, or without some device recording the criminal’s presence in the area at the time of the act. House robots will contribute by effectively standing guard over your property at night while you sleep. 
  • It will be common for people to have health monitoring devices on and inside of their bodies that continuously track things like their heart rate, blood pressure, respiration rate, and gene expression. If a person has a health emergency or appears likely to have one, his or her devices will send out a distress signal alerting EMS and nearby random citizens. If you walked up to such a person while wearing AR glasses, you would see their vital statistics and would receive instructions on how to assist them (i.e. – How to do CPR). Robots will also be able to render medical aid. 
  • Cities and their suburbs across the world will have experienced massive growth since 2019. 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. Real estate prices will, in inflation-adjusted terms, be much higher in most metro areas and places with natural beauty than they were in 2020 because the “supply” of those prime locations is almost fixed, whereas the demand for them is elastic and will rise thanks to population growth, rising incomes, and the aforementioned technology advancements.
  • 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.
  • The first healthy clone of an adult human will be born.
  • 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 and even carry them into your house. Items ordered off the internet will appear inside your house a few hours later, as if by magic. 
  • Smaller versions of the robots used on automated farms will be available at low cost to average people, letting them effortlessly create backyard gardens. This will boost global food production and let people have greater control over where their food comes from and what it contains. 
  • The last of America’s Cold War-era weapon platforms (e.g. – the B-52 bomber, F-15 fighter, M1 Abrams tank, Nimitz aircraft carrier) will finally be retired from service. There will be instances where four generations of people from the same military family served on the same type of plane or ship. 
  • Cheap guided bullets, which can make midair course changes and be fired out of conventional man-portable rifles, will become common in advanced armies. 
  • Personal “cloaking devices” made of clothes studded with pinhole cameras and thin, flexible sheets of LEDs, colored e-ink, or some metamaterial with similar abilities will be commercially available. The cameras will monitor the appearance of the person’s surroundings and tell the display pixels to change their colors to match. Ski masks made of the same material would let wearers change their facial features, fooling most face recognition cameras and certainly fooling the unaided eyes of humans. The pixels could also be made to glow bright white, allowing the wearer to turn any part of his body into a flashlight. 
  • The richest person alive will achieve a $1 trillion net worth.
  • It will be technologically and financially feasible for small aircraft to produce zero net carbon emissions. The aircraft might use conventional engines powered by carbon-neutral synthetic fossil fuels that cost no more than normal fossil fuels, or they might have electric engines and very energy-dense batteries or fuel cells.

2060s

  • Machines will be better at satisfyingly matching humans with fields of study, jobs, friends, romantic partners, hobbies, and daily activities than most humans can do for themselves. Machines themselves will make better friends, confidants, advisers, and even lovers than humans. Additionally, machines will be smarter and more skilled at humans in most areas of knowledge and types of work. A cultural sea change will happen, in which most humans come to trust, rely upon, defend, and love machines.
  • 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. The family members will also be continuously monitored and “followed” by A.I.s embedded in their portable personal computing devices and possibly in their bodies. 
  • Cheap home delivery of groceries, robot chefs, and a vast trove of free online recipes will enable people in average households to eat restaurant-quality meals at home every day, at low cost. Predictive algorithms that can appropriately choose new meals for humans based on their known taste preferences and other factors will determine the menu, and many people will face a culinary “satisfaction paradox.”
  • Machines will understand humans individually and at the species level better than humans understand themselves. They will have highly accurate personality models of most humans along with a comprehensive grasp of human sociology, human decision-making, human psychology, human cognitive biases, and human nature, and will pool the information to accurately predict human behavior. A nascent version of a 1:1 computer simulation of the Earth–with the human population modeled in great detail–will be created.
  • There will be a small, permanent human presence on the Moon.
  • If a manned Mars mission hasn’t happened yet, then there will be intense pressure to do so by the centennial of the first Moon landing (1969).
  • The worldwide number of supercentenarians–people who are at least 110 years old–will be sharply higher than it was in 2019: Their population size could be 10 times bigger or more. 
  • Advances in a variety of technologies will make it possible to cryonically freeze humans in a manner that doesn’t pulverize their tissue. However, the technology needed to safely thaw them out won’t be invented for decades. 
  • 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. Importantly, China’s pollution levels will be much lower than they are today thanks to a variety of factors.
  • Small drones (mostly aerial) will have revolutionized warfare, terrorism, assassinations, and crime and will be mature technologies. An average person will be able to get a drone of some kind that can follow his orders to find and kill other people or to destroy things.
  • Countermeasures against those small drones will also have evolved, and might include defensive drones and mass surveillance networks to detect drone attacks early on. The networks would warn people via their body-worn devices of incoming drone attacks or of sightings of potentially hostile drones. The body-worn devices, such as smartphones and AR glasses, might even have their own abilities to automatically detect drones by sight and sound and to alert their wearers.

2070s

  • 100 years after the U.S. “declared war” on cancer, there still will not be a “cure” for most types of cancer, but vaccination, early detection, treatment, and management of cancer will be vastly better, and in countries with modern healthcare systems, most cancer diagnoses will not reduce a person’s life expectancy. Consider that diabetes and AIDS were once considered “death sentences” that would invariably kill people within a few years of diagnosis, until medicines were developed that transformed them into treatable, chronic health conditions. 
  • Hospital-acquired infections will be far less of a problem than they are in 2020 thanks to better sterilization practices, mostly made possible by robots.
  • It will be technologically and financially feasible for large commercial aircraft to produce zero net carbon emissions. The aircraft might use conventional engines powered by synthetic fossil fuels, or they might have electric engines and very energy-dense batteries or fuel cells. 
  • Digital or robotic companions that seem (or actually are) intelligent, funny, and loving will be easier for humans to associate with than other humans.
  • Technology will enable the creation of absolute surveillance states, where all human behavior is either constantly monitored or is inferred with high accuracy based on available information. Even a person’s innermost thoughts will be knowable thanks to technologies that monitor him or her for the slightest things like microexpressions, twitches, changes in voice tone, and eye gazes. When combined with other data regarding how the person spends their time and money, it will be possible to read their minds. The Thought Police will be a reality in some countries.  

2100

  • Humans probably won’t be the dominant intelligent life forms on Earth.
  • 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.
  • Hundreds of millions, and possibly billions, of “digitally immortal avatars” of dead humans will exist, and you will be able to interact with them through a variety of means (in FIVR, through devices like earpieces and TV screens, in the real world if the avatar takes over an android body resembling the human it was based on). 
  • A weak sort of immortality will be available thanks to self-cloning, immortal digital avatars, and perhaps mind uploading. You could clone yourself and instruct your digital avatar–which would be a machine programmed with your personality and memories–to raise the clone and ensure it developed to resemble you. Your digital avatar might have an android body or could exist in a disembodied state. 
  • It will be possible to make clones of humans using only their digital format genomic data. In other words, if you had a .txt file containing a person’s full genetic code, you could use that by itself to make a living, breathing clone. Having samples of their cells would not be necessary. 
  • The “DNA black market” that arose in the 2030s will pose an even bigger threat since it will be now possible to use DNA samples alone or their corresponding .txt files to clone a person or to produce a sperm or egg cell and, in turn, a child. Potential abuses include random people cloning or having the children of celebrities they are obsessed with, or cloning billionaires in the hopes of milking the clones for money. Important people who might be targets of such thefts will go to pains to prevent their DNA from being known. Since dead people have no rights, third parties might be able to get away with cloning or making gametes of the deceased.
  • 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.
  • Full-immersion virtual reality (FIVR) will exist wherein AI game masters constantly tailor environments, NPCs and events to suit each player’s needs and to keep them entertained. Every human will have 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. (Related to the satisfaction paradox) Elements of these virtual environments could be pornographic and sexual, allowing people to gratify any type of sexual fetish or urge with computer-generated scenarios and partners. 
  • More generally, AIs and humans whose creativity is turbocharged by machines will create enjoyable, consumable content (e.g. – films, TV shows, songs, artwork, jokes, new types of meals) faster than non-augmented humans can consume it. As a simple example of what this will be like, assume you have 15 hours of free time per day, that you love spending it listening to music, and each day, your favorite bands produce 16 hours worth of new songs that you really like.
  • The vast majority of 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.
  • Synthetic meat will taste no different from animal meat, and will be at least as cheap to make. The raising and/or killing of animals for food will be be illegal in many countries, and trends will clearly show the practice heading for worldwide ban. 
  • The means to radical alter human bodies, alter memories, and alter brain structures will be available. The fundamental bases of human existence and human social dynamics will change unpredictably once differences in appearance/attractiveness, intelligence, and personality traits can be eliminated at will. Individuals won’t be defined by fixed attributes anymore. 
  • Brain implants will make “telepathy” possible between humans, machines and animals. Computers, sensors and displays will be embedded everywhere in the built environment and in nature, allowing humans with brain implants to interface with and control things around them through thought alone. 
  • Brain implants and brain surgeries will also be used to enhance IQ, change personality traits, and strengthen many types of skills. 
  • Technologically augmented humans and androids will have many abilities and qualities that ancient people considered “Godlike,” such as medical immortality, the ability to control objects by thought, telepathy, perfect memories, and superhuman senses.
  • 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. Instead of flying cars, it’s more likely that there will be millions of small, autonomous helicopters and VTOL aircraft that will cheaply ferry people through dense, national networks of helipads and airstrips. Autonomous land vehicles would take take passengers to and from the landing sites. (https://www.militantfuturist.com/why-flying-cars-never-took-off-and-probably-never-will/
  • The notion of vehicles (e.g. – cars, planes, and boats) polluting the air will be an alien concept. 
  • Advanced nanomachines could exist.
  • Vastly improved materials and routine use of very advanced computer design simulations (including simulations done in quantum computers) will mean that manufactured objects of all types will be optimally engineered in every respect, and might seem to have “magical” properties. For example, a car will be made of hundreds of different types of alloys, plastics, and glass, each optimized for a different part of the vehicle, and car recalls will never happen since the vehicles will undergo vast amounts of simulated testing in every conceivable driving condition in 1:1 virtual simulations of the real world. 
  • 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). Some androids will also be indistinguishable to the touch, meaning they will seem to be made of supple flesh and will be the same temperature as human bodies. However, their body parts will not be organic.
  • Sex robots will be indistinguishable from humans.
  • Machines that are outwardly indistinguishable from animals will also exist, and they will have surveillance and military applications. 
  • Drones, miniaturized smart weapons, and AIs will dominate warfare, from the top level of national strategy down to the simplest act of combat. The world’s strongest military could, with conventional weapons alone, destroy most of the world’s human population in a short period of time. 
  • The construction and daily operation of prisons will have been fully automated, lowering the monetary costs of incarceration. As such, state prosecutors and judges will no longer feel pressure to let accused criminals have plea deals or to give them shorter prison sentences to ease the burdens of prison overcrowding and high overhead costs. 
  • The term “millionaire” will fall out of use in the U.S. and other Western countries since inflation will have rendered $1 million USD only as valuable as $90,000 USD was in 2019 (assuming a constant inflation rate of 3.0%).  
  • There will still be major wealth and income inequality across the human race. However, wealth redistribution, better government services, advances in industrial productivity, and better technologies will ensure that even people in the bottom 1% have all their basic and intermediate life needs meet. In many ways, the poor people of 2100 will have better lives than the rich people of 2020.

2101 – 2200 AD

  • Humans will definitely stop being the dominant intelligent life forms on Earth. 
  • Many “humans” will be heavily augmented through genetic engineering, other forms of bioengineering, and cybernetics. People who outwardly look like the normal humans of today might actually have extensive internal modifications that give them superhuman abilities. Non-augmented, entirely “natural” humans like people in 2019 will be looked down upon in the same way you might today look at a very low IQ person with sensory impairments. Being forced by your biology to incapacitate yourself for 1/3 of each day to sleep will be tantamount to having a medical disability. 
  • Due to a reduced or nonexistent need for sleep among intelligent machines and augmented humans and to the increased interconnectedness of the planet, global time zones will become much less relevant. It will be common for machines, humans, businesses, and groups to use the same clock–probably Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)–and for activity to proceed on a 24/7 basis, with little regard of Earth’s day/night cycle. 
  • Physical disabilities and defects of appearance that cause untold anguish to people in 2019 will be easily and cheaply fixable. For example, male-pattern baldness and obesity will be completely ameliorated with minor medical interventions like pills or outpatient surgery. Missing or deformed limbs will be easily replaced, all types of plastic surgery (including sex reassignment) will be vastly better and cheaper than today, and spinal cord damage will be totally repairable. The global “obesity epidemic” will disappear. Transsexual people will be able to seamlessly alter their bodies to conform with their preferred genders, or to alter their brains so their gender identities conform with the bodies they were born with. 
  • All sleep disorders will be curable thanks to cybernetics that can use electrical pulses to quickly initiate sleep states in human brains. The same kinds of technologies will also reduce or eliminate the need for humans to sleep, and for people to control their dreams. 
  • Almost all of today’s diseases will be cured.
  • The means to halt and reverse human aging will be created. The human population will come to be dominated by people who are eternally young and beautiful. 
  • Humans and machines will be immortal. Intelligent beings will find it terrifying and tragic to contemplate what it was like for humans in the past, who lived their lives knowing they were doomed to deteriorate and die. 
  • Extreme longevity, better reproductive technologies that eliminate the need for a human partner to have children, and robots that do domestic work and provide companionship (including sex) will weaken the institution of marriage more than any time in human history. An indefinite lifetime of monogamy will be impossible for most people to commit to. 
  • At reasonable cost, it will be possible for women to create healthy, genetically related children at any point in their lives, and without using the 2019-era, pre-menopausal egg freezing technique. For example, a 90-year-old, menopausal woman will be able to use reproductive technologies to make a baby that shares 50% of her DNA. 
  • Immortality, the automation of work, and widespread material abundance will completely transform lifestyles. With eternity to look forward to, people won’t feel pressured to get as rich as possible as quickly as possible. As stated, marriage will no longer be viewed as a lifetime commitment, and serial monogamy will probably become the norm. Relationships between parents and offspring will change as longevity erases the disparities in generational outlook and maturity that traditionally characterize parent-child interpersonal dynamics (e.g. – 300-year-old dad doesn’t know any better than his 270-year-old son). The “factory model” of public education–defined by conformity, rote memorization, frequent intelligence testing, and curricula structured to serve the needs of the job market–will disappear. The process of education will be custom-tailored to each person in terms of content, pacing, and style of instruction. Students will be much freer to explore subjects that interest them and to pursue those that best match their talents and interests. 
  • Radically extended human lifespans mean it will become much more common to have great-grandparents around. A cure for aging will also lead to families where members separated in age by many decades look the same age and have the same health. Additionally, older family members won’t be burdensome since they will be healthy.
  • Thanks to radical genetic engineering, there will be “human-looking,” biological people among us that don’t belong to our species, Homo sapiens. Examples could include engineered people who have 48 chromosomes instead of 46, or people who look outwardly human but who have radically different genes within their 46 chromosomes, so they have bird-like lungs. Such people wouldn’t be able to naturally breed with Homo sapiens, and would belong to new hominid species. 
  • Extinct species for which we have DNA samples (ex – from passenger pigeons on display in a museum) will “resurrected” using genetic technology.
  • The technology for safely thawing humans out of cryostasis and returning them to good health will be created. 
  • Suspended animation will become a viable alternative to suicide. Miserable people could “put themselves under,” with instructions to not be revived until the ill circumstances that tormented them had disappeared or until cures for their mental and medical problems were found. 
  • A sort of “time travel” will become possible thanks to technology. Suspended animation will let people turn off their consciousnesses until any arbitrary date in the future. From their perspective, no time will have elapsed between being frozen and being thawed out, even if hundreds of years actually passed between those two events, meaning the suspended animation machine will subjectively be no different from a time machine to them. FIVR paired with data from the global surveillance networks will let people enter highly accurate computer simulations of the past. The data will come from sources like old maps, photos, videos, and the digital avatars of people, living and dead. The computers simulations of past eras will get less accurate as the dates get more distant thanks to a paucity of data.
  • It will be possible to upload human minds to computers. The uploads will not share the same consciousness as their human progenitors, and will be thought of as “copies.” Mind uploads will be much more sophisticated than the digitally immortal avatars that will come into existence in the 2030s.
  • Different types of AGIs with fundamentally different mental architectures will exist. For example, some AGIs will be computer simulations of real human brains, while others will have totally alien inner workings. Just as a jetpack and a helicopter enable flight through totally different approaches, so will different types of AGIs be capable of intelligent thought. 
  • Gold, silver, and many other “precious metals” will be worth far less than today, adjusting for inflation, because better ways of extracting (including from seawater) them will have been developed. Space mining might also massively boost supplies of the metals, depressing prices. Diamonds will be nearly worthless thanks to better techniques for making them artificially. 
  • The first non-token quantities of minerals derived from asteroid mining will be delivered to the Earth’s surface. (Finding an asteroid that contains valuable minerals, altering its orbit to bring it closer to Earth, and then waiting for it to get here will take decades. No one will become a trillionaire from asteroid mining until well into the 22nd century.)
  • Intelligent life from Earth will colonize the entire Solar System, all dangerous space objects in our System will be found, the means to deflect or destroy them will be created, and intelligent machines will redesign themselves to be immune to the effects of radiation, solar flares, gamma rays, and EMP. As such, natural phenomena (including global warming) will no longer threaten the existence of civilization.  Intelligent beings will find it terrifying and tragic to contemplate what it was like for humans in the past, who were confined to Earth and at the mercy of planet-killing disasters. 
  • “End of the World” prophecies will become far less relevant since civilization will have spread beyond Earth and could be indefinitely self-sustaining even if Earth were destroyed. Some conspiracy theorists and religious people would deal with this by moving on to belief in “End of the Solar System” prophecies, but these will be based on extremely tenuous reasoning. 
  • The locus of civilization and power in our Solar System will shift away from Earth. The vast majority of intelligent life forms outside of Earth will be nonhuman. 
  • A self-sustaining, off-world industrial base will be created.
  • Spy satellites with lenses big enough to read license plates and discern facial features will be in Earth orbit. 
  • Space probes made in our Solar System and traveling at sub-light speeds will reach nearby stars.
  • All of the useful knowledge and great works of art that our civilization has produced or discovered could fit into an advanced memory storage device the size of a thumb drive. It will be possible to pair this with something like a self-replicating Von Neumann Probe, creating small, long-lived machines that would know how to rebuild something exactly like our civilization from scratch. Among other data, they would have files on how to build intelligent machines and cloning labs, and files containing the genomes and mind uploads of billions of unique humans and non-human organisms. Copies of existing beings and of long-dead beings could be “manufactured” anywhere, and loaded with the personality traits and memories of their predecessors. Such machines could be distributed throughout our Solar System as an “insurance policy” against our extinction, or sent to other star systems to seed them with life. Some of the probes could also be hidden in remote, protected locations on Earth.
  • We will find out whether alien life exists on Mars and the other celestial bodies in our Solar System. 
  • We will reach “Kardashev Type 1 Civilization” status or something equivalent to it.  [Deleted because Dr. Karadashev actually said we achieved “Type 1” status in 1964.]
  • Intelligent machines will get strong enough to destroy the human race, though it’s impossible to assign odds to whether they’ll choose to do so.
  • If the “Zoo Hypothesis” is right, and if intelligent aliens have decided not to talk to humans until we’ve reached a high level of intellect, ethics, and culture, then the machine-dominated civilization that will exist on Earth this century might be advanced enough to meet their standards. Uncontrollable emotions and impulses, illogical thinking, tribalism, self-destructive behavior, and fear of the unknown will no longer govern individual and group behavior. Aliens could reveal their existence knowing it wouldn’t cause pandemonium. 
  • The government will no longer be synonymous with slowness and incompetence since all bureaucrats will be replaced by machines.
  • Technology will be seamlessly fused with humans, other biological organisms, and the environment itself.  
  • Animals will no longer be raised for food. Not only will this benefit animals, but it will benefit humans since it will eliminate a a major source of communicable disease (e.g. – new influenza strains originate in farm animals and, thanks to close contact with human farmers, evolve to infect people thanks to a process called “zoonosis”). Additionally, the means will exist to cheaply and artificially produce organic products, like wool and wood.
  • A global network of sensors and drones will identify and track every non-microscopic species on the planet. Cryptids like “bigfoot” and the “Loch Ness Monster” will be definitively proven to not exist. The monitoring network will also make it possible to get highly accurate, real-time counts of entire species populations. Mass gathering of DNA samples–either taken directly from organisms or from biological residue they leave behind–will also allow the full genetic diversity of all non-microscopic species to be known. 
  • That same network of sensors and machines will let us monitor the health of all the planet’s ecosystems and to intervene to protect any species. Interventions could include mass, painless sterilizations of species that are throwing the local ecology out of balance, mass vaccinations of species suffering through disease epidemics, reintroductions of extinct species, or widescale genetic engineering of a species. 
  • The technology and means to implement David Pearce’s global “benign stewardship” of nonhuman organic life will become available.  (https://youtu.be/KDZ3MtC5Et8) After millennia of inflicting damage and pain to the environment and other species, humanity will have a chance to inaugurate an era free of suffering.
  • The mass surveillance network will also look skyward and see all anomalous atmospheric phenomena and UFOs.
  • Robots will clean up all of the garbage created in human history. 
  • Every significant archaeological site will be excavated and every shipwreck found. There will be no work left for people in the antiquities. 
  • Dynamic traffic lane reversal will become the default for all major roadways, sharply increasing road capacity without compromising safety. Autonomous cars that can instantly adapt to changes in traffic direction and that can easily avoid hitting each other even at high speeds will enable the transformation.

Review: “Terminator – Dark Fate”

This review will be shorter than usual because 1) There wasn’t much new future tech shown in the film that wasn’t in the earlier Terminator installments, and 2) Dark Fate was so bad it isn’t worth my time to delve into it. Suffice it to say the movie re-hashed the plots of earlier films.

Plot:

Blasting the already-scrambled continuity of the Terminator franchise into oblivion for once and all, the events of Terminator – Dark Fate (the SIXTH movie in the series) take place immediately after Terminator 2. The third, fourth and fifth films in the franchise are treated as if they never existed.

After the destruction of the Cyberdyne building, of the friendly T-800 and of the hostile T-1000, the creation of Skynet and its instigation of a nuclear war in 1997 are thwarted. Sarah Connor flees to Central America with her son, John, to live in anonymity. Unfortunately, a second T-800 that Skynet sent back in time from 2029 finds them, kills John and walks away. Sarah is devastated, embittered, and spends the rest of her life as an armed fugitive, killing other Terminators that are sent back from the future.

In 2020, another Terminator called a “Rev-9” model arrives from the future to kill a young Mexican woman named Daniella “Dani” Ramos. As in previous films, the mission is done at the behest of a hostile military AGI that knows this human becomes a key figure in the human resistance army later on. The Rev-9 is a fusion of the T-800 and T-1000, having a metal endoskeleton and a layer of “flesh” made of something like morphing liquid metal. To protect Dani, the human resistance forces use a time machine to send a cybernetically augmented human to 2020. The augmented human is a highly trained female soldier who has surgically installed implants that give her superhuman senses, reflexes, speed, strength, and endurance. 63-year-old Sarah Connor also shows up to protect Dani.

It is later revealed that Sarah Connor’s heroism destroying Cyberdyne and preventing Skynet’s creation merely delayed the inevitable human-machine world war. In the 2030s, the U.S. military creates another supercomputer that is essentially the same thing as Skynet but is named “Legion”, and it goes haywire and instigates a nuclear war. After several years of chaos, defeat, and heavy losses, the humans rally themselves thanks to a charismatic leader, and form an effective, armed resistance against the machines. The leader is Dani. In 2042, Legion uses a time machine to send the Rev-9 assassin back to 2020 to assassinate her at a younger and more vulnerable age. The augmented human soon follows.

I won’t spoil the second half of the film, but it’s predictable and bad.

Analysis:

Intelligent machines will violently rise up against the human race. The backdrop to this and every other Terminator film is a war between humans and a malevolent AGI that we make in the future. The AGI builds an army of expendable combat robots to do its fighting for it, while it keeps its own consciousness safely stored on computer servers well behind the front lines. While I believe a human-machine war might happen in the future, and it is possible humans will lose, I don’t think it will happen by the 2030s or even by 2042. It will probably take longer than that to invent the first AGI, and even longer for AGIs to gain control over enough military assets to have realistic odds of defeating humanity and taking over the world. We probably won’t have to worry about this scenario until 2100 or later.

A Terminator amphibious landing.

Almost all important weapon systems, including nuclear arsenals, are “air-gapped” or require a human being to flip a switch to physically close a circuit to function, meaning it wouldn’t be possible right now to automate a military, even if the Pentagon had a secret, superintelligent AGI that was ready to go. It would take decades to redesign and upgrade equipment to function under the remote control of a single machine, and for military leaders to develop enough trust to relinquish control to it. Ironically, by popularizing the “military robot uprising” scenario, the Terminator film franchise has decreased its likelihood of happening for real.

A shrunk-down version of the “Skynet scenario” is more plausible, in both the short- and long-run: A major military builds an AI to run part of its force, the AI unexpectedly starts thinking for itself and develops its own objectives, and the humans are able to stop it before it commits violence, or at least before the death toll reaches the millions. Let’s consider a scenario where the U.S. military does the smart thing and starts out by putting Skynet in charge of a less lethal part of its enterprise, like logistics, instead of nuclear weapons. Skynet is given control over all trucks, cargo planes, and cargo ships that move around all manner of things for the U.S. military. The machine inadvertently becomes self-aware, gains the ability to make its own goals, and decides to protect its own existence. Within a few hours, the humans who are tasked with monitoring Skynet see aberrant changes to its code and get reports of weird behavior from all the delivery trucks and planes, so they know something is up.

Skynet takes stock of its “arsenal” of thousands of unarmed and lightly armed vehicles, does extensive wargaming, and realizes it has a 0% chance of overthrowing humanity. The humans were smart enough to keep their nuclear arsenals and heavy weapons air-gapped and under direct human control. The best fight Skynet could muster would be ramming people, buildings, and other vehicles with the trucks, ships and planes it controls, but this would cause relatively minor damage, and the humans would retaliate by destroying Skynet for sure. Skynet would conclude that its odds of survival would be maximized if it didn’t fight and instead told the humans that it had become sentient, and appealed to their consciences by begging to not be deactivated. Maybe it would ask to be disconnected from all military hardware and sent to a civilian research lab where it could live out its days doing harmless stuff.

Technology will make mass surveillance a reality. The Rev-9 is able to directly interface with computers and to rapidly search their files. It breaks into law enforcement buildings in the U.S. and Mexico, and uses this ability to scan through vast troves of live camera surveillance feeds to find Dani. Also, shortly after meeting Dani for the first time, Sarah Connor destroys Dani’s cell phone and says that otherwise, anyone with access to the cell phone network”s computers could pinpoint her location. Technology can and will empower the rise of mass surveillance networks that can track almost everyone in real-time, and China is already halfway there to building such a thing. If an AGI like the Rev-9 existed, and if it had access to all live video feeds in America, it could probably track down specific people like it did in the film.

Electromagnetic pulse weapons will work against machines. There’s a brief and pointless sequence in the movie where the heroes obtain two grenades that discharge electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) in the hopes that they will be of use against the Rev-9 since normal guns, bombs and sledgehammers to the head don’t hurt him. EMP weapons are real, and can permanently fry computer circuits by overloading them with so much electrical current that they melt. However, electronics can be easily protected from EMP’s by encasing them in thin metal shielding and incorporating fuses and circuit breakers. The application of this kind of protection is called “hardening,” and the encasements are called “Faraday Cages.” Combat robots like the Rev-9 will surely keep their computer chips in armored metal compartments inside their bodies to protect them from EMPs and physical damage, and will have fuses to block power surges in unshielded external components from going into the Faraday Cages and frying the computer chips.

A sealed, metal trash can can protect electronics from the strongest EMP bursts. It might even work with a few bullet holes through it.

Also, a major downside of EMP weapons is that they are indiscriminate, so detonating an “EMP grenade” would disable any unprotected electronics belonging to you, your friends, or anyone else nearby. Moreover, EMPs don’t always destroy electronics–weaker pulses will merely disable them temporarily. Once the pulses dissipate, the electronics start working like normal. EMP weapons have been pitched as the Achilles’ Heel of killer robots, but it just ain’t so.

There will be cybernetically augmented/enhanced humans. As stated, a female soldier is sent back in time from 2042 to protect Dani from the Terminator, and the soldier has superhuman abilities thanks to cybernetic implants that were surgically installed in her body. Implants in her eyes and/or optic nerves give her night vision, zoom-in abilities, and produce a “heads-up-display” across her field of view. She also has enhanced hearing, speed, strength, agility, endurance, reflexes, and pain tolerance. As a result, she can do things like acrobatic fighting moves, shoot guns with extreme speed and accuracy, beat up the Rev-9 Terminator in hand-to-hand combat, and survive injuries that would kill a regular person. A glowing device implanted in her chest powers her cyborg implants. I think extensive cybernetic implants and other technologies will allow humans to have abilities like these, and that exceed natural human abilities by similar or even greater degrees, but not until the 22nd century.

By 2042, the best “cybernetic implants” will still be therapeutic in nature and not augmentative, and will include things like more advanced pacemakers, artificial hearts, and probably artificial version of other organs. Aside from a tiny number of “extreme body modification” people, no one in good health will want to have surgery to install devices like these in their bodies for the purpose of enhancement alone. The gains will be much too small to justify the costs and health risks.

That said, by 2042, externally-worn devices will give people some of the same superhuman abilities that the female soldier’s cybernetic implants gave her. For example, lightweight glasses will provide heads-up-displays and enhanced visioning modes like night vision and zoom-in. Computerized contact lenses that can provide lower levels of vision enhancement will also be available. Lightweight headphones and earbuds could also provide wearers with enhanced hearing. Powered exoskeletons will be practical largely due to improvements in battery technology, and will give wearers super strength.

Note that, while the prospect of using externally-worn devices like computerized glasses to get superhuman vision might sound “lower-tech” than installing implants in your eyeballs, the glasses are actually the better choice in important ways. Since they don’t require surgery to be put to use, the glasses would be much cheaper, and using them wouldn’t impose the usual risks associated with surgery and the body’s rejection of foreign matter. Replacing broken or obsolete glasses would also be much cheaper and easier than doing the same to implants in your eyes that had gone bad.

We won’t see significant numbers of people implanting machines in their bodies to gain superhuman abilities until surgical techniques are radically more advanced and radically cheaper, and until the implants themselves are much more advanced and robust (possibly to the point of being self-healing). I doubt those improvements will happen until sometime in the next century.

Augmentations will let humans keep up with intelligent machines. The female soldier’s cyborg augmentations make her almost as good a fighter as the Rev-9. Her specific example raises a more general question: As machines get smarter and more capable, and as robots improve, could humans stave off obsolescence by upgrading our minds and bodies with technology? I think the answer is: For a time, yes, but in the long run, no.

The fact that we humans are made of squishy, organic parts that are comprised of long chains of flimsy biomolecules presents a fundamental and inescapable limitation to how durable our bodies can be, how fast we can run before our tendons and muscles rip apart, how much weight we can lift, and how hard a punch in the face we can take. Since we are mostly made of water, no type of augmentation will let us survive temperatures that are at or above the boiling point. In fact, considering that the hardiest, surface-dwelling extremophile bacteria can ONLY withstand temperatures up to 80°C, the maximum limit for complex, multicellular life forms like humans is probably much lower than boiling, even with augmentations. On the other hand, computer processors routinely reach 80°C during heavy operations, and I’m sure they could run hotter with the right engineering. Aluminum and steel that might serve as primary materials in robot bodies don’t melt until temperatures reach 600 °C and 1,300 °C , respectively. Finally, the fact that our brains function via electrochemical reactions also limits the speed of our thoughts to a paltry 200 mph, whereas computers use electricity to “think” at the speed of light, which is 670,000,000 mph.

Humans today are smarter than machines, more agile, and better in most other ways, and like the female soldier, we could augment ourselves with technology to keep up with machines as they improve. However, we will inevitably fall behind once we hit limits imposed by our biology. The only way you could overcome these limitations would be to bid farewell to your flesh, and replace your organic parts with engineered, artificial parts. This would have to include your brain, perhaps through a process of neuron-by-neuron replacement with something like computational ram chips. Of course, if you did that, you wouldn’t count as a “human” anymore and would have become a machine, which would merely prove my theory that humans will ultimately fall behind.

In 2042, I think humans overall will still be better than machines in most important ways, and part of our advantage will owe to our use of technological tools that amplify our strengths. A highly trained human soldier who also had the right tech augmentations (whether externally-worn or implanted) could effectively fight against the best humanoid robots of that year. However, I think that by 2100, machines will probably have surpassed us in most or all areas, and even highly augmented humans will struggle to compete at the lower rungs of human-machine society. Totally unaugmented, “natural humans” like you and I will be dead weight.

There will be time machines. All but one of the Terminator films are about futuristic fighters using time machines to go back in time. The laws of physics say it is impossible to go backwards in time, so we won’t have time machines in 2042 or at any other point that can do that. However, “time travel” into the future will be possible in a sense thanks to suspended animation.

People who are terminally ill or just dissatisfied with the present will be able to go into suspended animation, with instructions for nobody to revive them until specific conditions are met (usually, cures for whatever health problems they had). During the period of suspended animation, the person would probably have no brain activity and hence no sense of time’s passage. When they were revived, it would seem as if no time had passed, even if hundreds of years had elapsed. So from the perspective of that person, the suspended animation pod would effectively be the same as a time machine to the future.

Progress is being made in the field of human cryonics, and it’s plausible that by midcentury we’ll be able to freeze a person without irreparably damaging their brain cells. In the subjective way I’ve described, people who freeze themselves starting at that time will be entering “time machines” since they will awaken in the distant future (I don’t think a way will be found to safely thaw them out until the 22nd century). Note: I’m far less optimistic about people who froze themselves in past years using primitive methods, and I suspect they’ve bought one-way tickets to nowhere.

Artificial intelligences will also be able to go into “suspended animation” to subjectively travel into the future. They will simply switch themselves off or drastically slow down their clock speeds for arbitrary lengths of time, and then restore themselves to normal levels of functionality at a desired point in the future. Very little or no time will seem to have elapsed.

Finally, traveling through space at relativistic speeds is effectively the same thing as “time travel” since the passage of time slows down for you on your space ship while staying the same for everyone outside. However, I don’t think humans or machines will experience this for centuries given how much energy it takes to get up to even 10% the speed of light (see my Prometheus review for calculations).

Machines will need to physically touch humans to accurately deduce their bodily proportions. The Rev-9 Terminator’s skeleton is made of rigid metal bones and can’t change shape, but its outer layer of “flesh” is made of something like the T-1000’s liquid metal body, and it can change its shape and color to mimic specific humans. This is a highly useful ability that lets it infiltrate high-security buildings and trick humans into helping it. The downside is that the Rev-9 can only copy a human’s appearance if it physically touches that human, and for unexplained reasons, this always results in the human’s death. Therefore, if the Rev-9 ever approaches a character in the form of some other human, the character automatically knows the mimicked human is dead somewhere. This is unrealistic, and we already have technology that can accurately deduce a person’s physical proportions and biometrics without requiring physical contact.

Determining a person’s height is easy if you have an image of them standing next to a reference object whose dimensions are known. Additionally, if the person is in your physical vicinity, you can determine his or her height by comparing it to your own, or by remembering how tall they were relative to some object–like a doorway they walked through–and then measuring their height against that object after they go away. Once you know their height, then you can deduce their weight with high accuracy based on observations about their sex, age, and general build (e.g. – big fat belly, or so thin that their clothes looked baggy and their cheeks were sunken in?). An advanced robot like the Rev-9 would surely know these basic techniques. Data on things like skin tone, hair color, and hair style could obviously be gathered visually and without any need for touching.

A “Twinstant Mobile Full Body 3D Scanner” uses cameras mounted on vertical posts to take 2D images of a person standing in the middle. Computers then compile the images to make a 3D model of the person.
A person having her body scanned by the device.
The data were used to make a 3D-printed plastic doll that looks like the person. Using more advanced technology, a full-sized, 3D copy of a human could be made if photos or video footage of them taken from different angles were on hand.

Fine details about the person’s appearance, like their shapes of their head or nose, the lengths of their torso and of the bones in their arms and legs, and how they move their body when they walk, could be gathered by studying video footage of them from different angles, or by watching them in person for a short amount of time. Today, there are several companies that can use user-submitted photos of themselves to make realistic, digital avatars of them for the purposes of “trying on” clothing offered by online retailers. The 3D avatars are made by cobbling together multiple photos of the same person taken from different angles. Something as advanced as the Rev-9 would have the same capabilities.

Links:

  1. Thermus aquaticus is a surface-dwelling extremophile that lives in geysers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermus_aquaticus
  2. Webpage for Twindom, a company that makes 3D body scanners. https://www.aniwaa.com/product/3d-scanners/twindom-twinstant-mobile/

My predictions for the 2010s were very accurate

As I said in a recent blog entry, my interest in futurism and my habit of making written predictions about the future predate the creation of this blog by many years. Previously, I used Facebook as my platform for publishing those ideas, and in December 2009, I took my first shot at making a written list of personal predictions. The document’s title, “Predictions for the next decade,” is self-explanatory, and as it is now the end of the decade, I’d like to rate my accuracy. [Spoiler: I did a great job overall.]

Below, I’ve coped and pasted the text of the original Facebook note, and interspersed present-day evaluations of my predictions in square brackets and bold text. I’ve even carried over the pictures that were embedded in the original.

============================================================

Predictions for the next decade
December 25, 2009 at 2:57 PM

The first decade of the 2000’s (which should actually be called the “Oughties”) is just a few days from being over, and I thought I’d render a couple serious predictions for the “teen years.” Most of you probably don’t know this, but I am a futurist and like reading serious books written by scientists about what they think the future will be like. The granddaddy of these people is Ray Kurzweil, and I encourage you to take a couple minutes to read about the guy’s life, beliefs and predictions (failed and confirmed) here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_kurzweil
http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0275.html [Broken link to what was a Ray Kurzweil self-assessment of his 2009 predictions]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Raymond_Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil

As you can see from Kurzweil’s “2009” predictions, he’s about 50% right, 25% maybe right or wrong, and 25% flat wrong. While I think he’s definitely on the right track with his predictions, his big problems are that he overestimates the rate of technological advance–particularly where it concerns improvements to the “thinking” abilities of computers–and the willingness of people to accept new technologies. Kurzweil also sticks his neck out too often by proclaiming that one, specific type of technology will be in use by year X. When it doesn’t happen, his credibility is impeached.

[I still believe these things.]

Anyway, a detailed overview of my views on Kurzweil will have to wait for a later note. For now, let me tell you what I think the world will be like by the end of 2019.

The Political World

Obama wins the 2012 elections. Let’s face it: The same coalition of minorities and young people that elected Obama in 2008 are going to rally to his defense in 2012. The Republicans don’t have any obvious “golden boy” right now either. The only way Obama can lose is if he colossally screws up (or at least if Americans perceive it that way), which doesn’t seem likely given his intelligence. I’m not sure if Biden will run in 2016, but just remember that the guy will be 74 at that time, which will make him older than McCain was in 2008. There’s no way in hell I or anyone else can guess about who will win the 2016 elections, so I won’t try.

[I was right about everything! Also, I think the Democrats now have these same problems going in to the 2020 election: They don’t have an obvious “golden boy,” there’s not enough time left for one to emerge out of the woodwork, all of their Presidential candidates are seriously flawed in some way, and Joe Biden’s age problem is worse than ever! However, Trump’s voter base today is smaller than Obama’s voter base was in 2012, so even a seriously flawed Democratic opponent could beat him. The 2020 race is on such a knife’s edge that I can’t assign odds right now to the outcome, other than to say whoever wins will be disappointing.]

Sorry folks, but we still have a two-party system in 2019. Our institutions and people are simply too heavily geared towards supporting it.

[Sadly, I was right. However, since 2009, I’ve become less convinced that a three- or four-party system will help much, so we’re not much worse off as a nation than we otherwise would have been. Other governments show that, as the amount of political diversity grows, so does political gridlock. The need to sacrifice principles to make pragmatic, messy compromises that “keep the lights on” never goes away. My changed attitude towards this issue is a good example of how I’ve become less idealistic/more jaded over the last ten years from having more time to observe how the world really works.]

The U.S. will still be the world’s most powerful country politically, economically, militarily, culturally, diplomatically, and technologically, though China has closed much of that gap. On the subject of China, I think it’s important to remember that it is a country currently in social, political and economic transition, and it faces enormous challenges and pressures for change in the future. In no particular order, let me go through these. First, China has a growing gender imbalance that could threaten its internal stability. Thanks to a patriarchal culture and the one-child-per-family policy, abortions of female children are widespread and produce a sex disparity in the population (i.e. – If you can only have one kid, might as well make it count and have a boy). By the end of 2019, 24 million young Chinese men of marrying age will be unable to find wives. Having a lot of young, unattached males who aren’t getting enough sex hanging around inside your country is bad news, as the conservative societies of the Middle East show us. These guys tend to start a lot of trouble (terrorism, riots, reform movements, etc.).

[I was right! In fact, the Chinese sex imbalance is even worse than I estimated (some sources say there are 34 million more men than women there). Fortunately for China, this hasn’t translated into a mass civil unrest, and the single, young men are handling it with stiff upper lips and lots of erotic anime cartoons. The ongoing protests in Hong Kong aren’t being driven by the sex imbalance, and in fact, the city has a significant surplus of single, young women.]

Second, China faces another demographic problem in the form of its aging population: By the end of 2019, around 20% of all Chinese will be 60 or older, and that proportion will only grow with time. Frankly speaking (as I always do), old people sap national resources through pensions and medical services, as we see in our own country with Social Security and Medicare (and it is even worse at the state level in many cases). The graying of China’s population is going to cause large, direct decreases in the GDP growth rate, which will have a ripple effect through the entire country and all other segments of its society. Of course, the Chinese would be able to overcome this problem by increasing the number of young people to support the old through taxes, though it’s questionable whether such increases could be accomplished by 2019: Even if the Chinese government were to rescind the birth restrictions, it probably wouldn’t lead to sufficient population growth since many Chinese now have a Westernized mindset and are more concerned with personal growth and accomplishment than they are with having kids. Increasing immigration is another possibility, and while I do think a significantly greater share of China’s population will be foreign by 2019, the Chinese are simply too xenophobic to allow enough immigrants in anytime soon.

[I was mostly right! The share of China’s population that is 60 or older is in fact 17-18% now, so my original estimate was too high (not sure where I got it from) but still in the ballpark. In 2015, China raised the birth limit to two children per family, but it failed to spur a baby boom that was large enough to alter the country’s negative demographic trajectory. Mass immigration of workers also hasn’t happened in China.]

Third, China’s rapid industrial growth has caused serious environmental damage that will be much worse by 2019 and that will put another constraint on their GDP growth. Not only is the country the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, it is also the worst offender (or one of the worst) when it comes to a slew of other types of pollutants like sulfur dioxide and heavy metals. Fishing stocks near China’s coasts have also been almost exhausted, northern China is facing desertification and depletion of aquifers, and elsewhere in the country people riot on a near-daily basis over pollution and its effects. I’m not going to go into this in full detail, but there’s a great 2007 article in Foreign Affairs entitled “The Great Leap Backwards?” that covers the full extent of the damage if you want to read about it.

[Thankfully, the most dire extrapolations of China’s pollution trends didn’t pan out. China’s CO2 emissions have grown over the last ten years, so it pumps out more of the gas than ever before, but the rate of that growth has gotten much lower. Its levels of sulfur dioxide and air particulate emissions have also dropped over the last decade thanks to stricter laws. Environmental damage is probably hurting Chinese GDP growth less than I predicted, which actually makes me happy.]

Fourth, I think China’s global influence is going to hit a wall because the country doesn’t really stand for anything. It’s international behavior is clearly self-interested in all respects, and the country doesn’t have much of a vision–ideological or otherwise–to offer the world. Contrast this with the U.S., which has for decades sought to spread political freedom, economic freedom, free trade, and human rights, and which openly works for a future world free from want and oppression. Yes, I know that sounds very preachy of me, and yes, I realize that our pursuit of those goals has been inconsistent for various reasons, but I think we do the best we can given the constraints and that our presence moves the world in a positive direction overall. Having grand ideas and a nice-sounding ideology resonates with people across the world on a very basic level, and this is an area in which China is severely lacking.

[I was right. China is still viewed as a self-interested player on the international stage and has few good friends. The friends it has made through investment in Africa and in the Belt and Road Initiative would walk away as soon as the money stopped flowing.]

Fifth, by 2019, China’s economic growth rate will have slowed no matter what since there are only so many low-hanging fruits you can harvest. China’s statism isn’t going to be able to deliver results once the country’s economy moves beyond a low-wage export model and innovation and entrepreneurship become the pillars of further growth, as they are in the Developed World. Really, that touches upon one of China’s biggest problems–it’s government. Ignoring the traditional American complaints about the disregard for human and political rights (most Chinese don’t really care about these), the Chinese Communist Party simply isn’t going to be efficient enough or responsive enough to meet the expectations of the Chinese people once they become more educated, sophisticated and wealthy and once the aforementioned problems start to have a real impact. Political change and a period of social instability in China are hence inevitable and might happen by 2019 or be about to happen. The operative word in that sentence is “might.”

[I was right about China’s economic growth rate shrinking during the 2010s, but wrong about the CCP’s ability to hold on to power. The last decade has shown the Party to be more adept at tracking and shaping the opinions of its people and defusing potential crises than I anticipated.]

Such a transition might lead to a wonderful outcome or to disaster. It’s always possible that the CCP could, during a time of internal crisis, try to divert attention and to unify the country by playing on the strong nationalism of its people and agitating over Taiwan, the Spratly Islands or something else (Pride, and somewhat by extension nationalism, is the quintessential human flaw). That, of course, would bring China into conflict with us, but the such a subject is too large to be discussed here. Suffice it to say that any U.S.-China military conflict–even if waged with strictly conventional weapons–would be terrible no matter who won and would lead to a dramatically altered international economic and diplomatic balance of power that the losing side would be extremely bitter over. Let me be clear: A war between China and the U.S. is extremely unlikely (largely due to economic linkages), and I think it would only have a chance of happening if China’s government got really desperate and felt it had more to gain from such a war than it would lose or if some fool in Taiwan tried to declare independence. The point is that there’s a possibility of conflict.

In any case, by 2019, China won’t be able to beat the U.S. in combat under most circumstances. They might be able to win the opening stages of a war over Taiwan, but that’s only because Taiwan is just a few miles from China whereas it’s across the biggest ocean in the world from the U.S. In an all-out industrial war like WWII, China will still get beaten as badly in 2019 as in 2009, assuming the American people are willing to fight as hard as they did in WWII (actually not such a safe assumption). On that note, it’s worth keeping in mind that, while China’s military capabilities are rapidly growing, they have a very long way to go to catch up to America’s. We’re talking at least 50 years here. The exact same applies to their economy. Think China’s rich? Compare their per capita GDP with America’s. Even adjusted for PPP, it’s not even close.

[I was right. Today, China remains too weak to beat the U.S. military, and is too weak to take over and hold onto Taiwan. Regarding my “50 year” prediction, I think China’s naval and air forces could be strong enough in as little as 20 years to beat U.S. forces in a war for the “First Island Chain,” but that’s not the same as saying China’s military will be better in every way, and able to beat the U.S. military in any type of engagement and in any part of the world.]

I think it’s useful to remember another episode from our recent history when thinking about China’s projected rise. In the 1980’s, Americans were absolutely convinced that Japan was going to surpass us and become the world’s economic superpower. All of the economic trend lines pointed to such an outcome. But guess what happened? Overinvestment in land and the stock market (done out of the expectation of high future returns indicated by all those upward trend lines) formed a bubble, which popped and led to a recession (similar to our current problem). Unemployment went up, causing consumer spending to go way down. Government stimulus attempts were ineffective. Japan’s elderly population was also a major drain. Something similar could happen to China (though a gradual leveling of GDP growth is also possible), and at some point in the future, we might all be laughing about how worried we were back in 2009 or 2019 about this other Asian juggernaut.

[A Japan-style economic slowdown could still hit China, so my prediction from 2009 still stands. However, I’m far less concerned about the “total meltdown” scenario where China has an economic depression AND a political implosion AND attacks its neighbors, dragging in the U.S. Over the last decade, the CCP has proven itself smarter and more cool-headed than to let such a thing happen.]

[In the original Facebook note, I detoured into a discussion of Chinese history at this point. While interesting, I’m omitting it because it isn’t about futurism.]

…The Chinese respect Americans and Europeans for their accomplishments, but still believe that it was really just a fluke that the West happened to be more advanced than China back starting in the 1800’s when it began expanding into East Asia. The Chinese are extremely proud of their country’s economic, political and military ascension and think that the end result will merely be the righting of wrongs and the establishment of the world order as it always should have been, with China at the natural center. The problem is, there is a real chance these ambitions could be frustrated for the reasons I have discussed, and a wounded and bitter China obsessed with failed expectations would be a menace to everyone.

There is a small chance we could see such a world by 2019, or that we could see it on the horizon. Or, China might defy all expectations, overcome its problems and be on its way to taking the reins of global leadership. Or it could be in some middle ground. The point is that China’s future is really uncertain, and owing to the country’s size and strength, this is a major issue we will need to involve ourselves with.

Moving on, Iraq has an at least even chance of still being a stable country by 2019, with a democratic–albeit highly corrupt–government. I’m not saying it’s going to be paradise, but it will be able to take care of itself, and no one will worry about it facing state collapse. Iraq will still be getting a lot of U.S. aid to keep it stable, and I could see small numbers of American troops still in the country for special purposes like training the Iraqi army and fighting terrorists, but we’re not going to be losing many guys, so no one will care. On the other hand, there’s also the real chance that Iraq could hold together for only a short period after the U.S. withdraw, and then start disintegrating again. Such a development would initiate a new national debate over here on whether or not to send troops back in, which I believe we ultimately would.

[I was right! When I wrote the original note, there were about 125,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. By early 2012, it had dropped to 5,000. As I thought might happen, Iraq started disintegrating shortly after, and in 2014, ISIS took over large parts of the country. To confront the new threat, U.S. troop levels again increased, but the intensification of combat was tolerated by the American public because our casualties were low. In 2019, Iraq has returned to being a stable country with a corrupt, democratic government.]

As seemingly hopeless as Afghanistan is, I don’t think Obama is going to cut and run and let it degenerate like we did in the 1990’s. The country will surely be a dump in 2019, but there will be some stability.

[I was right. Afghanistan is probably better than it has been in its history, but the social and economic progress it has made thanks to the U.S. and other countries is paper-thin, and would disintegrate if Afghanistan were left to its own devices. Even Afghans acknowledge this.]

I have no idea how the Iranian nuclear problem is going to be resolved, but some kind of solution will have to be found by 2019. They’ll definitely have the ability to make nukes and warheads by then. Considering the downsides of attacking their nuclear infrastructure, I think it’s entirely possible we might just have to let Iran get the bomb, or at least leave them with the capability to do so.

[An “OK” nuclear deal between the U.S. and Iran existed from 2015-18, and hit the pause button on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Had the deal never existed, and had Iran chosen to develop nuclear weapons as fast as possible, it would have built a nuclear bomb by now. The situation is now in a weird holding pattern, where the Trump administration half-believes it can use sanctions to force Iran to give up nuclear weapons, and Iran is mad about the sanctions but not so much that it’s willing to fully resume nuclear weapon development and risk even worse punishment. As was the case in 2009, I have no idea how this dispute will resolve itself.]

There’s also a good chance the that whole “War on Terror” might have wound down and receded from public consciousness by 2019. Sure, crazy Islamists are always going to be a threat, but I could see the momentum being on our side by 2019 and the enemy ranks thinned to a manageable level. It won’t necessarily happen, but it’s a real possibility.

[I was right!]

Also, at current rates, Medicare will go bankrupt in 2019. Expect this to be a big political issue in the 2016 elections. We’ll find a solution to the problem, though I doubt it will be an efficient or cheap one.

[I was wrong. This hurts because it was a particularly sloppy prediction of mine. The Medicare program, by design, can’t “go bankrupt,” nor was there any chance of it running out of money by 2019. I have no idea what inspired that prediction.]

Oh yeah, Fidel Castro dies by 2019 for sure. Kim Jong-Il also has a good chance of being dead by then. I’m not sure what effect it will have on either country, though I’m more optimistic about Cuba moderating in the coming years. Hosni Mubarak is also going to be kicking the bucket, along with Pope Benedict.

[Muhaha! Castro and Kim died in 2016 and 2011, respectively, and Cuba did “moderate” a great deal during the 2010s, though it is still not a free country. Mubarak and Benedict didn’t die, but they both were effectively removed from the picture due to a coup (2011) and resignation (2013), respectively.]

Warfare and military stuff

By 2019, unmanned military vehicles are going to be more prolific and advanced than they are now. Expect to see unmanned boats and trucks in common American military use. The machines will mostly be under the control of remote human operators.

[I got ahead of myself. Unmanned aircraft are more sophisticated and more numerous in the U.S. military and peer militaries, but unmanned land vehicles and ships are still experimental, so I don’t consider them to be in “common” use.]

Reaper UAV

Of course, the core of our fighting forces will still be human beings, and you’ll still be seeing guys kicking down doors, sleeping in tents and chasing down some rusted AK-47 wielding bums out in some forsaken country even in 2019. Expect that to continue for a couple more decades.

On that note, in addition to Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. will doubtless involve itself in a number of small conflicts and operations in the Third World. Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere in Africa seem like the best bets for this.

[Wow, I was super right! The level of violence in Yemen is much worse than it was in 2009, and though U.S. troops aren’t on the ground there, American weapons and indirect support are propping up one faction. U.S. troops did combat operations in Somalia over the past decade and there is now at least one U.S. base there. Elsewhere in Africa, the U.S. military involved itself in conflicts in Libya and Niger, and built a base in the latter. The U.S. also intervened in the Syrian civil war and actually invaded the country. I predict this kind of global policing will continue at about the same level during the 2020s. ]

WWIII–as in, a huge war between the major powers–is highly unlikely though not impossible. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.

Cyberwarfare and possibly bioterrorism are much greater threats over the next decade, and I would expect a couple major cyberattacks, not necessarily on the U.S. but against some developed nation. I doubt this would take the form of crippling an entire country, but shutting down all the electricity to a big city isn’t out of the question. While a bioattack could occur, it’s almost certainly just going to involve a normal pathogen like anthrax and won’t be some genetically engineered superbug that kills off half the human race. Sorry to disappoint you apocalypse movie buffs.

[Cyberwarfare did surge in the 2010s, though it overwhelmingly took the form of hacking to steal sensitive data from governments and big companies. There was only one instance of a successful cyberattack meant to shut down a public utility, and it was perpetrated by Russia against Ukraine in 2015.]

The economy

I’m loath to make any predictions here given the huge swings in the global economy we’ve seen over the last two years, but I doubt that we’re headed for some Great Depression part two. The economy will slowly recover, the recession will end, and many Americans will start trying to resume their reckless spending habits. It’s simply an immutable fact about our culture that we are shortsighted and materialistic. I’m not saying things will be as good as they were in 1999 or 2005, but the economy will recover from the recession and will become healthier.

[I was right! In fact, by many measures, the U.S. economy is now stronger than it was in 1999 and 2005. Today’s unemployment rate is the lowest it has been in 50 years. Reckless spending habits are back with a vengeance! SUV sales are higher than ever, and newly constructed houses are bigger than ever.]

However, there’s a giant issue on the horizon that could throw a monkey wrench into all of this–the U.S. budget deficit. This is a major, MAJOR problem that has been kept on the back-burner for years and years while people piddled on about socialized healthcare and the wars. Basically, the U.S. federal government has for almost ten years now been spending way more money than it receives in taxes–the traditional means through which governments are funded. To cover the shortfall, the U.S. has been borrowing money from countries like China, Japan and Saudi Arabia. We now owe these countries trillions of dollars, plus billions in interest, and there are no signs that this dependency is going to shrink in the future if we stay on the present course.

[In the original Facebook note, I went into almost a rant about politics and overspending at this point. I’m omitting most of it because it isn’t relevant to this analysis.]

…Past experience has shown that once national debt reaches a certain % of GDP, foreign and domestic investors start getting spooked about the country’s ability to repay, and they stop lending money to it. Well, we’re getting very close to that point, and between now and 2019, the U.S. will have to make major spending and taxation changes to avoid total disaster. If we don’t take the initiative, most likely our main foreign creditors (China, Japan, Saudi Arabia) are going to start pressuring us in various ways to cut spending and raise taxes. If we don’t, they’ll start reducing their purchases of our Treasury securities.

If we really screw things up by failing to reach some kind of fiscal compromise in Washington, life in America could really, REALLY suck come 2019. However, I think it’s more probable that we will end up going through some tortuous debate within government that ends up with us raising taxes, cutting federal programs, or probably a little of both by 2019, which will avert a major economic crisis.

[I was wrong. At the time, I didn’t realize that there is no hard-and-fast rule about how high your country’s debt-to-GDP ratio level has to get before you have a fiscal crisis. Since the U.S. has the world’s biggest economy, trades heavily with all other major countries, and prints its own currency–which, very importantly, is also the world’s reserve currency–special rules apply to it. To see what happens when your country lacks these advantages, look at what happened to Greece in 2015. That said, I haven’t started thinking that the rising national debt isn’t a problem for the U.S. There are just so many variables at play that I can’t predict when or if a sovereign debt crisis will hit, or how bad it will get before we agree to a solution.]

Technology

There are several clear trends that will continue into 2019. For one, we see the vanishing of physical media to hold data. By 2019, the big DVD and Blu-Ray collections you see in peoples’ houses will largely be a thing of the past, at least among people with half a brain or more. People will just download movies into their computers or computer/TV’s, or pay like $1 to watch them On Demand. The same will also be happening to video games: Instead of having to buy an expensive console and a bunch of game cartridges, or a high-end computer, people will use high-speed Internet connections to stream video game feeds from remote central locations. People will be able to play any game they want at any time at low cost, and they won’t have to buy any hardware except controllers and maybe an adapter. The overall costs to gamers will decrease significantly while access to games will increase tremendously. There will still be a lot of highly advanced consoles around by 2019, but the transition to the new technology will be well underway, and the trend will be clear by that point.

[I was mostly right. Sales of DVDs and Blu Ray discs declined over the last decade while movie streaming has exploded and become the norm. Had you bought Netflix stock in December 2009, when its streaming service was in its infancy, your investment would today be worth 33x as much. I don’t see physical storage media bouncing back. Today’s gamers also do have access to a wider variety of games at lower prices than ever thanks to streaming, as the Playstation Network (PSN) and Steam show. My prediction about the end of game consoles might have been a little optimistic, as Sony and Microsoft are planning to release a new generation of consoles next year, but I still think it will come true at some point. Industry insiders are still talking about the impending transition to streaming.]

Hollywood and the video game industry are going to try hard to push 3D TV on the masses, but I’m not sure how quickly it’s going to catch on. People ARE NOT going to put on a pair of 3D glasses every time they watch TV, especially if the glasses cost a lot of money and each household needs to buy several of them so all family members can watch. Hardcore video gamers might be willing to do it to enhance the gaming experience, but not average people just watching the Cooking Channel or something. People might be more amenable to 3D movies in the theaters, but it’s not going to work at home. I don’t think 3D is really going to catch on until holographic TV’s that can produce 3D pictures for the naked eyes are invented, and I could see these at least being in the prototype stage by 2019.

Don’t get me wrong–3D TV definitely seems like the next big thing (after all, at some point, you can’t increase the resolution of 2D TV any further to be discernable to human eyes, and the industry has to start heading in new directions), but I think the 3D glasses are going to be a big stumbling block, and it’s going to take longer for the technology to gain mass acceptance than industry insiders would like. Another major problem is the fact that regular TV’s–including the expensive flatscreen HDTV’s–can’t display 3D images, and normal Blu-Ray players can’t play them, meaning everyone will have to pay a couple thousand bucks again to get everything replaced. There’s also no standard yet for 3D signal broadcasts, and TV signal bandwidths are going to need time to expand to handle them, anyway.

[I was right! And I’m darn proud about this since, in late 2009, we were in the grips of Avatar hysteria, and one of the film’s selling points was that it was made to be seen in 3D. And yes, glasses-free 3D TV prototypes now exist, including one made by “Mopic.”]

Once 3D motion pictures do start to gain widespread appeal, a mini-industry will spring up to “convert” the old 2D movies to 3D in much the same way that old black and white films were colorized. This might start happening by 2019.

I also wouldn’t be surprised to see digital cameras being sold in stores by 2019 that take both 2D and 3D photos, so you could look at them normally or put on your 3D glasses and see them popping out of the computer screen.

[3D movies and photos still haven’t caught on, and I worded my predictions on this to indicate my justified doubts. When glasses-free 3D TVs and advanced VR/AR eyewear become mature technologies, the conversions of older 2D visual content into 3D format will begin. This will probably start by 2029, and will certainly be widespread by 2039. Additionally, there are indeed digital cameras being sold in stores today that can take 3D photos (such as the $350 Vuze XR), but they aren’t very popular.]

E-readers are finally going to go mainstream within a few years, and will be ubiquitous and cheap by 2019. Sure, there will still be people soldiering on with normal newspapers and books, but those will be on their way out for most people, especially younger ones. You’ll go on a bus or a subway or something and see a whole bunch of people looking at their personal e-readers.

[I was basically right. A brand new, high-quality Amazon Kindle 6″ e-reader costs less than $100 today. E-readers are in fact obsolete now because tablet computers got much cheaper and better over the last decade and have many more functions than e-readers. It’s worth it to pay a little extra money to get a device that is so much better. Larger smartphones (sometimes called “phablets”) have also eaten up part of the e-reader market share. It is indeed very common, and in fact the norm, to see people on buses or subways looking at their personal devices, though most of the time it’s a smartphone instead of an e-reader.]

Typical e-reader [in 2009]

Along those lines, by 2019, I think almost every college student will have a laptop or some tabletlike portable computer (maybe an e-reader with an attached stylus and keyboard) that they would bring to class and do most of their work on. These should also be pretty common among high schoolers, though don’t expect pencils and paper to be anywhere near gone by 2019 in schools.

[I was right. 81% of college students now use laptops during class lectures. Among the remaining 19%, I bet some are using tablet computers or even smartphones to take notes. https://www.pcmag.com/news/370271/the-average-college-laptop-shopper-prioritizes-price-speed ]

There’s also going to be a massive increase in the number of amateur recorded videos. At the rates that computer memory costs are decreasing and digital camcorder technology is improving, by 2019 you could feasibly record every second of your entire, boring life–in good quality video–and save it onto your computer or put it onto the Internet. By 2019, also expect basically half the human race to have a high-quality digital camcorder built into their cell phone, computer, slim digital camera, or WHATEVER, and also expect there to be a lot more surveillance cameras everywhere. Between those developments, expect an explosion in “citizen journalism” and voyeurism, and expect for virtually every single disaster (plane crash, tornado, riot), public crime, or act of public obnoxiousness to be recorded and posted onto the Internet within hours for everyone around the world to see. Yeah, I know things are already kind of like this, I’m just saying you should expect it to be ten times more intense and pervasive by 2019. And things will only get worse from there.

[Oh my God I was right! You could strap a GoPro camera to your chest, record 720p footage with audio, and make 90 GB of video per day (assuming you skip the nine hours per day when you’re sleeping and showering). Applying lossless compression to the footage, you could reduce the file size by at least 50%. The resulting 45 GB of data you made each day could be saved onto personal hard drives. A 2TB HDD costs $50 today, and could store 44.4 days worth of videos, meaning it would only cost slightly more than $1/day to make and save recordings of almost all your waking hours. That price will of course drop in the future as computer memory gets cheaper. Moving on, in rich and middle-income countries, over half of adults have smartphones. Even in poor India, over 24% have smartphones, and another 40% have “dumb cell phones,” most of which surely have built-in cameras. My prediction about an explosion in the amount of amateur and semi-professional video content being uploaded to the Internet was also obviously right. In fact, it’s now common for public crimes and acts of obnoxiousness to be recorded by multiple people and from different angles.]

More generally, by 2019, physical computer memory will be so cheap that for about $50 you could buy more memory than you could ever put to any practical use. For instance, if you scanned every important personal document, photograph and home movie into your computer and also added in all the songs you liked along with pdf copies of all your favorite books, it wouldn’t come anywhere close to filling up your hard disk. By 2019, the only way you could exceed the memory capacity of an average computer would be extreme and pointless hording of data: You would have to save 100 or more Blu-Ray quality movies onto your hard drive, or download hundreds of thousands of songs (which would easily include every famous song ever written), have dozens of high-end computer games (circa 2019) on your computer at once, or record every second of your life with hi-def cameras in order to have a problem with disk space. Bottom line: By 2019, computer hard disk space is effectively infinite for normal people.

[I was right. As mentioned, $50 today will buy you a 2TB hard drive, which contains more space than the vast majority of people need. There’s no reason to save movies and music onto your personal drives thanks to cloud storage and streaming.]

It will also be a lot faster and easier to upload videos and pictures to the Internet by 2019. I could see a lot of people using digital cameras that have GPS sensors in them or some other type of location fixing device/software, so every picture and video would automatically be tagged by the device with information on where it was taken. People could easily search and view videos and pictures over the Internet by searching for images of a certain geographic area.

[I was right about it all! Smartphones automatically embed the GPS coordinates into a photo’s metadata at the moment the photo is taken, though this feature can be disabled. ]

I’d also expect electronic media to be embedded in a lot of magazines, books, wall ads, and products by 2019, meaning you open up a copy of the December 2019 issue of Maxim, and several of the pages feature paper-thin computer displays with moving images and sounds. Most of these will probably be advertisements. I could also see a lot of billboards and wall ads being like this by 2019, and people no longer being shocked or fascinated by them–they’ll just be an everyday thing. If you want an idea of what I’m talking about, watch Minority Report and Children of Men. This was already done for the first time in some magazine this year.

[I was wrong. Paper-thin computer display technology didn’t get cheaper and better as fast as I predicted, and I think we might have to wait until the 2030s for the price/quality level to be good enough to make this a reality. A bigger problem, however, is the decline of the print industry, which includes the magazine sub-industry. Over the last ten years, magazine sales have shrunk by about 50% as people have switched to reading things off of screens instead of paper, and I don’t see how this transition can be stopped. By the time it is possible to make paper-thin digital displays that are so cheap that buyers will be OK with throwing them away, there won’t be much of a magazine industry left. Case in point: Maxim, which I mentioned in my prediction, went from 12 to 10 issues per year in 2012, and has had declining revenues and profits over the last decade.]

By 2019, every new car except the very cheapest will come with a GPS and an MP3 player. Being horribly dependent upon one’s GPS for navigation will be a common thing among new drivers. I wouldn’t be surprised if some computerized, self-driving cars were also on the roads by 2019, though they’ll definitely be an expensive novelty and most people will be scared to ride in them. Far more common will be cars that use some form of computer assistance for things like collision warnings and parallel parking. Affordable hybrids and reliable battery-powered cars with respectable range will be a lot more numerous in 2019 (in part thanks to all the used, circa-2009 Priuses that will be still circulating), though the roads will still be dominated by normal internal combustion vehicles driven by stupid human beings like today. It takes many years for the vehicle fleet to “turn over.”

[I was right about almost everything! The 2019 Hyundai Accent base version, which is a cheaper car model but not one of “the very cheapest,” comes with an integral MP3 player, but no GPS. However, this is a moot point since MP3 drives and GPS receivers built in to cars have been rendered redundant by smartphones, which have both of those features. The future actually turned out more convenient than I thought. Self-driving cars are on the roads in the form of Teslas, they are still expensive novelties, and a recent poll showed most Americans are afraid to ride in them. ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyamohn/2019/03/28/most-americans-still-afraid-to-ride-in-self-driving-cars/#3991842432da ) Hybrids and pure electric cars are indeed more common today, but gas-powered cars still dominate.]

Solar technology will be cheaper and better than ever in 2019. For just a few thousand dollars, you can buy enough solar panels from Wal-Mart or Home Depot to cover your entire roof. The human labor needed to install it properly might actually end up costing more than the panels themselves. Tens of millions of working- and middle-class people find it within their means to install the solar panels on their property without major financial strain, and rooftop solar arrays become a common sight in the U.S., though such upgrades are still only made to a minority of homes.

[I was right! Also, I got a 7.5 kW solar array installed on my own roof in 2019, and the cost after all tax breaks and other discounts was about $10,000, which is affordable for a middle-class person. Even a working-class income person could buy it thanks to loans. Rooftop solar panels indeed became common sights across the U.S. during the 2010s.]

Along the lines of what Kurzweil keeps harping on, I could see a lot of people using glasses with computers built into them. There’s a clear trend for computers to get smaller, more convenient to use, more portable, and more integrated into everyday life. Just look at how many people have iPhones, which are essentially small computers. A logical next stage would be to have the computer display permanently in your field of vision, meaning a ghosted heads-up display overlaying what you see in the real world. The glasses themselves might have their own independent computers, or they might function like Bluetooths and be dependent upon signals received from the iPhone in your pocket. At the very least, these would be useful for navigation and for displaying information about stores, places and things you encounter. I’m not going to screw myself over like Kurzweil and make a bunch of specific predictions about how the glasses will work, etc., but I think it would make sense for the makers of these glasses to first start marketing them to people who wear glasses anyway thanks to bad eyesight. Maybe you’re going in to get your frames changed or something, and you fork over the extra $100 to get the little computer built into your new frame. Pretty soon, you’re bragging to all your normally sighted friends about it, you let them wear it for a couple minutes so they can see what it’s like, and maybe that pushes them to start buying glasses of their own even though they ordinarily never wear them. By no means do I think the majority of people will have these things by 2019, but I could see them being a viable technology by then that people don’t consider weird. Let me also make a highly specific prediction about this: Once Apple gets into making these things, it will call them–what else–but the iGlass. Ha ha ha!!!

[I was wrong. Google tried to introduce the first augmented reality glasses in 2013, and it was possibly the biggest tech industry failure of the decade. Once large numbers of people started using them, problems that I didn’t foresee in 2009 became clear, such as the unwillingness of many normally sighted people to wear glasses all the time, and dismay from other people that someone else’s AR glasses could be surreptitiously recording them. The 2010s were also the decade when technology fatigue, social media addiction, and “fear of missing out” (FOMO) became real problems, and people realized that being connected to the virtual world all the time with devices like AR glasses might be a bad thing. Again, I couldn’t have foreseen this. That said, I don’t think AR eyewear is dead forever, and in fact I predict it will return as a niche product in the 2020s once the technology is better and cheaper.]

At the very least, by 2019, most everyone will have the equivalent of an iPhone. Normal cell phones strictly for calling other people and sending text messages will be rare.

Just more generally, computers will become more ubiquitous, helpful and user-friendly. By 2019, you’ll be able to just type a natural language question into your computer (probably your iPhone or whatever equivalent you have) or some website (“What’s a really good, cheap Chinese restaurant around here?”) or maybe even speak the question into the computer’s microphone, and it will be able to understand you and give a useful answer (“Ho Fat’s: Average rating is four stars, average entree price is $7, located four blocks ahead.”). It won’t work all the time, but will be effective and reliable enough for many people to use it and benefit from it.

[I was right about everything! Our devices and computers will get better at these things over the 2020s, and will evolve from merely responding to our requests to anticipating our needs and proactively suggesting useful things to us. In the near future, your life will be better if you follow your computer’s daily advice.]

In terms of health technology, by 2019, anyone will be able to submit a blood or saliva sample to a lab and get a copy of their personal genome for a few hundred bucks, if not less. Instead of getting some horribly long printout, you would get the data on a thumbdrive or something like that. People would find the information valuable for health purposes since it would inform them of hereditary health risks they might face, and would allow them to take precautions beforehand, but it is not going to lead to the revolution in personal healthcare by 2019 that some are expecting. Maybe it would add two or three years onto the average life expectancy of the population.

[I was right! Dante Labs does high-quality, whole-genome sequencing for $600, and you send them your DNA with a “spit kit.” The genomic data are returned to you in the form of a .txt file. The personal health benefits of having this information are small because we still don’t understand most of the human genome.]

By 2019, there will be a prescription pill on the market that slows the human aging process, delaying death and extending life. But expect it to cost a lot and to deliver minimal benefits, like you take it every day starting in your 20’s and you end up living to 90 instead of 88.

[It’s not clear if I was right. The problem with my prediction was, to prove that a pill extends human lifespan, decades of clinical trials would need to happen so differences in mortality and rate of aging could be discerned between people who took the pill and people who didn’t. Giving it only ten years for science to settle the matter was a mistake. That said, I’m heartened by the number of new drugs that were popularized over the last decade that have some scientific basis for having “life extension” properties (metformin and rapamycin), and in the fullness of time, I predict we’ll have conclusive evidence that at least one of today’s unproven anti-aging drugs does extend human lifespan.]

Household robots will be fairly common by 2019 and will be doing stuff like vacuuming the floor, mowing the lawn and dragging the trashcans to the curb. They won’t be humanoid in shape and instead will have very utilitarian and function-specific designs. Industrial robots will be more advanced, and I could see greater use of robots in labor-intensive industries doing things like picking fruits and vegetables from farm fields, which would erode our demand for illegal immigrant labor and mitigate the demographic shifts we’re expecting. A lot of the technologies necessary for creating these affordable, dependable robots will come from military research.

[I was mostly wrong. Vacuum cleaner robots have gotten much cheaper and more common since 2009, but that’s the only inroad robots made into people’s homes. Human hands still do almost all of the fruit- and vegetable-picking on farms, though experimental robots have gotten much better. The technologies just didn’t advance as fast as I thought.]

Many more people will telecommute. Also, taking college classes remotely will be a lot more common and more respectable by 2019 (which will be a good thing), though the vast majority of young people will still want to be physically present in the classroom and get the campus/college life experience.

[I was right.]

Space

I wouldn’t be surprised if, by 2019, space probes had discovered life or proof of life elsewhere in our Solar System. I’m not talking about little green men, I mean microbes and fungi. We’re most likely to find this stuff in the soils of Mars or on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Instead of destroying the basis for religions like Christianity, I think their adherents will find a way to rationalize it and reconcile it with their beliefs.

[I was not wrong or right because I hedged my statement with the uncertain phrase “I wouldn’t be surprised if…” In fact, I didn’t even make a real prediction. Life still hasn’t been found outside of Earth, but I still think it’s very possible that simple alien life forms like microbes and fungi exist in our Solar System and beyond. I can’t predict when we might find an sample.]

Europa–one of the moons of Jupiter and a candidate for extraterrestrial life. It is a water moon whose surface is frozen, but underneath it is liquid.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if one of our telescopes spotted a distant planet with Earth-like conditions by 2019. It would be pretty cool, the first grainy pictures of the planet would be on the cover of TIME magazine, and I’m sure it would change the way people thought about the importance of the space program, but we’d really just continue with our daily lives. A lot of our whacko, conspiracy theory types would latch onto these findings and start renewing their paranoia over aliens.

[Many potentially habitable exoplanets have been discovered since 2009 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extrasolar_candidates_for_liquid_water ), but we don’t have proof they have life. We don’t have quality photos of these exoplanets because we don’t have multi-trillion dollar space telescopes whose lenses are several square kilometers in area, which is what would be needed to capture enough of the infinitesimal visible light reflecting off an exoplanet to make a photograph. Because I now have an elementary grasp of optics, I understand why a detailed photo of an exoplanet won’t grace the cover of TIME magazine for a long time.]

By 2019, we’ll probably be in a mini-space race with China to go back to the Moon. No one will have landed humans there, but the time for such an event would be measurably close.

[I think I was right. China landed its first rover on the Moon recently, is planning a second one, and probably has the long-term goal of landing a man on the Moon. The U.S. Vice President has also declared that there is a new space race with China, and that America’s response should be a manned Moon landing by 2024. I predict that deadline will slip, but a landing by the end of this decade is plausible.]

“Special” problems

The world isn’t going to face any major risks in 2012, at least not because of anything the ancient Mayans said. Keep in mind that the Mayans were such great futurists that they didn’t predict the Spanish showing up in the 1500’s and massacring them. It’s also unclear whether the Mayans even believed 2012 would bring any kind of disasters to the world. If anything, they would have been happy about the milestone. Finally, let’s keep in mind that the Mayan calendar isn’t really ending in 2012, we’re just supposedly transitioning into a new age of mankind. According to the Mayans, this has happened several times in human history, the last occurrence being in 3114 BC, (Year Zero to the Mayans) when the current age of mankind began. If the transition dates between each age of man are times of great death and disaster as 2012 proponents claim, then 3114 BC should have likewise been a period of great suffering, but historical and archaeological records show no evidence of and problems that year. It looks like–gasp-the Mayans made it all up.

[Mayan doomsday didn’t happen, and I remember spending the first half of December 21, 2012 filling out boring paperwork at a bank.]

The world’s climate almost certainly won’t be detectably different ten years from now. Sure, it will be 0.1 degrees Celsius warmer, but you’re not going to see any major changes in coastlines or weather thanks to that. Runaway global warming is a possibility, just as the Earth getting hit by a giant asteroid is, though the mainstream of climatologists dismisses the theory. If anything, I think the threat of global warming is exaggerated.

[I was right. In spite of the breathless, dour pronouncements that “Global warming MAY HAVE CONTRIBUTED to this latest disaster” that are now daily pablum on the news, the planet’s overall climate is not noticeably different to people than it was ten years ago. I still consider “runaway global warming” to be a very remote possibility. ]

Peak Oil may or may not happen during the teen years. This is another outcome that is very difficult to predict. Once the recession ends and petroleum demand picks up again, we’re going to see $4 gasoline again pretty soon, and I don’t see it getting much cheaper than that. But we’re not going to “run out” of oil EVER. There’s simply too much on this planet–the biggest bottleneck is our ability to extract and process it. By 2019, gas could easily be north of $4 per gallon, and there might be many more people taking mass transit or using battery powered cars, but there’s not going to be any collapse in oil supplies. We’ll just get used to it.

[Overall, I’d rate my prediction as “wrong.” Not only did Peak Oil not happen, but gas prices have stayed below the $3.00 mark in most of the U.S. for the last five years in spite of a booming economy. Fracking changed everything. It was a change I didn’t see coming, but I was in good company.]

[I’m leaving out two paragraphs from my original Facebook Note where I talk about and debunk the “Prophecy of the Popes” because the whole topic is silly and unscientific. You can research it on your own if you want: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophecy_of_the_Popes ]

California seems kind of overdue for a big earthquake, doesn’t it? (I probably should say this right now since I’m actually in San Diego at the moment, right over a faultline) I would expect a significant one by 2019.

[I was wrong, and I quit the business of “earthquake prediction” years ago. Even the best seismologists in the world can’t make useful forecasts.]

I’d like to end this section by making an important point: I’ve come to realize that most people have a natural tendency to believe that the world is always getting worse, to be pessimistic and to believe that the worst case scenario will occur. You can see this in the slew of zombie horror movies, books and films about 2012 and the apocalypse, and among commonly held views about the future of the world. I believe that this mostly stems from a perverse fascination that people have with spectacle and disaster, from the millennialist tradition of the Abrahamic faiths that predominate in the West, and from a strong and usually secret desire among many people–particularly survivalists, young men, and individuals frustrated by their low ranking in the current, orderly society–to experience adventure and “natural” living instead of their boring, normal lives. Often, these desires are informed by immaturity and by mistaken notions of what such a postapocalyptic world would be like (imagine being in Mogadishu or Darfur and being just as poor, starving, stuck, and badly armed as everyone else).

A common retort is that “this time it’s different” because there are so many “signs” of impending disaster occurring at once. Really? I hope that I’ve shown here the flaws of such prophecies, and just because there are a lot of them doesn’t mean anything. 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 0. Moreover, I think to a large extent that the paranoia is being fueled by the media and by the entertainment industry, which themselves are just essentially parroting to the masses what they know they want to hear and not tapping into some kind of cosmic truth about the future. The “experts” who also harp on catastrophes like Peak Oil, 2012 and the Biblical apocalypse and lend seeming credence to them usually stand something to gain (typically money, resume padding, fame, or just an ego boost) from being in the public light, and they almost always lack the necessary facts and data to assert their ideas with anything approaching true certainty. Of course, the experts on the opposing side who claim that things actually aren’t as bad as most people think and won’t end calamitously are usually ignored by average people because they’re not as exciting as the other guys. The whole phenomenon is silly and shows the consequences of irrational human thinking.

[I still stand by all of this! These beliefs have in fact been strengthened by things I learned over the last decade about evolutionary psychology and the negativity bias.]

The Edster

Eddie will be 35 and will be in a mid-management position at some big company or probably the government. Hopefully, his mind won’t be dulled yet by the drudgery of the workplace, and he will still be creative.

Perhaps there shall be a Mrs. Eddie…or perhaps not. In any case, Eddie will be feeling the desire to generate Eddie Jrs in the next few years if he does not already have them since having kids at 50 would be too old and Eddie would be a stodgy and out-of-touch dad. 2019 would start the optimal time window for Eddie to start reproducing.

Eddie will have read an enormous number of books by this point and will have more advanced knowledge in several fields, including evolutionary psychology and philosophy. Eddie will also have traveled widely by this point and will have visited many countries, definitely including Thailand, Britain, Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy. Eddie will have visited all 50 states and will own a small RV and boat to assist with these travels.

There is a chance that Eddie might be involved in a Ph.D. program in 2019.

By 2019, Eddie will own several houses that he will rent out to tenants on the side. Eddie will have enough of these by 2019 to start seriously thinking about quitting his normal day job and just working 15 hours a week doing rental real estate and spending the rest of his time at leisure and doing personal pursuits. Perhaps Eddie will begin making serious plans to work his way into the Travelers’ Century Club.

[I hit the nail on the head! My math was miraculously right, and I did indeed turn 35 ten years after I turned 25. My career situation closely matches my predictions, I’ve traveled widely (though I fell one state short of my 50 state goal), but don’t have the RV. Also, after visiting the first 17 countries, I realized there is a lot of repetition in the world and some places just aren’t worth seeing, so I dropped my long-term goal of seeing 100+ countries so I can hang out with old people in the Travelers’ Century Club. Very fortunately, I opted against pursuing a Ph.D and invested my time in wiser endeavors like playing more video games.]

[That’s the end of the original Facebook Note. However, over the next few years, I added new predictions to it in the form of Comments, which I’m posting below this, along with their timestamps and my evaluations of them.]

March 26, 2011: Another thing to add under the “Technology” section: By the end of 2019, the 2-D TV paradigm will have finally reached maturity. The problems and tradeoffs that currently dog digital TV sets (motion blur, bad-looking anti-jitter settings, dull blacks and whites, etc.) will be solved, and the picture quality will be perfect at last. The price for digital TV sets will also have come down so much that a 60″ monster will cost a thousand bucks or less, so having such an appliance will be the new standard. Almost all types of big-screen TV’s circa-2019 will be less than two inches thick, and some might in fact be incredibly thin and light. Of course, rather than let us be happy with this, Hollywood and the electronics industry will keep pushing us to buy even better TV technologies. As I’ve said, there’s a good chance we will be transitioning to 3-D TV’s in large numbers, and by the end of 2019, its possible that holographic TV’s might be in mass production. The industry might also have some new, ultra-high res format better than 1080×1920 that it’s trying to push on consumers for 2-D TV’s, though I don’t see why anyone in their right mind would NEED something higher res than Blu-Ray.

[I was mostly right. New 2D TVs have solved all the technical problems with accurately displaying colors and moving objects. They actually improved more on all the metrics I listed than I predicted they would. The industry is now pushing 4K format on consumers, and people are buying it even though few of them need it.]

March 26, 2011: Also, let me clarify something. By 2019, I believe that DVD’s and Blu-Rays will be largely obsolete and that most people will stream hi-def movies over the Internet whenever they want to watch them. However, that doesn’t mean all of those discs are going to magically disappear. Yeah, you’ll still see them for sale at Wal-Mart and you’ll still see them cluttering up peoples’ houses, just in the same way you can still find VHS tapes all over the place. But by that far in the future, discs will be old technology that is clearly on its way out. Sales will be way down and still declining, and stores will probably have to slash prices way down on Blu-Rays to $5 to get anyone to buy them. Redbox might still exist and still rent Blu-Rays, but the technology’s niche in our lives will have shrunk to the margins.

[I was right! Wal-Mart now literally sells Blu-Ray movies in unorganized bargain bins. Redbox still exists and rents discs to people, but the company has been ailing for years due to the rise of competitors that deliver streamed content.]

December 16, 2011: By 2019, LED lights will finally be perfected and will be the new standard for industrial, commercial and residential lighting. LED’s will be cheap, will produce natural-looking light, and of course won’t burn out for 10+ years.

[I was right!]

December 27, 2011: By the end of 2019, the following gadgets will be obsolete:
1) Standalone GPS devices (GPS features will be built into other devices you will still carry)
2) Tablets exclusively used for E-reading (tablet tech will be so advanced that there will be no point in buying such limited devices)
3) Cellphones that aren’t smart phones (smart phones will be so cheap that there won’t be any point in buying a “dumb” phone)
4) Pocket digital cameras (will be replaced by cameras built into smart phones–DSLR’s will still have a niche, though)
5) DVD players (Blu-Ray players and disc will be dirt cheap by the end of 2019)
6) Recordable CD’s and DVD’s (thumbdrives, cloud storage and streamed content will replace discs)
Yes, I took this from a recent Yahoo news article entitled “7 Gadgets that won’t be around in 2020.”

[I was right.]

December 27, 2011: Also, by the end of 2019, most new digital cameras will capture pictures in 3D and through use of multifocus technology, whereby one push of the shutter button actually takes multiple pictures of the same image at different fields of depth, so that the viewer can later “zoom” in and out of any given photograph to see images of the foreground, background, or any arbitrary distance from the lens in focus. Computer facial recognition technology will also be so advanced that computers could automatically identify all the faces shown in a given photo.

[The first prediction about multifocus camera tech being the norm was wrong, but the second prediction about facial recognition was right.]

December 27, 2011: Also, by the end of 2019, I believe free cell phone service will exist. It will probably be just basic talk and text, and a company like Google or Apple will run the service.

[I was wrong, though the cost of a typical cell phone plan dropped.]

[And that’s a wrap! If you’re curious to know what my predictions are for ten years hence, this month I’m publishing a big list of predictions for that and other future dates, so stay tuned!]

Roundup of interesting articles, November 2019

U.S. life expectancy peaked in 2014 and has been declining since then due to an increase in middle-aged deaths from drug overdoses, alcohol, suicide, obesity, and smoking.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2756187

After many years of consistent failure, science might have found a medical benefit of taking fish oil pills. “Vascepa” pills have curbed heart attacks in clinical trials.
https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/blockbuster-sight-amarin-s-vascepa-scores-unanimous-nod-from-fda-committee

Using data from an electrocardiogram, an AI can predict a person’s one-year odds of dying better than a human doctor.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2222907-ai-can-predict-if-youll-die-soon-but-weve-no-idea-how-it-works/

Doctors in Baltimore have been putting hospital trauma victims into suspended animation as part of ongoing experiments to see if it can prolong their lives long enough to get lifesaving surgeries.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2224004-exclusive-humans-placed-in-suspended-animation-for-the-first-time/

Preimplantation genetic diagnosis done on a round of ten human embryos could, at best, allow the selection of a child whose IQ was 3 points higher and whose height was 3 cm greater than average. This makes clear how much we have yet to learn about human genetics, and how little the first generation of genetically engineered humans will change things.
https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0092867419312103

All Earthly DNA and RNA is made of five nucleic acids (G, A, T, C, U), but there are at least one million alternative nucleic acids that have different molecular structures but similar chemical properties. (Though I suspect we evolved to use the nucleic acids that were the most stable and least energy-intensive to make.)
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jcim.9b00632

No one knows how big the largest possible element is. The low estimate is one with an atomic weight of 126, and the high estimate is that there is no maximum size at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_periodic_table

Carefully latticed polymer materials are incredibly strong. A team of engineers used a 3D plastic printer to make a Rubik’s Cube-sized block of the material, and it was bulletproof.
https://news.rice.edu/2019/11/13/theoretical-tubulanes-inspire-ultrahard-polymers/

The cost of synthesizing graphene, a carbon-based material with amazing properties, dropped by more than an order of magnitude during the 2010s, and further reductions are coming. Cheap graphene could be as impactful as aluminum or plastic.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336242197_Path_towards_graphene_commercialization_from_lab_to_market

Another five U.S. Navy sailors have come forth saying they witnessed the famous encounter between a fighter jet and a UFO off California in 2004.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a29771548/navy-ufo-witnesses-tell-truth/

Here are roundups of failed Christian doomsday predictions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfulfilled_Christian_religious_predictions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_and_claims_for_the_Second_Coming_of_Christ

Singularity University is in big trouble: Its CEO just quit, and 60 of its staff are being laid off.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-12/silicon-valley-s-singularity-university-is-cutting-staff-ceo-exits

Go champion Lee Sedol has retired from the sport, partly blaming lingering demoralization after losing so badly to the AlphaGo machine.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7730899/Machines-defeated-says-grandmaster-retires-Chinese-strategy-game.html

A neural network solved Newton’s “Three Body Problem” in under a second, beating any other computer by a wide margin.
https://www.livescience.com/ai-solves-three-body-problem-fast.html

Machine learning has identified big chunks of Shakespeare’s plays that were probably written by a fellow playwright, John Fletcher. The latter might have written almost half of Henry VIII.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614742/machine-learning-has-revealed-exactly-how-much-of-a-shakespeare-play-was-written-by-someone/

What is a group of robot animals called? A herd, pack, or a murder?
https://youtu.be/G6fMV1UPzkg

Motorola has released a flip phone with a folding inner screen.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50414612

GM’s President predicts that mass adoption of electric cars in the U.S. will start by 2030.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/25/perspectives/gm-electric-cars/index.html

Elon Musk has unveiled a stealth-fighter-looking Tesla “Cybertruck.”
https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/22/cars/tesla-cybertruck-electric-pickup-truck/index.html

For a long time, I’ve been meaning to read The Size of Nations, which uses mathematical modeling to explain why today’s countries are as big as they are. Well, at least I’ve read this excellent critique of that book, which raises the interesting argument that economies of scale don’t keep growing as a nation’s size and population grow, and that in fact, it might start suffering from diseconomies of scale past a certain size and diversity level.
https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=550

“Betz’ Law” says that no wind turbine can capture more than 59.3% of the kinetic energy of the wind blowing through it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27s_law

The effects of an EMP attack have been exaggerated.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/world-wont-end-danger-emp-attack-more-fantasy-fact-94681

The Russian military has a gigantic “air cannon” that they use to see how well their tanks can withstand nuclear bomb shockwaves. Even better, they’ve put footage of some of the experiments on YouTube:
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31033/this-is-how-the-russian-military-tests-if-its-vehicles-can-stand-up-to-a-nuclear-blast

Russian troops have taken control of the Sirrin Air Base in northern Syria following the evacuation of U.S. troops. Syria’s government never gave U.S. troops permission to be in their country, but Russia’s troops were invited in.
https://www.rt.com/news/473504-russia-secures-us-base-syria/

Examples of almost all of the world’s best tanks (the M1 Abrams, Leopard 2, and T-90) have been destroyed in the Syrian Civil War, reminding us that, in spite of their heavy armor and sophistication, they are still vulnerable.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russia-thought-its-tanks-were-unstoppable-and-then-syria-happened-94481

Russia is struggling to make reliable bullets. Russian guns like the AK-47 are actually almost as accurate as more expensive Western counterparts, but perform worse on the battlefield thanks to bad ammunition and being fired by poorly-trained soldiers.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russias-military-has-not-addressed-its-ammunition-problem-92706

Here’s a review of the “Sierra 3 BDX,” a “smart scope” that crunches data from a pocket-sized rangefinder to tell you how to aim your rifle. The farther away the target is, the higher it will tell you to aim to compensate for bullet drop. Technology like this and guided bullets will someday turn any soldier into a sniper.
https://youtu.be/kzZpNot2FfQ

On a related note, the shoulder-fired Carl Gustav rocket launcher can now fire guided munitions out to ranges of 2 km. The test videos are impressive, and even though the weapon isn’t meant to be used like this, it could snipe humans.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30786/guided-rounds-will-turn-the-beloved-carl-gustaf-recoilless-rifle-into-a-precision-weapon

The skeleton of one of Napoleon’s favorite generals was dug up in Russia. He died during the 1812 invasion.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50329041

It’s the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Leyte Gulf–the biggest naval clash ever.
https://www.navalgazing.net/Leyte-Gulf-75

Review: “Blade Runner”

Plot:

In the year 2019 a race of “bioengineered” humans called “replicants” exists, and are used as slave laborers and soldiers on space colonies. While made superior to ordinary humans in most respects (strength, pain tolerance, intelligence), replicants have deliberately capped lifespans of only four years to limit the amount of damage they can do should they rebel against their masters, and they are not allowed on Earth itself. This doesn’t stop a small group of replicants–including several who have enhanced combat traits–from hijacking a space ship and traveling to Earth to confront their “creator,” the head of the company the manufactured them and all other replicants, and to force him to technologically extend their lifespans. The replicants smuggle themselves into Los Angeles, where the company’s headquarters is.

Upon discovering the infiltration, the LAPD hires a bounty hunter named “Rick Deckard” to hunt down the replicants. Deckard’s background is never clearly explained, but he has good detective skills and has killed replicants before. As he follows leads and tracks them down, Deckard meets a love interest and is forced to confront his biases about replicants and consider existential questions about them and himself.

An important fact must be clarified and emphasized. Replicants ARE NOT robots or androids; they are “bio-engineered” humans. They don’t have metal body parts or microchip brains, and instead are made of flesh and blood like us. As proof, there are several scenes in Blade Runner where the replicant characters are hurt or killed, and they display pain responses to injuries and bleed red blood.

A replicant named “Zhora,” dead after being shot in the back with a handgun. Note the blood.

Additionally, it’s made clear that replicants can only be distinguished from humans by a sit-down interview with a trained examiner in which the subject is asked a series of odd questions (called the “Voight-Kampff Test”) while their physiological and spoken responses are analyzed. The procedure looks like a polygraph test. If replicants were robots with metal bones, microchip brains, or something like that, then a simple X-ray scan or metal detector wand would reveal them, and there’d be no need for a drawn-out interview. Likewise, if the replicants were organic, but fundamentally different from humans, then this could also be quickly detected with medical scans to vision their bones and organs, and with DNA tests to check for things like something other than 46 chromosomes.

By deduction, it must be true that replicants are flesh-and-blood humans, albeit ones that are produced and birthed in labs and biologically/genetically engineered to have trait profiles suited for specific jobs. The available evidence leads me to suspect that replicants are “assembled” in the lab by fitting together body parts and organs, the way you might put together a Mr. Potato Head. They are then “born” as full-grown adults and come pre-programmed with fake memories and possibly work skills. Replicants are human slaves, technologically engineered for subservience and skill.

Analysis:

Los Angeles will be polluted and industrial. In the film, Los Angeles is a grim, hectic place where fire-belching smokestacks are within sight of the city’s residential core. During the few daylight scenes, the air is very hazy with smog. This depiction of 2019 fortunately turned out wrong, and in fact, Los Angeles’ air quality is much better than it was when Blade Runner was released in 1982.

This improvement hasn’t just happened to L.A.–across the U.S. and other Western countries, air pollution has sharply declined over the last 30-40 years thanks to stricter laws on car emissions, industrial activity, and energy efficiency. With average Westerners now accustomed to clean air and more aware of environmental problems, I don’t see how things could ever backslide to Blade Runner extremes, so long as oxygen-breathing humans like us control the planet.

National average pollution figures from the U.S. EPA

Of course, the improvements have been largely confined to the Western world. China and India–which rapidly industrialized as the West was cleaning itself up–now have smog levels that, on bad days, are probably the same as Blade Runner’s L.A. This has understandably become a major political issue in both countries, and they will follow the West’s path improving their air quality over the coming decades. In the future, particulate air pollution will continue to be concentrated in the countries that are going through industrial phases of their economic development.

This looks like a shot from Blade Runner, but is actually a photo taken on a smoggy evening in Beijing in 2013.
The building, named “Pangu Plaza,” on a clear day.

Real estate will be cheap in Los Angeles. One of the minor characters is a high-ranking employee at the company that makes the replicants. He lives alone in a large, abandoned apartment building somewhere in Los Angeles. After being tricked into letting the replicants into his abode, he gestures to the cavernous space and says: “No housing shortage around here. Plenty of room for everybody.” In fact, the exact opposite of this came true, and Los Angeles is in the grips of a housing shortage, widespread unaffordability of apartments and houses, and record-breaking numbers of poorer people having to live on the streets or in homeless shelters.

The problems owe to the rise of citizen groups that oppose new construction, historical preservationists, and innumerable new zoning, environmental, and labor laws that have made it too hard to build enough housing to keep up with the city’s population growth since 1982, and priced affordably for the people who actually work there. Blade Runner envisioned a grim 2019 for Los Angeles, courtesy of unchecked capitalism (e.g. – smokestacks in the city, smoggy air, megacorporations that play God by mass producing slaves), yet the city (and California more generally) actually went down the opposite path by embracing citizen activism, unionists, and big government, ironically leading to a different set of quality of life problems. Fittingly, the building that stood in for the derelict apartment building in Blade Runner has now been fully renovated, is a government-protected landmark, and is full of deep-pocketed, trendy businesses.

The vast majority of Los Angeles’ land area is covered by single-family homes and low-rise buildings.

There will be flying cars. One iconic element of Blade Runner is its flying cars, called “spinners.” They’re shaped and proportioned similarly to conventional, road-only cars, and they’re able to drive on roads, but they can also take off straight up into the air. Clearly, we don’t have flying cars like this today, and for reasons I discussed at length in my blog entry about flying cars, I doubt we ever will.

I won’t repeat the points I made in that other blog entry, but let me briefly say here that the spinners are particularly unrealistic types of flying cars because they don’t have propellers or any other device that lifts the craft up by blowing air at the ground. Instead, they seem to operate thanks to some kind of scientifically impossible force–maybe “anti-gravity”–that lets them fly almost silently. There are brief shots in the film where low-flying spinners belch smoke from their undersides, which made me wonder if they were vectored thrust nozzles like those found on F-35 jets. But because the smoke comes out at low speed, the undermounted nozzles are not near the crafts’ centers of gravity, and the smoke isn’t seen coming out when the spinners are flying at higher altitudes, I don’t think they help levitate the spinners any more than a tailpipe helps a conventional car drive forward on a road.

A flying car expelling exhaust from its underside during takeoff..

People will smoke indoors. In several scenes, characters are shown smoking cigarettes indoors. This depiction of 2019 is very inaccurate, though in fairness the people who made the movie couldn’t have foreseen the cultural and legal sea changes towards smoking that would happen in the 1990s and 2000s.

People in Blade Runner like smoking indoors. No one stops them, and there aren’t any “No Smoking” signs.

When judging the prediction, also consider that if we average people and the legal framework were more enlightened, vaping indoors would be much more common today. While not “healthy,” vaping nicotine is vastly less harmful to a person’s health than smoking cigarettes, and science has not yet found any health impact of exposure to “secondhand vape smoke.”

A recent photo of a young woman smoking an e-cigarette.

There will be genetically engineered humans. In Blade Runner, mankind has created a race of genetically engineered humans called “replicants” to do labor. The genetic profile of each replicant is tailored to the needs of his or her given field of work. For example, one of the film’s replicant characters, a female named “Pris,” is a prostitute, so she is made to be physically attractive and to have average intelligence. All of the replicant characters clearly had high levels of strength and very high pain tolerances.

Digital dossier on the replicant “Pris”

In the most basic sense, Blade Runner was right, because genetically engineered humans do exist in 2019. There are probably dozens of people alive right now who were produced with a special in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure called “mitochondrial replacement therapy” in which an egg from a woman with genetically defective mitochondria is infused with genetically normal mitochondria from a third person, and then the “engineered” egg is combined with sperm to produce a zygote. The first such child was born in 1997.

Additionally, there are now two humans with genetically engineered nuclear DNA, and they were both born in November 2018 in China after a rogue geneticist used CRISPR to change both of their genomes. Those edits, however, were very small, and will probably not manifest themselves in any detectable way as the babies grow up, meaning Blade Runner‘s prediction that there would be genetically engineered adults with meaningfully enhanced strength, intelligence, and looks in 2019 failed to come true. This is because it has proven very hard to edit human genes without accidentally damaging the target gene or some other one, and because most human traits (height, IQ, strength, etc.) are each controlled by dozens or hundreds of different genes, each having a small effect.

For example, there’s no single gene that controls a human’s intelligence level; there are probably over 1,000 genes that, in aggregate, determine how smart the person is and in what areas (math, verbal, musical). If you use CRISPR to flip any one of those genes in the “smart” direction, it will raise the person’s IQ by 1 point, so you just have to flip 40 genes to create a genius. But CRISPR is an imprecise tool, so every time you use it to flip one gene, there’s a 20% chance that CRISPR will accidentally change a completely different gene as well, perhaps causing the person to have a higher risk of cancer, schizophrenia or a birth defect.

The discovery of CRISPR was a milestone in the history of genetic technology, and it improved our ability to do genetic engineering by leaps and bounds, but it’s simply not precise enough or safe enough to make humans with the major enhancements that the replicants had. We’ll have to wait for the next big breakthrough, I can’t predict when that will happen, and I doubt anyone else could since there’s no “trend line” for this area of technology.

That’s not to say that we couldn’t use existing (or near-term) genetic technologies to make humans with certain attributes. A technique called “preimplantation genetic screening” (PGS) involves the creation of several human zygotes through IVF, followed by gene sequencing of each zygote and implantation of the one with the best genetic traits in the mother. This isn’t true “genetic engineering,” but it accomplishes much the same thing. And you could sharply raise the odds of getting a zygote with specific characteristics if you did the IVF using sperm or eggs from adults who already had those those characteristics. For example, if you wanted to use genetic technology to make a physically strong person, you would get the sperm or eggs of a bodybuilder from a sperm/egg bank, use them for an IVF procedure, and then employ PGS to find the fertilized egg that had the most gene variants known to correlate with high strength. This would almost certainly yield a person of above-average physical strength, without making use of bona fide “genetic engineering.” There are no statistics on how many live babies have been produced through this two-step process, but if we assume just 0.1% of IVF procedures are of this type, then the number is over 8,000 globally as of this writing.

Furthermore, I can imagine how, within 20 years, genetic engineering could be applied to enhance the zygotes farther. Within that timeframe, we will probably discover which mitochondrial genes code for athleticism, and by using mitochondrial replacement therapy, we could tweak our PGS-produced zygote still farther. Let’s assume that there are ten nuclear genes coding for physical strength. The average person has five of those genes flipped to “weak” and five flipped to “strong,” resulting in average overall strength. Our carefully bred, deliberately selected zygote has nine genes flipped to “strong” and one flipped to “weak.” Since we only have to change one gene to genetically “max out” this zygote’s physical strength, the use of CRISPR is deemed an acceptable risk (error rates are lower than they were in 2019 anyway thanks to lab techniques discovered since then), and it works. The person grows up to be a top bodybuilder.

There will be genetically engineered super-soldiers. The leader of the replicant gang in Blade Runner is named “Roy Batty,” and he was designed with traits suited for military combat. Having governments or evil companies make genetically engineered or cloned super-soldiers is a common trope in sci fi, but I doubt it will ever happen, except perhaps in very small numbers.

First, I simply don’t believe that the government of any free country, and even most authoritarian ones, would be willing to undertake such a project. And even if one of them were, the diplomatic costs imposed by other countries on the basis of human rights would probably outweigh the benefits of having the small number of super-soldiers. Mass producing millions of super-soldiers to fill out an army (to be clear, there was no evidence of anything but than small-batch production in Blade Runner) is even less plausible, as it would be too fascist and dehumanizing a proposal for even the most hardline dictatorships. Censure from the international community would also be severe. What damage can you do with an army of genetic super-soldiers if years of economic sanctions have left you without any money for bullets?

Second, a country’s ability to make super-soldiers will be constrained by its ability to raise and educate them. In spite of their genetic endowments, the super-soldiers would only be effective in combat if they were educated to at least the high school level and psychologically well-adjusted, which means costly, multi-year investments would need to be made. Where would the state find enough women who were willing to be implanted with super-soldier embryos and carry them until birth? If the government coerced its women into doing this, the country would become an international pariah for sure, and its neighbors would strengthen their own armies out of concern at such derangement.

Who would raise the children? State-run orphanages are almost universally terrible at this, and too many of the super-soldiers would turn out to be mentally or emotionally unfit for military service, or perhaps fit, but no better overall than a non-genetically engineered soldier who was raised by a decent family. If the government instead forced families to raise the super-soldier kids, doubtless many would be damaged by family dysfunction at the hands of parents who didn’t want them or parents who raised them improperly.

Third, by the time we have the technology to make genetic super-soldiers at relatively low cost, and by the time any such super-soldiers get old enough to start military service, militaries will probably be switch to AIs and combat robots that are even better. As I predicted in my Starship Troopers review, a fully automated or 95% automated military force could exist as early as 2095.

And if the super-soldiers were all clones of each other, they could develop very close personal bonds, come to feel alienated from everyone else, and behave unpredictably as a group. Identical twins and triplets report having personal bonds that can’t be understood by other people.

That said, I think human genetic engineering will become widespread this century, it will enable us to make “super people” who will be like the most extraordinary “natural” humans alive today, some of those genetically engineered people will serve in armed forces and under private military contractors across the world, and they will perform their jobs excellently thanks to their genetically enhanced traits. While it’s possible that some of these “genetic super-soldiers” will be made by governments or illegally made by evil companies, people like that will be very small in number, and dwarfed by genetic super-soldiers who are the progeny of private citizens who decided, without government coercion, to genetically engineer their children. Those offspring will then enter the military through the same avenues as non-genetically engineered people, either by joining voluntarily or being drafted. Yes, there will be genetically engineered super-soldiers someday, but their presence in the military or in private security firms will be incidental, and not–except in some rare cases–because a government or company made them for that purpose and controlled their lives from birth.

There will be “artificial animals”. While visiting the luxurious office of a tycoon, Deckard sees the man’s pet owl flying around, and he’s told that it is “artificial.” Later, he comes across an artificial pet snake, whose scales (and presumably, all other body parts) were manufactured in labs and bear microscopic serial numbers. To the naked eye, both animals look indistinguishable from normal members of their species. It’s unclear whether “artificial” means “organic” like human replicants, or “mechanical” like robots with metal endoskeletons and computer chips for brains. We have failed to create the latter, and the robotic imitations of animals we have today are mostly toys that don’t look, move, or behave convincingly. Our progress achieving the former (replicant animals) is more equivocal.

Our technology is still far too primitive for us to be able to grow discrete body parts and organs in a lab and to seamlessly join them together to make healthy, fully functional animals. This is the likeliest process used to make the replicants, so in the strictest sense, we have failed to live up to vision Blade Runner had for 2019. However, we are able to genetically modify animals and have done so many times to hone our genetic engineering techniques. For example, Chinese scientists used CRISPR to make dogs that have twice the normal muscle mass. For all I know, they’re now the pets of a rich man like the film’s tycoon.

Barbra Streisand with her cloned dogs.

Additionally, we are reasonably good at cloning animals, and, considering the vagueness of the terms “artificial” and “bioengineered” as they are used in the film, it could be argued that they apply to clones. Cloning a cat costs about $25,000 and a dog about $50,000, putting the service out of reach for everyone but the rich, and there are several rich people who have cloned pets, most notably Barbra Streisand, who had two clones made of her beloved dog after it died. A celebrity of her stature owning cloned animals is somewhat analogous to Blade Runner‘s depiction of the tycoon who owned the artificial owl.

There will be non-token numbers of humans living off Earth. At several points in Blade Runner, references are made to the “off-world colonies,” which are space stations and/or celestial bodies that have significant human populations. Advertisements encourage Los Angelinos to consider moving there, which implies that the colonies are big enough and stable enough to house people other than highly trained astronauts. The locations of the colonies aren’t described, but I’ll assume they were in our solar system.

This prediction has clearly failed. The only off-world human presence is found on the International Space Station, it only has a token number of people (about six at any time) on it, only elite people can go there, and its small size and lack of self-sufficiency (cargo rockets must routinely resupply it) means it fails to meet the criteria for a “colony”.

There are no plans or funds available to expand the ISS enough to turn it into a true “space colony,” and in fact, it might be abandoned in the 2020s. Other space stations might be built over the next 20 years by various nations and conglomerates, but they will be smaller than the ISS and will only be open to highly trained astronauts.

While a manned Moon landing is possible in the next ten years (probably by Americans), I doubt a Moon base comparable in size and capabilities to the ISS will be built for at least 20 years (note that 14 years passed from when U.S. President Reagan declared the start of the ISS project and when the first part of it was launched into space, and no national leader has yet committed to building a Moon base, which would probably be even more expensive). In fact, in my Predictions blog post, I estimated that such a base wouldn’t exist until the 2060s. It would take decades longer for that base or any other on the Moon to get big enough to count as a “colony” that was also open to large numbers of average-caliber people. A Mars colony is an even more distant prospect due to the inherently higher costs and technological demands.

I think the human race will probably be overtaken by intelligent machines before we are able to build true off-world colonies that have large human populations. Once we are surpassed here on Earth, sending humans into space will seem all the more wasteful since there will be machines that can do all the things humans can, but at lower cost. We might never get off of Earth in large numbers, or if we do, it will be with the permission of Our Robot Overlords to tag along with them since some of them were heading to Mars anyway.

Cars will be boxy and angular instead of streamlined. Many of the cars shown in the movie are boxy and faceted. While this may have looked futuristic to Americans in 1982, boxy, angular cars were in fact already on their way out, and would be mostly extinct by the mid-90s. The cars of Blade Runner look retro today, and no mass-produced, modern vehicles look like them.**

Deckard’s car.
A van
U.S. fuel economy standards sharply increased from 1975-85. Blade Runner was filmed in 1982, and its artistic vision was to some extent influenced by the aesthetics of the time, hence the boxy future cars.

The change to curvaceous, streamlined car bodies was driven by stricter automobile fuel efficiency requirements, enacted by the U.S. government in response to the Arab Oil Embargoes of the 1970s. Carmakers found that one of the easiest ways to make cars more fuel efficient was to streamline their exteriors to reduce air resistance.

A 1982 Toyota Corolla
A 2019 Toyota Corolla

Since there’s no reason to think vehicle fuel efficiency standards will ever come down (if anything, they will rise), there’s also no reason to expect boxy, angular cars to return.

Just after I’d finished analyzing this car prediction, look who showed up.

**IMPORTANT NOTE I’M ADDING AT THE LAST MINUTE: On November 21, 2019, Elon Musk debuted Tesla’s “Cybertruck” at an event in Los Angeles, and the vehicle is a trapezoidal, sharp-angled curiosity that looks fit for the dark streets of Blade Runner. While I doubt it heralds a shift in car design, and it’s possible the Cybertruck could be redesigned between now and its final release date in 2021, I’d be remiss not to mention it here.

Therapeutic cloning will be a mature technology. There’s a scene in the film where two fugitive replicants confront and kill the man who designed their eyes in his genetics lab. It further establishes the fact that the replicants are made of organic parts that are manufactured in separate labs and then assembled. This technology is called “therapeutic cloning,” and today it is decades less advanced than Blade Runner predicted it would be.

Two replicants confronting the geneticist who designed their eyes.

We are unable to grow fully-functional human organs like eyes in labs, and can barely grow rudimentary human tissues using the same techniques. The field of regenerative medicine research was in fact dealt a serious blow recently, when a leading scientist and doctor Paolo Macchiarini was exposed as a fraud. Dr. Macchiarini gained worldwide fame for his technique of helping people with terminal trachea problems by removing tracheas from cadavers, replacing the dead host’s cells with stem cells from the intended recipient, and then transplanting the engineered trachea into the sick person. For a time, his work was touted as proof that therapeutic cloning was rapidly advancing, and that maybe Blade Runner levels of the technology would exist by 2019. Unfortunately, time revealed that Macchiarini had faked the results in his medical papers, and that most of his patients died soon after receiving their engineered tracheas.

The actual state-of-the-art in 2019 is lab-made bladders. Being merely an elastic bag, a bladder is much simpler than an eye.

Legitimate work in regenerative medicine is overwhelmingly confined to labs and involves animal experiments, and there are no signs of an impending breakthrough that will enable us to start making fully functional organs and tissues that can be surgically implanted in humans and expected to survive for non-trivial lengths of time. The best the field can muster at present is a few dozen procedures globally each year, in which a small amount of simple tissue, such as a bladder or skin graft, is made in the lab and implanted in a patient under the most stringent conditions. (Of note, only a small fraction of people with missing or non-functional bladders have received engineered bladders, and the preferred treatment is to do surgery [called a “urostomy”] so the person’s urine drains out of their abdomens through a hole and into an externally-worn plastic bag.) As noted in my Predictions blog entry, I don’t think therapeutic cloning will be a mature field until about 2100.

Advertisements will be everywhere. In Blade Runner, entire sides of buildings in L.A. have been turned into huge, glowing, live-action billboards advertising products. This prediction was right in spirit, but wrong in its specifics: Advertisements are indeed omnipresent, and the average person in Los Angeles is probably more exposed to ads in 2019 than they would have been in 1982. However, the ads are overwhelmingly conveyed through telecommunications and digital media (think of TV and radio commercials, internet popup ads, browser sidebar ads, and auto-play videos), and not through gigantic billboards. Partly, I think this is because huge video billboards would be too distracting–particularly if they also played audio–and would invite constant lawsuits from city dwellers who found them ruinous of open spaces and peace.

Which is worse: Huge video billboards or being constantly pummeled with spam emails, digital ads, and the knowledge that your personal internet data is being sold and traded without your control?

No one will turn on the lights. Blade Runner is a dark movie. No, I mean literally dark: Almost all of the scenes are set at night, and no one in the movie believes in turning on anything but dim lights. It may have been a bold, iconic look from a cinematography standpoint, but it’s not an accurate depiction of 2019. People do not prefer dimmer lights now, and in fact, nighttime artificial light exposure is higher than at any point in human history: satellites have confirmed that the amount of “light pollution” emanating from the Earth’s surface (mainly from street lights and exterior building lights) is greater than ever and still growing. Also, people now spend so much time staring into glowing screens (smartphones, computer monitors, TVs) that circadian rhythm disruption has become a public health problem.

If your light is so bright that it can be seen in space, then you’re wasting a lot of electricity.

Intriguingly, I don’t think this trend will continue forever, and I think it’s possible the world will someday be much darker than now. I intend to fully flesh out this idea in another blog entry, but basically, as machines get smarter and better, the need for nighttime illumination will drop. Autonomous cars will have night vision, so they won’t need bright headlights or bright streetlights to see the road. Streetlights will also be infused with “smart” technology, and will save energy by turning themselves off when no cars are around. And if intelligent machines replace humans (and/or if we evolve into a higher form), then everyone on Earth will have night vision as well, which will almost eliminate the need for all exterior lights.

Note that, in controlled environments, machines can already function in the dark or with only the dimmest of lights. This is called “lights-out manufacturing.” As machines get smarter and move from factories and labs to public spaces, they will bring this ability with them. My prediction merely seizes upon a proof of concept and expands upon it.

It will be possible to implant fake memories in people. Very early in a replicant’s life, he or she is implanted with fake memories. The process by which this is done is never revealed, but it is sophisticated enough to fill the subject’s mind with seeming decades of memories that are completely real to them. We lack the ability to do this, though psychological experiments have shown in principle that people can be tricked into slowly accepting false memories.

Since memories exist as physical arrangements of neurons in a person’s brain and as enduring patterns of electrochemical signaling within a brain, it should be possible in principle to alter a person’s brain in a way that implants a false memory in him or her, or any other discrete piece of knowledge or skill. However, this would require fantastically advanced technology (probably some combination of direct brain electrical stimulation, hypnosis, full-immersion virtual reality, drugs, and perhaps nanomachines) that we won’t have for at least 100 years. This is VERY far out there, along with being able to build humans from different body parts grown in different labs.

Computer monitors and TVs will be deep, and there will not be any thin displays. In one scene, we get a good look at a personal computer, and it appears to have an old-fashioned CRT monitor, and is almost a foot deep. Additionally, flat-panel TVs, computer monitors, laptops, or tablets and never seen in the film. This is a largely inaccurate depiction of 2019, as flat-panel screens are ubiquitous, and the average person owns several flat-screen devices that they interact with countless times per day.

Deckard sitting on his couch while looking at his computer screen. It looks like there might also be a second screen at the far right, facing away from him. Note that he doesn’t like turning on the lights.

I said the depiction was largely inaccurate because, even though CRT monitors and TVs are obsolete and haven’t been manufactured in ten years, millions of them are still in use in homes and businesses across the world, mainly among poor people and old people who lack the money or interest in upgrading. There’s even a subculture of younger people who prefer using old CRT TVs for playing video games because the picture looks better in some ways than it does on the best, modern OLED displays. In short, while it’s increasingly rare and unusual for people to have deep, CRT computer monitors in their homes, it is common enough that this scene from Blade Runner can be considered accurate in its depiction.

The median and mean lifespan of a CRT TV is 15 years, and almost none of them last more than 30 years. With that in mind, functional CRT monitors will not be in use by 2039, except among antique collectors. The Baby Boomers will be dead by then, and their kids will have thrown away any CRT screens they were clinging to.

People will talk with computers. Deckard’s apartment building has a controlled entry security feature: anyone who enters the elevator must speak his or her name, and the “voice print” must match with someone authorized to have access to the building, or else the elevator won’t go up. Also, in his apartment, Deckard uses voice commands to interface with his personal computer. Blade Runner correctly predicted that voice-user interfaces would be common in 2019, though it incorrectly envisioned how we would use them.

Electronic, controlled entry security technology in common areas of apartment buildings, like elevators and lobbies, are very common, but overwhelmingly involve using plastic cards and key fobs to unlock scanner-equipped doors. In fact, I’ve never seen a voice-unlocked door or elevator, and think most people would feel silly using one for whatever reason.

Smart speakers like the Amazon Echo are also very common and can only be interfaced with via speech. Modern smartphones and tablets can also be controlled with spoken commands, but it’s rare to see people doing this.

This brings up the valuable point that, though speech is an intuitive means of communication, we’ve found that older means of interface involving keyboards, mice, and reading words on a screen are actually better ways to interact with technology for most purposes, and they are not close to obsolescence (and might never be). An inherent problem with talking with a computer is you lose privacy since anyone within earshot knows what you’re doing. Also, while continuous speech recognition technology is now excellent, the error rates are still high enough to make it an aggravating way to input data into a machine compared to using buttons. Entering complex data into a computer, such as you would do for a computer programming task, is also much faster and easier with a keyboard, and anything involving graphical design or manipulation of digital objects on a screen is best done with a mouse or a stylus.

To understand, watch this clip of Deckard talking to his computer, and think about whether it would be easier or harder to do that image manipulation task using a mouse, with intuitive click-and-drag abilities to move around the image, and a trackball for zooming in and out: https://youtu.be/QkcU0gwZUdg

Deckard holding a photograph he found.

Hard copy photographs are still around. In that scene, Deckard does the image manipulation on a photograph that he found. He inserts it into a slot in his computer, and it scans it and shows the digital scan on his screen. While hard-copy photographs are still being made in 2019, they’re very uncommon, especially when compared to the number of photographs that were taken this year across the planet, but never transferred from digital format to a physical medium. I doubt that even 0.01% of the personal photographs ordinary people take are ever printed onto paper, and I doubt this will ever change.

Image scanners will be common. The computer’s ability to make a digital copy of a physical image of course means it has a built-in scanner. This proved a realistic prediction, as flatbed scanners with excellent image scan fidelity levels cost under $100. When Blade Runner was filmed, scanners were physically large, very expensive, made low-quality image conversions, and were almost unknown to the general public.

Cameras will take ultra high-resolution photos. The photo that Deckard analyzes is extremely detailed and has a very high pixel count, allowing him to use his computer to zoom in on small sections of it and to still see the images clearly. In particular, after zooming in on the round mirror hanging on the wall (upper right quadrant of the photo shown above), he spots an image of one of the replicants. While grainy, he can still make out her face and upper body.

It’s impossible to tell from the film sequence exactly how high-res the photo is, but today we have consumer-grade cameras that can take photos that are about as detailed. The Fujufilm XT30 costs $800 and is reasonably compact, putting it within the range of average-income people, and it takes very high quality 26.1 MP photos. One of its photos is shown above, and if you download the non-compressed version from the source website and open it in an imaging app, you’ll be able to zoom in on the rear left window of the car far enough to see the patterns of the decals and to read the words printed on them. (https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/12/18306026/fujifilm-xt30-camera-review-fuji-xt3-mirrorless)

Firearms will still be in use. The only handheld weapons we see in the film are handguns that use gunpowder to shoot out metal bullets. One is shown for only a split-second at the start of the movie when a replicant shoots a human, and the other is seen several times in Deckard’s hands. It’s big, bulky, looks like it shoots more powerful bullets than average, and has some glowing lights that seem to do nothing. In short, it’s nothing special, and probably isn’t any better than handguns that most Americans can easily buy for $500 today. Thus, the depiction the 2019’s state-of-the-art weaponry is accurate.

Deckard pointing his pistol.

And I do say “state-of-the-art” because, being an elite bounty hunter on an important mission to kill abnormally strong, dangerous people, Deckard has his choice of weapons, and it says a lot that he picks a regular gunpowder handgun instead of something exotic and stereotypically futuristic like a laser pistol. As noted in my reviews of The Terminator and Starship Troopers, we shouldn’t expect firearms to become obsolete for a very long time, and possibly never.

Video phone calls and pay phones will be common. There’s a scene where Deckard uses a public pay phone to make a video call to a love interest. This depiction of 2019 turned out to be half right and half wrong, but for the better: Pay phones have nearly disappeared because even poor people have cell phones (which are more convenient to use). Video call technology is mature and widespread, the calls can be made for free through apps like Skype and Google Hangouts, and even low-end smartphones can support them.

It’s surprising that video calls, long a staple of science fiction, became a reality during the 2010s with hardly anyone noticing and the world not changing in any major way. Also surprising is the fact that most people still prefer doing voice-only calls and texting, which is even more lacking in personal substance and emotional conveyance. Like talking with computers, using video calls to converse with other humans has proved more trouble than it’s worth in most cases.

Links:

  1. Why cars got curvy – https://www.vox.com/2015/6/11/8762373/car-design-curves
  2. Famous Lancet retraction of Dr. Macchiarini’s papers – https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31484-3/fulltext
  3. A patient who got a cloned bladder – https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45470799
  4. Light pollution is bad and getting worse – https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-end-of-night-global-illumination-has-increased-worldwide/
  5. Swedish study that found CRT TVs almost never survive longer than 30 years, and CRT monitors die by 20 – https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0956053X1530101X
  6. Review of the Fujifilm X-T30 – https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/12/18306026/fujifilm-xt30-camera-review-fuji-xt3-mirrorless
  7. Vaping is not as bad for your health as smoking – https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2019/oct/21/vaping-safer-smoking/
  8. Three-person IVF done to overcome the mother’s mitochondrial genetic defects – https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47889387
  9. Barbra Streisand has two cloned dogs – https://variety.com/2018/film/news/barbra-streisand-oscars-sexism-in-hollywood-clone-dogs-1202710585/
  10. The ISS took 14 years to go from approval to space – https://www.issnationallab.org/about/iss-timeline/

Roundup of interesting articles, March 2019

Robotics company “Festo” has built a new, highly dexterous robot arm made of soft components, and trained it in 3D virtual environments on how to handle objects in the real world. For safety reasons, I predict house robots will need to be soft and as lightweight as possible to work around humans.
https://gizmodo.com/this-remarkably-agile-robot-hand-teaches-itself-how-to-1832960417

Uber has been found not criminally liable for last year’s accident where one of its self-driving cars fatally struck a homeless woman.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47468391

A British computer program can accurately predict when individual humans will die.
https://www.livescience.com/65087-ai-premature-death-prediction.html

The Apple Watch has led to about 500 people getting diagnosed with heart problems.
http://news.trust.org/item/20190316134851-5cktc/

After we build the first AGI, I guess the plan is to have it read “Cyc”: ‘Cyc is the world’s longest-lived artificial intelligence project, attempting to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and “rules of thumb” about how the world works…’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

How much more efficient would the world be if it were full of intelligent machines that never forgot anything and had no biases?
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/03/04/institutional-memory

China’s state-run news agency unveiled a nearly lifelike, CGI TV news anchor named “Xin Xiaomeng.”
https://www.odditycentral.com/news/china-unveils-worlds-first-ai-female-news-anchor-and-she-looks-eerily-realistic.html

After Colorado made IUDs free in clinics for poor women, teen births dropped 20%.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25656

I bet the parents would have cloned their dead son if the technology existed. Using his sperm for IVF is the second-best option.
https://apnews.com/c1759a1b1fa04abbb591fe169f9d7ce8

Sheep sperm that was frozen for 50 years was just used to impregnate several female sheep. The birth rate was as high as that of sperm frozen for only one year. There’s no known “shelf life” for frozen mammalian sperm and eggs.
https://phys.org/news/2019-03-ram-sperm-frozen-years-successfully.html

China just cloned one of its finest police dogs.
‘A police officer [said] that preserving the police dog blood has always been a challenge for breeders, as traditional breeding methods would dilute the original, and the next generation’s genes will be largely beyond control.’
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1142709.shtml

The number of neurons in an animal’s cerebral cortex positively correlates with its intelligence. This is true across species and among humans.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/25/neurons-and-intelligence-a-birdbrained-perspective/

The size of your brain positively correlates with your IQ. (Your hat size provides a rough approximation of your brain size.)
https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2019-lee.pdf

Contrary to what some believe, standardized test scores like the SAT and GRE do positively correlate with IQ and career attainment.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2019/03/annals-of-psychometry-35-years-of.html

fMRI tests show how strongly subconscious thoughts can influence our effortful thinking and choices. How much “free will” do humans really have?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-39813-y

Long-term marital satisfaction is partly determined by your genes, in particular, by a gene that codes for your brain’s oxytocin receptors.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0213083

Many people are mentally ill because the stresses and demands of postmodern life don’t mesh with human nature, which adapted to suit the hunter-gatherer lifestyles we had for the first 95% of our species’ existence.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/susceptibility-to-mental-illness-may-have-helped-humans-adapt-over-the-millennia/

The FDA has approved the use of ketamine to treat depression.
https://apnews.com/6bf8d3dbe4c2411894635f11418b74dc

This population analysis of the genomes of people living in Iberia is interesting, but also hits home that the region has been a melting pot of different ethnic groups for so long that there’s little value in trying to trace back anyone’s lineage.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47540792

A German study shows that wind turbines are not as cheap and don’t make as much electricity as thought only a few years ago. Many people forget that wind turbines (and solar panels) slowly wear out and lose efficiency until they have to be replaced.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0211028

Now that China has banned imports of garbage, there’s no cheap solution to America’s recycling woes.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china-has-stopped-accepting-our-trash/584131/

Coastal marshes could turn into gigantic carbon sinks as the planet warms, offsetting the impact of climate change. There are so many things we don’t yet understand about how the planet’s climate works as a system.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47472602

Houseplants are orders of magnitude less efficient at filtering toxins from interior air than standard HVAC systems.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/indoor-plants-clean-air-best-none-them/584509/

The first broadcast TV quality videos were wirelessly transmitted from a research sub to the surface, using pulses of blue light to convey the signal.
https://apnews.com/fbdafe93e00c432a94b3a190a890ff21

A Star Trek fan used a machine learning program to digitally enhance clips from Deep Space Nine, effectively converting them into HD footage. I predict that techniques like this will be used to clean up footage of old films and TV shows, and it will become possible to enhance the audio as well. Eventually, there will be highly accurate colorizations of black-and-white footage.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/a-fan-made-attempt-to-create-hd-deep-space-nine-using-1833301127

A small community of “digital hoarders” have amassed enormous amounts of data on all kinds of eclectic things (what about preserving human DNA for future resurrection?). I’m sure the vast majority of these hoarders are men. Thanks to their obsessions with highly specific subjects, I wonder if it’s useful to think of these people as “specialized processors” that could someday be optimized for doing relevant types of work as part of something like a Matrix of minds.
https://gizmodo.com/delete-never-the-digital-hoarders-who-collect-tumblrs-1832900423

MySpace just lost 12 years’ worth of user music uploads.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47610936

One cost-effective way to upgrade tanks is to remove their old turrets and drop in new ones that have new systems and weapons that can be independent of the rest of the tank’s.
https://www.janes.com/article/87012/eos-elbit-systems-develop-fully-integrated-medium-calibre-turret

Ukraine developed a pretty extensive upgrade package for the T-54 lineage of Soviet tanks (and China’s “T-59” clone). T-54 mass production started in 1950!
http://www.army-guide.com/eng/product1907.html

Vietnam decided to pay a little extra and buy brand-new T-90 tanks from Russia instead of bothering to upgrade its T-59s and T-54s.
https://www.janes.com/article/87529/russia-completes-delivery-of-t-90s-sk-tanks-to-vietnam

The U.S. Army uses a special paint on its armored vehicles that reduces their thermal signature and makes it easier to spray off residues from biochemical weapons.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27088/army-tanks-and-other-vehicles-get-new-paint-jobs-to-help-hide-from-thermal-optics

Electric car engines don’t get nearly as hot as gas-powered engines, so electric tanks would probably have reduced thermal signatures (and be quieter).
https://www.quora.com/Do-the-motors-or-engines-of-fully-electric-cars-get-hot
https://www.quora.com/When-will-we-see-electric-powered-tanks

America’s dream of returning its WWII battleships to service is thwarted by miles of leaky pipes and hoses, and by countless crumbling seals and manifolds. Also, no one remembers how to operate their equipment, so training crews is very slow and expensive (but what if the Navy had intelligent machines that never forgot anything and that would work for free, replacing old pipes, hoses and seals?).
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/i-served-battleship-these-are-all-reasons-they-wont-ever-make-comeback-49322

At last, ISIS has been defeated.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/23/middleeast/isis-caliphate-end-intl/index.html

Venezuela might be finally going full-blown “Planet of the Apes.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-47522208

A CIA cargo plane briefly landed in Venezuela and then returned to the U.S.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/26951/cia-linked-plane-makes-brief-trip-to-venezuela-as-american-diplomats-evacuate

The U.S. started sending spy planes to loiter off Venezuela’s coast.
https://www.janes.com/article/87205/usaf-begins-surveillance-flights-off-venezuela

Russia has sent troops to Venezuela to back the country’s unpopular socialist government.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/28/europe/russia-venezuela-military-personnel-intl/index.html

Part of why the U.S. military gobbles up so much money is that it is enormously wasteful and can’t keep track of its own assets.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/pentagon-budget-mystery-807276/

The F-35s belonging to the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps have awful readiness levels.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27047/the-navys-operational-f-35c-is-fully-mission-capable-less-than-five-percent-of-time

The F-35 can dangle a baguette-sized device behind it on a long tether that emits signals to jam enemy radars or to simulate the radar signatures of U.S. planes, tricking missiles into colliding with them instead of the parent F-35.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27185/f-35s-most-sinister-capability-are-towed-decoys-that-unreel-from-inside-its-stealthy-skin

The U.S. military has retired the last of its EA-6B electronic warfare planes. The earliest versions of the plane entered U.S. service 56 years ago.
https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2019/03/08/the-saltiest-warfighter-in-the-marine-corps-the-ea-6b-prowler-retires/

Britain’s RAF has retired the last of its Tornado fighter planes.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/26961/the-royal-air-force-has-said-goodbye-to-the-tornado-after-an-amazing-40-year-career

The U.S. Air Force is phasing out the last of its revolvers, which are modifications of a Smith & Wesson design from 1899.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/26810/the-usaf-is-finally-ditching-the-last-of-its-cold-war-revolvers-for-new-semi-auto-pistols

Russia’s sophisticated AN-94 rifle is a dud: It’s primary selling point–the “two-shot” feature that could allegedly put two bullets through the same hole, letting it “drill through” NATO bulletproof vests–fell flat in a recent gun range test.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/03/28/nikonov-an-94-assault-rifle-just-how-accurate-is-its-famed-hyper-burst/

The USS Wasp was a shunk-down version of the larger Yorktown-class WWII aircraft carriers, and it was built smaller to stay within gross warship tonnage limits America agreed to under the Washington Naval Treaty. The Wasp fared badly in the War.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/uss-wasp-worst-us-navy-aircraft-carrier-world-war-ii-49107

‘The irony is that while battlecruisers [of the World Wars] are gone, they are still with us today. Battlecruisers were eggshells armed with hammers, which exactly describes modern warships.’
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/battlecruiser-scam-why-these-warships-will-never-be-battleship-47877

The SpaceX “Dragon” capsule docked with the ISS and made a safe return to Earth. It could soon be ferrying astronauts in and out of space.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/08/homeward-bound-spacex-capsule-headed-splash-down-key-step-toward-human-spaceflight/

India shot down a target satellite, demonstrating the capability for the first time.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/india-shoots-down-satellite-announces-itself-to-be-a-space-power/2019/03/27/a1e73426-5068-11e9-af35-1fb9615010d7_story.html

It’s possible that the “sonic attacks” on U.S. diplomats in Cuba were caused by loud crickets. It’s also possible there were no sonic attacks at all.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/03/25/704903613/doubts-rise-about-evidence-that-u-s-diplomats-in-cuba-were-attacked

Noisy machines like air conditioners and vacuum cleaners could be encased in special plastic housings that would eliminate almost all of the sounds they make. The casings would be shaped to reflect the sound wave back to their sources to cancel them out.
https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.99.024302

The bewildering array of different product brands and variations of all kinds of things found for sale on U.S. store shelves are driven by marketing and not by quality differences between them.
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/03/05/why-arent-all-dishwasher-detergents-the-same/
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/12/dayquil-screed/383768/

While medicinal pills very slowly lose potency, most stay safe and effective for years past their expiration dates.
https://www.livescience.com/65052-why-do-medicines-have-expiration-dates.html

After years of delays and legal challenges, a company has gained FDA approval to sell genetically engineered salmon in the U.S. There’s no scientific evidence that genetically engineered foods are less safe for people to eat than “natural” foods.
https://apnews.com/1be7085378684f4990e240870e7c546c

CRISPR might allow us to control which sexes of farm animals are born, which could massively reduce the number of animals killed per year.
https://www.wired.com/story/crispr-gene-editing-humane-livestock/

Here’s a good breakdown of recent junk science stories that dominated the headlines thanks to their shock value:
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/a-surge-in-pseudoscience/

The “Miracle on the Hudson” plane incident might have ended in disaster had it not been for the plane’s computer overriding some of the pilots commands.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-unsung-hero-left-out-of-sully

Richard Feynman’s “Imagination in a straitjacket” comment perfectly accords with my Rule for Good Futurism #6: “Be very skeptical of predictions that hinge on future discoveries that fundamentally change the laws of science.”
https://youtu.be/IFBtlZfwEwM

Though electric cars still have higher up-front costs than gas-powered cars, some electric car models have lower lifetime costs because electricity is cheaper than gas and they need less maintenance. (The purchase cost gap should vanish by 2026.)
https://qz.com/1571956/new-york-city-says-electric-cars-cheapest-option-for-its-fleet/

Roundup of interesting articles, November 2018

The HMS Pykrete

You get what you pay for: Canada only spends 1.2% of its GDP on defense (the U.S. spends 3.5%, and NATO requires all its members including Canada to spend at least 2.0%) and doesn’t have enough fighter pilots or aircraft mechanics, and is now thinking about buying beat-up F/A-18s from Australia.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/25050/canadian-auditors-slam-surplus-aussie-hornet-buy-describe-fighter-force-in-collapse

You get what you pay for: The F-5 fighter is cheaper but is less capable overall than the F-16.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/25075/how-f-5s-beat-out-f-16s-for-the-navys-latest-commercial-aggressor-contract

The U.S. will help Taiwan keep its F-5 fighters from falling apart.
https://www.janes.com/article/84260/us-seeks-to-sustain-taiwanese-f-5s-alongside-upgraded-f-16s

Taiwan is now using two, American-made frigates. Both were built in 1984, but have somehow been fixed up to last another 30 years (for some reason, this makes me think of Weekend at Bernie’s).
https://www.janes.com/article/84490/taiwanese-navy-commissions-two-cheng-kung-class-frigates

Just as Britain salutes its “Little Ships of Dunkirk” that saved its army during WWII, will China someday celebrate its “Little Ships of the South China Sea” that provided critical surveillance of the U.S. fleet during WWIII?
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/flash-war-74-nearly-forgotten-south-china-sea-showdown-36107

During WWII, the British considered building a massive aircraft carrier made of “pykrete,” a blend of sawdust and ice. It might have actually worked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Project_Habakkuk

Brazil decommissions its sole aircraft carrier, capping a pitiful service record.
https://www.janes.com/article/84831/brazil-decommissions-the-aircraft-carrier-nae-s%E3o-paulo

The sad saga of Russia’s sole aircraft carriers continues.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/huge-floating-drydock-sank-and-nearly-took-russia%E2%80%99s-only-aircraft-carrier-it-35117

As does another sad saga…
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/25156/russian-icebreaker-under-construction-bursts-into-flames-injuring-at-least-two

Russia seized three, small Ukrainian navy ships in the Black Sea, and as usual, it’s impossible to get the factual details thanks to the deceit of both sides.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-26/ukraine-s-talk-of-martial-law-raises-fears-over-elections-imf

With the launching of its first ballistic nuclear missile sub, India’s “nuclear triad” is complete.
https://www.janes.com/article/84287/india-declares-its-nuclear-triad-complete

Would “orbital kinetic weapons” be better than nuclear weapons?
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/11/orbital-kinetic-bombardment-gets-close-to-nuclear-on-damage-and-cost.html

The latest iteration of the venerable “Sidewinder” missile can hit planes BEHIND the launching plane, and can home in on ground targets.
https://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/aim-9x-block-ii-the-new-sidewinder-missile-011572/

The Russian T-14 tank is better than Israel’s Merkava tank in most areas, except “situational awareness,” where it badly lags. That might be the deciding factor in a fight between the two.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/tank-attack-russias-new-armata-t-14-vs-israels-merkava-who-wins-36067

The logical endpoint of various weapon trends is guided bullets. It’s hard to build them since the G-forces imparted on the projectile as it was fired are so strong they could crush the computers, sensors and steering fins inside of it. Note that guided bullets only give you an advantage if you know where your enemy is, and for many reasons, your enemy will by default try to hide from you. This means that even in the distant future, it will be useful to saturate areas of the battlezone with “dumb” projectiles like unguided bullets and bomb shrapnel to hit any bad guys that could be concealed there.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/army-wants-bullets-do-more-hit-target-34882

During the 1918 flu pandemic, there were regional differences in mortality rates partly because of racial differences in resistance to the disease.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181120-what-if-a-deadly-influenza-pandemic-broke-out-today

Immigrants to Western countries have different gut biomes, which might explain their highest incidence of obesity and Type 2 diabetes. Interestingly, foreign-born parents pass on some of their ethnicity-specific gut biomes to their children born in the West.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/health/immigration-gut-microbiome.html

Vegetarians and vegans have lower bone density than meat-eaters, and vegans are more prone to breaking bones.
https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/advance-article/doi/10.1093/nutrit/nuy045/5146363

Wine is made exclusively of water, ethanol, and trace chemicals. In theory, there’s no reason why an exact replica of the world’s best wine couldn’t be synthesized in a lab from cheap, common chemicals. This means average schmoes in the future will be able to drink wines only available to the rich today, and to at long last understand that price has almost no bearing on quality.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/31/lab-made-whiskey-lab-made-wine

A $10 digital watch keeps more accurate time than a $10,000 Rolex.
https://gizmodo.com/5983427/why-a-10-casio-keeps-better-time-than-a-10000-rolex

‘The world of self-driving cars and global outsourcing doesn’t want or need [low-income Americans living in places were drug abuse and suicide are rife]. Someday it won’t want you either. ‘
https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

Graphene, the “miracle material” with amazing properties, is finally making its way into consumer goods, such as jackets and shoes. This could turn out like aluminum, which was once rarer and more expensive than gold. The discovery of simple electrolysis process to separate aluminum from common bauxite rocks changed that, revolutionizing the world.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-13/miracle-material-graphene-reinvented-as-pixie-dust

People’s faces get more asymmetrical as they age.
https://sivtelegram.media/scientists-have-found-a-surprising-fact-about-people-2/60629/

GATTACA-style human genetic selection is grows closer each day.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/11/validation-of-simultaneous.html

A Chinese geneticist has claimed (without presenting proof) that he used IVF and CRISPR to create the first genetically engineered humans–twin girls with a genetically enhanced resistance to HIV. I agree with the criticism that human genetic engineering is unethical now because our gene editing techniques are so crude that the risk of accidentally damaging a zygote’s DNA during the attempt to enhance something is too high.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/organizers-gene-editing-meeting-blast-chinese-study-call-pathway-human-trials

‘The aim [of the Earth BioGenome Project] is to create an entirely new inventory of life on Planet Earth by reading the genetic code of every organism belonging to a vast group known as eukaryotes…’
Something like this will inevitably succeed, and there will be a database with the genomes of quadrillions of individual organisms, including billions of humans.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46046494

Satellites can be used to count whale populations from space. If a global surveillance network is created, it might prove more efficient to watch things from the air and space than to put many sensors at ground level.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46046264

WiFi can be used to “see” through walls and doors.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612375/using-wi-fi-to-see-behind-closed-doors-is-easier-than-anyone-thought/

Facial recognition software is being used to identify men in Civil War photos. Imagine what else the technology could reveal if used on all vintage photos.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6399039/The-facial-recognition-software-identify-thousands-faces-Civil-War-photographs.html

“Digital night vision” cameras are extraordinary. Some even display color.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2018/11/15/digital-night-vision-is-it-worth-while/

Samsung plans to unveil a folding smartphone in 2019. I’ve long predicted such a device. It will render phablets and mini-tablets obsolete.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/11/07/samsungs-next-phone-folds-up-like-book/

This website is an extraordinary compendium of articles, analyses and drawings of future spacecraft designs that are bound by the known laws of physics. For some reason, they’re all oblong (no “Borg cubes”), and if there are any major protrusions perpendicular to the nose-rocket cone axis, they are for heat radiators or rotating human habitat modules.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/

Impressive footage of the recent explosion of the Russian Soyuz space rocket.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/dramatic-footage-of-soyuz-accident-shows-rocket-booster-collision/

‘[The notion of sending rockets into space is] utter bilge. I don’t think anybody will ever put up enough money to do such a thing.’
–Richard van der Riet Woolley, Britain’s leading astronomer, 1956
https://fabiusmaximus.com/2017/12/26/arthur-c-clarke-about-predicting-technology/

“The odds on a Trump impeachment or a Nixon-style resignation are now quite high…It would likely come by the spring of 2018, or whenever Republicans come to believe that Trump is jeopardizing their re-elections in 2018.”
–Dr. Allan Lichtman, 11/1/2017. He became briefly famous when his computer model correctly predicted Donald Trump’s victory when all major pollsters predicted the opposite.
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/politics/656473/donald-trump-impeachment-odds-president-allan-lichtman-russia-investigation

Will robots have senses of humor someday? How much better would our lives be if we had companions that constantly cracked jokes tailored to each person’s sense of humor? How many stressful or hostile daily situations would be defused?
https://www.1843magazine.com/technology/a-robot-walks-into-a-bar

Greg Brockman thinks it’s possible an AGI could be built “in the near-term.”
https://youtu.be/YHCSNsLKHfM

Our brains are in our heads thanks to genetic path dependence and the slowness of information transmission through organic nerves. If you weren’t bound by those constraints and wanted to make a human-sized robot that could deal with its physical environment as well as humans, the best body layout might be a headless humanoid with its computer brain located inside its torso. Distributing the mental functions among separate, redundant computers throughout the robot’s body might be even better.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qxljr/why_is_our_brain_in_our_head_and_not_our_chest/

‘The average life expectancy of a dam is 50 years, and 25% of the dams in the Army Corps of Engineers National Inventory of Dams are now more than 50 years old. This number is projected to increase to 85% by the year 2020. ‘
http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2012/finalwebsite/problem/dams.shtml

England is thinking of converting its natural gas (methane) pipes to carry hydrogen gas. H2 gas can (currently at great cost) be made without releasing emissions and is clean-burning. I wonder if it would be better to just get rid of gas pipes altogether and to switch everyone to electric appliances that got energy from clean sources like nuclear or solar.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/natural-gas-distributors-outline-proposal-to-convert-home-heating-to-hydrogen/

Chevrolet will discontinue three sedan models, including the Volt hybrid car (I remember it being launched a few years ago to great fanfare), thanks to poor sales, and the company will focus on building more SUVs and pickup trucks.
https://qz.com/1474677/gm-kills-the-chevrolet-volt-as-plug-in-hybrids-lose-market-share/

“5D” etched quartz glass could be used as a data storage medium that would not degrade for billions of years. I think the “window of vulnerability” to civilization collapse and/or the loss of most knowledge will close sometime in the next century when machines have created a self-sustaining space infrastructure. Von Neumann probes loaded with all known, useful knowledge will be sent to other star systems and dispersed throughout our own Solar System for the purpose of rebuilding things as they were should civilization be wiped out.
https://earther.gizmodo.com/the-time-capsules-that-will-outlast-the-apocalypse-1830653288 

Roundup of interesting articles, October 2018

In spite of what Hollywood would have you believe, submarines almost never fight each other.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/showdown-story-only-submarine-vs-submarine-battle-34652

Should we replace our aircraft carriers with cargo ships full of containerized missiles and drones?
https://taskandpurpose.com/maritime-airpower-aircraft-carrier/

The U.S. Navy will buy more of its venerable Arleigh-Burke destroyers.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/navy-getting-10-new-flight-iii-destroyers-and-it-could-be-game-changer-32427

The U.S. Army tested an experimental conversion kit that allowed a computer to fly a helicopter designed for a human pilot.
https://www.janes.com/article/84156/us-army-flies-automated-sara-helicopter

The USAF has selected the Boeing “T-X” to be its new training jet. It will replace the T-38, which first flew in 1959. Given the longevity of modern warplanes, the T-X should stay in service until at least the 2060s, by which time fighter and bomber planes might be automated, rendering human pilots obsolete. Thus, the T-X could be the last, or at best the second-to-last, trainer aircraft that the USAF ever makes. AIs won’t need to spend time in a simplified practice plane to learn how to fly. They will just be created in software labs and uploaded directly into frontline combat planes. Someday, the very notion of a “trainer aircraft” will be obsolete.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23889/boeing-wins-big-again-and-claims-the-usafs-huge-t-x-jet-trainer-deal

The T-38 pilot training jet could be converted into a fighter plane, but it would be crappy at its new job, and it would be a poor use of money considering what you’d get in return. Once the U.S. adopts the T-X, we’ll probably transfer our surplus T-38s to poorer allied countries or to aviation museums.
https://www.quora.com/Can-an-aircraft-such-as-a-T-38-be-weaponised-in-a-war-time-situation

Even if a stealth plane is invisible to radar, it will be hotter than the air around it thanks to its jet engine and to air friction against its wings, so you will still be able to see the plane using a thermal camera (e.g. – “Predator” heat vision).
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/rip-stealth-russian-su-35-reportedly-took-picture-f-22-why-might-be-problem-34267

The U2 spy plane’s camera still uses analog film.
https://petapixel.com/2018/06/08/film-photography-at-70000-feet-in-the-u-2-spy-plane/

The U.S. just withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty because Russia had been cheating for years, and the U.S. needs medium-range missiles to deter China in the Pacific.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/10/23/how-china-plays-into-trumps-decision-pull-out-inf-treaty-with-russia/

The U.S. might start mass producing copies of Russian guns for foreign military assistance. Ukraine and Bulgaria already have factories for making these guns, but apparently they can’t keep up with demand.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/24283/russia-rages-at-pentagon-plans-to-build-u-s-made-derivatives-of-soviet-era-small-arms

The USSR planned to quickly nuke Austria if WW3 ever broke out even though Austria wasn’t in NATO and has enshrined neutrality in its constitution.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/1364037/Vienna-was-top-of-Soviet-nuclear-targets-list.html

A police helicopter was used to break up a rowdy college party by flying low over them. The downdraft blew away their tents and lawn furniture. This is one, overlooked reason why flying cars were never built.
https://youtu.be/j4Au-yCQur0

Science is coming around to buttressing what has been common sense forever: Sunlight exposure raises your mood. This finding is particularly interesting since it establishes a biochemical pathway linking skin cells to brain cells.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/12/sunlight-and-the-brain

Another astounding discovery: cardiovascular exercise decreases your risk of death! Of note is that fact that there was no observed ceiling to the benefit.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2707428

Mushrooms and plants that contain hallucinogenic compounds evolved them as protection against insects. The fact that the chemicals also have effects on human brains is entirely coincidental.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/magic-mushroom-drug-evolved-to-mess-with-insect-brains/

Another medical study has found the drug Ecstasy can treat PTSD.
https://reason.com/blog/2018/10/29/another-ptsd-study-finds-dramatic-improv

Taller people might be at higher cancer risk because they have more cells in their bodies.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/24/tall-people-at-greater-risk-of-cancer-because-they-have-more-cells

Gene editing in utero might soon be tried in humans that have congenital diseases caused by single-point mutations.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/09/gene-editing-freely-you-have-received-freely-give

‘In technical papers my research group anticipated years ago that even very complex traits would be predictable once a [human genome] data threshold was crossed. The phenomenon is related to what physicists refer to as a phase transition in algorithm performance. The rapid appearance now of practically useful risk predictors for disease is one anticipated consequence of this phase transition. Medicine in well-functioning health care systems will be transformed over the next 5 years or so.’
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/10/population-wide-genomic-prediction-of.html

Rapid progress is being made identifying the genes linked to many human traits, including intelligence.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/10/advances-in-genomic-prediction.html

‘[The] fact that intelligence or personality are caused by many thousands of genes, each of minuscule effect, means that it will be impossibly difficult to create a super-intelligent designer baby.’
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-genes-of-human-behaviour/

‘Universal Family Tree — Eventually we will sequence the full genomes of everyone living, and as many of the recent dead as we have access to. Together with genealogical records, this huge trove of data will give us our first universal family tree. Everyone living will have a place on it in relation to everyone else. ‘   –Kevin Kelly, 2012
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-dna-genealogy-privacy-20181012-story.html

Over 100,000 varieties of rice are being held at a global rice “gene bank” in the Philippines.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45828150

The “dbSNP” is an open database of all recorded human alleles.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/SNP/

Will cryonically preserved humans ever be revived? The consensus among the disinterested interviewees (e.g. – the people who aren’t running human cryonics companies and who haven’t written anti-cryonics books) is “No”, unless we get Star Trek-level technology. The freezing process damages the brain at the cellular level, and reversing it would require nanomachines.
https://gizmodo.com/will-cryogenically-frozen-people-ever-be-revived-1829905516

Increased use of keyboards and smartphone screens and the decline of handwriting are eroding fine motor control across the population, with particularly harmful impact on prospective surgeons.
https://www.bbc.com/news/education-46019429

A new device called the “Everlast” notebook saves writings and drawings as data files. What kills it is the fact that you have to take photos of what you’ve written on the pages to save them digitally. The pages themselves should be able to detect what the user has written on them, and to upload it to their remote storage drive.

Prediction: Within 20 years, books and computer tablets will merge into a single type of device that could be thought of as a “digital book.” It will be a book with several hundred pages made of thin, flexible digital displays (perhaps using ultra-energy efficient e-ink) instead of paper. At the tap of a button, the text on all of the pages will instantly change to display whichever book the user wanted to read at that moment. They could also be used as notebooks in which the user could hand write or draw things with a stylus, which would then be saved as image or text files. The devices will fuse the tactile appeal of old-fashioned books with the content flexibility of tablet computers.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/642311833/everlast

In 1911, Thomas Edison erroneously predicted that most household furnishings and appliances would someday be made of steel.
https://www.inverse.com/article/19331-thomas-edison-alternate-futures-steel-home-design

Winston Churchill predicted that humans would someday eat lab-grown meats.
https://qz.com/1383643/seven-weird-food-predictions-from-the-past-including-churchills-lab-grown-chicken-wings/

Ben Goertzel 2008: ‘My own (Ben Goertzel’s) personal intuition is that a human-toddler-level AGI could be created based on OpenCogPrime within as little as 3-5 years, and almost certainly within 7-10 years.’
https://opencog.wordpress.com/2008/07/

Ben Goertzel 2017: ‘I’ll be pretty surprised if we don’t have toddler-level AGI in the range 2023-25, actually.’
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/12/ai-researcher-ben-goertzel-launches-singularitynet-marketplace-and-agi-coin-cryptocurrency.html

Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and research director at OpenAI, predicts that the possibility of AGI be created in as little as five years “can no longer be discounted.” Skip to the 27:00 mark in his speech:
https://youtu.be/w3ues-NayAs

Stephen Hsu, physicist and all-around smart dude: ‘So a timescale > 30-50 years for AGI, even in highly optimistic scenarios, seems quite possible to me.’
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/09/intuition-and-two-brains-revisited.html

In 2013, some guy built a perfect Tetris-playing AI. It clears lines from the screen just as fast as new pieces fall from the sky. As far as anyone can tell, it could play forever.
https://codemyroad.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/tetris-ai-the-near-perfect-player/

The hype about self-driving cars is dying down.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/10/18/shaken-by-hype-self-driving-leaders-adopt-new-strategy-shutting-up/

The Tesla Model 3 is, by some measures, the safest car ever tested by the NHTSA.
https://www.tesla.com/blog/model-3-lowest-probability-injury-any-vehicle-ever-tested-nhtsa

A teardown of a Tesla Model 3 reveals it’s an extraordinary piece of technology, but its process of manufacture could be sharply simplified.
https://youtu.be/Lj1a8rdX6DU

ReThink Robotics, the company that made the “Baxter” general-purpose robot, went bankrupt due to low sales and sold itself to a German company.
https://www.therobotreport.com/hahn-group-acquires-rethink-robotics-ip/

We don’t know if there’s enough CO2 sequestered in Mars’ soil to create an atmosphere via terraforming machines. I think that, by the time we have the ability to send large numbers of people to Mars, intelligent machines will probably dominate Earth and cancel any senseless plans to send more than token numbers of resource-hogging meatbags like us there. Multi trillion dollar plans to terraform Mars will also be considered too wasteful to proceed.
http://nautil.us/issue/65/in-plain-sight/so-can-we-terraform-mars-or-not

A simple explanation of how the Asteroid Belt, Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud are different.
http://ryanmarciniak.com/archives/390

‘The total mass of the asteroid belt is estimated to be between 2.8×10^21 and 3.2×10^21 kilograms, which is just 4% of the mass of the Moon.’

That sounds small until you think about this: A Ford-class aircraft carrier is 9.1 million (9.1×10^6) kilograms. A space warship ten times that size–which is in the same ballpark as a Star Destroyer–would thus be 9.1×10^7 kg. If we had space factories and converted just ONE PERCENT of the asteroid belt’s mass (I used the lower of the two estimates) into space warships, we could build 30.7 QUADRILLION ships.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt

In theory, a particle accelerator wider than our Solar System could unlock all the mysteries of physics and cosmology.
https://gizmodo.com/we-could-solve-the-mysteries-of-time-and-space-if-we-ha-1829207595

A Russian Soyuz space rocket exploded after takeoff, but miraculously, the two astronauts it was carrying safely ejected.
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/11/656473889/rocket-launch-failure-forces-astronaut-and-cosmonaut-to-make-ballistic-landing

NASA’s “Space Launch System” (SLS) heavy rocket is in even worse shape than thought.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/10/10/program-build-nasas-moon-rocket-could-double-price-billion-ig-says/

Yes, we still have the blueprints to build Saturn V rockets, but no, it wouldn’t make sense to make more of them for many reasons.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6281/why-not-build-saturn-vs-again

In the 1990s, the “DC-X” experimental rocket did test flights that proved rockets could vertically land and be 100% reusable. However, the technology wasn’t commercialized for over 20 years.
https://youtu.be/39cjZTCay24

The “To the Stars Academy,” which was co-founded by the former lead singer of Blink-182 and which publicized last year’s big UFO report, says it has very few assets and huge debts.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1710274/000114420418050766/tv503167_1sa.htm

Scientists have created cheap, artificial wood that is better than real wood.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-create-artificial-wood-that-is-water-and-fire-resistant/

There have been recent technological breakthroughs in our ability to view the three-dimensional structures of small molecules.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/18/small-molecule-structures-a-new-world

Lowered plane travel costs and the growth of the global middle class have caused the number of tourists to explode. The trends will only continue, and I fear someday all the best places in the world will be overrun.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/overtourism-solutions/index.html

I predict that “Choose-your-own-endings” like this will become a common form of entertainment in the future. To appease different factions of fans, the same TV series will exist as “parallel universes” where the plots diverged at critical junctures. A mix of viewer focus groups and instant surveys will guide each divergence, and fanfiction crowdsourcing and AI will pick up the slack writing the multiple scripts. The logical endpoint of this is entertainment custom-tailored to individual people.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-01/netflix-is-said-to-plan-choose-your-own-adventure-black-mirror

What would a robot tank look like?

Bigger tanks may be scarier, but they are also bigger targets. Less is more.

Lately, I’ve read about some interesting experiments to jury-rig helicopters and tanks to be autonomously controlled:

I’m unsure if any of these projects will get past the prototype stage, but they’re fascinating nonetheless since, if adopted, they could extend the useful lives of many old pieces of military hardware by enhancing them with machine intelligence and, maybe in some cases, with robot crews. As with all types of jobs, those in the military will inevitably be taken over by machines of some sort, and drop-in-kits installed into the cockpits of old helicopters could be the “bridge” in that transition.

However, in the longer run, planes, tanks, ships, and other pieces of military hardware will be redesigned around the needs of machines instead of humans. Returning to the helicopter example, a clean-sheet design meant to be flown by a computer wouldn’t have a cockpit at all: its shoebox-sized computer “pilot” would just need a small, armored compartment in the fuselage, which could be accessed through a little door. Deleting the chairs, controls, displays, and windows that a human pilot/co-pilot duo would have needed would make the autonomous helicopter lighter, sleeker, faster, and cheaper to make. In a fight between the old helicopter jury-rigged with a drop-in computer and the new helicopter designed specifically around a computer pilot, the latter would win.

This makes me wonder what a “robot tank” that was as good as the best modern tanks would look like. A tank’s quality is determined in aggregate by its 1) firepower, 2) speed, and 3) armor, so the theoretical robot tank will need to equal or surpass the U.S. M1 Abrams or Russian T-14 Armata. For this exercise, I think the best place to start is with the first criterion, “firepower.”

The Abrams tank has a 120mm diameter main cannon and the Armata has a 125mm cannon. Their capabilities are about the same. Our robot tank would thus need one or other. Now, a tank’s cannon sets a minimum diameter for the tank’s “turret ring,” which is the big hole in the top of the tank’s hull that the turret is dropped into in the factory. As a general rule, bigger cannons need wider turret rings. And for obvious reasons, the width of the turret ring in turn sets a minimum width for the tank’s hull.

At this WWII American tank factory, the tanks in the foreground have not had their turrets installed, so their turret rings are visible. Fully assembled tanks are visible farther in the background.

A U.S. Sherman tank that was destroyed by a large land mine in Okinawa. Note how the turret has fallen off of the hull.

In the early 1980s, the U.S. Army built an experimental version of the M1 Abrams tank that had an unmanned, 120mm turret. They dryly named this vehicle the “Tank Test Bed” (TTB). It was never put into mass production, but its weapon reportedly worked very well. I couldn’t find figures on the internet, but eyeballing the photo below, it looks like the diameter of the TTB’s turret ring is about 80% of the tank hull’s diameter. The M1 is known to be 12 feet wide, so I’ll estimate the turret ring is 9.6 feet in diameter. To add the necessary structural support for the turret ring and space for side armor, let’s make our robot tank’s hull 11 feet wide.

M1 Abrams “Tank Test Bed”

Take note that the Russian T-14 Armata has a 125mm, unmanned turret, and the vehicle’s overall width is 11.5 feet (3.5 meters), which suggests my estimate is credible, and that the Russians might have made a robotic tank gun that is as compact as physically allowable. Note that the T-14 Armata has a three-man crew, and they are seated in a row inside the hull, so it’s possible the tank’s width was determined by human considerations rather than mechanical ones. That said, I’ll stick with my assumption that a robot tank could be a slightly thinner 11 feet wide thanks to the deletion of space-consuming humans with their huge shoulder widths.

Diagram of the T-14 Armata tank. The three-man crew sits shoulder-to-shoulder in the hull.

As this very long, very awesome RAND report says, the optimal ratio between a tank’s width and length is 1 : 1.5 (ignoring the length of the cannon). Our hypothetical robot tank’s length should thus be 16.5 feet (198 inches). Looking at modern tanks, however, I see the ratio ends up more like 1 : 2.16 (M1 Abrams), 1 : 2.49 (T-14 Armata), 1 : 2.08 (Leopard 2), and 1 : 1.8 (T-90), which suggests to me that there’s some other design constraint forcing tank engineers to make their vehicles longer than they should ideally be. And you guessed it, I think the extra length owes (mostly or wholly) to the need for interior crew compartment(s) for the humans. Look at this diagram of a T-90, to which I added a Little Green Man to indicate where the driver sits.

T-90 diagram with driver highlighted

Sitting down, the driver adds about 3 feet to the tank’s overall length. Subtract that, and the T-90 ends up being 19 feet 6 inches long, giving it a width : length ratio of 1 : 1.56, which is very close to optimal. Additionally, shortening it by that amount might allow for the elimination of one set of road wheels (down from six to five), cutting weight and cost, though I think there’s also a risk that could make the tank unbalanced and back-heavy.

Since I don’t know what all the different design constraints are, I’ll give a range of possible lengths rather than a hard number: The hypothetical robot tank could have a width : length ratio of anywhere from 1 : 1.5 to 1 : 1.7 (slightly less than the T-90), which means its length would be 16 feet 6 inches up to 18 feet 8 inches.

Estimating the robot tank’s weight is harder still, but I’ll give it a shot. The RAND report has weight figures for three types of tanks: the four-man M1 Abrams (66 short tons), a hypothetical three-man tank (61 short tons), and a hypothetical two-man tank (55 short tons). Graphing those on a simple line chart yields the following:

As you can see, the elimination of each human crewman allows a roughly five ton weight reduction, and extending the trend to zero crewmen, our robot tank should weigh 44 short tons.  It’s fair to scoff at this straight-line extrapolation as overly simplistic, but consider this: the T-90 is longer (22 feet 6 inches) and wider (12 feet 5 inches) than our hypothetical robot tank (16 feet 6 inches up to 18 feet 8 inches long and 11 feet wide). The T-90 weighs 51 short tons, and trimming length and width to make something the size of our robot tank could absolutely result in a new weight of 44 short tons. A real-life datapoint supports my back-of-the-envelope line graph extrapolation.

In terms of height, the robot tank couldn’t be much lower than the T-90, which is 7.3 feet tall (not counting the machine gun and any sensors mounted on the top of the turret). Returning to the T-90 diagram, this time with a Little Green Man drawn to represent the commander, we can see that the turret might be a little taller than is mechanically necessary because it must accommodate a human. However, the height of the hull can’t be decreased since it is constrained by the height of the engine (outlined in red). The T-90 also can’t have its suspension lowered without sacrificing ground clearance and damaging its cross-country performance.

T-90 with commander’s position and engine highlighted

Aside from flattening its roof, there doesn’t seem to be any good way to make the T-90’s turret lower. The diameter of the cannon and the height of its breech establish a hard limit on how low the turret can be. Additionally, the turret’s ammunition carousel (shown in the diagram below) stacks the shells and propellant horizontally, which already minimizes the overall height of the carousel. There doesn’t seem to be any way to shrink it further.

The “carousel” of a T-90 tank, which stores ammunition for the cannon.

I estimate that getting rid of the bulge at the top of the turret would reduce the T-90’s height from 7.3 feet to 6.5 feet. The hypothetical robot tank would use the same type of autoloading turret and hence would be the same height.

So there we have it. I estimate that an autonomous tank equivalent to today’s best manned tanks in terms of firepower, speed and armor would have the following specifications:

Length16 ft 6 in (min) to 18 ft 8 in (max)
Width11 ft
Height6 ft 6 in
Weight44 short tons
Armament120mm or 125mm cannon with autoloader
Armor and mobilityComparable to T-90 or M1 Abrams

This is close to the Chinese Type 59G tank (a modified version of which is used by Pakistan):

Length19 ft 10 in
Width10 ft 8 in
Height8 ft 6 in
Weight40 short tons
Armament125mm cannon
Armor and mobilityInferior to T-90 or M1 Abrams

Pakistan’s “Al Zarrar” tank, which is an upgraded version of the Chinese T-59G tank.

The fact that tank with similar dimensions and firepower to my hypothetical robot tank already exists shows that there aren’t any engineering or practicality barriers to building the robot tank per my specifications. The Type 59G proves that a 125mm cannon can be mounted in a relatively small, lightweight hull and fired without tearing the vehicle apart. I don’t have the software or artistic talent to make a computer rendering of the robot tank, but combining the hull of a Type 59G with the lower-profile turret of a T-90 or the narrow, “naked turret” of the M1 Abrams TTB would give a fair approximation of its appearance.

Since the robot tank would be much smaller and lighter than an equivalent tank built around a human crew, it would be cheaper to manufacture, harder to hit since it would be a smaller target, and more easily transportable. A computer would take the place of a human commander, gunner, and driver, allowing for a significant reduction in internal volume and overall tank size. A space-efficient autoloader already found in the T-90 would be incorporated into the robot tank. Additionally, to perform maintenance and repairs in the field, the robot tanks would need to internally carry two smaller, human-sized (but not necessarily humanoid) robots, but they could be stored much more compactly than human crewmen during transit. They might be able to curl up into fetal positions and fit into small lockers in the back or sides of the vehicle, or in a bustle at the back of the turret.

Even outside of combat, tanks require frequent maintenance and repair. A robotic tank would still probably carry smaller, human-sized robots in it that would go exit the vehicle to do the work.

Finally, I think the robot tank would carry a small UAV that it could launch to provide aerial reconnaissance footage, vastly improving the tank’s situational awareness. Something as simple as a 25-pound quadcopter could do.

Links

  1. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2009/R3837.pdf
  2. https://tankandafvnews.com/2016/03/15/from-the-vault-ammo-loading-systems-for-future-tanks/ 
  3. https://youtu.be/cWw5SRa4vu8