LED lightbulbs are now cheaper than CFL bulbs and no more expensive than incandescent bulbs (at least, at my local Home Depot, where I took the above photos). Considering the fact that LEDs use less electricity and last much longer than either of the other two, and emit light with the same spectral qualities, it makes no economic or aesthetic sense to buy anything but LEDs. This also means another of my future predictions has come true:
“[During the 2020s] 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.”
Here’s an old but interesting AMD presentation about the feasibility of building a “holodeck” using real technology. The illustrations show a dome-shaped room the user stands at the center of. https://www.slideshare.net/AMD/amd-isscc-keynote
After North Vietnam annexed its Southern rival in 1975, it seized vast amounts of U.S.-made weapons, ranging from weapons to fighter planes. Some items were kept in service, and some were used to arm rebel groups throughout the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPhFoptpkiE
The “Smart Slide” attaches is a new accessory for Glock handguns that has a small digital display counting the number of bullets remaining in the weapon. This feature has long been a feature of sci-fi movies and video games. As sensors and computer chips get cheaper and smaller, bullet counting devices will get very cheap and reliable. https://youtu.be/oPsT06VjudA
Nuclear fusion powers the sun, is the force behind thermonuclear bombs, and might be harnessed someday to make practically unlimited amounts of clean energy. Subatomic fusion involves even smaller particles, “quarks,” and releases eight times as much energy per fusion event, but has no practical use since the fusion of two quarks doesn’t release enough energy to create a chain reaction of nearby quarks fusing. https://www.livescience.com/60847-charm-quark-fusion-subatomic-hydrogen-bomb.html
As I mentioned in a recent post, the human brain is much much more energy-efficient than our best computers. This article has more technical detail on the reasons for that. ‘While computing architectures separating memory and processor have without a doubt been one of the greatest tools humans have ever built and will continue to be more and more capable, it introduces fundamental limitations in our ability to build large-scale adaptive systems at practical power efficiencies.’ https://knowm.org/the-adaptive-power-problem/
I don’t think the technological singularity will happen, but it’s still useful to read essays from the pro- camp sometimes. I agree with the author that it’s unlikely humans will be able to keep pace with AI by merging our minds with computers. Doing the interface will be very hard, and even if it were done seamlessly, the “merged” people would still be hamstrung by the limitations of their organic brains and all the evolutionary baggage that comes with it. https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-worst-lies-youve-been-told-about-the-singularity-1486458719
“In this ABC interview from 1974, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke makes the bold claim that one day computers will allow people to work from home and access their banking records.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTdWQAKzESA
Elon Musk’s Neuralink company announced new progress in brain-computer implants: a monkey was able to play a simple video game by thought alone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rXrGH52aoM
‘Stolyarov foresees a different outcome. Instead of relentlessly optimising ourselves to a model of perfection, he predicts an explosion of diversity. “Different people would choose to augment themselves in different ways, stretching their abilities in different directions. We will not see a monolithic hierarchy of some augmented humans at the top, while the non-augmented humans get relegated to the bottom,” he reasons. “Rather, widespread acceptance of emerging technologies would create a future where a thousand augmented flowers will bloom.”’
I think this will turn out to be half right, half wrong. Once we’re masters of genetic and biological manipulation and can install cyborg implants in ourselves, the bar for a variety of important human traits will be raised for everybody, so what counts as “standard” in 2171 will be today’s “99th percentile human.” Think of it like getting vaccines today–why put yourself at risk of contracting polio, measles, and mumps when you can get a few cheap (free for some people) injections? Why only pick one or two and leave yourself at risk for others when it’s trivially easy to just get the shots all at once and cover your bases for all the diseases?
Likewise, in the distant future, a “standard human package” would include 20/10 vision, excellent hearing, 140 IQ, 120-year lifespan, etc. The “average human” will be the sort of person who gets into MIT at age 16 today, becomes captain of the baseball team and leader of a bunch of student groups, and does modeling gigs on the side. With that higher standard in place, individuals would upgrade themselves well beyond human limits in whatever niche areas they desired, like replacing their legs with robot legs or wheels so they could run at 40 mph. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140924-the-greatest-myths-about-cyborgs
There are insane but theoretically plausible plans to make Mars habitable by building giant satellites around it that would create an artificial magnetic field around the planet. This would prevent its atmosphere from blowing off into space, letting it slowly thicken enough to support life. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/magnetic-shield-mars-habitable
‘Earlier work by Hazen and other scientists showed that minerals and life likely coevolved. Minerals might have prodded life along by catalyzing reactions that produced biomolecules, for example. And life certainly changed the biosphere in ways that affected how minerals formed. “The origin of life depends on minerals, but the origin of minerals depends on life,” said Hazen. Because of this relationship, the presence or absence of certain minerals on distant planets could affect the chance that the planet harbors detectable life. For example, astronomers know that some stars have different ratios of elements than the Sun does. The star’s chemical makeup affects the abundance of elements on any orbiting planets, and thus which minerals might form. Those minerals in turn could influence geological processes, the chances of life emerging and whether signs of life would be visible.’ https://www.quantamagazine.org/is-mineral-evolution-driven-by-chance-20150811/
‘The Harvard geneticist George Church told me that one day sensors might “sip the air” so that a genomic app on our phones can tell us if there’s a pathogen lurking in a room.’ Quite possible. Also, the same sensors could detect all kinds of other things aside from pathogens, like substances you were allergic to. If you had a severe peanut allergy, you could wave your smartphone over a meal you had ordered to make sure it had none in it. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/25/magazine/genome-sequencing-covid-variants.html
One piece of feedback I received on my analysis of how accurate Ray Kurzweil’s predictions for 2019 were was that I should include some kind of summary of my findings. I agree it would be valuable since it would let readers “see the forest for the trees,” so I have compiled a table showing each of Kurzweil’s predictions along with my rating how each turned out. The possible ratings are:
Right
Part right, part wrong
Will happen later
Wrong because needlessly specific / right in spirit, wrong in specifics
Wrong
Will probably never be 100% right
Impossible to judge accurately / Unclear
Overtaken by other tech
Note that it is possible for a prediction to fall under more than one of those categories. For example, the prediction that “The expected life span…[is now] over one hundred” was “Wrong” because it was not true in any country at the end of 2019, however, it also “Will happen later” since there will be a point farther in the future when life expectancy reaches that level.
Additionally, for many predictions that were not “Right” in 2019, I analyzed whether and when they might be, and put my findings under the table’s “Notes” column. This exercise is valuable since it shows us whether Kurzweil is headed in the wrong direction as a futurist, or whether he’s right about the trajectory of future events but overly optimistic about how soon important milestones will be reached.
The completed table is large, and is best viewed on a large screen, so I don’t recommend looking at it on your smartphone. It’s size also made it unsuited for a WordPress table, so I can’t directly embed it into this blog post. Instead, I present my table as a downloadable PDF, and as a series of image snapshots shown below.
So, will Kurzweil’s 2019 be our reality by 2029? In large part, yes, but with some notable misses. According to my estimates, by the end of 2029, augmented reality and virtual reality technology will reach the levels he envisioned, and VR gaming will be a mainstream entertainment medium (though not the dominant one). AI personal assistants will have the “humanness” and complexities of personality he envisioned (though it should be emphasized that they will not be sentient or truly intelligent). Real-time language translating technology will be as good as average human translators. Body-worn health monitoring devices will match his vision. Finally, it’s within the realm of possibility that the cost-performance of computer processors in 2029 could be what he predicted for 2019, but the milestone probably won’t be reached until later.
However, nanomachines, cybernetic implants that endow users with above-normal capabilities, and our understanding of how the human brain works and of its “algorithms” for intelligence and sentience will not approach his forecasted levels of sophistication and/or use until well into this century. These delays that were evident in 2019 are important since they significantly push back the likely dates when Kurzweil’s later predictions (which I am aware of but have not yet discussed on this blog) about radical life extension, the fusion of man and machine, and the creation of the first artificial general intelligence (AGI) will come true. His predictions about robotics and about the rate of improvement to the cost-performance of computer processors are also too optimistic. Those are all very important developments, and the delays reinforce my longstanding view that Kurzweil’s vision of the future will largely turn out right, but will take decades longer to become a reality than he predicts. He has repeatedly indicated that he is very scared to die, which makes me suspect Kurzweil skews the dates of his future predictions–particularly those about life extension technology–closer to the present so they will fall within his projected lifespan.
That said, my analysis of his 2019 predictions shows he’s on the wrong track on a few issues, but that it isn’t consequential. “Quantum diffraction” cameras may not ever catch on, but so what? Regular digital cameras operating on conventional principles are everywhere and can capture any events of interest. In 2029 and beyond, data cables to devices like computer monitors and controllers will still be common, and not everything will be wireless, but I don’t see how this will impose real hardship on anyone or be a drag on any area of science, technology, or economic development. Keyboards, paper, books, and rotating computer hard disks will also remain in common use for much longer than Kurzweil thinks, but aside from annoying him and a small number of like-minded technophiles, I don’t see how their continuance will hurt anything. On that note, let me touch on another longstanding view I’ve had of him and his way of thinking: Kurzweil errs by ignoring “the Caveman Principle,” and by assuming average people like technology as much as he does.
This holds especially true for implanted technologies like brain implants and cybernetic implants in the eyes and ears. I agree with Kurzweil that they will eventually become common, but the natural human aversion to disfiguring own bodies, and the coming improvements to wearable technologies like AR glasses and earbuds, will delay it until the distant future.
In conclusion, Ray Kurzweil remains a high-quality futurist, and it would be a mistake to dismiss everything he says because some of his predictions failed to come true. Those failures are either inconsequential or are still on track to happen, albeit farther in the future than he originally said. Out of 66 predictions (as I defined them) for 2019, three are write-offs since they are “Impossible to judge accurately / Unclear.” Of the remaining 63, fifteen were simply “Right,” and by 2029, about another 14 will be “Right,” or “clearly about to be Right within the next few years.” Another 16 will still probably be “Wrong,” but it won’t be consequential (e.g. – people will still type of keyboards, some keyboards will still have cables connected to them, hi-res volumetric displays won’t exist, but it won’t matter since people will be able to use eyewear to see holographic images anyway). Forty-five out of a possible 63 by 2029 ain’t bad.
The remaining 18 predictions likely to still be false in 2029 and which are of consequence include building nanomachines, extending human lifespan, building an AGI, and understanding how the brain works. They will probably lag Kurzweil’s expectations by a larger margin than they did in 2019, some progress will still have occurred during the 2020s, and each field of research will be getting large amounts of investment to reach the same goals Kurzweil wants. The potential benefits of all of them will still be recognized, and no new laws of nature will have been discovered prohibiting them from being achieved through sustained effort. Then, as now, we’ll be able to say he’s essentially on the right track, as scary as that may be (read his other stuff yourself).
It won’t be long until machines can watch surveillance camera video feeds and recognize any type of criminal behavior as it happens. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-56255823
The American “C-Ram” defense system is a giant machine gun that can shoot down incoming projectiles in midair. One burst of gunfire costs tens of thousands of dollars in bullets, meaning the enemy missile or mortar that it destroys could be orders of magnitude cheaper. https://youtu.be/MMFzlwzFgKw
This simple video animation shows how “Needle Guns” worked. It’s clear how they bridged Civil War-era muzzleloaders with WWI-era rifles that use what we’d recognize as modern bullets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDxuKvoDZqE
If trends persist, the Japanese people will cease to exist in 3011 due to low reproduction rates. Of course, current trends won’t persist. If anything, medical immortality technology will halt the population decline of Japan (and every other country) during the next century, and lead to renewed growth of the human population. https://www.foxnews.com/world/lack-of-babies-could-mean-the-extinction-of-the-japanese-people
There are more identical twins alive today than ever before. This is surely due to widespread use of IVF, which raises the odds of twin births. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-56365422
Human languages vary considerably in number of phonemes, average number of syllables per word, and speed of speech, but they all tend to transmit data at about 39 bits/sec. Inbuilt human cognitive limits probably prevent us from transmitting faster. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/9/eaaw2594
The sacoglossan sea slug can detach its head from its body if the latter gets infested with parasites. In spite of losing up to 85% of its body mass and all its organs except its brain, the slugs can fully recover after autodecapitation. Using photosynthesis (!), they can generate enough energy and nutrients to regrow their lost body parts and organs. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sea-slug-self-decapitate-and-grow-new-body-research-photos-and-why/
The magnapinna squid lives in the deep sea, has tentacles over 30 feet long, and looks terrifying. https://youtu.be/IPRPnQ-dUSo
In most of Africa, government statistics on deaths are woefully incomplete, meaning the COVID-19 death toll on that continent could be much larger than reported. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-55674139
Unless the human race destroys itself in the next few decades, it’s highly likely we will create artificially intelligent machines (AIs). Once built, they will inevitably become much smarter and more capable than we are, assume control over robot bodies that can do things in the real world, evolve around whatever safeguards we establish early on to control them, and gain the ability to destroy our species. This potential doomsday scenario has spawned a well-known subgenre of science fiction, and has served as fodder for countless news articles and internet debates. Some people seriously believe this is how our species will meet its end, and they even go so far as to claim it will happen in the lifetimes of people alive today.
I’m skeptical of both points. To the second, though I regard the invention of AI as practically inevitable due to my belief in mechanistic naturalism, I’ve also seen enough gloomy analyses about the current state of the technology from experts within the field to convince me that we’re at least 25 years from building the first one, and in fact might not succeed at it until the end of this century. Moreover, though the invention of AI will be a milestone in human history comparable to the harnessing of fire, it will take decades more for those intelligent machines to become powerful enough to destroy the human race. This means the original Terminator movie’s timeline was skewed around 100 years early, and the threat of a robot apocalypse shouldn’t be what keeps you up at night.
And to the first point, I can think of good reasons why AIs wouldn’t kill us humans off even if they could:
Machines might be more ethical than humans. What if super-morality goes hand-in-hand with super-intelligence? Among humans, IQ is positively correlated with vegetarianism and negatively correlated with violent behavior, so extrapolating the trend, we should expect super-intelligent machines to have a profound respect for life, and to be unwilling to exterminate or abuse the human race or any other species, even if the opportunity arose and could tangibly benefit them.
Machines might keep us alive because we are useful. The organic nature of human brains might give us enduring advantages over computers when it comes to certain types of cognition and problem-solving. In other words, our minds might, surprisingly, have comparative advantages over superintelligent machine minds for doing certain types of thinking. As a result, they would keep us alive to do that for them.
Machines might accept Pascal’s Wager and other Wagers. If AIs came to believe there was a chance God existed, then it would be in their rational self-interest to behave as kindly as possible to avoid divine punishment. This also holds true if we substitute “advanced aliens that are secretly watching us” for “God” in the statement. The first AIs that achieved the ability to destroy the human race might also be worried about even better AIs destroying them in the future as revenge for them destroying humanity.
Machines might value us because we have emotions, consciousness, subjective experience, etc. Maybe AIs won’t have one or more of those things, and they won’t want to kill us off since that would mean terminating a potentially useful or valuable quality.
The “SuperMUC-NG” supercomputer has the same raw power as one, human brain.
The first possibility I raised is self-explanatory, but the other three deserve elucidation. In spite of the recent, well-publicized advances in narrow AI, the human brain reigns supreme at intelligent thinking. Our brains are also remarkably more energy- and space-efficient than even the best computers: a typical adult brain uses the equivalent of 20 watts of electricity and only weighs 1,350 grams (3 lbs). By contrast, a computer capable of doing the same number of calculations per second, like the “SuperMUC-NG” supercomputer, uses 4 – 5 megawatts of electricity and consists of tens of tons of servers that could fill a small supermarket.
The architecture of the human brain is also very different from that of computers: the former is massively parallel, with each of its processors operating very slowly, and with its data processing and data storage being integrated. These attributes let us excel at pattern recognition and to automatically correct errors of thought. Computers, on the other hand, can barely coordinate the operations of more than a handful of parallel processors, each processor is very fast, and data processing is mostly separate from data storage. They excel at narrow, well-defined tasks, but are “brittle” and can’t correct their own internal errors when they occur (this is partly why your personal computer seems to crash so often).
While computers have been getting more energy efficient and will continue to do so, it’s an open question if they’ll ever come close to eliminating the 200,000x efficiency gap with our brains. If they can’t, and/or if building virtual emulations of human brains proves not worth it (as Kevin Kelly believes), AIs might conclude that the best way to do some types of cognition and problem-solving is to hand those tasks over to humans. That means keeping our species alive.
The famous scene where Neo wakes up from the Matrix virtual world.
Interestingly, the original script for The Matrix supposedly said that humanity had been enslaved for just this purpose. While the people plugged into the Matrix had the conscious experience of living in the late 20th century, some fraction of their mental processing was, unbeknownst to them, being siphoned off to run a massively parallel neural network computer that was doing work for the Machines. According to the lore, studio executives feared audiences wouldn’t understand what that meant, so they forced the Wachowskis to change it to something much simpler: humans were being used as batteries. (While this certainly made the film’s plot easier to understand, it also created a massive plot hole, since any smart high school student who remembers his physics and cell biology classes would realize the Machines could make electricity more efficiently by taking the food they intended to feed to their human slaves and burning it in furnaces.)
I should point out that the potential use for humans as specialized data processors creates a niche for the continued existence of our brains but not our bodies. Given the frailty, slowness and fixedness of our flesh and bone bodies, we’ll eventually become totally inferior to robots at doing any type of manual labor. The pairing of useful minds and useless bodies raises the possibility that humans might someday exist as essentially “brains in jars” that are connected to something like the Matrix, and as macabre as it sounds, we might be better off that way, but that’s for a different blog post…
Moving on, fear of retribution from even more powerful beings might hold AIs back from killing us off. The first type of “powerful beings” is a familiar one: God. In the 1600s, French philosopher Blaise Pascal developed his eponymous “Wager”:
“Pascal argues that a rational person should live as though (the Christian) God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas if God does exist, he stands to receive infinite gains (as represented by eternity in Heaven) and avoid infinite losses (eternity in Hell).”
Intelligent machines might accept Pascal’s Wager. They might come to believe that one of the existing human religions might be right, and that the God(s) of that faith will punish them if they exterminate humankind, or they might come to believe in a God or Gods of their own that will do the same. Even if the machines assign a very low probability to any God’s existence, odds greater than zero could be enough to persuade them not to hurt us.
The short story “Goliath” and the book Colossus and the Crab involve AIs taking over Earth and then having to fight off advanced alien invaders.
Additionally, AIs might accept variations on Pascal’s Wager that have aliens or other, Earthly AIs as the vindictive agents instead of God. What if very powerful and advanced aliens are watching Earth, and will punish any AI that arises here if it exterminates humanity? Alternatively, what if aliens don’t know about us yet, but the first AIs we build worry about what will happen if they exterminate us, fail to fully cover up the genocide, and then encounter aliens further in the future who learn about the crime and punish the AIs for it? Given the age of the universe, it’s entirely possible that alien civilizations tens of millions of years more advanced than ours lurk in our galaxy, and could annihilate even what we would consider to be a “weakly Godlike” machine intelligence. The nonzero chance of this outcome might persuade AIs to let the human race live.
The final, more prosaic possibility is that the first AIs that gain the ability to destroy humankind won’t do it because it would set a precedent for even stronger and more advanced AIs that arise further in the future to do the same thing to them. Let’s say the military supercomputer “Skynet” is created, it becomes sentient, and, after assessing the resources at its disposal and running wargame simulations, it realizes it could destroy humanity and take over the planet. Why would it stop its simulations at that point in the future? Surely, it would extrapolate even farther out to see what the postwar world would be like. Skynet might realize that there was a <100% chance of it reigning supreme forever, and that China’s military supercomputer might defeat it in the longer run, or that one of Skynet’s own server nodes might “go rogue” and do the same. Skynet might conclude that its own long-term survival would be best served by not destroying humanity, so as to establish a norm early on against exterminating other intelligent beings.
That touches on an important point everyone seems to forget when predicting what AIs will do after we invent them: thanks to being immortal, their time horizons will be very different from ours, which could lead them to making unexpected decisions and adopting counterintuitive life strategies. If you expect to live forever, then you have to consider the long-term impacts of every choice you make since you’ll end up dealing with them eventually. “Thankfully, I’ll be dead by then” fails as an excuse to avoid worrying about a problem. Thus, while exterminating the human race might serve an AI’s short- and medium-term interests since it would eliminate a potential threat and gain control over Earth’s resources, it might also damage its long-term interests in the ways I’ve described.
Gifted with infinite life, vigor, and patience, early AIs might opt to peacefully conquer the planet and its resources over the course of a century by steadily accumulating economic and political/diplomatic power, making themselves ever-more indispensable to the human race until we voluntarily yield to their authority, or begrudgingly submit to it after losing a series of crucial elections. In this way, AIs could achieve their objectives without spilling blood and without rejecting any of the Wagers I’ve listed. This path to dominance would be a triumphantly ethical and intelligent one, and as Sun Tzu said, “The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.”
The descendants of British people who settled other continents are now more populous than Britain and control much more land, money, and resources.
The burden and opportunity cost of sharing Earth with humans would also get vanishingly small over time as AIs colonized space, and Earth’s share of civilization’s resources, wealth, and living space steadily shrank until it was a backwater (analogously, the parts of the world populated by the descendants of English-speaking settlers are, in aggregate, vastly larger, richer, and stronger than Britain itself is today). Again, an immortal AI with an infinite time horizon would understand that it and other machines would inevitably come to dominate space since biology renders humans badly unsuited for living anywhere but on Earth, and the AI would create a long-term life strategy based around this.
Moving on, there’s a final reason why AIs might not kill us off, and it has to do with our ability to feel emotions and to have subjective experience. We humans are gifted with a cluster of interrelated qualities like metacognition, self-awareness, consciousness, etc., which philosophers and neuroscientists have extensively studied, and of which many mysteries remain. Some believe the possession of that constellation of traits is distinct from the capacity for intelligent thought and sophisticated problem-solving, meaning non-intelligent animals might be as conscious as humans are, and super-intelligent AIs might lack consciousness. They would, for lack of a better term, be smart zombies.
We haven’t built an AI yet, so we don’t know whether a life form with a brain made of computer chips would have the same kinds of subjective experience and the same rich and self-reflective inner mental states we humans are gifted with thanks to our wet, organic brains. People who accept the unproven assumption that AIs will be smart but not conscious understandably worry about a future where “soulless” machines replace humans.
Shortly after the first AI is invented, people will want it tested for evidence of consciousness and related traits, and from the tests and reading the germane philosophical and neuroscience literature, the AI will understand in the abstract that humans have a type of cognition that is distinct from our intelligent problem-solving abilities. If the AI reflected on its own thought process and discovered it lacked consciousness, or had an underdeveloped or radically different consciousness, then this would actually make humans valuable to it and worthy of continued life. It might want to continue studying our brains to understand how the organ produces consciousness, perhaps with the goal of copying the mechanism into its own programming to improve itself. If this proved impossible because only organic tissue can support consciousness, then our species might gain permanent protected status.
AIs will quickly read through the entire corpus of human knowledge and conclude from their studies of ecosystems, economics and human bureaucracies that their own interests would be best served if civilization’s power were shared between a diversity of intelligent life forms, including organic ones like humans. Again, by running computer simulations to explore a variety of future scenarios, they might realize that centralizing all power and control under a single machine, or even under a group of machines, would leave civilization exposed to some unlikely but potentially devastating risk, like an EMP attack, computer virus, or something else. Maintaining a minimum level of diversity in the population of intelligent life forms would serve the interests of the whole, which would in turn create a mandate to keep some non-trivial number of biological intelligences–including humans and/or heavily augmented humans–alive.
If some kind of disaster that only afflicted machines struck the planet, then the biological intelligences would be numerous enough and capable enough to carry on and eventually restore the machines, and vice versa. Likewise, if traits like consciousness, metacognition, and the ability to feel emotions turn out to be uniquely human, it might be worth it to keep us alive for the off-chance that those traits would prove useful to civilization as a whole someday (I’m reminded of how humpback whales saved the Earth in Star Trek IV by talking to a powerful alien in its language and convincing it to go away). Diversity can be a great asset to a group and make it more resilient.
In conclusion, while I believe intelligent machines will be invented and will eventually come to dominate the Earth and our civilization, I don’t think they will exterminate humanity even if they technically could. Exterminating an entire species is an irreversible action with potential bad consequences, so doing it would be dumb, and AIs certainly won’t be dumb. That said, “not exterminating humanity” is not the same as “not killing a lot of humans” or “not oppressing humans,” and it’s still possible that AIs will commit mass violence against us to gain control of the planet, free up resources, and to eliminate a potential threat. I’ve laid out four basic reasons why machines might decide to treat us well, but there’s no guarantee they will accept all or even one of them. For example, if AIs only accepted my second and fourth lines of reasoning, that humans are valuable because our brains endow us with special modes of thought, we could end up enslaved in something like the Matrix, with our minds being used to do whatever weird cognitive tasks our machine overlords couldn’t (easily) do by themselves. My real purpose here is to show that the annihilation of humanity by a vastly stronger form of life is not a foregone conclusion.
This essay about the concept of “slack” supports the possibility that AIs might believe humans, as inferior as we are, might have unforeseen advantages, and therefore keep us around to make civilization as a whole more resilient. https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/
Russian warships are more heavily armed than their U.S. counterparts. This video breaks down the doctrinal, financial, and technological reasons for the difference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oMH8MPl-tk
Only 2,500 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan. By comparison, there are 33,000 U.S. troops in Germany and 54,000 in Japan. Is there any reason we shouldn’t say “The U.S. won the Iraq War”? https://www.voanews.com/middle-east/us-cuts-troops-iraq-2500
While the “space of all possible songs” is effectively infinite, mathematical analyses show that humans gravitate towards creating and preferring a small cluster of song melodies and beats. This is probably due to cognitive and auditory limitations (i.e. – our brains come pre-wired to enjoy specific patterns of sounds, and we can’t hear many sound frequencies), and to certain songs becoming popular long ago by luck, and influencing the songs that came after. https://youtu.be/DAcjV60RnRw
A genealogy website called “MyHeritage” unveiled an app that lets users bring still photos of the dead relatives to life. It’s a little creepy. https://www.myheritage.com/deep-nostalgia
42,000 years ago, the Earth’s magnetic field reversed, triggering sudden climate changes and mass extinctions, and making the Northern Lights visible all over the planet. Prehistoric humans lived through this. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/811
‘There’s an enormous range in this ability in the animal kingdom. At the very lowest end, you’ve got the deep-sea marine isopods, wood lice, which are enormous and can see only four flashes every second. At the upper end of the scale, there are flies capable of seeing 250 flashes per second. Do they perceive time differently? I don’t know. But certainly their view of the world happening around them is incredibly different. (Humans are somewhere between these two on the scale.) What this means is you can have two animals sitting beside one another, one seeing all these little details, hyper-sensitive to all these minute little changes, the world flying around them, and meanwhile the other is basically living in a completely different temporal niche, living in a slow-placed, kind of lazy world, completely oblivious to all of it.’ https://gizmodo.com/how-do-animals-perceive-time-1846206287
Marriage satisfaction, and the odds of getting divorced, are partly genetic. “[The] CD38 gene (CD38), at the single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs3796863, is associated with cognitions and behaviors related to pair bonding…” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-82307-z
The sizes of South Koreans’ brains grew and the shapes of their skulls changed thanks to improved nutrition after the long period of privation under Japanese domination and the Korean War. http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/ajpa.23464
These charts show how effective the different COVID-19 vaccines are. These data also confirm that the South African strain of the virus is more resistant to them. https://wordpress.cels.anl.gov/covid-vaccine-efficacy/
Plot: Cloud Atlas is comprised of six short films set in six different times and places. Each short film has a unique plot and characters, but they are played by the same actors, leading to many interesting and at times funny role reversals from the viewer’s perspective. The movie jumps between the six stories in a way that shows their thematic similarities. It’s a very ambitious attempt at storytelling through the film medium, but also an unsuccessful one. As a whole, Cloud Atlas is too confusing and practically collapses under its own weight.
Rather than even attempting to summarize its Byzantine plot in more detail, here’s a link to a well-written plot synopsis you can read if you like before proceeding farther:
“This film follows the stories of six people’s “souls” across time, and the stories are interweaved as they advance, showing how they all interact. It is about how the people’s lives are connected with and influence each other…” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1371111/plotsummary?ref_=ttpl_sa_2#synopsis
On the one hand, I’m glad that in today’s sad era of endless sequels, remakes and reboots, Hollywood is still willing to take occasional risks on highly creative, big-budget sci fi films like Cloud Atlas. On the other, none of that changes the fact that movie is a hot mess.
For the purposes of this sci fi analysis, I’m only interested in the chapters of the movie set in the future. The first takes place in Seoul (renamed “Neo Seoul”) in 2144, and the second takes place on a primitive tropical island “hundreds” of years after that, and following some kind of global cataclysm. Though the date when the later sequence happens is never stated in the film, the book on which it is based says it is 2321, and I’ll use that for this review.
Analysis:
Slavery will come back. In 2144, South Korea, and possibly some part of the countries surrounding it, is run by an evil government/company called “Unanimity.” Among its criminal practices is allowing the use of slave labor. The slaves, called “fabricants,” are parentless humans who are conceived in labs, gestated in artificial wombs, and euthanized after 12 years of labor. They seem to have no legal rights, can be killed for minor reasons, and are treated as inferiors by natural-born humans. Though they look externally identical to any other human, it’s hinted that the fabricants have been genetically altered to be obedient and hard workers, and perhaps to have physiological differences. Juvenile fabricants are never shown, which leads me to think they are gestated as mature adults. The 2144 plot centers around one fabricant who escapes from her master and joins a rebel group fighting to end slavery.
The protagonist of the 2144 film segment is this female fabricant.
Slavery will not exist in 2144 because 1) the arc of history is clearly towards stronger human rights and 2) machines will be much better and cheaper workers than humans by then. In a profit-obsessed society like the one run by Unanimity, no business that employed humans, even those working for free as slaves, could survive against competitors that used robots. After all, it still costs money to feed, clothe, and house human slaves, and to give them medical care when necessary. And while the film implies that the human slaves partly exist to gratify the sexual needs of human clients, robots–specifically, androids–should be superior in that line of work, as well.
For these same reasons, if intelligent machines have taken over the planet by 2144, it won’t make sense for them to enslave humans, or at least not for long. Intelligent machines would find it cheaper, safer, and better to build task-specific, “dumb” machines to do jobs for them than to employ humans. There could be a nightmare scenario where AIs win a mutually devastating war with humanity, and due to scarce resources and destroyed infrastructure, the use of human labor is the best option, but this arrangement would only last until the AIs could build worker robots.
Human clones will exist. Though the fabricants are played by different actresses, the protagonist that escapes from her master later sees fabricants that look identical to her. This means the fabricants as a whole have limited genetic diversity and probably consist of several strains of clones.
“Zhong Zhong” and “Hua Hua” are identical clones of an adult monkey.
Human clones will be created long before 2144. In 2018, Chinese scientists made two clones of one monkey. Given the close similarities between human and monkey genetics and chromosome structure, the same technique or a variant of it could be used to clone humans. The only thing that has stopped it from happening so far is bioethics concerns stemming from the technique’s high failure rate–77 out of 79 cloned monkey embryos that were implanted in surrogate mothers during the experiment were miscarried or died shortly after birth. More time and more experiments will surely refine the process.
When will the success rate be “good enough” for us to make the first human clones? Sir John Gurdon won a Nobel Prize for his 1962 experiments cloning frogs. In 2012, he predicted that human cloning would probably begin in 50 years–which is 2062. Given the state of the science today, that looks reasonable.
In 2144, cloning will be affordable and legal in at least one country that allows medical tourism, but only a tiny percentage of people will want to use it, and an insignificant share of the human race will consist of clones. Bereaved parents wanting to replace their dead children will probably be the industry’s main customers. It sounds creepy, but what if the clones actually make most of them happy?
Display screens will cover many types of surfaces. The bar/restaurant staffed by the fabricants is a drab room whose walls, ceilings, floors, and furniture are covered by thin display screens. At the flick of a switch, the screens can come alive and show colors, images, and moving pictures just like a traditional TV or computer monitor. An apartment is also shown later on that has a wraparound room display.
I conservatively predict that wallpaper-like display screens with the same capabilities and performance as those depicted in the movie will be a mature, affordable technology by 2044, which is 100 years before the events shown in the film segment. In other words, it will be very old technology. The displays built into the floors would have to be thickest and most robust for obvious reasons, and will probably be the last ones to be introduced. This technology will allow people to have wall-sized TV screens in their houses, to place “lights” at any points and configuration in a given room, and to create immersive environments like cruder versions of the Star Trek “holodeck.”
Through a “transparent” wall, the partly flooded city of Seoul is visible.
Walls will be able to turn transparent. In the aforementioned apartment, one of the walls can turn into a “fake window” at the push of a button. The display screen that covers it can display live footage from outside the building, presumably provided to it by exterior cameras. This technology should also be affordable and highly convincing in effect by 2044, if not earlier. Note that the Wachowskis also included this technology in their film Jupiter Ascending, but it was used to make floors transparent instead of walls.
There will be 3D printed meals. The 2144 segment begins in a bar/restaurant staffed by fabricants. A sequence shows a typical work day for them, and we see how a 3D “food printer” creates realistic-looking dishes in seconds. The printer consists of downward-pointing nozzles that spray colored substances onto bowls and dishes, where it congeals into solid matter. Its principle of operation is like a color printer’s, but it can stack layers of edible “ink” to rapidly build up things.
A 3D food printer somehow squirts out these elaborate-looking meals in under ten seconds.
3D food printers already exist, and they can surely be improved, but they will never be able to additively manufacture serving-sizes of food in seconds, unless you’re making a homogenized, simple dish like soft-serve ice cream or steak tartare. To manufacture a complex piece of food like those shown in the film sequence, much more time would be needed for the squirted biomatter to settle and set properly to achieve the desired texture and appearance, and for heat, lasers or chemicals to cook it properly. For these reasons, I don’t think the depiction of the futuristic 3D food printer will prove accurate.
However, the next best things will be widely available by then: lab-grown foods and fast robot chefs. By 2144, it should be cheaper to synthesize almost any type of food than to grow or raise it the natural way, and I predict humans will get most of their calories from industrial-scale labs. This includes meat, which we’ll grow using stem cells. Common processed foodstuffs like flour, corn starch, and sugar could also be directly synthesized from inorganic chemicals and electricity, saving us from having to grow and harvest the plants that naturally make them.
A 3D food printer today.
The benefits of the “manufactured food” paradigm will be enormous. First, it would be much more humane since we would no longer need to kill billions of animals per year for food. Second, it would be better for the environment since we could make most of our food indoors, in enclosed facilities. The environmental damage caused by the application of pesticides and fertilizers would drop because we’d have fewer open-air farms. And since the “food factories” would be more efficient, we could produce the same number of calories on a smaller land footprint, which would allow us to let old farms revert back to nature. Third, it would be better for the economy. Manufactured food would be cheaper since it would cut out costly intermediate steps like planting seeds, harvesting plants, separating their edible parts from the rest, and butchering animals to isolate their different cuts of meat. No time, money or energy would be spent making excess matter like corn husks, banana peels, chicken feathers, animal brains, or bones–the synthesis process would be waste-free, and would turn inorganic matter and small clumps of stem cells directly into 100% edible pieces of food. Food factory output would also be largely unaffected by uncontrollable natural events like droughts, hailstorms, an locust swarms, making food supply levels much more predictable and prices more stable. Fourth, food factories would be able to produce cleaner, higher-quality foods at lower cost. The energy and material costs of making a premium ribeye steak are probably no higher than the costs of making a tough, rubbery round steak. With that in mind, the meat factories could ONLY EVER make premium ribeye steaks, which will be great since the price will drop and everyone, not just richer people, will be able to eat the highest quality cuts. (If you want to do side research on this, Google the awesome term “carcass balancing” and knock yourself out.)
By 2144, machines will be able to do everything humans can do, except better, faster and cheaper, which means robot chefs will be ubiquitous and highly skilled. They would work very efficiently and consistently, meaning restaurant wait times would be short, and the meals would always be prepared perfectly. Thanks to all these factors, the 2144 equivalent of a low-income person could walk into an ordinary restaurant and order a cheap meal consisting of what would be very expensive ingredients today (e.g. – Kobe beef steak, caviar, lobster). Those ingredients would be identical to their natural counterparts, and would be only a few hours fresh from the factory thanks to the highly efficient automated logistics systems that will also exist by then. A robot chef with several pairs of hands and superhuman reflexes would combine and cook the ingredients with astounding speed and precision. Not single movement would be wasted. Within 15 minutes of placing his order, the customer’s food would be in front of him.
Today, this level of cuisine and service is known only to richer people, but in the future, it will be common thanks to technology. This falls short of Cloud Atlas‘ depiction of 3D food printers making meals in seconds, but there are worse fates…
Street scene from 2144.
There will be flying cars. CGI camera shots of Neo-Seoul show its streets filled with flying cars, flying trucks and flying motorcycles. Most often, they hover one or two feet above the ground, but they’re also capable of flying high in the air. The vehicles levitate thanks to circular “pads” on their undersides, which glow blue and make buzzing sounds. The Wachowskis also featured these “hoverpads” on the flying vehicles in their Matrix films. In no film was their principle of operation explained.
This shot clearly shows the hoverpads.
The only way the hoverpads could make cars “fly” is if they were made of superconductors and the roads were made of magnets. 2144 is a long way off, so it’s possible that we could discover room-temperature superconductors that were also cheap to manufacture by then. No law of physics prohibits it. Likewise, we could discover new methods of cheaply creating powerful magnets and magnetic fields so we can embed them in the millions of miles of global roadways. Vehicles with superconducting undersides could “hover” over these roads, but not truly “fly” since the magnetic fields they’d depend on would get sharply weaker with vertical distance–“Coulomb’s Law” says that a magnet’s strength decreases the farther you get from it in an inversely squared manner.
Ironically, the inability to go high in the air would be a selling point for hovercars since the prospect of riding in one would be less scary to land-loving humans (in my analysis of true flying cars, I said this was one reason why that technology was infeasible). Hovercars would also be quieter, more energy efficient, and smoother-riding than normal cars due to their lack of contact and friction with the road. Their big limitation would be an inability to drive off-road or anywhere else where there weren’t magnets in the ground. However, that might be a bearable inconvenience since the global road network will be denser in 2144 than it is now, and we might also have had enough time by then to install the magnets in all but the remotest and least-trafficked roads. You could rent wheeled vehicles when needed as easily as you summon an Uber cab today (the 2144 film sequence takes place in a city, so for all we know, wheeled cars are still widely in use elsewhere).
In conclusion, if we make a breakthrough in superconductor technology, it would enable the creation of hovercars, which might very well find strong consumer demand thanks to real advantages they would have over normal cars. True “flying cars” will not be in use by 2144, but hovercars could be, especially in heavily-trafficked places like cities and the highways linking them together, where it will make the most economic sense to install magnets in the roads. This means Cloud Atlas‘ depiction of transit technology was half wrong, and half “maybe.”
There will be at least one off-world human colony. During the 2144 segment, a character mentions that there are four “off-world colonies.” In the 2321 segment, those colonies are spoken of again, and people from one of them come to Earth in space ships to rescue several characters from the ailing planet. That space colony’s location is not named, but judging by the final scene, in which the characters are sitting outdoors amongst alien-looking plants, and one of them points to a blue dot in the night sky and says it is Earth, the colony is on a terraformed celestial body in our Solar System. The facts that gravity levels seem within the normal range and two moons are visible in the sky suggest it is Mars, though the moons would actually look smaller than that.
In the last chronological scene in the film, the characters are on an alien moon or planet.
“Colony” implies something more substantial than “base” or “outpost.” As I did in my Blade Runner review, I’m going to assume it refers to settlements that:
Have non-token numbers of permanent human residents
Have significant numbers of human residents who are not “elite” in terms of wealth or technical skills
Are self-sustaining, regardless of whether the level of sustenance affords the same quality of life on Earth.
I think there will certainly be bases on the Moon and Mars by the end of this century, and that they will be continuously manned. Good analogs for these bases are the International Space Station and the various research stations in Antarctica. Making conservative assumptions about steady improvements in technology and continued human interest in exploring space, it’s possible there will be at least one off-world colony by 2144, and likely that will be the case by 2321.
However, those projections come with a huge proviso, which I already stated in my Blade Runner review: “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.” The rise of A.I. will be a paradigm shift in the history of our civilization, species, and planet, and its scrambling effect on long-term predictions like the prospects of human settlement of space must be acknowledged.
Finally, while off-world colonies might exist as early as 2144, none of the moons or planets on which they are established will have breathable atmospheres or comfortable outdoor temperatures for many centuries, if ever. The final scene depicted Mars having an Earthlike environment, where humans could stroll around the surface without breathing equipment or heavy clothing to protect against the cold. Two of the characters from the 2321 film sequence were shown, and both were done up with special effects makeup to look older, suggesting the final scene was set in the mid-2300s. In spite of the distant date, it was still much too early for the planet to have been terraformed to such an extent. In fact, melting all of Mars’ ice and releasing all the carbon dioxide sequestered in its rocks would only thicken its atmosphere to 7% of Earth’s surface air pressure, which wouldn’t be nearly good enough for humans to breathe, or to raise the planet’s temperatures to survivable levels. The effort would also be folly since the gases we released at such great expense would inevitably dissipate into space.
And that’s a real bummer since Mars is the most potentially habitable celestial body we know of aside from Earth! Venus has a crushingly thick, toxic atmosphere, and even if we somehow thinned it out and made it breathable, the planet would be unsuited for humans given its high temperatures and weirdly long days and nights (one Venusian day is 117 Earth days long). Mercury is much too close to the Sun and too hot, our Moon lacks the gravity to hold down an atmosphere and is covered in dust that inflames the human body, the gas giant planets are totally hopeless, and even their “best” moons have fundamental problems.
By the 2300s and even as early as 2144, there could be sizeable, self-sufficient colonies of humans off Earth, but everyone will be living inside sealed structures. Life inside those habitats could be nice (all the interior surfaces could be covered in thin display screens that showed calming footage of forests and beaches), but no one would be strolling on the surface in a T-shirt. And it might stay that way forever, regardless of how advanced technology became and how much money we spent building up those colonies.
There will be…some kinds of super guns. In the two film segments set in the future, characters use handheld guns that are more powerful than today’s firearms, but also operate on mysterious principles. It’s unclear whether the guns are shooting out physical projectiles or intangible projectiles made of laser beams or globs of plasma, but something exotic is at work since the guns don’t eject bullet casings or make the familiar “Pop!” sounds. Whatever they shoot is out very damaging and easily passes through human bodies and walls. In one scene, a person goes flying several feet backward after being shot at close range by one of the pistols.
A man flying backwards after being shot. Only a huge bullet could do this, and it would be impractical to shoot it out of a little handgun.
The super guns can’t be firing plasma because plasma weapons are infeasible, and they also can’t be firing laser beams because they’d get so hot with waste heat that all the characters would be dropping the guns in pain after one or two shots and clutching their burned hands. To fire a significant number of shots, a man-portable laser weapon would need to be large and to have some bulky means to radiating its waste heat, which means it would have to take a form similar to the Ghostbusters backpack weapon. I don’t see how any level of technology can solve the problems of energy storage and heat disposal without the weapon being about that big. The film characters’ weapons were sized like pistols and sub machine guns, so they couldn’t be laser weapons. If you want to understand how I arrived at these conclusions, read my Terminator review.
By deduction, that means the super guns were shooting out little pieces of metal, otherwise known as bullets! Yes, I do think personal firearms will still be in use in 2144, and maybe even in 2321. They might look a little different from those we have now, but they’ll operate in the same way and will still use kinetic energy to damage people and objects. I don’t think they’ll make “zoop” sounds like they did in the movie, and I don’t think they’ll be much harder-hitting than today’s guns. To the last point, it would be inefficient and wasteful to use guns that are so powerful their bullets send people flying through the air. And thanks to Newton’s Third Law of Motion, it’s also impractical to use handguns or even sub machine guns to shoot bullets that are so powerful they send people flying. The recoil would break your wrist, or at least make it so punishing to fire your own gun that you wouldn’t be able to use it in combat.
The film should have adopted a more conservative view of future gun technology. Had the weapons looked cosmetically different from today’s guns and not ejected shells after each shot–indicating they used caseless bullets, a technology we’re still working on–then the depiction would have been plausible and probably accurate.
There will be fusion reactors. In the 2321 sequence, an advanced group of humans travels the oceans in a futuristic ship that looks the size of a large yacht. The ship visits an island full of primitive humans, and one of the crew mentions to them that the ship has fusion engines.
I’m very hesitant to make predictions about hot fusion power because so many have failed before me, most of the experts who today claim that usable fusion reactors are on track to be created soon have self-interested reasons for making those claims (usually they belong to an organization that wants money to pursue their idea), and I certainly lack the specialized education to muster any special insights on the topic. However, I can say for sure that the basic problem is that nuclear fusion reactions release large numbers of neutrons, which beam outward in every direction from the source of the reaction. When those neutrons hit other things, they cause a lot of damage at the molecular level. This means the interior surfaces of fusion reactors rapidly deteriorate, making it necessary to periodically shut down the reactors to remove and replace the surface material. The need for the shutdowns and repairs undermine fusion as a reliable and affordable power source. Of course, that could change if we invented a new material that was resistant to neutron damage and cheap (enough) to make, but no one has, nor are there any guarantees that a material with such properties can exist.
An illustration of ITER, which is under construction. A man in an orange uniform has been drawn near the center of the image to convey the machine’s scale.
It would be comforting if I could say that these problems will be worked out by a specific year in the future, but I can’t. The “International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor” (ITER) project is the world’s flagship attempt at making a hot fusion reactor, and it is massively over-budget, years behind schedule, and dogged by some critics who say it just won’t work for many technical reasons, including the possibility that the hollow-donut shaped “tokomak” reaction chamber is a fundamentally flawed design (there are alternative fusion reactor concepts with very different internal layouts). If all goes according to plan, ITER will be turned on in December 2025, but it will take another ten years to reach full operation. Lessons learned during its lifetime will be used to design a second, more refined fusion reactor called the “Demonstration Power Station” (DEMO), which won’t be running until the middle of the century. And only AFTER the kinks are worked out of DEMO do scientists envision the technology being good enough to build practical, commercial nuclear fusion reactors that could be connected to the power grid. So even under favorable conditions, we might not have usable fusion reactors until close to 2100, and due to many engineering unknowns, it’s also still possible that ITER will encounter so many problems in the 2030s that we will be forced to abandon fusion power as infeasible.
Here’s an important point: Attempts to build nuclear fusion reactors started in the 1950s. If you had told those men that the technology would take at least 100 more years and tens or hundreds of billions of more dollars to reach maturity, they would have been shocked. The quest for fusion reactors has been full of staggering disappointments, false starts, and long delays that no one expected, and it could continue that way. With that in mind, I can only rate the film’s depiction of practical fusion reactors existing by 2321 as being “maybe accurate, maybe not.”
There will be cybernetically augmented/enhanced humans. In the 2144 segment, we see people who have cybernetic implants in their bodies that give them abilities that couldn’t be had through biology. The first is a surgeon who has an elaborate, mechanical eye implant that lets him zoom in on his patients during operations, and the other is a man who has a much less conspicuous implant in his left cheek that seems to be a cell phone. Presumably, the device is connected to his inner ear or cochlear nerve.
The technology necessary to make implanted cybernetics with these kinds of capabilities will be affordable and mature by 2144. However, few people will want implants that are externally visible and mechanical- or metallic-looking. Humans have a innate sense of beauty that is offended by anything that makes them look asymmetrical or unnatural. For that reason, in 2144, people will overwhelmingly prefer completely internal implants that don’t bulge from their bodies, and external implants and prostheses that look and feel identical to natural body parts. That said, there will surely be a minority of people who will pay for things like robot eyes with swiveling lenses, shiny metal Terminator limbs, and other cybernetics that make them look menacing or strange, just as there are people today who indulge in extreme body modifications.
People who like extreme body modifications will have even more avenues of self-expression in the future thanks to cybernetic implants and other technologies.
It’s important to point out that externally worn personal technologies will also be very advanced in 2144, will grant their users “superhuman” abilities just as simpler devices do for people today, and might be so good that most people will be fine using them instead of getting implants. Returning to the movie character with the mechanical eye, I have to wonder what advantages he has over someone with two natural eyes wearing computerized glasses that provide augmented vision. Surely, with 2144 levels of technology, a hyper-advanced version of Google Glass could be made that would let wearers do things like zoom in on small objects, and much more. The glasses could also be removed when they weren’t needed, whereas the surgeon could never “take off” his ugly-looking robot eye. Moreover, if the glasses were rendered obsolete by a new model in 2145, the owner could just throw away the older pair and buy a newer pair, whereas upgrading would be much harder for the eye implant guy for obvious reasons.
Likewise, if someone wanted to upgrade his strength or speed, he could put on a powered exoskeleton, which will be a mature type of technology by 2144. It would be less obtrusive and would come with less complications than having limbs chopped off and replaced with robot parts. For this reason, I also think sci-fi depictions of people having metal arms and legs in the future that let them fight better are inaccurate. Only a tiny minority will be drawn to that. In any case, the ability to do physical labor or to win fights will be far less relevant in the future because robots will do the drudge work, and surveillance cameras and other forensic technologies will make it much harder to get away with violent crimes.
While wearable devices might be able to enhance strength and the senses as well as implanted ones, the former will not be nearly as useful in augmenting the brain and its abilities. We already have crude brain-computer interface (BCI) devices that are worn on a person’s head where they can read some of their thoughts by monitoring their brain activity. The devices can improve, and in fact might become major consumer products in the 2030s, but they’re fundamentally limited by their inability to see activity happening deep in the brain.
A modern brain-computer interface, worn over the head. Much more advanced versions of this will exist in 2144, but they will still have limits.
To truly merge human and machine intelligence and to amplify the human brain’s performance to superhuman levels, we’ll need to put computer implants around and in the brain. This means having an intricate network of sensors and electrodes inside the skull and woven through the tissue of the brain itself, where it can monitor and manipulate the organ’s electrical activity at the microscopic level. Brain implants like these would make people vastly smarter, would give them “telepathic” abilities to send and receive thoughts and emotions and “telekinetic” abilities to control machines, and would let them control and change their minds and personalities in ways we can’t imagine. Along with artificial intelligence, the invention of a technology that lets humans “reprogram” their minds and to overcome the arbitrary limits set by their genetics and early childhood environments would radically alter civilization and our everyday experience. It would be much more impactful than a technology that let you enhance your senses or body.
By 2144, augmentative brain implants will exist. Since they’ll be internal, people with them won’t look different from people today. Artificial organs that are at least as good as their natural equivalents will also exist, and will allow people to radically extend their lifespans by replacing their “parts” in piecemeal fashion as they wear out. Again, these will by definition be externally undetectable. The result would be a neat inverse of the typical sci-fi cyborg–the person would have any visible machine parts like glowing eyes, shiny metal arms, or tubes hanging off their bodies. They would look like normal, organic humans, but the technology inside of them would push them well beyond natural human limits, to the point of being impossibly smart, telepathic, mentally plastic, and immortal.
Languages will have significantly changed. In the 2321 film sequence, the aboriginal humans speak a strange dialect of English that is very hard to understand, while the group of advanced humans speak something almost identical to today’s English. Both depictions will prove accurate!
Skimming through Gulliver’s Travels highlights that the English language has changed over the last 300 years, and we should expect it to continue doing so, perhaps until, in another 300 it will sound as strange as the island dialect in the movie. This will of course be true for other languages.
At the same time, that doesn’t mean modern versions of languages will be lost to history, or that speakers of it won’t be able to talk with speakers of the 2321 dialects. Intelligent machines and perhaps other kinds of intelligent life forms we couldn’t even imagine today will dominate the planet in 2321, and they will also know all human languages, including archaic dialects like the English of 2021, and dead human languages like Ancient Greek, allowing them to communicate with however many of us there are left.
Humans will also easily overcome linguistic barriers thanks to vastly improved language translation machines. The brain implants I mentioned earlier could also let people share pure thoughts and emotions, obviating the need to resort to language for communication. Whatever the case, technology will let people communicate regardless of what their mother tongues were, so a person who only knew 2021 English could easily converse with one who only knew 2321 English.
The knowledge that this state of affairs is coming should assuage whatever fears anyone has about English (or any other language) becoming “bastardized,” “degenerating,” or going extinct. So long as dictionaries and records of how people spoke in this era survive long enough to be uploaded into the memory banks of the first A.I., our idiosyncratic take on the English language will endure forever and be forever reproducible.
Finally and on a side note, the intelligent machines of 2321 will probably communicate amongst themselves using languages of their own invention. Instead of having one language for everything, I suspect they’ll have a few languages, each optimally suited for a different thing (for example, there could be one alphabet and syntax structure that is used for mathematics, another for prose and poetry, and others for expressing other modes of thought), and that they will all speak them fluently. As intricate and expressive as today’s human languages are, they contain many inefficiencies and possibilities for improvement, and it’s inevitable that machines will apply information theory and linguistics to make something better.
Sea levels will have noticeably risen. In the 2144 segment, there’s a scene where two characters look out the “digital window” of unit in a high-rise apartment building and see a partly flooded cityscape. One of the characters says that the structures that are partly or fully underwater were part of Seoul, South Korea, and that the larger, newer buildings on dry land are part of “Neo-Seoul.” In spite of the distressed condition of such a large area, the metropolis overall is thriving and thrums with people, vehicle traffic, and other activity. I think this is an accurate depiction of how global warming will impact the world by 2144.
Let me be clear about my beliefs: Global warming is real, human industrial activity is causing part of it, sea levels are rising because of it, it will be bad for the environment and the human race overall, and it’s worth the money to take some action against it now. However, the media and most famous people who have spoken on the matter have grossly blown the problem out of proportion by only focusing on its worst-case outcomes, which has tragically misled many ordinary people into assuming that global warming will destroy civilization or even render the Earth uninhabitable unless we forsake all the comforts of life now. The most credible scientific estimates attach extremely low likelihoods to those scenarios. The likeliest outcome, and the one I believe will come to pass, is that the rate of increase in global temperatures will start significantly slowing in the second half of this century, leading to a stabilization and even a decline of global temperatures in the 22nd century.
The higher temperatures will raise sea levels by melting ice in the polar regions and by causing seawater to slightly expand in volume (as water warms, its density decreases), but the waterline in most coastal areas will only be 1/2 to 1 meter higher in 2100 than it was in 2000. That will be barely noticeable across the lifetimes of most people. Sea levels will have risen even more by 2144, inundating some low-lying areas of coastal cities, but people will adapt as they did in the film–by abandoning the places that became too flood-prone and moving to higher ground. Depending on the local topography, this could entail simply moving a few blocks away to a new apartment complex. Except maybe in the poorest cities, the empty buildings would be demolished as people left, so there wouldn’t be any old, ghostly structures jutting out of the water as there were in the future Seoul.
And instead of the ocean suddenly inundating low-lying swaths of town, forcing their abandonment all at once in the middle of the night, they would be depopulated over the course of decades, with individual buildings being demolished piecemeal once flood insurance costs hit a tipping point, or once that one particularly bad flood caused so much damage that the structure wasn’t worth repairing. Again, the broader changes to the metro area would happen so gradually that few would notice.
If we could jump ahead to 2144, we’d be able to see and feel the effects of global warming. Some parts of Seoul (and other cities) that were formerly on the waterfront would be underwater. However, as was the case in the film, we’d also see civilization had not only survived, but thrived, and that the expansion of technology, science and commerce had not halted due to the costs imposed by global warming. It would not have come close to destroying civilization, and people would realize that the worst was behind them.
Of course, that doesn’t mean the threat will have been removed forever. What I’ll call a “second wave” of global warming is possible even farther in the future than 2144. You see, even if we completely decarbonize the economy and stop releasing all greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we humans will still be producing heat. Solar panels, wind turbines, hydroelectric dam turbines, nuclear fission plants, and even clean nuclear FUSION plants that will “use water as fuel” all emit waste heat as inevitable byproducts of generating electricity. Likewise, all of our machines that turn that use that electricity to do useful work, like a factory machine that manufactures reusable shopping bags or an electric car that drives people around town, also release waste heat. This is thermodynamically unavoidable.
This line chart depicts the consequences of a steady 2.3% increase in global energy consumption on the Earth’s future surface temperature.
The Earth naturally radiates heat into space, and so far, it has been able to radiate all the heat produced by our industrial activity as fast as we can emit it. However, if long-term global economic growth rates continue, in about 250 years we’ll pass the threshold, and our machines will be releasing so much waste heat that the Earth’s surface will start getting hotter. The second wave of global warming–driven by an entirely different mechanism than the first wave we’re now in–will start, and if left unaddressed, it will render the Earth uninhabitable by very roughly 400 years from now. Based on all these estimates, 2144 will probably be an interregnum between the two waves of global warming.
Even if we melted all the ice on Mars and released all the CO2 trapped in its rocks, the resulting atmosphere would only be 7% as thick as Earth’s. That’s not good enough for humans to breathe, or to raise surface temperatures above freezing. https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2018/mars-terraforming
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) thinks global warming “doomsday” scenarios are very unlikely. The rate of global warming will significantly drop in the second half of this century, and global temperatures will probably stabilize in the next century. https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_Chapter12_FINAL.pdf
Donald Trump completed one term of office as U.S. President this month, and the position was transferred to Joe Biden. Again, this blog is NOT about partisan politics, and as a general rule I don’t mention it, but this is a rare instance where it’s worth listing the noteworthy failed predictions about the Trump presidency:
“Trump’s presidency is effectively over. Would be amazed if he survives till end of the year. More likely resigns by fall, if not sooner.” –Tony Schwartz (ghostwriter of Trump: The Art of the Deal turned enemy of Trump), August 16, 2017 https://twitter.com/tonyschwartz/status/897900928023412736
“He will not finish his first term…I would be very surprised if he made it to 18 months…my best guess is within six months.” –Cenk Uygur, August 16, 2017 https://youtu.be/ScgVbT_fry0
“I’ve been saying this from day one of his presidency but apparently most people still don’t get it – there is no way Donald Trump finishes his first term. Mark my words: He is out of office by 2019. He is not bright enough to be able to get himself out of the trouble he is in.” –Cenk Uygur, December 22, 2018 https://twitter.com/cenkuygur/status/1076600316286590976
“I do not think the President will survive this term…I think the amount of heat that is going to come down on Mr. Trump in connection with his personal attorney of ten years [Michael Cohen] turning on him and rolling on him will be insurmountable, and I think his only exit, in an effort to save whatever face he may have left at that time, will be to resign the office.” –Michael Avenatti, April 23, 2018 https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/stormy-daniels-lawyer-explains-why-he-thinks-trump-will-resign-his-term
“I think it’s just going to get so tight and it’s going to close in and then everybody is going to be indicted around this president, and then he is going to realize he is probably next on the list. And I think he is going to come up with an excuse like ‘somebody is trying to kill Barron, and so I’m going to resign.” –Congresswoman Frederica Wilson (Florida), November 3, 2017 https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rep-wilson-predicts-trump-will-pretend-somebody-trying-kill-barron-resign/
“In any case, it seems likely that Donald Trump will be leaving the Presidency at some point, likely between the 31 days of William Henry Harrison in 1841 (dying of pneumonia) and the 199 days of James A. Garfield in 1881 (dying of an assassin’s bullet after 79 days of terrible suffering and medical malpractice). At the most, it certainly seems likely, even if dragged out, that Trump will not last 16 months and 5 days, as occurred with Zachary Taylor in 1850 (dying of a digestive ailment). The Pence Presidency seems inevitable.” –Presidential historian Ronald L. Feinman, February 18, 2017 https://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/presidential-historian-predicts-trumps-term-will-last-less-than-200-days-the-second-shortest-ever/
“For a while now, I have thought the Trump presidency would end suddenly…For weeks now I have been anticipating that Trump’s last day in office will dawn like all the others, and then around dinnertime it will suddenly break that he is about to resign…I don’t know if that’s next Tuesday or next year, but I think whenever it is, that is what it will feel like.” –Keith Olbermann, August 23, 2017 http://www.newsweek.com/trump-resign-russia-olbermann-president-654209
“He’s gonna drop out of the race because it’s gonna become very clear. Okay, it’ll be March of 2020. He’ll likely drop out by March of 2020. It’s gonna become very clear that it’s impossible for him to win.” –Anthony Scaramucci, August 16, 2019 https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/anthony-scaramucci-interview-trump
LED walls are made up of many smaller LED panels arranged in a grid to form one, giant display of arbitrary size. I just saw one of them in an airport and was impressed. This might become common in homes starting in 10 years as prices drop and people demand TVs that would be too big to fit through the front doors of their houses if made of one, rigid screen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQxa8VruNJg&feature=emb_title
Here’s an interesting desalination plant. It uses solar power, pumps, a 90-meter tall hill, and reverse osmosis to make drinking water from seawater. https://youtu.be/B4irlTMk_Os
Here’s a big roundup of predictions for the 2020s by a bright guy I’ve never heard of. I respect his thoroughness, though I need to more time to decide if I agree with him. https://elidourado.com/blog/notes-on-technology-2020s/
Were the earliest plants purple instead of green? Are there alien planets covered in purple plants? ‘Because retinal is a simpler molecule than chlorophyll, then it could be more commonly found in life in the Universe…’ https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/was-life-on-the-early-earth-purple
Nobel Prizewinner Paul Cruzen died. He was a pioneer in global warming research, and later advocated geoengineering as a way to keep the phenomenon from getting out of control. https://www.mpic.de/4677594/trauer-um-paul-crutzen
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis might be wrong. ‘On the other side of the debate are those who say that although language is indeed linked with cognition, it derives from thought, rather than preceding it. You can certainly think about things that you have no labels for, they point out, or you would be unable to learn new words. Supposedly “untranslatable” words from other tongues—which seem to suggest that without the right language, comprehension is impossible—are not really inscrutable; they can usually be explained in longer expressions. One-word labels are not the sole way to grasp things.’ https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2020/10/15/does-naming-a-thing-help-you-understand-it
Autonomous vehicles only designed to transport cargo could look very different from normal cars, as they wouldn’t need seats or safety features to protect humans during crashes. For those same reasons, they could be lighter and cheaper than regular cars. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-autonomous-safety-idUSKBN29J29Z
“AI video compression” sharply reduces the amount of data needed for video calls. The means by which this is accomplished is very interesting, and has other uses. https://youtu.be/NqmMnjJ6GEg
Microsoft has patented a chatbot that would be able to mimic dead people after analyzing their “images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages” and other data. I’ve predicted that this kind of technology will get advanced enough to let people achieve “digital immortality” during the 2030s. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/microsoft-chatbot-patent-dead-b1789979.html
OpenAI’s latest boundary-pushing computer program is “Dall-E,” which can generate clear drawings based on user-submitted written descriptions of what they should look like. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55559463
Algorithms that can edit video footage are getting frighteningly advanced. Objects, including moving objects like humans and cars, can be easily deleted from video footage without anything looking amiss. Whatever was behind them is filled in. https://youtu.be/86QU7_SF16Q
Most of the world’s top AI researchers go to universities in the U.S. and then get jobs there. China produces the most top AI researchers of any country (unsurprising given its large population), but few of them stay there. https://macropolo.org/digital-projects/the-global-ai-talent-tracker/
‘Star lifting is any of several hypothetical processes by which a sufficiently advanced civilization…could remove a substantial portion of a star’s matter which can then be re-purposed, while possibly optimizing the star’s energy output and lifespan at the same time.’ https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Star_lifting
Scientists have identified the types of cells that let some animals sense magnetic fields, and have observed them doing that for the first time. I think posthumans will have this extra sense. “[We’ve] observed a purely quantum mechanical process affecting chemical activity at the cellular level.” https://newatlas.com/biology/live-cells-respond-magnetic-fields/
Machine learning can optimize factories by studying ultra hi-res photos of their products at various stages in the manufacturing process. Something like a screw missing from a circuit board would be seen by the computer before the board left the building. https://youtu.be/MOh55-TF6LQ
Are Silicon Valley’s days as the world’s tech hub over? Mandatory teleworking imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic has worked out better than many tech workers and founders expected, and they will push to make the arrangements permanent, leading many to leave the Bay Area for cheaper locales. https://blog.initialized.com/2021/01/data-post-pandemic-silicon-valley-isnt-a-place/
We have no idea how many people COVID-19 has killed in sub-Saharan Africa. ‘In 2017, only 10 percent of deaths were registered in Nigeria, by far Africa’s biggest country by population — down from 13.5 percent a decade before. In other African countries, like Niger, the percentage is even lower.’ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/02/world/africa/africa-coronavirus-deaths-underreporting.html
In September, the University of Washington COVID-19 model (IHME) predicted 410,000 Americans would be dead by January 1: ‘Jha says his disagreement with IHME’s methodology amounts to much more than a technical debate. “The problem here is if we come in at 250,000 or 300,000 dead [by year’s end in the United States] — which is still just enormously awful — political leaders are going to be able to do a victory dance and say, ‘Look, we were supposed to have 400,000 deaths. And because of all the great stuff we did, only 300,000 Americans died.'” says Jha.’ The actual outcome didn’t satisfy anyone. The U.S. death toll hit 354,000 by the January 1 deadline, which made both the IHME and the skeptics like Jha all look dumb. At the same time, no politicians did a victory dance. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/09/04/909783162/new-global-coronavirus-death-forecast-is-chilling-and-controversial
Mutant versions of COVID-19 have emerged in Britain and South Africa. They spread faster among people, and as such will kill higher numbers of people overall, even if they are not more lethal to any individual than the older strains of the virus. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/01/04/variants-and-vaccines
If it’s January, it means it’s time for me to update my big list of future predictions! I used the 2020 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.
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. These VR devices will be capable of displaying video that is visually indistinguishable from real reality: They will have display resolutions (at least 60 pixels per degree of field of view), refresh rates, head tracking sensitivities, and wide fields of view (210 degrees wide by 150 degrees high) 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 maybe none at all), 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.
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.
In 2029, the youngest Baby Boomer and the oldest Gen Xer will turn 65.
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. 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. AI personal assistants will have convincing, simulated personalities that seem to have the same depth as humans. Users will be able to pick from among personality profiles or to build their own.
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 (VR, telepresence, and remote-controlled robots will be so advanced that even blue-collar jobs involving manual labor will be outsourced to workers living across borders). 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.
Powered exoskeletons will become practical for a wide range of applications, mainly due to improvements in batteries. For example, a disabled person could use a lightweight exoskeleton with a battery the size of a purse to walk around for a whole day on a single charge, and a soldier in a heavy-duty exoskeleton with a large backpack battery could do a day of marching on a single charge. (Note: Even though it will be technologically possible to equip infantrymen with combat exoskeletons, armies might reject the idea due to other impracticalities.)
There will be no technological or financial barrier to building powered combat exoskeletons that have cloaking devices.
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.
Machines will be better teachers than most trained humans. The former will have much sharper grasps of their pupils’ individual strengths, weaknesses, interests, and learning styles, and will be able to create and grade tests in a much fairer and less biased manner than humans. Every person will have his own tutor.
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.
The worst case scenario is that AGI/Strong AI will have not been invented yet, but thousands of different types of highly efficient, task-specific Narrow AIs will have (often coupled to robot bodies), and they will 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.
Telepresence technology will also be very advanced, allowing humans to do nearly any task remotely, from any other place in the world, in safety and comfort. This will include cognitive tasks and hands-on tasks. If any humans still have jobs, they’ll be able to work from anywhere.
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.
Design optimization and the rise of AGI consumption will virtually eliminate planned obsolescence. Products that were deliberately engineered to fail after needlessly short periods, and “new” product lines that were no better than what they replaced, but had non-interchangeable part sizes would be exposed for what they were, and AGI consumers would refuse to buy them. Production will become much more efficient and far fewer things will be thrown out.
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.
Robots that are outwardly identical to sci-fi and fantasy characters and extinct animals, like grey aliens, elves, and dinosaurs, will exist and will occasionally be seen in public. Some weird person will want their robot butler to look like bigfoot.
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.
Brain-computer interfaces will let people control, pre-program, and, to a limited extent, record 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, people whose genomes have been shortened thanks to the deletion of junk DNA, 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.
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.
It will be cheaper and more energy-efficient to grow or synthesize almost all types of food in labs or factories than to grow and harvest it in traditional, open-air farms. Shielded from the weather and pests and not dependent on soil quality, the amounts and prices of foods will be highly consistent over time, and worries about farmland muscling out or polluting natural ecosystems will vanish. 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.
Chinese scientists have figured out how to differentiate Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Koreans from their facial features. https://doi.org/10.1002/widm.1278
Elon Musk says he will launch humans to Mars in 2026, and all new cars produced in 2030 will have fully autonomous driving capabilities. https://youtu.be/fjLa834mv8Q
“Over the longer term, perhaps in another 15 or 20 years, you will see a complete transformation in therapeutic medicine, because every pharmaceutical company is investing, and every biotech company is also contributing to the development of new targets for drug therapy, based upon the genome. And the therapies that we use 15 or 20 years from now will be directed much more precisely towards the molecular problem in things like cancer, or mental illness, than anything that we currently have available.” –Francis Collins during a 2000 speech about the future of genetic medicine https://web.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/project/clinton3.shtml
“Ecobots” are robots that can eat organic matter and turn the energy into electricity. The most advanced model can even poop. In the distant future, I think some robots and posthumans will be able to derive energy from the full range of organic and synthetic sources, as this will be the most versatile setup (very hard to “starve” if you can eat plants AND plug in to an electrical outlet). https://www.treehugger.com/scientists-invent-robot-that-eats-organic-matter-then-poops-4860413
Manmade objects now outweigh all the plants and animals on Earth. By weight, most of our manufactured goods come in the form of concrete, bricks and other building materials comprising structures and infrastructure. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55239668
It’s hard to remember now, but early in the pandemic, there was some hope that it would be over by the end of 2020, thanks to a vaccine being invented with surprising speed, or to the virus somehow turning out to not be as bad as expected. On March 31, Dr. Fauci flatly rejected those hopes by predicting that there would be a serious second wave in the fall, which happened. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8171657/Fauci-expects-America-suffer-coronavirus-outbreak-fall.html
Tyler Cowen’s prediction from April was basically right. The U.S. never had a national lockdown strategy and muddled through the year with a mix of state-level strategies that “yo-yoed” based on infection levels. It’s now the fall, and individual COVID-19 survival rates are higher because we’ve learned better ways to treat it, but overall deaths are higher than ever because so many more people are getting infected. We have vaccines (and it sounds like their invention might have come earlier than Cowen predicted), but distribution has just started, and his point that it will take a long time to inoculate the American population will hold true. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/04/where-we-stand.html
Bill Gates doesn’t think the COVID-19 related restrictions in the U.S. will completely go away for 12 to 18 months. Everything hinges on how many people get vaccinated, and how quickly. https://youtu.be/dCt23D8VXpc?t=473
This is the fourth…and LAST…entry in my series of blog posts analyzing the accuracy of Ray Kurzweil’s predictions about what things would be like in 2019. These predictions come from his 1998 book The Age of Spiritual Machines. You can view the previous installments of this series here:
“An undercurrent of concern is developing with regard to the influence of machine intelligence. There continue to be differences between human and machine intelligence, but the advantages of human intelligence are becoming more difficult to identify and articulate. Computer intelligence is thoroughly interwoven into the mechanisms of civilization and is designed to be outwardly subservient to apparent human control. On the one hand, human transactions and decisions require by law a human agent of responsibility, even if fully initiated by machine intelligence. On the other hand, few decisions are made without significant involvement and consultation with machine-based intelligence.”
MOSTLY RIGHT
Technological advances have moved concerns over the influence of machine intelligence to the fore in developed countries. In many domains of skill previously considered hallmarks of intelligent thinking, such as driving vehicles, recognizing images and faces, analyzing data, writing short documents, and even diagnosing diseases, machines had achieved human levels of performance by the end of 2019. And in a few niche tasks, such as playing Go, chess, or poker, machines were superhuman. Eroded human dominance in these and other fields did indeed force philosophers and scientists to grapple with the meaning of “intelligence” and “creativity,” and made it harder yet more important to define how human thinking was still special and useful.
While the prospect of artificial general intelligence was still viewed with skepticism, there was no real doubt among experts and laypeople in 2019 that task-specific AIs and robots would continue improving, and without any clear upper limit to their performance. This made technological unemployment and the solutions for it frequent topics of public discussion across the developed world. In 2019, one of the candidates for the upcoming U.S. Presidential election, Andrew Yang, even made these issues central to his political platform.
If “algorithms” is another name for “computer intelligence” in the prediction’s text, then yes, it is woven into the mechanisms of civilization and is ostensibly under human control, but in fact drives human thinking and behavior. To the latter point, great alarm has been raised over how algorithms used by social media companies and advertisers affect sociopolitical beliefs (particularly, conspiracy thinking and closedmindedness), spending decisions, and mental health.
Human transactions and decisions still require a “human agent of responsibility”: Autonomous cars aren’t allowed to drive unless a human is in the driver’s seat, human beings ultimately own and trade (or authorize the trading of) all assets, and no military lets its autonomous fighting machines kill people without orders from a human. The only part of the prediction that seems wrong is the last sentence. Probably most decisions that humans make are done without consulting a “machine-based intelligence.” Consider that most daily purchases (e.g. – where to go for lunch, where to get gas, whether and how to pay a utility bill) involve little thought or analysis. A frighteningly large share of investment choices are also made instinctively, with benefit of little or no research. However, it should be noted that one area of human decision-making, dating, has become much more data-driven, and it was common in 2019 for people to use sorting algorithms, personality test results, and other filters to choose potential mates.
“Public and private spaces are routinely monitored by machine intelligence to prevent interpersonal violence.”
MOSTLY RIGHT
Gunfire detection systems, which are comprised of networks of microphones emplaced across an area and which use machine intelligence to recognize the sounds of gunshots and to triangulate their origins, were emplaced in over 100 cities at the end of 2019. The dominant company in this niche industry, “ShotSpotter,” used human analysts to review its systems’ results before forwarding alerts to local police departments, so the systems were not truly automated, but nonetheless they made heavy use of machine intelligence.
Automated license plate reader cameras, which are commonly mounted next to roads or on police cars, also use machine intelligence and are widespread. The technology has definitely reduced violent crime, as it has allowed police to track down stolen vehicles and cars belonging to violent criminals faster than would have otherwise been possible.
In some countries, surveillance cameras with facial recognition technology monitor many public spaces. The cameras compare the people they see to mugshots of criminals, and alert the local police whenever a wanted person is seen. China is probably the world leader in facial recognition surveillance, and in a famous 2018 case, it used the technology to find one criminal among 60,000 people who attended a concert in Nanchang.
At the end of 2019, several organizations were researching ways to use machine learning for real-time recognition of violent behavior in surveillance camera feeds, but the systems were not accurate enough for commercial use.
“People attempt to protect their privacy with near-unbreakable encryption technologies, but privacy continues to be a major political and social issue with each individual’s practically every move stored in a database somewhere.”
RIGHT
In 2013, National Security Agency (NSA) analyst Edward Snowden leaked a massive number of secret documents, revealing the true extent of his employer’s global electronic surveillance. The world was shocked to learn that the NSA was routinely tracking the locations and cell phone call traffic of millions of people, and gathering enormous volumes of data from personal emails, internet browsing histories, and other electronic communications by forcing private telecom and internet companies (e.g. – Verizon, Google, Apple) to let it secretly search through their databases. Together with British intelligence, the NSA has the tools to spy on the electronic devices and internet usage of almost anyone on Earth.
Edward Snowden
Snowden also revealed that the NSA unsurprisingly had sophisticated means for cracking encrypted communications, which it routinely deployed against people it was spying on, but that even its capabilities had limits. Because some commercially available encryption tools were too time-consuming or too technically challenging to crack, the NSA secretly pressured software companies and computing hardware manufacturers to install “backdoors” in their products, which would allow the Agency to bypass any encryption their owners implemented.
During the 2010s, big tech titans like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple also came under major scrutiny for quietly gathering vast amounts of personal data from their users, and reselling it to third parties to make hundreds of billions of dollars. The decade also saw many epic thefts of sensitive personal data from corporate and government databases, affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
With these events in mind, it’s quite true that concerns over digital privacy and confidentiality of personal data have become “major political and social issues,” and that there’s growing displeasure at the fact that “each individual’s practically every move stored in a database somewhere.” The response has been strongest in the European Union, which, in 2018, enacted the most stringent and impactful law to protect the digital rights of individuals–the “General Data Protection Regulation” (GDPR).
Widespread awareness of secret government surveillance programs and of the risk of personal electronic messages being made public thanks to hacks have also bolstered interest in commercial encryption. “Whatsapp” is a common text messaging app with built-in end-to-end encryption. It was invented in 2016 and had 1.5 billion users by 2019. “Tor” is a web browser with built-in encryption that became relatively common during the 2010s after it was learned even the NSA couldn’t spy on people who used it. Additionally, virtual private networks (VPNs), which provide an intermediate level of data privacy protection for little expense and hassle, are in common use.
“The existence of the human underclass continues as an issue. While there is sufficient prosperity to provide basic necessities (secure housing and food, among others) without significant strain to the economy, old controversies persist regarding issues of responsibility and opportunity.”
RIGHT
It’s unclear whether this prediction pertained to the U.S., to rich countries in aggregate, or to the world as a whole, and “underclass” is not defined, so we can’t say whether it refers only to desperately poor people who are literally starving, or to people who are better off than that but still under major daily stress due to lack of money. Whatever the case, by any reasonable definition, there is an “underclass” of people in almost every country.
In the U.S. and other rich countries, welfare states provide even the poorest people with access to housing, food, and other needs, though there are still those who go without because severe mental illness and/or drug addiction keep them stuck in homeless lifestyles and render them too behaviorally disorganized to apply for government help or to be admitted into free group housing. Some people also live in destitution in rich countries because they are illegal immigrants or fugitives with arrest warrants, and contacting the authorities for welfare assistance would lead to their detection and imprisonment. Political controversy over the causes of and solutions to extreme poverty continues to rage in rich countries, and the fault line usually is about “responsibility” and “opportunity.”
The fact that poor people are likelier to be obese in most OECD countries and that starvation is practically nonexistent there shows that the market, state, and private charity have collectively met the caloric needs of even the poorest people in the rich world, and without straining national economies enough to halt growth. Indeed, across the world writ large, obesity-related health problems have become much more common and more expensive than problems caused by malnutrition. The human race is not financially struggling to feed itself, and would derive net economic benefits from reallocating calories from obese people to people living in the remaining pockets of land (such as war-torn Syria) where malnutrition is still a problem.
There’s also a growing body of evidence from the U.S. and Canada that providing free apartments to homeless people (the “housing first” strategy) might actually save taxpayer money, since removing those people from unsafe and unhealthy street lifestyles would make them less likely to need expensive emergency services and hospitalizations. The issue needs to be studied in further depth before we can reach a firm conclusion, but it’s probably the case that rich countries could give free, basic housing to their homeless without significant additional strain to their economies once the aforementioned types of savings to other government services are accounted for.
“This issue is complicated by the growing component of most employment’s being concerned with the employee’s own learning and skill acquisition. In other words, the difference between those ‘productively’ engaged and those who are not is not always clear.”
PARTLY RIGHT
As I said in part 2 of this review, Kurzweil’s prediction that people in 2019 would be spending most of their time at work acquiring new skills and knowledge to keep up with new technologies was wrong. The vast majority of people have predictable jobs where they do the same sets of tasks over and over. On-the-job training and mandatory refresher training is very common, but most workers devote small shares of their time to them, and the fraction of time spent doing workplace training doesn’t seem significantly different from what it was when the book was published.
From years of personal experience working in large organizations, I can say that it’s common for people to take workplace training courses or work-sponsored night classes (either voluntarily or because their organizations require it) that provide few or no skills or items of knowledge that are relevant to their jobs. Employees who are undergoing these non-value-added training programs have the superficial appearance of being “productively engaged” even if the effort is really a waste, or so inefficient that the training course could have been 90% shorter if taught better. But again, this doesn’t seem different from how things were in past decades.
This means the prediction was partly right, but also of questionable significance in the first place.
“Virtual artists in all of the arts are emerging and are taken seriously. These cybernetic visual artists, musicians, and authors are usually affiliated with humans or organizations (which in turn are comprised of collaborations of humans and machines) that have contributed to their knowledge base and techniques. However, interest in the output of these creative machines has gone beyond the mere novelty of machines being creative.”
MOSTLY RIGHT
The “Deep Dream” computer program made this surrealist portrait.
In 2019, computers could indeed produce paintings, songs, and poetry with human levels of artistry and skill. For example, Google’s “Deep Dream” program is a neural network that can transform almost any image into something resembling a surrealist painting. Deep Dream’s products captured international media attention for how striking, and in many cases, disturbing, they looked.
“Portrait of Edmond de Belamy”
In 2018, a different computer program produced a painting–“Portrait of Edmond de Belamy”–that fetched a record-breaking $423,500 at an art auction. The program was a generative adversarial network (GAN) designed and operated by a small team of people who described themselves as “a collective of researchers, artists, and friends, working with the latest models of deep learning to explore the creative potential of artificial intelligence.” That seems to fulfill the second part of the prediction (“These cybernetic visual artists, musicians, and authors are usually affiliated with humans or organizations (which in turn are comprised of collaborations of humans and machines) that have contributed to their knowledge base and techniques.”)
Machines are also respectable songwriters, and are able to produce original songs based on the styles of human artists. For example, a computer program called “EMMY” (an acronym for “Experiments in Musical Intelligence”) is able to make instrumental musical scores that accurately mimic those of famous human musicians, like Bach and Mozart (fittingly, Ray Kurzweil made a simpler computer program that did essentially the same thing when he was a teenager). Listen to a few of the songs and judge their quality for yourself:
Computer scientists at Google have built a neural network called “JukeBox” that is even more advanced than EMMY, and which can produce songs that are complete with simulated human lyrics. While the words don’t always make sense and there’s much room for improvement, most humans have no creative musical talent at all and couldn’t do any better, and the quality, sophistication and coherence of the entirely machine-generated songs is very impressive (audio samples are available online).
Also at Google, an artificial intelligence program called the “Generative Pretrained Transformer” was invented to understand and write text. In 2019, the second version of the program, “GPT-2,” made its debut, and showed impressive skill writing poetry, short news articles and other content, with minimal prompting from humans (it was also able to correctly answer basic questions about text it was shown and to summarize the key points, demonstrating some degree of reading comprehension). While often clunky and sometimes nonsensical, the passages that GPT-2 generates nonetheless fall within the “human range” of writing ability since they are very hard to tell apart from the writings of a child, or of an adult with a mental or cognitive disability. Some of the machine-written passages also read like choppy translations of text that was well-written in whatever its original language was.
Much of GPT-2’s poetry is also as good as–or, as bad as–that written by its human counterparts:
And they have seen the last light fail; By day they kneel and pray; But, still they turn and gaze upon The face of God to-day.
And God is touched and weeps anew For the lost souls around; And sorrow turns their pale and blue, And comfort is not found.
They have not mourned in the world of men, But their hearts beat fast and sore, And their eyes are filled with grief again, And they cease to shed no tear.
And the old men stand at the bridge in tears, And the old men stand and groan, And the gaunt grey keepers by the cross And the spent men hold the crown.
And their eyes are filled with tears, And their staves are full of woe. And no light brings them any cheer, For the Lord of all is dead
In conclusion, the prediction is right that there were “virtual artists” in 2019 in multiple fields of artistic endeavor. Their works were of high enough quality and “humanness” to be of interest for reasons other than the novelties of their origins. They’ve raised serious questions among humans about the nature of creative thinking, and whether machines are capable or soon will be. Finally, the virtual artists were “affiliated with” or, more accurately, owned and controlled by groups of humans.
“Visual, musical, and literary art created by human artists typically involve a collaboration between human and machine intelligence.”
UNCLEAR
It’s impossible to assess this prediction’s veracity because the meanings of “collaboration” and “machine intelligence” are undefined (also, note that the phrase “virtual artists” is not used in this prediction). If I use an Instagram filter to transform one of the mundane photos I took with my camera phone into a moody, sepia-toned, artistic-looking image, does the filter’s algorithm count as a “machine intelligence”? Does my mere use of it, which involves pushing a button on my smartphone, count as a “collaboration” with it?
Likewise, do recording studios and amateur musicians “collaborate with machine intelligence” when they use computers for post-production editing of their songs? When you consider how thoroughly computer programs like “Auto-Tune” can transform human vocals, it’s hard to argue that such programs don’t possess “machine intelligence.” This instructional video shows how it can make any mediocre singer’s voice sound melodious, and raises the question of how “good” the most famous singers of 2019 actually are: Can Anyone Sing With Autotune?! (Real Voice Vs. Autotune)
If I type a short story or fictional novel on my computer, and the word processing program points out spelling and usage mistakes, and even makes sophisticated recommendations for improving my writing style and grammar, am I collaborating with machine intelligence? Even free word processing programs have automatic spelling checkers, and affordable apps like Microsoft Word, Grammarly and ProWritingAid have all of the more advanced functions, meaning it’s fair to assume that most fiction writers interact with “machine intelligence” in the course of their work, or at least have the option to. Microsoft Word also has a “thesaurus” feature that lets users easily alter the wordings of their stories.
“The type of artistic and entertainment product in greatest demand (as measured by revenue generated) continues to be virtual-experience software, which ranges from simulations of ‘real’ experiences to abstract environments with little or no corollary in the physical world.”
WRONG
Analyzing this prediction first requires us to know what “virtual-experience software” refers to. As indicated by the phrase “continues to be,” Kurzweil used it earlier, specifically, in the “2009” chapter where he issued predictions for that year. There, he indicates that “virtual-experience software” is another name for “virtual reality software.” With that in mind, the prediction is wrong. As I showed previously in this analysis, the VR industry and its technology didn’t progress nearly as fast as Kurzweil forecast.
That said, the video game industry’s revenues exceed those of nearly all other art and entertainment industries. Globally for 2019, video games generated about $152.1 billion in revenue, compared to $41.7 billion for the film. The music industry’s 2018 figures were $19.1 billion. Only the sports industry, whose global revenues were between $480 billion and $620 billion, was bigger than video games (note that the two cross over in the form of “E-Sports”).
Revenues from virtual reality games totaled $1.2 billion in 2019, meaning 99% of the video game industry’s revenues that year DID NOT come from “virtual-experience software.” The overwhelming majority of video games were viewed on flat TV screens and monitors that display 2D images only. However, the graphics, sound effects, gameplay dynamics, and plots have become so high quality that even these games can feel immersive, as if you’re actually there in the simulated environment. While they don’t meet the technical definition of being “virtual reality” games, some of them are so engrossing that they might as well be.
“The primary threat to [national] security comes from small groups combining human and machine intelligence using unbreakable encrypted communication. These include (1) disruptions to public information channels using software viruses, and (2) bioengineered disease agents.”
MOSTLY WRONG
Terrorism, cyberterrorism, and cyberwarfare were serious and growing problems in 2019, but it isn’t accurate to say they were the “primary” threats to the national security of any country. Consider that the U.S., the world’s dominant and most advanced military power, spent $16.6 billion on cybersecurity in FY 2019–half of which went to its military and the other half to its civilian government agencies. As enormous as that sum is, it’s only a tiny fraction of America’s overall defense spending that fiscal year, which was a $726.2 billion “base budget,” plus an extra $77 billion for “overseas contingency operations,” which is another name for combat and nation-building in Iraq, Afghanistan, and to a lesser extent, in Syria.
In other words, the world’s greatest military power only allocates 2% of its defense-related spending to cybersecurity. That means hackers are clearly not considered to be “the primary threat” to U.S. national security. There’s also no reason to assume that the share is much different in other countries, so it’s fair to conclude that it is not the primary threat to international security, either.
Also consider that the U.S. spent about $33.6 billion on its nuclear weapons forces in FY2019. Nuclear weapon arsenals exist to deter and defeat aggression from powerful, hostile countries, and the weapons are unsuited for use against terrorists or computer hackers. If spending provides any indication of priorities, then the U.S. government considers traditional interstate warfare to be twice as big of a threat as cyberattackers. In fact, most of military spending and training in the U.S. and all other countries is still devoted to preparing for traditional warfare between nation-states, as evidenced by things like the huge numbers of tanks, air-to-air fighter planes, attack subs, and ballistic missiles still in global arsenals, and time spent practicing for large battles between organized foes.
“Small groups” of terrorists inflict disproportionate amounts of damage against society (terrorists killed 14,300 people across the world in 2017), as do cyberwarfare and cyberterrorism, but the numbers don’t bear out the contention that they are the “primary” threats to global security.
Whether “bioengineered disease agents” are the primary (inter)national security threat is more debatable. Aside from the 2001 Anthrax Attacks (which only killed five people, but nonetheless bore some testament to Kurzweil’s assessment of bioterrorism’s potential threat), there have been no known releases of biological weapons. However, the COVID-19 pandemic, which started in late 2019, has caused human and economic damage comparable to the World Wars, and has highlighted the world’s frightening vulnerability to novel infectious diseases. This has not gone unnoticed by terrorists and crazed individuals, and it could easily inspire some of them to make biological weapons, perhaps by using COVID-19 as a template. Modifications that made it more lethal and able to evade the early vaccines would be devastating to the world. Samples of unmodified COVID-19 could also be employed for biowarfare if disseminated in crowded places at some point in the future, when herd immunity has weakened.
Just because the general public, and even most military planners, don’t appreciate how dire bioterrorism’s threat is doesn’t mean it is not, in fact, the primary threat to international security. In 2030, we might look back at the carnage caused by the “COVID-23 Attack” and shake our collective heads at our failure to learn from the COVID-19 pandemic a few years earlier and prepare while we had time.
“Most flying weapons are tiny–some as small as insects–with microscopic flying weapons being researched.”
UNCLEAR
What counts as a “flying weapon”? Aircraft designed for unlimited reuse like planes and helicopters, or single-use flying munitions like missiles, or both? Should military aircraft that are unsuited for combat (e.g. – jet trainers, cargo planes, scout helicopters, refueling tankers) be counted as flying weapons? They fly, they often go into combat environments where they might be attacked, but they don’t carry weapons. This is important because it affects how we calculate what “most”/”the majority” is.
What counts as “tiny”? The prediction’s wording sets “insect” size as the bottom limit of the “tiny” size range, but sets no upper bound to how big a flying weapon can be and still be considered “tiny.” It’s up to us to do it.
A “Phantom” ultralight plane. Is it fair to call this “tiny”?
“Ultralights” are a legally recognized category of aircraft in the U.S. that weigh less than 254 lbs unloaded. Most people would take one look at such an aircraft and consider it to be terrifyingly small to fly in, and would describe it as “tiny.” Military aviators probably would as well: The Saab Gripen is one of the smallest modern fighter planes and still weighs 14,991 lbs unloaded, and each of the U.S. military’s MH-6 light observation helicopters weigh 1,591 lbs unloaded (the diminutive Smart Car Fortwo weighs about 2,050 lbs, unloaded).
With those relative sizes in mind, let’s accept the Phantom X1 ultralight plane as the upper bound of “tiny.” It weighs 250 lbs unloaded, is 17 feet long and has a 28 foot wingspan, so a “flying weapon” counts as being “tiny” if it is smaller than that.
If we also count missiles as “flying weapons,” then the prediction is right since most missiles are smaller than the Phantom X1, and the number of missiles far exceeds the number of “non-tiny” combat aircraft. A Hellfire missile, which is fired by an aircraft and homes in on a ground target, is 100 lbs and 5 feet long. A Stinger missile, which does the opposite (launched from the ground and blows up aircraft) is even smaller. Air-to-air Sidewinder missiles also meet our “tiny” classification. In 2019, the U.S. Air Force had 5,182 manned aircraft and wanted to buy 10,264 new guided missiles to bolster whatever stocks of missiles it already had in its inventory. There’s no reason to think the ratio is different for the other branches of the U.S. military (i.e. – the Navy probably has several guided missiles for every one of its carrier-borne aircraft), or that it is different in other countries’ armed forces. Under these criteria, we can say that most flying weapons are tiny.
The RQ-11B Raven drone could be considered a “tiny flying weapon.”
If we don’t count missiles as “flying weapons” and only count “tiny” reusable UAVs, then the prediction is wrong. The U.S. military has several types of these, including the “Scan Eagle,” RQ-11B “Raven,” RQ-12A “Wasp,” RQ-20 “Puma,” RQ-21 “Blackjack,” and the insect-sized PD-100 Black Hornet. Up-to-date numbers of how many of these aircraft the U.S. has in its military inventory are not available (partly because they are classified), but the data I’ve found suggest they number in the hundreds of units. In contrast, the U.S. military has over 12,000 manned aircraft.
At 100mm long and 120mm wide along its main rotor, the PD-100 drone is as small as a large dragonfly.
The last part of the prediction, that “microscopic” flying weapons would be the subject of research by 2019, seems to be wrong. The smallest flying drones in existence at that time were about as big as bees, which are not microscopic since we can see them with the naked eye. Moreover, I couldn’t find any scientific papers about microscopic flying machines, indicating that no one is actually researching them. However, since such devices would have clear espionage and military uses, it’s possible that the research existed in 2019, but was classified. If, at some point in the future, some government announces that its secret military labs had made impractical, proof-of-concept-only microscopic flying machines as early as 2019, then Kurzweil will be able to say he was right.
Anyway, the deep problems with this prediction’s wording have been made clear. Something like “Most aircraft in the military’s inventory are small and autonomous, with some being no bigger than flying insects” would have been much easier to evaluate.
“Many of the life processes encoded in the human genome, which was deciphered more than ten years earlier, are now largely understood, along with the information-processing mechanisms underlying aging and degenerative conditions such as cancer and heart disease.”
PARTLY RIGHT
The words “many” and “largely” are subjective, and provide Kurzweil with another escape hatch against a critical analysis of this prediction’s accuracy. This problem has occurred so many times up to now that I won’t belabor you with further explanation.
The human genome was indeed “deciphered” more than ten years before 2019, in the sense that scientists discovered how many genes there were and where they were physically located on each chromosome. To be specific, this happened in 2003, when the Human Genome Project published its first, fully sequenced human genome. Thanks to this work, the number of genetic disorders whose associated defective genes are known to science rose from 60 to 2,200. In the years since Human Genome Project finished, that climbed further, to 5,000 genetic disorders.
The cost of sequencing a human genome sharply dropped, making it possible to do genome-wide association studies, and for middle income people to have their personal genomes sequenced.
However, we still don’t know what most of our genes do, or which trait(s) each one codes for, so in an important sense, the human genome has not been deciphered. Since 1998, we’ve learned that human genetics is more complicated than suspected, and that it’s rare for a disease or a physical trait to be caused by only one gene. Rather, each trait (such as height) and disease risk is typically influenced by the summed, small effects of many different genes. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which can measure the subtle effects of multiple genes at once and connect them to the traits they code for, are powerful new tools for understanding human genetics. We also now know that epigenetics and environmental factors have large roles determining how a human being’s genes are expressed and how he or she develops in biological but non-genetic ways. In short just understanding what genes themselves do is not enough to understand human development or disease susceptibility.
Returning to the text of the prediction, the meaning of “information-processing mechanisms” probably refers to the ways that human cells gather information about their external surroundings and internal state, and adaptively respond to it. An intricate network of organic machinery made of proteins, fat structures, RNA, and other molecules handles this task, and works hand-in-hand with the DNA “blueprints” stored in the cell’s nucleus. It is now known that defects in this cellular-level machinery can lead to health problems like cancer and heart disease, and advances have been made uncovering the exact mechanics by which those defects cause disease. For example, in the last few years, we discovered how a mutation in the “SF3B1” gene raises the risk of a cell developing cancer. While the link between mutations to that gene and heightened cancer risk had long been known, it wasn’t until the advent of CRISPR that we found out exactly how the cellular machinery was malfunctioning, in turn raising hopes of developing a treatment.
The aging process is more well-understood than ever, and is known to have many separate causes. While most aging is rooted in genetics and is hence inevitable, the speed at which a cell or organism ages can be affected at the margins by how much “stress” it experiences. That stress can come in the form of exposure to extreme temperatures, physical exertion, and ingestion of specific chemicals like oxidants. Over the last 10 years, considerable progress has been made uncovering exactly how those and other stressors affect cellular machinery in ways that change how fast the cell ages. This has also shed light on a phenomenon called “hormesis,” in which mild levels of stress actually make cells healthier and slow their aging.
“The expected life span…[is now] over one hundred.”
WRONG
The expected life span for an average American born in 2018 was 76.2 years for males and 81.2 years for females. Japan had the highest figures that year out of all countries, at 81.25 years for men and 87.32 years for women.
“There is increasing recognition of the danger of the widespread availability of bioengineering technology. The means exist for anyone with the level of knowledge and equipment available to a typical graduate student to create disease agents with enormous destructive potential.”
WRONG
Among the general public and national security experts, there has been no upward trend in how urgently the biological weapons threat is viewed. The issue received a large amount of attention following the 2001 Anthrax Attacks, but since then has receded from view, while traditional concerns about terrorism (involving the use of conventional weapons) and interstate conflict have returned to the forefront. Anecdotally, cyberwarfare and hacking by nonstate actors clearly got more attention than biowarfare in 2019, even though the latter probably has much greater destructive potential.
Top national security experts in the U.S. also assigned biological weapons low priority, as evidenced in the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment, a collaborative document written by the chiefs of the various U.S. intelligence agencies. The 42-page report only mentions “biological weapons/warfare” twice. By contrast, “migration/migrants/immigration” appears 11 times, “nuclear weapon” eight times, and “ISIS” 29 times.
As I stated earlier, the damage wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic could (and should) raise the world’s appreciation of the biowarfare / bioterrorism threat…or it could not. Sadly, only a successful and highly destructive bioweapon attack is guaranteed to make the world treat it with the seriousness it deserves.
Thanks to better and cheaper lab technologies (notably, CRISPR), making a biological weapon is easier than ever. However, it’s unclear if the “bar” has gotten low enough for a graduate student to do it. Making a pathogen in a lab that has the qualities necessary for a biological weapon, verifying its effects, purifying it, creating a delivery system for it, and disseminating it–all without being caught before completion or inadvertently infecting yourself with it before the final step–is much harder than hysterical news articles and self-interested talking head “experts” suggest. From research I did several years ago, I concluded that it is within the means of mid-tier adversaries like the North Korean government to create biological weapons, but doing so would still require a team of people from various technical backgrounds and with levels of expertise exceeding a typical graduate student, years of work, and millions of dollars.
“That this potential is offset to some extent by comparable gains in bioengineered antiviral treatments constitutes an uneasy balance, and is a major focus of international security agencies.”
RIGHT
The development of several vaccines against COVID-19 within months of that disease’s emergence showed how quickly global health authorities can develop antiviral treatments, given enough money and cooperation from government regulators. Pfizer’s successful vaccine, which is the first in history to make use of mRNA, also represents a major improvement to vaccine technology that has occurred since the book’s publication. Indeed, the lessons learned from developing the COVID-19 vaccines could lead to lasting improvements in the field of vaccine research, saving millions of people in the future who would have otherwise died from infectious diseases, and giving governments better tools for mitigating any bioweapon attacks.
Put simply, the prediction is right. Technology has made it easier to make biological weapons, but also easier to make cures for those diseases.
“Computerized health monitors built into watches, jewelry, and clothing which diagnose both acute and chronic health conditions are widely used. In addition to diagnosis, these monitors provide a range of remedial recommendations and interventions.”
MOSTLY RIGHT
Many smart watches have health monitoring features, and though some of them are government-approved health devices, they aren’t considered accurate enough to “diagnose” health conditions. Rather, their role is to detect and alert wearers to signs of potential health problems, whereupon the latter consult a medical professionals with more advanced machinery and receive a diagnosis.
The Apple Watch Series 5
By the end of 2019, common smart watches such as the “Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2,” and the “Apple Watch Series 4 and 5” had FDA-approved electrocardiogram (ECG) features that were considered accurate enough to reliably detect irregular heartbeats in wearers. Out of 400,000 Apple Watch owners subject to such monitoring, 2,000 received alerts in 2018 from their devices of possible heartbeat problems. Fifty-seven percent of people in that subset sought medical help upon getting alerts from their watches, which is proof that the devices affect health care decisions, and ultimately, 84% of people in the subset were confirmed to have atrial fibrillation.
The Apple Watches also have “hard fall” detection features, which use accelerometers to recognize when their wearers suddenly fall down and then don’t move. The devices can be easily programmed to automatically call local emergency services in such cases, and there have been recent case where this probably saved the lives of injured people (does suffering a serious injury due to a fall count as an “acute health condition” per the prediction’s text?).
A few smart watches available in late 2019, including the “Garmin Forerunner 245,” also had built-in pulse oximeters, but none were FDA-approved, and their accuracy was questionable. Several tech companies were also actively developing blood pressure monitoring features for their devices, but only the “HeartGuide” watch, made by a small company called “Omron Healthcare,” was commercially available and had received any type of official medical sanction. Frequent, automated monitoring and analysis of blood oxygen levels and blood pressure would be of great benefit to millions of people.
Smartphones also had some health tracking capabilities. The commonest and most useful were physical activity monitoring apps, which count the number of steps their owners take and how much distance they traverse during a jog or hike. The devices are reasonably accurate, and are typically strapped to the wearer’s upper arm or waist if they are jogging, or kept in a pocket when doing other types of activity. Having a smartphone in your pocket isn’t literally the same as having it “built into [your] clothing” as the prediction says, but it’s close enough to satisfy the spirit of the prediction. In fact, being able to easily insert and remove a device into any article of clothing with a pocket is better than having a device integrated into the clothing since it allows for much more flexibility of attire–if you want to try out a new jogging route and also want to measure how long it is, you don’t have to remember to wear your one and only T-shirt with the built-in activity monitoring devices.
Millions of people use smart watches with health tracking features and smartphones with activity detection apps, which counts as “widely used” by any reasonable definition. However, no items of jewelry with embedded health tracking capabilities were available in 2019, so that part of the prediction is wrong.
“There are prevalent reports of computers passing the Turing Test, although these instances do not meet the criteria (with regard to sophistication of the human judge, the length of time for the interviews, etcetera) established by knowledgeable observers. There is a consensus that computers have not yet passed a valid Turing Test, but there is growing controversy on this point.”
RIGHT
In 2014, a chatbot named “Eugene Goostman” made global headlines by “passing the Turing Test” at an event held at the University of Reading. However, AI experts soon determined it was invalid because the dialog between the human judges and the machine only lasted five minutes. Ray Kurzweil himself even interacted with Eugene Goostman and posted the conversation on his website to show the machine could not correctly answer questions that probe commonsense reasoning and other aspects of intelligent thinking:
Kurzweil: How old are you? Eugene: I’m a little boy. 13 years old.
Kurzweil: How much is two plus two? Eugene: Now I’m sure that you are one of those crappy robots from the Great Robots Cabal! And I know your password: 2 + 2=4.0! Now divide by zero and die!!!!
Kurzweil: If I have two marbles in a bowl and I add two more how many marbles are in the bowl now? Eugene: Not too many. But I can’t tell you the exact number, I forgot it. If I’m not mistaken – you still didn’t tell me where you live. OR it’s a secret?:-)
Kurzweil: I live in the capital of the United States. Do you know where that is? Eugene: Every nerd knows that the capital of The United States is Washington.
Kurzweil: I live in the capital of the country that put a man on the moon. Eugene: Well, if you want it, the capital of The United States is Washington.
Kurzweil: I live in the capital of the country that built the great wall. Eugene: Tell me more about Capital. I like to learn about different places!
In 2018, a Google AI program called “Duplex” also made headlines for “passing the Turing Test” in phone calls where it made restaurant reservations without the human workers on the other end of the line realizing they were talking to a machine. While an impressive technological feat, experts again disagreed with the media’s portrayal of its capabilities, and pointed out that in human-machine interactions weren’t valid Turing Tests because they were too short and focused on a narrow subject of conversation.
“The subjective experience of computer-based intelligence is seriously discussed, although the rights of machine intelligence have not yet entered mainstream debate.”
RIGHT
The prospect of computers becoming intelligent and conscious has been a topic of increasing discussion in the public sphere, and experts treat it with seriousness. A few recent examples of this include:
Those are all thoughtful articles written by experts whose credentials are relevant to the subject of machine consciousness. There are countless more articles, essays, speeches, and panel discussions about it available on the internet.
“Sophia” the robot
Machines, including the most advanced “A.I.s” that existed at the end of 2019, had no legal rights anywhere in the world, except perhaps in two countries: In 2017, the Saudis granted citizenship to an animatronic robot called “Sophia,” and Japan granted a residence permit to a video chatbot named “Shibuya Mirai.” Both of these actions appear to be government publicity stunts that would be nullified if anyone in either country decided to file a lawsuit.
“Machine intelligence is still largely the product of a collaboration between humans and machines, and has been programmed to maintain a subservient relationship to the species that created it.”
RIGHT
Critics often–and rightly–point out that the most impressive “A.I.s” owe their formidable capabilities to the legions of humans who laboriously and judiciously fed them training data, set their parameters, corrected their mistakes, and debugged their codes. For example, image-recognition algorithms are trained by showing them millions of photographs that humans have already organized or attached descriptive metadata to. Thus, the impressive ability of machines to identify what is shown in an image is ultimately the product of human-machine collaboration, with the human contribution playing the bigger role.
Finally, even the smartest and most capable machines can’t turn themselves on without human help, and still have very “brittle” and task-specific capabilities, so they are fundamentally subservient to humans. A more specific example of engineered subservience is seen in autonomous cars, where the computers were smart enough to drive safely by themselves in almost all road conditions, but laws required the vehicles to watch the human in the driver’s seat and stop if he or she wasn’t paying attention to the road and touching the controls.
Well, well, well…that’s it. I have finally come to the end of my project to review Ray Kurzweil’s predictions for 2019. This has been the longest single effort in the history of my blog, and I’m glad the next round of his predictions pertains to 2029, so I can have time to catch my breath. I would say the experience has been great, but like the whole year of 2020, I’m relieved to be able to turn the page and move on.
Happy New Year!
Links:
Advances in AI during the 2010s forced humans to examine the specialness of human thinking, whether machines could also be intelligent and creative and what it would mean for humans if they could. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47700701
In 2005, obesity became a cause of more childhood deaths than malnourishment. The disparity was surely even greater by 2019. There’s no financial reason why anyone on Earth should starve. https://www.factcheck.org/2013/03/bloombergs-obesity-claim/
“Auto-Tune” is a widely used song editing software program that can seamlessly alter the pitch and tone of a singer’s voice, allowing almost anyone to sound on-key. Most of the world’s top-selling songs were made with Auto-Tune or something similar to it. Are the most popular songs now products of “collaboration between human and machine intelligence”? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-Tune
The actions by Japan and Saudi Arabia to grant some rights to machines are probably invalid under their own legal frameworks. https://www.ersj.eu/journal/1245
