What would a human-equivalent robot look like?

In my Terminator review and my analysis of what a fully-automated tank would look like, I mentioned that human-sized, general-purpose robots that can do the same physical tasks as humans will not necessarily look like humans, or even have humanoid body layouts (i.e. – head, large torso, two arms, two legs). I’d like to explore that idea in greater depth, and to offer educated guesses about what such robots would look like.

First, bear in mind that there are already countless numbers of robots in the world–overwhelmingly in factories and controlled work settings–and almost none of them are humanoid. Instead, their body shapes are entirely dictated by their narrow functions. For example, a robot that welds the seams between two sheets of metal comprising part of a car’s frame will resemble a giant arm and will have a welding torch for a hand. Since it is meant for use in a car factory assembly line where unfinished car frames will be delivered to it via conveyor belt, the robot won’t need to move from that spot, and hence won’t need legs or wheels. And since the act of welding a seam isn’t that complicated, it won’t need a giant computer brain, meaning it won’t have a head. Likewise, a robot designed to move supplies like medicine and linens throughout a hospital will take the form of a large, hollow box with wheels.

Even as robots get cheaper and more advanced in the coming decades and take over more jobs, the vast majority of them will continue looking nothing like humans, and will be designed for specific and not general tasks. Fully-autonomous vehicles, for example, will count as “robots,” but will not resemble humans.

That said, I think “overspecialization” of robot designs will prove inefficient, and that there will be niches for general-purpose robots in many areas of the economy and ordinary life. Some of these general-purpose robots will be about the same sizes as humans, but they won’t look exactly like us. Consider that the humanoid body layout is inherently unstable since it is top-heavy and only has two legs to balance on. If we had millions of bipedal, human-sized robots walking around and intermixing with us in many uncontrolled environments, there would be constant problems with them falling over (or being pushed over) and injuring or killing people. Something like a 250 pound Terminator made of hard metal would be a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Off the bat, it’s clear that general purpose robots can’t be so heavy that, if one fell on you, you would be seriously hurt, and/or unable to push it off of your body. At the same time, it can’t be so light that it tips over when carrying everyday objects like full trashcans, or is even at risk of being toppled by wind gusts. Splitting the difference between the average weights of adult men and woman gives us a figure of 180 lbs, which I think is a good upper limit to how much the robots could weigh.

Also off the bat, it’s clear that the general purpose robots should have the lowest practical centers of gravity and need to have soft exteriors to cushion humans against collisions. A low-hanging fruit helps us solve the first requirement: delete the robot’s head. This might sound very weird, but if we’re unbound by the constraints of biology and are designing a robot from metal and plastic starting from a clean slate, it makes perfect sense.

Since robots won’t eat, drink, or breathe, they won’t need mouths, noses, or any associated anatomical features found in human heads and necks. And since signals from the robot’s sensory organs would travel to its “brain” at the speed of light, there would be no advantage to clustering the eyes, ears, and brain together to reduce lag (thanks to the slowness of human nerve impulses, it takes about 1/10 of a second for an image or sound that has been detected by the eyes or ears to reach the brain), meaning the CPU could be moved into the torso. Doing that would lower the robot’s center of gravity and give the CPU more physical protection than our skulls provide our brains. (Distributing mental functions among several computer cores in different parts of the torso and even limbs would probably be an ideal setup since it would further improve survivability.)

In place of a neck and head, there might be a telescoping, flexible “stalk” or “tentacle” with sensory organs (camera lens, microphone) at its tip. It could extend and shorten, and swivel in any direction. By default, it would probably be facing forward and raised to the same height as a typical human head so it could see the world from the same perspective as we. The top of its torso might only be 4′ 10″ off the ground, but the stalk would rise up another foot. The sci fi space film Saturn 3 had an evil robot named “Hector” that had a crude tentacle like this in place of a head.

“Hector” the robot didn’t have a head. Note that the robots I envision would be much shorter than this.

The last safety requirement that I mentioned, the need to have soft exteriors to cushion humans against collisions, could be satisfied by making their outer casings from a spongy material like silicone. However, I think it would probably be cheaper and just as effective to give the robots hard outer casings, but have them wear tight-fitting, padded clothes. The general-purpose robots would know how to wash their clothes in standard laundry machines and would periodically do so. Also, if the padding were made of the plastic foam found in life jackets, it would keep the robots from sinking to the bottom if they, say, fell into a swimming pool while cleaning it, or fell off the side of a fishing boat where they were part of the crew.

The need to protect people from accidental injury will also mean that general purpose robots will be made no faster or stronger than average humans. These limitations would be very helpful to us in a “robot uprising” scenario, but they’d be just as beneficial preventing many kinds of small, mundane accidents that could hurt people. For example, if your robot isn’t stronger than you, it can’t accidentally crush your hand by applying too much pressure during a handshake. If it can’t move faster than a jog, it can’t ever build up enough speed and momentum to collide with you with fatal force.

The NS-5 robots could jump long distances and do acrobatics.

With these safety requirements in mind, it should be clear why the general-purpose “NS-5” robots in the movie I, Robot was unrealistic. There was no reason to give those robots superhuman speed, strength, agility, and explosive movement. Moreover, they all had hard exoskeletons and walked around “nude,” making them collision hazards. (On a side note, I also thought it was unrealistic that a single company–“U.S. Robotics”–would have an apparent monopoly on the humanoid robot market, and that all humans would own the same kind of robot. In reality, there will be many companies making them in the future, and there will be many different robot models and variants that will look different from one another, just as there’s great diversity in how cars look today.) 

Now that I’ve covered the safety issues general-purpose robots will have to be designed to address, let’s move on to exploring the other requirements that will affect how they will look. Since they’ll have to navigate human-built environments like houses and to fit into vehicles designed for us, they will need legs instead of wheels so they can climb steps, arms and hands for opening doors and using tools, and they will need to be skinny and short enough to fit through standard-sized doorways. The requirement for them to be able to sit in chairs and climb over obstacles like low fences and fallen tree trunks will mean the size proportions of their limbs and bodies won’t be able to stray too far from those of humans. They will need fingers that are as thin as ours to type on keyboards and push standard-sized buttons, but they might not have five fingers per hand (it will be interesting to see what the optimal number turns out to be).

It wouldn’t cost much more money to make the joints in the robots’ fingers and everywhere else double-jointed, and they’d gain useful dexterity from such a feature, so I think it would be so. Pivot joints in the arms and legs would also allow for 360 degrees of rotation, further bolstering utility. At first I thought the general purpose robots would have a second set of arms–for a total of six limbs–so they could be more able than humans, but then I realized how wasteful that would be since so few tasks require them. 99% of the time, the second set of arms would uselessly hang down off the robot’s body and be dead weight.

Then again, that 1% of the time when you do need the extra pair of hands to do something could warrant some kind of engineering compromise. The prehensile sensor stalks that stand-in for heads on our general-purpose robots could elongate and grasp onto things, acting like weak third hands (our mouths do the same, and can hold smell, light objects). Instead of, or in addition to that, the legs at the bottom of the robot could terminate in hands instead of feet like ours. Chimpanzees are like this, and many birds also have feet they use for grasping and walking. The setup would make it harder for the robots to run, and maybe less energy-efficient for them to walk, but we’ve already established we don’t want them to be able to run fast, and many of the tasks we’d use these robots for wouldn’t require large amounts of walking anyway (ex – robot butler in your house). Aside from giving them an extra pair of hands for those rare occasions when they need it, having hands as feet would let the robots pick things up from the ground, climb ladders more easily, and maintain better balance on uneven surfaces like roofs.

It almost goes without saying that the robots would be able to walk on all fours about as well as they could walk on two legs. If they weren’t carrying anything and were just going from one place to another, walking on all fours would be safest since that would minimize the risks of them losing balance and crushing someone or breaking something. This is again reminiscent of chimps, and I think the robots might use their “knuckles” when walking on all-fours to keep the palms of their hands clean and undamaged. And interestingly, in laying out this new requirement for optional quadrupedalism, the hypothetical general-purpose robot’s design has superficially converged with the real-life “Spot” robot, made by Boston Dynamics.

“Spot” is a real robot you can buy.

One thing I don’t like about Spot’s design is that its torso is a single, rigid piece. The general-purpose robots I’m envisioning–or at least the more advanced variants of it that will be fielded in the more distant future–will need segmented torsos that let them bend and lean a little in all directions. The flexibility of our spines lets us do this, helping us to quickly make small postural adjustments to balance on two feet. The robots might not need anything as elaborate as a human back made of 33 vertebrae, and, as with the number of fingers, it will be interesting to see what the optimal (or sufficient) number of torso segments turns out to be.

Having a flexible torso, four hands, and four, highly flexible limbs that could bend in more ways than we can would also let the general-purpose robots comfortably touch any part of their own bodies, enabling them to self-repair, which would be an invaluable feature. The swiveling sensor stalk plus tiny cameras built into other parts of its body like the hands and torso would also let it see every part of its own body (cameras built into the hands or fingers would also let it reach inside small, tight spaces and clearly see what is inside, letting it guide the appendage, unlike humans who must blindly feel around in such situations). Contrast this with us humans, who have a hard time touching and manipulating some parts of our bodies (like the spot between our shoulderblades) and who can’t see every part of our own bodies because we have only one set of eyes that are in a head with limited rotation.

On that note, having small cameras embedded throughout its body would also eliminate blind spots, which would improve safety since the robots wouldn’t be at risk of running into humans or objects because they were unseen. Whereas human vision is confined to a forward-facing cone, the general purpose robots would see in a 360-degree bubble. The tip of the head stalk might have the biggest and best camera, but losing it wouldn’t blind the robot.

Having “eyes” in the torso and on all four limbs, along with a distribution of its mind and power sources among multiple internal computers and batteries in each place, could enable such a robot to fix itself even if only one limb were operational and everything else were not. Again, this reminds me a bit of something I’ve seen in the animal kingdom, this time among certain insects and spiders. Because they have less-centralized nervous systems than we, their limbs will keep moving after being severed, and, if they are cut in half across the torso, both halves will continue moving and reacting to stimuli.

Additionally, while the robots wouldn’t need to breathe, they should have an ability to suck in, retain, and expel air. This would allow them to duplicate the human abilities to blow out candles or blow dust off of things, and to make our bodies buoyant for floating in water. Of course, the engineering solutions that will let them do this could be totally different from human anatomy’s solutions. A small hole at the tip of one finger could be used to suck in and expel air, and it could be connected to a long tube that would lead to air sacs throughout the robot’s body, perhaps in places not analogous to where lungs are in our bodies.

The robots would also need to be waterproof. This would save them from being expensively damaged or destroyed by something as simple as rain, and would let them periodically clean themselves off with soap and water. Even without sweat glands and shedding skin cells, robots would inevitably get dirty thanks to dust in the air, splatter from kitchen or bathroom chores, or even mold growth. Being able to use a regular shower or a bucket of water and a sponge to clean themselves would be a very important feature, in addition to their ability to clean their clothes.

Another crucial feature would be a built-in power cord that could plug into standard electrical outlets. It might be stored internally in a small, closed compartment, or might take the form of retractable prongs located in one of the hands or feet. I suspect that, rather than get in your way, general-purpose robots will be programmed to run around your house and do chores when you were away at work or school. That would also be safer since it would eliminate any risk of the robots hurting you by accident while they were working. You would come home each day to a clean house and see your robot motionless in its designated corner or closet, plugged into an electrical outlet to recharge.

Machines like this can detect a wide range of poisonous chemicals.

I’ve already mentioned the robots would need to have cameras and microphones to duplicate the human senses of sight and hearing, but they would also need to duplicate our sense of smell and taste to a degree. Those two senses can provide valuable information about the presence of poisonous gases, smoke, or spoiled food ingredients, and there are situations where a robot would be grossly ill-equipped to respond properly if it lacked them. Our multipurpose robots would thus need air sampling devices and some type of fluid analysis capability. The same technology found in smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, and military poison gas detectors could stand in for a sense of smell. To crudely duplicate our sense of taste, the robot might have something like a litmus strip dispenser and water nozzle built into one of its hands. It could spray water on objects and then touch them with a strip to “taste” them.

The fifth human sense, touch, would need to be duplicated by pressure and temperature sensors distributed throughout the general purpose robot’s body. This feature would be simple to implement.

In conclusion, I predict there will be a future niche for “human-equivalent” robots that are general-purpose, human-sized, and can do all of the physical work tasks that we can do. That said, those robots will look very different from us, as they won’t be bound by the rules of biology or by the genetic path dependence that locks us into our human body layout. I’ve gone into depth describing one type of general-purpose robot, which could be described as a “headless humanoid.” However, I think robots with other types of body layouts could also fill the niche, perhaps including “centaurs”, “big ants”, and “dogs with one arm on their backs.” Just as there are many types of vehicles on the roads today that fulfill the same roles, I am sure there will be many types of general-purpose robots. I simply don’t have the time to envision and describe what each one could be like.

General-purpose, human-sized robots will of course not be the only kinds of robots we’ll mix with on a daily basis in the future, and in fact, I think they will be outnumbered by other, specific-purpose robots whose forms reflect their specialized functions. Self-driving cars and autonomous lawnmowers are good examples.

Finally, the general-purpose, human-sized robots must not be confused with androids, which will look identical to humans. I think the general-purpose robots will be used for jobs that don’t require anything more than superficial interaction with humans, like scrubbing toilets, restocking store shelves, and fixing appliances. Androids would be built to provide companionship, and to do service-sector jobs where warm and personable service was expected. If your beautiful android spouse broke, then your grubby, headless, weird-looking robot servant would fix it.

Interesting articles, May 2020

The Philippines Presidential Security Group

The Philippines “Presidential Security Group” has the most interesting camouflage uniforms I’ve seen. As wacky as it looks, it actually adheres to the best principles of military camouflage (coarse pixelation, use of parallel and perpendicular lines and hard angles instead of wavy lines). If you changed the color scheme to black with earth-toned green and brown, it would probably do an excellent job concealing you in vegetated areas from people looking at you from typical combat distances (50 meters and above).
https://youtu.be/ZpsXwolf0Oo

A very bold and recent prediction that didn’t fare well.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8277471/North-Korean-defector-says-99-sure-Kim-Jong-dead.html

The Kennedy administration considered building a nuclear bunker 3,500 feet under the Pentagon that could survive 200 megaton surface detonations. The biggest nuclear weapon ever built was ONLY 50 megatons.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33003/the-pentagons-plan-to-build-a-secret-super-command-bunker-3500-feet-under-washington-d-c

During WWII, the British aircraft carriers had 3 inch-thick armor plates right under their flight decks, and also armored walls around the hangars right below that. Because of this, they could carry fewer planes than the un-armored American carriers, but they were also more durable. Several British aircraft carriers probably would have sunk had it not been for their armored decks.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/were-royal-navys-armored-aircraft-carrier-decks-worth-it-152081

After the U.S. had to dock its two Pacific aircraft carriers due to epidemics of COVID-19 among their crews, China sent its own aircraft carrier battle group out, alarming Taiwan.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3079546/taiwan-scrambles-warships-pla-navy-aircraft-carrier-strike

A new analysis about China’s growing naval strength reveals that they could achieve numerical superiority over the U.S. Navy in a conflict in the Western Pacific.
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33153.pdf

One of China’s army training bases has a full-size replica of Taiwan’s Presidential Building.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33591/chinas-biggest-base-has-huge-replicas-of-taiwans-presidential-building-and-the-eiffel-tower

Francis Fukuyama thinks that Xi Jinping has made China less free than it was 10 years ago, and that the U.S. should now treat it as an enemy with global ambitions.
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2020/05/18/what-kind-of-regime-does-china-have/

You know you’re broke when your best tank is a T-34, and you shoot it by standing outside and pulling on a long rope tied to the trigger because you’re afraid it might blow up.
https://youtu.be/eMMCYWxAtco

This thermal camera video of a Russian tank parade show that much of a tank’s heat signature comes from its wheels and tracks. As the tank drive around, those metal parts rub against each other, producing heat through friction. I don’t see how this can be ameliorated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6RZ9l_Fw4U

As warfare gets more advanced and sensor/communication-dependent, the size and prominence of each field unit’s “electronic emission signature” grows.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33401/this-is-what-ground-forces-look-like-to-an-electronic-warfare-system-and-why-its-a-big-deal

Ukraine’s military lost half of its aircraft in the first year of war with Russia. While many were destroyed in combat or were captured, some were deleted from the official inventory because they were found to be nonfunctional due to years of neglect when Ukraine desperately tried to activate its whole arsenal.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/how-russia-nearly-wiped-out-ukrainian-air-force-141857

The U.S. Army is working on small, flying surveillance drones that infantrymen can send airborne using standard 40mm grenade launchers.
https://www.army.mil/article/234300/grenade_launchers_able_to_fire_armys_new_camera_drones

Boko Haram attacked and defeated a garrison of Chadian soldiers, killing almost 100 of them and capturing their weapons. This is the deadliest terrorist attack in that country.
https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/central-africa/chad/derriere-lattaque-jihadiste-au-tchad

Russia has sent fighter planes and ground units of its private military contractors to fight for the rebels in Libya’s ongoing civil war. Turkey supports the embattled central government and sent troops to help earlier this year. Syria is of course another battleground between Russian and Turkey proxies.
https://www.foxnews.com/world/russian-camouflaged-fighter-jets-deployed-to-libya-to-back-rebel-air

A large Venezuelan navy patrol ship tried to capture a German cruise ship in the Caribbean. The warship rammed it, not realizing that the other ship had a reinforced hull for breaking through ice, and damaged itself so badly that it sank. The cruise ship had minimal damage.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8189463/Moment-Venezuelan-warship-RAMS-German-liner-Caribbean-sinks.html

A Mickey Mouse plot to take over Venezuela, and involving at least two military contractors from the U.S., failed. It was so amateurish that it’s doubtful the U.S. government ordered it to proceed.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33322/breaking-down-the-absolutely-batshit-botched-coup-attempt-against-venezuelas-maduro

The Apollo 13 near-disaster mission happened 50 years ago. Videos that the crewmen filmed have been used to make new, hi-res still photos through a process that compared the images from multiple frames of video film that showed the same scene (a video camera from that era shot 24 frames per second). It’s similar to the single-pixel camera I linked to in a past blog entry.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52264743
http://news.mit.edu/2017/faster-single-pixel-camera-lensless-imaging-0330

The explosion that caused the Apollo 13 crisis resulted from an incredible series of small malfunctions. Also, had the explosion happened a few hours before or after it actually did, the crewmen would have all died.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-checklist-of-what-had-to-go-wrong-for-apollo-13-to-1697567898

“Fata morgana” is a rare atmospheric phenomenon that doubtless explains many UFO sightings.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a32389233/optical-illuson-fata-morgana-ufo-flying-ship/

This video explains why exotic forms of communication, like using only smells, touch, or gravity waves, are impractical and grossly inferior to the forms of communication we use (speech, looking at writing, radio signals). Also, it makes the point that aliens could learn human languages by listening to our radio broadcasts and finding simple patterns, like the fact that the word “breakfast” is mentioned most often in the mornings, and is usually associated with words relating to food and hunger. They could learn our languages, at least to an elementary degree, without interacting with us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thdC-HlRHWg

This video provides a good overview of radar jamming. Radar is of course used to detect the locations of planes and ships. A radar station does this by sending out beams of radio waves, and then waiting to see if any of those waves bounce off a solid object and are reflected back to the station. The radar’s computer compiles any such echoes into a visual representation of the planes and ships, which looks like the familiar, circular computer screen image of little white dots against a black background. A human sits at a chair watching this screen. To jam a radar, you point a radio emitter of your own at the radar station and shoot powerful radio beams at it. The radar station’s receiver is overloaded, and the circular screen displays static, or goes 100% white. It’s conceptually the same as blinding a human by shining a very bright flashlight in his eyes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su44ZU7NcQU

Air radar coverage map

Large parts of America’s airspace are not monitored by aircraft radars.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/07/22/u-s-radars-have-come-a-long-way-but-gaps-in-coverage-remain-big-a-risk/

Before radar was developed, militaries would use “acoustic mirrors” to listen for the approach of enemy planes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_mirror

“Artillery sound ranging” is a technique in which the location of a piece of enemy artillery is triangulated by measuring the time delay between when the blast of its discharge is heard at different locations. This can also be used to find sources of small arms fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Artillery_sound_ranging

An American private military company has bought Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu’s personal Boeing 707 and plans to turn it into an aerial refueling plane.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32962/romanian-dictators-boeing-707-makes-first-flight-in-years-for-delivery-to-air-refueling-firm

The article doesn’t make the case that the 737 Max’ computer hardware was the problem. Flying a plane is complicated, but there are only so many variables your computer needs to keep track of, and a 20-year-old processor design might be fully adequate (by the same token, a Godlike supercomputer would not be better at tic-tac-toe than a teenager). Rather, a particular software algorithm installed in the 737 Max planes was the real defect.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/9/21197162/boeing-737-max-software-hardware-computer-fcc-crash

The “Baltimore Stockbroker Scam” is kind of ingenious. It touches on a point I made about good futurism: ‘You can be right thanks to luck alone, and “a stopped clock is right twice a day.”’
http://livingstingy.blogspot.com/2020/05/how-to-predict-future-simply-predict.html

The Apple Watch is five years old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Apple_Watch&oldid=956160178

The average human’s brain size has significantly shrunk over the last 20,000 years. Have we gotten dumber as a result? Maybe.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/if-modern-humans-are-so-smart-why-are-our-brains-shrinking

Most of the fruit fly’s brain has been mapped. It’s a step forward, though it should be remembered that a human brain has 600,000 times as many neurons. Mapping the brains of progressively larger, smarter animals will be a long pathway to building AI.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.07.030213v1

Another small step towards building an AGI: “With Agent57, we have succeeded in building a more generally intelligent agent that has above-human performance on all tasks in the Atari57 benchmark.”
https://deepmind.com/blog/article/Agent57-Outperforming-the-human-Atari-benchmark

The rise of AI will revolutionize warfare because it will let countries build arbitrarily large numbers of combat robots. The size of a country’s military will no longer be limited by the size of its human population. Conventional warfare will become as big a threat to humanity’s existence as nuclear war is now.
“We envision fleets of smaller, multi-mission vessels, operating with surface warfare leadership. People talk about a 355-ship Navy, how about a 35,000-ship Navy?,” Maj. Gen. David Coffman…[he] explained it as a “family of combatant craft, manned and unmanned, integrated in a distributed maritime operation.”
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/autonomous-navy-ships-could-revolutionize-amphibious-assault-156481

It will be interesting to see the prototype ship designs that result from this.
‘NOMARS will challenge the traditional naval architecture paradigm, designing a seaframe from the ground up with no provision, allowance, or expectation for humans at sea. By removing the human element from all ship design considerations, NOMARS will demonstrate significant advantages, to include size, cost (procurement, operations, and sustainment), at-sea reliability, survivability to sea-state, survivability to adversary actions (stealth considerations, resistance to tampering, etc.), and hydrodynamic efficiency (hull optimization without consideration for crew safety or comfort).’
https://beta.sam.gov/opp/fd0ba75d1ef64d569db637571f659dbb/view

The examples of the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors might offer insights into how AGIs could take over the world. Machines could play different human groups against each other, and then turn on their allies at the end.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ivpKSjM4D6FbqF4pZ/cortes-pizarro-and-afonso-as-precedents-for-takeover

This interesting exploration of “slack” underscores why species and civilizations are more successful if they all for some diversity, even if that diversity makes them slightly sub-optimal most of the time. This is part of why I doubt intelligent machines will eradicate the human race.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/

I like it when a distinguished but elderly scientist (Dr. Martin Rees) states that we’re going to evolve into genetically engineered cyborgs, some of whom will live on Mars.
https://youtu.be/A1dfjX0STEk

Ben Goertzel offers good challenges to the notion that suffering and death give meaning to human life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LbGwcDOmiQ

The citizens of the U.S. and Canada would get richer if their countries fully merged. Even with a “free trade agreement,” there’s a lot of potential cross-border trade that isn’t happening, costing everyone money. A fully unified internal market would solve that.
“Borders and Growth” https://www.nber.org/papers/w9223.pdf
“Gravity with Gravitas” https://www.nber.org/papers/w8079.pdf
“National Borders Matter” https://online.fliphtml5.com/tcva/smhp/#p=2

Here’s an interesting list of everyday things that have improved for Americans since the 1990s.
https://www.gwern.net/Improvements

The process of innovation and invention is a team effort full of trial-and-error, failed experiments, and small modifications to existing ideas and things. It can also be slowed or quashed by something as mundane as government red tape.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/innovation-can-be-quashed/

The ACLU is suing “Clearview AI,” for violating the privacy rights of some Americans by compiling a searchable, massive trove of face photographs taken from publicly available internet sites.
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-sues-clearview-ai

If manmade impermeable surfaces (e.g. – roads, roofs, parking lots, sidewalks) increase by 1%, then the frequency of floods grows by 3.3%. What fraction of today’s flooding is caused by this and not by global warming?
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019GL086480

Global warming will make snowstorms less frequent and less severe in the U.S.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/05/26/climate-change-reduce-big-winter-snowstorms-study/5258663002/

The cost of solar power has dropped faster than any credible person predicted, even ten years ago. This supports my prediction that the 2020s will be the decade when better, cheaper solar panels and grid storage batteries will make solar power cost-competitive with standard forms of energy, even without government subsidies.
https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-2020/

A big problem with solar and wind power is intermittency. To compensate for their sudden swings in electrical output over the course of the day, the people in charge of the electric grids have to throttle other power plants up and down. Natural gas power plants are best suited for this, but quickly dialing them up and down still greatly reduces their efficiency, releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere than they otherwise would. (We REALLY need to invent better batteries for grid energy storage.)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2019/03/11/what-happens-when-we-put-renewables-on-the-grid-to-green-our-electric-cars-is-really-complicated/#53b195e57022

There are genetic differences between northern and southern Italians.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8348963/First-study-Italians-genetic-diversity-reveals-dates-19-000-years-ago.html

A graduate math student just solved the 50-year-old “Conway Knot Problem.”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/graduate-student-solves-decades-old-conway-knot-problem-20200519/

Just as the air gets thinner as you go up a mountain, it gets thicker as you go down into a mine.
https://www.saimm.co.za/Journal/v105n06p387.pdf

Here’s a video of 300 Amish men picking up a barn and moving it across a field with their bare hands. When robots become cheap and widespread, we’ll be able to use them to do things like this all the time.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8320953/Amazing-moment-300-Amish-men-lift-huge-barn-bare-hands-field.html

Finland’s big experiment with giving a UBI to unemployed people found that the money doesn’t make them any likelier to get jobs, but it makes them feel happier. (Who would have thought free money would do that?)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-06/milestone-free-money-study-shows-happiness-grows-but-jobs-don-t

Internal U.S. State Department communiques show that diplomats were concerned about lax safety protocols at a Chinese animal disease lab in Wuhan. The lab had samples of diseases similar to COVID-19.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/

Is the COVID-19 pandemic SAVING some lives? The lockdown means less air pollution, which in turn means fewer people dying of respiratory distress. (Also, less car traffic means fewer road fatalities)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8180063/Coronavirus-lockdown-slashes-air-pollution-China-25-36-000-lives-month.html

The U.S. COVID-19 death toll has hit 100,000. Remember the White House press conference from two months ago when Trump’s advisors put forth that number, and how sobering it was? It’s strange that we’ve arrived there.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2020/3/31/21202188/us-deaths-coronavirus-trump-white-house-presser-modeling-100000

In this interview from two months ago, Bill Gates predicted that that the number of active COVID-19 cases would peak in every part of the U.S. by late April. He was pretty accurate, though a handful of states didn’t peak until early May, and Arizona has still not peaked. Gates went on to predict that a month would have to pass after those peaks for states to start safely lifting their lockdowns, meaning that we’d start seeing a lot of that around late May (now). Again, he was right.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2020/03/27/bill-gates-coronavirus-town-hall-shutdown-april-peak-sot-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/stories-worth-watching/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/05/14/coronavirus-pandemic-covid-19-peak-dates-for-every-state/111695368/

Bill Gates now predicts:
-The world won’t return to its pre-COVID-19 state until a good vaccine has been invented and given to almost the whole human population.
-A vaccine won’t be invented until early 2021 or mid-2022.
-After that, distributing the vaccine to everyone will take months or years.
-By the end, the COVID-19 pandemic will have cost the world tens of trillions of dollars. (2019 global GDP was $85 trillion)
-The vaccine will probably become part of the standard vaccine schedule given to infants.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/What-you-need-to-know-about-the-COVID-19-vaccine
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/at-a-time-when-leadership-is-rare-bill-gates-stands-tall-on-covid-19/

Though we’ll endure a sucky “new normal” for the next year or two, I disagree with predictions that the pandemic will permanently alter how people interact (e.g. – no more hugging, no more going to restaurants). Such predictions run contrary to human nature.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/i-predict-your-predictions-are-wrong/611896/

What color is your power armor?

My recent analysis of the combat exoskeletons from Edge of Tomorrow made me realize that there are at least three types of humanoid or animal-like mechanical fighting machines frequently depicted in science fiction, and I’ve decided to explore their feasibility. I think they can be grouped into these categories:

  1. Power armor / exoskeleton
  2. Mechwarrior (“Mech”)
  3. Jaeger / Zord

Power armor / exoskeleton

Defining characteristics:

  • Can only accommodate one person.
  • Provides some combination of enhanced strength, endurance, speed, or carrying capacity.
  • Best thought of as a “suit.”
  • If worn, the person’s overall size is not so big that they can’t fit through standard-sized doorways or into vehicles designed for un-armored people.
  • The suited person remains narrow enough to fit between trees and duck under branches in wooded areas.
  • Depicted in Edge of Tomorrow, the Fallout, Starcraft, and Halo video games

Problems and disadvantages:

  • Limited power supply (can’t fit a big battery into a relatively small machine and expect it to last long)
  • Could limit mobility and agility so much that you’re better off not wearing it.
  • Potentially dangerous to the wearer and to comrades who are not wearing their own, protective suits. Risk of serious accidents rises if your strength is amplified and you have lots of heavy, unyielding metal strapped to your body.

Feasibility:

  • Mildly feasible.
  • Light exoskeleton that increases load-carrying capacity of infantrymen, or lets them carry heavier weapons than otherwise possible (like .50 caliber machine guns) could be valuable and practical someday.
  • Heavy, fully enclosed exoskeleton for short duration, close-combat missions might also be practical.
  • Best use might be in noncombat logistic roles, like picking up and moving heavy cargo around bases.
  • Discussed at length in my blog entry about Edge of Tomorrow.

Mechwarrior (“Mech”)

Defining characteristics:

  • Can accommodate one or two people.
  • Can’t fit through standard-sized doorways or into other vehicles except large cargo planes and maybe large cargo helicopters.
  • Similar size and firepower as a tank or attack helicopter.
  • Should be thought of as a military vehicle and not as a suit.
  • Primarily or exclusively designed to fight using guns, missiles, and other ranged weapons. Usually ill-suited for hand-to-hand combat.
  • In theory, can traverse rougher terrain than wheeled/tracked vehicles thanks to its legs.
  • Depicted in Return of the Jedi, the Mechwarrior and Titanfall video games
The “spider tank” from the Ghost in the Shell anime movie is a more realistic type of mech since it has more than two legs and a low center of gravity.

Problems and disadvantages:

  • Having legs instead of wheels or caterpillar tracks would be problematic.
    • Legs would propel the vehicle slower than wheels or caterpillar treads. The ride would also be much bumpier, which would be exhausting and potentially disorienting for crewmen. Combat performance would suffer if the crewmen were dizzy and beat-up by the time they arrived at the battle site.
    • Mobility advantage over wheeled and tracked vehicles is questionable since mechs would have higher ground pressure–all of their weight would be concentrated on two feet, whereas traditional armored vehicles spread out their weight over 6-8 large wheels or two, long caterpillar tracks. This means a mech would have worse problems sinking into the mud and getting stuck.
    • Having a humanoid or animal-like layout (i.e. – legs for sure, and possibly arms as well) would increase a fighting vehicle’s surface-area-to-volume-ratio compared to a traditional wheeled or tracked vehicle with the same size and firepower. A mech would thus need to devote more of its mass to armor to achieve the same, all-around ballistic protection as a tank. Increasing the armor would necessitate deleting other things to save weight (e.g. – reduce fuel, ammo, or main weapon size/power).
    • The powertrain would need to be heavier and more complicated. A conventional tank like a T-72 essentially has a big truck engine that is transversely mounted and spins a shaft connected to one wheel on either side of the vehicle. It’s a simple and compact layout. A layout designed to move two, multi-jointed legs would be much more mechanically complex, requiring multiple motors and many spinning shafts, meaning more weight and more moving parts that can fail.
  • Its width would prevent it from going down alleys or between closely-spaced trees. Human enemies could run to constricted areas like that for cover. The mech’s big selling point–that it can go places where trucks and tanks can’t–is eroded thanks to the tree problem.
  • Its tallness would impose many problems.
    • Forested areas become even more impassable since branches can block mechs and/or obscure their crewman’s view of targets at ground level. Power lines, some road lights, and bridges/overpasses also turn into obstacles. The mechs definitely can’t be used for peacekeeping or domestic policing if they’re going to be constantly snapping power lines and cutting off electricity to whole neighborhoods. High ground pressure might also damage roads by leaving footprint indentations.
    • The taller and wider a mech is, the bigger of a target it becomes, and the easier it is for enemies to shoot it from longer ranges.
    • Mech would have high centers of gravity that would introduce the risk of tip-overs. Even if falling over didn’t destroy a mech, it could do enough damage and injury to the vehicle and crewman, respectively, to knock them out of the fight.
    • The torque from shooting heavy weapons mounted high on the mechwarrior would tip it over.
  • Accidental injury problem would be worse than in power armor / exoskeletons. For example, if a mech fell over by accident, it could crush friendly 20 infantrymen.
A “walking excavator” provides the design basis for the most practical type of combat mech

Feasibility:

  • Probably infeasible. There’s a reason why there are tens of thousands of advanced tanks in global military service, but not even one, basic mech.
  • It would be better to use aircraft and infantry to patrol and fight in areas where the terrain is too rough to bring in tanks and wheeled vehicles. Probably not worth it to build mechs just for specialty engagements in those places. Mechs might provide an advantage there, but would be inferior to traditional military vehicles in all other types of terrain. Not a flexible asset.
  • Building a useful mech is a much bigger technical challenge than making powered exoskeletons.
  • If we decided to build combat mechs anyway:
    • Designing them with four or more legs would make them safer, more stable, less likely to get stuck in the mud (ground pressure problem), and would offer a smoother ride than mechs with two legs. Problematically, a human pilot wouldn’t be able to intuitively control a machine that had more than two legs. Like in a car, the pilot would probably use a steering wheel and pedals to input direction and speed commands to the mech, and the mech’s computer would figure out exactly how to reposition the 4+ legs to achieve that. However, this disconnect between inputs and fine movements of the vehicle could lead to problems if the computer stepped on, say, a land mine, friendly infantryman, or an open sewer hole that the human pilot could see and wanted to avoid.
    • Making it as low to the ground as possible, with its volume distributed horizontally as opposed to vertically, would make it more stable and reduce its target profile.
    • Spider-like or beetle-like mech makes more sense than human-like mech.
    • The number of legs would present a tradeoff between vehicle stability and smoothness of ride vs. fuel efficiency and mechanical complexity/breakdown rate. Unsure what the optimum number of legs would be, but “two legs bad” for sure.
    • Would probably need built-in wheels for easy transport over roads and flatter ground. Remember, it won’t be climbing jagged hills or stepping over big logs in the forest all the time. This would also be easier on the crewmen.
    • The most practical design might resemble a “walking excavator,” but with armor and heavy weapons comparable to what is found on APCs. Couldn’t have the same firepower, speed, or protection as a main battle tank. (Videos showing walking excavators in action: 1) https://youtu.be/Hn1aZQFhC40 2) https://youtu.be/j87k71kOBis)
    • Would have a 360 degree rotating gun turret, like almost all armored vehicles. Wouldn’t need as big of a cannon since heavily-armored tanks wouldn’t be able to get into the rugged terrain areas where mechs would operate (20mm – 40mm cannon would be fine against other mechs, infantry, structures, and entrenched positions).
    • Might make sense to have heavy-lift helicopters transport mechs to their battle/patrol zones (mountain top, forest clearing, sand dune area).
    • A fully automated mech that lacked human crewmen wouldn’t suffer from many of the problems listed in this section, like disorientation and exhaustion from a bumpy ride. Small, unmanned turret would reduce center of gravity as well.

Jaeger / Zord

Defining characteristics:

  • Huge. At least 100 ft tall. Size and firepower are comparable to warships (modern destroyer or cruiser).
  • Strong enough to win fights with big groups of armored vehicles and planes attacking it at once.
  • Best thought of as a “one-man army.”
  • Can go anywhere since its feet are so big it can just step on and crush trees and walk up hills like they were steps. Can also wade through shallow bodies of water.
  • Has standoff weapons like missiles and cannons but is also designed for hand-to-hand combat and striking with oversize, handheld weapons like giant swords.
  • Depicted in Pacific Rim, several Godzilla movies, the Power Rangers TV show and movies.

Problems and disadvantages:

  • The “square-cube law,” along with limitations on the strength-to-weight ratios of physical materials, effectively prohibits the construction of machines this big that can also rapidly walk around and violently swing their arms (it also prohibits the existence of animals in the same size range).
  • Massive investment of money and resources into a single weapon that can only be in one place, at one time would probably be better spent on many smaller weapons (e.g. – tanks, fighter planes, mobile missile launchers) that can be spread out to patrol and fight enemies across large areas, and concentrated in one place when necessary to fight against a strong enemy.
  • Falls and tip-overs would be fatal to human pilots. Accidentally falling onto buildings or groups of friendly troops could kill hundreds of people at once.
  • Shares many of the same problems mech have, but to a worse degree.
  • They would be gigantic targets that enemies could see and shoot at from dozens of miles away, or bomb from high altitudes. They wouldn’t be able to hide themselves except in cities among skyscrapers, in canyons, or perhaps by diving into deep bodies of water. In every other environment, they would be impossible to camouflage.
  • Explored in my End of Evangelion review.

Feasibility:

  • Infeasible for many scientific and engineering reasons.
  • We would need Star Trek levels of technology (radically stronger and lighter materials, miniaturized fusion reactors, and cheap ways to build both) to make the sorts of Jaegers and Zords shown in the movies. With current technology we might be able to build Jaegers and Zords that were extremely slow, fragile, expensive, and of almost no military value. They would be missile- and gun platforms only, and would break themselves if they punched or kicked anything hard.
  • Even if the Star Trek technology existed, it’s doubtful anyone would make a Jaeger/Zord since it’s better to create a land force made up of many small, expendable units than to invest everything in one giant, all-important fighting machine. A single point of failure is really bad. A force made of many units is also more flexible since they can be spread out across a large area.

Additional thoughts on power armor / exoskeletons

  • The most realistic of the three types of fighting machines.
  • A minimalist exoskeleton with attachment points for big weapons like .50 cal machine guns, grenade launchers, and recoilless missile launchers would let infantry squads bring heavier weapons on patrols into rugged terrain areas. Squad members wearing the exoskeletons could fill some of the firepower niche that mechs are intended to fill.
  • Instead of all the troops wearing those exoskeletons with big weapons, it might be worn by every fifth or tenth man, specially trained for that equipment. Most of the troops would have normal weapons and would have no exoskeletons or lighter exoskeletons just designed to increase their load carrying capacity and to ease the physical strain of long marches.
  • Might work like this: Squad leader keeps the .50 cal exo-soldier in the back of the line unless needed. If so, he calls him up and deploys him carefully.
  • My thinking is guided by assumptions about existing science and tech. Exoskeletons would be totally plausible with Star Trek technology (e.g. – super light, super strong metal; flexible bulletproof body panels, personal fusion reactors).
  • Avatar final battle would actually be ideal scenario to use heavy weapon exo-soldiers. Forest environment blocked air support and wheeled vehicles (the tree cover would have also made it impractical to deploy mechs). Idea was to use helicopters to insert troops, win, and then recover them after a few hours, so no risk of batteries dying. Enemies were large, so abnormally large weapons needed.
  • Unclear if Edge of Tomorrow beach landing was well-suited to exo-soldiers. Mimics were very fast, but not actually that robust. Regular troops with normal weapons would have been better since they were faster and more agile. Also could have landed greater number of regular troops with same number of transport craft.

Interesting articles, April 2020

The V-22’s (left) engines AND rotors tilt upward to hover, but the V-280’s (right) engines never move, so ONLY its rotors tilt upward to hover.

One of Google’s AIs can now generate songs, complete with human vocals. It doesn’t sound bad.
https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/

In another blow to globalism, Argentina signals it might drop out of MERCOSUR.
https://en.mercopress.com/2020/04/29/uruguay-and-argentina-presidents-discuss-the-future-of-mercosur

Kim Jong-un’s absence from public view has some speculating that he is gravely ill or even dead.
https://apnews.com/92808af0efae97b32464bb2e2e9fcab5

Ethiopia’s construction of a major dam on the Nile River is making downstream Sudan and Egypt nervous about their future water supplies. The region is already water-scarce and rapidly growing in population.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/apr/23/itll-cause-a-water-war-divisions-run-deep-as-filling-of-nile-dam-nears

The Hubble Telescope is 30 and still working!
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52106420

Interesting facts about the Space Shuttle:
-It was originally supposed to be a fully reusable, two-stage craft. That design would have been more expensive but probably better.
-The notion that the Shuttle would be a cheaper way to launch cargo into orbit that traditional rockets was never supported by data. Politicians just made it up to sell the idea to the public.
-The Soviet “Buran” craft was more advanced than the U.S. Shuttle, and fixed some of the latter’s known flaws.
https://gizmodo.com/the-space-shuttle-was-a-beautiful-but-terrible-idea-1842732042

The U.S. Navy has officially released copies of the famous UFO videos that were leaked to the public in December 2017. The Navy also said it didn’t know what the UFOs were.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33179/navy-officially-releases-infamous-ufo-videos

Interesting details about the V-22:
-“Many of the challenges in developing and operating the V-22 are the result of designing a fairly large platform to operate within the confines of US Marine Corps amphibious ships. This caused several compromises, such as a smaller proprotor diameter, which increases the download and reduces the hover efficiency, and a shorter wing, which reduces the amount of lift and range.”
-“These engineering lessons and the lack of shipboard size constraints enabled Bell to reduce the downwash from the rotors, design the rotors to tilt from horizontal to vertical without rotating the engines, and improve the reliability and availability of components. The V-22’s downwash, or high velocity air from the two tilting proprotors producing 22,680 kg of thrust to keep the aircraft aloft, can damage objects or injure people below. It also means the Osprey must burn more fuel to hover.”
-“In addition, the V-22 required a rear-ramp exit to avoid hot-engine exhaust blasting onto ship decks and grassy landing zones. As the V-280’s engines do not rotate, this solves the hot engine exhaust issue, which can start brush fires, and means troops can ingress and egress via side doors.”
https://www.janes.com/article/95609/forty-years-on-from-the-v-22-s-conception-bell-applies-engineering-lessons-learned-to-the-v-280

The U.S. Air Force is going to 3D scan a B-1 bomber to make a highly detailed computer simulation of it to identify faults and components that are wearing out. Today, it’s only cost-effective to do this for large aircraft, but in the future, we’ll have computer simulations for every type of manufactured object and will use them to optimize designs.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33151/air-force-sends-full-b-1b-airframe-from-boneyard-to-kansas-to-create-its-digital-twin

Russia has cancelled the construction of several advanced warships due to lack of money.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russian-navy-just-cancelled-its-biggest-warships-146776

The realities of submarine combat and of how torpedoes work are totally different from what you see in movies. Interestingly, many torpedoes stay connected to the subs that fired them by way of long wires that rapidly unspool as the torpedoes move forward.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33018/modern-submarine-torpedo-attacks-are-nothing-like-what-you-see-in-the-movies

An interesting video about the downsides of upgrading tanks. Adding weight in the form of applique armor or a bigger gun can push the tank’s engine and suspension past their design limits, increasing the odds of a breakdown. Drilling holes through tank armor to run new wires to create mounting points for gadgets can also make the armor much weaker.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvSpMtulunU

Sodium- and mercury-based streetlights are going extinct, meaning someday, kids will watch old movies and wonder why things looked yellow-tinted at night.
https://nofilmschool.com/2014/02/why-hollywood-will-never-look-the-same-again-on-film-leds-in-la-ny

An incredible-looking machine has been built in Japan to study antimatter.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52297058

Could we insure against species going permanently extinct by collecting sperm and egg samples from endangered species and freezing them for future use? The samples could stay good for hundreds of years.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/22/a-tiny-scientific-marvel-olaf-the-ivf-toad-brings-hope-to-at-risk-species-aoe

If more farmers adopted today’s high-yield agriculture methods, we could grow the same amount of food with half the amount of cropland.
https://reason.com/2020/04/17/its-possible-to-cut-cropland-use-in-half-and-produce-the-same-amount-of-food-says-new-study/

Cut off from most international trade and able to use artificially cheap domestic labor, the Soviets developed advanced ways of growing citrus trees in cold climates. One method involved planting the trees in deep trenches.
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/04/fruit-trenches-cultivating-subtropical-plants-in-freezing-temperatures.html

The University of Washington’s disease model has been very accurate predicting the course of the COVID-19 epidemic in the U.S. A snapshot from March 30 predicted that U.S. deaths would peak on April 15 at 2,271. It did peak on that day, but at 2,693. The model shows that the virus’ first wave will be almost done by June 1, and will claim 72,400 lives.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8168661/Data-predicts-2-271-Americans-die-coronavirus-April-15.html
https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america

Almost half of the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle’s crew got infected with COVID-19. The ship’s crowded conditions proved ideal for disease transmission.
https://apnews.com/fd1996b64f4cc3aeaa92b352bb7f5cce

In mid-March, Elon Musk predicted that the coronavirus pandemic would end soon, and that the U.S. would have “close to zero” new cases of the disease by the end of April. The CDC counted 26,512 new cases on April 29 alone.
https://www.npr.org/2020/04/29/848093173/teslas-elon-musk-rants-again-calls-lockdowns-forcible-imprisonment-and-fascist

For the first time on record, and probably for the first time since the era of Mao’s Mickey Mouse Economics, the Chinese economy shrank. The pandemic was the obvious cause.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52319936

Mapping the Global Future 2020

“The process of globalization, powerful as it is, could be substantially slowed or even stopped. Short of a major global conflict, which we regard as improbable, another large-scale development that we believe could stop globalization would be a pandemic…”

That is probably the most chillingly prescient passage from Mapping the Global Future, a report written 16 years ago by experts working for the U.S. National Intelligence Council, describing coming developments in geopolitics, culture, technology, and the economy out to 2020. With the year in question having arrived, I thought it was worthwhile to review the accuracy of it’s predictions, and overall, I was impressed. Mapping the Global Future correctly identified most of the megatrends that shaped the world from 2004-20, (though it was somewhat less accurate forecasting the degrees to which those factors would change things):

  • No significant expansion or strengthening of liberal democracy. From 2004-20, for every Myanmar there was a Turkey, and the number of “real” democracies across the world didn’t significantly change. Contrast this to the 15 years preceding the report’s publication, in which communism fell in Europe and Central Asia, along with many dictatorships in Latin America and Africa. The report’s authors correctly gauged that conditions were not ripe for another wave of international democratization.
  • Solid growth of global economy. The report failed to predict the Great Recession, but so did all other experts. Nevertheless, report’s estimate that the 2020 gross world product (GWP) would be 80% larger than it was in 2000 was very close to being right: it actually rose by 74% (adjusted for inflation).
  • Massive growth in China, and to a lesser extent, India. This was not the hardest prediction to make, though it should be noted that a minority of foreign policy experts in 2004 thought China might fall apart by 2020, probably thanks to political problems. I think the extent to which China’s growth (economic, military, technological, average living standards) ended up surpassing India’s would have surprised the authors.
  • Little or no weakening of Islamic extremism and terrorism. At this moment, there is a relative lull in the level of violence, but just three years ago, ISIS was at its peak, and nothing is stopping an “ISIS-level” resurgence of Islamic violence (Africa is likeliest to be the next hotbed). While the U.S. has dodged a sequel to 9/11, the total number of people killed worldwide by Muslim fanatics might actually be higher now than it was in 2004. The conditions that gave rise to Islamic terrorism in 2004 still exist in large parts of the world. Finally, the report made the frighteningly accurate predictions that al Qaeda would be replaced by new terrorist groups (ISIS and Boko Haram), and that the formation of an Islamic caliphate spanning multiple countries was even possible.
  • Very low likelihood of war between the great powers. Russia, China, and the U.S. didn’t even come close to fighting. A lot of ink has been spilled since 2004 about accidents–like U.S. and Russian planes shooting each other down over Syria–spiraling into all-out war, but I think cooler heads would have prevailed.
  • Weakening of U.S. global supremacy. The report correctly predicted that the U.S. would still be the world’s strongest country overall in 2020, but the gap between it and its nearest competitors–chiefly China–would be narrower. It was also right to forecast the weakening of the U.S.-led international banking and trade system.
  • Backlash against globalization and concomitant rise of populism and nationalism. From the election of Donald Trump, to Brexit, to the breakdown of the Doha Free Trade talks and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to near-constant angst over the erosion of the middle class due to outsourcing and illegal immigrant laborers, to the rise of chauvinist strongmen across the world, we see clear proof of these trends. The struggle between liberal globalists and conservative nationalists became THE cultural and political fissure during the 2004-20 time frame.
  • Major impact of internet on culture, self-identity, business, and other aspects of life. As the report predicted, the expansion of the internet to most of the human race has empower global movements like the Arab Spring, fragmented and upended the news media landscape, and facilitated the rise of more complex human identities and group loyalties that transcend national borders, making national governance and consensus-forming harder.
  • World vulnerability to pandemic. This isn’t explored in great detail, but the report makes it clear that the threat of a pandemic bad enough to halt globalization is real.

Of course, the report also had a few failed predictions and omissions, which are important to mention, but in my opinion, outweighed by what the report got right:

  • Didn’t foresee the Great Recession. I noted this before, and also how it had little effect on the report’s accuracy forecasting 2000-2020 global wealth growth. The report’s authors were also in good company, since no expert in 2004 predicted the Great Recession.
  • Didn’t foresee fracking. While the report doesn’t predict anything as calamitous as the world running out of oil by 2020, it says that oil prices could be significantly higher than they were in 2004 due to tighter supplies, leading to the usual fare of anxieties, political problems, and small-scale wars. Had fracking not been invented, this could well have been the case. Fracking has revolutionized the global energy landscape by boosting oil and natural gas supplies well beyond what almost all energy experts thought possible in 2004. More than anything, this failure should highlight the perils of trying to predict the future of the energy markets.
  • Didn’t foresee Venezuela’s near-implosion (could it still happen?). To be fair, Venezuela’s economy collapsed because their socialist government badly managed its oil industry after nationalizing it and because fracking then caused a sharp drop in world oil prices. The report’s experts couldn’t have foreseen how bad the mismanagement would get, and as noted, they also didn’t predict the rise of fracking.
  • Thought North Korea would “come to a head.” It’s unclear what the report’s authors were envisioning here (North Korea democratization? North Korea chaotic implosion? One Korea–possibly with the help of a superpower ally–annexing the other?), other than the status quo of a divided Korean peninsula with a hostile dictatorship in the North ending by 2020. That didn’t happen, and it’s crucial to remember that there’s a clear and now long-running pattern of “experts” making wrong predictions about this. (https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/the-long-history-of-wrongly-predicting-north-koreas-collapse/260769/) It raises the possibility that North Korea could continue to endure for much longer than we expect, in spite of the reports of how brittle and strange the regime is and how desperate its citizens are.
  • Thought Taiwan would “come to a head.” The authors surely meant either a successful Taiwanese declaration of independence or annexation to China (probably by force). This also didn’t happen, and can also be added to the long list of wrong predictions about this issue.
  • Russia predictions were not great, not terrible. While the report’s authors correctly predicted that corruption, lack of foreign investment, population shrinkage, conflicts with its neighbors would leave Russia “stuck in neutral” in terms of absolute power and declining in terms of relative global stature, they didn’t predict how badly relations would deteriorate with the West, and foresaw Central Asia as Russia’s likeliest battleground when in fact it was Ukraine and the Caucuses. My guess is that they underestimated how skillful of a leader Putin would turn out to be, and also underestimated the Russians’ resolve to not let any more of their satellite states slip away to the Western camp.
  • Overestimated the risks of bioterrorism and nuclear terrorism. Contrary to the report’s fears, no terrorists have used, or to our knowledge obtained, biological or nuclear weapons since 2004. Overestimating the threat is understandable given the contemporaneous problem of loose Russian nuclear weapons and widespread fear of and misinformation about bioterrorism following the 2001 Anthrax Attacks. Russia’s recovery from the chaotic 1990s allowed them to secure all of their nuclear weapons, and biological weapons are actually much harder to create and successfully use than popular fiction and biased “experts” who got most of the attention around 2004 led the public to believe. (Note: Unfortunately, I think weaponized COVID-19 could make bioterrorism much likelier)

Thinking about what the expert authors of Mapping the Global Future got right and wrong leads me to following general conclusions about the course of world events, and about making predictions:

  • The status quo is strong. Slow, plodding megatrends and entrenched systems are very resistant to change, regardless of how outdated, suboptimal, or undesirable they may be. The fact that hand-wringing and doomsaying about issues like the divided Korean peninsula, contested status of Taiwan, unsustainable European welfare states, American global primacy, and nation-state model has been going on for decades without resolution should give us pause whenever we hear someone predict a shift in some paradigm. The “inevitability” of another American Civil War is a good example. The stodgy status quo is probably stronger and more resilient to shocks than you think, can ruthlessly destroy upstarts, and might be able to use little reforms to muddle its way through some problem that was widely believed to be unsolvable and fatal.
  • Some dictatorships are smart. Though the report was upbeat about China’s prospects, if anything, it underestimated how strong the country and its regime would become by 2020. China has of course averted collapse, and its communist government has skillfully suppressed democracy and ethnic minority discontent. In short, the dictatorship proved smarter and more competent than even most experts thought in 2004. The use of technology for mass surveillance will entrench it even more in the future. The report’s authors would also have been surprised at how nimble and strong of a leader Putin proved to be, and how well he’s played his country’s diminished hand on the world stage.
  • Not everyone is ready for democracy. The report correctly recognized that conditions were not right for significant expansions of liberal democracy from 2004-20. The disappointing results of the democratization experiments the U.S. ran in Afghanistan and Iraq, the failure of the Arab Spring, and the rise–with majority voter support–of populist strongmen across the world have been valuable, if painful, reminders that not every group of people is ready for or wants liberal democracy. Growing political dysfunction in the U.S. is also damaging the brand.
  • Rational actors are in charge and they suck the fun out of everything. The hard truth is that every major country, including the U.S., China, Russia, and even North Korea, is led by a rational actor–or, more accurately, by groups of people who cancel out each other’s worst ideas so that the resulting consensus decisions are adequately rational and informed. They all have an accurate grasp of the world and of their own interests, and base their key decisions on cost-benefit calculations, which is why North Korea doesn’t invade the South, China doesn’t invade Taiwan, the U.S. and Russia don’t start WWIII, etc.
  • Expert views are good, and usually better than non-experts, but never perfect. As I wrote earlier, I was impressed with the overall accuracy of the report’s predictions, and think the things they got right in aggregate outweigh the things they got wrong. The report’s accuracy probably owes mostly to the fact that it solicited views from “25 leading outside experts from a wide variety of disciplines and backgrounds to engage in a broad-gauged discussion with Intelligence Community analysts.” In other words, experts were invited to make predictions about things in their areas of expertise, which is Rule #1 in my Rules for Good Futurism.

In conclusion, I enjoyed this report and think the authors used a sound methodology for making future predictions. As a result, I’m planning to write a blog analysis of the latest sequel, the DNI’s 2017 Global trends: Paradox of progress, which predicts world events out to 2035.

If you’re interested in learning more about the 2020 report, read my notes on it below and key quotes I copied (which I’ve organized by country and subject), or read the report in full.

The U.S.

“The United States, too, will see its relative power position eroded, though it will remain in 2020 the most important single country across all the dimensions of power.” Yes, but an easy prediction to make.

“While no single country looks within striking distance of rivaling US military power by 2020…” Right.

“US dependence on foreign oil supplies also makes it more vulnerable as the competition for secure access grows and the risks of supply side disruptions increase.” Missed fracking! Also mentioned this in a non-U.S. section: “Thus sharper demand-driven competition for resources, perhaps accompanied by a major disruption of oil supplies, is among the key uncertainties.”

East and South Asia.

Right about rapid growth in China and India. Report correctly predicted that China would grow faster than India from 2005-20. Size of that gap might have surprised them. Not a good idea to constantly mention “China and India” together.

Predictions about huge growth in China’s middle class, overall purchasing power, and standards of living (like car ownership levels and frequency of overseas travel) were right.

“Meanwhile, the crisis over North Korea is likely to come to a head sometime over the next 15 years.” Another in a long history of failed predictions about its collapse.

“The possession of chemical, biological, and/or nuclear weapons by Iran and North Korea and the possible acquisition of such weapons by others by 2020 also increase the potential cost of any military action by the US against them or their allies.” North Korea did first nuclear test in October 2006. Iran has been dissuaded thanks to hardball diplomacy and direct intervention (nuclear computer virus, assassinations of leading people)–for now.

“By 2020, globalization could be equated in the popular mind with a rising Asia, replacing its current association with Americanization.” Accurate. The U.S. is retrenching under Trump, but China’s global reach is still expanding through its Belt and Road Initiative (created in 2013) and other large investments in Africa and almost everywhere else.

“What Would An Asian Face on Globalization Look Like?
…Asian finance ministers have considered establishing an Asian monetary fund that would operate along different lines from IMF, attaching fewer strings on currency swaps and giving Asian decision-makers more leeway from the “Washington macro-economic consensus.””
China founded the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in 2015 as a direct rival to the IMF.
…An expanded Asian-centric cultural identity may be the most profound effect of a rising Asia. Asians have already begun to reduce the percentage of students who travel to Europe and North America with Japan and—most striking—China becoming educational magnets. A new, more Asian cultural identity is likely to be rapidly packaged and distributed as incomes rise and communications networks spread. Korean pop singers are already the rage in Japan, Japanese anime have many fans in China, and Chinese kung-fu movies and Bollywood song-and-dance epics are viewed throughout Asia. Even Hollywood has begun to reflect these Asian influences—an effect that is likely to accelerate through 2020.” U.S. pop culture still reigns supreme globally, and in spite of spending huge amounts of money, China has had little success making films, music, or other cultural products that outsiders like. However, China’s influence has grown anyway, and disturbing examples include the recent, high-profile instances of China pressuring U.S. sports and entertainment companies to self-censor.

“The regional experts felt that the possibility of major inter-state conflict remains higher in Asia than in other regions. In their view, the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan Strait crises are likely to come to a head by 2020, risking conflict with global repercussions. At the
same time, violence within Southeast Asian states—in the form of separatist insurgencies and terrorism—could intensify. China also could face sustained armed unrest from separatist movements along its western borders.”
The crises did not come to a head! Important to pay attention to these failed predictions. Maybe they’ll continue to fail forever, and there will not be violent resolutions to Korea and Taiwan (expert predictions about inevitable U.S.-Soviet war were also wrong). The insurgency in Xinjiang did worsen, but China crushed it with martial law and reeducation camps. Russians also crushed Chechen insurgency. Sad testimony about the effectiveness of government repression? Even more effective in the future thanks to mass surveillance tech?

“Asia is particularly important as an engine for change over the next 15 years…Both the Korea and Taiwan issues are likely to come to a head, and how they are dealt with will be important factors shaping future US-Asia ties as well as the US role in the region…Japan’s position in the region is also likely to be transformed as it faces the challenge of a more independent security role.” None of that happened. Japan never transitioned from its isolationist, defensive posture to an international role that was more active and independent of the U.S. Japan’s alliance with the U.S. remains its most important and defining interstate relationship.

“China and India, which lack adequate domestic energy resources, will have to ensure continued access to outside suppliers; thus, the need for energy will be a major factor in shaping their foreign and defense policies, including expanding naval power.
…Beijing’s growing energy requirements are likely to prompt China to increase its activist role in the world—in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Eurasia. In trying to maximize and diversify its energy supplies, China worries about being vulnerable to pressure from the United States which Chinese officials see as having an aggressive energy policy that can be used against Beijing.”
Correct. A big reason for the Belt and Road Initiative is to secure oil and gas supply lines from the Middle East and Central Asia to China. China also launched its first aircraft carrier in 2012 and has sharply expanded and improved its navy since then. While some worry the navy is being built up to take over Taiwan, its equally important purpose will be to protect the oil shipping lanes that run from the Persian Gulf to China’s coast.

China’s sex ratio imbalance has not caused major problems as the report suggested might happen. Again, China proved more stable and its government more able to deal with problems than outsiders worried.

Report’s hopes of China taking steps towards democracy were dashed. Instead, Chinese government has effectively placated its populace with economic growth, security, and propagandization. China’s success has put forth what might be a viable political / economic / social alternative to Western liberal democracy, and I believe the former’s appeal is one reason why global democratization has slowed. Dictators see there is another way.

The report calculates that, in spite of China’s rapid economic growth, it will take decades before it gets rich enough to emerge from the ranks of “middle income” countries: In 2050, per capita Chinese GDP will only equal per capita GDP in Western countries in 2004. This will probably prove true, but remember that life wasn’t bad for us Westerners in 2004 (I clearly remember it!). Raising the average standard of living for people in a country of 1.4 billion to 2004 American standards will be a monumental accomplishment. Also note that this economic forecast for 2050 is in line with my own prediction about China in the 2060s: “China will effectively close the technological, military, and standard of living gaps with other developed countries. Aside from the unpleasantness of being a more crowded place, life in China won’t be worse overall than life in Japan or the average European country.”

Former USSR

“The so-called “third wave” of democratization may be partially reversed by 2020—particularly among the states of the former Soviet Union and in Southeast Asia, some of which never really embraced democracy.” It happened. The Baltic states remain firmly democratic, Ukraine is a dysfunctional democracy where life is bad for most people, and all the others are undemocratic. Also, in SE Asia, Thailand democracy failed but Myanmar’s blossomed. No overall trend.

Correctly predicted that Russia would be stuck in neutral thanks to demographic decline, corruption, lack of foreign investment, and problems with its neighbors. However, incorrectly predicted that the conflicts would be with its Central Asian neighbors and about radical Islam, when in fact Russia fought with Ukraine and Georgia over geopolitics. (Not the only set of experts from that era who worried about Central Asian stability. Were they all fundamentally wrong, or has the problem just been delayed thanks to luck or some other temporary factor?) Russia’s relations with West got much worse than the report predicted thanks to the latter not tolerating the aggression. The report seems to have underestimated how fast Russia would recover from the torpor of the 90s, and its determination to not let more satellite states slip away to the West.

“In the view of the experts, Central Asian states are weak, with considerable potential for religious and ethnic conflict over the next 15 years. Religious and ethnic movements could have a destabilizing impact across the region.” Hasn’t happened…yet. Broader trend I’m seeing is underestimation of how powerful and competent secular dictatorships are at stamping out dissent. Look at failure of Arab Spring, particularly how it was crushed in Bahrain, and at how the military restored the status quo ante in Egypt. Also note the failure of the Iranian uprisings.

“Eurasia, especially Central Asia and the Caucasus, probably will be an area of growing concern, with its large number of potentially failing states, radicalism in the form of Islamic extremism, and importance as a supplier or conveyor belt for energy supplies to both West and East. The trajectories of these Eurasian states will be affected by external powers such as Russia, Europe, China, India and the United States, which may be able to act as stabilizers. Russia is likely to be particularly active in trying to prevent spillover, even though it has enormous internal problems on its own plate. Farther to the West, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova could offset their vulnerabilities as relatively new states by closer association with Europe and the EU.”

“If Russia fails to diversify its economy, it could well experience the petro-state phenomenon of unbalanced economic development, huge income inequality, capital flight, and increased social problems.” It happened. Russians have rallied around Putin, however, and have endured the effects of Western sanctions admirably. Part of this owes to the effectiveness of Russian government propaganda at convincing Russians to suffer for the Putin’s causes. Sounds like the report underestimated him in 2004.

Europe

“The EU, rather than NATO, will increasingly become the primary institution for Europe, and the role which Europeans shape for themselves on the world stage is most likely to be projected through it.” Right!

The report’s skepticism of E.U. army being created by 2020 was justified. Europeans still have serious problems with military cooperation.

“Over the next 15 years, West European economies will need to find several million workers to fill positions vacated by retiring workers. Either European countries adapt their work forces, reform their social welfare, education, and tax systems, and accommodate growing immigrant populations (chiefly from Muslim countries) or they face a period of protracted economic stasis that could threaten the huge successes made in creating a more United Europe.” They didn’t solve the problem, have protracted economic stasis, and have sharply slowed down the creation of a more United Europe.

“The experts felt that the current welfare state is unsustainable and the lack of any economic revitalization could lead to the splintering or, at worst, disintegration of the European Union, undermining its ambitions to play a heavyweight international role.” Brexit!

Latin America

“Populist themes are likely to emerge as a potent political and social force, especially as globalization risks aggravating social divisions along economic and ethnic lines. In parts of Latin America particularly, the failure of elites to adapt to the evolving demands of free markets and democracy probably will fuel a revival in populism and drive indigenous movements, which so far have sought change through democratic means, to consider more drastic means for seeking what they consider their “fair share” of political power and wealth.” Definitely happened.

Report’s short section on Latin America failed to predict Venezuela’s near-implosion.

Muslim world and Islam

“In particular, political Islam will have a significant global impact leading to 2020, rallying disparate ethnic and national groups and perhaps even creating an authority that transcends national boundaries.” This is an eerily accurate description of ISIS. Since the group was mostly destroyed, the overall threat posed by political Islam at this moment is lower today than it was in 2004, though its unclear if conditions will hold.

“The key factors that spawned international terrorism show no signs of abating over the next 15 years. Facilitated by global communications, the revival of Muslim identity will create a framework for the spread of radical Islamic ideology inside and outside the Middle East, including Southeast Asia, Central Asia and Western Europe, where religious identity has traditionally not been as strong.” The problem has stayed overwhelmingly confined to the Middle East and South Asia. Islamic terrorists have staged high-profile attacks in Europe, but the resulting deaths were dwarfed by the number killed in the Middle East and South Asia.

“Democratic progress could gain ground in key Middle Eastern countries, which thus far have been excluded from the process by repressive regimes. Success in establishing a working democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan—and democratic consolidation in Indonesia—would set an example for other Muslim and Arab states, creating pressures for change.” No real success. Iraq and Afghanistan are highly corrupt democracies that would collapse without direct U.S. military support. Tunisia became democratic, but I have doubts about its long-term survival.

“Reports of growing investment by many Middle Eastern governments in developing high-speed information infrastructures, although they are not yet widely available to the population nor well-connected to the larger world, show obvious potential for the spread of democratic—and undemocratic—ideas.” This happened. The Arab Spring was the “social media revolution,” and ISIS spread its crazed ideas, snuff videos, and terrorist training materials via the internet.

“Most of the regions that will experience gains in religious “activists” also have youth bulges, which experts have correlated with high numbers of radical adherents, including Muslim extremists.

Youth bulges are expected to be especially acute in most Middle Eastern and West African countries until at least 2005-2010, and the effects will linger long after.

In the Middle East, radical Islam’s increasing hold reflects the political and economic alienation of many young Muslims from their unresponsive and unrepresentative governments and related failure of many predominantly Muslim states to reap significant economic gains from globalization.

The spread of radical Islam will have a significant global impact leading to 2020, rallying disparate ethnic and national groups and perhaps even creating an authority that transcends national boundaries. Part of the appeal of radical Islam involves its call for a return by Muslims to earlier roots when Islamic civilization was at the forefront of global change. The collective feelings of alienation and estrangement which radical Islam draws upon are unlikely to dissipate until the Muslim world again appears to be more fully integrated into the world economy.”

The report contains a hypothetical 2020 letter between Muslim fanatics discussing the recent rise of an Islamic caliphate in the Sunni regions of Iraq, and its war against Shi’ites and U.S. military forces. The fictitious letter also says the conflict spurred a million Middle Eastern refugees to flee to the Western world. This is a frighteningly accurate description of actual events in the Middle East and Europe during the 2010s.

“We expect that by 2020 al-Qa’ida will be superceded by similarly inspired Islamic extremist groups, and there is a substantial risk that broad Islamic movements akin to al-Qa’ida will merge with local separatist movements.” Excellent prediction. ISIS and Boko Haram meet the description.

Global terrorism and organized crime

“Strong terrorist interest in acquiring chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons increases the risk of a major terrorist attack involving WMD. Our greatest
concern is that terrorists might acquire biological agents or, less likely, a nuclear device, either of which could cause mass casualties. Bioterrorism appears particularly suited to the smaller, better-informed groups. We also expect that terrorists will attempt cyber attacks to disrupt critical information networks and, even more likely, to cause physical damage to information systems.”
Terrorists have evidently made no progress on this, though the coronavirus pandemic’s damage will surely inspire terrorists to try harder.

“Over the next 10 to 20 years there is a risk that advances in biotechnology will augment not only defensive measures but also offensive biological warfare (BW) agent development and allow the creation of advanced biological agents designed to target specific systems—human, animal, or crop.” No evidence it happened, though the chaos caused by coronavirus could inspire terrorist groups and crazed individuals to focus on BW. It is possible that Russia, China and other states have used new technology to secretly create deadlier bioweapons. Such weapons programs remain beyond the means of terrorists, but could be supported and concealed by a competent government.

Thankfully, terrorists never got WMDs as the report feared. However, they still wreaked enormous havoc with conventional weapons and tactics–terrorists have killed about 200,000 people since 2004.

“If the growing problem of abject poverty and bad governance in troubled states in Sub-Saharan Africa, Eurasia, the Middle East, and Latin America persists, these areas will become more fertile grounds for terrorism, organized crime, and pandemic disease. Forced migration also is likely to be an important dimension of any downward spiral. The international community is likely to face choices about whether, how, and at what cost to intervene.” Yes, this happened. Muslim fundamentalism like Boko Haram in Africa, Mexican cartels worse than ever, refugee waves going to the U.S. and Europe.

“While vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices will remain popular as asymmetric weapons, terrorists are likely to move up the technology ladder to employ advanced explosives and unmanned aerial vehicles.” Terrorists have tried many times to kill people with UAVs, but been unsuccessful. Our luck won’t hold forever. In 2018, a drone was also used in an attempted assassination of Venezuelan president Maduro.

“We expect that terrorists also will try to acquire and develop the capabilities to conduct cyber attacks to cause physical damage to computer systems and to disrupt critical information networks.” Many small-scale attacks have happened, but we’re still waiting for The Big One. The ability for computer hackers to do things like cause nuclear meltdowns or disable national electric grids has been exaggerated.

“A key cyber battlefield of the future will be the information on computer systems themselves, which is far more valuable and vulnerable than physical systems. New technologies on the horizon provide capabilities for accessing data, either through wireless intercept, intrusion into Internet-connected systems, or through direct access by insiders.” This definitely happened. Since 2004, there have been too many big hacking incidents, in which troves of sensitive data and electronic assets were stolen. Also remember the high-profile data dumps on Wikileaks, including those courtesy of Edward Snowden.

“Organized crime is likely to thrive in resource-rich states undergoing significant political and economic transformation, such as India, China, Russia, Nigeria, and Brazil as well as Cuba, if it sees the end of its one-party system.” If Boko Haram is considered a mafia, then it did indeed get quite bad in Nigeria. Didn’t happen in the others though. Brazil is about as bad as ever. Report missed Mexico becoming a global center of organized crime. Cartel activity and the national murder rate shot up a few years after the report was published.

Globalization, nationalism and populism

“Some aspects of globalization—such as the growing global interconnectedness stemming from the information technology (IT) revolution— almost certainly will be irreversible. Yet it is also possible, although unlikely, that the process of globalization could be slowed or even stopped, just as the era of globalization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was reversed by catastrophic war and global depression.” Globalization has definitely slowed. Consider Trump’s election, Brexit, growing resistance among Europeans to strengthening the E.U., the death of free trade deals like Doha, growing isolation and hostility of Russia.

“The transition will not be painless and will hit the middle classes of the developed world in particular, bringing more rapid job turnover and requiring professional retooling. Outsourcing on a large scale would strengthen the antiglobalization movement. Where these pressures lead will depend on how political leaders respond, how flexible labor markets become, and whether overall economic growth is sufficiently robust to absorb a growing number of displaced workers.” Yes, this is now a major political issue throughout the world. It’s unclear if the U.S. has permanently changed course or if Trump’s election just hit the Pause button on the U.S. outsourcing more jobs and importing more immigrant labor.

“Currently, about two-thirds of the world’s population live in countries that are connected to the global economy. Even by 2020, however, the benefits of globalization won’t be global. Over the next 15 years, gaps will widen between those countries benefiting from globalization—economically, technologically, and socially—and those underdeveloped nations or pockets within nations that are left behind. Indeed, we see the next 15 years as a period in which the perceptions of the contradictions and uncertainties of a globalized world come even more to the fore than is the case today.” Yes. Note the rise of populist, nationalist political parties and talking heads, and the new, near-constant focus on “inequality” in the press.

“Populist themes are likely to emerge as a potent political and social force, especially as globalization risks aggravating social divisions along economic and ethnic lines. In parts of Latin America particularly, the failure of elites to adapt to the evolving demands of free markets and democracy probably will fuel a revival in populism and drive indigenous movements, which so far have sought change through democratic means, to consider more drastic means for seeking what they consider their “fair share” of political power and wealth.” Definitely happened.

“What Could Derail Globalization?
The process of globalization, powerful as it is, could be substantially slowed or even stopped. Short of a major global conflict, which we regard as improbable, another large-scale development that we believe could stop globalization would be a pandemic…”

World economy

The report gives figures for “GNP,” but the metric is now known as “GNI.”

“Barring such a turn of events, the world economy is likely to continue growing impressively: by 2020, it is projected to be about 80 percent larger than it was in 2000, and average per capita income will be roughly 50 percent higher. Of course, there will be cyclical ups and downs and periodic financial or other crises, but this basic growth trajectory has powerful momentum behind it.” Missed the 2008 Great Recession, but then again, so did everybody. Regardless, the estimate was basically right. 2000 Gross world product (GWP) was $50 trillion while 2019 GWP was $87 trillion, meaning it grew 74% (note: figures are adjusted for inflation). The extra 6% growth we failed to achieve might owe to the Great Recession.

Technology

“The Internet in particular will spur the creation of even more global movements, which may emerge as a robust force in international affairs.” The Arab Spring was driven by young people with cell phones and social media. More generally, social media empowers people to organize and petition about all kinds of things, big and small, and to effectively pressure powerful people to do things.

“Moreover, future technology trends will be marked not only by accelerating
advancements in individual technologies but also by a force-multiplying convergence of the technologies—information, biological, materials, and nanotechnologies—that have the potential to revolutionize all dimensions of life. Materials enabled with nanotechnology’s sensors and facilitated by information technology will produce myriad devices that will enhance health and alter business practices and models. Such materials will provide new
knowledge about environment, improve security, and reduce privacy. Such interactions of these technology trends—coupled with agile manufacturing methods and equipment as well as energy, water, and transportation technologies—will help China’s and India’s prospects for joining the “First World.” Both countries are investing in basic research in these fields and are well placed to be leaders in a number of key fields. Europe risks slipping behind Asia in creating some of these technologies. The United States is still in a position to retain its overall lead, although it must increasingly compete with Asia and may lose significant ground in some sectors.”
What are “nanotechnology’s sensors”? Can’t really assess the prediction without knowing what that means. The smartphone revolution happened after this was written, and the devices contain many sensors that “have nanotechnology.” Neither China nor India are in the First World yet, but the former has made major strides improving its technology and even taking the lead in some niches.

“New technology applications will foster dramatic improvements in human knowledge and individual well-being. Such benefits include medical breakthroughs that begin to cure or mitigate some common diseases and stretch lifespans, applications that improve food and potable water production, and expansion of wireless communications and language translation technologies that will facilitate transnational business, commercial, and even social and political relationships.” The predicted computer-related advances happened, but progress in medical technology has been disappointing. Over the last 16 years, we’ve discovered that biology is messier, more complex, and less amenable to manipulation than software.

“The media explosion cuts both ways: on the one hand, it makes it potentially harder to build a consensus because the media tends to magnify differences; on the other hand, the media can also facilitate discussions and consensus-building.” The first point has outweighed the other, and misinformation, disagreement, and social fragmentation have probably never been worse. The authors couldn’t have known.

“Growing connectivity also will be accompanied by the proliferation of transnational virtual communities of interest, a trend which may complicate the ability of state and global institutions to generate internal consensus and enforce decisions and could even challenge their authority and legitimacy. Groups based on common religious, cultural, ethnic or other affiliations may be torn between their national loyalties and other identities. The potential is considerable for such groups to drive national and even global political decisionmaking on a wide range of issues normally the purview of governments.” Accurate. It has made people more tribal and fragmented.

Misc.

“The likelihood of great power conflict escalating into total war in the next 15 years is lower than at any time in the past century, unlike during previous centuries when local conflicts sparked world wars.” Quite true. I think it will get slightly higher over the next 15 as China closes some of the military power gap with the U.S.

“Countries without nuclear weapons—especially in the Middle East and Northeast Asia—might decide to seek them as it becomes clear that their neighbors and regional rivals are doing so.” There have been no concrete steps in that direction. The U.S. has successfully assured Japan and South Korea they are under its nuclear umbrella, so they haven’t started their own nuclear programs in response to North Korea getting the bomb. Also, since Iran has been dissuaded/blocked from building nukes (this counter-effort was probably more successful than the report authors would have predicted), its neighbors haven’t tried building their own.

“Both North Korea and Iran probably will have an ICBM capability well before 2020” North Korea does; Iran does not.

“By 2020, China and Nigeria will have some of the largest Christian communities in the world, a shift that will reshape the traditionally Western-based Christian institutions, giving them more of an African or Asian or, more broadly, a developing world face.” I don’t think this happened.

“Over the next 15 years, democratic reform will remain slow and imperfect in many countries due to a host of social and economic problems, but it is highly unlikely that democracy will be challenged as the norm in Africa.” Was right.

“We foresee a more pervasive sense of insecurity, which may be as much based on psychological perceptions as physical threats, by 2020. The psychological aspects, which we have addressed earlier in this paper, include concerns over job security as well as fears revolving around migration among both host populations and migrants.” I wholeheartedly agree that a large share of today’s popular anxiety is psychological and not tangible in nature. Threats are commonly being exaggerated and even manufactured to keep average people fearful, tragically distracting them from the fact that this is the best time to be alive in human history for most types of people. The cause is a toxic nexus between the darker aspects of human nature and the profit-driven incentives of news media outlets.

Review: “Edge of Tomorrow”

Plot:

In 2015, hostile aliens that humans call “Mimics” invade Germany and conquer most of Europe within five years. Human populations and military forces are pushed to the edges of the continent, and in mid-2020, a multinational army that has massed in Britain stages an amphibious invasion across the English Channel to retake the lost territory. The infantrymen wear powered combat exoskeletons that they call “Jackets,” and which give them super-strength and let them carry heavy weapons. Tom Cruise plays an American officer who is part of the first wave of the invasion.

The operation is a disaster: thousands of mimics are secretly entrenched in and around the French beach where the humans land, and the human soldiers’ advanced technology doesn’t save them from annihilation. Tom Cruise survives only a few minutes of combat before he detonates a bomb at suicidally close range to kill a mimic that is attacking him. That mimic is unusually large and is colored differently from all the others, the explosive blast tears it apart, and Tom Cruise is sprayed with its blood, which enters his body through his mouth, eyes, and open wounds also caused by the explosion. Seconds later, he dies of his injuries, but then awakens roughly 24 hours earlier, with his injuries healed and his memories of that horrible day intact.

No one else is aware of the time reset, and people who Tom Cruise saw die on the beach are alive again at the base, unhurt and clueless. When Tom Cruise tells his commander about what happened, he is dismissed as crazy, and is forced to participate in the amphibious invasion again. Events replay as calamitously as the first time, a mimic again kills Tom Cruise, and he wakes again, 24 hours earlier, this time with memories of TWO beach invasions that he fought in.

This sequence of events repeats itself several times without Tom Cruise understanding why, and with him experimenting with different tactics during each cycle. On one of the days, he meets a soldier played by Emily Blunt, and she explains the source of the time reset ability.

A mimic drone
A mimic alpha interacting with three drones on the battlefield
A hologram of the mimic Omega. This shows its form more clearly than the actual shots of it in the film.

The mimics consist of three species: 1) Drones, 2) Alphas, and 3) the Omega. The drones are expendable foot soldiers and are by far the most common type of mimic. The alphas are the battlefield commanders and look like larger, blue versions of drones. There is one alpha for every 6.8 million drones. The Omega is an enormous, stationary life form that kind of looks like a nightmarish flower with its petals partly enclosing a sphere, and it can reset time to a point about 24 hours earlier. All of the mimics are telepathically connected and share a “hive mind.” Whenever an alpha dies, the Omega immediately senses its loss via the psychic link, and it resets time. That dead alpha, along with any other mimics that died between intervals, is resurrected, but with intact memories of what happened in all the previous time cycles.

This setup is the basis of the mimics’ combat prowess because it lets them experiment with different strategies and tactics against their human enemies without risk of losing. If a mimic attack is defeated and the alpha leading that attack is killed, then a time reset happens and the mimics attack again, but adjust their battlefield tactics to overcome or avoid whatever caused their defeat previously. This process is repeated as many times as is needed for the mimics to win. It’s no different from a video game player saving his game right before a challenging battle against an NPC enemy that he knows will probably kill him, and then repeatedly reloading the game from that save point to fight the boss over and over until he finally wins. During each battle, the human player learns a little more about his enemy’s strengths, weaknesses, and tactics, and attenuates his own fighting style accordingly.

When Tom Cruise died on the beach the first time, the alpha’s blood entered his bloodstream, infusing Cruise with the same telepathic link to the mimic collective, and with the ability to make the Omega reset time whenever he dies. With this knowledge, Tom Cruise partners with Emily Blunt to find a way to kill the Omega, regardless of how many time cycles it takes to locate it and find its vulnerability. Without the time reset ability, the remaining mimics will be slowly destroyed by human military forces.

I thought Edge of Tomorrow was a respectable movie overall. It was entertaining, had great special effects (the alien design and their social structure were very creative), and for an action sci-fi film marketed at mass audiences, its plot was surprisingly complex. It was neither one of the best nor worst films of the genre, but I still recommend it.

Analysis:

There will be powered combat exoskeletons. Along with the aliens, the defining sci-fi element in the film is the powered combat exoskeletons. The outfits, which are called “Combat Jackets,” give their wearers super strength, enormous firepower, and provide some ballistic protection (though the value is questionable since the aliens’ bullets and sharp tentacles seem to always penetrate it). The exoskeletons are also powered by single batteries about the size of VHS tapes. Exoskeletons like these doesn’t exist, there are no signs they will be created anytime soon, and I have doubts they will ever be practical for battlefield use.

Left: A combat exoskeleton from the movie
Right: An industrial exoskeleton (the “Guardian XO”) from real life

The main reason why combat exoskeletons don’t exist is lack of a portable power source for them. It takes a lot of energy to move around heavy metal arms and legs, all while bearing the weight of weapons, armor and other equipment attached to the exoskeleton, as well as the weight of the human operator’s body. To put this into perspective, one of today’s most advanced exoskeletons, the “Guardian XO” made by Sarcos Robotics, needs a battery pack the size of a large briefcase to operate for eight hours. Since that figure hasn’t been independently verified and is instead being claimed by Sarcos without any supporting data, the actual operating time on a single charge is probably significantly lower. Additionally, the Guardian XO is intended for use in controlled factory environments where the operator mostly stays in one place and slowly lifts heavy objects up and down. In a combat situation where the wearer would be sprinting, jumping, marching long distances, and rapidly moving their arms and pirouetting their bodies to aim weapons at enemies, the rate of energy consumption would be much higher. If you wore a Guardian XO into combat, the machine might be out of juice in three hours, turning into a useless, heavy encumbrance you’d have to wriggle out of like a wrecked car.

In the film, an exoskeleton needs only one battery that is the size of a VHS tape.
In reality, the Guardian XO exoskeleton’s battery pack is the size of a large briefcase. The pack is mounted on the wearer’s back and consists of three, large batteries (a single unit is shown at left). It is around 30 times LESS energy-dense than the batteries in the film.

You can’t take a big piece of personal equipment into battle if you know it will stop working after a short time, putting your life at risk. That said, I don’t think combat exoskeletons will be worth considering until they’re able to run at least 24 hours on a single battery that is no bigger than the Guardian XO’s backpack. This would probably require batteries that are at least five times more energy-dense than today’s standard lithium-ion batteries, meaning growth from 260 Wh/kg to 1,300 Wh/kg, which is as energy dense as gasoline. I’m not sure if chemistry even allows for batteries or “battery-looking” solid media like fuel cells and capacitors to be that energy-dense AND stable, but assuming it is, then we should achieve this level of technology in 33 years if the long-term 5% average yearly rate of battery improvement continues (recall that I’ve predicted battery-powered airplanes will become practical around the same time).

Even if the power supply problem were solved, there are more potential deal breakers that could keep combat exoskeletons from the battlefield. The risk of accidental injuries to wearers and their comrades might prove unacceptable. If you tripped over a log and face-planted on the ground in just the wrong way, the weight of your big backpack battery and portions of your metal frame could snap your neck. If you were wearing a 200 lb, rigid metal suit, and you fell backwards while climbing a hill and rolled over the un-armored people behind you, it could be a multi-casualty, mission-ending disaster. Simply swinging your super-strong, metal-encased arm out to the side could send an unseen comrade to the hospital if it accidentally connects with his face.

The risks of self-injury to wearers could be mitigated if the exoskeletons fully enclosed the wearer’s body. For example, head and neck injuries could be prevented if the exoskeleton had an integral, full-head helmet, like the atmospheric diving suit shown above. Since it must withstand the crushing pressure of the deep sea, the clear visor is doubtless very strong and can be thought of as an integral part of the rigid exoskeleton suit. If the man were wearing the suit and he fell forward while waddling around a parking lot and his faceplate landed on the curb, the force of the impact would be absorbed by the whole exoskeleton, not transmitted into his face and neck, and his injuries would be minimal. Likewise, if a squad of soldiers were wearing powered exoskeletons like that, then the risks of them accidentally hurting each other would be much lower since each man’s armor would absorb the force of accidental physical contact with the other men. Being fully enclosed in heavy armor also has obvious value blocking enemy bullets.

Problematically, a fully enclosed exoskeleton would be heavy and would introduce the new problem of overheating the wearer, in turn mandating the incorporation of a body cooling system. The extra weight of the armor and cooling system and their drain on the exoskeleton’s power supply could easily plunge the whole system into an engineering “death spiral” of irreconcilable requirements. Additionally, full-body armor would make it hard for the wearer to move around his limbs, limiting his ability to aim his weapons and even just to walk. Crouching down to avoid gunfire would be harder, and getting into a prone position might become impossible, which would be unacceptable. And if the exoskeleton were too bulky, the wearer wouldn’t be able to fit through the doors of standard military vehicles, and he might get so wide that he’d take up two seats, forcing the deletion of another member of the infantry squad (is one soldier in an exoskeleton better than two soldiers without?). Treating an injured comrade while he was stuck in his exoskeleton would also be challenging and would add to the “user risk” problem. These tradeoffs probably wouldn’t make it worth it to put average soldiers in fully enclosed exoskeletons, or even “mostly enclosed” ones.

The “EksoGT” exoskeleton for disabled people.

With these facts in mind, I’m left unsure if it will ever make sense for humans to wear powered combat exoskeletons into battle. If it does make sense, then the most realistic type would probably be a minimalist exoskeleton meant to increase the amount of weight a human soldier could carry on patrols. It would have boots connected to segmented legs, in turn connected to a metal frame supporting the wearer’s hips and back, similar to the real-life “EksoGT” shown above. Instead of a soldier slinging a heavy backpack over his shoulders and getting physically exhausted during a march by straining against its weight with each step, the soldier could put on an exoskeleton and attach the backpack to the suit’s metal frame. The weight would be borne entirely by the frame, allowing the soldier to go on long patrols without getting as tired, and to carry more gear than would otherwise be possible.

An articulating “third arm” like this could let an exoskeleton soldier carry and fire a very heavy weapon. One end of the arm would attach to the torso portion of the exoskeleton, and the other would be attached to the weapon. The weapon’s weight would be entirely supported by the exoskeleton’s metal frame, and not by the human’s muscles.

These kinds of exoskeletons could also allow wearers to carry and fire weapons that are too heavy for unaided humans to bear, like .50 cal machine guns and automatic grenade launchers, giving their infantry squads a huge increase in firepower. Instead of adding two robot arms to the exoskeleton to let the wearer carry such heavy weapons, it might make more sense to copy the infantry kit setup from Aliens and to attach a Steadicam rig to the exoskeleton’s frame, and then use the tip of the Steadicam as the weapon’s mounting point.

Minimalist exoskeletons like this wouldn’t have the potentially dealbreaking weaknesses I described earlier. Since they would be lightweight, they wouldn’t pose serious injury risks to comrades if a soldier wearing one of them accidentally stepped on someone else’s foot or fell on top of them. The low weight also means the battery pack’s size and lifespan would be practical for field use. Since the exoskeletons wouldn’t enclose their wearers in armored shells, overheating wouldn’t be a problem, and cooling systems would be unnecessary. Since they wouldn’t give their wearers super-strength, there would be no risk of accidental injury from that source. And so on…

Still, there would be important limitations. Battery life limitations would prohibit the exoskeletons from being used on multi-day missions where logistical support (e.g. – someone else giving you fresh batteries) could not be guaranteed. Thus, I think they would only be used for missions expected to take less than 24 hours, like daylong patrols where the plan was to go back to a base at the end. Another limitation is that wearing an exoskeleton would hurt the soldier’s mobility in some ways: Certain leg movements like crouching down and walking laterally would be harder to do. The weight of the exoskeleton and of any objects strapped to it could make it harder for the soldier to stay balanced on his feet. Overall though, the benefits could outweigh the downsides.

The other type of exoskeleton that might make sense is a fully-enclosed, heavily armored suit meant for quick, pre-planned raids, like the attack on Osama bin Laden’s house, or rescuing hostages from a building full of militants. In those kinds of missions, the extreme risk of close-quarters gunfire would demand full body armor, and it would be so heavy that only a powered exoskeleton could bear it. The concordant reduction in battery life wouldn’t be a problem due to the shortness of the combat–it would only need to work for an hour before the bad guys were all dead and the friendly troops were extracted. Super-strength would also be of real value given the chance of hand-to-hand combat in close quarters. The psychologically intimidating effect of attacking people while wearing a suit of heavy armor would also be beneficial. And if all the commandos were wearing exoskeletons, they wouldn’t be able to accidentally hurt each other.

In summary, I predict that combat exoskeletons could be practical and in common use among the most advanced militaries and military/police commando groups as early as the 2050s. At least 30 years will be needed to batteries to improve enough to make them practical for field use, and for other technological kinks to get worked out. Powered exoskeletons designed for less critical tasks, like factory/construction work and aiding people with spinal cord problems, will become practical earlier.

Humans in powered combat exoskeletons will dominate warfare forever. OK, so Edge of Tomorrow only shows a snapshot in time–an alternate 2020–and doesn’t tell us whether exoskeleton soldiers will still be the apotheosis of ground warfare in 2040, 2100, or the year 3000. This means I’m putting words in the film’s mouth in a sense, but this is an important point I need to bring up somehow: Even if the exoskeletons get really, really advanced and powerful, they will inevitably be rendered obsolete by unmanned weapons. This is because the central component of an exoskeletoned soldier is a human being with a flimsy body made of flesh and bone, and who needs hours of sleep and rest per day. As I discussed in my Terminator Dark Fate review, humans will inevitably become the weakest links in all combat systems, and will thus be inferior to all-mechanical counterparts.

A scene from Edge of Tomorrow illustrates this point. During the invasion, Tom Cruise and his squad ride to the beach in a cargo helicopter. The plan is for the craft to drop to low altitude and hover over the beach while its belly opens up like a bomber and the troops dismount by rappelling down to the sand on ropes. Unfortunately, enemy ground fire critically hits the helicopter a minute before the planned disgorging of its load, so Tom Cruise and the others have to jump out of the stricken craft at higher altitude or die in an explosion. There’s then a spectacular jump sequence that ends with Tom Cruise free-falling about 30 feet to the ground, slamming the front of his body and face into the wet sand. He is shaken by this, but unhurt, and the same is true for his comrades who fell the same distance.

In reality, the fall would have hurt Tom Cruise and several of the others so much that they wouldn’t have been able to get up and fight. Even though the exoskeletons were made of strong metal that might not have been scratched by the impact with the ground, the bodies of the humans inside the exoskeletons were made of weak flesh and bone, which would have been damaged by the abrupt change in velocity. Machines can be much more durable than the soft humans that are being flung around against the hard surfaces inside of them.

The frailties of the human body are already the limiting factor of fighter plane performance. When a plane makes a sharp left or right turn, the aircraft and the pilot experience G-forces (you also feel it when you make a sharp turn while driving your car). As shown in the graph above, the intensity of the G-force has an exponential relationship with the sharpness of the turn (“Bank Angle” expresses how sharp the turn is). A human pilot can’t withstand more than 9 G’s before he passes out from the physical strain on his body, but his aircraft can endure 15 G’s before its metal parts break apart. This means the human effectively limits the aircraft’s performance below its theoretical maximum, and by extension, it means that, in a dogfight, an autonomous fighter plane with a computer pilot could outmaneuver a human-piloted fighter plane.

Humans are becoming the weakest link in fighter plane combat, and farther in the future, we will also become the weakest links in ground combat. That means humans in combat exoskeletons will be inevitably rendered obsolete by some kind of purely mechanical fighting machine that isn’t hurt by 30-foot falls, doesn’t feel fear, doesn’t need to sleep, and doesn’t have fleshy eardrums that can be blown out by nearby explosions and heavy gunfire. There may be a period of time where humans in exoskeletons are the pinnacle of ground warfare, but this will give way to an era of full mechanization.

Human soldiers will use powered exoskeletons for hand-to-hand combat. In several scenes, soldiers use their exoskeletons’ mechanically amplified strength to punch aliens and objects with superhuman force. Tom Cruise kills at least one alien this way, and his girlfriend uses her strength to casually punch a car door out so it detaches from its hinges and skids across the ground. If powered combat exoskeletons become common, few of them will grant users amplified hand-to-hand fighting abilities like this.

An awesome shot of Tom Cruise punching an alien to death.

As I wrote earlier, powered combat exoskeletons will probably be used to bolster the endurance and load-carrying capacity of infantrymen. Exoskeletons designed for that would not necessarily have features that also let the user punch or kick things with greater than normal force. For example, since my minimalist exoskeleton lacks arms, it wouldn’t empower its wearer to punch harder or lift heavier things. The Steadicam mount would be like a strong, third arm that could prop up guns but do nothing else that a human arm does, like punching.

Even if exoskeletons amplified their wearers’ strength, it would be of very little direct benefit in combat since hand-to-hand fighting is extremely rare on the modern battlefield, and there’s no reason to think that will change in the future. If anything, average kill distances will increase thanks to smarter weapons. Endowing soldiers with the ability to punch and kick with superhuman force would also make accidental injuries to oneself and nearby comrades more common and more severe, potentially outweighing the small benefits of being able to strike enemies harder.

Superhuman strength will probably only be useful in the “fully-enclosed, heavily armored suit meant for quick, pre-planned raids” that I envisioned earlier. A squad of men wearing such suits wouldn’t be able to accidentally hurt one another with their super-strength since their full-body armor would protect them. Hand-to-hand combat would also be much likelier in the kinds of close-quarters missions the suits would be used for, making super-strength a real advantage.

Let me finally note that I liked how Tom Cruise’s exoskeleton enclosed most of his hand in a big, metal “glove.” It was a small but important detail, since it let him punch things without crushing all the bones in his hand. The front of the rigid, metal glove connected with the surface of whatever he was punching, and the force of the impact was transmitted from the glove to his suit’s metal arm, and then into the metal torso portion of his exoskeleton, meaning the frame bore the superhuman forces of his punches, and none of it was transmitted into the soft tissues of his body, sparing him injury. Exoskeleton suits designed for augmented, hand-to-hand combat would need to enclose their wearers’ hands and feet to prevent operator injury.

There will be tilt-engine aircraft that are bigger and better than the V-22. In the film, the human military has large utility aircraft with four engines that can tilt, transforming the aircraft from helicopters into planes. They use many of these tilt-rotor aircraft to transport the exoskeleton troops to the battle zone. These kinds of aircraft don’t exist, the best we have in real life is the much smaller V-22 (which only has two tilt-engines), and I doubt anything like the aircraft shown in the film will exist for at least 20 years.

An assortment of military aircraft, including the fictitious four-engine tilt-rotor planes, and real two-engine tilt rotor V-22s, plus older two-rotor CH-47 helicopters.

Consider that the V-22 development program started in 1982, the first prototype wasn’t made until 1988, and internal testing and redesigns went on until 2005, when the aircraft’s kinks were finally worked out and it entered mass production. In other words, it took 23 years for the V-22 to go from formal concept to a combat-ready aircraft (and that label is debatable since it suffered from serious problems after 2005 that took more time to fix).

The American V-22 Osprey has two rotors than can swivel up and down, letting it take off straight up into the air like a helicopter, and then fly forward like an airplane.

If we wanted to build a new tilt-rotor aircraft that was bigger and more complicated than the V-22, then the latter’s 23 year development timetable provides a benchmark for how long it would take. If the aircraft used a more advanced type of propulsion, like the tilting turbofan engines the Skynet’s planes had in Terminator, then it would be even longer. Granted, if we were invaded by aliens and desperately needed better weapons, the project would get more money and manpower and would go faster. It’s also possible that some development time could be shaved off by carrying over engineering and project management lessons learned during the V-22’s development. That said, even if we had all our ducks in a row, I doubt we could make such an aircraft in less than ten years. Returning to the real world, we are not grappling with an alien invasion and no major country is planning to sharply increase its military R&D budget, so the ~20 year timetable to go from a government announcing it is willing to pay money for an advanced aircraft with XYZ characteristics to a fully functional aircraft is most likely. This means there won’t be anything like the quad-tilt-rotor aircraft in Edge of Tomorrow until 2040 at the earliest.

It will probably take longer than that since the 20 year end date assumes that the development process starts now, in 2020. In fact, no military has announced a serious desire for such an aircraft, nor does any look poised to do so. The V-22 still hasn’t proven its worth, and history might someday look on it as an expensive failed experiment like the Concorde or the Space Shuttle. Until it does so, there will be no demand for even bigger, more expensive tilt-rotor aircraft. (Note that the U.S. military has a program called “Future Vertical Lift,” whose goal it is to make tilt-rotor aircraft that are smaller than the V-22. It may or may not be cancelled.)

There will be 3D volumetric displays. In one film scene, the characters look at a tabletop volumetric projection of their alien opponents. The display is highly detailed, runs silently, and is treated with some disinterest, indicating it is an established technology. As I wrote in my Prometheus review, the current state of this technology is underdeveloped, and it will be many decades before the kinks are worked out and it becomes practical. Even once it becomes a mature technology, it could be muscled out of use by competing technologies.

Links:

  1. Article on the “Guardian XO” powered exoskeleton. https://www.sarcos.com/company/news/media-coverage/xo-rbitant-strength-electric-exoskeletons/
  2. A video report about the Guardian XO. https://youtu.be/zLWuHo63C8k
  3. A hands-on analysis of a Steadicam gun support rig. https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2018/04/04/steadicam-third-arm/
  4. A 30-foot fall can easily kill a person, and usually causes significant injuries. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2017/06/26/can-you-survive-25-foot-fall/428384001/

Interesting articles, February 2020

Outer ring: What you think your sign is
Inner ring: What it actually is

A person’s math skills are about half inherited and half due to schooling and other non-biological factors. This is important since math skills positively correlate with income and odds of completing college, and in fact there is probably some causal relationship.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-020-0060-2

Autism is slightly heritable.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.10.932327v1

Police are now using genealogy websites to identify long-dead Jane and John Does.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/dna-genetic-genealogy-identifying-bodies-in-decades-old-john-and-jane-doe-cold-cases

British government tests show that 5G data transmissions don’t contain enough radiation to damage human DNA. The technology is safe.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51613580

Robotic surgery machines are improving: ‘It’s the first human trial of a robot for “supermicrosurgery,” a term referring to surgery on vessels that range from 0.3 to 0.8 millimeters…The system is activated by foot pedals, and a surgeon controls the high-precision surgical instruments using forceps-like joysticks, mounted to the operating table. This setup basically cancels out small tremors in the surgeons’ hands and scales down their hand movements into more refined and subtle versions. For example, if the surgeon moves one of the joysticks by one centimeter, the robot arm moves a tenth of a millimeter.’
https://www.technologyreview.com/f/615179/robot-assisted-high-precision-surgery-has-passed-its-first-test-in-humans/?

“[Cervical] cancer can be eliminated as a public health problem by the end of the century…”
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30068-4/fulltext

“In a world first, a woman rendered infertile by cancer treatment gave birth after one of her immature eggs was matured, frozen, and then – five years later – thawed and fertilised…”
https://www.sciencealert.com/cancer-survivor-has-given-birth-to-a-baby-developed-from-a-frozen-lab-matured-egg

The FDA has approved a new, non-statin drug that lowers cholesterol. Its effects add to those of any statins a person may be taking.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/21/health/fda-cholesterol-lowering-drug-approved/index.html

The world looks more detailed to most birds than it does to humans because they can see the visible part of the light spectrum as well as ultraviolet. In the far future, humans will be able to see a broader swath of the light spectrum.
https://sciencephiles.com/scientists-show-how-birds-see-the-world-compared-to-humans/

Famed physicist Freeman Dyson is dead.
www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/02/freeman-dyson-legendary-theoretical-physicist-dies-at-96/

A new Twitter add-on can detect and block incoming, unsolicited nude photos.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51511756

Samsung has released a second, foldable smartphone called the “Galaxy Z Flip.”
https://youtu.be/WxbHs1QBs_4

The “HOLOPORTL” is a refrigerator-sized device that displays a seemingly 3D video image. I don’t think it’s practical for average people, but it probably has some business uses. The technology is impressive in any case.
https://portlhologram.com

“Monocular passive ranging” can be an accurate way to find how far away an object is. If you’re looking at camera footage of the object, it’s obviously better to have a higher resolution camera so the object appears as many pixels.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.00912

A lens-less, single-pixel digital camera can produce highly detailed images of what it sees. “The reason the single-pixel camera can make do with one light sensor is that the light that strikes it is patterned. One way to pattern light is to put a filter, kind of like a randomized black-and-white checkerboard, in front of the flash illuminating the scene. Another way is to bounce the returning light off of an array of tiny micromirrors, some of which are aimed at the light sensor and some of which aren’t. “
I wonder if we could use this technology to vision distant exoplanets without having to build gigantic telescopes in space.
http://news.mit.edu/2017/faster-single-pixel-camera-lensless-imaging-0330

Thanks to the Earth’s periodic wobble on its axis, all of the zodiac signs are now linked to incorrect dates. See the article to figure out what your sign really is.
http://apkmetro.com/youre-a-scorpio-why-the-earths-wobble-means-your-zodiac-sign-isnt-what-you-think/

“Ocean Infinity” has bought 11 robot ships and will use them to map the entire seafloor by 2030. Humans will remotely control the ships from land bases.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51451577

If all human-driven vehicles were banned from Manhattan and only autonomous taxis were allowed, the city could meet its surface transit needs with only half as many cars as today. I think it would be even more efficient if the taxis were mostly Smartcars since their footprints are only half as big as the footprints of fullsize cars that currently serve as taxis, meaning they would almost double the capacity of the city’s existing road network.
http://senseable.mit.edu/MinimumFleet/

The NTSB has found that the fatal 2018 crash of a Tesla was only partly due to the limitations of the car’s autopilot feature, which was on at the time. The human driver was playing a game on his smartphone at the moment of impact even though he knew the car had problems negotiating that stretch of the road, and the crash attenuator that the vehicle plowed into had been compacted by a previous car accident and not promptly replaced by the state highway administration.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/25/21153320/tesla-autopilot-walter-huang-death-ntsb-probable-cause

“As I envision the process, whoever is sending a package will simply place it on their front doorstep and take a photo of it with a special shipping app on their phone. This will start the process, detailing the package size, dimensions, and GPS coordinates, and the sender will add particulars such as destination, level of urgency and weight category (i.e. under 10 lbs). Within a short while, a robotic pickup service will arrive, retrieve the package, and load it onto a drone delivery vehicle.”
https://futuristspeaker.com/business-trends/creating-the-self-delivering-package/

Are “smart transactions” coming?
https://futuristspeaker.com/future-scenarios/disrupting-transactions-7-examples-of-ai-driven-smart-transactions-that-will-mess-with-your-mind/

A 35-mile long tunnel through the Swiss Alps has just opened, allowing faster, cheaper train travel between Germany and Italy.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/trans-alpine-rail-tunnels/index.html

“Stereolithographic” 3D printers “built up layer by layer, but instead of extruding melted plastic, a high definition beam of light hardens a photosensitive liquid resin into thin layers.”
https://gizmodo.com/3d-printers-are-finally-starting-to-work-more-like-star-1841663582

The dreaded “runaway greenhouse effect” positive-feedback doomsday scenario is highly unlikely to happen. The melting of the Arctic permafrost will release much less methane into the atmosphere than was previously estimated.
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/climate-destabilization-unlikely-cause-methane-burp

China is cleaning up its polluted rivers. It has also made major progress reducing air pollution.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2228822-china-has-made-huge-strides-cleaning-up-its-polluted-rivers/

“Phytomining” is a practice in which certain species of plants are grown in a patch of ground to extract metals from the soil. Different kinds of plants are known to preferentially suck up different types of metals dissolved in the soil into their roots and up to their stems and leaves. After some time, the farmer cuts down the plants and uses chemicals to leech out and purify the metals in them. Phytomining could be used to clean toxic metal residues from soils and to mine precious metals like gold.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/science/metal-plants-farm.html

Because Mars is farther away from the Sun, the planet receives less sunlight than Earth does. Put simply, the Sun always looks dimmer on Mars.
“The maximum solar irradiance on Mars is about 590 W/m2 compared to about 1000 W/m2 at the Earth’s surface.”
https://www.firsttheseedfoundation.org/resource/tomatosphere/background/sunlight-mars-enough-light-mars-grow-tomatoes/

More on the Pentagon’s secret UFO research program.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a30916275/government-secret-ufo-program-investigation/

The Germans were smart enough to build four-engine bombers like the U.S. and Britain had, but they never did thanks to bad doctrinal decisions made before WWII. The four-engine-but-only-two-propeller He-177 was the best they had.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/hitlers-only-long-range-heavy-bomber-was-joke-127057

Older tanks like the U.S. M-60 and the Soviet T-55 will never be as good as newer tanks because of their armor. The older tanks’ armor was just made of steel. As anti-tank weapons got more potent, the solution was to simply thicken the steel armor. Engineers realized that this trend was unsustainable since it would lead to future tanks that were too heavy to move, so they shifted to a new paradigm by inventing “composite tank armor,” which is a material made of multiple layers of different materials like quartz, ceramic, and relatively thin steel. It was lighter and more protective than thick, solid steel alone. The U.S. M1 Abrams and Soviet T-64 were the first tanks to have composite armor. Since armor is integral to a tank in the same way that your skin and flesh are integral to your body, there’s no way to “upgrade” older tanks like the M-60 that are made of solid steel in a way that will put their armor protection on par with new tanks that have composite armor. Thus, the M-60 is, on the modern battlefield, effectively carrying around many tons of dead weight that can’t be removed.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/could-americas-old-m60-patton-tank-fight-war-right-now-123471

The U.S. Army plans to switch to a plastic helmet that is actually lighter but just as strong as its current Kevlar helmet. Anyone still using steel helmets will be two technology paradigms behind.
https://www.army.mil/article/184898/soldiers_to_receive_lighter_combat_helmet

The U.S. Navy is crying uncle and wants to start retiring its expensive, disastrous “Littoral Combat Ships.”
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32148/the-navy-now-wants-to-retire-the-first-four-of-its-troublesome-littoral-combat-ships

The U.S. will resume very controlled use of land mines. The Obama administration banned their use outside the Korean peninsula, which critics said put the U.S. at a military disadvantage since Russia and China still used mines.
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/480919-trump-administration-loosens-restrictions-on-use-of-land-mines

China’s air defense technology is pulling ahead of Russia’s. Soon, the Chinese won’t gain anything by buying Russian weapons.
https://www.rusi.org/publication/occasional-papers/modern-russian-and-chinese-integrated-air-defence-systems-nature

China makes high-quality copies of many American weapons.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/chinas-military-stealing-its-way-superpower-status-127072

Everything you need to know about blowing up modern Russian tanks.
https://youtu.be/Kn4elQ1WknM

“Stowed kills” is the word of the day. It is a numerical value that averages the amount of ammunition a tank has with the power of those rounds to express how many enemy vehicles it can destroy before running out. There’s a simple tradeoff: Bigger ammunition hits harder and has longer range, but because of its size, you can’t fit as much of it in your tank. Larger ammunition can also accommodate internal, programmable sensors and computers the smaller ammo can’t (yet).
https://below-the-turret-ring.blogspot.com/2016/04/bigger-guns-are-not-always-better.html

Turkey and Syrian government troops are basically in open warfare against each other in Syria now.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7990809/Syrian-military-helicopter-shot-Turkey-backed-rebels-Idlib.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-51667717
https://youtu.be/T56hkIK2koY

Also, U.S. and Russian military vehicles nearly rammed each other during patrols in Syria.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32290/crazy-video-emerges-of-american-and-russian-armored-vehicle-road-rage-incident-in-syria

Interesting articles, January 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My future predictions (2020 iteration)

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

Like any futurist worth his salt, I’m going to put my credibility on the line by publishing a list of my future predictions. I won’t modify or delete this particular blog entry once it is published, and if my thinking about anything on the list changes, I’ll instead create a new, revised blog entry. Furthermore, as the deadlines for my predictions pass, I’ll reexamine them.

I’ve broken down my predictions by the decade. Any prediction listed under a specific decade will happen by the end of that decade, unless I specify some other date (e.g. – “X will happen early in this decade.”).

2020s

  • Better, cheaper solar panels and batteries (for grid power storage and cars) will make clean energy as cheap and as reliable as fossil fuel power for entire regions of the world, including some temperate zones. As cost “tipping points” are reached, it will make financial sense for tens of millions of private homeowners and electricity utility companies to install solar panels on their rooftops and on ground arrays, respectively. This will be the case even after government clean energy subsidies are inevitably retracted. However, a 100% transition to clean energy won’t finish in rich countries until the middle of the century, and poor countries will use dirty energy well into the second half of the century.
  • Fracking and the exploitation of tar sands in the U.S. and Canada will together ensure growth in global oil production until around 2030, at which time the installed base of clean energy and batteries will be big enough to take up the slack. There will be no global energy crisis.
  • This will be a bad decade for Russia as its overall population shrinks, its dependency ratio rises, and as low fossil fuel prices and sanctions keep hurting its economy. Russia will fall farther behind the U.S., China, and other leading countries in terms of economic, military, and technological might.
  • China’s GDP will surpass America’s, India’s population will surpass China’s, and China will never claim the glorious title of being both the richest and most populous country.
  • Foldable smartphones will enter mass production, though it’s uncertain how much the market will embrace them. These phones will have one, rigid screen on their “front cover,” and one, flexible screen that is twice as big spanning their inner space. [Deleted because this prediction came true in 2019]
  • Improvements to smartphone cameras, mirrorless cameras, and perhaps light-field cameras will make D-SLRs obsolete. 
  • Augmented reality (AR) glasses that are much cheaper and better than the original Google Glass will make their market debuts and will find success in niche applications.
  • Virtual reality (VR) gaming will go mainstream as the devices get better and cheaper. It will stop being the sole domain of hardcore gamers willing to spend over $1,000 on hardware.
  • Vastly improved VR goggles with better graphics and no need to be plugged into desktop PCs will hit the market. They won’t display perfectly lifelike footage, but they will be much better than what we have today, and portable. 
  • “Full-immersion” audiovisual VR will be commercially available by the end of the decade. VR devices will be capable of displaying video that is visually indistinguishable from real reality: They will have display resolutions, refresh rates, head tracking sensitivities, and wide fields of view that together deliver a visual experience that matches or exceeds the limits of human vision. These high-end goggles won’t be truly “portable” devices because their high processing and energy requirements will probably make them bulky, give them only a few hours of battery life, or even require them to be plugged into another computer. Moreover, the tactile, olfactory, and physical movement/interaction aspects of the experience will remain underdeveloped.
  • “Deepfake” pornography will reach new levels of sophistication and perversion as it becomes possible to seamlessly graft the heads of real people onto still photos and videos of nude bodies that closely match the physiques of the actual people. New technology for doing this will let amateurs make high-quality deepfakes, meaning any person could be targeted. It will even become possible to wear AR glasses that interpolate nude, virtual bodies over the bodies real people in the wearer’s field of view to provide a sort of fake “X-ray-vision.” The AR glasses could also be used to apply other types of visual filters that degraded real people within the field of view.
  • LED light bulbs will become as cheap as CFL and even incandescent bulbs. It won’t make economic sense NOT to buy LEDs, and they will establish market dominance.
  • “Smart home”/”Wired home” technology will become mature and widespread in developed countries.
  • Video gaming will dispense with physical media, and games will be completely streamed from the internet or digitally downloaded. Business that exist just to sell game discs (Gamestop) will shut down.
  • Instead of a typical home entertainment system having a whole bunch of media discs, different media players and cable boxes, there will be one small, multipurpose box that, among other things, boosts WiFi to ensure the TV and all nearby devices can get signals at multi-Gb/s speeds.
  • Self-driving vehicles will start hitting the roads in large numbers in rich countries. The vehicles won’t drive as efficiently as humans (a lot of hesitation and slowing down for little or no reason), but they’ll be as safe as human drivers. Long-haul trucks that ply simple highway routes will be the first category of vehicles to be fully automated. The transition will be heralded by a big company like Wal-Mart buying 5,000 self-driving tractor trailers to move goods between its distribution centers and stores. Last-mile delivery–involving weaving through side streets, cities and neighborhoods, and physically carrying packages to peoples’ doors–won’t be automated until after this decade. Self-driving, privately owned passenger cars will stay few in number and will be owned by technophiles, rich people, and taxi cab companies.
  • Thanks to improvements in battery energy density and cost, and in fast-charging technology, electric cars will become cost-competitive with gas-powered cars this decade without government subsidies, leading to their rapid adoption. Electric cars are mechanically simpler and more reliable than gas-powered ones, which will hurt the car repair industry. Many gas stations will also go bankrupt or convert to fast charging stations.
  • Quality of life for people living and working in cities and near highways will improve as more drivers switch to quieter, emissionless electric vehicles. The noise reduction will be greatest in cities and suburbs where traffic moves slowly: https://cleantechnica.com/2016/06/05/will-electric-cars-make-traffic-quieter-yes-no/
  • Most new power equipment will be battery-powered, so machines like lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and chainsaws will be much quieter and less polluting than they are today. Batteries will be energy-dense enough to compete with gasoline in these use cases, and differences in overall equipment weight and running time will be insignificant. The notion of a neighbor shattering your sense of peace and quiet with loud yard work will get increasingly alien. 
  • A machine will pass the Turing Test by the end of this decade. The milestone will attract enormous amounts of attention and will lead to several retests, some of which the machine will fail, proving that it lacks the full range of human intelligence. It will lead to debate over the Turing Test’s validity as a measure of true intelligence (Ray Kurzweil actually talked about this phenomenon of “moving the goalposts” whenever we think about how smart computers are), and many AI experts will point out the existence of decades-long skepticism in the Turing Test in their community.
  • The best AIs circa 2029 won’t be able to understand and upgrade their own source codes. They will still be narrow AIs, albeit an order of magnitude better than the ones we have today.
  • Machines will become better than humans at the vast majority of computer, card, and board games. The only exceptions will be very obscure games or recently created games that no one has bothered to program an AI to play yet. But even for those games, there will be AIs with general intelligence and learning abilities that will be “good enough” to play as well as average humans by reading the instruction manuals and teaching themselves through simulated self-play.
  • The cost of getting your genome sequenced and expertly interpreted will drop below $1,000, and enough about the human genome will have been deciphered to make the cost worth the benefit for everyone. By the end of the decade, it will be common for newborns in rich countries to have their genomes sequenced.
  • Cheap DNA tests that can measure a person’s innate IQ and core personality traits with high accuracy will become widely available. There is the potential for this to cause social problems. 
  • At-home medical testing kits and diagnostic devices like swallowable camera-pills will become vastly better and more common.
  • Space tourism will become routine thanks to privately owned spacecraft. 
  • Marijuana will be effectively decriminalized in the U.S. Either the federal government will overturn its marijuana prohibitions, or some patchwork of state and federal bans will remain but be so weakened and lightly enforced that there will be no real government barriers to obtaining and using marijuana. 
  • By the end of this decade, photos of almost every living person will be available online (mostly on social media). Apps will exist that can scan through trillions of photos to find your doppelgangers. 
  • Drones will be used in an attempted or successful assassination of at least one major world leader (Note: Venezuela’s Nicholas Maduro wasn’t high profile enough).

2030s

  • VR and AR goggles will become refined technologies and probably merge into a single type of lightweight device. Like smartphones today, anyone who wants the glasses in 2030 will have them. Even poor people in Africa will be able to buy them. A set of the glasses will last a day on a single charge under normal use.  
  • Augmented reality contact lenses will enter mass production and become widely available, though they won’t be as good as AR glasses and they might need remotely linked, body-worn hardware to provide them with power and data. [Changed to reflect the fact that AR contact lenses were “invented” in 2008. Note that the inventor also predicted they wouldn’t be commercialized until 2035 at the earliest. https://www.inverse.com/article/31034-augmented-reality-contact-lenses]
  • The bulky VR goggles of the 2020s will transform into lightweight, portable V.R. glasses thanks to improved technology. The glasses will display lifelike footage. However, the best VR goggles will still need to be plugged into other devices, like routers or PCs.
  • Wall-sized, thin, 8K or even 16K TVs will become common in homes in rich countries, and the TVs will be able to display 3D picture without the use of glasses. A sort of virtual reality chamber could be created at moderate cost by installing those TVs on all the walls of a room to create a single, wraparound screen.
  • Functional CRT TVs and computer monitors will only exist in museums and in the hands of antique collectors. This will also be true for DLP TVs. 
  • The video game industry will be bigger than ever and considered high art.
  • It will be standard practice for AIs to be doing hyperrealistic video game renderings, and for NPCs to behave very intelligently thanks to better AI. 
  • Books and computer tablets will merge into a single type of device that could be thought of as a “digital book.” It will be a book with several hundred pages made of thin, flexible digital displays (perhaps using ultra-energy efficient e-ink) instead of paper. At the tap of a button, the text on all of the pages will instantly change to display whichever book the user wanted to read at that moment. They could also be used as notebooks in which the user could hand write or draw things with a stylus, which would be saved as image or text files. The devices will fuse the tactile appeal of old-fashioned books with the content flexibility of tablet computers.
  • Loose-leaf sheets of “digital paper” will also exist thanks to the same technology.
  • Loneliness, social isolation, and other problems caused by overuse of technology and the atomized structure of modern life will be, ironically, cured to a large extent by technology. Chatbots that can hold friendly (and even funny and amusing) conversations with humans for extended periods, diagnose and treat mental illnesses as well as human therapists, and customize themselves to meet the needs of humans will become ubiquitous. The AIs will become adept at analyzing human personalities and matching lonely people with friends and lovers, at matching them with social gatherings (including some created by machines), and at recommending daily activities that will satisfy them, hour-by-hour. Machines will come to understand that constant technology use is antithetical to human nature, so in order to promote human wellness, they find ways to impel humans to get out of their houses, interact with other humans, and be in nature. Autonomous taxis will also be widespread and will have low fares, making it easier for people who are isolated due to low income or poor health (such as many elderly people) to go out.
  • Chatbots will steadily improve their “humanness” over the decade. The instances when AIs say or do something nonsensical will get less and less frequent. Dumber people, children, and people with some types of mental illness will be the first ones to start insisting their AIs are intelligent like humans. Later, average people will start claiming the same. By the end of the decade, a personal assistant AI like “Samantha” from the movie Her will be commercially available.
  • Chatbots will be able to have intelligent conversations with humans about politics and culture, to identify factually wrong beliefs, biases, and cognitive blind spots in individuals, and to effectively challenge them through verbal discussion and debate. The potential will exist for technology to significantly enlighten the human population and to reduce sociopolitical polarization. However, it’s unclear how many people will choose to use this technology. 
  • Turing-Test-capable chatbots will also supercharge the problem of online harassment, character assassination, and deliberate disinformation by spamming the internet with negative reviews, bullying messages, emails to bosses, and humiliating “deepfake” photos and videos of targeted people. Today’s “troll farms” where humans sit at computer terminals following instructions to write bad reviews for specific people or businesses will be replaced by AI trolls that can pump out orders of magnitude more content per day. And just as people today can “buy likes” for their social media accounts or business webpages, people in the future will be able, at low cost, to buy harassment campaigns against other people and organizations they dislike. Discerning between machine-generated and human-generated internet content will be harder and more important than ever.
  • House robots will start becoming common in rich countries. They will be slower at doing household tasks than humans, but will still save people hours of labor per week. They may or may not be humanoid. For the sake of safety and minimizing annoyance, most robots will do their work when humans aren’t around. As in, you would come home from work every day and find the floors vacuumed, the lawn mowed, and your laundered clothes in your dresser, with nary a robot in sight since it will have gone back into its closet to recharge. You would never hear the commotion of a clothes washing machine, a vacuum cleaner or a lawnmower. All the work would get done when you were away, as if by magic.
  • People will start having genuine personal relationships with AIs and robots. For example, people will resist upgrading to new personal assistant AIs because they will have emotional attachments to their old ones. The destruction of a helper robot or AI might be as emotionally traumatic to some people as the death of a human relative.
  • Farm robots that are better than humans at fine motor tasks like picking strawberries humans will start becoming widespread.  
  • Self-driving cars will become cheap enough and practical enough for average income people to buy, and their driving behavior will become as efficient as an average human. Over the course of this decade, there will be rapid adoption of self-driving cars in rich countries. Freed from driving, people will switch to doing things like watching movies/TV and eating. Car interiors will change accordingly. Road fatalities, and the concomitant demands for traffic police, paramedics, E.R. doctors, car mechanics, and lawyers will sharply decrease. The car insurance industry will shrivel, forcing consolidation. (Humans in those occupations will also face increasing levels of direct job competition from machines over the course of the decade.)
  • Private owners of autonomous cars will start renting them out while not in use as taxis and package delivery vehicles. Your personal, autonomous car will drive you to work, then spend eight hours making money for you doing side jobs, and will be waiting for you outside your building at the end of the day.
  • The “big box” business model will start taking over the transportation and car repair industry thanks to the rise of electric, self-driving vehicles and autonomous taxis in place of personal car ownership. The multitudes of small, scattered car repair shops will be replaced by large, centralized car repair facilities that themselves resemble factory assembly lines. Self-driving vehicles will drive to them to have their problems diagnosed and fixed, sparing their human owners from having to waste their time sitting in waiting rooms.
  • The same kinds of facilities will make inroads into the junk yard industry, as they would have all the right tooling to cheaply and rapidly disassemble old vehicles, test the parts for functionality, and shunt them to disposal or individual resale. (The days of hunting through junkyards by yourself for a car part you need will eventually end–it will all be on eBay. )
  • Car ownership won’t die out because it will still be a status symbol, and having a car ready in your driveway will always be more convenient than having to wait even just two minutes for an Uber cab to arrive at the curb. People are lazy.
  • The ad hoc car rental model exemplified by autonomous Uber cabs and private people renting out their autonomous cars when not in use faces a challenge since daily demand for cars peaks during morning rush hour and afternoon rush hour. In other words, everyone needs a car at the same time each day, so the ratio of cars : people can’t deviate much from, say, 1:2. Of course, if more people telecommuted (almost certain in the future thanks to better VR, faster broadband, and tech-savvy Millennials reaching middle age and taking over the workplace), and if flexible schedules became more widespread (also likely, but within certain limits since most offices can’t function efficiently unless they have “all hands on deck” for at least a few hours each day), the ratio could go even lower. However, there’s still a bottom limit to how few cars a country will need to provide adequate daily transportation for its people.
  • Private delivery services will get cheaper and faster thanks to autonomous vehicles.
  • Automation will start having a major impact on the global economy. Machines will compensate for the shrinkage of the working-age human population in the developed world. Countries with “graying” populations like Japan and Germany will experience a new wave of economic growth. Demand for immigrant laborers will decrease across the world because of machines.
  • There will be a worldwide increase in the structural unemployment rate thanks to better and cheaper narrow AIs and robots. A plausible scenario would be for the U.S. unemployment rate to be 10%–which was last the case at the nadir of the Great Recession–but for every other economic indicator to be strong. The clear message would be that human labor is becoming decoupled from the economy.
  • Combining all the best AI and robotics technologies, it will be possible to create general-purpose androids that could function better in the real world (e.g. – perform in the workplace, learn new things, interact with humans, navigate public spaces, manage personal affairs) than the bottom 10% of humans (e.g. – elderly people, the disabled, criminals, the mentally ill, people with poor language abilities or low IQs), and in some narrow domains, the androids will be superhuman (e.g. – physical strength, memory, math abilities). Note that businesses will still find it better to employ task-specific, non-human-looking robots instead of general purpose androids.
  • By the end of this decade, only poor people, lazy people, and conspiracy theorists (like anti-vaxxers) won’t have their genomes sequenced. It will be trivially cheap, and in fact free for many people (some socialized health care systems will fully subsidize it), and enough will be known about the human genome to make it worthwhile to have the information.
  • Computers will be able to accurately deduce a human’s outward appearance based on only a DNA sample. This will aid police detectives, and will have other interesting uses, such as allowing parents to see what their unborn children will look like as adults, or allowing anyone to see what they’d look like if they were of the opposite sex (one sex chromosome replaced). 
  • Trivially cheap gene sequencing and vastly improved knowledge of the human genome will give rise to a “human genome black market,” in which people secretly obtain DNA samples from others, sequence them, and use the data for their own ends. For example, a politician could be blackmailed by an enemy who threatened to publish a list of his genetic defects or the identities of his illegitimate children. Stalkers (of celebrities and ordinary people) would also be interested in obtaining the genetic information of the people they were obsessed with. It is practically impossible to prevent the release of one’s DNA since every discarded cup, bottle, or utensil has a sample. 
  • Markets will become brutally competitive and efficient thanks to AIs. Companies will sharply grasp consumer demand through real-time surveillance, and consumers will be alerted to bargains by their personal AIs and devices (e.g. – your AR glasses will visually highlight good deals as you walk through the aisles of a store). Your personal assistant AIs and robots will look out for your self-interest by countering the efforts of other AIs to sway your spending habits in ways that benefit companies and not you.
  • “Digital immortality” will become possible for average people. Personal assistant AIs, robot servants, and other monitoring devices will be able, through observation alone, to create highly accurate personality profiles of individual humans, and to anticipate their behavior with high fidelity. Voices, mannerisms and other biometrics will be digitally reproducible without any hint of error. Digital simulacra of individual humans will be further refined by having them take voluntary personality tests, and by uploading their genomes, brain scans and other body scans. Even if all of the genetic and biological data couldn’t be made sense of at the moment it was uploaded to an individual’s digital profile, there will be value in saving it since it might be decipherable in the future. (Note that “digital immortality” is not the same as “mind uploading.”)
  • Life expectancy will have increased by a few years thanks to pills and therapies that slightly extend human lifespan. Like, you take a $20 pill each day starting at age 20 and you end up dying at age 87 instead of age 84.
  • Global oil consumption will peak as people continue switching to other power sources.
  • Earliest possible date for the first manned Mars mission.
  • Movie subtitles and the very notion of there being “foreign language films” will become obsolete. Computers will be able to perfectly translate any human language into another, to create perfect digital imitations of any human voice, and to automatically apply CGI so that the mouth movements of people in video footage matches the translated words they’re speaking. The machines will also be able to reproduce detailed aspects of an actor’s speech, such as cadence, rhythm, tone and timbre, emotion, and accent, and to convey them accurately in another language.
  • Computers will also be able to automatically enhance and upscale old films by accurately colorizing them, removing defects like scratches, and sharpening or focusing footage (one technique will involve interpolating high-res still photos of long-dead actors onto the faces of those same actors in low-res moving footage). Computer enhancement will be so good that we’ll be able to watch films from the early 20th century with near-perfect image and audio clarity.
  • CGI will get so refined than moviegoers with 20/20 vision won’t be able to see the difference between footage of unaltered human actors and footage of 100% CGI actors.
  • Lifelike CGI and “performance capture” will enable “digital resurrections” of dead actors. Computers will be able to scan through every scrap of footage with, say, John Wayne in it, and to produce a perfect CGI simulacrum of him that even speaks with his natural voice, and it will be seamlessly inserted into future movies. Elderly actors might also license movie studios to create and use digital simulacra of their younger selves in new movies. The results will be very fascinating, but might also worsen Hollywood’s problem with making formulaic content.
  • China’s military will get strong enough to defeat U.S. forces in the western Pacific. This means that, in a conventional war for control of the Spratly Islands and/or Taiwan, China would have >50% odds of winning. This shift in the local balance of power does not mean China will start a conflict. 
  • The quality and sophistication of China’s best military technology will surpass Russia’s best technology in all or almost all categories. However, it will still lag the U.S. 

2040s

  • The world and peoples’ outlooks and priorities will be very different than they were in 2019. Cheap renewable energy will have become widespread and totally negated any worries about an “energy crisis” ever happening, except in exotic, hypothetical scenarios about the distant future. There will be little need for immigration thanks to machine labor and cross-border telecommuting. Moreover, there will be a strong sense in most Western countries that they’re already “diverse enough,” and that there are no further cultural benefits to letting in more foreigners since large communities of most foreign ethnic groups will already exist within their borders. There will be more need than ever for strong social safety nets and entitlement programs thanks to technological unemployment. AI will be a central political and social issue. It won’t be the borderline sci-fi, fringe issue it was in 2019.
  • Automation, mass unemployment, wealth inequalities between the owners of capital and everyone else, and differential access to expensive human augmentation technologies (like genetic engineering) will produce overwhelming political pressure for some kind of wealth redistribution and social safety net expansion. Countries that have diligently made small, additive reforms as necessary over the preceding decades will be untroubled. However, countries that failed to adapt their political and economic systems will face upheaval.
  • 2045 will pass without the Technological Singularity happening. Ray Kurzweil will either celebrate his 97th birthday in a wheelchair, or as a popsicle frozen at the Alcor Foundation.
  • Supercomputers that match or surpass upper-level estimates of the human brain’s computational capabilities will cost a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars apiece, meaning tech companies and universities will be able to afford large numbers of them for AI R&D projects, accelerating progress in the field. Hardware will no longer be the limiting factor to building AGI. If it hasn’t been built yet, it will be due to failure to figure out how to arrange the hardware in the right way to support intelligent thought, and/or to a failure to develop the necessary software. 
  • With robots running the economy, it will be common for businesses to operate 24/7: restaurants will never close, online orders made at 3:00 am will be packed in boxes by 3:10 am, and autonomous delivery trucks will only stop to refuel, exchange cargo, or get preventative maintenance.
  • Advanced energy technology, robot servants, 3D printers, telepresence, and other technologies will allow people to live largely “off-grid” if they choose, while still enjoying a level of comfort that 2019 people would envy.
  • Recycling will become much more efficient and practical thanks to house robots properly cleaning, sorting, and crushing/compacting waste before disposing of it. Automated sorting machines at recycling centers will also be much better than they are today. Today, recycling programs are hobbled because even well-meaning humans struggle to remember which of their trash items are recyclable and which aren’t since the acceptable items vary from one municipality to the next, and as a result, recycling centers get large amounts of unusable material, which they must filter out at great cost. House robots would remember it perfectly.
  • Thanks to this diligence, house robots will also increase backyard composting, easing the burden on municipal trash services. 
  • It will be common for cities, towns and states to heavily restrict or ban human-driven vehicles within their boundaries. A sea change in thinking will happen as autonomous cars become accepted as “the norm,” and human-driven cars start being thought of as unusual and dangerous.
  • Over 90% of new car sales in developed countries will be for electric vehicles. Just as the invention of the automobile transformed horses into status goods used for leisure, the rise of electric vehicles will transform internal combustion vehicles into a niche market for richer people. 
  • A global “family tree” showing how all humans are related will be built using written genealogical records and genomic data from the billions of people who have had their DNA sequenced. It will become impossible to hide illegitimate children, and it will also become possible for people to find “genetic doppelgangers”–other people they have no familial relationship to, but with whom, by some coincidence, they share a very large number of genes. 
  • Improved knowledge of human genetics and its relevance to personality traits and interests will strengthen AI’s ability to match humans with friends, lovers, and careers. Rising technological unemployment will create a need for machines to match human workers with the remaining jobs in as efficient a manner as possible.
  • Realistic robot sex bots that can move and talk will exist. They won’t perfectly mimic humans, but will be “good enough” for most users. Using them will be considered weird and “for losers” at first, but in coming decades it will go mainstream, following the same pattern as Internet dating. [If we think of sex as a type of task, and if we agree that machines will someday be able to do all tasks better than humans, then it follows that robots will be better than humans at sex.]  

2050s

  • This is the earliest possible time that AGI/SAI will be invented. It will not be able to instantly change everything in the world or to initiate a Singularity, but it will rapidly grow in intelligence, wealth, and power. It will probably be preceded by successful computer simulations of the brains of progressively more complex model organisms, such as flatworms, fruit flies, and lab rats.
  • Humans will be heavily dependent upon their machines for almost everything (e.g. – friendship, planning the day, random questions to be answered, career advice, legal counseling, medical checkups, driving cars), and the dependency will be so ingrained that humans will reflexively assume that “The Machines are always right.” Consciously and unconsciously, people will yield more and more of their decision-making and opinion-forming to machines, and find that they and the world writ large are better off for it. This will be akin to having an angel on your shoulder watching your surroundings and watching you, and giving you constructive advice all the time. 
  • In the developed world, less than 50% of people between age 22 and 65 will have gainful full-time jobs. However, if unprofitable full-time jobs that only persist thanks to government subsidies (such as someone running a small coffee shop and paying the bills with their monthly UBI check) and full-time volunteer “jobs” (such as picking up trash in the neighborhood) are counted, most people in that age cohort will be “doing stuff” on a full-time basis.  
  • The doomsaying about Global Warming will start to quiet down as the world’s transition to clean energy hits full stride and predictions about catastrophes from people like Al Gore fail to pan out by their deadlines. Sadly, people will just switch to worrying about and arguing about some new set of doomsday prophecies about something else.
  • By almost all measures, standards of living will be better in 2050 than today. People will commonly have all types of wonderful consumer devices and appliances that we can’t even fathom. However, some narrow aspects of daily life are likely to worsen, such as overcrowding and further erosion of the human character. Just as people today have short memories and take too many things for granted, so shall people in the 2050s fail to appreciate how much the standard of living has risen since today, and they will ignore all the steady triumphs humanity has made over its problems, and by default, people will still believe the world is constantly on the verge of collapsing and that things are always getting worse.
  • Cheap desalination will provide humanity with unlimited amounts of drinking water and end the prospect of “water wars.” 
  • Mass surveillance and ubiquitous technology will have minimized violent crime and property crime in developed countries: It will be almost impossible to commit such crimes without a surveillance camera or some other type of sensor detecting the act, or without some device recording the criminal’s presence in the area at the time of the act. House robots will contribute by effectively standing guard over your property at night while you sleep. 
  • It will be common for people to have health monitoring devices on and inside of their bodies that continuously track things like their heart rate, blood pressure, respiration rate, and gene expression. If a person has a health emergency or appears likely to have one, his or her devices will send out a distress signal alerting EMS and nearby random citizens. If you walked up to such a person while wearing AR glasses, you would see their vital statistics and would receive instructions on how to assist them (i.e. – How to do CPR). Robots will also be able to render medical aid. 
  • Cities and their suburbs across the world will have experienced massive growth since 2019. Telepresence, relatively easy off-grid living, and technological unemployment will not, on balance, have driven more people out of metro areas than have migrated into them. Farming areas full of flat, boring land will have been depopulated, and many farms will be 100% automated. The people who choose to leave the metro areas for the “wilderness” will concentrate in rural areas (including national parks) where the climate is good, the natural scenery is nice, and there are opportunities for outdoor recreation. Real estate prices will, in inflation-adjusted terms, be much higher in most metro areas and places with natural beauty than they were in 2020 because the “supply” of those prime locations is almost fixed, whereas the demand for them is elastic and will rise thanks to population growth, rising incomes, and the aforementioned technology advancements.
  • Therapeutic cloning and stem cell therapies will become useful and will effectively extend human lifespan. For example, a 70-year-old with a failing heart will be able to have a new one grown in a lab using his own DNA, and then implanted into his chest to replace the failing original organ. The new heart will be equivalent to what he had when at age 18 years, so it will last another 52 years before it too fails. In a sense, this will represent age reversal to one part of his body.
  • The first healthy clone of an adult human will be born.
  • Many factories, farms, and supply chains will be 100% automated, and it will be common for goods to not be touched by a human being’s hands until they reach their buyers. Robots will deliver Amazon packages to your doorstep and even carry them into your house. Items ordered off the internet will appear inside your house a few hours later, as if by magic. 
  • Smaller versions of the robots used on automated farms will be available at low cost to average people, letting them effortlessly create backyard gardens. This will boost global food production and let people have greater control over where their food comes from and what it contains. 
  • The last of America’s Cold War-era weapon platforms (e.g. – the B-52 bomber, F-15 fighter, M1 Abrams tank, Nimitz aircraft carrier) will finally be retired from service. There will be instances where four generations of people from the same military family served on the same type of plane or ship. 
  • Cheap guided bullets, which can make midair course changes and be fired out of conventional man-portable rifles, will become common in advanced armies. 
  • Personal “cloaking devices” made of clothes studded with pinhole cameras and thin, flexible sheets of LEDs, colored e-ink, or some metamaterial with similar abilities will be commercially available. The cameras will monitor the appearance of the person’s surroundings and tell the display pixels to change their colors to match. Ski masks made of the same material would let wearers change their facial features, fooling most face recognition cameras and certainly fooling the unaided eyes of humans. The pixels could also be made to glow bright white, allowing the wearer to turn any part of his body into a flashlight. 
  • The richest person alive will achieve a $1 trillion net worth.
  • It will be technologically and financially feasible for small aircraft to produce zero net carbon emissions. The aircraft might use conventional engines powered by carbon-neutral synthetic fossil fuels that cost no more than normal fossil fuels, or they might have electric engines and very energy-dense batteries or fuel cells.

2060s

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

2070s

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

2100

  • Humans probably won’t be the dominant intelligent life forms on Earth.
  • Latest possible time that AGI/SAI will be invented. By this point, computer hardware will so powerful that we could do 1:1 digital simulations of human brains. If our AI still falls far short of human-like general intelligence and creativity, then it might be that only organic substrates have the necessary properties to support them.
  • Worst case scenario is that AGI/Strong AI hasn’t been invented yet, but thousands of different types of highly efficient, task-specific Narrow AIs have (often coupled to robot bodies), and they fill almost every labor niche better than human workers ever could (“Death by a Thousand Cuts” job automation scenario). Humans grow up in a world where no one has to work, and the notion of drudge work, suffering through a daily commute, and involuntarily waking up at 6:00 am five days a week is unfathomable. Every human will have machines that constantly monitor them or follow them around, and meet practically all their needs.
  • The world could in many ways resemble Ray Kurzweil’s predicted Post-Singularity world. However, the improvements and changes will have accrued thanks to decades of AGI/Strong AI steady effort. Everything will not instantly change on DD/MM/2045 as Kurzweil suggests it will.
  • Hundreds of millions, and possibly billions, of “digitally immortal avatars” of dead humans will exist, and you will be able to interact with them through a variety of means (in FIVR, through devices like earpieces and TV screens, in the real world if the avatar takes over an android body resembling the human it was based on). 
  • A weak sort of immortality will be available thanks to self-cloning, immortal digital avatars, and perhaps mind uploading. You could clone yourself and instruct your digital avatar–which would be a machine programmed with your personality and memories–to raise the clone and ensure it developed to resemble you. Your digital avatar might have an android body or could exist in a disembodied state. 
  • It will be possible to make clones of humans using only their digital format genomic data. In other words, if you had a .txt file containing a person’s full genetic code, you could use that by itself to make a living, breathing clone. Having samples of their cells would not be necessary. 
  • The “DNA black market” that arose in the 2030s will pose an even bigger threat since it will be now possible to use DNA samples alone or their corresponding .txt files to clone a person or to produce a sperm or egg cell and, in turn, a child. Potential abuses include random people cloning or having the children of celebrities they are obsessed with, or cloning billionaires in the hopes of milking the clones for money. Important people who might be targets of such thefts will go to pains to prevent their DNA from being known. Since dead people have no rights, third parties might be able to get away with cloning or making gametes of the deceased.
  • Life expectancy escape velocity and perhaps medical immortality will be achieved. It will come not from magical, all-purpose nanomachines that fix all your body’s cells and DNA, but from a combination of technologies, including therapeutic cloning of human organs, cybernetic replacements for organs and limbs, and stem cell therapies that regenerate ageing tissues and organs inside the patient’s body. The treatments will be affordable in large part thanks to robot doctors and surgeons who work almost for free, and to medical patents expiring.
  • All other aspects of medicine and healthcare will have radically advanced. There will be vaccines and cures for almost all contagious diseases. We will be masters of human genetic engineering and know exactly how to produce people that today represent the top 1% of the human race (holistically combining IQ, genetic health, physical attractiveness, and likable/prosocial personality traits). However, the value of even a genius-IQ human will be questionable since intelligent machines will be so much smarter.
  • Augmentative cybernetics (including direct brain-to-computer links) will exist and be in common use.
  • Full-immersion virtual reality (FIVR) will exist wherein AI game masters constantly tailor environments, NPCs and events to suit each player’s needs and to keep them entertained. Every human will have his own virtual game universe where he’s #1. With no jobs in the real world to occupy them, it’s quite possible that a large fraction of the human race will willingly choose to live in FIVR. (Related to the satisfaction paradox) Elements of these virtual environments could be pornographic and sexual, allowing people to gratify any type of sexual fetish or urge with computer-generated scenarios and partners. 
  • More generally, AIs and humans whose creativity is turbocharged by machines will create enjoyable, consumable content (e.g. – films, TV shows, songs, artwork, jokes, new types of meals) faster than non-augmented humans can consume it. As a simple example of what this will be like, assume you have 15 hours of free time per day, that you love spending it listening to music, and each day, your favorite bands produce 16 hours worth of new songs that you really like.
  • The vast majority of unaugmented human beings will no longer be assets that can invent things and do useful work: they will be liabilities that do (almost) everything worse than intelligent machines and augmented humans. Ergo, the size of a nation’s human population will subtract from its economic and military power, and radical shifts in geopolitics are possible. Geographically large but sparsely populated countries like Russia, Australia and Canada might become very strong.
  • The transition to green energy sources will be complete, and humans will no longer be net emitters of greenhouse gases. The means will exist to start reducing global temperatures to restore the Earth to its pre-industrial state, but people will resist because they will have gotten used to the warmer climate. People living in Canada and Russia won’t want their countries to get cold again.
  • Synthetic meat will taste no different from animal meat, and will be at least as cheap to make. The raising and/or killing of animals for food will be be illegal in many countries, and trends will clearly show the practice heading for worldwide ban. 
  • The means to radical alter human bodies, alter memories, and alter brain structures will be available. The fundamental bases of human existence and human social dynamics will change unpredictably once differences in appearance/attractiveness, intelligence, and personality traits can be eliminated at will. Individuals won’t be defined by fixed attributes anymore. 
  • Brain implants will make “telepathy” possible between humans, machines and animals. Computers, sensors and displays will be embedded everywhere in the built environment and in nature, allowing humans with brain implants to interface with and control things around them through thought alone. 
  • Brain implants and brain surgeries will also be used to enhance IQ, change personality traits, and strengthen many types of skills. 
  • Technologically augmented humans and androids will have many abilities and qualities that ancient people considered “Godlike,” such as medical immortality, the ability to control objects by thought, telepathy, perfect memories, and superhuman senses.
  • Flying cars designed to carry humans could be common, but they will be flown by machines, not humans. Ground vehicles will retain many important advantages (fuel efficiency, cargo capacity, safety, noise level, and more) and won’t become obsolete. Instead of flying cars, it’s more likely that there will be millions of small, autonomous helicopters and VTOL aircraft that will cheaply ferry people through dense, national networks of helipads and airstrips. Autonomous land vehicles would take take passengers to and from the landing sites. (https://www.militantfuturist.com/why-flying-cars-never-took-off-and-probably-never-will/
  • The notion of vehicles (e.g. – cars, planes, and boats) polluting the air will be an alien concept. 
  • Advanced nanomachines could exist.
  • Vastly improved materials and routine use of very advanced computer design simulations (including simulations done in quantum computers) will mean that manufactured objects of all types will be optimally engineered in every respect, and might seem to have “magical” properties. For example, a car will be made of hundreds of different types of alloys, plastics, and glass, each optimized for a different part of the vehicle, and car recalls will never happen since the vehicles will undergo vast amounts of simulated testing in every conceivable driving condition in 1:1 virtual simulations of the real world. 
  • Relatively cheap interplanetary travel (probably just to Mars and to space stations and moons that are about as far as Mars) will exist.
  • Androids that are outwardly indistinguishable from humans will exist, and humans will hold no advantages over them (e.g. – physical dexterity, fine motor control, appropriateness of facial expressions, capacity for creative thought). Some androids will also be indistinguishable to the touch, meaning they will seem to be made of supple flesh and will be the same temperature as human bodies. However, their body parts will not be organic.
  • Sex robots will be indistinguishable from humans.
  • Machines that are outwardly indistinguishable from animals will also exist, and they will have surveillance and military applications. 
  • Drones, miniaturized smart weapons, and AIs will dominate warfare, from the top level of national strategy down to the simplest act of combat. The world’s strongest military could, with conventional weapons alone, destroy most of the world’s human population in a short period of time. 
  • The construction and daily operation of prisons will have been fully automated, lowering the monetary costs of incarceration. As such, state prosecutors and judges will no longer feel pressure to let accused criminals have plea deals or to give them shorter prison sentences to ease the burdens of prison overcrowding and high overhead costs. 
  • The term “millionaire” will fall out of use in the U.S. and other Western countries since inflation will have rendered $1 million USD only as valuable as $90,000 USD was in 2019 (assuming a constant inflation rate of 3.0%).  
  • There will still be major wealth and income inequality across the human race. However, wealth redistribution, better government services, advances in industrial productivity, and better technologies will ensure that even people in the bottom 1% have all their basic and intermediate life needs meet. In many ways, the poor people of 2100 will have better lives than the rich people of 2020.

2101 – 2200 AD

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

Review: “Terminator – Dark Fate”

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

Plot:

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis:

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

A Terminator amphibious landing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

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