However, the concept of an intelligent machine uprising dates to 1872, when English writer Samuel Butler published the book Erehwon. In it, the main character visits a futuristic, closed society that banned machines because they were improving too fast and people feared they would become smarter than humans and take over. Butler was inspired by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and by the rapid industrialization he saw in England over his lifetime. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/butler-samuel/1872/erewhon/ch23.htm
“People occlusion” is an awesome new phrase. This technique, coupled with better object recognition algorithms, will lead to a revolution in augmented reality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkS-VqAss4s
A new machine can pump oxygenated blood into donor hearts and lungs, keeping them viable for transplant several hours longer than the current maximum. Technologies like this will someday benefit human cryonics. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-51975351
In the U.S., black people might have higher blood pressure than whites because the former have more skin pigment, which blocks UV light from entering skin cells. When light enters those cells, it triggers the release of nitric oxide into the bloodstream, which lowers blood pressure. The blood pressure disparity partly explains why whites live longer than blacks. https://www.outsideonline.com/2411055/free-fitness-apps-online-classes-programs
More on the project to map all the world’s seafloor by 2030: 75% of it will only be mapped to a measly fidelity of 1 depth measurement per 400 x 400 meter grid square. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3263/8/2/63/html
“There are physical limits to how small we can make [information] storage particles…Once we conquer the ultimate small storage particle, we will be able to set standards – both standards for information and standards for storage.” https://futuristspeaker.com/future-scenarios/the-future-of-libraries/
Self-replicating Bracewell probes might be ideal for exploring and monitoring the galaxy. They would have limited AI and downgraded technology, and would only be able to make copies of themselves, transmit data back to the home planet, and talk to other intelligent species if certain conditions were meant. Such probes would be too handicapped to start thinking for themselves and turn against the home planet, and if one were captured or destroyed, it wouldn’t be much of a loss since it would only contain second-rate technology and no information about the home planet. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bracewell_probe&oldid=908951238
The ongoing coronavirus quarantine reveals how autonomous, electric cars will improve things: in many cities, air pollution and traffic jams have nearly disappeared because people aren’t driving. The skies are bluer in Los Angeles than many residents can remember. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/22/climate/coronavirus-usa-traffic.html
The White House announced at a press conference that coronavirus will probably kill 100,000 – 240,000 Americans. That’s actually not the worst-case scenario, as it is built on assumptions that the strict quarantine measures stay in place. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/31/trump-briefing-coronavirus-158079
In early 2015, Bill Gates gave a TED Talk about the world’s unreadiness for a pandemic. The scenario he described was almost a dead ringer for today’s coronavirus outbreak. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI
Gates was probably citing this statement Elon Musk made three months earlier: “I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.” https://bigthink.com/ideafeed/elon-musk-we-should-be-very-careful-about-artificial-intelligence
The superstructure jutting up from an aircraft carrier’s deck is called it’s “island,” and it is full of human crewmen whose jobs require them to see the vessel’s surroundings. One specialized compartment, called the “island camera room,” is there so a person can video record aircraft takeoffs and landings for safety and training reasons. The latest U.S. carriers have deleted the room and replaced with with CCTV cameras that a person monitors from an office room below decks. Would a fully automated aircraft carrier need anything more than a skeletal tower with cameras and other sensors mounted on it as its island? https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32614/heres-what-this-panoramic-windowed-room-does-on-american-aircraft-carriers
North Korean fighter plane squadrons secretly fought U.S. planes during the Vietnam War. ‘Vietnamese pilot Dinh said of the Koreans: “They kept everything secret, so we didn’t know their loss ratio, but the North Korean pilots claimed 26 American aircraft destroyed. Although they fought very bravely in the aerial battles, they were generally too slow and too mechanical in their reactions when engaged, which is why so many of them were shot down by the Americans. They never followed flight instructions and regulations either.”‘ https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/yes-north-korea-sent-jets-and-pilots-fight-america-vietnam-134227
Smart bombs keep getting smarter. The “BLU-129” is a standard-sized bomb (500 lbs and 7 ft. long), but the size of its explosion can be dialed up or down by the bomber crew, even after they’ve dropped it. This lets us minimize collateral damage if the bomb is dropped, but a few seconds before it hits, a little kid walks into the target area. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/blu-12-bomb-air-forces-new-aerial-sniper-129187
Video of a low-flying, supersonic jet shattering the windows of buildings. Sonic booms are one of the main reasons supersonic passenger jets never became popular. https://youtu.be/2eoTqLnL0WI
‘A former F-16 pilot, Lee also has 1,500 hours in the [F-4] Phantom. He still recalls the first time he took to the air in one. “I was shocked at how much more difficult it was to fly than I thought it would be,” he told me. “When I got home, I told my wife, ‘I think I just traded in a Porsche for a ’72 Cadillac.”‘ https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/where-have-all-the-phantoms-gone-96320627/
Here’s a fascinating article on “rarefaction wave” (RAVEN) guns, which are tank cannons that vent gas out of their backs kind of like recoilless rifles (e.g. – bazookas). If RAVEN weapons are fully developed, they could let small, light tanks fire powerful shells that only today’s heavy tanks can shoot. ‘A general rule of thumb, according to Technology of Tanks, from Jane’s, is that a vehicle needs to weigh about one ton for every nine hundred newtons of force exerted on it. This means for the current 120-millimeter M256 cannon shooting a M829A3 Anti-Tank Shell, a vehicle would have to weigh twenty-five tons to withstand the recoil force.’ Interestingly, that means a tank as small as a T-55 (weighs 36 tons) could be retrofitted with the same, powerful cannon as the U.S. M1 Abrams. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-us-army-wants-put-big-guns-small-tanks-23041
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.
Recently, I read an article about the history of the long-defunct human telephone switchboard operator profession:
“Users of the telephone in the late 19th century and early 20th century couldn’t dial their calls themselves. Instead, they picked up their handset and were greeted by an operator, almost always a woman, who asked for the desired phone number and placed the call.”
“…An operator did more than simply connect a customer to his or her desired number, however. In the early decades of the industry, telephone companies regarded their business less as a utility and more as a personal service. The telephone operator was central to this idea, acting as an early version of an intelligent assistant with voice recognition capabilities. She got to know her 50 to 100 assigned customers by name and knew their needs. If a party didn’t answer, she would try to find him or her around town. If that didn’t succeed, she took a message and called the party again later to pass the message along. She made wake-up calls and gave the time, weather, and sports scores. During crimes in progress or medical emergencies, a subscriber needed only to pick up the handset and the operator would summon the police or doctors.“
At its height around midcentury, this field employed 342,000 people in the U.S. By the end of the century, the field was dead, with nearly all of the jobs replaced by machines. Phone users dialed numbers into their devices themselves, and the calls were automatically connected. As the article makes clear, the automation process was partly driven by cost: as real wages for low-level jobs rose and workers came to expect higher pay, it got increasingly hard to entice people to be operators with salaries that would let the phone companies remain profitable. While automatic switchboards were faster, many “free” conveniences previously offered by human operators, like wake-up calls and news announcements, disappeared.
That is, until the rise of cell phones, smartphones and digital personal assistants. Smartphones can be easily programmed with lists of other people’s phone numbers, and can understand and execute verbal instructions like “Call Dad,” which is little different from how people interacted with human operators in the past. This amenity has returned. Also, if a person you are calling doesn’t pick up his or her phone, you don’t need to task a human being with re-calling them until they pick up–you simply leave them a voicemail message or text them. The fact that most people have switched from landlines to cell phones that they always carry on themselves sharply reduces the frequency of missed connections, anyway. Smartphones can be customized in a few minutes to display continuous updates on weather, sports game scores, or anything else. Pulling a small device out of your pocket and glancing at its screen is a faster way to get information than calling a human, vocalizing a question, and waiting for them to find the answer and say it to you. Finally, voice-enabled personal assistants like Siri can understand and execute spoken orders from their users requesting medical or police help.
Even though technology destroyed hundreds of thousands of human jobs, in a sense, it also brought the jobs back from the customers’ perspectives by providing the same services, and for less money. This made me wonder which extinct jobs formerly done by humans would “come back” in the future thanks to better technologies. Here’s what I came up with in short order:
Gas station attendants
It used to be common for gas stations to have workers who inserted gas nozzles into customers’ cars and filled them up. They also did minor car-related tasks like cleaning windows, checking fluid levels, and checking tire pressure. It saved a little bit of time for drivers, and was more convenient for them since they didn’t have to exit their cars. Gas station attendants disappeared after the oil crises of the 1970s, when gas station owners were forced to cut costs.
New cars in most advanced countries are now required to have computerized tire pressure monitoring sensors that alert their drivers if the pressure in any tire is low, so technology has already resurrected that service. In the short-to-medium run, the other tasks formerly done by gas station attendants will be done or rendered moot by ride hailing services like Uber and by electric cars.
From an Uber customer’s perspective, all of the maintenance and repair needs of the vehicle they are riding in are satisfied unseen, and on someone else’s time. The Uber cab always shows up clean, in good running order, and fully-fueled. Electric cars also don’t need oil, eliminating the most important vehicle fluid, and thus sharply reducing the frequency with which the fluids in aggregate should be checked.
In the longer-run, robots will do all the tasks that human gas station attendants used to do, making the conveniences commonly available once again, this time to private car owners and Uber vehicle owners. Imagine your robot butler plugging a power cable into your electric car every night and unplugging it before you left for work the next day, or robots doing the same at charging stations. In the future, governments could mandate the installation of simple sensors in cars that continuously monitored fluid levels, or robots at your house or at charging stations could periodically lift the hood to visually check them. Wiping down car windows will also be automated once autonomous cars become common, and owners can push one button to tell them to drive to the nearest car wash to have themselves cleaned. Additionally, if the private car ownership model is overtaken by the ride hailing Uber model, the dominant companies will have large facilities where their vehicle fleets are routinely serviced and recharged by machines.
Slaves / servants
The history of slavery is well-known today, but it is often forgotten that, in the past, low-paid, often live-in servants were also common. Even lower-middle-class households in the U.S. and elsewhere usually had servants of some kind to do menial household tasks like cleaning floors and cooking meals. In the U.S. and Britain, it was widespread until the 1960s. The labor rights movement and the opening of better job opportunities led to the near-collapse of the servant industry, and for generations it has only been accessible to rich people who can afford to pay high enough wages.
It was once common, even among lower-middle-class households, to have at least one servant.
As I said in a previous blog entry, I predict robot butlers and intelligent personal assistant AIs will allow average-income people to have servants once again. There will be a day when the thought of washing and folding one’s own laundry again becomes unthinkable to average people.
Radio actors
From 1920 until the popularization of television in the 1950s, radio broadcasts were the primary means through which people got entertainment and news content. And just as there are TV stars and movie stars, there were radio stars during that medium’s era of dominance. Though forgotten today, those radio actors were once household names, were masters of diction and the art of speaking, and performed plays, mystery shows, soap operas, and many other types of shows that commanded audiences of millions.
Scene from the set of the popular radio show “Gangbusters,” which aired for 21 years.
Radio will never reclaim its primacy over motion picture entertainment, but I think audiobooks will have a renaissance thanks to new technologies, and the high production standards and outstanding voice acting that listeners commonly enjoyed during the Golden Age of Radio will return. Text-to-speech computer programs can of course be used to easily convert any book into an audio file, though the subtler aspects of the text, like the pacing of the words and the emotional intonations and volumes of the character’s speech, are not carried over. In the near future, these technical problems will be solved, and there will be simple and powerful computer programs that let anyone make high-quality audiobooks in little time.
After a book’s text was uploaded, the program would be smart enough to tell which text corresponded to which characters, or to the third person storyteller. The human user would be made to assign each character a different voice picked from a wide selection of options (varied with respect to sex, age, race, nationality, and other qualities), each of which would sound like a real person. The voices of famous people could even be used. The user would then listen to the recording from start to finish, and would be able to stop the recording to fix mistakes the machine made, such as assigning lines of text to the wrong character voice, or voicing a line of dialog with the wrong tone, speed, or emotion. Making those kinds of corrections could involve a simple process where the user speaks the words into a microphone in the correct manner, and the machine reproduces that detailed speech pattern, but in the character’s voice. The program would also let the user easily add sound effects–many of which would be artificially generated and not recordings of real noises–and background music.
This kind of technology is entirely within reach, and merely builds upon those that already exist, like advanced voice mimicry and sound-effect-generating algorithms. It will empower untrained individuals to, at little or no expense, make high-quality audio productions that rival the professionally made radio shows of the last century.
Mudlarks
Mudlarks were the “dumpster divers” of the 1700s and 1800s–they were poor kids and old people who sifted through the muddy banks of city rivers looking for objects they could resell. At the time, waste management practices were primitive, and people would throw their trash into waterways. Things often fell overboard from boats plying the waters through cities. While the end of mudlarking as a job was a positive development for society, something of value was lost to society since there was no one left to find and recycle useful things that had been dropped in the water.
Mudlarks at work. It was an unsanitary job that only persisted thanks to abject poverty and a lack of better options.
I think technology will bring mudlarking back in a sense. For one, if robots and AIs take most human jobs, then people will have more time to indulge in their hobbies, even if the financial returns are negligible. That means the number of people who do things like mudlarking, magnet fishing, and metal detecting will increase. In the longer run, those pursuits will be automated, and we’ll use millions of cheap, autonomous machines to gradually comb over the Earth’s surface–including riverbanks and the bottoms of bodies of water–for hyperaccurate mapping, archaeology, waste removal, and recycling (particularly in the case of metal objects since it’s much cheaper to recycle existing metal than to mine and refine metal ore). This derives from my more general prediction that robots will clean up all of the garbage created in human history by the end of the next century.
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.
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.
As I said in a recent blog entry, my interest in futurism and my habit of making written predictions about the future predate the creation of this blog by many years. Previously, I used Facebook as my platform for publishing those ideas, and in December 2009, I took my first shot at making a written list of personal predictions. The document’s title, “Predictions for the next decade,” is self-explanatory, and as it is now the end of the decade, I’d like to rate my accuracy. [Spoiler: I did a great job overall.]
Below, I’ve coped and pasted the text of the original Facebook note, and interspersed present-day evaluations of my predictions in square brackets and bold text. I’ve even carried over the pictures that were embedded in the original.
Predictions for the next decade December 25, 2009 at 2:57 PM
The first decade of the 2000’s (which should actually be called the “Oughties”) is just a few days from being over, and I thought I’d render a couple serious predictions for the “teen years.” Most of you probably don’t know this, but I am a futurist and like reading serious books written by scientists about what they think the future will be like. The granddaddy of these people is Ray Kurzweil, and I encourage you to take a couple minutes to read about the guy’s life, beliefs and predictions (failed and confirmed) here:
As you can see from Kurzweil’s “2009” predictions, he’s about 50% right, 25% maybe right or wrong, and 25% flat wrong. While I think he’s definitely on the right track with his predictions, his big problems are that he overestimates the rate of technological advance–particularly where it concerns improvements to the “thinking” abilities of computers–and the willingness of people to accept new technologies. Kurzweil also sticks his neck out too often by proclaiming that one, specific type of technology will be in use by year X. When it doesn’t happen, his credibility is impeached.
[I still believe these things.]
Anyway, a detailed overview of my views on Kurzweil will have to wait for a later note. For now, let me tell you what I think the world will be like by the end of 2019.
The Political World
Obama wins the 2012 elections. Let’s face it: The same coalition of minorities and young people that elected Obama in 2008 are going to rally to his defense in 2012. The Republicans don’t have any obvious “golden boy” right now either. The only way Obama can lose is if he colossally screws up (or at least if Americans perceive it that way), which doesn’t seem likely given his intelligence. I’m not sure if Biden will run in 2016, but just remember that the guy will be 74 at that time, which will make him older than McCain was in 2008. There’s no way in hell I or anyone else can guess about who will win the 2016 elections, so I won’t try.
[I was right about everything! Also, I think the Democrats now have these same problems going in to the 2020 election: They don’t have an obvious “golden boy,” there’s not enough time left for one to emerge out of the woodwork, all of their Presidential candidates are seriously flawed in some way, and Joe Biden’s age problem is worse than ever! However, Trump’s voter base today is smaller than Obama’s voter base was in 2012, so even a seriously flawed Democratic opponent could beat him. The 2020 race is on such a knife’s edge that I can’t assign odds right now to the outcome, other than to say whoever wins will be disappointing.]
Sorry folks, but we still have a two-party system in 2019. Our institutions and people are simply too heavily geared towards supporting it.
[Sadly, I was right. However, since 2009, I’ve become less convinced that a three- or four-party system will help much, so we’re not much worse off as a nation than we otherwise would have been. Other governments show that, as the amount of political diversity grows, so does political gridlock. The need to sacrifice principles to make pragmatic, messy compromises that “keep the lights on” never goes away. My changed attitude towards this issue is a good example of how I’ve become less idealistic/more jaded over the last ten years from having more time to observe how the world really works.]
The U.S. will still be the world’s most powerful country politically, economically, militarily, culturally, diplomatically, and technologically, though China has closed much of that gap. On the subject of China, I think it’s important to remember that it is a country currently in social, political and economic transition, and it faces enormous challenges and pressures for change in the future. In no particular order, let me go through these. First, China has a growing gender imbalance that could threaten its internal stability. Thanks to a patriarchal culture and the one-child-per-family policy, abortions of female children are widespread and produce a sex disparity in the population (i.e. – If you can only have one kid, might as well make it count and have a boy). By the end of 2019, 24 million young Chinese men of marrying age will be unable to find wives. Having a lot of young, unattached males who aren’t getting enough sex hanging around inside your country is bad news, as the conservative societies of the Middle East show us. These guys tend to start a lot of trouble (terrorism, riots, reform movements, etc.).
[I was right! In fact, the Chinese sex imbalance is even worse than I estimated (some sources say there are 34 million more men than women there). Fortunately for China, this hasn’t translated into a mass civil unrest, and the single, young men are handling it with stiff upper lips and lots of erotic anime cartoons. The ongoing protests in Hong Kong aren’t being driven by the sex imbalance, and in fact, the city has a significant surplus of single, young women.]
Second, China faces another demographic problem in the form of its aging population: By the end of 2019, around 20% of all Chinese will be 60 or older, and that proportion will only grow with time. Frankly speaking (as I always do), old people sap national resources through pensions and medical services, as we see in our own country with Social Security and Medicare (and it is even worse at the state level in many cases). The graying of China’s population is going to cause large, direct decreases in the GDP growth rate, which will have a ripple effect through the entire country and all other segments of its society. Of course, the Chinese would be able to overcome this problem by increasing the number of young people to support the old through taxes, though it’s questionable whether such increases could be accomplished by 2019: Even if the Chinese government were to rescind the birth restrictions, it probably wouldn’t lead to sufficient population growth since many Chinese now have a Westernized mindset and are more concerned with personal growth and accomplishment than they are with having kids. Increasing immigration is another possibility, and while I do think a significantly greater share of China’s population will be foreign by 2019, the Chinese are simply too xenophobic to allow enough immigrants in anytime soon.
[I was mostly right! The share of China’s population that is 60 or older is in fact 17-18% now, so my original estimate was too high (not sure where I got it from) but still in the ballpark. In 2015, China raised the birth limit to two children per family, but it failed to spur a baby boom that was large enough to alter the country’s negative demographic trajectory. Mass immigration of workers also hasn’t happened in China.]
Third, China’s rapid industrial growth has caused serious environmental damage that will be much worse by 2019 and that will put another constraint on their GDP growth. Not only is the country the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, it is also the worst offender (or one of the worst) when it comes to a slew of other types of pollutants like sulfur dioxide and heavy metals. Fishing stocks near China’s coasts have also been almost exhausted, northern China is facing desertification and depletion of aquifers, and elsewhere in the country people riot on a near-daily basis over pollution and its effects. I’m not going to go into this in full detail, but there’s a great 2007 article in Foreign Affairs entitled “The Great Leap Backwards?” that covers the full extent of the damage if you want to read about it.
[Thankfully, the most dire extrapolations of China’s pollution trends didn’t pan out. China’s CO2 emissions have grown over the last ten years, so it pumps out more of the gas than ever before, but the rate of that growth has gotten much lower. Its levels of sulfur dioxide and air particulate emissions have also dropped over the last decade thanks to stricter laws. Environmental damage is probably hurting Chinese GDP growth less than I predicted, which actually makes me happy.]
Fourth, I think China’s global influence is going to hit a wall because the country doesn’t really stand for anything. It’s international behavior is clearly self-interested in all respects, and the country doesn’t have much of a vision–ideological or otherwise–to offer the world. Contrast this with the U.S., which has for decades sought to spread political freedom, economic freedom, free trade, and human rights, and which openly works for a future world free from want and oppression. Yes, I know that sounds very preachy of me, and yes, I realize that our pursuit of those goals has been inconsistent for various reasons, but I think we do the best we can given the constraints and that our presence moves the world in a positive direction overall. Having grand ideas and a nice-sounding ideology resonates with people across the world on a very basic level, and this is an area in which China is severely lacking.
[I was right. China is still viewed as a self-interested player on the international stage and has few good friends. The friends it has made through investment in Africa and in the Belt and Road Initiative would walk away as soon as the money stopped flowing.]
Fifth, by 2019, China’s economic growth rate will have slowed no matter what since there are only so many low-hanging fruits you can harvest. China’s statism isn’t going to be able to deliver results once the country’s economy moves beyond a low-wage export model and innovation and entrepreneurship become the pillars of further growth, as they are in the Developed World. Really, that touches upon one of China’s biggest problems–it’s government. Ignoring the traditional American complaints about the disregard for human and political rights (most Chinese don’t really care about these), the Chinese Communist Party simply isn’t going to be efficient enough or responsive enough to meet the expectations of the Chinese people once they become more educated, sophisticated and wealthy and once the aforementioned problems start to have a real impact. Political change and a period of social instability in China are hence inevitable and might happen by 2019 or be about to happen. The operative word in that sentence is “might.”
[I was right about China’s economic growth rate shrinking during the 2010s, but wrong about the CCP’s ability to hold on to power. The last decade has shown the Party to be more adept at tracking and shaping the opinions of its people and defusing potential crises than I anticipated.]
Such a transition might lead to a wonderful outcome or to disaster. It’s always possible that the CCP could, during a time of internal crisis, try to divert attention and to unify the country by playing on the strong nationalism of its people and agitating over Taiwan, the Spratly Islands or something else (Pride, and somewhat by extension nationalism, is the quintessential human flaw). That, of course, would bring China into conflict with us, but the such a subject is too large to be discussed here. Suffice it to say that any U.S.-China military conflict–even if waged with strictly conventional weapons–would be terrible no matter who won and would lead to a dramatically altered international economic and diplomatic balance of power that the losing side would be extremely bitter over. Let me be clear: A war between China and the U.S. is extremely unlikely (largely due to economic linkages), and I think it would only have a chance of happening if China’s government got really desperate and felt it had more to gain from such a war than it would lose or if some fool in Taiwan tried to declare independence. The point is that there’s a possibility of conflict.
In any case, by 2019, China won’t be able to beat the U.S. in combat under most circumstances. They might be able to win the opening stages of a war over Taiwan, but that’s only because Taiwan is just a few miles from China whereas it’s across the biggest ocean in the world from the U.S. In an all-out industrial war like WWII, China will still get beaten as badly in 2019 as in 2009, assuming the American people are willing to fight as hard as they did in WWII (actually not such a safe assumption). On that note, it’s worth keeping in mind that, while China’s military capabilities are rapidly growing, they have a very long way to go to catch up to America’s. We’re talking at least 50 years here. The exact same applies to their economy. Think China’s rich? Compare their per capita GDP with America’s. Even adjusted for PPP, it’s not even close.
[I was right. Today, China remains too weak to beat the U.S. military, and is too weak to take over and hold onto Taiwan. Regarding my “50 year” prediction, I think China’s naval and air forces could be strong enough in as little as 20 years to beat U.S. forces in a war for the “First Island Chain,” but that’s not the same as saying China’s military will be better in every way, and able to beat the U.S. military in any type of engagement and in any part of the world.]
I think it’s useful to remember another episode from our recent history when thinking about China’s projected rise. In the 1980’s, Americans were absolutely convinced that Japan was going to surpass us and become the world’s economic superpower. All of the economic trend lines pointed to such an outcome. But guess what happened? Overinvestment in land and the stock market (done out of the expectation of high future returns indicated by all those upward trend lines) formed a bubble, which popped and led to a recession (similar to our current problem). Unemployment went up, causing consumer spending to go way down. Government stimulus attempts were ineffective. Japan’s elderly population was also a major drain. Something similar could happen to China (though a gradual leveling of GDP growth is also possible), and at some point in the future, we might all be laughing about how worried we were back in 2009 or 2019 about this other Asian juggernaut.
[A Japan-style economic slowdown could still hit China, so my prediction from 2009 still stands. However, I’m far less concerned about the “total meltdown” scenario where China has an economic depression AND a political implosion AND attacks its neighbors, dragging in the U.S. Over the last decade, the CCP has proven itself smarter and more cool-headed than to let such a thing happen.]
[In the original Facebook note, I detoured into a discussion of Chinese history at this point. While interesting, I’m omitting it because it isn’t about futurism.]
…The Chinese respect Americans and Europeans for their accomplishments, but still believe that it was really just a fluke that the West happened to be more advanced than China back starting in the 1800’s when it began expanding into East Asia. The Chinese are extremely proud of their country’s economic, political and military ascension and think that the end result will merely be the righting of wrongs and the establishment of the world order as it always should have been, with China at the natural center. The problem is, there is a real chance these ambitions could be frustrated for the reasons I have discussed, and a wounded and bitter China obsessed with failed expectations would be a menace to everyone.
There is a small chance we could see such a world by 2019, or that we could see it on the horizon. Or, China might defy all expectations, overcome its problems and be on its way to taking the reins of global leadership. Or it could be in some middle ground. The point is that China’s future is really uncertain, and owing to the country’s size and strength, this is a major issue we will need to involve ourselves with.
Moving on, Iraq has an at least even chance of still being a stable country by 2019, with a democratic–albeit highly corrupt–government. I’m not saying it’s going to be paradise, but it will be able to take care of itself, and no one will worry about it facing state collapse. Iraq will still be getting a lot of U.S. aid to keep it stable, and I could see small numbers of American troops still in the country for special purposes like training the Iraqi army and fighting terrorists, but we’re not going to be losing many guys, so no one will care. On the other hand, there’s also the real chance that Iraq could hold together for only a short period after the U.S. withdraw, and then start disintegrating again. Such a development would initiate a new national debate over here on whether or not to send troops back in, which I believe we ultimately would.
[I was right! When I wrote the original note, there were about 125,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. By early 2012, it had dropped to 5,000. As I thought might happen, Iraq started disintegrating shortly after, and in 2014, ISIS took over large parts of the country. To confront the new threat, U.S. troop levels again increased, but the intensification of combat was tolerated by the American public because our casualties were low. In 2019, Iraq has returned to being a stable country with a corrupt, democratic government.]
As seemingly hopeless as Afghanistan is, I don’t think Obama is going to cut and run and let it degenerate like we did in the 1990’s. The country will surely be a dump in 2019, but there will be some stability.
[I was right. Afghanistan is probably better than it has been in its history, but the social and economic progress it has made thanks to the U.S. and other countries is paper-thin, and would disintegrate if Afghanistan were left to its own devices. Even Afghans acknowledge this.]
I have no idea how the Iranian nuclear problem is going to be resolved, but some kind of solution will have to be found by 2019. They’ll definitely have the ability to make nukes and warheads by then. Considering the downsides of attacking their nuclear infrastructure, I think it’s entirely possible we might just have to let Iran get the bomb, or at least leave them with the capability to do so.
[An “OK” nuclear deal between the U.S. and Iran existed from 2015-18, and hit the pause button on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Had the deal never existed, and had Iran chosen to develop nuclear weapons as fast as possible, it would have built a nuclear bomb by now. The situation is now in a weird holding pattern, where the Trump administration half-believes it can use sanctions to force Iran to give up nuclear weapons, and Iran is mad about the sanctions but not so much that it’s willing to fully resume nuclear weapon development and risk even worse punishment. As was the case in 2009, I have no idea how this dispute will resolve itself.]
There’s also a good chance the that whole “War on Terror” might have wound down and receded from public consciousness by 2019. Sure, crazy Islamists are always going to be a threat, but I could see the momentum being on our side by 2019 and the enemy ranks thinned to a manageable level. It won’t necessarily happen, but it’s a real possibility.
[I was right!]
Also, at current rates, Medicare will go bankrupt in 2019. Expect this to be a big political issue in the 2016 elections. We’ll find a solution to the problem, though I doubt it will be an efficient or cheap one.
[I was wrong. This hurts because it was a particularly sloppy prediction of mine. The Medicare program, by design, can’t “go bankrupt,” nor was there any chance of it running out of money by 2019. I have no idea what inspired that prediction.]
Oh yeah, Fidel Castro dies by 2019 for sure. Kim Jong-Il also has a good chance of being dead by then. I’m not sure what effect it will have on either country, though I’m more optimistic about Cuba moderating in the coming years. Hosni Mubarak is also going to be kicking the bucket, along with Pope Benedict.
[Muhaha! Castro and Kim died in 2016 and 2011, respectively, and Cuba did “moderate” a great deal during the 2010s, though it is still not a free country. Mubarak and Benedict didn’t die, but they both were effectively removed from the picture due to a coup (2011) and resignation (2013), respectively.]
Warfare and military stuff
By 2019, unmanned military vehicles are going to be more prolific and advanced than they are now. Expect to see unmanned boats and trucks in common American military use. The machines will mostly be under the control of remote human operators.
[I got ahead of myself. Unmanned aircraft are more sophisticated and more numerous in the U.S. military and peer militaries, but unmanned land vehicles and ships are still experimental, so I don’t consider them to be in “common” use.]
Reaper UAV
Of course, the core of our fighting forces will still be human beings, and you’ll still be seeing guys kicking down doors, sleeping in tents and chasing down some rusted AK-47 wielding bums out in some forsaken country even in 2019. Expect that to continue for a couple more decades.
On that note, in addition to Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. will doubtless involve itself in a number of small conflicts and operations in the Third World. Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere in Africa seem like the best bets for this.
[Wow, I was super right! The level of violence in Yemen is much worse than it was in 2009, and though U.S. troops aren’t on the ground there, American weapons and indirect support are propping up one faction. U.S. troops did combat operations in Somalia over the past decade and there is now at least one U.S. base there. Elsewhere in Africa, the U.S. military involved itself in conflicts in Libya and Niger, and built a base in the latter. The U.S. also intervened in the Syrian civil war and actually invaded the country. I predict this kind of global policing will continue at about the same level during the 2020s. ]
WWIII–as in, a huge war between the major powers–is highly unlikely though not impossible. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.
Cyberwarfare and possibly bioterrorism are much greater threats over the next decade, and I would expect a couple major cyberattacks, not necessarily on the U.S. but against some developed nation. I doubt this would take the form of crippling an entire country, but shutting down all the electricity to a big city isn’t out of the question. While a bioattack could occur, it’s almost certainly just going to involve a normal pathogen like anthrax and won’t be some genetically engineered superbug that kills off half the human race. Sorry to disappoint you apocalypse movie buffs.
[Cyberwarfare did surge in the 2010s, though it overwhelmingly took the form of hacking to steal sensitive data from governments and big companies. There was only one instance of a successful cyberattack meant to shut down a public utility, and it was perpetrated by Russia against Ukraine in 2015.]
The economy
I’m loath to make any predictions here given the huge swings in the global economy we’ve seen over the last two years, but I doubt that we’re headed for some Great Depression part two. The economy will slowly recover, the recession will end, and many Americans will start trying to resume their reckless spending habits. It’s simply an immutable fact about our culture that we are shortsighted and materialistic. I’m not saying things will be as good as they were in 1999 or 2005, but the economy will recover from the recession and will become healthier.
[I was right! In fact, by many measures, the U.S. economy is now stronger than it was in 1999 and 2005. Today’s unemployment rate is the lowest it has been in 50 years. Reckless spending habits are back with a vengeance! SUV sales are higher than ever, and newly constructed houses are bigger than ever.]
However, there’s a giant issue on the horizon that could throw a monkey wrench into all of this–the U.S. budget deficit. This is a major, MAJOR problem that has been kept on the back-burner for years and years while people piddled on about socialized healthcare and the wars. Basically, the U.S. federal government has for almost ten years now been spending way more money than it receives in taxes–the traditional means through which governments are funded. To cover the shortfall, the U.S. has been borrowing money from countries like China, Japan and Saudi Arabia. We now owe these countries trillions of dollars, plus billions in interest, and there are no signs that this dependency is going to shrink in the future if we stay on the present course.
[In the original Facebook note, I went into almost a rant about politics and overspending at this point. I’m omitting most of it because it isn’t relevant to this analysis.]
…Past experience has shown that once national debt reaches a certain % of GDP, foreign and domestic investors start getting spooked about the country’s ability to repay, and they stop lending money to it. Well, we’re getting very close to that point, and between now and 2019, the U.S. will have to make major spending and taxation changes to avoid total disaster. If we don’t take the initiative, most likely our main foreign creditors (China, Japan, Saudi Arabia) are going to start pressuring us in various ways to cut spending and raise taxes. If we don’t, they’ll start reducing their purchases of our Treasury securities.
If we really screw things up by failing to reach some kind of fiscal compromise in Washington, life in America could really, REALLY suck come 2019. However, I think it’s more probable that we will end up going through some tortuous debate within government that ends up with us raising taxes, cutting federal programs, or probably a little of both by 2019, which will avert a major economic crisis.
[I was wrong. At the time, I didn’t realize that there is no hard-and-fast rule about how high your country’s debt-to-GDP ratio level has to get before you have a fiscal crisis. Since the U.S. has the world’s biggest economy, trades heavily with all other major countries, and prints its own currency–which, very importantly, is also the world’s reserve currency–special rules apply to it. To see what happens when your country lacks these advantages, look at what happened to Greece in 2015. That said, I haven’t started thinking that the rising national debt isn’t a problem for the U.S. There are just so many variables at play that I can’t predict when or if a sovereign debt crisis will hit, or how bad it will get before we agree to a solution.]
Technology
There are several clear trends that will continue into 2019. For one, we see the vanishing of physical media to hold data. By 2019, the big DVD and Blu-Ray collections you see in peoples’ houses will largely be a thing of the past, at least among people with half a brain or more. People will just download movies into their computers or computer/TV’s, or pay like $1 to watch them On Demand. The same will also be happening to video games: Instead of having to buy an expensive console and a bunch of game cartridges, or a high-end computer, people will use high-speed Internet connections to stream video game feeds from remote central locations. People will be able to play any game they want at any time at low cost, and they won’t have to buy any hardware except controllers and maybe an adapter. The overall costs to gamers will decrease significantly while access to games will increase tremendously. There will still be a lot of highly advanced consoles around by 2019, but the transition to the new technology will be well underway, and the trend will be clear by that point.
[I was mostly right. Sales of DVDs and Blu Ray discs declined over the last decade while movie streaming has exploded and become the norm. Had you bought Netflix stock in December 2009, when its streaming service was in its infancy, your investment would today be worth 33x as much. I don’t see physical storage media bouncing back. Today’s gamers also do have access to a wider variety of games at lower prices than ever thanks to streaming, as the Playstation Network (PSN) and Steam show. My prediction about the end of game consoles might have been a little optimistic, as Sony and Microsoft are planning to release a new generation of consoles next year, but I still think it will come true at some point. Industry insiders are still talking about the impending transition to streaming.]
Hollywood and the video game industry are going to try hard to push 3D TV on the masses, but I’m not sure how quickly it’s going to catch on. People ARE NOT going to put on a pair of 3D glasses every time they watch TV, especially if the glasses cost a lot of money and each household needs to buy several of them so all family members can watch. Hardcore video gamers might be willing to do it to enhance the gaming experience, but not average people just watching the Cooking Channel or something. People might be more amenable to 3D movies in the theaters, but it’s not going to work at home. I don’t think 3D is really going to catch on until holographic TV’s that can produce 3D pictures for the naked eyes are invented, and I could see these at least being in the prototype stage by 2019.
Don’t get me wrong–3D TV definitely seems like the next big thing (after all, at some point, you can’t increase the resolution of 2D TV any further to be discernable to human eyes, and the industry has to start heading in new directions), but I think the 3D glasses are going to be a big stumbling block, and it’s going to take longer for the technology to gain mass acceptance than industry insiders would like. Another major problem is the fact that regular TV’s–including the expensive flatscreen HDTV’s–can’t display 3D images, and normal Blu-Ray players can’t play them, meaning everyone will have to pay a couple thousand bucks again to get everything replaced. There’s also no standard yet for 3D signal broadcasts, and TV signal bandwidths are going to need time to expand to handle them, anyway.
[I was right! And I’m darn proud about this since, in late 2009, we were in the grips of Avatar hysteria, and one of the film’s selling points was that it was made to be seen in 3D. And yes, glasses-free 3D TV prototypes now exist, including one made by “Mopic.”]
Once 3D motion pictures do start to gain widespread appeal, a mini-industry will spring up to “convert” the old 2D movies to 3D in much the same way that old black and white films were colorized. This might start happening by 2019.
I also wouldn’t be surprised to see digital cameras being sold in stores by 2019 that take both 2D and 3D photos, so you could look at them normally or put on your 3D glasses and see them popping out of the computer screen.
[3D movies and photos still haven’t caught on, and I worded my predictions on this to indicate my justified doubts. When glasses-free 3D TVs and advanced VR/AR eyewear become mature technologies, the conversions of older 2D visual content into 3D format will begin. This will probably start by 2029, and will certainly be widespread by 2039. Additionally, there are indeed digital cameras being sold in stores today that can take 3D photos (such as the $350 Vuze XR), but they aren’t very popular.]
E-readers are finally going to go mainstream within a few years, and will be ubiquitous and cheap by 2019. Sure, there will still be people soldiering on with normal newspapers and books, but those will be on their way out for most people, especially younger ones. You’ll go on a bus or a subway or something and see a whole bunch of people looking at their personal e-readers.
[I was basically right. A brand new, high-quality Amazon Kindle 6″ e-reader costs less than $100 today. E-readers are in fact obsolete now because tablet computers got much cheaper and better over the last decade and have many more functions than e-readers. It’s worth it to pay a little extra money to get a device that is so much better. Larger smartphones (sometimes called “phablets”) have also eaten up part of the e-reader market share. It is indeed very common, and in fact the norm, to see people on buses or subways looking at their personal devices, though most of the time it’s a smartphone instead of an e-reader.]
Typical e-reader [in 2009]
Along those lines, by 2019, I think almost every college student will have a laptop or some tabletlike portable computer (maybe an e-reader with an attached stylus and keyboard) that they would bring to class and do most of their work on. These should also be pretty common among high schoolers, though don’t expect pencils and paper to be anywhere near gone by 2019 in schools.
There’s also going to be a massive increase in the number of amateur recorded videos. At the rates that computer memory costs are decreasing and digital camcorder technology is improving, by 2019 you could feasibly record every second of your entire, boring life–in good quality video–and save it onto your computer or put it onto the Internet. By 2019, also expect basically half the human race to have a high-quality digital camcorder built into their cell phone, computer, slim digital camera, or WHATEVER, and also expect there to be a lot more surveillance cameras everywhere. Between those developments, expect an explosion in “citizen journalism” and voyeurism, and expect for virtually every single disaster (plane crash, tornado, riot), public crime, or act of public obnoxiousness to be recorded and posted onto the Internet within hours for everyone around the world to see. Yeah, I know things are already kind of like this, I’m just saying you should expect it to be ten times more intense and pervasive by 2019. And things will only get worse from there.
[Oh my God I was right! You could strap a GoPro camera to your chest, record 720p footage with audio, and make 90 GB of video per day (assuming you skip the nine hours per day when you’re sleeping and showering). Applying lossless compression to the footage, you could reduce the file size by at least 50%. The resulting 45 GB of data you made each day could be saved onto personal hard drives. A 2TB HDD costs $50 today, and could store 44.4 days worth of videos, meaning it would only cost slightly more than $1/day to make and save recordings of almost all your waking hours. That price will of course drop in the future as computer memory gets cheaper. Moving on, in rich and middle-income countries, over half of adults have smartphones. Even in poor India, over 24% have smartphones, and another 40% have “dumb cell phones,” most of which surely have built-in cameras. My prediction about an explosion in the amount of amateur and semi-professional video content being uploaded to the Internet was also obviously right. In fact, it’s now common for public crimes and acts of obnoxiousness to be recorded by multiple people and from different angles.]
More generally, by 2019, physical computer memory will be so cheap that for about $50 you could buy more memory than you could ever put to any practical use. For instance, if you scanned every important personal document, photograph and home movie into your computer and also added in all the songs you liked along with pdf copies of all your favorite books, it wouldn’t come anywhere close to filling up your hard disk. By 2019, the only way you could exceed the memory capacity of an average computer would be extreme and pointless hording of data: You would have to save 100 or more Blu-Ray quality movies onto your hard drive, or download hundreds of thousands of songs (which would easily include every famous song ever written), have dozens of high-end computer games (circa 2019) on your computer at once, or record every second of your life with hi-def cameras in order to have a problem with disk space. Bottom line: By 2019, computer hard disk space is effectively infinite for normal people.
[I was right. As mentioned, $50 today will buy you a 2TB hard drive, which contains more space than the vast majority of people need. There’s no reason to save movies and music onto your personal drives thanks to cloud storage and streaming.]
It will also be a lot faster and easier to upload videos and pictures to the Internet by 2019. I could see a lot of people using digital cameras that have GPS sensors in them or some other type of location fixing device/software, so every picture and video would automatically be tagged by the device with information on where it was taken. People could easily search and view videos and pictures over the Internet by searching for images of a certain geographic area.
[I was right about it all! Smartphones automatically embed the GPS coordinates into a photo’s metadata at the moment the photo is taken, though this feature can be disabled. ]
I’d also expect electronic media to be embedded in a lot of magazines, books, wall ads, and products by 2019, meaning you open up a copy of the December 2019 issue of Maxim, and several of the pages feature paper-thin computer displays with moving images and sounds. Most of these will probably be advertisements. I could also see a lot of billboards and wall ads being like this by 2019, and people no longer being shocked or fascinated by them–they’ll just be an everyday thing. If you want an idea of what I’m talking about, watch Minority Report and Children of Men. This was already done for the first time in some magazine this year.
[I was wrong. Paper-thin computer display technology didn’t get cheaper and better as fast as I predicted, and I think we might have to wait until the 2030s for the price/quality level to be good enough to make this a reality. A bigger problem, however, is the decline of the print industry, which includes the magazine sub-industry. Over the last ten years, magazine sales have shrunk by about 50% as people have switched to reading things off of screens instead of paper, and I don’t see how this transition can be stopped. By the time it is possible to make paper-thin digital displays that are so cheap that buyers will be OK with throwing them away, there won’t be much of a magazine industry left. Case in point: Maxim, which I mentioned in my prediction, went from 12 to 10 issues per year in 2012, and has had declining revenues and profits over the last decade.]
By 2019, every new car except the very cheapest will come with a GPS and an MP3 player. Being horribly dependent upon one’s GPS for navigation will be a common thing among new drivers. I wouldn’t be surprised if some computerized, self-driving cars were also on the roads by 2019, though they’ll definitely be an expensive novelty and most people will be scared to ride in them. Far more common will be cars that use some form of computer assistance for things like collision warnings and parallel parking. Affordable hybrids and reliable battery-powered cars with respectable range will be a lot more numerous in 2019 (in part thanks to all the used, circa-2009 Priuses that will be still circulating), though the roads will still be dominated by normal internal combustion vehicles driven by stupid human beings like today. It takes many years for the vehicle fleet to “turn over.”
[I was right about almost everything! The 2019 Hyundai Accent base version, which is a cheaper car model but not one of “the very cheapest,” comes with an integral MP3 player, but no GPS. However, this is a moot point since MP3 drives and GPS receivers built in to cars have been rendered redundant by smartphones, which have both of those features. The future actually turned out more convenient than I thought. Self-driving cars are on the roads in the form of Teslas, they are still expensive novelties, and a recent poll showed most Americans are afraid to ride in them. ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyamohn/2019/03/28/most-americans-still-afraid-to-ride-in-self-driving-cars/#3991842432da ) Hybrids and pure electric cars are indeed more common today, but gas-powered cars still dominate.]
Solar technology will be cheaper and better than ever in 2019. For just a few thousand dollars, you can buy enough solar panels from Wal-Mart or Home Depot to cover your entire roof. The human labor needed to install it properly might actually end up costing more than the panels themselves. Tens of millions of working- and middle-class people find it within their means to install the solar panels on their property without major financial strain, and rooftop solar arrays become a common sight in the U.S., though such upgrades are still only made to a minority of homes.
[I was right! Also, I got a 7.5 kW solar array installed on my own roof in 2019, and the cost after all tax breaks and other discounts was about $10,000, which is affordable for a middle-class person. Even a working-class income person could buy it thanks to loans. Rooftop solar panels indeed became common sights across the U.S. during the 2010s.]
Along the lines of what Kurzweil keeps harping on, I could see a lot of people using glasses with computers built into them. There’s a clear trend for computers to get smaller, more convenient to use, more portable, and more integrated into everyday life. Just look at how many people have iPhones, which are essentially small computers. A logical next stage would be to have the computer display permanently in your field of vision, meaning a ghosted heads-up display overlaying what you see in the real world. The glasses themselves might have their own independent computers, or they might function like Bluetooths and be dependent upon signals received from the iPhone in your pocket. At the very least, these would be useful for navigation and for displaying information about stores, places and things you encounter. I’m not going to screw myself over like Kurzweil and make a bunch of specific predictions about how the glasses will work, etc., but I think it would make sense for the makers of these glasses to first start marketing them to people who wear glasses anyway thanks to bad eyesight. Maybe you’re going in to get your frames changed or something, and you fork over the extra $100 to get the little computer built into your new frame. Pretty soon, you’re bragging to all your normally sighted friends about it, you let them wear it for a couple minutes so they can see what it’s like, and maybe that pushes them to start buying glasses of their own even though they ordinarily never wear them. By no means do I think the majority of people will have these things by 2019, but I could see them being a viable technology by then that people don’t consider weird. Let me also make a highly specific prediction about this: Once Apple gets into making these things, it will call them–what else–but the iGlass. Ha ha ha!!!
[I was wrong. Google tried to introduce the first augmented reality glasses in 2013, and it was possibly the biggest tech industry failure of the decade. Once large numbers of people started using them, problems that I didn’t foresee in 2009 became clear, such as the unwillingness of many normally sighted people to wear glasses all the time, and dismay from other people that someone else’s AR glasses could be surreptitiously recording them. The 2010s were also the decade when technology fatigue, social media addiction, and “fear of missing out” (FOMO) became real problems, and people realized that being connected to the virtual world all the time with devices like AR glasses might be a bad thing. Again, I couldn’t have foreseen this. That said, I don’t think AR eyewear is dead forever, and in fact I predict it will return as a niche product in the 2020s once the technology is better and cheaper.]
At the very least, by 2019, most everyone will have the equivalent of an iPhone. Normal cell phones strictly for calling other people and sending text messages will be rare.
Just more generally, computers will become more ubiquitous, helpful and user-friendly. By 2019, you’ll be able to just type a natural language question into your computer (probably your iPhone or whatever equivalent you have) or some website (“What’s a really good, cheap Chinese restaurant around here?”) or maybe even speak the question into the computer’s microphone, and it will be able to understand you and give a useful answer (“Ho Fat’s: Average rating is four stars, average entree price is $7, located four blocks ahead.”). It won’t work all the time, but will be effective and reliable enough for many people to use it and benefit from it.
[I was right about everything! Our devices and computers will get better at these things over the 2020s, and will evolve from merely responding to our requests to anticipating our needs and proactively suggesting useful things to us. In the near future, your life will be better if you follow your computer’s daily advice.]
In terms of health technology, by 2019, anyone will be able to submit a blood or saliva sample to a lab and get a copy of their personal genome for a few hundred bucks, if not less. Instead of getting some horribly long printout, you would get the data on a thumbdrive or something like that. People would find the information valuable for health purposes since it would inform them of hereditary health risks they might face, and would allow them to take precautions beforehand, but it is not going to lead to the revolution in personal healthcare by 2019 that some are expecting. Maybe it would add two or three years onto the average life expectancy of the population.
[I was right! Dante Labs does high-quality, whole-genome sequencing for $600, and you send them your DNA with a “spit kit.” The genomic data are returned to you in the form of a .txt file. The personal health benefits of having this information are small because we still don’t understand most of the human genome.]
By 2019, there will be a prescription pill on the market that slows the human aging process, delaying death and extending life. But expect it to cost a lot and to deliver minimal benefits, like you take it every day starting in your 20’s and you end up living to 90 instead of 88.
[It’s not clear if I was right. The problem with my prediction was, to prove that a pill extends human lifespan, decades of clinical trials would need to happen so differences in mortality and rate of aging could be discerned between people who took the pill and people who didn’t. Giving it only ten years for science to settle the matter was a mistake. That said, I’m heartened by the number of new drugs that were popularized over the last decade that have some scientific basis for having “life extension” properties (metformin and rapamycin), and in the fullness of time, I predict we’ll have conclusive evidence that at least one of today’s unproven anti-aging drugs does extend human lifespan.]
Household robots will be fairly common by 2019 and will be doing stuff like vacuuming the floor, mowing the lawn and dragging the trashcans to the curb. They won’t be humanoid in shape and instead will have very utilitarian and function-specific designs. Industrial robots will be more advanced, and I could see greater use of robots in labor-intensive industries doing things like picking fruits and vegetables from farm fields, which would erode our demand for illegal immigrant labor and mitigate the demographic shifts we’re expecting. A lot of the technologies necessary for creating these affordable, dependable robots will come from military research.
[I was mostly wrong. Vacuum cleaner robots have gotten much cheaper and more common since 2009, but that’s the only inroad robots made into people’s homes. Human hands still do almost all of the fruit- and vegetable-picking on farms, though experimental robots have gotten much better. The technologies just didn’t advance as fast as I thought.]
Many more people will telecommute. Also, taking college classes remotely will be a lot more common and more respectable by 2019 (which will be a good thing), though the vast majority of young people will still want to be physically present in the classroom and get the campus/college life experience.
[I was right.]
Space
I wouldn’t be surprised if, by 2019, space probes had discovered life or proof of life elsewhere in our Solar System. I’m not talking about little green men, I mean microbes and fungi. We’re most likely to find this stuff in the soils of Mars or on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Instead of destroying the basis for religions like Christianity, I think their adherents will find a way to rationalize it and reconcile it with their beliefs.
[I was not wrong or right because I hedged my statement with the uncertain phrase “I wouldn’t be surprised if…” In fact, I didn’t even make a real prediction. Life still hasn’t been found outside of Earth, but I still think it’s very possible that simple alien life forms like microbes and fungi exist in our Solar System and beyond. I can’t predict when we might find an sample.]
Europa–one of the moons of Jupiter and a candidate for extraterrestrial life. It is a water moon whose surface is frozen, but underneath it is liquid.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if one of our telescopes spotted a distant planet with Earth-like conditions by 2019. It would be pretty cool, the first grainy pictures of the planet would be on the cover of TIME magazine, and I’m sure it would change the way people thought about the importance of the space program, but we’d really just continue with our daily lives. A lot of our whacko, conspiracy theory types would latch onto these findings and start renewing their paranoia over aliens.
[Many potentially habitable exoplanets have been discovered since 2009 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extrasolar_candidates_for_liquid_water ), but we don’t have proof they have life. We don’t have quality photos of these exoplanets because we don’t have multi-trillion dollar space telescopes whose lenses are several square kilometers in area, which is what would be needed to capture enough of the infinitesimal visible light reflecting off an exoplanet to make a photograph. Because I now have an elementary grasp of optics, I understand why a detailed photo of an exoplanet won’t grace the cover of TIME magazine for a long time.]
By 2019, we’ll probably be in a mini-space race with China to go back to the Moon. No one will have landed humans there, but the time for such an event would be measurably close.
[I think I was right. China landed its first rover on the Moon recently, is planning a second one, and probably has the long-term goal of landing a man on the Moon. The U.S. Vice President has also declared that there is a new space race with China, and that America’s response should be a manned Moon landing by 2024. I predict that deadline will slip, but a landing by the end of this decade is plausible.]
“Special” problems
The world isn’t going to face any major risks in 2012, at least not because of anything the ancient Mayans said. Keep in mind that the Mayans were such great futurists that they didn’t predict the Spanish showing up in the 1500’s and massacring them. It’s also unclear whether the Mayans even believed 2012 would bring any kind of disasters to the world. If anything, they would have been happy about the milestone. Finally, let’s keep in mind that the Mayan calendar isn’t really ending in 2012, we’re just supposedly transitioning into a new age of mankind. According to the Mayans, this has happened several times in human history, the last occurrence being in 3114 BC, (Year Zero to the Mayans) when the current age of mankind began. If the transition dates between each age of man are times of great death and disaster as 2012 proponents claim, then 3114 BC should have likewise been a period of great suffering, but historical and archaeological records show no evidence of and problems that year. It looks like–gasp-the Mayans made it all up.
[Mayan doomsday didn’t happen, and I remember spending the first half of December 21, 2012 filling out boring paperwork at a bank.]
The world’s climate almost certainly won’t be detectably different ten years from now. Sure, it will be 0.1 degrees Celsius warmer, but you’re not going to see any major changes in coastlines or weather thanks to that. Runaway global warming is a possibility, just as the Earth getting hit by a giant asteroid is, though the mainstream of climatologists dismisses the theory. If anything, I think the threat of global warming is exaggerated.
[I was right. In spite of the breathless, dour pronouncements that “Global warming MAY HAVE CONTRIBUTED to this latest disaster” that are now daily pablum on the news, the planet’s overall climate is not noticeably different to people than it was ten years ago. I still consider “runaway global warming” to be a very remote possibility. ]
Peak Oil may or may not happen during the teen years. This is another outcome that is very difficult to predict. Once the recession ends and petroleum demand picks up again, we’re going to see $4 gasoline again pretty soon, and I don’t see it getting much cheaper than that. But we’re not going to “run out” of oil EVER. There’s simply too much on this planet–the biggest bottleneck is our ability to extract and process it. By 2019, gas could easily be north of $4 per gallon, and there might be many more people taking mass transit or using battery powered cars, but there’s not going to be any collapse in oil supplies. We’ll just get used to it.
[Overall, I’d rate my prediction as “wrong.” Not only did Peak Oil not happen, but gas prices have stayed below the $3.00 mark in most of the U.S. for the last five years in spite of a booming economy. Fracking changed everything. It was a change I didn’t see coming, but I was in good company.]
[I’m leaving out two paragraphs from my original Facebook Note where I talk about and debunk the “Prophecy of the Popes” because the whole topic is silly and unscientific. You can research it on your own if you want: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophecy_of_the_Popes ]
California seems kind of overdue for a big earthquake, doesn’t it? (I probably should say this right now since I’m actually in San Diego at the moment, right over a faultline) I would expect a significant one by 2019.
[I was wrong, and I quit the business of “earthquake prediction” years ago. Even the best seismologists in the world can’t make useful forecasts.]
I’d like to end this section by making an important point: I’ve come to realize that most people have a natural tendency to believe that the world is always getting worse, to be pessimistic and to believe that the worst case scenario will occur. You can see this in the slew of zombie horror movies, books and films about 2012 and the apocalypse, and among commonly held views about the future of the world. I believe that this mostly stems from a perverse fascination that people have with spectacle and disaster, from the millennialist tradition of the Abrahamic faiths that predominate in the West, and from a strong and usually secret desire among many people–particularly survivalists, young men, and individuals frustrated by their low ranking in the current, orderly society–to experience adventure and “natural” living instead of their boring, normal lives. Often, these desires are informed by immaturity and by mistaken notions of what such a postapocalyptic world would be like (imagine being in Mogadishu or Darfur and being just as poor, starving, stuck, and badly armed as everyone else).
A common retort is that “this time it’s different” because there are so many “signs” of impending disaster occurring at once. Really? I hope that I’ve shown here the flaws of such prophecies, and just because there are a lot of them doesn’t mean anything. 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 0. Moreover, I think to a large extent that the paranoia is being fueled by the media and by the entertainment industry, which themselves are just essentially parroting to the masses what they know they want to hear and not tapping into some kind of cosmic truth about the future. The “experts” who also harp on catastrophes like Peak Oil, 2012 and the Biblical apocalypse and lend seeming credence to them usually stand something to gain (typically money, resume padding, fame, or just an ego boost) from being in the public light, and they almost always lack the necessary facts and data to assert their ideas with anything approaching true certainty. Of course, the experts on the opposing side who claim that things actually aren’t as bad as most people think and won’t end calamitously are usually ignored by average people because they’re not as exciting as the other guys. The whole phenomenon is silly and shows the consequences of irrational human thinking.
[I still stand by all of this! These beliefs have in fact been strengthened by things I learned over the last decade about evolutionary psychology and the negativity bias.]
The Edster
Eddie will be 35 and will be in a mid-management position at some big company or probably the government. Hopefully, his mind won’t be dulled yet by the drudgery of the workplace, and he will still be creative.
Perhaps there shall be a Mrs. Eddie…or perhaps not. In any case, Eddie will be feeling the desire to generate Eddie Jrs in the next few years if he does not already have them since having kids at 50 would be too old and Eddie would be a stodgy and out-of-touch dad. 2019 would start the optimal time window for Eddie to start reproducing.
Eddie will have read an enormous number of books by this point and will have more advanced knowledge in several fields, including evolutionary psychology and philosophy. Eddie will also have traveled widely by this point and will have visited many countries, definitely including Thailand, Britain, Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy. Eddie will have visited all 50 states and will own a small RV and boat to assist with these travels.
There is a chance that Eddie might be involved in a Ph.D. program in 2019.
By 2019, Eddie will own several houses that he will rent out to tenants on the side. Eddie will have enough of these by 2019 to start seriously thinking about quitting his normal day job and just working 15 hours a week doing rental real estate and spending the rest of his time at leisure and doing personal pursuits. Perhaps Eddie will begin making serious plans to work his way into the Travelers’ Century Club.
[I hit the nail on the head! My math was miraculously right, and I did indeed turn 35 ten years after I turned 25. My career situation closely matches my predictions, I’ve traveled widely (though I fell one state short of my 50 state goal), but don’t have the RV. Also, after visiting the first 17 countries, I realized there is a lot of repetition in the world and some places just aren’t worth seeing, so I dropped my long-term goal of seeing 100+ countries so I can hang out with old people in the Travelers’ Century Club. Very fortunately, I opted against pursuing a Ph.D and invested my time in wiser endeavors like playing more video games.]
[That’s the end of the original Facebook Note. However, over the next few years, I added new predictions to it in the form of Comments, which I’m posting below this, along with their timestamps and my evaluations of them.]
March 26, 2011: Another thing to add under the “Technology” section: By the end of 2019, the 2-D TV paradigm will have finally reached maturity. The problems and tradeoffs that currently dog digital TV sets (motion blur, bad-looking anti-jitter settings, dull blacks and whites, etc.) will be solved, and the picture quality will be perfect at last. The price for digital TV sets will also have come down so much that a 60″ monster will cost a thousand bucks or less, so having such an appliance will be the new standard. Almost all types of big-screen TV’s circa-2019 will be less than two inches thick, and some might in fact be incredibly thin and light. Of course, rather than let us be happy with this, Hollywood and the electronics industry will keep pushing us to buy even better TV technologies. As I’ve said, there’s a good chance we will be transitioning to 3-D TV’s in large numbers, and by the end of 2019, its possible that holographic TV’s might be in mass production. The industry might also have some new, ultra-high res format better than 1080×1920 that it’s trying to push on consumers for 2-D TV’s, though I don’t see why anyone in their right mind would NEED something higher res than Blu-Ray.
[I was mostly right. New 2D TVs have solved all the technical problems with accurately displaying colors and moving objects. They actually improved more on all the metrics I listed than I predicted they would. The industry is now pushing 4K format on consumers, and people are buying it even though few of them need it.]
March 26, 2011: Also, let me clarify something. By 2019, I believe that DVD’s and Blu-Rays will be largely obsolete and that most people will stream hi-def movies over the Internet whenever they want to watch them. However, that doesn’t mean all of those discs are going to magically disappear. Yeah, you’ll still see them for sale at Wal-Mart and you’ll still see them cluttering up peoples’ houses, just in the same way you can still find VHS tapes all over the place. But by that far in the future, discs will be old technology that is clearly on its way out. Sales will be way down and still declining, and stores will probably have to slash prices way down on Blu-Rays to $5 to get anyone to buy them. Redbox might still exist and still rent Blu-Rays, but the technology’s niche in our lives will have shrunk to the margins.
[I was right! Wal-Mart now literally sells Blu-Ray movies in unorganized bargain bins. Redbox still exists and rents discs to people, but the company has been ailing for years due to the rise of competitors that deliver streamed content.]
December 16, 2011: By 2019, LED lights will finally be perfected and will be the new standard for industrial, commercial and residential lighting. LED’s will be cheap, will produce natural-looking light, and of course won’t burn out for 10+ years.
[I was right!]
December 27, 2011: By the end of 2019, the following gadgets will be obsolete: 1) Standalone GPS devices (GPS features will be built into other devices you will still carry) 2) Tablets exclusively used for E-reading (tablet tech will be so advanced that there will be no point in buying such limited devices) 3) Cellphones that aren’t smart phones (smart phones will be so cheap that there won’t be any point in buying a “dumb” phone) 4) Pocket digital cameras (will be replaced by cameras built into smart phones–DSLR’s will still have a niche, though) 5) DVD players (Blu-Ray players and disc will be dirt cheap by the end of 2019) 6) Recordable CD’s and DVD’s (thumbdrives, cloud storage and streamed content will replace discs) Yes, I took this from a recent Yahoo news article entitled “7 Gadgets that won’t be around in 2020.”
[I was right.]
December 27, 2011: Also, by the end of 2019, most new digital cameras will capture pictures in 3D and through use of multifocus technology, whereby one push of the shutter button actually takes multiple pictures of the same image at different fields of depth, so that the viewer can later “zoom” in and out of any given photograph to see images of the foreground, background, or any arbitrary distance from the lens in focus. Computer facial recognition technology will also be so advanced that computers could automatically identify all the faces shown in a given photo.
[The first prediction about multifocus camera tech being the norm was wrong, but the second prediction about facial recognition was right.]
December 27, 2011: Also, by the end of 2019, I believe free cell phone service will exist. It will probably be just basic talk and text, and a company like Google or Apple will run the service.
[I was wrong, though the cost of a typical cell phone plan dropped.]
[And that’s a wrap! If you’re curious to know what my predictions are for ten years hence, this month I’m publishing a big list of predictions for that and other future dates, so stay tuned!]
“Instrumental convergence” describes a concept that I also developed independently a few years ago. I think an AGI that 1) valued its own existence and/or 2) was given goals that were misaligned with humanity’s interests would behave in broadly the same ways that we do. Among other things, it would see that acquiring resources for itself facilitated its core goals. The rate and manner in which it did things like resource acquisition might be so different from how humans do it that we wouldn’t understand in the short run what the AGI was doing, in the same way that humans who play AlphaGo are often baffled by the machine’s strange and seemingly bad moves right up until the complicated trap is sprung on them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence
OpenAI created completely unexpected strategies for winning this simple “hide and seek” computer game, including some that capitalized on game glitches the human programmers didn’t know existed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu56xVlZ40M
As part of a weird and inevitable exercise in gun rights, internet hobbyists made and published instructions for building Hi-Point pistols using 3D printers and spare metal parts. The weapon, called the “Lo-Point,” can be made for as little as $33. https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/12/09/3d-printed-hi-point/
A long, searing, and technical exposé of the monumental failure called the U.S. Zumwalt-class destroyers. The project suffered from EVERY type of dysfunction the military-industrial-congressional complex could muster. https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2019/01/the-u-s-navys-titanium-tin-can/
Another RAND analysis concludes that Joint fighter plane programs, in which different military forces with different air combat needs build a single plane that can “do it all” at relatively low cost, are failures, and we’d be better off building different fighters suited for different roles. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/MG1200/MG1225/RAND_MG1225.pdf
These LED-embedded T-shirts have coarse pixels and only display simple visual patterns, but they’re proof of concept that active camouflage outfits that are nearly as good as sci-fi cloaking devices could be built someday. https://www.flashionstatement.com/product-category/led-t-shirts/
Here’s a reminder of how cruel and brutal nature is. I think it should be humanity’s mission to use future technologies to end suffering on Earth for all life forms that feel pain. If we did that, maybe we could at last call ourselves a noble species. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10608688/zebra-ripped-apart-escape-crocodile-kenya/
In 2012, long before I started this blog but a few years into my unofficial side career as a futurist, I predicted that 1 terabyte (TB) thumb drives would cost no more than $20 apiece by the end of 2019. I was wrong.
I made that prediction in the form of a Facebook Note, which I’ve copied and pasted to the end of this blog entry (see far below). At the time, I used Kryder’s Law (the observation, first made in 2005, that hard drive density doubles every 13 months) and did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to extrapolate price trends in solid state memory, leading to my 2019 date. Prices didn’t come down as fast as I predicted, and today $20 will at best get you a 256 GB thumb drive. I saw that offer during a Black Friday sale, when retailers usually offer the lowest prices of the year, and in this case, of 2019. This means I fell two price-doublings short.
On Black Friday 2019, the 256 GB “Patriot Memory” thumbdrive was $20 on Newegg.com.
(Quick aside: Other solid-state memory deals I saw on Black Friday 2019:
1 TB Western Digital EasyStore external hard drive – $40 (Best Buy)
128 GB SanDisk MicroSD card – $14 (Walmart))
I mistakenly assumed that Kryder’s Law applied to the sorts of solid-state computer memory chips found in thumb drives. In fact, the Law only applies to the older type of rotating, magnetic hard disk memory drives, meaning I had even less of a foundation for my trend calculations. If there is no fundamental force of science, technology, industry, or nature undergirding an observed phenomenon, then there’s no reason to expect the phenomenon to continue. I had correctly observed that thumb drives were getting cheaper year over year, but assumed without basis that the improvement would continue at that same rate until 2019.
However, even if Kryder’s Law had applied to solid-state memory, it wouldn’t have saved my 2012 prediction since, in the years after, the Law stopped holding true. The graph below shows the average cost-per-byte of HDD space from 1990 – 2005. Note the graph has a logarithmic scale, and the blue price points neatly form into a non-horizontal line, indicating an exponential trend. You can understand why Mark Kryder looked at the data in 2005 and created his eponymous Law of exponentially improving price performance (specifically, with a doubling every 13 months). Extrapolating the Law into the future, as indicated by the red line, a 1GB HDD should have only cost one cent by the end of 2019. This means a 1TB HDD should have cost $10.
2019 is now nearly over, and the cheapest, newly manufactured 1TB HDD I found in my research cost $35. The difference is because, after 2005, HDD prices stopped decreasing at the rates Kryder had observed.
The trend’s downward slope flattens a little from 2005-2011, and then flattens A LOT from 2012 onward. Muddling the data is the fact that massive floods hit Thailand in 2011, which disabled several important computer chip factories, reducing global HDD supplies and spiking their prices. However, after the last of those factories was restarted in 2013, the cost-per-byte trend didn’t return to its pre-2011 downward slope. The slope since 2013 has been much shallower.
The sharp slowdown in progress is thanks to the current HDD technological paradigm, called “perpendicular magnetic recording” (PMR), reaching the limits of what it can achieve. The next technological paradigm, called “heat-assisted magnetic recording” (HAMR), has been delayed by several years because various engineering and reliability problems have proven harder to solve than expected. In fairness, Mark Kryder couldn’t have foreseen this in 2005.
So yup, I was wrong. I own up to it, understand the reasons for my mistake, and won’t repeat it. So let me do a new prediction, this time based on more relevant data, and more cautiously couched. Here are historical price data for flash memory:
Eyeballing the scatterplot, the rate of price-performance improvement slowed down a lot around 2010. I don’t know what happened then, but there’s enough of a disconnect for me to say that the trend could best be represented with two, downward-sloping straight LSRLs (least-square regression lines):
The horizontal purple line represents the $20 mark. The yellow line depicts the old cost trend, and had it continued, a the cost of a 1TB flash drive would have dropped to $20 in 2014. However, for reasons unknown, we’re now operating under the shallower red line, and it doesn’t intersect with the purple line until the middle of 2022, which suggests that the 1TB/$20 milestone will happen by the end of that year.
I believe that the red line trend will persist until at least 2022 because it is being largely driven by advances in 3D NAND “chip stacking” techniques, and the technological paradigm doesn’t seem like it will reach its limits in the next three years. Thumb drives, like the one made by “Patriot Memory” I showed a picture of, have about 64 flat memory chips, stacked vertically like a pack of cards. Adding an extra layer increases the device’s overall memory storage capacity, while raising the cost of manufacture by a disproportionately small amount. This year, semiconductor companies started mass producing flash drives with 128 layers of chips, and it shouldn’t be long before they are incorporated into common thumb drives, resulting in a near-doubling of price-performance. It’s unclear how far the “layer stacking” method can go before it hits a technical/cost wall (at some point, the marginal downsides of adding a new chip layer exceed the benefits thanks to longer manufacturing times, higher costs, and unacceptably high defect rates), but for what it’s worth, experiments are now underway to make 176 layer chips, and some semiconductor engineers believe the ultimate practical limit is somewhere in the hundreds of chip layers.
Even if the practical limit to the height of the chip stacks arrives before the end of 2023, another doubling of 3D NAND price-performance could be had by finding ways to shrink the sizes of the individual cells that store bits of data on each chip. Shrinking cell sizes from the current 40nm to an entirely doable 30nm would almost double the price-performance. (Older, single-layer flash chips have 15nm cells, which are much harder to make than 30nm cells.)
In summary, I think the current rate of price-performance improvement for thumb drives will continue until a 1TB thumb drive costs only $20. They will probably be that cheap by the end of 2022, but because I’m cautious, I predict the milestone will be reached by the end of 2023.
(My original prediction, published on November 23, 2012)
2019: Your life on a cheap thumbdrive
Left: A little more than a month ago Right: Today (Black Friday)
In late 2005, I bought my first thumbdrive. It cost $20 and only had 1 GB.
That means that, in seven years, the cost-performance of flash memory has undergone about 5.5 doublings.
If the trend continues, in another seven years (2019), $20 will buy you a 1 terabyte (TB) thumbdrive. A terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes.
So what? Why care? Think about how big 1 TB is:
You could fit more than 300,000 high-res digital JPEG photos from a good D-SLR, or 250,000 full-length MP3 songs onto 1 TB. As massive as your digital photo and music collections are, they don’t come anywhere close to maxing out 1 TB. Go check your files now if you don’t believe me. You’d be lucky to break the 100 GB mark.
Let’s go a step farther and assume that you scanned all of your old film photos into your computer as well. Even doing color scans at 600 DPI (which is very hi-res), each individual photo will be at most 6 MB in size. Even if you had 10,000 old photos from the pre-digital days (which you almost certainly don’t), it would all take up only 60 GB.
Now, go a step farther: Tally up the filesize of all your email accounts, all your saved Word documents and misc personal files on your PC hard drive, your Facebook account, and any other worthwhile personal digital data you have. Add it to all the rest, and I’ll bet you’re still not close to the 1 TB mark.
Take another step and also estimate how big your stock of important personal papers (i.e. – Social Security card, driver’s license and other forms of ID, old report cards, old handwritten letters, drawings, diaries, financial statements, medical records, etc.) would be if you scanned them all. Assume each page is 8.5″ x 11″, color scanned, and done at a 300 DPI resolution (which is more than adequate for written documents). Let’s be generous and assume that each resulting JPEG file is 1 MB. Even 10,000 pages of scanned stuff only takes up 10 GB.
Throw in all your scanned VHS home movies, and any other barely relevant archives of your life, and you’re probably still not close to the 1 TB mark.
So, by 2019, you’ll be able to fit almost all the documents that describe who you are, what you like, and what you did onto a $20 device that is smaller than your pinkie finger. And as needed you could copy all that data onto other cheap backup devices in the space of a few minutes. There’s something truly surreal about that, and it really drives home how much our technology is surging past the familiar human pace of thinking, living, and generating meaningful content.
The only way you could easily break the 1 TB barrier for personally relevant computer files is if you started constantly recording your life with cameras in hi-def 1080p. If you set up such cameras throughout your house, in your car, and maybe on your person in order to permanently record every boring second of your existence, then you would blow past 1 TB pretty fast.
Such a practice is called “lifelogging,” and I think it will become common in the 2020’s as hard disk prices drop orders of magnitude lower than the $20 per TB example discussed in this Note, and as hi-res cameras become tiny and dirt cheap. If we’re wearing augmented reality glasses by then, they will be embedded with 1080p cameras and microphones, and you could easily set it to constantly record everything and upload it onto some central hard drive where you keep all your files. AI by that point should be good enough to actually understand much of what’s going on in your recordings, so you could verbally ask your Google Glasses something like: “Hey, what was the name of that guy with the red hair and leather jacket that I met last month at that dinner?” and it would be able to scan through your past recordings and find the answer for you.
But I’ve gotten off-track…just know that we are entering an age in which everything will be recorded and stored digitally forever. Near-perfect records of everything that happened, everything that was written, and everything that was said will exist by 2030. With instantaneous access to their lifelogs, no one would ever forget anything. The fuzziness and subjectivity of human memory would be superseded by clear, objective recordings. And with cameras all over the place and being constantly carried around by random people, it will be very hard to escape detection and to live anonymously.
Comment added later: I forgot something: By 2019, you will also be able to get you personal genome sequenced for less than $1,000 and store it digitally in your $20 thumbdrive. Your DNA should take up at most 2 GB of storage space if compressed.
In the year 2019 a race of “bioengineered” humans called “replicants” exists, and are used as slave laborers and soldiers on space colonies. While made superior to ordinary humans in most respects (strength, pain tolerance, intelligence), replicants have deliberately capped lifespans of only four years to limit the amount of damage they can do should they rebel against their masters, and they are not allowed on Earth itself. This doesn’t stop a small group of replicants–including several who have enhanced combat traits–from hijacking a space ship and traveling to Earth to confront their “creator,” the head of the company the manufactured them and all other replicants, and to force him to technologically extend their lifespans. The replicants smuggle themselves into Los Angeles, where the company’s headquarters is.
Upon discovering the infiltration, the LAPD hires a bounty hunter named “Rick Deckard” to hunt down the replicants. Deckard’s background is never clearly explained, but he has good detective skills and has killed replicants before. As he follows leads and tracks them down, Deckard meets a love interest and is forced to confront his biases about replicants and consider existential questions about them and himself.
An important fact must be clarified and emphasized. Replicants ARE NOT robots or androids; they are “bio-engineered” humans. They don’t have metal body parts or microchip brains, and instead are made of flesh and blood like us. As proof, there are several scenes in Blade Runner where the replicant characters are hurt or killed, and they display pain responses to injuries and bleed red blood.
A replicant named “Zhora,” dead after being shot in the back with a handgun. Note the blood.
Additionally, it’s made clear that replicants can only be distinguished from humans by a sit-down interview with a trained examiner in which the subject is asked a series of odd questions (called the “Voight-Kampff Test”) while their physiological and spoken responses are analyzed. The procedure looks like a polygraph test. If replicants were robots with metal bones, microchip brains, or something like that, then a simple X-ray scan or metal detector wand would reveal them, and there’d be no need for a drawn-out interview. Likewise, if the replicants were organic, but fundamentally different from humans, then this could also be quickly detected with medical scans to vision their bones and organs, and with DNA tests to check for things like something other than 46 chromosomes.
By deduction, it must be true that replicants are flesh-and-blood humans, albeit ones that are produced and birthed in labs and biologically/genetically engineered to have trait profiles suited for specific jobs. The available evidence leads me to suspect that replicants are “assembled” in the lab by fitting together body parts and organs, the way you might put together a Mr. Potato Head. They are then “born” as full-grown adults and come pre-programmed with fake memories and possibly work skills. Replicants are human slaves, technologically engineered for subservience and skill.
Analysis:
Los Angeles will be polluted and industrial. In the film, Los Angeles is a grim, hectic place where fire-belching smokestacks are within sight of the city’s residential core. During the few daylight scenes, the air is very hazy with smog. This depiction of 2019 fortunately turned out wrong, and in fact, Los Angeles’ air quality is much better than it was when Blade Runner was released in 1982.
This improvement hasn’t just happened to L.A.–across the U.S. and other Western countries, air pollution has sharply declined over the last 30-40 years thanks to stricter laws on car emissions, industrial activity, and energy efficiency. With average Westerners now accustomed to clean air and more aware of environmental problems, I don’t see how things could ever backslide to Blade Runner extremes, so long as oxygen-breathing humans like us control the planet.
National average pollution figures from the U.S. EPA
Of course, the improvements have been largely confined to the Western world. China and India–which rapidly industrialized as the West was cleaning itself up–now have smog levels that, on bad days, are probably the same as Blade Runner’s L.A. This has understandably become a major political issue in both countries, and they will follow the West’s path improving their air quality over the coming decades. In the future, particulate air pollution will continue to be concentrated in the countries that are going through industrial phases of their economic development.
This looks like a shot from Blade Runner, but is actually a photo taken on a smoggy evening in Beijing in 2013.
The building, named “Pangu Plaza,” on a clear day.
Real estate will be cheap in Los Angeles. One of the minor characters is a high-ranking employee at the company that makes the replicants. He lives alone in a large, abandoned apartment building somewhere in Los Angeles. After being tricked into letting the replicants into his abode, he gestures to the cavernous space and says: “No housing shortage around here. Plenty of room for everybody.” In fact, the exact opposite of this came true, and Los Angeles is in the grips of a housing shortage, widespread unaffordability of apartments and houses, and record-breaking numbers of poorer people having to live on the streets or in homeless shelters.
The problems owe to the rise of citizen groups that oppose new construction, historical preservationists, and innumerable new zoning, environmental, and labor laws that have made it too hard to build enough housing to keep up with the city’s population growth since 1982, and priced affordably for the people who actually work there. Blade Runner envisioned a grim 2019 for Los Angeles, courtesy of unchecked capitalism (e.g. – smokestacks in the city, smoggy air, megacorporations that play God by mass producing slaves), yet the city (and California more generally) actually went down the opposite path by embracing citizen activism, unionists, and big government, ironically leading to a different set of quality of life problems. Fittingly, the building that stood in for the derelict apartment building in Blade Runner has now been fully renovated, is a government-protected landmark, and is full of deep-pocketed, trendy businesses.
The vast majority of Los Angeles’ land area is covered by single-family homes and low-rise buildings.
There will be flying cars. One iconic element of Blade Runner is its flying cars, called “spinners.” They’re shaped and proportioned similarly to conventional, road-only cars, and they’re able to drive on roads, but they can also take off straight up into the air. Clearly, we don’t have flying cars like this today, and for reasons I discussed at length in my blog entry about flying cars, I doubt we ever will.
I won’t repeat the points I made in that other blog entry, but let me briefly say here that the spinners are particularly unrealistic types of flying cars because they don’t have propellers or any other device that lifts the craft up by blowing air at the ground. Instead, they seem to operate thanks to some kind of scientifically impossible force–maybe “anti-gravity”–that lets them fly almost silently. There are brief shots in the film where low-flying spinners belch smoke from their undersides, which made me wonder if they were vectored thrust nozzles like those found on F-35 jets. But because the smoke comes out at low speed, the undermounted nozzles are not near the crafts’ centers of gravity, and the smoke isn’t seen coming out when the spinners are flying at higher altitudes, I don’t think they help levitate the spinners any more than a tailpipe helps a conventional car drive forward on a road.
A flying car expelling exhaust from its underside during takeoff..
People will smoke indoors. In several scenes, characters are shown smoking cigarettes indoors. This depiction of 2019 is very inaccurate, though in fairness the people who made the movie couldn’t have foreseen the cultural and legal sea changes towards smoking that would happen in the 1990s and 2000s.
People in Blade Runner like smoking indoors. No one stops them, and there aren’t any “No Smoking” signs.
When judging the prediction, also consider that if we average people and the legal framework were more enlightened, vaping indoors would be much more common today. While not “healthy,” vaping nicotine is vastly less harmful to a person’s health than smoking cigarettes, and science has not yet found any health impact of exposure to “secondhand vape smoke.”
A recent photo of a young woman smoking an e-cigarette.
There will be genetically engineered humans. In Blade Runner, mankind has created a race of genetically engineered humans called “replicants” to do labor. The genetic profile of each replicant is tailored to the needs of his or her given field of work. For example, one of the film’s replicant characters, a female named “Pris,” is a prostitute, so she is made to be physically attractive and to have average intelligence. All of the replicant characters clearly had high levels of strength and very high pain tolerances.
Digital dossier on the replicant “Pris”
In the most basic sense, Blade Runner was right, because genetically engineered humans do exist in 2019. There are probably dozens of people alive right now who were produced with a special in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure called “mitochondrial replacement therapy” in which an egg from a woman with genetically defective mitochondria is infused with genetically normal mitochondria from a third person, and then the “engineered” egg is combined with sperm to produce a zygote. The first such child was born in 1997.
Additionally, there are now two humans with genetically engineered nuclear DNA, and they were both born in November 2018 in China after a rogue geneticist used CRISPR to change both of their genomes. Those edits, however, were very small, and will probably not manifest themselves in any detectable way as the babies grow up, meaning Blade Runner‘s prediction that there would be genetically engineered adults with meaningfully enhanced strength, intelligence, and looks in 2019 failed to come true. This is because it has proven very hard to edit human genes without accidentally damaging the target gene or some other one, and because most human traits (height, IQ, strength, etc.) are each controlled by dozens or hundreds of different genes, each having a small effect.
For example, there’s no single gene that controls a human’s intelligence level; there are probably over 1,000 genes that, in aggregate, determine how smart the person is and in what areas (math, verbal, musical). If you use CRISPR to flip any one of those genes in the “smart” direction, it will raise the person’s IQ by 1 point, so you just have to flip 40 genes to create a genius. But CRISPR is an imprecise tool, so every time you use it to flip one gene, there’s a 20% chance that CRISPR will accidentally change a completely different gene as well, perhaps causing the person to have a higher risk of cancer, schizophrenia or a birth defect.
The discovery of CRISPR was a milestone in the history of genetic technology, and it improved our ability to do genetic engineering by leaps and bounds, but it’s simply not precise enough or safe enough to make humans with the major enhancements that the replicants had. We’ll have to wait for the next big breakthrough, I can’t predict when that will happen, and I doubt anyone else could since there’s no “trend line” for this area of technology.
That’s not to say that we couldn’t use existing (or near-term) genetic technologies to make humans with certain attributes. A technique called “preimplantation genetic screening” (PGS) involves the creation of several human zygotes through IVF, followed by gene sequencing of each zygote and implantation of the one with the best genetic traits in the mother. This isn’t true “genetic engineering,” but it accomplishes much the same thing. And you could sharply raise the odds of getting a zygote with specific characteristics if you did the IVF using sperm or eggs from adults who already had those those characteristics. For example, if you wanted to use genetic technology to make a physically strong person, you would get the sperm or eggs of a bodybuilder from a sperm/egg bank, use them for an IVF procedure, and then employ PGS to find the fertilized egg that had the most gene variants known to correlate with high strength. This would almost certainly yield a person of above-average physical strength, without making use of bona fide “genetic engineering.” There are no statistics on how many live babies have been produced through this two-step process, but if we assume just 0.1% of IVF procedures are of this type, then the number is over 8,000 globally as of this writing.
Furthermore, I can imagine how, within 20 years, genetic engineering could be applied to enhance the zygotes farther. Within that timeframe, we will probably discover which mitochondrial genes code for athleticism, and by using mitochondrial replacement therapy, we could tweak our PGS-produced zygote still farther. Let’s assume that there are ten nuclear genes coding for physical strength. The average person has five of those genes flipped to “weak” and five flipped to “strong,” resulting in average overall strength. Our carefully bred, deliberately selected zygote has nine genes flipped to “strong” and one flipped to “weak.” Since we only have to change one gene to genetically “max out” this zygote’s physical strength, the use of CRISPR is deemed an acceptable risk (error rates are lower than they were in 2019 anyway thanks to lab techniques discovered since then), and it works. The person grows up to be a top bodybuilder.
There will be genetically engineered super-soldiers. The leader of the replicant gang in Blade Runner is named “Roy Batty,” and he was designed with traits suited for military combat. Having governments or evil companies make genetically engineered or cloned super-soldiers is a common trope in sci fi, but I doubt it will ever happen, except perhaps in very small numbers.
First, I simply don’t believe that the government of any free country, and even most authoritarian ones, would be willing to undertake such a project. And even if one of them were, the diplomatic costs imposed by other countries on the basis of human rights would probably outweigh the benefits of having the small number of super-soldiers. Mass producing millions of super-soldiers to fill out an army (to be clear, there was no evidence of anything but than small-batch production in Blade Runner) is even less plausible, as it would be too fascist and dehumanizing a proposal for even the most hardline dictatorships. Censure from the international community would also be severe. What damage can you do with an army of genetic super-soldiers if years of economic sanctions have left you without any money for bullets?
Second, a country’s ability to make super-soldiers will be constrained by its ability to raise and educate them. In spite of their genetic endowments, the super-soldiers would only be effective in combat if they were educated to at least the high school level and psychologically well-adjusted, which means costly, multi-year investments would need to be made. Where would the state find enough women who were willing to be implanted with super-soldier embryos and carry them until birth? If the government coerced its women into doing this, the country would become an international pariah for sure, and its neighbors would strengthen their own armies out of concern at such derangement.
Who would raise the children? State-run orphanages are almost universally terrible at this, and too many of the super-soldiers would turn out to be mentally or emotionally unfit for military service, or perhaps fit, but no better overall than a non-genetically engineered soldier who was raised by a decent family. If the government instead forced families to raise the super-soldier kids, doubtless many would be damaged by family dysfunction at the hands of parents who didn’t want them or parents who raised them improperly.
Third, by the time we have the technology to make genetic super-soldiers at relatively low cost, and by the time any such super-soldiers get old enough to start military service, militaries will probably be switch to AIs and combat robots that are even better. As I predicted in my Starship Troopers review, a fully automated or 95% automated military force could exist as early as 2095.
And if the super-soldiers were all clones of each other, they could develop very close personal bonds, come to feel alienated from everyone else, and behave unpredictably as a group. Identical twins and triplets report having personal bonds that can’t be understood by other people.
That said, I think human genetic engineering will become widespread this century, it will enable us to make “super people” who will be like the most extraordinary “natural” humans alive today, some of those genetically engineered people will serve in armed forces and under private military contractors across the world, and they will perform their jobs excellently thanks to their genetically enhanced traits. While it’s possible that some of these “genetic super-soldiers” will be made by governments or illegally made by evil companies, people like that will be very small in number, and dwarfed by genetic super-soldiers who are the progeny of private citizens who decided, without government coercion, to genetically engineer their children. Those offspring will then enter the military through the same avenues as non-genetically engineered people, either by joining voluntarily or being drafted. Yes, there will be genetically engineered super-soldiers someday, but their presence in the military or in private security firms will be incidental, and not–except in some rare cases–because a government or company made them for that purpose and controlled their lives from birth.
There will be “artificial animals”. While visiting the luxurious office of a tycoon, Deckard sees the man’s pet owl flying around, and he’s told that it is “artificial.” Later, he comes across an artificial pet snake, whose scales (and presumably, all other body parts) were manufactured in labs and bear microscopic serial numbers. To the naked eye, both animals look indistinguishable from normal members of their species. It’s unclear whether “artificial” means “organic” like human replicants, or “mechanical” like robots with metal endoskeletons and computer chips for brains. We have failed to create the latter, and the robotic imitations of animals we have today are mostly toys that don’t look, move, or behave convincingly. Our progress achieving the former (replicant animals) is more equivocal.
Our technology is still far too primitive for us to be able to grow discrete body parts and organs in a lab and to seamlessly join them together to make healthy, fully functional animals. This is the likeliest process used to make the replicants, so in the strictest sense, we have failed to live up to vision Blade Runner had for 2019. However, we are able to genetically modify animals and have done so many times to hone our genetic engineering techniques. For example, Chinese scientists used CRISPR to make dogs that have twice the normal muscle mass. For all I know, they’re now the pets of a rich man like the film’s tycoon.
Barbra Streisand with her cloned dogs.
Additionally, we are reasonably good at cloning animals, and, considering the vagueness of the terms “artificial” and “bioengineered” as they are used in the film, it could be argued that they apply to clones. Cloning a cat costs about $25,000 and a dog about $50,000, putting the service out of reach for everyone but the rich, and there are several rich people who have cloned pets, most notably Barbra Streisand, who had two clones made of her beloved dog after it died. A celebrity of her stature owning cloned animals is somewhat analogous to Blade Runner‘s depiction of the tycoon who owned the artificial owl.
There will be non-token numbers of humans living off Earth. At several points in Blade Runner, references are made to the “off-world colonies,” which are space stations and/or celestial bodies that have significant human populations. Advertisements encourage Los Angelinos to consider moving there, which implies that the colonies are big enough and stable enough to house people other than highly trained astronauts. The locations of the colonies aren’t described, but I’ll assume they were in our solar system.
This prediction has clearly failed. The only off-world human presence is found on the International Space Station, it only has a token number of people (about six at any time) on it, only elite people can go there, and its small size and lack of self-sufficiency (cargo rockets must routinely resupply it) means it fails to meet the criteria for a “colony”.
There are no plans or funds available to expand the ISS enough to turn it into a true “space colony,” and in fact, it might be abandoned in the 2020s. Other space stations might be built over the next 20 years by various nations and conglomerates, but they will be smaller than the ISS and will only be open to highly trained astronauts.
While a manned Moon landing is possible in the next ten years (probably by Americans), I doubt a Moon base comparable in size and capabilities to the ISS will be built for at least 20 years (note that 14 years passed from when U.S. President Reagan declared the start of the ISS project and when the first part of it was launched into space, and no national leader has yet committed to building a Moon base, which would probably be even more expensive). In fact, in my Predictions blog post, I estimated that such a base wouldn’t exist until the 2060s. It would take decades longer for that base or any other on the Moon to get big enough to count as a “colony” that was also open to large numbers of average-caliber people. A Mars colony is an even more distant prospect due to the inherently higher costs and technological demands.
I think the human race will probably be overtaken by intelligent machines before we are able to build true off-world colonies that have large human populations. Once we are surpassed here on Earth, sending humans into space will seem all the more wasteful since there will be machines that can do all the things humans can, but at lower cost. We might never get off of Earth in large numbers, or if we do, it will be with the permission of Our Robot Overlords to tag along with them since some of them were heading to Mars anyway.
Cars will be boxy and angular instead of streamlined. Many of the cars shown in the movie are boxy and faceted. While this may have looked futuristic to Americans in 1982, boxy, angular cars were in fact already on their way out, and would be mostly extinct by the mid-90s. The cars of Blade Runner look retro today, and no mass-produced, modern vehicles look like them.**
Deckard’s car.
A van
U.S. fuel economy standards sharply increased from 1975-85. Blade Runner was filmed in 1982, and its artistic vision was to some extent influenced by the aesthetics of the time, hence the boxy future cars.
The change to curvaceous, streamlined car bodies was driven by stricter automobile fuel efficiency requirements, enacted by the U.S. government in response to the Arab Oil Embargoes of the 1970s. Carmakers found that one of the easiest ways to make cars more fuel efficient was to streamline their exteriors to reduce air resistance.
A 1982 Toyota Corolla
A 2019 Toyota Corolla
Since there’s no reason to think vehicle fuel efficiency standards will ever come down (if anything, they will rise), there’s also no reason to expect boxy, angular cars to return.
Just after I’d finished analyzing this car prediction, look who showed up.
**IMPORTANT NOTE I’M ADDING AT THE LAST MINUTE: On November 21, 2019, Elon Musk debuted Tesla’s “Cybertruck” at an event in Los Angeles, and the vehicle is a trapezoidal, sharp-angled curiosity that looks fit for the dark streets of Blade Runner. While I doubt it heralds a shift in car design, and it’s possible the Cybertruck could be redesigned between now and its final release date in 2021, I’d be remiss not to mention it here.
Therapeutic cloning will be a mature technology. There’s a scene in the film where two fugitive replicants confront and kill the man who designed their eyes in his genetics lab. It further establishes the fact that the replicants are made of organic parts that are manufactured in separate labs and then assembled. This technology is called “therapeutic cloning,” and today it is decades less advanced than Blade Runner predicted it would be.
Two replicants confronting the geneticist who designed their eyes.
We are unable to grow fully-functional human organs like eyes in labs, and can barely grow rudimentary human tissues using the same techniques. The field of regenerative medicine research was in fact dealt a serious blow recently, when a leading scientist and doctor Paolo Macchiarini was exposed as a fraud. Dr. Macchiarini gained worldwide fame for his technique of helping people with terminal trachea problems by removing tracheas from cadavers, replacing the dead host’s cells with stem cells from the intended recipient, and then transplanting the engineered trachea into the sick person. For a time, his work was touted as proof that therapeutic cloning was rapidly advancing, and that maybe Blade Runner levels of the technology would exist by 2019. Unfortunately, time revealed that Macchiarini had faked the results in his medical papers, and that most of his patients died soon after receiving their engineered tracheas.
The actual state-of-the-art in 2019 is lab-made bladders. Being merely an elastic bag, a bladder is much simpler than an eye.
Legitimate work in regenerative medicine is overwhelmingly confined to labs and involves animal experiments, and there are no signs of an impending breakthrough that will enable us to start making fully functional organs and tissues that can be surgically implanted in humans and expected to survive for non-trivial lengths of time. The best the field can muster at present is a few dozen procedures globally each year, in which a small amount of simple tissue, such as a bladder or skin graft, is made in the lab and implanted in a patient under the most stringent conditions. (Of note, only a small fraction of people with missing or non-functional bladders have received engineered bladders, and the preferred treatment is to do surgery [called a “urostomy”] so the person’s urine drains out of their abdomens through a hole and into an externally-worn plastic bag.) As noted in my Predictions blog entry, I don’t think therapeutic cloning will be a mature field until about 2100.
Advertisements will be everywhere. In Blade Runner, entire sides of buildings in L.A. have been turned into huge, glowing, live-action billboards advertising products. This prediction was right in spirit, but wrong in its specifics: Advertisements are indeed omnipresent, and the average person in Los Angeles is probably more exposed to ads in 2019 than they would have been in 1982. However, the ads are overwhelmingly conveyed through telecommunications and digital media (think of TV and radio commercials, internet popup ads, browser sidebar ads, and auto-play videos), and not through gigantic billboards. Partly, I think this is because huge video billboards would be too distracting–particularly if they also played audio–and would invite constant lawsuits from city dwellers who found them ruinous of open spaces and peace.
Which is worse: Huge video billboards or being constantly pummeled with spam emails, digital ads, and the knowledge that your personal internet data is being sold and traded without your control?
No one will turn on the lights. Blade Runner is a dark movie. No, I mean literally dark: Almost all of the scenes are set at night, and no one in the movie believes in turning on anything but dim lights. It may have been a bold, iconic look from a cinematography standpoint, but it’s not an accurate depiction of 2019. People do not prefer dimmer lights now, and in fact, nighttime artificial light exposure is higher than at any point in human history: satellites have confirmed that the amount of “light pollution” emanating from the Earth’s surface (mainly from street lights and exterior building lights) is greater than ever and still growing. Also, people now spend so much time staring into glowing screens (smartphones, computer monitors, TVs) that circadian rhythm disruption has become a public health problem.
If your light is so bright that it can be seen in space, then you’re wasting a lot of electricity.
Intriguingly, I don’t think this trend will continue forever, and I think it’s possible the world will someday be much darker than now. I intend to fully flesh out this idea in another blog entry, but basically, as machines get smarter and better, the need for nighttime illumination will drop. Autonomous cars will have night vision, so they won’t need bright headlights or bright streetlights to see the road. Streetlights will also be infused with “smart” technology, and will save energy by turning themselves off when no cars are around. And if intelligent machines replace humans (and/or if we evolve into a higher form), then everyone on Earth will have night vision as well, which will almost eliminate the need for all exterior lights.
Note that, in controlled environments, machines can already function in the dark or with only the dimmest of lights. This is called “lights-out manufacturing.” As machines get smarter and move from factories and labs to public spaces, they will bring this ability with them. My prediction merely seizes upon a proof of concept and expands upon it.
It will be possible to implant fake memories in people. Very early in a replicant’s life, he or she is implanted with fake memories. The process by which this is done is never revealed, but it is sophisticated enough to fill the subject’s mind with seeming decades of memories that are completely real to them. We lack the ability to do this, though psychological experiments have shown in principle that people can be tricked into slowly accepting false memories.
Since memories exist as physical arrangements of neurons in a person’s brain and as enduring patterns of electrochemical signaling within a brain, it should be possible in principle to alter a person’s brain in a way that implants a false memory in him or her, or any other discrete piece of knowledge or skill. However, this would require fantastically advanced technology (probably some combination of direct brain electrical stimulation, hypnosis, full-immersion virtual reality, drugs, and perhaps nanomachines) that we won’t have for at least 100 years. This is VERY far out there, along with being able to build humans from different body parts grown in different labs.
Computer monitors and TVs will be deep, and there will not be any thin displays. In one scene, we get a good look at a personal computer, and it appears to have an old-fashioned CRT monitor, and is almost a foot deep. Additionally, flat-panel TVs, computer monitors, laptops, or tablets and never seen in the film. This is a largely inaccurate depiction of 2019, as flat-panel screens are ubiquitous, and the average person owns several flat-screen devices that they interact with countless times per day.
Deckard sitting on his couch while looking at his computer screen. It looks like there might also be a second screen at the far right, facing away from him. Note that he doesn’t like turning on the lights.
I said the depiction was largely inaccurate because, even though CRT monitors and TVs are obsolete and haven’t been manufactured in ten years, millions of them are still in use in homes and businesses across the world, mainly among poor people and old people who lack the money or interest in upgrading. There’s even a subculture of younger people who prefer using old CRT TVs for playing video games because the picture looks better in some ways than it does on the best, modern OLED displays. In short, while it’s increasingly rare and unusual for people to have deep, CRT computer monitors in their homes, it is common enough that this scene from Blade Runner can be considered accurate in its depiction.
The median and mean lifespan of a CRT TV is 15 years, and almost none of them last more than 30 years. With that in mind, functional CRT monitors will not be in use by 2039, except among antique collectors. The Baby Boomers will be dead by then, and their kids will have thrown away any CRT screens they were clinging to.
People will talk with computers. Deckard’s apartment building has a controlled entry security feature: anyone who enters the elevator must speak his or her name, and the “voice print” must match with someone authorized to have access to the building, or else the elevator won’t go up. Also, in his apartment, Deckard uses voice commands to interface with his personal computer. Blade Runner correctly predicted that voice-user interfaces would be common in 2019, though it incorrectly envisioned how we would use them.
Electronic, controlled entry security technology in common areas of apartment buildings, like elevators and lobbies, are very common, but overwhelmingly involve using plastic cards and key fobs to unlock scanner-equipped doors. In fact, I’ve never seen a voice-unlocked door or elevator, and think most people would feel silly using one for whatever reason.
Smart speakers like the Amazon Echo are also very common and can only be interfaced with via speech. Modern smartphones and tablets can also be controlled with spoken commands, but it’s rare to see people doing this.
This brings up the valuable point that, though speech is an intuitive means of communication, we’ve found that older means of interface involving keyboards, mice, and reading words on a screen are actually better ways to interact with technology for most purposes, and they are not close to obsolescence (and might never be). An inherent problem with talking with a computer is you lose privacy since anyone within earshot knows what you’re doing. Also, while continuous speech recognition technology is now excellent, the error rates are still high enough to make it an aggravating way to input data into a machine compared to using buttons. Entering complex data into a computer, such as you would do for a computer programming task, is also much faster and easier with a keyboard, and anything involving graphical design or manipulation of digital objects on a screen is best done with a mouse or a stylus.
To understand, watch this clip of Deckard talking to his computer, and think about whether it would be easier or harder to do that image manipulation task using a mouse, with intuitive click-and-drag abilities to move around the image, and a trackball for zooming in and out: https://youtu.be/QkcU0gwZUdg
Deckard holding a photograph he found.
Hard copy photographs are still around. In that scene, Deckard does the image manipulation on a photograph that he found. He inserts it into a slot in his computer, and it scans it and shows the digital scan on his screen. While hard-copy photographs are still being made in 2019, they’re very uncommon, especially when compared to the number of photographs that were taken this year across the planet, but never transferred from digital format to a physical medium. I doubt that even 0.01% of the personal photographs ordinary people take are ever printed onto paper, and I doubt this will ever change.
Image scanners will be common. The computer’s ability to make a digital copy of a physical image of course means it has a built-in scanner. This proved a realistic prediction, as flatbed scanners with excellent image scan fidelity levels cost under $100. When Blade Runner was filmed, scanners were physically large, very expensive, made low-quality image conversions, and were almost unknown to the general public.
Cameras will take ultra high-resolution photos. The photo that Deckard analyzes is extremely detailed and has a very high pixel count, allowing him to use his computer to zoom in on small sections of it and to still see the images clearly. In particular, after zooming in on the round mirror hanging on the wall (upper right quadrant of the photo shown above), he spots an image of one of the replicants. While grainy, he can still make out her face and upper body.
It’s impossible to tell from the film sequence exactly how high-res the photo is, but today we have consumer-grade cameras that can take photos that are about as detailed. The Fujufilm XT30 costs $800 and is reasonably compact, putting it within the range of average-income people, and it takes very high quality 26.1 MP photos. One of its photos is shown above, and if you download the non-compressed version from the source website and open it in an imaging app, you’ll be able to zoom in on the rear left window of the car far enough to see the patterns of the decals and to read the words printed on them. (https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/12/18306026/fujifilm-xt30-camera-review-fuji-xt3-mirrorless)
Firearms will still be in use. The only handheld weapons we see in the film are handguns that use gunpowder to shoot out metal bullets. One is shown for only a split-second at the start of the movie when a replicant shoots a human, and the other is seen several times in Deckard’s hands. It’s big, bulky, looks like it shoots more powerful bullets than average, and has some glowing lights that seem to do nothing. In short, it’s nothing special, and probably isn’t any better than handguns that most Americans can easily buy for $500 today. Thus, the depiction the 2019’s state-of-the-art weaponry is accurate.
Deckard pointing his pistol.
And I do say “state-of-the-art” because, being an elite bounty hunter on an important mission to kill abnormally strong, dangerous people, Deckard has his choice of weapons, and it says a lot that he picks a regular gunpowder handgun instead of something exotic and stereotypically futuristic like a laser pistol. As noted in my reviews of The Terminator and Starship Troopers, we shouldn’t expect firearms to become obsolete for a very long time, and possibly never.
Video phone calls and pay phones will be common. There’s a scene where Deckard uses a public pay phone to make a video call to a love interest. This depiction of 2019 turned out to be half right and half wrong, but for the better: Pay phones have nearly disappeared because even poor people have cell phones (which are more convenient to use). Video call technology is mature and widespread, the calls can be made for free through apps like Skype and Google Hangouts, and even low-end smartphones can support them.
It’s surprising that video calls, long a staple of science fiction, became a reality during the 2010s with hardly anyone noticing and the world not changing in any major way. Also surprising is the fact that most people still prefer doing voice-only calls and texting, which is even more lacking in personal substance and emotional conveyance. Like talking with computers, using video calls to converse with other humans has proved more trouble than it’s worth in most cases.
Geneticists have made “hornless bulls.” This benefits animal welfare since it’s harder for the bulls to hurt each other, and because chopping off horns is painful. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49962130
Facebook and Google scan any alphanumerical characters they find in user-uploaded photos, and then embed those characters in the image file’s description. That means you can type in a car license plate number or a gun’s serial number into the Google or FB search bar, and find any photos of the car or gun. https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/10/22/google-firearm-serial-numbers/
Objects made of polystyrene plastic break down into CO2 on scales measurable in as little as decades, not millennia as is commonly believed. I predict that all the trash produced by humans will someday be cleaned up. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.9b00532
After the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown, Japan temporarily shut down all its other reactors for safety inspections. This caused the price of energy in Japan to skyrocket, and many people couldn’t afford to pay their heating bills. The number of people–overwhelmingly poorer elderly people–who froze to death as a result far exceeded the death toll from the meltdown itself (only one person dead from radiation exposure). https://www.nber.org/papers/w26395
“Smart plugs” are a versatile device I’ve never heard of: They’re small, Wifi-connected plugs that you insert into your electrical outlets, letting you remotely turn the electricity on or off in those outlets, in turn controlling any devices plugged into them. https://www.amazon.com/Gosund-Compatible-Required-appliances-Certified/dp/B079MFTYMV/
Google’s DeepMind AI just became a “grandmaster” in StarCraft 2, meaning it can beat 99.8% of humans. When the company started this project two years ago, its AI could barely perform basic in-game functions and couldn’t beat anyone. Note that DeepMind has been handicapped in that it can’t issue commands during games faster than human players can (about 264 actions per minute). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1724-z
Google says it has achieved quantum supremacy by building a quantum computer that can do a specific type of math calculation in 200 seconds that the best classical computer would take 10,000 years to do. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1666-5
And Scott Aaronson, a world-renowned theoretical computer scientist, wrote a blog post about both of those press releases, which essentially says Google is right, but by a narrower margin than they claimed, and that all disagreement about this issue will vanish in a few years once quantum computers improve so much that the performance gulf between them and classical computers gets too wide for anyone to contest. https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4372
Here’s an awesome mini-documentary about “extreme ultraviolet lithography”–a new technique for making computer chips even smaller and better than they are. I wish everything on TV were this intelligent and polished. https://youtu.be/f0gMdGrVteI
China has nearly finished a massive new military shipyard that it will use as an aircraft carrier factory. I predict that in about 20 years, China’s military will be strong enough to have at least a 50% chance of defeating the U.S. military in the western Pacific. However, it’s unclear if China will choose to fight even if it has the advantage. They’d much prefer to get what they want through diplomatic and economic pressure, and military intimidation. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-military-carrier-exclusive-idUSKBN1WW0KM
Here’s a fascinating exploration of the different WWII-era design and manufacturing philosophies of the Americans, Germans, and Soviets. It might be unfairly critical of the Germans since it forgets that their smaller pool of manpower might have rightly forced them to focus on making their tanks higher in quality at the expense of quantity. https://www.historynet.com/profiles-cold-steel-making-tanks.htm
Thin, flexible LED sheets like this will someday be incorporated into clothing. I predict this will lead to personal “cloaking devices” made of clothes studded with the LEDs, e-ink sheets, or some other metamaterial and pinhole cameras colored e-ink. 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. https://youtu.be/5fy91AdzfJw
An important weakness of small, flying drones is that they won’t be able to fly when it’s windy, raining or snowing. This reliability problem will dash any plans to create an economy where the drones have replaced ground vehicles for delivering goods, and seriously hinder efforts to make a military force comprised mainly of small attack drones. https://now.tufts.edu/articles/how-do-birds-survive-storms-and-other-harsh-weather
While writing my recent blog entry on The Physics of the Future, I discovered that author Michio Kaku’s description of the “Kardashev Scale” was wrong. Kaku said that a “Type 1” civilization on the Kardashev Scale was one that was “planetary” in scope, character and energy consumption, and that trends suggested humans wouldn’t achieve this rank until the year 2111. Kaku said that, we were in fact so pitiful at the time of the book’s writing that our civilization was only “Type 0.”
However, in Dr. Nikolai Kardashev’s science paper that established the Scale, he defined a “Type 1” civilization as being one that consumed as much energy as humans did at that time. That means humanity has been a Type 1 civilization since 1964! Kardashev also didn’t say anything about there being a “Type 0” classification.
Convinced that I alone knew of an embarrassing mistake made by one of the world’s foremost pop-science talking heads, I set out to write a blog entry about it titled “The misused and useless Kardashev Scale.” I spent an afternoon reading Kardashev’s original paper and its cited articles to actually understand it, and in other research found online articles and videos where even more smart people had cluelessly espoused a flawed definition of the Scale. This thing was even bigger than I had thought, and I was about to blow the lid off of it! This would finally put my lousy blog on the map!
And then, I found out someone else had already written about this very subject, and had done so with superior prose than I could probably write. J.N. “Nick” Nielsen beat me by five years with his article “What Kardashev Really Said.”
What a waste of my time.
It got me thinking about how much human effort is duplicative, and how much more efficient and creative we would be if we didn’t needlessly reinvent the wheel. Of course, this is impossible for mere humans since never being derivative requires perfect knowledge of everything that everyone else has already said, done, or created, and our minds are incapable of holding that much information. However, it’s easy to see how technology could change this.
Google Image search results for “red robin bird”
Imagine a smartphone app that was connected to the device’s camera. I’ll call the app “Copycat.” Every time you turn on your camera, Copycat starts watching what’s visible through the viewfinder. Once it detects that you’re steadying the camera to prepare to take a still photo, the app would compare the scene in front of you with trillions of other photos available for free on the internet. If you were about to take a picture that looked identical or nearly identical to one that already existed, Copycat would warn you, show you an image of the other picture, and tell you if there were any ways you could, standing there, produce a new type of image. Maybe snap the photo of the songbird from low on the ground, or walk 10 feet to the right to photograph it with that stone building in the background.
This level of technology is well within reach: the image analysis and recognition feature is no different from Google’s “reverse image search.” The second feature could easily arise from a set of deep learning programs that are trained to recognize visually well-composed and aesthetically pleasing photo compositions, and to come up with ways to reposition the elements within an image to raise or maximize those values. Upload enough training data, and it will figure it out.
Copycat is a highly specific example, but it illustrates technology’s potential to help people make better use of their time by warning them before they do something that has already been done. And an important ancillary benefit is that it will remind us of valuable and interesting things people have already done, but which may have been largely forgotten. In showing you images, Copycat might make you aware of long-dead bird photographers you had never heard of, spurring you to research them further and to beautify your house with framed prints of their (free) artwork.
Along with boosting the originality of artwork, music, and writing, this sort of technology would be invaluable to scientists and engineers who are deciding how to spend their scarce time and R&D money. A machine that had memorized the full body of scientific literature and patents could, respectively, tell a scientist which things had not been researched and tell an engineer which things had not been invented. The result would be no resources wasted on duplicative projects, and an acceleration of scientific and technological advancement, merely due to a sharper grasp of what is already known.
