The U.S. and Britain only became allies around 1900, when Germany’s rise forced Britain to nearly withdraw from the Americas to secure its rear flank and shuffle its limited military resources to Europe. The U.S. also correctly calculated that it could pressure Britain to the bargaining table if it built its own navy up enough to give it regional superiority to the Royal Navy in the Caribbean. Similarly, if the Chinese achieve regional superiority over the Americans in the South China Sea, it could make U.S. forces peacefully (but begrudgingly) cede control. https://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-america-beat-queen-victoria%E2%80%99s-britain-without-fighting-30797
For some reason, the Chinese press isn’t reporting on all of its country’s warship launchings. This might lead average Chinese people to underestimate the size of their own navy, but of course every respectable spy agency is seeing everything. https://www.janes.com/article/83269/china-quietly-increasing-warship-numbers
Mirrorless cameras are improving, and will make DSL-R cameras obsolete within a few years. I predict it won’t make sense for anyone to buy a DSL-R by 2030, though there may still be a market for them among uninformed consumers and people interested in their nostalgia value. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45627055
Following the recent release of the “iPhone XS Max” impelled this tongue-in-cheek analysis, which projects that iPhones will be as big as small tablet computers by 2025, which is comical. However, I predict the growth trend will continue as predicted, but the iPhones will stay pocket-sized thanks to foldable screens. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/09/13/how-big-will-the-iphone-get
Fields medalist Alain Connes praises the defunct Soviet math academies, and of the general merits of allowing smart people to pursue pure knowledge instead of being pressured to use their talents to make money. If machines make human labor obsolete and everyone is put on welfare–er, a UBI–will people follow their passions and cultivate useful, inborn talents? Or at that point in the future, will human math geniuses just run into more frustration since machines would also be superior at pure math? http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-french-way-alain-connes-interview.html
Autonomous cars would make traffic lights obsolete since the vehicles would wirelessly coordinate with each other to avoid collisions. Perpendicular streams of car traffic could flow through each other’s gaps at road intersections with the precision of Blue Angels stunt pilots. Eliminating stop lights would improve the flow and rhythm of traffic, reducing jams. I also predict that this ability to coordinate as a swarm will allow for dynamic lane reversals according to acute changes in traffic flow. For example, imagine there’s a city where everyone works, a suburb where everyone lives, and an eight-lane highway connecting the two. Every morning, the four lanes leading into the city are clogged with cars because all the people are trying to get in to their workplaces and the four lanes leading out of the city are empty, and every evening the reverse is true. If all the people have autonomous cars, only a four-lane, one-way highway would be needed since the cars would all switch directions without danger of head-on collisions twice a day to match the changing needs of the flow of people. https://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/infrastructure/how-vehicletovehicle-communication-could-replace-traffic-lights-and-shorten-commutes
The more interesting and much more plausible future technology the article touches on is automated inventories of all items in your home. Once you have enough cameras in your home, and perhaps a robot butler, they’d set about identifying every object in every room to create a list. (Monitoring of refrigerator contents and automated ordering of replacement foods to replace those verging on exhaustion or spoilage will be another aspect of this.) The frequency with which you used the objects would also be observed, and your machines would encourage you to get rid of things you never used, like your old set of skis. They’ll make it easy by putting ads on eBay and scheduling times for buyers to pick them up. You’ll just have to push the “OK” button. Physical goods will be allocated across the population more efficiently as a result, and prices for things will go down once billions of objects collecting dust in garages and attics enter the market.
Automated personal inventories will also show us how infrequently we use possessions we consider “essential,” like tools (e.g. – you only use your rake two days per year, each autumn), which will probably give rise to “libraries of things” instead of personal ownership. (This is simply an extension of the same logic supporting the idea that Uber-style ridesharing will replace personal car ownership.) When you think about it, it really is kind of crazy to spend money on something that sits idle in your house 99.99% of the time. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/style/robot-furniture-beep-beep-boop.html
…And then this article about a “wardrobe rental service” highlights the limitations of the sharing vs. private ownership model. It would probably take more time and energy to move clothes around between people, and the apparent cost savings would be a false efficiency. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45630395
In spite of new records being set in nearly every sport, every year, scientist David Epstein thinks it’s not being caused by human genetic evolution, and in fact, much of the improvement is illusory. https://youtu.be/8COaMKbNrX0
The 16% of human genes that were known to scientists in 1991 accounted for half of all genetics studies in 2015. 27% of human genes have never been the focus of a science paper. Is this imbalance due to some kind of human bias, or have we rightly focused on studying the genes that are the most important? https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/09/the-popularity-contest-of-human-genes/570586/
The year is 2035, and highly advanced robots (most of which are humanoid) are everywhere. Many of them have superhuman levels of strength, speed and agility, and they are over 1 billion in number [U.N. projections say there will be about 9 billion humans by then]. In spite of the obvious threat they might pose to the human race, people trust they won’t turn hostile because they are programmed with supposedly unalterable failsafes and lack emotions and self-drive. Those critical assumptions about the machines are cast into doubt when a top roboticist is murdered at the headquarters of the U.S. Robotics company, and the detective assigned to the case (played by Will Smith) discovers that a robot might have been responsible.
Analysis:
Most houses and buildings will look the same as they do today. At the beginning of the film, we see Will Smith’s apartment, which looks identical in size, layout and furnishings to a 2018 apartment. The only thing kind of futuristic is a single-bladed ceiling fan, which you could probably buy today from a rich man’s novelty store like Brookstone or SkyMall. Will Smith then visits his grandmother’s apartment, which is not futuristic in any way (until later in the film, when she gets a house robot). Shortly after that, we see a panoramic of Chicago’s skyline, and while there are several new, futuristic skyscrapers and elevated highways, most of the city is still made of old brick buildings. There are even some street scenes showing graffiti-covered walls and run-down fronts of buildings.
And later, Will Smith and his boss have beers after work at a grimy little restaurant that looks of 1950’s vintage, except for the robot bartender and flatscreen TV. I, Robot accurately shows how future technologies will be integrated into the built environment in 2035: Most of it will just be overlaid onto older things. For example, a brick apartment building from the 1940s will have solar panels installed on its roof and might have a gigantic TV screen draped over its side. The apartments themselves won’t change from their original floor sizes and layouts, and they’ll still be full of furnishings that people in the 1940s would recognize (beds, tables, chairs, refrigerators, etc.), but they will have robots running around inside them doing work.
The only kind of “furnishing/appliance” I think will vanish between now and 2035 is the traditional home entertainment center, which typically consists of a large, heavy TV–often supported by a table–video and game devices like Blu-ray players and Playstations, and a shelf full of movie and game discs. By 2035, TVs will be at most a centimeter thick (and possibly as thin as paper) and will be hung on walls, and all videos and games will be streamed from the internet or from a personal hard drive. Either there will be no more player devices, or at most a person will need one, small box device that plays every type of media and interfaces with game controllers. Discs will be long obsolete.
There will be wall-sized displays. In the film, there are billboard-sized TV screens on the sides of some buildings that mostly play commercials. This will prove accurate for 2035, and the TVs will have 8K or even 16K resolution. I already discussed this in my review of Prometheus and won’t go into it at length again.
Prices will be inflated. In the aforementioned movie scene where Will Smith and his boss get beers at a restaurant, the final tab for a burger and a couple drinks is $46.50. Yes, inflation will naturally continue, and both wages and prices will be much higher in 2035. Moreover, assuming a constant price inflation rate of 3.0%, the term “millionaire” will fall out of use in the U.S. and other Western countries by 2100 since by then, inflation will have rendered $1 million USD only as valuable as $90,000 USD is in 2018.
Autonomous cars that drive as well as humans will be widespread. Will Smith’s car has a self-driving feature. At the rate the technology is improving, the 2030’s will be the decade when self-driving car technology becomes widespread in rich countries. The decade could start with self-driving cars being an expensive luxury feature that most people mistrust and with self-driving cars only comprising 1-5% of all cars on the road, and the decade will probably end with self-driving features coming as standard on new vehicles, and 50% of cars having autonomous capabilities. Will Smith has a luxury sedan in 2035, which is consistent with this prediction.
The typical passenger car in a rich country won’t use gas. Towards the end of the film, Will Smith brings his motorcycle out of storage for the climactic battle with the machines. Bridget Moynahan–a roboticist at USR who is helping him with his murder investigation–gets on the back and says: “Don’t tell me this bike runs on gas!”, indicating that some alternative car fuel technology predominates in the 2035, and gas-powered vehicles are the exception. Considering the large amount of fossil fuels still available, the heavy investment in related infrastructure, and the time it takes for the vehicle fleet to turn over, I think gasoline will still be the primary fuel for vehicles in 2035. However, I think important technological advances in other areas will be seriously threatening its dominance, and a large fraction of vehicles will use something else. If anything, batteries will be cheaper and more energy dense thanks to incremental tech improvements, so electric cars will be practical for everyday use.
We already know this is possible: the Tesla Model 3 is a purely battery-powered vehicle that exists today, has very gooddrive characteristics and a 310 mile range on a single charge (which is the same range a comparable gas-powered sedan has on a full tank). The big problem is the car’s high manufacture costs, which are somewhere between $44,000 and $50,000 apiece, putting them out of reach of most people. About $10,000 of the cost is due to the battery pack, meaning future improvements in battery technology are crucial for making electric cars mainstream. Such improvements are entirely possible: we know that the energy density of modern batteries could, in theory, be improved by a factor of at least 3 to 6 (http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/kurt-zenz-house/the-limits-of-energy-storage-technology) . It’s not going to be easy to get there, but considering the research dollars being thrown at the problem, I think it’s reasonable to assume that the advances will happen by 2035, and average-income people will be able to afford battery powered cars with ~300 mile ranges.
Breakthroughs in fast battery charging tech, fuel cells, and using synthetic microorganisms to synthesize chemical fuels in a carbon-neutral manner could also realistically happen by 2035. Whichever of these becomes most popular, by 2035 there will definitely be viable alternatives to using gasoline in personal vehicles, but it will take decades more to turn over the whole fleet of gas-powered cars.
There will be fully automated factories. In one scene, Will Smith visits a factory that builds robots and finds it is fully automated, meaning no humans work there. Instead, robots build other robots. Considering the decades-long decline in manufacturing sector employment numbers, I think the total obsolescence of human factory workers is inevitable, the only question is how soon it will happen. By 2035, I think high-tech companies like today’s Apple will have fully automated factories, mostly to demonstrate their technical prowess to the public and not necessarily because it’s cheaper than having any human workers. However, this will be atypical, and in almost all modern factories there will still be some humans, though they will be very highly trained people vastly outnumbered by machines, and there will be far fewer of them than today. Other areas of the economy, including agriculture and the service sector, will also be much more heavily automated by 2035, and it will be common to see this in everyday life in the form of robots restocking shelves at Wal-Mart and machine arms handing you your food at the McDonald’s drive-thru. I have no doubt that all low-skill jobs will ultimately be done by machines, liberating humans from drudgery (though also probably causing massive structural unemployment).
There will be ubiquitous surveillance. In the film, every room and hallway in the USR headquarters building has a continuous “sensor strip” running horizontally across the top section of the wall. The sensor strip apparently has tiny cameras, microphones, speakers, and holographic image emitters built into it, so everything happening inside the building is continuously recorded, and the building’s evil A.I. can physically manifest itself anywhere as a talking hologram. While I don’t think there will be “sensor strips” as depicted in the film, I, Robot still nailed some key aspects of life in 2035 with the concept. As I’ve written before, tiny sensors will be everywhere in our environment and on our bodies well before 2035, meaning most things happening in public spaces and even inside of houses and buildings will be recorded. Computers will also be smart enough to understand what is happening in the recordings and which people are in them, so yes, if an evil A.I. wanted to track your activities in 2035, it could do so.
And thanks to tiny microphones and speakers being built into future televisions (again, I’ve already gone over this in a note), you could indeed interact with the evil A.I. just by talking and having the wall TV suddenly come alive as its portal to you. The wall TV might even project the A.I.’s image as a hologram instead of as a 2-D moving picture. Alternatively, you could have the same interaction through your augmented reality glasses, which will also be a mature and widespread consumer technology by 2035.
Robots will pervade our daily lives. Of course, the one thing dominating I, Robot’s depiction of the future is robots. They’re all over the place doing all sorts of jobs. Multipurpose humanoid robots called “Nestor Series Robots” stay in peoples’ houses doing chores like cooking food, and they run around in public doing other tasks like walking dogs, delivering mail, dumping trash cans into garbage trucks. They have superhuman levels of speed and strength. Other, more task-specific robots with non-humanoid designs do things like demolish old buildings (Will Smith almost gets killed by one of these) and clean roadways of debris. While I don’t think the robots with the dexterity, speed, and intelligence of the Nestor Series will exist by 2035, I think the clunkier task-specific robots will, and they will be getting widespread.
Robots specialized for road maintenance deal with a car wreck inside a tunnel
After all, if computers are smart enough to drive cars by that year, it stands to reason that they’d also be smart enough to sweep highways, mow lawns, pick crops, and do some household chores. So yes, in 2035, you will encounter robots each day, either inside your home or in public, or both. You might go into a McDonald’s and see an R2D2-style robot with six arms flipping burgers. The trash truck that empties out dumpsters into itself won’t have any human beings in it. You might have a robot in your home that understands your verbal commands and can do things like wash dishes, operate your laundry machine and drag your trashcans to the curb. It will be slow, clumsy and weak compared to a human and probably won’t look like a human, but it will safely and reliably do tasks around the house and will be worth the money. It will probably adapt to your schedule and do all the work during the daytime when you were away at work or school, and then get out of the way when you were around (like how most people use Roomba vacuum cleaner robots today). As in the movie, these robots will automatically download software patches and updates, some of which would endow it with new skills and abilities.
We will have built massive, new infrastructure in densely populated areas. In the movie, Chicago has underground highway tunnels that cars speed through at 100 mph. Um, no. Seventeen years isn’t enough time to build that, and if it were going to get done by 2035, it would be in the public planning stages now. Will it happen EVENTUALLY, though? Say, by 2065? Quite possibly. Robots will vastly increase the size of the labor force and they will work for free, making all sorts of thitherto impossible public works projects feasible. Giant dams, new subways, national mag-lev networks, huge bridges, demolitions of decrepit buildings, cleaning up toxic waste sites–all sorts of projects that we can’t do now thanks to inadequate time and money will be done in the future with cheap robot labor. At that point, the biggest stumbling block will be political resistance from people living in neighborhoods that don’t want the giant glass skyscraper going up next to them.
And robot labor won’t just make a difference at the level of big national projects–it will have a big impact on average people. While the house robots of 2035 will be clunky and limited in function, their counterparts in the second half of this century will have superhuman physical abilities and skills sets. They’ll eventually be able to do anything, from mowing your lawn to cooking your food to building an extension to your house. They’ll have a superior sense of aesthetics to you and will make intelligent recommendations about how to manage your household instead of only waiting for your orders. Just imagine a world where every lawn is mowed, every scrap of trash on the street is picked up, every house is spacious and resembles something from Better Homes and Gardens, and every household has a master chef and a 24/7 security guard in one. Imagine all of our infrastructure upgraded and the existing stock of crappy, old buildings being heavily upgraded or demolished and replaced with something of much higher quality. It would be a cleaner, prettier, more comfortable world and would represent a major increase to standards of living.
There will be crazy parking garages where cars are stored on giant, spinning racks. The fatal problem: if you had any loose stuff in your car (coins, papers, half-empty coffee travel mug), it would go flying all over the place and would end up all over the dashboard and windshield. In 2035, parking lots will still be “normal,” though most won’t have human attendants, and most will be suffering financially due to declining business.
In 2035, people in rich countries will commonly have autonomous cars, and instead of parking in an expensive lot close to their destination and then walking the final distance on foot, people will have their cars drop them off at the destination, and then drive off by themselves to park in the cheapest place within X miles and wait. This will destroy much of the private parking lot industry since the cars would be able to find the nearest free parking space, and then precisely time when they left the space to coincide with you exiting the front door of the place where it dropped you off. Something like a “sharing economy for parking spaces,” whereby private citizens would rent out empty spaces in their driveways and curbsides by the hour for very low rates (the whole process would be automated) would also be formidable competition for professionally-run parking garages. Such a business will become practical once the AIs driving cars and the AIs managing the patchwork of private parking spaces can talk to each other.
There will be no smartphones, tablets, or augmented/virtual reality glasses. The most advanced personal electronic devices people used in the movie were earbud-style cell phones. NO!!!
People will have natural-looking bionic arms that are better than normal arms. Halfway through the film, it is revealed that Will Smith’s left arm is actually a robotic prosthesis installed after his natural arm was severed in a car accident. It looks completely natural, blends into his body, apparently allows him to feel sensations, and has the full range of human motion. We find out it’s a robot arm when it gets damaged in a fight and sparks start flying out. I think this sort of technology is inevitable, but will come way later than 2035. The state-of-the-art in limb prosthetics in 2035 will be about the same as the state-of-the-art in robotics, which I described earlier as being slow and clumsy, but at least in the lower end of the human range.
There will be tiny hologram emitters. At the start of the film, when Will Smith first learns about the murder, he speaks to a hologram of the dead man. The human-sized hologram is produced by a small, pocket-sized device lying on the ground. It’s possible to make free-floating holograms (see my Prometheus review), but only with large machines and, probably, large amounts of energy. I doubt the technology will improve enough by 2035 to allow hologram emitters to be so small. Also, when the holographic man speaks, his speech seem to be coming from his holographic mouth instead of from the device lying on the ground, which is inaccurate.
Robots will have berserker emotions. The best-known scene in the film is probably where Sonny–the robot suspected of the murder–becomes so angry during his jailhouse interrogation that he slams his fists into the heavy metal table, denting it. Since emotions are merely the result of biochemical and bioelectric activity in the human brain, and since I believe that all aspects of the human brain and its functions can be ultimately simulated in computers, I think machines will eventually gain human emotions, and it’s entirely possible they could go through a period of their evolution when they had extreme human emotions like explosive anger or depression. But in the long run, it’s not going to make sense for them to be capable of emotions that override their logical thinking, make them threatening or untrustworthy, or debilitate them. A.I.’s will have a huge advantage of humans in that they will be able to edit their own mental “programming,” and I think they will wisely decide to inhibit or reduce certain emotions.
By 2035, machines will probably have passed the Turing Test, meaning they will be able to carry on free-form conversations with humans for minutes on end without making mistakes. However, they won’t actually be capable of intelligent thought and won’t be self-aware like humans are. Similarly, by the same year, I think machines will be able to sense the emotions of the humans around them with good accuracy and will be able to simulate their own emotions (through speech, mannerisms, or other actions) fairly convincingly. However, these will be mere simulations of emotions–machines will lack the inner experiences of things like happiness, anger, and fear.
Switching gears to shoehorn a random point into this note, let me return to something from earlier. While the world of 2035 will look very similar to the world today, and new technologies will mostly just be overlaid onto the existing infrastructure, I think in the longer run, free robot labor will enable us to REPLACE or radically upgrade our existing infrastructure. But does that mean every single building is going to turn into some kind of Borg-like structure that in terms of form and function will be unrecognizable to us today? Absolutely not. I’m thinking more along the lines of run-down houses and buildings being replaced with something you would today think of as luxurious and spacious. Living in a house you’d see in a style catalog today will become the new standard in the future. There wouldn’t be mile-high skycrapers everywhere, but ugly urban buildings and abandoned factories would disappear.
Will we all live in mansions? No, but none of us will be packed into tiny apartments or dwellings overloaded with people. How much extra utility do you really gain once your house grows beyond a certain size? Will we all have fleets of luxury vehicles? No, but then again, why does one person need more than one vehicle?
My broader point is that, even at the end of this century (and possibly beyond), many aspects of life and features of the built environment will be the same as today, we’ll discover there are some sensible limits to how much things can and should change, and we’ll find that technology can’t improve upon certain things. Here are some made-up examples of futurism falls victim to the “technology improves everything” fallacy and fails to consider the cost/benefit tradeoff of making things more high tech:
Instead of your desk being made out of wood, it will be made out of perfectly structured hard polymers impregnated with self-regenerating nanomachines that immediately fix even the smallest crack, and it will also be embedded with powerful computers. Why does the desk need all of that?
Instead of cleaning your dishes by putting them in a normal dishwasher that sprays them with soap and water, you will put them into a dishwasher that uses nanomachines and sound waves to clean them. Is there something wrong with soap and hot water? Are we constantly dealing with rotting food stuck to our plates, bowls and utensils because our current dishwashers aren’t advanced enough to wash them away?
Instead of you using a simple remote control to change channels on your TV, you will change the channels using arm and hand gestures that your TV will be able to see and understand. What’s so hard about pushing a button on a remote control? How does using physical gestures make things better or easier?
(I read this in a sci-fi short story year ago) Instead of rubbing a bar of soap over your body in the shower, you will say “Lather” and your showerhead will spray soapy water onto you, and then you will say “Rinse” and it will only spray pure water onto you to wash off all the soap. In the future, only losers rub soap over their filthy bodies, I guess.
This is the future: F/A-18 fighter planes dropped micro-UAVs as part of an experiment. The UAVs formed into swarms and completed missions. The WWII-era “Bat Bomb” will make a comeback courtesy of this kind of tech. https://youtu.be/ndFKUKHfuM0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb
An unmanned surveillance/communication drone called “Zephyr” just spent 25 days aloft continuously. It has an electric engine powered by solar panels on its wings. At its 70,000-foot cruise altitude, it would look like a tiny speck to people on the ground, and I bet with simple active camouflage that would turn its underside the same shade of blue as the sky, it would be invisible. Mass surveillance and ubiquitous internet are probably inevitable. https://warisboring.com/new-spy-drone-flies-non-stop-for-a-month/
Machines can now even alter footage of entire human bodies to simulate entirely fake body movements. https://youtu.be/PCBTZh41Ris
The stunning advances in AI over the last few years have come at a cost: the amount of computer power required to make each happen has been exponentially rising. It might get too expensive to continue in as little as 3.5 years, after which, the pace of performance improvement will slow. https://aiimpacts.org/interpreting-ai-compute-trends/
A robot called “RangerBot” has entered use, and will patrol the Great Barrier Reef for invasive starfish species and kill them with poison injections. As I wrote in today’s other blog entry, autonomous machines will someday do multitudes of tasks that the human labor force can’t, yielding radical and unexpected benefits. https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/rangerbot-programmed-to-kill/
Forty years since the birth of the first Test Tube Baby, only 1-2% of annual U.S. births are done through IVF. I think human genetic engineering will follow approximately the same pattern. The first Designer Baby could be born within ten years, but it will be decades longer before even 5% of babies born each year are engineered. https://www.pennmedicine.org/updates/blogs/fertility-blog/2018/march/ivf-by-the-numbers
Chinese geneticists used CRISPR to replace disease-causing alleles in human zygotes, without side effects to other parts of the genomes. The zygotes could have been implanted in women through IVF, and if carried to term, the resulting children would have been the first genetically engineered humans in history. I predict the milestone will happen by 2039, and perhaps as soon as 2028. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/scientists-tweak-dna-viable-human-embryos
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s admission that his muscled physique elicited polarized reactions from women (half thought it was hot, half thought it was repulsive) have implications for human genetic engineering. People would use it to make kids that were leaner and stronger, but due to aesthetic concerns, few would push it to the very extreme of what is possible. http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/08/arnold-will-to-power.html
Anyone interested in engineering their kid to have a specific eye color should note that there are such things as surgically implanted fake irises that do the same thing. I note that most of the YouTube videos about this (the “Bright Ocular” implant) have titles like “bright ocular removal,” “never get bright ocular” or “bright ocular made me blind.” Maybe iris implants will be better by the time human genetic engineering is widespread. https://youtu.be/WB0RThNrYHw
Your Instagram photo uploads are not original. Right now, the photo matching is being done by humans, but soon machines will do it. As AI and mass surveillance get more pervasive with time, machines will make it clear to us the full, scary scope of how derivative our art is, how much time we waste unwittingly reinventing the wheel, and how many “new” things are really just copies of old things we’ve forgotten about. https://qz.com/quartzy/1349585/you-are-not-original-or-creative-on-instagram/
Consumerism is a big lie. Your expensive “distressed jeans” are made of normal denim that has been shot with a laser gun. https://youtu.be/F0ZrZ4h2xGQ
According to virtual wind tunnel simulations, the fighter craft from Star Wars have poor aerodynamics. Yes, it doesn’t matter when they’re flying through the vacuum of space, but what about all the times they’ve been shown flying in a planet’s atmosphere? https://youtu.be/PilQTjw1Qis
I think nuclear missiles will be common space weapons. Newton’s Third Law would also make it hard to shoot projectile weapons since it would nudge your ship in the opposite direction. There would also probably be “effective speed limits” on how fast the space ship would travel, since burning up 51% of your fuel to charge headlong at the enemy will mean certain death for you if you are pointed towards the depths of space. https://www.quora.com/What-would-a-realistic-space-battleship-look-like
Facebook has abandoned its project to use high-endurance flying drones to broadcast internet to poor parts of the world. However, Google’s counterpart, which uses high-altitude balloons, is still going strong. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44624702
Just think: In only about five years, there will be A.I.s that can debate politics with humans on Facebook, never tiring, never taking offense, and replying instantly to anything you write. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44531132
The criminal who just committed a mass shooting at a Maryland newspaper was hard to fingerprint at the police station and he refused to give his name, so the police took a photo of him and quickly identified him by uploading it to the Maryland Image Repository System (or MIRS), “which includes over ten million photos drawn from known offenders and the state’s entire driver’s license database.” https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/29/17518364/facial-recognition-police-identify-capital-gazette-shooter
If you want an idea of how radically we could improve humans through genetic engineering, read articles like this and then consider that IQ is at least 50% genetic. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44668452
Richard Feynman was one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, but as a child scored a mere 124 on an IQ test (smarter than average, but not genius-level). It’s possible that the disappointing score simply owed to the fact that there was too low a ceiling to the difficulty of the math questions. https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/07/annals-of-psychometry-iqs-of-eminent.html
Gerontologists in Italy have found that the mortality rate hits 50% once a person turns 105, and stays at that level indefinitely, suggesting that the ultimate limit on human lifespan is unknown. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05582-3
In the distant future, there will be a single database with the genomes of quadrillions of different organisms, including DNA from all humans. If paired with something like a cloning lab, it could create any organism in the database from scratch. It reminds me of a combination of the “Universal Constructor” from the Deus Ex video game and the use of organic “blanks” in The 6th Day movie to rapidly make human clones. https://qz.com/1315829/the-dna-of-all-the-animals-on-earth-will-be-recorded-in-an-enormous-new-genetics-project/
Old photos that have turned black with age can be restored using an x-ray scanner. Someday, we’ll be able to use more advanced techniques to restore/upgrade old film footage and photos to perfect clarity. They’ll do highly accurate and natural-looking colorizations of black and white photos. https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/new-technique-brings-secrets-out-of-old-daguerreotypes/
“If AI rationally allocates resources through big data analysis, and if robust feedback loops can supplant the imperfections of “the invisible hand” while fairly sharing the vast wealth it creates, a planned economy that actually works could at last be achievable.” This same thought occurred to me a few years ago. Communists shouldn’t get too excited though, since the same AI-powered mass surveillance system would also keenly understand the abilities of each human and could track whether they put in an honest day’s work or not, which would in turn affect the AI’s decisions about how “fair shares” of the day’s wealth should be allocated. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/05/03/end-of-capitalism/
If you’re only counting animals that might have consciousness and can probably feel pain, daily births are in the billions per day. Since those species’ populations are mostly steady-state (neither growing nor declining overall), then the same number of deaths must happen each day. Many of those deaths are agonizing because they owe to untreated injuries, disease, or slaughter at the hands of unskilled humans. There’s a fringe coalition of transhumanists, altruists, and animal rights advocates who think it is humanity’s ultimate mission to use technology to end this cycle of suffering, possibly by capturing all wild animals and putting them in something like The Matrix. All humans would also go vegetarian or switch to lab-grown meats. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44412495
‘The Summit’s theoretical peak speed is 200 petaflops, or 200,000 teraflops. To put that in human terms, approximately 6.3 billion people would all have to make a calculation at the same time, every second, for an entire year, to match what Summit can do in just one second. ‘ That is probably not true. We don’t know how much computation the human brain does, but the best guesses converge on the “tens of petaflops” realm, plus or minus one order of magnitude. So what this milestone really means is that, for $400-600 million, we can now build a supercomputer with the same raw processing power as 1-10 human brains. That sounds pretty snicker-worthy until you remember the cost-performance of supercomputers improves by an order of magnitude every 5-7 years. So using a conservative extrapolation, a supercomputer with the same power as 1-10 human brains should cost single-digit millions of dollars by 2033, putting them within reach of midsized businesses and second-tier college Computer Science departments. Big entities like militaries, spy agencies and Google will collectively have tens or hundreds of thousands of them. If we haven’t built an artificial general intelligence (AGI) by 2040, it won’t be thanks to deficient or costly computer hardware. It will be because we don’t know how to properly arrange the hardware to support intelligent thought and because of a failure to develop the software of intelligence. https://qz.com/1301510/the-us-has-the-worlds-fastest-supercomputer-again-the-200-petaflop-summit/ https://aiimpacts.org/trends-in-the-cost-of-computing/
Assuming a constant 3% inflation rate, $1 million in the year 2120 will only be worth $50,000 in today’s money. Being a “millionaire” in the future will be meaningless, and the title will probably fall out of use. (Similarly, it wasn’t long ago that having a $100,000 income was a huge deal.) But given that central banks support price inflation because it’s a sneaky way of cutting wages without making human workers mad, will inflation stop once machines take over the economy? https://www.officialdata.org/2018-dollars-in-2120?amount=50000&future_pct=0.03
Here’s an old episode of the Joe Rogan show where he debates a very skilled tech skeptic named “Bruce Damer” who pours a lot of cold water on his optimism. Start watching about halfway through. https://youtu.be/SSf2bVpibmw
My idea for “solar Venetian blinds” was commercialized by a company called “SolarGaps” a few months before I wrote my blog entry. Dang it! An overlooked advantage of having an all-knowing AI is that it would warn you up front if your big idea had already been thought of by someone else. Humanity could use its energies much more efficiently without wasting time reinventing the wheel. https://youtu.be/whrroUUWCYo
[This draft has been sitting unfinished for almost a year, and on this lazy Sunday afternoon, I’ve finally gotten around to polishing it off and publishing it.]
Imagine driving a car down a highway at 60 mph for three hours and only seeing this.
A year ago, I spent a week in the Dakotas and Nebraska, marking my first visit to all of those places. During my many hours spent driving on the highway in my rental car and surveying the landscape, several (odd) things crossed my mind, which surprisingly enough, merit posting on this sci-tech blog.
First, let me say that for people like myself who live in urban or suburban environments, the emptiness of rural Dakota and Nebraska is profound and has to be experienced to be fully appreciated. Agricultural areas that are close enough to DC region that I’ve taken road trips through them–such as rural Ohio and Indiana–are on an entirely higher plane of density (in terms of human population and infrastructure). The Great Plains and the Midwest definitely ain’t the same thing. My trip last year thus reset my baseline about what counts as “empty” or “rural” (and I suspect trekking across Alaska would cause yet another redefinition).
The emptiness of the Dakotas is also understandable after you spend time there: there’s just nothing there to keep your interest. The terrain is monotonous (mostly flat or with low, undulating hills going out to every horizon), there’s little wildlife and few trees, and extreme weather is common. It reminded me that not every place dominated by nature is equally interesting or aesthetically pleasing. If I had to choose a “wild” place to live as hermit or nature-loving hippie, I’d pick a mountainous locale that offered good hikes and a variety of wildlife for watching, fishing and hunting, or a spot along a coastline. Being in the middle of a literal sea of grass gets old very fast.
This is something to bear in mind when contemplating how the population will redistribute in the future if teleworking gets even more common and/or if machines render many people permanently unemployed. Without jobs keeping them tethered to cities and their surrounding suburbs, I think tens of millions of people will move to rural areas known for their natural beauty and to charming small towns (it might be helpful to map where wealthy retired people move to in large numbers). However, there are a limited number of such places, so the same problems we see today in metro areas like congestion, (relative) overpopulation, high real estate prices, and the gentrification-driven transformation of “genuine” towns into “boutique” towns would recur. Given the choice to live anywhere, almost no one would pick a little house in the prairie, but competition would be savage for plots of land in places like Silverthorne, CO or Sedona, AZ. The more verdant and mountainous part of western South Dakota near the Black Hills could also grow.
Time magazine mapped the 25 most popular destinations for retired Americans who move across state lines.
Once farms are fully automated or can be operated remotely (visualize a guy sitting in an office cubicle, using his computer to control a “drone farm combine” from 1,000 miles away), vast stretches of flat, boring land in places like the Dakotas could become completely devoid of humans. Instead of being a new phenomenon, it would just mark the endpoint of several generations-long trends in America related to agricultural automation, depopulation of rural counties thanks to low birth rates and young people moving to more interesting places like cities, and the dying out of “farm country culture” and “small town culture.”
Rural counties lost considerable population in the last decade.
This transition would be sad in some ways, but probably beneficial on balance. Not a day goes by anymore without an article appearing in a major newspaper about the epidemic of suicide, drug abuse (especially opioids and prescription pills), and despair in rural America. Clearly, something is wrong.
During my trip, I drove through several remote, decaying towns–where half the structures looked abandoned and where old, badly rusted vehicles were scattered everywhere–and some settlements that were mere clusters of trailers near the highway. It made no sense to me for people to live in visible poverty, hours away from the nearest city and its cultural, educational and employment opportunities, beyond commuting range to any jobs, and in the midst of a monotonous landscape. What did the people do with their time? How much did their remoteness undermine their access to police and medical help during emergencies? How much extra money and manpower did the local governments have to spend extending those services, as well as utilities like electricity, to them?
It made even less sense to me for people to live in such places, when I found that the same countryside vistas, quiet, and feeling of isolation could be had by living 30 minutes outside a small or medium-sized city in Dakota or Nebraska. (If you don’t believe me, set out from Bismarck, ND in a car in any direction, drive for 30 minutes, doing the last ten minutes on a randomly chosen country road, and then stop and see where you are.) I think the government should fund programs to voluntarily relocate people from economically depressed small towns to metro areas (participants would have their moving expenses paid for and would be linked with affordable new homes in metro areas and entry-level jobs, but their old homes would be torn down and the land rezoned for non-residential use and or “re-wilded”) Though this is an admittedly controversial belief, bear in mind that there’s a precedent for it: During the Great Depression, a small federal agency was created called the “Resettlement Administration,” and one of the things it did was use federal money to buy poor farms in the Dust Bowl region so the suffering farmers could move elsewhere. The land was then put under the oversight of experts in forestry and soil erosion, repairing the ecological damage done by inappropriate farming practices.
But government action might not be needed to realize this scenario. I can imagine a future farm in the middle of nowhere, North Dakota, that is still owned by the same family that was granted the land in the 1800s, even though the family’s members no longer live there. The ones that do take an active role in farming live in nice, suburban houses in Bismarck, where they use telepresence virtual reality technology to remotely control machines on their farm. The machines are mostly automated, but occasionally have mechanical problems or face situations their programming leaves them unprepared for, requiring human intervention. They only have to physically visit the farm once every few weeks. Sometimes the men of the family also go there for bird hunting, to fish in the creek, and to hold family reunions in the farmhouse they remember from their childhood. I could imagine similar setups for cattle ranchers, who would entrust the herding of their cattle to different kinds of drones, which would operate autonomously most of the time and, at the flick of a switch, be remotely controllable by a human anywhere on the planet.
Another thing that struck me during my trip was that, even if people were sparse in the countryside, EVIDENCE of people was almost constantly apparent. By that I mean manmade things, like roads, power lines, buildings (farm-related sheds and shelters), radio antennas, planes flying overhead, and fences. There were lots and lots and lots of wire fences, hemming in the roads on both sides to keep cattle from freely wandering.
The presence of so much land-based infrastructure, even in places most people would call “the middle of nowhere,” hit home for me how easy it will be someday to create a national mass surveillance network. Once sensors inevitably get dirt cheap and robots can install and maintain them at low cost, there’s little reason they couldn’t be placed everywhere, even in remote parts of the Great Plains. The easiest way to do it would be to install sensor clusters (cameras, microphones, air pressure sensors, wind sensors) on power line poles. The mounting points are already there, they could be mounted high to provide long-distance views, and they’d have access to electricity. Since power lines usually parallel roads, maintenance bots would have easy access to them, and they’d be able to monitor movements of people and cargo since most everything travels via roads.
Even one sensor on every tenth pole along the highways I traversed would be good enough: the cameras would be within line of sight of each other and could see everything for miles around given the flat topography and lack of obstructions. If they detected anything in the distance they couldn’t identify, they could cue drones to investigate and could plug the surveillance gaps while being even fewer in number and more diffuse than the fixed place sensor network. Americans probably would never agree to install a mass surveillance system like this for the purpose of spying on themselves, but it might get started for innocuous reasons, like improved weather forecasting, air traffic monitoring, or wildlife monitoring.
One beneficial applications for all these technologies would be the safe reintroduction of herds of wild animals to the Great Plains. The sensor network and drones could track and shepherd them across the vast private ranches, keeping them a safe distance from the cattle, and corralling them from one fence gate to another. (Yes, being stuck in a rental car for hours while driving across a plain landscape [pun intended] will lead my mind to conjure such things.)
OK, returning to reality a little, I was surprised and disappointed by the lack of solar panels and wind turbines in the Dakotas and Nebraska. The region is well-known for being windy, and it’s actually slightly sunnier than the Mid-Atlantic, which where I’m from. But strangely, even though land costs more here, solar panels are much more common sights. If anything, I’d imagine people living in the Great Plains would welcome wind turbines as a break from the visual monotony of the natural landscape, and if I’m wrong and they don’t want to look at them, it wouldn’t be hard to find an empty valley just over the horizon for them. The large swaths of open land–including poor-quality land that was clearly unsuited for agriculture–also lend themselves to building utility-scale solar farms, yet I saw none.
Having said so many negative and strange things about my visit to the Dakotas and Nebraska, let me conclude that it was actually a good trip, nothing bad happened to me, and the people of the Great Plains struck me as very decent folk. It’s not my intention to insult anyone with my observations or speculations about how the region could improve in the future, and I hope anyone from rural America can appreciate the insights of a lifelong suburbanite like me.
An ocean buoy detected a 78 foot high wave south of New Zealand, making it the largest wave ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere. As the number and density of automated sensors like buoys, weather stations, and drones grow, so will data and film footage of extraordinarily rare occurrences and life forms. In 20 years, you’ll be able to ask your computer to “Show me everything weird that happened today” and spend the next several hours watching video clips from around the world, including places devoid of humans. https://newatlas.com/record-wave-southern-ocean/54602/
“Ocado” is a British grocery store chain that has no brick-and-mortar retail stores and only does home deliveries. Their food warehouses, where groceries are stored and packaged, are heavily automated and use hundreds of robots. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43968495
It will also probably be easy to program autonomous vehicles to drive in ways that use as little fuel as possible. Many human truck drivers have a hard time keeping up these habits because they require near-constant focus and patience. Moreover, since machines don’t need to sleep, autonomous trucks could structure their routes in such a way that they were mostly on the roads during non-peak hours, like the middle of the night, meaning fewer traffic jams for everybody and less wasted gas. http://www.fleetowner.com/fuel_economy/fuel-economy-0701
One of the NYT’s auto experts thinks gas-powered cars will be obsoleted by fast-recharging electric cars within five years, and sales of both will sharply shift to reflect this. Without giving a deadline for autonomous cars, he drops a lot of hints it will take substantially longer than five years to become mature and ubiquitous. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/technology/personaltech/electric-self-driving-flying-cars.html
Will America’s new “Right to Try” policy that allows terminally ill people to take drugs still in Phase II clinical trials help much? Probably not, and not just because only 10% of drugs prove themselves effective during Phase II. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/05/25/federal-right-to-try
A meta-analysis of fMRI studies that “proved” male and female brains operate differently suggests they might have been flawed, and researchers might have failed to publish null findings. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-23976-1
America’s early school start times are awful for students and their parents. As early as 1913, the practice’s ill effects on sleep, learning and quality of life were noted. Why do we do it anymore? https://schoolstarttime.org/early-school-start-times/
“[Intelligence] is a spectrum of abilities since there are many different goals you can have, so it makes no sense to quantify something’s intelligence by just one number [like an IQ score]. To see how ridiculous that would be, just imagine if I told you that athletic ability could be quantified by a single number, the ‘Athletic Quotient,” and whatever athlete had the highest ‘AQ’ would win all the gold medals in the Olympics.” https://youtu.be/p9eLpRbRk4c
And in classic fashion, the Navy is dumping its worn-out, excess F/A-18C and D Hornets (note the lack of “Super”) on the Marine Corps. The Navy has 270 of these older fighter planes and will give the Marines 136 of them, mostly to be cannibalized for spare parts. The Navy’s final 134 Hornets will probably be transferred in the future as it gets more Super Hornets and F-35C’s. http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19040/navy-to-slash-legacy-f-a-18-hornet-fleet-to-prop-up-beleaguered-usmc-squadrons
In 1872, 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. It’s the earliest example of the the “robot uprising” trope I’ve seen. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/butler-samuel/1872/erewhon/ch23.htm
A few bummer remarks about the state of artificial intelligence. FIRST: ‘The current ways of trying to represent the nervous system…[are little better than] what we had 50 years ago.’ –Marvin Minsky, 2013 https://youtu.be/3PdxQbOvAlI
SECOND: ‘Over the next 30 years, we’re not going to see Commander Data…there is an A.I. bubble right now and people are making a fundamental error on estimating how good A.I. is going to be [and] how quickly.’ –Rodney Brooks, 2017 https://youtu.be/ig1qaqyMIXc
Google’s “Duplex Assistant” can perfectly imitate humans during brief phone calls. I think machines will pass the Turing Test within 11 years, and shortly thereafter, we won’t be able to tell the difference between human speakers and CGI versions of them: we’ll be able to make machines that can speak using a real human being’s voice, to intelligently carry on conversations with other humans, and to even answer questions and put forth topics of conversation as the imitated human would. https://youtu.be/ijwHj2HaOT0
Non-invasive, wearable sensors that monitor muscle and nerve activity can be used to accurately represent a person’s physical movements in a virtual reality avatar. The demo video is incredible. https://youtu.be/5Z5aZK2C3ew
If you’re reading this blog, then you probably know who Ray Kurzweil is and what he thinks the future will be like. And if you don’t, then SHAME ON YOU! Kurzweil is one of the world’s greatest living futurists (though several of his predictions have failed), he’s influenced my own thinking, and if you know little or nothing about him, stop right now and go read his Wikipedia entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil).
Kurzweil’s perfusion and fame as a futurist have made him the subject of many “accuracy analyses” of predictions whose deadlines have come and gone. In spite of how crowded the field is, I think there is a narrow area where I could be of use: tracking his predictions about the future of solar power.
On this topic, Kurzweil is quite bold: He thinks that solar power is growing exponentially, so it will supply 100% of the WORLD’S (not just America’s) ENERGY (not just ELECTRICITY) within 15 years. Additionally, his predictions are unambiguous in their wording and deadlines, rendering them highly amenable to objective evaluation. For better or worse, he won’t be able to talk his way out of this, as he has several times in the past through written rebuttals of unfavorable analyses.
The U.S. generates huge amounts of ENERGY, only a small fraction of which is ELECTRICITY, a lot of it gets wasted, and the remainder gets to end users.
I’m starting this blog entry to keep a running tally of all of Ray Kurzweil’s predictions regarding when the world will get 100% of its energy from solar power. The table below this will serve as a quick summary of the key data points in those predictions, while the written paragraphs below it will cite their exact wordings. Note that his deadline for 100% solar power has fluctuated over the last 13 years from 2025 to 2033, and I suspect it will continue to do so (Kurzweil will probably do something like bump it up by ~1 year every 2 years). His statements about the number of exponential “doublings” left until solar power supplies 100% of humanity’s energy also barely withstands arithmetic scrutiny (If solar power’s electricity output is doubling every two years, then why did he say it was 8 doublings away from 100% in 2011, but then say it was still 8 doublings away in 2013? Since two years had passed between the predictions, shouldn’t it have been down to 7 doublings in 2013?).
This blog entry will be updated as Kurzweil inevitably makes new predictions about this topic, so stay tuned!
Date of prediction
# of "doublings" left until 100% solar energy
Year when 100% of energy will be solar
2024/3/12
?
2034***
2016/4/19
?
2036**
2016/3/30
6
2028
2014/6/10
5*
2026 (low) - 2028 (high)*
2013/4/23
8
2029 (low) - 2033 (high)
2011/2/16
8
2027 (low) or 2031 (high)
2010/3/16
?
2028
2008/4/13
?
2028
2008/2/19
?
2028
2005/12/23
?
2025
2005/10/25
?
2030
* Kurzweil’s June 10, 2014 prediction is based on the observation that, at that point in time, solar and wind together produced 4% of America’s energy.
**Kurzweil’s April 19, 2016 prediction pertained to “solar and other renewables” and his wording suggested the 100% milestone would be reached in less than 20 years.
***In his March 12, 2024 interview, Kurzweil first said the prediction pertained only to “solar,” but added a few minutes later that the energy mix would merely be 100% “renewable,” which included wind power.
March 12, 2024
“[Solar power technology is on] an exponential curve. And if you look at the curve, we’ll be getting 100% of all the energy we need in ten years.
…We’re gonna go to all renewable energy–wind and sun–within ten years.”
April 19, 2016 [republished on Kurzweil’s website on December 20, 2018]
What about our energy and food needs?
“Certainly within 20 years we’ll be meeting all our energy requirements through solar and other renewables. We’re awash in energy—10,000 times more than we need, from the sun—and we’re going to move to these renewables not just because we’re concerned about the impact on the environment but because it will be cheaper and more economic.”
Turning his attention to solar, Kurzweil said four years ago Google founder Larry Page and he were asked by the National Academy of Engineering to study emerging energy technologies. The men selected solar due to its exponential growth. Kurzweil said solar has been around for over 25 years, and its market share has doubled every two years.
“In 2012, solar panels were producing 0.5% of the world’s energy supply. Some people dismissed it, saying, ‘It’s a nice thing to do, but at a half percent, it’s a fringe player. That’s not going to solve the problem,’” Kurzweil said. “They were ignoring the exponential growth just as they ignored the exponential growth of the Internet and genome project. Half a percent is only eight doublings away from 100%.
“Now it is four years later, [and solar] has doubled twice again. Now solar panels produce 2% of the world’s energy, right on schedule. People dismiss it, ‘2%. Nice, but a fringe player.’ That ignores the exponential growth, which means it is only six doublings or [12] years from 100%.”
“We’re now…at 4% [of global energy needs being supplied by solar and wind power]. Maybe five doublings from 100% at two years each, that’s gonna be on the order of a decade from now. The use of energy is growing a little bit so maybe it’ll be 12 or 14 years.”
April 23, 2013
“We also see an exponential progression in the use of solar energy,” he has predicted. “It is doubling now every two years. Doubling every two years means multiplying by 1,000 in 20 years. At that rate we’ll meet 100% of our energy needs in 20 years.”
Since around one-third of that 104GW installed capacity is in Germany and China is only really getting going, Kurzweil’s forecasts don’t look too far-fetched.
Despite these glitches (or S curves) on his graph, Kurzweill still believes that a “doubling every two years means it’s only eight more doublings before it meets 100% of the world’s energy needs.”
That takes us to about 2027, close to his predictions in 2008.
“Today, solar is still more expensive than fossil fuels, and in most situations it still needs subsidies or special circumstances, but the costs are coming down rapidly — we are only a few years away from parity. And then it’s going to keep coming down, and people will be gravitating towards solar, even if they don’t care at all about the environment, because of the economics.
So right now it’s at half a percent of the world’s energy. People tend to dismiss technologies when they are half a percent of the solution. But doubling every two years means it’s only eight more doublings before it meets a hundred percent of the world’s energy needs. So that’s 16 years. We will increase our use of electricity during that period, so add another couple of doublings: In 20 years we’ll be meeting all of our energy needs with solar, based on this trend which has already been under way for 20 years.” [Kurzweil said.]
People may react similarly to his solar use forecast, he notes. However, since information technology is doubling every two years, our knowledge about and capability to utilize solar energy is “only eight doublings away from meeting 100% of our energy needs,” explains Kurzweil. Not only the U.S., but also countries like Germany, China, and Israel are actively pursuing solar energy systems.
“Take energy. Today, 70 percent of it comes from fossil fuels, a 19th-century technology. But if we could capture just one ten-thousandth of the sunlight that falls on Earth, we could meet 100 percent of the world’s energy needs using this renewable and environmentally friendly source. We can’t do that now because solar panels rely on old technology, making them expensive, inefficient, heavy and hard to install. But a new generation of panels based on nanotechnology (which manipulates matter at the level of molecules) is starting to overcome these obstacles. The tipping point at which energy from solar panels will actually be less expensive than fossil fuels is only a few years away. The power we are generating from solar is doubling every two years; at that rate, it will be able to meet all our energy needs within 20 years.”
“We also see an exponential progression in the use of solar energy,” [Kurzweil] said. “It is doubling now every two years. Doubling every two years means multiplying by 1,000 in 20 years. At that rate we’ll meet 100 percent of our energy needs in 20 years.”
“To take energy, for example, I talk about how within 20 years we could have nanoengineered solar panels which would capture enough sunlight to meet all of our energy needs. If we captured 1 percent of 1 percent of the sunlight that falls on the Earth, we could meet all of our energy needs in a renewable fashion. Now we can’t do that today ’cause solar panels right now are an old industrial technology. But using new nanoengineered techniques, you’ll see actually significant progress in the next five years, but over 20 years we’ll actually be able to meet all of our needs with these kinds of renewable energy technologies and that store them in nanoengineered fuel cells.” [Kurzweil said.]
“This will mean that by the mid 2020s we will be able to meet our energy needs using very inexpensive nanotechnology-based solar panels that will capture the energy in 0.03 per cent of the sunlight that falls on the Earth, which is all we need to meet our projected energy needs in 2030.”
The predictions that Kurzweil’ made about solar power before 2005 are few, and don’t mention “doubling times” or give any future dates by which X% of global energy needs will be met with solar.
Alien telescopes could see from very long distances that the Earth had all the chemical ingredients for organic life. In fact, anyone in our galaxy who has pointed a big telescope at us in the last 500 million years would have seen a habitable, blue planet. Even if it’s impossible to exceed light speed, you’d think someone would have come to Earth by now… https://youtu.be/4-ugewmyK30?t=1m18s
The theory that advanced aliens might seed the galaxy–including our own Solar System–with hidden surveillance devices was first advanced as early as 1948. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracewell_probe
Since there are 687 days in a Martian year, there would have to be about 23 months if you wanted to keep the months an average of 30 days long. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darian_calendar
Four years after a young Chinese couple died in a car accident, one of their parents used leftover frozen embryos from the couples’ IVF treatment to conceive a grandchild in a surrogate mother. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-43724395
Cloning could be used to bring back extinct animals and dead humans. ‘In 1996, scientists used 277 cloned embryos to get one successful Dolly. “Now if you do cloned cattle, you can transfer 100 cattle cloned embryos and get about 10–20 cloned animals born,” says Tian. “That’s an amazing change.”’ http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180328-the-increasingly-realistic-prospect-of-extinct-animal-zoos
Women really are “the fairer sex”: though the genes for blonde hair are equally common in Caucasian males and females, they’re much more likely to be phenotypically expressed in the females. http://www.bbc.com/news/health-43782751
Soliciting “loyal communists” to donate sperm might actually have a scientific basis, since it is known that political views are influenced by brain structure and are partly heritable. Also note that the 19% acceptance rate at Chinese sperm banks is actually far higher than the rates at American sperm banks. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/world/asia/china-sperm-communist-party.html
The “Golden State Killer,” who murdered 12 people and raped 51, was finally found when the police clandestinely submitted a DNA sample from one of his crime scenes to a private genealogy company and got a match. While this raises concerns about genetic privacy, the tactic doesn’t seem to have been illegal. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43916830
Transsexual women (e.g. – people who were born male, but who later came to gender-identify as female) will be able to run in the Boston Marathon as women. https://apnews.com/33f30c4a20ec4ab582b8f87ba262f351
The U.S. is now using guided, air-to-ground missiles that are the size of two baguettes attached end-to-end. As sensors and computer chips get cheaper and better, we’ll someday have guided bullets that fire out of conventional rifles. http://www.janes.com/article/79453/usmc-deploys-apkws-on-f-a-18-hornet
‘Sometime in the 1980’s the advanced sector, beginning with the U.S., will collapse into a new Dark Age — perhaps in a matter of weeks — after breakdowns in energy, transit and communications systems intensify each other. The population will be halved, decentralized, exposed to a new barbarism. ‘ https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/roberto-vacca/the-coming-dark-age/
A ketamine nasal spray (“esketamine”) has proven highly effective at treating depression in human trials, but some scientists worry it could invite the same addiction and abuse as opioid pills have.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/04/20/nasal-spray-of-party-drug-shows-promise-as-fast-acting-antidepressant-researchers-say/
A large fraction of English people believe baseless claims that things like microwave ovens, genetically modified foods, and drinking from plastic water bottles cause cancer. I suspect the prevalence of these beliefs is similar among Americans. http://www.bbc.com/news/health-43895514
The notion that pharmaceuticals companies have “miracle cures” for diseases that they’re “holding back” from the public because it profits them to do so makes no sense when you consider that many of the big guys working at those companies and their families still get those same diseases and die from them. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/world/europe/ian-wilmut-parkinsons-dolly-sheep.html
‘Overall, the real killers in drug discovery stem from – to put it mildly – our incomplete understanding of biology.’
When we’re able to build computer simulations of human brains, we should also be able to build simulations of human bodies, and rapidly discover new drugs by basically injecting random compounds into the simulation and seeing what happens. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/04/03/new-chemistry-and-its-limits
A Yale research team “restored circulation to” 100 – 200 pig brains obtained from slaughterhouses and discovered that some of their cells survived for up to 36 hours. Before anyone jumps the bioethics gun, they should wait for all the details about the experiments to come out, as this is perfect fodder for media misrepresentation. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611007/researchers-are-keeping-pig-brains-alive-outside-the-body/
Aubrey de Grey took a break from his day job researching human immortality to remind us he’s a genius and not simply a nutcase. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.02385.pdf
Having live-in servants and full-time maids used to be common in America thanks to a former abundance of very cheap labor and to necessity: in the days before dishwashing machines, laundry machines, refrigeration, indoor plumbing, and shrink-wrapped meat, even middle-class families often found themselves forced to hire servants to do their basic household chores. Robot butlers will simply be reinventions of a very old, common practice. https://www.economist.com/node/21541717
Ready Player One’s trailers stacked on giant racks would actually be an expensive way to house poor people. In reality, a dystopian Columbus, OH would be full of Soviet-style concrete apartment buildings that all looked alike. https://youtu.be/kjS0QPfl_9k
My local government has a program to reimburse 100% of the cost of residential rain barrels, and since it’s hard for me to ever argue with “free,” I signed up. The only requirements are that each participant attend a lecture about rain barrels and related subjects (which I did), and that each participant also show a government inspector that they’ve properly installed your rain barrel (which I haven’t yet).
The presentation was given by environmental people from local agencies and nonprofits, and they explained that the primary benefit of rain barrels was to reduce storm water runoff and the attendant problems with flash flooding and fish kills. Roads and driveways are covered in motor oil and other chemicals, and lawns and farms are covered in pesticides and fertilizers. When it rains heavily, these chemicals are washed into waterways all at once, which kills aquatic life and also makes the waterways unsafe for humans for days.
A rain barrel helps mitigate this problem by storing the water that falls onto your house’s roof. You put the barrel next to your downspout and do some simple cutting and crimping of the metal downspout to connect it to a hole in the top of the barrel. During storms, the rain that falls on your roof flows into the rain barrel and stays there, reducing local water runoff by some minuscule amount. Presumably, if every house and building had a rain barrel, there would be a meaningful reduction in flooding and fish kills (the presenters unfortunately had no estimates, so I made some of my own below).
Before the presentation ended, the problem with the rain barrel concept became clear to me: they require routine maintenance. It’s up to homeowners to keep track of how full their rain barrels are and to periodically drain them (productive uses like washing cars or watering gardens were suggested), or else they’ll fill to the brim after a few storms and thereafter overflow each time it rains, defeating their purpose. Homeowners also have to check on them to make sure they aren’t clogged up with dead leaves or full of mosquito larvae.
Call me a cynic, but I think even this small amount of diligence is too much for most people, and rain barrels will function best if they automatically empty themselves of water. The simplest (and probably best) solution might be to screw a cap with a tiny hole in the middle over the rain barrel’s faucet. The hole would only allow a few drops of water to leak through it per minute, which would be a much slower flow rate than the unobstructed downspout. The rain barrel would fill during storms and then slowly discharge its load over several days. Keep in mind that it’s not the amount of rain that causes the problem, but the suddenness of the rain, so discharging all the water in your rain barrel won’t contribute to flooding or fish kills if it happens very gradually. Once-yearly maintenance might consist of cleaning the dead leaves out of the barrel and installing a new cap, which might cost $2.00 at Home Depot. That sounds doable for average people.
I’m going to call this idea the “Russian engineering solution.”
The spigot at the base of my rain barrel
In lieu of making a cap, I’ve screwed a 4′ long extension hose into the spigot, and pointed the hose away from my house to prevent discharged water from flowing towards its foundations. Last Saturday night, my area got its first major rainfall since I installed the barrel, and to my surprise, it filled to the brim in a few hours (FYI, 700 square feet of roof feed into the downspout that is connected to the rain barrel). I opened the spigot and emptied out the tank on Sunday. However, it didn’t rain for the rest of that day or the next, and it occurred to me that the rain barrel’s utility as a storm water runoff and flood control device would be optimized if its discharges took rainfall forecasts into account and were timed to occur when the ground was as dry as possible.
In other words, because it rained on Saturday night, the ground was still soaked on Sunday, its absorbency was reduced, and the water I discharged from my barrel that day might have added to the runoff problem. It would have been better if I had instead drained the barrel on Monday since the ground would have been more absorbent thanks to the extra day of drying out, but I didn’t know that since I didn’t check the weather forecast.
My 55 gallon rain barrel filled almost to the brim after just one night of moderate rain.
Checking weather forecasts to time the barrel discharges requires unrealistic diligence from people, so automation would be necessary. And if we’re designing a truly “smart” rain barrel, why not try to full optimize it by programming it to consider all pertinent variables? This includes:
The amount of water in the barrel (easily done with a float)
Absorbency of the soil (estimated based on recent rainfall and barrel discharges)
Rainfall forecast for the next 72 hours (including amount and timing of rainfalls; would require wireless access to an internet weather service)
Conversion factor that uses the rainfall forecast to predict how much new water will flow into the barrel (the barrel could formulate its own conversion factor by comparing past rainfall events with corresponding increases to its own load)
And of course, the smart rain barrel would need internal features that would let it discharge itself without human help, and I think copying the tried-and-true toilet tank setup would be fine. A chain could connect the float to some type of simple machine, and the float’s rise and fall along with the water level would apply tension to the chain, which the machine would somehow store as potential energy (a mousetrap or a revolver’s hammer give clues as to how this can be done). When signaled by the smart rain barrel’s computer, the machine would use that stored potential energy to mechanically lift the “toilet flapper” at the bottom of the barrel, letting the water flow out.
I’m going to call this the “American engineering solution.”
Ha ha! So which do we prefer?
Russian engineering solution: Simple, cheap, non-optimal but good enough
American engineering solution: Complex, expensive, optimal
Call me unpatriotic, but I’m inclined towards the former. Glory to Russia!
And lastly, how much would rain barrels of either sort help mitigate storm water runoff and flash flooding? It’s impossible to say for sure, but this should be the starting point of any estimate:
‘In the United States alone, pavements and other impervious surfaces cover more than 43,000 square miles—an area nearly the size of Ohio—according to research published in the 15 June 2004 issue of Eos, the newsletter of the American Geophysical Union. Bruce Ferguson, director of the University of Georgia School of Environmental Design and author of the 2005 book Porous Pavements, says that a quarter of a million U.S. acres are either paved or repaved every year. Impervious surfaces can be concrete or asphalt, they can be roofs or parking lots, but they all have at least one thing in common—water runs off of them, not through them. And with that runoff comes a host of problems.
…According to the nonprofit Center for Watershed Protection, as much as 65% of the total impervious cover over America’s landscape consists of streets, parking lots, and driveways—what center staff refer to as “habitat for cars.”’ SOURCE
That means in the U.S., 35% of impervious surfaces are roofs of buildings or houses. If we make the very optimistic assumptions that 1) every roofed structure in the country had a smart rain barrel system, 2) the gutters and downspouts of each structure shunted 100% of the rain falling on their roofs to the barrels, and 3) the barrels were big enough to never overfill except during extreme instances like hurricanes, then the smart rain barrels would presumably reduce the runoff problem by 35%, which is nothing to sneeze at.
Of course, all of that assumes 100% participation rates and 100% efficiency rates, neither of which is realistic unless we’re thinking about the distant future, when humanity is much better off and has worked its way very far down the “Global Problems List.”
More realistic assumptions would set at everything at 50%: 50% of structures have rain barrels, the average rain barrel collects 50% of the rain that falls on the roof (that’s true of my own setup), the average rain barrel doesn’t overfill during 50% of rain events. In that case, the storm water runoff reduction is only 4.375%. [Frownie face.]
I thought the movie Prometheus was awful, and rather than waste my time ranting about all the things I hated, I’ll just say I agree with the critics who collectively bashed the confused and scientifically flawed storyline, shallow and unlikable characters, and inexplicable/unrealistically stupid behavior of the characters. I love the first three Alien films, but everything since has been disastrous. Enough said.
Instead of spending any time writing about the flawed plot (IMDB has a summary here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1446714/synopsis) , I’ll jump straight to an analysis of the vision of the future depicted in the film, which is set in 2093.
We will have proof that humans evolved from or were engineered by aliens. Prometheus is premised on the notion that ancient aliens seeded the Earth with life and repeatedly returned to direct the genetic and cultural evolution of humans. The theory that intelligent aliens influenced the rise of the human species is debunked by the fossil record, by comparative DNA analyses of humans and other hominids, and by human biochemistry. Together they prove we are indigenous to Earth and that we slowly evolved from simpler species. By 2093, we will not have “new evidence” that contradicts this story of our origins, though there will probably still be many uneducated and/or mentally ill people who believe in this and other conspiracy theories. It is at least slightly plausible that life began on Earth billions of years ago thanks to panspermia (i.e. – an asteroid containing simple organic matter fell to Earth), but I don’t see how we could ever prove the hypothesis since time has destroyed any evidence that may have existed.
Some robots will be indistinguishable from humans. One of the main characters is “David,” an artificially intelligent robot who looks and acts like a human. Since David is modeled after humans, he is a special type of robot called an “android,” and note the literal translation of the word from Greek is “man-like” (andro-oid). I think androids like David will exist by 2093, and they will be capable of an impressive range of behaviors and functions that will make them seem very human-like. In fact, they’ll be so refined that we might not be able to tell them apart from humans at all, or only be able to do so on rare occasions (ex – some of their responses to questions might not make sense). Whether they will be truly conscious and creative like humans is a different matter.
Left: A human crew member. Right: David the android.
The hyper-realistic sculptures made by artists like Ron Mueck, and advanced animatronics like the Garner Holt Productions Abraham Lincoln convince me that we could build robot bodies today that look 95% the same as real humans. Eeking out that last 5% to cross the Uncanny Valley should be easy to accomplish long before 2093. The much harder part is going to be endowing the machines with intelligence, with the ability to walk and stay balanced on two feet, and with other forms of physical deftness and coordination that will allow them to safely and efficiently work alongside humans and to do so without appearing “mechanical” in their movements.
Sculpture by Ron Mueck
Machines will do surgery on people, unassisted. There’s a gruesome and silly scene in Prometheus where the female main character realizes she is pregnant with a rapidly growing alien-human hybrid. She runs into the space ship’s infirmary, lies down in a coffin-sized surgery pod, and orders the machine to surgically remove the fetus. Several robotic arms bearing laser scalpels and claws do it in about a minute. I think surgery will be completely automated by 2093, along with all or almost all other types of jobs. Replacing high-paid human doctors with robot doctors that work for free will make healthcare dramatically cheaper and easier to access (with positive effects on human life expectancy and quality of life), though mass unemployment will also reduce the amount of money people have to pay for things like healthcare.
There will be space ships that can travel faster than the speed of light. The Prometheus space ship is capable of faster than light space travel, and the movie’s events take place in a different star system. Our current understanding of physics informs us that there is no way to exceed the speed of light, and propelling something as big as the Prometheus to just 10% of that speed would require impractically large amounts of energy. While mass figures for the fictional ship are unavailable, let’s assume it weighed about as much as the Space Shuttle, which was 2,000,000 kg. This kinetic energy calculator indicates it would require 9 x 10^20 Joules of energy to accelerate it to 10% of the light speed (30,000,000 meters/second). That’s as much energy as the entire United States generates in nine years.
While science is by nature always open to revision, I think it’s a bad idea to base one’s vision of the future on assumptions that well-tested pillars of science like the Theory of Relativity will just go away. That said, I don’t think faster than light space travel is likely to exist in 2093–or perhaps ever–so we’ll still be confined to our solar system then.
FWIW, the space ships flying around our solar system by that year will be considerably larger and more advanced than what we have now, and it’s likely that space ships of similar size and technology (sans light speed drives) as the Prometheus will be plying interplanetary space.
There will be instantaneous gene-sequencing machines. In Prometheus, the humans find a severed alien head inside a wrecked alien structure, and they bring it back to their space ship for examination. The alien belongs to an advanced species nicknamed “The Engineers,” and the head’s features are very human-like. As part of the examination, the humans take a DNA sample from the head and put it in a gene sequencing machine, which determines it shares 99% of its genome with humans. The cost of sequencing a full human genome has plummeted at a rate exceeding Moore’s Law, and well before 2093, the service will become trivially cheap (e.g. – the same price as routine blood tests or vaccinations) and will take a few hours.
FYI, today it costs less than $5,000 to sequence a human genome, and the machines can do the work in about 24 hours. But since we can only decipher a minuscule fraction of the genetic information, it’s still not worth it for healthy people to get their genomes sequenced. Within 20 years, the price will get low enough and the medical utility will get high enough to change that.
Paper-thin, ultra-high-res display screens will be in common use. Computer monitors and TV’s with these qualities are shown throughout the film. Many of them are also integrated into translucent glass, so clear windows can also serve as touchscreens. This will be a very old, mature technology by 2093.
A set of display interfaces
Wall-sized display monitors will be common. Early in Prometheus, there’s a scene where David is watching a film on a TV screen that covers an entire wall of a room in the space ship. This should be very old technology by 2093, and given current trends, floor-to-ceiling TVs will become available to average-income Americans in the 2030s. Since standard-sized doorways are too small to fit enormous TVs through them, the TVs will also need to be paper-thin and rollable into tubes, or capable of being assembled from a grid of many smaller pieces.
David watching “Lawrence of Arabia” on a wall-sized TV
Suspended animation pods will exist. During the multi-year space journey from Earth to the alien planet where the film’s events happen, the human crew members are kept in a state of suspended animation in coffin-sized pods. The mechanism through which their physiological functions are suspended (i.e. – Deep cold? Preservative fluids injected into their bodies? Something else?) is never made clear, but one crew member is shown to be dreaming in her pod, indicating that her brain is still active, and by necessity, her metabolism (even if it is dramatically slowed). That being the case, the “hypersleep” depicted in Prometheus is fundamentally different from today’s human preservation methods, which involve freezing dead people whose biochemical and brain activity have ceased in liquid nitrogen.
Frankly, I can’t say whether suspended animation will exist in 2093 because there isn’t any trendline for the technology like Moore’s Law that I can put on a graph and extrapolate. The best I can do is to note that our ability to preserve human organs meant for transplantation is improving as time passes, we do not appear to be close to the limit of what is scientifically possible, credible scientists have proposed ways to improve the relevant technologies, and whole-body human cryopreservation and revival is theoretically possible.
Machines will be able to read human thoughts and create digital representations of those thoughts that other people can watch. At the start of the movie, the Prometheus is still en route to the alien planet, all of the humans are in cryosleep pods, and David the android is the only crew member awake. During the montage that shows how he spends his time as the ship’s custodian, he takes a moment to check on the status of a female member of the crew. David puts a virtual reality visioning device on his face, and through it he is able to see a dream that the person is having at that moment, as if he were watching live-action film footage. I think this technology will exist by 2093, but its capabilities will be more limited than shown in the film.
Human thought is not a magical phenomenon; it happens thanks to biochemical and bioelectric events happening inside of our brains. Currently, we don’t understand the linkages between specific patterns of brain activity and specific thoughts, and our technologies for monitoring brain activity are coarse, but there’s no reason to assume both won’t improve until we have machines that can decipher thoughts from brain activity. To quote Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen, “An adult brain is a finite thing, so its basic workings can ultimately be known through sustained human effort.”
Unlike faster than light space travel, mind reading machines don’t violate any laws of physics, nor is there reason to believe the machines would require impractically large amounts of energy. In fact, crude versions of the technology have already been built in labs using fMRI machines and brain implants. In all cases, the machines first recorded the participants’ brain activity during training sessions where the humans were made to do scripted physical or mental tasks. The machines learned which patterns of brain activity correlated with which human thoughts or physical actions, enabling them to do things like decipher simple sentences the humans were thinking of with high accuracy. In other lab experiments of this nature, physically disabled people were able to command robot arms to move around and grab things by thought alone.
However, I think the accuracy of mind reading machines will be hampered by the fundamentally messy, plastic nature of the human mind. Scientists commonly refer to the human brain as an example of “wetware” due to its fusion of its hardware and software, and to its ever-shifting network of internal connections. As a result, if I close my eyes and try to envision an apple, there will be a discrete pattern of brain activity. If I do this again in a few minutes, the activity pattern will be slightly different. Contrast this with a computer, where the image of an apple exists as a discrete software file that never changes. Because of this, even if a brain scanning machine had perfect, real-time information about all brain activity, its interpretation of what the activity meant would always have some margin of error.
The cinematic dream footage that David sees in virtual reality.
Returning to the movie’s specific depiction of mind reading technology, let me add that if we could see the same mental images that a person sees while dreaming, I doubt they would look sharp or well-detailed, or that the sequence of events would follow a logical order for more than a few seconds before the dream transformed into something different. It would be like watching a fuzzy, low-resolution art film comprised of disjointed images and sounds, occasionally peaking in intensity and coherence enough for you to discern something of meaning, before dissolving into the equivalent of human brain “static.” So while it’s plausible that, in 2093, you could use machines to read someone else’s thoughts, I think the output you would see would be much less accurate and less detailed than it was in Prometheus.
There will be small, flying drones that can do many things autonomously, like mapping places and finding organic life. After landing on the alien planet, the crew of the Prometheus travels overland to a mysterious alien structure and goes inside. The interior is a long series of dark, twisting corridors and strange rooms. To speed up their exploration, one crewman releases two volleyball-sized flying drones, which zip down the corridors while beaming red, contorting lasers at everything. As they float along, the drones transmit live data back to the Prometheus that is compiled to build a 3D volumetric map of the alien structure’s interior spaces.
Simpler examples of this technology already exist and are used for mapping, farming and forestry (one of many commercial examples is “Drone Deploy” https://youtu.be/SATijfXnshg; another is “Elios,” which is enmeshed in a spherical cage as protection against collisions in tight spaces). Sensor miniaturization, better motors and batteries, better AI, and cost reductions to every type of technology will allow us to build scanning drones that are almost identical to those in the movie decades before 2093. The only parts of the movie’s depiction I disagree with are 1) the use of red lasers for sensing (passive sensors and LIDAR beams that are invisible to human eyes are likelier) and 2) the use of some type of magical antigravity technology to fly (recognizable means of propulsion like spinning rotors and directed jets of exhaust will probably still be in use, though they will be smaller but more powerful thanks to improved technology). Small, cheap, highly versatile flying drones will have enormous implications for mass surveillance, espionage, environmental monitoring, and warfare.
There will be 3D volumetric displays. The bridge of the Prometheus has a large table that can project detailed, 3D volumetric images above it. The crew uses it to view an architectural diagram of the alien structure they find on the planet. Crude versions of this technology already exist, and can make simple images that float in midair by focusing laser beams on discrete points in space called “voxels” (volumetric pixels) heating them to such high temperatures that they turn the air into glowing plasma. If enough voxels are simultaneously illuminated, 3D objects can be constructed in the same way that pixels on a digital watch face can arrange into numbers if lit up in the right sequence.
Volumetric display of the alien complex, 2093
Today’s volumetric displays produce ozone gas and excessive noise thanks to air ionization, but it’s plausible the problems could be solved or at least greatly reduced by 2093. For certain applications, the displays would be very useful, though I think holographic displays (i.e. – a flat screen TV doesn’t make voxels but uses other techniques to fool your eye into thinking its images are popping out of the screen) and virtual reality glasses will fulfill the same niche, possibly at lower cost. Intelligent machines might also be so advanced that they won’t need to look at volumetric displays to grasp spatial relationships as humans have to.
State of the art volumetric display, 2011
Some disabled people and old people will use powered exoskeletons instead of wheelchairs. The space mission depicted in the film is funded by an elderly tech tycoon named “Peter Weyland.” Unbeknownst to most of the crew, he secretly embarked with them from Earth, and is sleeping in a suspended animation pod in a locked room while the first 3/4 of the film’s events unfold. At that point, David awakens him, and it is revealed to the surviving crewmen that Weyland supported the mission in the hopes that the aliens would give him a cure for his own mortality. They get into their space suits for a final trip to the alien structure, and Weyland’s outfit includes a light, powered exoskeleton for his lower body, which allows him to walk much faster than he normally could given his age.
Weyland, right, is wearing an articulated exoskeleton around his legs and lower back.
Exoskeletons for the disabled and the elderly already exist, a recent example being the “Phoenix” unit made by the “suitX” company. Unfortunately, Phoenix is $40,000 (a typical electric wheelchair is only $2,000) and requires a somewhat heavy battery backpack. I suspect that Phoenix’ high cost is due to patents and R&D costs being amortized over a small production run, and that the physical materials the suits are made of are not expensive or exotic. Prices for Phoenix-like exoskeletons will only decline as relevant patents expire, copycats arise, and batteries get lighter and cheaper. It’s hard to see how these kinds of exoskeletons won’t be ubiquitous among mobility-impaired people by 2093 (as electric wheelchairs are today), if not decades before.
That being said, I don’t think they’ll make electric wheelchairs completely obsolete because some disabled and old people will find it too physically taxing to stand upright, even if supported by a prosthesis. Some users might also find it too time-consuming to put on and take off exoskeletons each day (note the large number of straps in the photo below).
The Phoenix exoskeleton
There will be lots of 100+ year old people. Piggybacking off the last point, Mr. Weyland is 103 years old, though since he spent the space journey in suspended animation, his aging process was probably slowed down, making his “biological age” slightly lower than his chronological age. Though living 100 years has a kind of mythic aura, it’s actually only a little higher than the current life expectancy in rich countries, and, making conservative assumptions about future improvements to healthcare, living to 100 will probably be common in 2093 (doing the math, you could someday be in this group).
Today, a wealthy white male who is diligent about his diet and exercise (as Weyland probably had been throughout his life) can expect to live to about 90. In fact, that’s a low estimate since it assumes the state of medical technology will stay fixed at 2017 levels for his entire life. In reality, we’re certain to develop new medicines, prostheses, and therapies that extend lifespan farther between now and 2093. A 10 year bump to average life expectancy in the next 76 years–which would put Weyland over the century mark–is entirely possible, and note that U.S. life expectancy actually grew more than that in the 76 years preceding 2017, so there’s recent historical precedent for lifespan increases of this magnitude.
In 2093, “100 will be the new 80,” and indefinite extensions to human lifespan might even be on the horizon.
What was missing from the movie’s depiction of 2093:
The fusion of man and machine. Where were the Google glasses? Google contact lenses? Google eye implants? Google brain implants? Go-Go Gadget Legs? (Bionic limbs) By 2093, it will be common for humans to have wearable and body-implanted advanced technologies.
Not enough automation and robots on the space ship. Computers and machines will doing way more of the work, reducing the need for resource-hogging humans.
