All humans are born ignorant and helpless. A child’s parents, community, and society pays an enormous sum of time and money to provide their basic needs and to prepare them for adulthood. Nearly all children in modern societies are incapable of being anything but economic liabilities until age 16, when they might finally have the right intelligence, strength, and personality traits to work full time and contribute more to the economy than they consume.
Of course, in increasingly advanced societies like ours, economic, scientific, and technological growth depend on having high-quality human capital, and that requires schooling and workplace training well into a person’s 20s. This effectively extends the “liability” phase of such a person’s life just as long, as higher education usually costs more money than a young adult student can make at a side job.
Once that is finished, the productive period of an educated person’s life lasts about 40 years, after which they retire and stop contributing to the economy, science, or technology. In terms of a resource balance sheet, the only difference between this period of a person’s life and his childhood is that, as a retiree, he is probably living off his own accumulated savings rather than other peoples’ money.
And then the person dies, at 80 let’s say. He spent the first 25 years of his life learning and preparing for the workforce, 40 years participating in it and making real, measurable contributions to the world, and the final 15 years hanging around his house and pursuing low-key hobbies. That means this person, who we’ll think of as the “average skilled professional,” had a “lifetime efficiency rate” of 50%. Not bad, right?
Actually, it’s much worse once you also consider this person’s daily time usage:
The average, working-age American only spends about 1/3 of his day working. Sleep takes up just as much time, and the remaining 1/3 of the day is devoted to leisure, satisfying basic physiological needs (e.g. – eating, drinking, cleaning one’s body), running errands, doing chores, and caring for offspring or elderly parents. This means the typical person’s “lifetime efficiency rate” decreases by 2/3, from 50% to 16.6%.
But it gets worse. Any adult who has spent time in a workplace knows that eight hours of real work rarely get done during an eight-hour workday. Large amounts of time are wasted doing pointless assignments that shouldn’t exist and don’t actually help the organization, going to meetings that accomplish nothing and/or take longer than necessary, socializing with colleagues, using computers and smartphones for entertainment and socializing, doing non-value-added training, or doing actual value-added refresher training that must be undertaken because the brains of the human workers constantly forget things. In industrial jobs, there’s often downtime thanks to lack of supplies or to a crucial piece of equipment being unavailable.
From personal experience and from years of observation, I estimate that only 25% of the average American professional’s work day is spend doing real, useful work. That means the lifetime efficiency rate drops to 4.2%.
It still gets worse. Realize that many highly productive people who, let’s say, might actually do eight hours of real work per eight hour work day, are actually doing things that damage the world and slow down the pace of progress in every dimension. Examples include:
A journalist who consciously inserts systematic bias into their news reports, which in turn leave thousands of people misinformed, anxious, and bigoted against another group of people.
An advertising executive whose professional life revolves around tricking thousands of people into buying goods or services that they don’t need, or that are actually inferior to those offered by competitors. The result is a massive misallocation of money, and possible social problems as only people with higher incomes can visibly enjoy the useless products, while poorer people can only watch with envy.
A mathematician who uses his gifts in the service of a Wall Street hedge fund, finding exotic and highly technical ways to aggregate stock market money in his company’s hands at the expense of competitors. The hedge fund creates no value and doesn’t expand the size of the “economic pie”–it merely expands the size of its own slice of that pie.
A bureaucrat who manages a program meant to further some ill-defined social mandate. Though he and his team have won internal agency awards for various accomplishments, by every honest metric, the program has consistently and completely failed to help its target demographic.
A drug dealer who “hustles” his part of the city from sunrise to sunset, doing dozens of deals per day and often dodging bullets. The drugs leave his customers too intoxicated to work or to take care of themselves and their families, and have sent many of them to hospitals thanks to overdoses and chemical contaminants.
These kinds of people do what could be called “counterproductive work” or “undermining work,” and it can be very hard to tell them apart from people who do useful work that helps the whole world. Unfortunately, peripheral people who use their own labors to support the counterproductive people, like the cameraman who films the dishonest newscaster’s reports, are also doing counterproductive work, even if they don’t realize it. Once the foul efforts of these people are subtracted from the equation, the lifetime efficiency rate of the median American professional drops to, I’ll say, 3.5%.
Only 3.5% of this educated and well-trained person’s life is spent doing work that benefits society with no catches or caveats. Examples include:
A heart surgeon who saves the lives of younger people.
A medical researcher who runs experiments that help discover a vaccine for a painful, widespread disease.
A chemist who discovers a way to make solar panels more cheaply, without any reduction to the panels’ efficiency, lifespan, or any other attribute.
A civil engineer who designs a bridge that sharply reduces commute times for local people, resulting in aggregate fuel savings that exceed the bridge’s construction cost in ten years.
A carpenter who helps build affordable housing that meets all building codes, in a place where it is in high demand.
In each case, the person’s labor helps other people while hurting no one, and improves the efficiency of some system.
Let me mention two important caveats to this thought experiment. First, humanity’s 3.5% efficiency rate might sound pitiful, but it beats every other species, which all have 0% efficiency. One-hundred percent of every non-human animal’s time is spent satisfying physiological needs (e.g. – hunger, sleep), avoiding danger, caring for offspring, and indulging in pleasure (which might be fairly lumped in with “satisfying physiological needs”). At the end of its life, the animal leaves behind no surpluses, no inventions, and no works that benefit its species or anything else, except maybe by pure accident. Our measly 3.5% efficiency rate allowed our species to slowly edge out all the others and to dominate the planet.
Second, under my definition of “efficiency,” it’s possible for a person to have 0% efficiency even though they work very hard, create tangible fruits of their labor, and never do “counterproductive work.” A perfect example of such a person would be a primitive hunter or sustenance farmer who is always on the brink of starvation and spends all his time acquiring and eating food, with no time left over for other pursuits. He never invents a new type of spear or plow, never builds anything more than a wooden shack that will collapse shortly after he dies, and never makes up any religions or useful pieces of knowledge. For the first 95% of our species’ existence, our aggregate lifetime efficiency rate was infinitesimally greater than 0%.
Am I doing this thought experiment just to be dour and to cast humanity in a cynical light? No. By illustrating how inefficient we are, I’m just making a case that we’ll be surpassed by intelligent machines that will be invariably more efficient. Ha ha!
The first key advantage intelligent machines will have is perfect memories. They will never forget anything, and will be able to instantly recall all their memories. This will dramatically shorten the amount of time it takes to educate one of them to the same level as the average American professional I’ve profiled in this essay. Much of teaching is repetition of the same things again and again. And since intelligent machines wouldn’t forget anything, there would be no need for periodic retraining in the workplace, which takes time away from doing real work. Machines wouldn’t have “skills degradation,” and they wouldn’t need to practice tasks to remind themselves how to do them.
(Note that I’m not even assuming that machines will be faster at learning new things than humans are. Again, I’m being conservative by only assuming that they don’t forget things.)
The second key advantage would be near-freedom from human physiological needs, like the need to sleep, eat, or clean one’s self. Intelligent machines would need to periodically go offline for maintenance, repairs or upgrades, but this wouldn’t gobble up anywhere near as much time as it does in humans. For example, while a human spends 33% of his life sleeping, a typical server at a major tech company like Amazon or Facebook spends less than 1% of its time “down.” Intelligent machines wouldn’t have a good correlate to “eating,” since they would only consume electricity and do it while simultaneously performing work tasks. And since machines wouldn’t sweat, shed skin, or grow more than trivial amounts of bacteria on themselves, they wouldn’t need to clean their bodies or garb (if they wore any) nearly as often as humans. Intelligent machines also wouldn’t have a need for leisure, or if they did, they might need less than we do, saving them even more time.
Instead of being able to devote just eight hours a day to learning and working, an intelligent machine could devote 20 hours a day to them, as a conservative estimate. This, in turn, would further shorten the amount of time needed to educate a machine to the same level as the average American professional. I wrote earlier that the professional needed schooling until age 25 to be able to start a high-level job. Since the intelligent machine can spend more time each day studying, it can attend the same number of classes in only 10 years. And since it has a perfect memory, it lessons don’t need to contain as much repetition, and remedial lessons are unnecessary. Let’s say that cuts the amount of schooling needed by 30%. An intelligent machine only needs seven years to operate at the same level as a highly educated 25-year-old human.
And in the workplace, an intelligent machine wouldn’t be subject to the distractions that its human colleagues were (e.g. – socializing, surfing the internet), though its human bosses might still give it pointless assignments or force it to attend unproductive meetings. Still, during an eight-hour day, it would get at least seven hours of real work done (and this is another conservative guess). But as noted earlier, it would actually have 20 hour work days, meaning it would get 17.5 hours of real work done each day, dwarfing the two hours of real work the typical American professional does per day.
As for the “counterproductive work” / “undermining work,” I predict that human bosses will someday task intelligent machines with doing it, allowing scams, disinformation peddling, and criminal enterprises to reach new heights of efficiency. However, the victims will all be humans. Intelligent machines themselves would not be dumb enough, impulsive enough, or possessed of the necessary psychological weaknesses to take whatever bait the “counterproductive workers” were offering, and the latter will be laid bare before their eyes and avoided. For example, an intelligent machine looking to buy a new vehicle would have a perfect understanding of its own needs, and would only need a few seconds to thoroughly research all the available vehicle models and identify the one that best met its criteria. Car commercials designed to play on human emotions, insecurities, and lifestyle consciousness to dupe people into buying suboptimal vehicles wouldn’t sway the machine at all.
I won’t do another set of calculations for the hypothetical intelligent machine, but it should be clear that its advantages will be many and will compound on top of each other, resulting in them being much more efficient that even highly trained humans at doing work. Moreover, in a machine-dominated world, where they controlled the economy, government, and resource allocation, parasitic “counterproductive work” that we humans mistake for useful work would probably disappear. Just as humans slowly edged out all other species thanks to our tiny work efficiency advantage over them, intelligent machines will edge out humans in the future. It’s just a question of when.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has gone badly. In spite of Russia’s fearsome reputation and its recent military modernization, its battlefield performance has been disappointing and marred by many mistakes. The Ukrainians have fought harder than anyone anticipated, and have inflicted serious losses on their enemy. What was supposed to have been a quick, surgical operation to replace Ukraine’s regime with one friendlier to Moscow is turning into a bloody stalemate. Western sanctions against Russia for the invasion have been very severe, setting the country on course for major economic problems within a few months. It’s clear that Putin badly miscalculated when he decided to launch the war. Here’s a roundup of war articles:
On March 4, Russia scholar Michael Kofman predicted: “I try not to make too many predictions. I think given all the problems in the Russian campaign, delusional assumptions, an unworkable concept of operations, little prepared for a sustained war like this, I give it ~3 more weeks before this is an exhausted force.” https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael/status/1499967950975115269
This is a great analysis of Russia’s mistakes, and the likely future of the war. One basic insight is that the Russians were too weak to attack Ukraine on three fronts (northern, eastern, and southern) and achieve major objectives on all of them. They should have used all their forces to attack only one front. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/03/21/michael-kofman-russia-military-expert-00018906
It’s also prudent to remember that Russia has a much greater warmaking capacity than Ukraine. In the long run, and if it were willing to pay the price, Russia could take over its smaller neighbor. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60881915
Ukraine has captured at least one, seemingly intact example of the Russian Army’s most advanced field radio, the “R-187P1 Azart.” The Russians have far fewer Azarts than they claimed before the invasion, and are mostly relying on older radios and even cellphones, which can all be more easily jammed and eavesdropped on. And, in an example of the corruption that pervades Russia and has damaged its battlefield performance, there’s evidence that the Russian company in charge of making Azart radios secretly imported electronic components from China to make them, and pocketed the difference between what the Russian government paid them, and what they saved by using Chinese parts. https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/russian-comms-ukraine-world-hertz
‘The CIA director said Putin premised his war on four false assumptions: He thought Ukraine was weak, he believed Europe was distracted and wouldn’t mount a strong response, he thought Russia’s economy was prepared to withstand sanctions and he believed Russia’s military had been modernized and would fight effectively.’ https://www.npr.org/2022/03/08/1085155440/cia-director-putin-is-angry-and-frustrated-likely-to-double-down
Here’s a video of a Ukrainian infantry platoon going into battle armed with a variety of Western-supplied antitank missiles. These have caused major damage to Russia’s military vehicle fleet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gezu6A9zcLU
The Ukrainian soldiers who ambushed and destroyed a small column of Russian vehicles near Kiev give a detailed description of the battle, at the site. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ryCBcq_qxk
Video of Ukrainian troops blowing up an abandoned Russian tank, presumably because of the chance that Russian forces might recapture the area and return the vehicle to service. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFhspNJEHIk
The U.S. government’s official stance is now that Russian forces have committed war crimes against the Ukrainian people, and the matter should be investigated by an international criminal court. https://www.state.gov/war-crimes-by-russias-forces-in-ukraine/
An interesting bit about NATO standards: ‘Finally, some national standards are recognized as not inferior to NATO standards and do not require revision (in Ukraine, for instance, these are those related to potable water quality). The fact that compliance with all NATO standards is not the norm even for leading states members is evidenced by the fact that no country of the Alliance has achieved the mark of 100%, although in some, including Germany (91%), Great Britain (83%), France, Norway (81% each), Canada (76%), the degree of the implementation of standards is very high…Let us assume that if the current pace of implementation is maintained, Ukraine will implement at least 90% of the existing standards of the Alliance in approximately 13–14 years.’ https://rpr.org.ua/en/news/ukraine-and-nato-standards-progress-under-zelenskyy-s-presidency/
Britain is planning on upgrading its tank fleet to indigenously made Challenger 3’s, but it’s not economical for them to keep such a small fleet of one-off tanks that are specific to their country. They should switch to either the U.S. M1 Abrams or German Leopard 2, and maybe sell their Challenger 2’s to smaller NATO countries, like the Balkan states. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44927/british-armys-next-generation-challenger-3-tank-is-now-under-construction
The Soviet VVA-14 was one of the weirdest but potentially most versatile aircraft ever built. Its designer had plans for even more dramatic variants that weren’t built. https://youtu.be/UD7xiWWs-bs
NASA briefly experimented with “passive” communications satellites that were large balloons made out of radar-reflecting materials. One ground station would aim a powerful radio at it and broadcast a signal, which would bounce off the balloon and deflect at such an angle that another ground station thousands of miles distant would receive it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Echo
Using CRISPR, scientists were able to self-fertilize a female mouse with her own eggs. One of the resulting 12 zygotes lived to adulthood. It was not a clone of her. A clone shares 100% of your DNA, and a natural child shares 50% of your DNA. This new technique could be used to make offspring that shared an unnatural amount of your DNA, like 75 or 85%. https://phys.org/news/2022-03-mammalian-offspring-derived-unfertilized-egg.html
My predictions about humans in 12,022 A.D.: -There might still be some Homo sapiens, though they will be genetically engineered. Imagine today’s all-star athlete who graduated from high school at 17, went to MIT on an academic scholarship, and is also a model on the side being the average human by then. We could breed with them. -There will be “human-looking” people that will have radically different genetics and anatomical/physiological features from us. Imagine a person who looks externally normal, but has bird lungs, octopus eyes, and a different number of chromosomes than you. They will be so different that they will count as different species, and we won’t be able to breed with them. -There will be intelligent but nonhuman-looking life forms that are the products of many iterations of genetic engineering. Imagine something like a horse-sized spider with a big brain occupying most of its torso. It could trace its lineage back to a normal human that is alive today. -Some members of those three groups of intelligent life forms will be meshed with technology that augments their abilities. There might be a Homo sapien with synthetic, self-healing organs that are superior to his old, natural organs, there might be a “human-looking” Homo neosapien that also has brain implants to make him smarter, and there might be intelligent spiders with nanomachines circulating in their bloodstreams to assist with various bodily processes.
‘[By 1,000 years from now] The bulk of technology will remain simple or semi-simple, while a smaller portion will continue to complexify greatly. I expect our cities and homes a thousand years hence to be recognizable, rather than unrecognizable. As long as we inhabit bodies approximately our size – a few meters and 50 kilos — the bulk of the technology that will surround us need not be crazily more complex. And there is good reason to expect we’ll remain the same size, despite intense genetic engineering and downloading to robots. Our body size is weirdly almost exactly in the middle of the size of the universe. The smallest things we know about are approximately 30 orders of magnitude smaller than ourselves, and the largest structures in the universe are about 30 orders of magnitude bigger. We inhabit a middle scale that is sympathetic to sustainable flexibility in the universe’s current physics. Bigger bodies encourage rigidity, smaller ones encourage empheralization. As long as we own bodies – and what sane being does not want to be embodied? – the infrastructure technology we already have will continue (in general) to work. Roads of stone, buildings of modified plant material and earth, not that different from our cities and homes 2,000 years ago. Some visionaries might imagine complex living buildings in the future, for instance, but most average structures are unlikely to be more complex than the formerly living plants we already use. They don’t need to. I think there is a “complex enough” restraint. Technologies need not complexify to be useful in the future. Danny Hillis, computer inventor, once confided to me that he believed that there’s a good chance that 1,000 years from now computers might still be running programming code from today, say a unix kernel and TCP/IP. They almost certainly will be binary digital. Like bacteria, or cockroaches, these simpler technologies remain simple, and remain viable, because they work. They don’t have to get more complex.’ https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-arc-of-comp/
What happens if you load an enormous amount of data on chemical reactions and human biology into an AI, and then task it with finding lethal compounds against us?
‘In less than 6 hours after starting on our in-house server, our model generated 40,000 molecules that scored within our desired threshold. In the process, the AI designed not only VX, but also many other known chemical warfare agents that we identified through visual confirmation with structures in public chemistry databases. Many new molecules were also designed that looked equally plausible. These new molecules were predicted to be more toxic, based on the predicted LD50 values, than publicly known chemical warfare agents.’ https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00465-9
This analysis predicts that the U.S. trucking industry will probably switch to a “transfer-hub” model where autonomous trucks transport goods over long, simple highway routes, while human drivers in smaller trucks move the cargoes over shorter distances at both ends. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01103-w
Small doses of radiation might actually benefit human health thanks to a process called “hormesis.” Note that nuclear power is so expensive partly because the power plants aren’t allowed to release any radiation at all to the surrounding environment, and that requirement is predicated on the assumption that any amount of radiation exposure hurts people. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/832949v1
I agree that the fake meat industry has been overhyped. Though meat substitutes are cheaper and more convincing than ever, they will not render meat consumption extinct. Not even close. Lab-grown meats will eventually eliminate the need to kill animals for food, but the technology won’t be good enough until near the end of this century (it’s not as good or advancing as fast as its contemporary cheerleaders claim). https://reason.com/2022/03/05/the-fake-meat-revolution-has-stalled/
Computers have translated pig noises into a basic “vocabulary” of emotional and mental states. A variety of technologies will let us communicate with animals in the future, and possibly to even share thoughts with them. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07174-8
North Korea still operates some Japanese-made trains from the 1930s. Thanks to the country’s socialist economy, labor is practically free, making it financially possible to keep fixing the trains in spite of their age. Once robots have made labor free across the world, will it become common for manufactured objects of all kinds to stay in service much longer than they do now? https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2021/07/blast-from-past-north-koreas-whacky.html
The German gunboat Graf von Goetzen was launched in 1915 and sent to Tanzania (then a German colony) to dominate Lake Tanganyika. Though the Germans left, the ship didn’t, and it remains in service to this day as a ferry, renamed the Liemba. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Liemba
There’s a new scientific paper claiming that ivermectin doesn’t treat COVID-19. Instead, it kills parasitic worms in people, boosting their immune systems just enough to let them survive COVID-19. Parasites are only common in tropical areas. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.3079
The pandemic isn’t over: China just locked down one of its biggest and most important cities due to a surge in COVID-19 cases. It will have global economic consequences. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-60893070
A few years ago, I did a thought exercise where I deduced what a robot tank would be like. I concluded that the lack of human crewmen would allow such a tank to be shorter, lighter, and less voluminous than manned tanks, but that it would still look unmistakably “tank-like” and would be in the size range of current tanks. Thus, the future of armored warfare will look much the same as its present, even if a lot of new technology will be hidden under the hood.
Now I wonder if this would be the case for warships. Given their great variety, I have to restrict my analysis to just one type, the aircraft carrier, but my key conclusions can probably apply to the rest. And since there are many types of aircraft carriers, I’m focusing this analysis on supercarriers in particular, which only the U.S. Navy has at present. The newest American supercarrier that is also fully mission-capable is the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush, and as such, it’s fair to call it America’s “best” aircraft carrier. So what would a robot George Bush look like?
The USS George H.W. Bush
First, the ship’s gross architecture would stay the same. It would need an oblong hull with a pointed front to minimize hydrodynamic drag. The top would need to be flat and uncluttered so planes could land on and take off from it. Even in the far future, most planes will still take off and land the traditional way on runways. Even with more advanced aircraft technology, fighter planes won’t hover straight up into the air to take off. Vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) will, thanks to physics and the usefulness of “lift,” always be a MUCH less fuel-efficient way to get airborne and then return to the ground than speeding down a runway. Every extra pound that a VTOL plane needs to land and take off is one pound it doesn’t have for weapons.
The George H.W. Bush’s island structure.
In fact, the only external difference between the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush and its robot equivalent would be the ships’ islands. On an aircraft carrier, the “island” is a vertical protrusion on the otherwise-flat flight deck, and it somewhat resembles a small office building. It provides mounting points for radars, radios, and other sensors, and also contains the bridge, flight control room, and smaller rooms for specialized tasks.
These photos show the bridge of one of the Bush’s sister ships.
The captain and his command crew are in the bridge, where they monitor and control overall ship operations. The flight control room is one level above that, and is where other officers coordinate aircraft movements on and off the carrier. It’s obvious why these crewmen need to be situated in a high place where they have good views of the ship’s flight deck and the surrounding waters. In turn, the physical sizes of human bodies and our need for clearance space to walk around each other dictate the dimensions of those rooms, and ultimately, the shape and size of the island. Thus, this part of an aircraft carrier is designed around the human form.
On an automated aircraft carrier, such considerations could be dispensed with since humans wouldn’t be aboard. Visual monitoring of the flight deck and seas could be done with cameras, allowing the bridge, flight control room, and other small rooms in the island that support their functions to be deleted (computers located deep inside the ship’s hull would watch the video feeds). As a result, the office-building-like island would be thinned down to a mast. It might be of a metal lattice design, or could be solid with a geometrically faceted exterior to reduce the ship’s radar signature.
A British frigate with three masts of two different designs. The one at left is geometric, while the two at right are simple metal lattice towers. A robot aircraft carrier’s island would look like one of these.
A thinner island would help a robot aircraft carrier by increasing its flight deck area and reducing the air turbulence over it. The ship’s survivability would also be improved since its command staff wouldn’t be kept in an exposed, vulnerable location. Instead, it’s command functions would be done by a central computer located in an armored room below decks.
A Nimitz-class carrier like the George H.W. Bush typically contains 56 planes (mostly fighters like the F/A-18) and 15 helicopters. Our robot version of the carrier would have autonomous versions of those aircraft. Since the planes lack human pilots and crewmen, things like ejection seats, steering controls, bubble canopies, computer screens, and oxygen pumps could be deleted, reducing gross weight. That weight savings would let the aircraft take off and land a little more easily, possibly reducing the lengths of runway they needed, and hence reducing the overall length of the ship.
However, any such benefit would be tiny since the weight of the pilot and his supporting equipment is relatively minuscule. For example, an F/A-18 Super Hornet that is fully fueled and armed for a combat mission could weigh over 50,000 lbs, less than 1,000 lbs of which is represented by the pilot and his aforementioned support gear. An unmanned F/A-18 might be able to take off and land on a runway a few feet shorter than the manned version, but that’s it. Therefore, the lengths of the runways used for takeoffs and landings on the robot carrier would either be the same as those on the human-crewed counterpart, or imperceptibly shorter.
The reduction of the island’s mass might result in the flight deck being slightly narrower since the port side of the deck wouldn’t need to flare out as much to counterbalance the weight of the starboard side.
A careful look at this head-on view of the George H.W. Bush reveals that the port side of the ship (right side in this photo) juts out farther from the ship’s centerline than the starboard side (left side in the photo). This asymmetry exists to balance out the island’s weight.
The robot ship’s “freeboard,” which refers to the vertical distance between the surface of the water and the top of its flight deck, would be the same or very close to the manned version’s, which is 57 feet. In general, as ships get longer and heaver, they need higher freeboards to keep stable. A high freeboard is also very important for ships meant to sail through rough seas, which an aircraft carrier would need to do since wars don’t pause for bad weather anymore. There’s no reason to think the manned USS George H.W. Bush’s freeboard is not optimal given the ship’s size and function, nor is there evidence that the crew’s uniquely human needs affected the freeboard.
The USS Midway appears to sit lower in the water than the USS George H.W. Bush
The argument for this optimality is strengthened by the example of the USS Midway, another aircraft carrier that served the U.S. Navy from 1945 to 1992. In the 1960s, it went through a major renovation in which the flight deck was widened to accommodate the bigger planes that were entering service, which added substantial weight to the ship and made it sit lower in the water. The reduced freeboard hurt the Midway‘s performance in rough seas, and the ship also had more problems with waves splashing into the ship’s open side elevators, and even splashing over the bow to soak the flight deck. The problems kept it from conducting flights in sea conditions that the George H.W. Bush could still operate in. The contrast between the ships further supports the conclusion that the Bush’s freeboard is already optimized, and wouldn’t be different or would only be a tiny amount different in an autonomous version of the ship.
To summarize this analysis of the robot carrier’s exterior, it might have have a slightly different profile and slightly different dimensions to its flight deck compared to the manned version. However, this would be very hard to see, and by far, the most visible difference would be to the island.
The ship’s interior layout is the most subject to human needs since it is where almost 6,000 people work and live, 24 hours a day, for months on end. Before moving on to that half of this analysis, it’s important to point out that an autonomous aircraft carrier would still need crewmen, though they’d be robotic. They would need to be able to move around the ship for inspections, maintenance, repairs, emergency response, and to transport things. Therefore, the inside of the robotic George H.W. Bush would still be comprised of rooms, doors, stairways, and passageways to enable the crew to access every part of the ship.
To understand how the ship’s interior layout would change if human-centric design concerns were abandoned, first study these cutaway illustrations of the George H.W. Bush’s class of ships:
A simplified cross-section of the USS George H.W. Bush.
The USS Nimitz is one of the USS George H.W. Bush’s sister ships.
A side view of the USS Ronald Reagan’s interior, another of the Bush’s sister ships. A larger version that you can zoom in on is at the image creator’s website: http://patrickturner.com/carrier.html
A cutaway showing the size and location of the USS Ronald Reagan’s hangar deck.
Let’s start by distinguishing the features and sections of the ship that exist because of the presence of humans, or are larger than they need to be because of human physiology, from the features and sections that do not. The hangar is massive and is necessary to house the carrier’s aircraft for maintenance, repairs and modifications. It’s size is dictated by the sizes of the planes and by the need to have enough space around each one to be able to move them around and provide crew with access to them. There’s no reason to assume the size or layout of the hangar deck would be different if the carrier were autonomous, so the largest single room in the ship would be the same.
This is also true for the series of large rooms at the ship’s lowest point, called “the fourth deck,” which contain its nuclear reactors, electrical generators and gearing that connects the engines to the propellers. Smaller rooms on the fourth deck that store jet fuel, munitions for the planes, and water for the steam catapults are also not designed around human needs. (They are stored at the lowest part of the ship to keep its center of gravity low, improving its stability.)
It’s impossible to generalize about all the other decks of the ship since rooms dedicated to purely mechanical functions (e.g. – jet engine repair shop, steam catapult piping spaces) are mixed in with those dedicated to human crew needs (e.g. – bunk rooms, hospital, cafeteria). All we can say is those of the former category would stay, while the latter would disappear, leaving a lot of empty space.
The robot crewmen wouldn’t need to eat, sleep, party, or satisfy hygienic needs, and would probably stay at their work stations almost all the time. The only room dedicated to their unique needs might be a specialized repair shop and spare parts room. Those rooms would take vastly less space than the bunk rooms, bathrooms, cafeterias, bakeries, laundromats, conference rooms, etc. that would need to be there to satisfy a human crew’s needs.
The ability to work constantly would also allow a robot crew to be smaller than a human one without reducing work output. Assuming an average sailor works a 12-hour day and works as efficiently as a robot when he’s on duty, 3,000 robots could to the work of 6,000 humans. The disparity might actually turn out to be more extreme.
Getting rid of the human crew wouldn’t just save internal space–it would save weight. The clothing, beddings, beds, furniture, cooking appliances, laundry machines, bathroom fixtures, lockers, food, and water (in excess of what is needed for the steam catapults), plus the plumbing and electrical/data cables needed to support some of those features add up, and if the humans disappeared, so would all of those things. Ironically, a robotic aircraft carrier would also have fewer computers and display monitors in it since the machines wouldn’t need them because they’d be able to directly interface their minds with the ship’s sensors and main computer. Lessening the number of devices would also save weight.
Moreover, the need to divide a ship’s internal space into rooms that only exist due to human needs, like walling off an area to create privacy for a bathroom, adds weight since the walls themselves are heavy. If the ship weren’t designed around human needs, more parts of the ship could be large, open areas, cutting overall weight.
With these considerations in mind, a low estimate for the amount of weight saved by eliminating the human crew is one ton (2,000 lbs) per person. The total weight savings is therefore 6,000 tons, which is a small but still helpful boost for a vessel displacing 114,000 tons.
Our robotic version of the George H.W. Bush could deal with its excess internal volume and weight savings in a three different ways. The simplest option would be to just accept having more empty space inside of itself, and to capitalize on the slight increase in sailing speed and ship energy efficiency that would owe to being lighter. The ship would have the same number of decks and the same internal volume and the manned version, but the rooms would be larger, there would be less of them, and they would be less full of stuff. This option would let the carrier be more mission flexible since it could double as a transport.
The Nimitz-class USS Theodore Roosevelt undergoing replenishment at sea. Note the temporary cables connecting the ships, which are used to move supplies.
The second option would be to fill the robot George H.W. Bush‘s newly empty spaces with 6,000 tons of other stuff to improve its performance in some way. Nimitz-class aircraft carriers are powered by nuclear reactors whose uranium lasts for 20 years, so it wouldn’t help to add spare uranium rods to the ship (refueling is done in port for the sake of safety, anyway). However, other types of essential supplies are depleted over the course of a multi-month cruise, forcing a carrier to halt operations so it can pull alongside a cargo ship for a tedious resupply process called “replenishment.”
The lack of human crewmen would mean the carrier would no longer need food replenishments, but it would still need replenishments of aviation fuel, munitions, and spare parts for its aircraft and itself. Given that a Nimitz-class ship’s 8,500 ton supply of aviation fuel , called “JP-5,” only last about seven days during routine operations, and even less during round-the-clock combat operations, the robot version of the ship would derive the most benefit from adding more fuel tanks.
If the capacity of the robot George H.W. Bush’s aviation fuel storage tanks increase from 8,500 to 14,500 tons, if JP-5 is 6.8 pounds per U.S. gallon, and if a gallon of liquid is 0.134 cubic feet, then we can calculate how much volume the added 6,000 tons of fuel will take up inside the ship.
Glimpsing at this cross-section of the George H.W. Bush again, we see that aviation fuel in stored in long tanks stretching along the port and starboard sides of the ship (item #8 in the image). At the waterline, the ship is 1,092 feet long, and the draught (the distance between the waterline and the bottom of the ship’s hull) is 37 feet. So if we add 236,470 cubic feet of fuel tanks to the existing tanks indicated in the illustration…
1,092 feet x 37 feet = 40,404 square feet on port side and starboard side (80,808 total) 236,470 cubic feet / 80,808 square feet = 2.9 feet
…then we could fit in the extra fuel by widening the existing storage areas by a mere 2.9 feet. As a result, in the above illustration, item #8 would be very slightly wider on both sides of the ship, and item #10 would be very slightly narrower by the same amount. Adding 6,000 tons of aviation fuel is very doable.
The result would be a ship that weighed and handled the same as its manned counterpart, but could launch airstrikes against enemies for longer periods of time before having to pause to get a gas refill from another ship. The robot carrier’s upper decks would have a lot more empty space than the manned version, but it wouldn’t be able to fill it up without slowing itself down.
The third option would be to get rid of the surplus human spaces by deleting some of the ship’s decks, in turn reducing the carrier’s total interior volume. The mission-essential rooms that remained, like the repair shops and spare parts storage rooms, would then be reconfigured so they filled up the ship’s interior efficiently, with no empty spaces or oversized rooms. If you could explore this robot George H.W. Bush version, it would seem as claustrophobic as its manned counterpart, though it would take less time to tour the latter since it would have one or two fewer decks.
This modification would cut even more weight from the vessel, allowing it to travel faster with the same nuclear reactors, or to travel at the same speed with smaller reactors. The reduced mass would also make it faster and cheaper to build.
“Freeboard” is the vertical distance between the water’s surface and the top of a ship’s hull, and “draught” is the vertical distance between the bottom of a ship’s hull and the water’s surface.
But this design change raises a potential problem: If we reduce the number of decks in the ship, then we reduce its overall height from the bottom to top. As discussed earlier in this analysis, we can’t reduce the freeboard because that’s already optimized. That means we have to reduce the “draught” (also called “draft”), which is the vertical distance from the bottom of the ship’s hull to the water’s surface. However, reducing the draught too much can make a ship unstable.
The George H.W. Bush‘s draught is 37 feet. If one deck were deleted, the draught would be 28.5 feet, and the ship’s weight would also decrease. Let’s say it drops from 114,000 tons to 100,000. Would the ship still be stable? Maybe. After all, there are several cruise ships whose dimensions with nearly identical dimensions, and they’re very seaworthy:
Ship name
Tonnage
Draught (ft)
Length (ft)
Width (ft)
USS George H.W. Bush (manned)
114,000
37
1,040
134
USS George H.W. Bush (robot) minus one deck
100,000
28.5
1,040
134
Carnival Sunshine
103,881
26.25
892
125
Costa Fortuna
102,587
27.23
892
125
MSC Orchestra
92,409
25.75
964
105
Norwegian Pearl
93,530
28.3
964
105
The cruise ships with draughts of 25.75 – 28.3 feet can handle rough seas, so the table suggests our robot aircraft carrier would presumably be able to do so just as well with a draught of 28.5 feet. However, it’s possible the demands placed on a ship designed for war are different from those of a ship designed for recreation, making a 28.5 foot draught insufficient for an aircraft carrier. A warship probably needs to be able to accelerate harder, make tighter turns, and endure worse weather conditions than a cruise liner. Unlike my research on the freeboard, I wasn’t able to find data on the optimal draught for a carrier, so I can’t answer the question, I can only conclude that a robotic aircraft carrier might have fewer decks and less internal volume than a manned counterpart.
In conclusion, while a robot version of the U.S.S George H.W. Bush wouldn’t look much different from a manned version on the outside, there would be substantial differences on the inside. All of the rooms and items that existed to service the needs of the human crew (bunk rooms, bathroom, cafeterias, offices, furniture, display monitors, etc.) would be missing. If the robot version retained the same amount of internal space as the manned version, then it would feel much emptier and more open inside. Its performance would also be superior to the manned version in one or more areas (e.g. – faster, more fuel for planes, better mission flexibility thanks to more storage space). If the robot version were designed to exclude excess volume, then it would feel about as constricted as the manned version, and it’s interior would be smaller, making it faster to do a full walking tour of the ship. A less capacious version of the USS George H.W. Bush may or may not have better performance in one or more areas than its manned counterpart, but for sure, it would be faster and cheaper to manufacture, allowing a country to make more ships for the same amount of money.
Finally, another observed difference would be lower levels of activity on an autonomous aircraft carrier since there would be far fewer crewmen. Moreover, since the crew would all be robots, they wouldn’t need to roam the ship to visit bathrooms, the cafeteria, buddies, or their bunks–they would stay put at their duty locations almost all the time. For example, a robot that fixed airplane engines would spend all its time in the engine repair shop. If it needed power, it would plug itself into a wall outlet in that room. It might only ever leave the room to visit the robot repair shop when it broke.
The robots would be of different sizes and designs to suit different roles on the ship. Obviously, they would need to be waterproof and capable of working normally underwater, to some reasonable depth and pressure level (100 – 200 meters). Unlike human crewmen, if the carrier were sinking, they would stay inside and focus on fixing the vessel, reducing the odds of it being lost. They could even keep working in parts of the ship that had filled with water.
Contrast that scenario with the premature abandonment of the U.S.S. Yorktown in WWII, which happened because the captain erroneously assumed the ship was doomed, and the human crewmen were afraid to risk their lives by remaining on it. The central computer of a robot George H.W. Bush would not make such a mistake, and its robot crew would unfailing execute its orders until the end, even in the worst of circumstances.
Russia has invaded Ukraine for a variety of reasons.
I’m not defending Putin, but he’s not simply an evil man who wants to conquer his neighbors. Years of Western European and, specifically, American foreign policy decisions have made him feel disrespected and backed into a corner. Our lack of a long-term, realist grand strategy for dealing with Russia has done major damage. https://reason.com/2022/02/25/how-the-past-4-american-presidents-helped-escalate-tensions-in-ukraine/
This may have been right. ‘But kicking off an invasion of Ukraine in the middle of Xi’s Olympic moment could throw a wrench into such warmth, and risk drawing China into the diplomatic fray. It’s possible Xi asked Putin in their recent call not to invade Ukraine during the Games, according to one diplomat in Beijing who asked not to be identified talking about such scenarios.’ https://nationalpost.com/news/world/war-in-ukraine-is-putin-waiting-for-the-beijing-winter-olympics-to-begin
This was wrong. ‘Russia may stage a large-scale military intervention in the Ukrainian region of Donbass at the end of January, and it could involve around 94,300 troops, Ukrainian Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov claimed on Friday.’ https://thepressunited.com/updates/ukraine-says-russia-may-invade-in-january/
Here’s a remarkable video of a CNN reporter stumbling across Russian paratroopers who just took over an airport in Ukraine. He approached them because he mistakenly thought they were Ukrainian. The Russians were friendly to him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1J6LpkG9zo
The “Henry Long Ranger” is probably the most advanced lever-action rifle ever made. However, the big unsolved design flaws were making it easy to clean the barrel and to clean and remove the internal mechanism. https://youtu.be/wsCO0XV5rwA
‘Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is the process of extracting bioenergy from biomass and capturing and storing the carbon, thereby removing it from the atmosphere. The carbon in the biomass comes from the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) which is extracted from the atmosphere by the biomass when it grows. Energy is extracted in useful forms (electricity, heat, biofuels, etc.) as the biomass is utilized through combustion, fermentation, pyrolysis or other conversion methods. Some of the carbon in the biomass is converted to CO2 or biochar which can then be stored by geologic sequestration or land application, respectively, enabling carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and making BECCS a negative emissions technology (NET).’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage
“Nucleosynthesis” is a process in which a light element is put inside a fusion reactor and bombarded with protons and neutrons, some of which it captures, converting it into a heavier element. Once we have built commercial fusion reactors, we could use the technique to make heavier elements like gold and uranium, and to ensure that we never ran out of any type of element. Terrestrial nucleosynthesis would also decrease the need for asteroid mining to satisfy Earth’s mineral needs. https://twitter.com/friedberg/status/1492382218307575809
This very technical article estimates that the first holographic TVs will become commercially available in the 2040s. They will present slightly different images to a viewer’s right and left eyes, fooling their brains into perceiving the displayed images as being 3D. In short, you’ll be able to watch movies in 3D without having to wear the glasses. The first generation of holographic TVs will operate on the principle of “multiview horizontal parallax only” (HPO), meaning 1) several people watching the same TV set from different angles (e.g. – watching from the left, watching straight-on from the center, watching from the right) will perceive its footage as being 3D and 2) the picture will only look 3D if the viewers’ heads are level. If one of them tilted his head 90 degrees, so his ear was flat against his shoulder, the footage would look 2D instead of 3D. Improved holographic displays operating on more advanced principles will emerge in the decades after. https://www.light-am.com/en/article/doi/10.37188/lam.2021.028
‘In North America, gradient is expressed in terms of the number of feet of rise per 100 feet of horizontal distance. Two examples: if a track rises 1 foot over a distance of 100 feet, the gradient is said to be “1 percent;” a rise of 2 and-a-half feet would be a grade of “2.5 percent.”…The effect of grades on train operations is significant. For each percent of ascending grade, there is an additional resistance to constant-speed movement of 20 lbs. per ton of train. This compares with a resistance on level, straight track of about 5 lbs. per ton of train. A given locomotive, then, can haul only half the tonnage up a .25-percent grade that it can on the level. Descending grades carry their own penalties in the form of equipment wear and tear and increased fuel consumption.’ https://www.trains.com/trn/train-basics/abcs-of-railroading/grades-and-curves/
The adoption of widespread tea drinking in England starting around 1700 led to a 12% decline in mortality since more adults were boiling their dirty water before drinking it. https://eh.net/eha/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Antman.pdf
An important health benefit of smoking is that it reduces appetite, in turn lowering a smoker’s body weight. From 2002-17, the decline in smoking in the U.S. caused a small increase in the country’s obesity rate. https://www.nber.org/papers/w29701
For the last 20 years, efforts to create a new Lyme disease vaccine have failed because scientists made a wrong assumption about how an important part of the Lyme bacterium was shaped. Several candidate vaccines failed because they were designed to attach themselves to the wrong shape on the outsides of the bacteria. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/lyme-disease-molecule-revealed
At a meeting between French president Macron and Vladimir Putin, the latter refused to take a COVID-19 test out of fear the Russia would use it to secretly sequence his DNA, and use the information against him. Note my relevant prediction, which I said will come true in the 2030s:
“Trivially cheap gene sequencing and vastly improved knowledge of the human genome will give rise to a “human genome black market,” in which people secretly obtain DNA samples from others, sequence them, and use the data for their own ends. For example, a politician could be blackmailed by an enemy who threatened to publish a list of his genetic defects or the identities of his illegitimate children. Stalkers (of celebrities and ordinary people) would also be interested in obtaining the genetic information of the people they were obsessed with. It is practically impossible to prevent the release of one’s DNA since every discarded cup, bottle, or utensil has a sample.” https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-kept-macron-distance-snubbing-covid-demands-sources-2022-02-10/
“Tetrachromats” are people who have four types of photoreceptors in their eyes instead of the usual three, allowing them to see more colors. This article profiles one tetrachromat, and she finds the colors of nature more stimulating than the average person, while color schemes found in many buildings and manmade environments are bracing. I think our descendants will be able to see more colors than we can. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/30/im-really-just-high-on-life-and-beauty-the-woman-who-can-see-100-million-colours
As a reminder of how unexpected the current real estate price boom is, consider this July 2020 article from The Economist: “Many economists still expect house prices to fall over the whole of 2020—but such forecasts are looking increasingly shaky.”
In other words, as late as mid-2020, there was still no consensus over what direction the U.S. housing market was headed, and even the experts were unaware of how much prices were about to jump. Keep this in mind when reading today’s news articles where those same experts predict what the housing market will do over the next few years. I doubt a big crash in prices is coming, but the possibility can’t be written off. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2020/07/02/americas-housing-market-is-so-far-unfazed-by-recession
Consider the years of (highly expensive) training men go through just to become fighter pilots, the need for nearly continuous re-training to prevent them from forgetting skills, and the many hours of preparation and after-action work that they must do for each single hour of flight of actual combat missions. It’s amazing but also colossally inefficient. Once someone figures out how to build autonomous fighter planes that can be mass produced, programmed in a few hours at the factory, and uploaded with mission instructions in a few seconds, it will be the end of human pilots. They will be overwhelmed by machine fighter planes that can do missions around the clock, even if the human fighter pilots are better in 1:1 combat against them. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44099/why-fighter-pilots-work-for-eight-hours-intensely-to-only-fly-for-30-minutes
One of Google’s most advanced narrow AIs was tasked with finding a better way to losslessly compress internet videos. It did, but its method was only 4% better than what human computer scientists had created. Across a surprising number of technologies, humans have already achieved optimums or come very close to them. https://deepmind.com/blog/article/MuZeros-first-step-from-research-into-the-real-world
James Cameron now thinks that Skynet would destroy humanity by circulating deepfake videos on the internet to turn people against each other. “The news cycles happen so fast, and people respond so quickly, you could have a major incident take place between the interval between when the deepfake drops and when it’s exposed as a fake.” https://www.pcmag.com/news/james-cameron-skynet-would-destroy-humanity-with-deepfakes-not-nukes
For the record, I think a hostile AI would use a variety of weapons and tactics against us in a war, including advanced digital disinformation campaigns. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic shows how effective biological warfare would be against us, so we should expect that, and I also think Skynet would build some robots to kill us “kinetically,” though the vast majority of them wouldn’t look like T-800s.
‘To that end, here is what I expect AI progress will look like if it fits the patterns of past progress.
Major new methods or capabilities for AI will be demonstrated in systems that are generallypretty poor.
Under the right conditions, such as a multi-billion-dollar effort by a state actor, the first version of an important new AI capability or method may be sufficiently advanced to be a major global risk or of very large strategic value.
An early system with poor practical performance is likely to be followed by very rapid progress toward a system that is more valuable or dangerous
Progress leading up to an important new method or capability in AI is more likely to be accelerating than it is to be stagnant. Notable advances preceding a new capability may not be direct ancestors to it.
Plot: At an unspecified point in the future, it has become common for people to implant their children with devices that record everything they see and hear. The implants, called “Zoes” (two syllables), are organic, are implanted at the fetal stage of life somewhere in the central nervous system, and “grow” as the child grows. The implants are unnoticeable, and people are only told they have them once they hit adulthood. For technical reasons, the audiovisual contents of the Zoes can’t be downloaded until after the person dies.
Robin Williams is the main character and protagonist. The film starts with a memory from his own childhood where he is hanging out alone during a day trip to the countryside and encounters another boy his age, who is also alone. The two get on friendly terms and explore an abandoned building together. While walking over a narrow beam, the other boy falls over the edge, lands on his head and immediately dies. Kid Robin Williams could have saved him by grabbing him as he was dangling from the edge, but he hesitated and the boy died. He runs away and never tells anyone else about this traumatic and shameful memory.
Years later, Robin Williams has found work as a “cutter”–a sort of futuristic video editor who downloads Zoe recordings from the recently deceased and then edits them down into two- or three-hour movies that show all the milestones and positive highlights of their lives. These recordings are usually shown at funerals, given to loved ones, and serve as semi-official records of what happened in a person’s life.
Robin Williams editing footage from a zoe
The editing process entails deleting recordings of bad things the person did (like spousal abuse, child molestation, and everyday acts of cruelty), leaving a happy but false representation of the person’s life. Robin Williams’ choice of this profession clearly stems from his own desire to assuage his own guilty memories of the childhood incident. His character’s last name–“Hakman”–brings the symbolism to an even more obvious level.
The movie’s main conflict arises when Robin Williams is asked to cut the Zoe footage for a wealthy businessman who recently died. After reviewing it, not only does Robin Williams realize the man was a secret pedophile, but he also finds clues that the dead boy from his own childhood might have actually survived and crossed paths with the businessman. Added to the mix is the fact that Robin Williams is under a short deadline to do the cut and return the original footage to the family, and a dangerous terrorist group wants to steal the Zoe footage for blackmail purposes.
The year is never revealed in The Final Cut. Also, aside from the Zoes, the film depicts a world identical to our own–there are no flying cars, laser guns, robots, etc. Most people don’t even have stainless steel dishwashers. It’s a cop-out and makes the film more of a fantasy than anything else. By the time Zoes exist, it will be so far in the future that nearly everything about the world will be different from today.
Analysis:
There will be brain implants that record what people see and hear. In principle, this technology is possible and we already have crude versions of it. Implants that can monitor brain activity and turn a person’s thoughts into written text were recently invented to help people with speech disabilities. More advanced implants that monitor the parts of the brain that processed vision and hearing could someday decode the things a person was seeing and hearing. Alternatively, implants could be attached to the optic and cochlear nerves to directly monitor the stimuli being received by the eyes and ears (respectively), before any of it had been processed by the brain.
Safe, affordable central nervous system implants with capabilities like “Zoes” won’t exist until sometime in the 22nd century. However, average people will be able to effectively do the same type of lifelogging by the end of this decade by wearing the new generation of augmented reality (AR) glasses that are coming.
Brain implants will have “organic” characteristics. The Zoes “grew” along with their hosts, and since they were permanent, lasted a lifetime, and didn’t need to be removed for maintenance, they must have had self-healing capabilities and the ability to extract energy from blood or body heat. The devices thus had “organic” characteristics.
Some technologies will eventually gain organic attributes, and it’s clear this would be especially advantageous for devices implanted in “wet” brains and bodies. As one example, storage of digital information can presently only be done using artificial substrates like hard disk drives and flash drives, but scientists are developing ways to do it using DNA, which is an organic molecule. DNA is an incredibly efficient way to store information (a microscopic amount of it in just one of your cells can hold close to 1 GB of data), and existing cellular self-repair mechanisms are excellent at protecting the data contained in DNA from decay. This might be the ideal data storage medium for brain implants considering the enormous amounts of audiovisual data that would need to be saved.
Beyond that, advanced nanomachines and/or micromachines could fully bridge the gap between organic and synthetic since they would be artificial microorganisms and would allow macro-scale machines to grow, heal, and to move their parts in totally organic ways. Some robots will have supple bodies and will be made of what could be thought of as “artificial cells,” and some humans will have synthetic implants and body parts that look biological and have some properties of organic tissue. The line between “natural” and “artificial” might disappear, leading to life forms combining the attributes of both in refined ways.
Of course, that milestone won’t be reached anytime soon. Again, we’ll probably have to wait until the 22nd century to see this level of technology.
People won’t be able to control their own implants. Another two of the film’s conceits are that people can’t turn their own Zoes off or view the footage they have captured. Only after a person dies can the footage be downloaded (presumably, this involves brain surgery) and viewed (by other people).
Things will never turn out this way. Users will always demand control over their devices and their data privacy, and they will find Zoes useless if they can’t view their own recordings. Actual brain implants we create in the future will be able to transmit and receive data to and from external devices, and will also have simple features allowing users to do things like delete and play back recordings, or temporarily deactivate. (Also consider the legal, employment, and social consequences for a person if it were known that he was always recording everything he was experiencing.) If, for some reason, brain implants lacked these features, then people would instead use AR glasses for their lifelogging.
Machines will be able to recognize what is happening in video footage. A scene I really liked in The Final Cut was where Robin Williams used his computer to scan through the wealthy businessman’s Zoe footage. The data file is thousands of hours long, and the computer rapidly shuffled through every second of it, recognized what the dead man was doing each moment, and categorized each clip appropriately. It automatically sorted clips into groups like “Eating,” “Watching TV,” “At work,” “Walking around,” and “Having sex.” With the basic level of sorting completed, Robin Williams could then go through the clips and use his human judgment to select the ones best representing the man’s major achievements, milestones, and positive traits.
Well before Zoes are invented, computers will become smart enough to do this. In just the last five years, major progress has been made teaching machines to understand what’s going on in video footage, to accurately transcribe speech and recognize sounds, and to identify people through biometrics. Within ten years, a person will be able to upload his lifelogging footage from his AR glasses to a computer and have it sorted with the same speed, accuracy and thoroughness as Robin Williams’ computer. They will even be able to identify locations based on visible landmarks and other clues, and to make other intelligent inferences about the contents of clips.
Far from being a parlor trick or something that is only useful to obsessive-compulsives, this technology could help ordinary people. For example, in 10 years you could ask: “Who was that guy in the white jacket that I talked to at that party last week?” and your AR glasses will understand your spoken question, scan through its stored footage, and answer you, perhaps also offering an instant replay of the episode. It will be like having superhuman memory.
Parents will put implants in their newborn children. In the film, Zoes are implanted in their hosts in early childhood, meaning the decision is made by a host’s parent. It may sound unrealistic for parents to have unnecessary brain surgeries done on their children, but once Zoe-like devices are cheap and surgical techniques are more advanced, it could become common. It might be considered a great blessing for parents to enable their kids to re-live episodes from their childhoods later on. Just don’t expect any of this until the 22nd century.
The FDA just approved the “Eversense E3” glucose monitoring implant. It is surgically placed in a person’s upper arm and can remain there for up to 180 days. More advanced and longer-lasting implants are sure to come.
What might become common much sooner is the installation of health monitoring implants in children. The devices would be smaller, simpler and cheaper than Zoes and would be placed in less vital parts of the body than the brain, making surgery far less risky. Such implants could monitor vital functions (e.g. – heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, temperature, cholesterol, hormone levels, diet, gene expression) and alert parents and doctors to health problems in their earliest phases, and to sudden medical emergencies. The implants might even double as location trackers for use if the children became lost or were kidnapped. If the price and risk are low enough, and the benefits are high enough, the natural parental instinct to do everything to protect one’s children could lead to monitoring implants becoming common in a few decades.
Will tech implants ever be worth it?
But in the interim, body-worn devices will satisfy those functions. As discussed in my Cloud Atlas review, external devices can do most of the same things implanted devices could, but at lower cost and without need for surgery. In my analysis of Ray Kurzweil’s 2019 predictions, I explained how smart watches had become affordable and could continuously monitor many of their wearers’ vital signs, warn them of irregular heartbeats, and alert the local paramedics if they detected “hard falls” followed by user nonresponse. More features, like blood pressure monitoring, will be added with time. Smart watches can also be used as tracking devices.
In my analysis of how accurate my predictions for the 2010s were, I also calculated that it was feasible in 2020 for an average person to record every waking hour of his life with a GoPro, and at a respectable 720p video resolution. The cost of storing the footage would be only $1 a day, putting the whole system well within the financial means of most people in rich countries. Of course, that would require the person to strap a small box to his forehead, which would look so silly few would do it. However, the new generation of AR glasses that will be commercially available by the end of this decade will be sleek and stylish, and have unobtrusive cameras. Hard disk prices will also keep declining, meaning it won’t be long until it costs mere pennies a day to store videos of one’s waking life.
With that in mind, AR glasses that give people the same audiovisual recording abilities as the Zoe brain implants will be affordable and available by the end of this decade. Smart watches that can closely monitor their wearers’ health and provide them with significant medical help will be available around the same time. Improved computer algorithms will be able to pool and analyze all of the data gathered by a person’s various devices to detect patterns and make sophisticated inferences. For instance, it could correlate your early-afternoon headaches with your cup of yogurt at breakfast, and inform you that you are probably going lactose intolerant. Your devices could give you real-time summaries of your health status and make hourly activity recommendations based on the day’s data (“Go for a walk”…”Breathe deeply to calm down”…”Take your medication”).
And very importantly, putting on these or other body-worn devices won’t require surgery, and if they ever broke or became obsolete, you could simply take them off and and throw them away. That won’t be true for body implants. So are cyborg implants merely another poorly conceived sci-fi trope, like laser pistols, which will never materialize?
No. Body implants like Zoes will ultimately make sense for humans to get, and will have important advantages over body-worn devices, but it will take a long time for the implants to become common.
AR glasses can only record what you are seeing and hearing, not what you are tasting, smelling, or feeling on your skin. Only a brain implant like a Zoe could capture those senses, as well as your moment-to-moment emotional states. If you wanted to truly re-live happy memories, an implant would be needed.
And while smart watch technology will reach impressive heights, it will be handicapped by its inability to access the wearer’s bloodstream. Devices inside a person’s body could monitor hormone levels, glucose levels, immune system activity, gene expression, toxin levels, and other important metrics, in addition to doing everything smart watches do. Implants could even stimulate your body with things like electric shocks to your heart, hormone dumps into your bloodstream, or neurotransmitter releases into your brain to counteract health problems. Even without any future cures for diseases or breakthroughs in reversing the aging process, such devices by themselves would significantly improve public health and lifespan.
These and other cybernetic devices will migrate into our bodies once we have found ways to make them totally unobtrusive and reliable, and once the cost and invasiveness of surgery dramatically improves (robot surgeons that work for free might help). Some limited ability to self-repair and to internally reconfigure to account for technology updates will also be needed, and the radically advanced nature of such technology is is why I don’t see the cyborg era dawning this century.
Four final points that weren’t covered in the film:
Ubiquitous surveillance will reduce bad behavior. If people know they’re probably being recorded and the recordings will be stored forever and possibly shared with millions of people, they’re less likely to commit crimes or behave uncivilly. The effect is greater if they know that biometric analysis like facial recognition or voice recognition can easily uncover their real identities from video footage. Thanks to everything being recorded and to the world being populated by intelligent machines and posthumans that will lack berserker emotions and extreme stupidity, the 22nd century will probably be a very polite era.
Having implants in your brain and body that monitor your surroundings, your behavior, and your physiological state could lead to a spooky condition where your personal assistant AI that is watching them could anticipate your thoughts, actions, and needs. If gifted with high enough intelligence and tasked with furthering your long-term enlightened self-interests, your AI could find clever ways to nudge or even control you. As a simple example, it might act like an angel on your shoulder and tell you through your ocular nerve “Don’t eat that pie. You’ve already consumed 2,300 calories today. You get a break on your health insurance premiums if I report you’ve been eating well.” More paternalistically, it might be able to release synthetic dopamine into your brain to calm you down from fits, or just plain take over your body if you were doing something highly illegal or self-destructive. Mind-influencing and mind-control could, along with ubiquitous surveillance, give rise to a very peaceful and harmonious world (or a dystopian one).
Ubiquitous surveillance will create interesting tensions between peoples’ memories and what actually happened. The film touches on this when the brother of a recently deceased man remarks to Robin Williams that the video clip of a childhood boat trip was at odds with his own recollection. It’s beyond the scope of this essay to discuss this issue in depth, but the replacement of fuzzy human memories with clear, unchanging recordings will be a two-edged sword. Past traumas and failures would never be forgotten, but people would also be able to see their own actions through unbiased lenses and to see themselves in a more honest light.
There will be “snitch apps” in the future. Once people have AR glasses, they will be able to download apps that automatically compare the faces of every person they encounter with mugshots of all known criminals and terrorists, and then report sightings to law enforcement. Even if just 0.1% of the population used these when in public, it would be highly effective. There might even be crowdsourced “Wikis” of non-criminal rude people (ex – “Karens” who had public outbursts made notorious by YouTube) whom you could also set your devices to look out for and to highlight for your avoidance or mockery. Likewise, your own reputation would be viewable to other people wearing their own AR glasses.
Implants that can do simple functions like monitoring blood cholesterol levels already exist. As they get cheaper, smaller and better, they will get more common. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-21841829
On the second anniversary of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani’s assassination by a U.S. drone strike, two Iranian drones attacked an American military base in Baghdad. Both were shot down by a U.S. antiaircraft system called “C-RAM.” A C-RAM unit has a built-in radar that identifies the locations and flight paths of enemy aircraft and missiles, and it uses the data to aim its heavy machine gun so the bullets intercept them. All the human operator has to do is push a button to allow the C-RAM to fire. At the 0:26 mark in the video, the C-RAM opened fire on one of the Iranian drones. Note the laser-like stream of bullets. The machine’s aim was perfect. https://youtu.be/Ajkg8yfgug0
Contrast that with footage of human-aimed antiaircraft guns trying to shoot down Japanese kamikaze planes in WWII. You’ll see dozens of machine guns spewing out thousands of bullets at one plane, and missing–often being wildly off-target. https://youtu.be/4mTECUWP0Hk?t=171
At the same time, GPT-3 is a much better chatbot than the best of ten years ago. I think each iteration of GPT will make fewer conversational mistakes than the last, until some future version (GPT-6?) is finally “good enough” to pass the Turing Test. http://lacker.io/ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.html
Once “Metaverse” technology is mature and widespread, it will be common for sports fans to “hang out” in the bleachers of sports arenas during games. They could even pay for retired athletes and other popular commentators to sit with them in VR and narrate the games. Other fans will still be willing to buy tickets to sit in the real bleachers and attend the games in-person. https://futuristspeaker.com/business-trends/when-nfl-football-moves-into-the-metaverse/
Machines can now convert a series of still photos of a building or place into a hi-res, 3D mock-up. Eventually, there will be a hyper-realistic, 1:1 virtual version of the real world that people will be able to explore in VR. https://youtu.be/yptwRRpPEBM
“Frequency hopping” is a method of sending encrypted messages with radio signals. A message like a simple sentence is chopped up into bits, each of which is transmitted on a different frequency from the other. To anyone listening to just one radio wavelength, they will only hear a single, brief sound of the message. However, the intended recipient will hear the whole thing thanks to a special radio descrambler that knows how the bits are distributed across the frequency spectrum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum
Dial-up modems from 20+ years ago used sounds to send and receive data. This is why, if you established the connection and then picked up the phone, you’d hear loud static for a moment–the static was the digital data being conveyed as sounds. Telephone lines weren’t built with the future needs of the internet in mind–they were designed around the much less demanding needs of human speech and listening. As a result, they can’t handle more than 56 kilobytes of data transfer. https://www.10stripe.com/articles/why-is-56k-the-fastest-dialup-modem-speed.php
In 1991, George Friedman published a book predicting the U.S. and Japan would fight a war by 2020. This is something to remember when thinking about his other geopolitical predictions, which also look likely to fail. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrbUX84LcXg
Six months ago, Peter Zeihan predicted “We are gonna have inflation in the last half of this year that is absolutely going to be higher than what we had in the early 80s [and] probably faster than what we had in the 70s.” He was basically right. The U.S. inflation rate for November was the highest since July 1982. https://youtu.be/x_fpY63fcd8?t=3560
Nuclear-powered civilian ships were introduced before the technology was fully ready, and were doomed by irrational public fears about radiation and by unfair press coverage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYj4F_cyiJI
Theoretically, we could also build antennas that used the planet’s radiation of excess heat into space to generate electricity. https://www.pnas.org/content/111/11/3927
Theoretically, 10 quadrillion people could live on Earth. We’d just have to build 300,000-storey high skyscrapers to fit everyone, plus a bunch of other megaprojects to radiate the planet’s excess heat into space and regulate global sunlight levels. https://hereticalupdate.substack.com/p/is-earth-running-out-of-resources
‘The result is that you see a distinct parabolic shape in the returns on investment for a tall building. The point of maximum return varies depending on the city, the type of construction and the location of building, and real estate professionals go to great effort to determine the economic building height for a given case. For an office building on a piece of valuable urban real estate, this has traditionally been considered to be in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 storeys tall. During planning for the Empire State Building, it was calculated that 75 storeys was the optimal height, and developers suggested that 70 storeys should be the maximum during the planning of One World Trade Center. But the existence of an increasing number of Manhattan supertall residential buildings suggests that this limit might be increasing, at least for luxury residential real estate.
Building height in excess of this “theoretical optimum” is often height for height’s sake, with the idea that an exceptionally tall building will have “prestige value” that more than compensates for the less efficient design. The (real or perceived) benefits of prestige, combined with the rising costs of servicing the upper floors, often results in buildings that achieve their height by adding large volumes of unoccupied space at the top. The Burj Khalifa, currently the tallest building, is perhaps the ultimate example of this, with the top 29% of the building being unoccupied space.’ https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/why-skyscrapers-are-so-short/
Imagine a 1 – 10 rating scale for your full possible range of emotional experiences.
1 = Most miserable and painful you can be 5 = Feel neither good nor bad 10 = Most happy and blissful you can be
People intuitively think that the increments between each number are subjectively constant, so the felt difference between levels 9 and 10 is the same as the difference between levels 5 and 6. However, there’s evidence that the good and bad extremes are way, way, way more extreme, so that going from level 9 to level 10 is much more of a jump in subjective pleasure than going from level 5 to 6 is. https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/log-scales
With training, most people can learn to control single neurons in their brains. In the far future, I think humans will be able to control their own thoughts, emotions, and gene expression, just by thinking about it. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.05.079038v1.full
For the first time, a pig heart has been transplanted into a human without killing the person. The pig had been genetically engineered so its heart cells would be similar enough to human tissue to not be rejected by the human immune system. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59944889
This article was published in June 2020, a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, it was unclear what the effect on birthrates would be, and it could have been argued that more children that normal were going to be conceived since couples would have more time at their homes together. The article predicted the 2021 U.S. birthrate would be 300,000 – 500,000 lower than it was in 2020. The data are still coming in, but there was a decline, closer towards the lower end of their estimate. https://www.brookings.edu/research/half-a-million-fewer-children-the-coming-covid-baby-bust/
Plot: Welcome to 2022. Welcome to a grotesquely overpopulated, resource-depleted, polluted, and impoverished world. It’s a place where practically every tree has been cut down and every person herded into cities to make room for farms that nevertheless barely make enough food for everyone, where the air is sticky and thick with toxic smog and the stench of unwashed bodies and corpses, and where the hungry masses are perpetually on the brink of rioting. There’s no joy, hope, jobs, or even real food anymore–just little processed crackers rationed to the population. It’s a place where corrupt politicians and the executives of corporations collude to protect their own power and privileges at any cost, even if it means forcing the ultimate sacrilege on humanity.
Manhattan, 2022
Welcome to New York City. It’s a decaying and crime-ridden cauldron that is so crowded it’s literally standing room only in many of its apartments and streets. Charlton Heston knows this city well, and keeps busy in it. He’s a homicide detective, and of such esteem that he enjoys the privilege of having his own, small apartment, which he shares with only one other person: his elderly assistant named “Sol.” Their dreary routine is interrupted one day when they are assigned to investigate the murder of one of New York’s richest people–a man named “Simonson” who was a Board member at the “Soylent” corporation.
Soylent is an enormous food processing company that controls half the world’s food supply. Their “Red” and “Yellow” products are derived from plants, and are formed into crackers or loaves. Their latest product, “Green,” is said to be derived from plankton harvested from the ocean. Soylent Red, Yellow and Green are staple foods for New Yorkers, and probably billions of people beyond.
Soylent foods for sale at a New York market
As the investigation proceeds, Heston quickly realizes Simonson’s murder was no robbery gone bad, as it appeared at first glance. As he and Sol follow the clues, it leads them to mortal danger, a conspiracy involving some of the world’s most powerful men, and to a profoundly disturbing secret about the food supply.
Soylent Green was a laugh-out-loud inaccurate portrayal of the world in 2022. Yeah, I know we have our problems, but they don’t compare to the film’s dystopia. The fact that it was so far off the mark should be FOOD FOR THOUGHT for anyone who takes the current crop of doomsday global warming movies set in the future (e.g. – Geostorm, Snowpiercer, Interstellar) seriously.
That said, I still liked Soylent Green and think it’s worth watching so long as it isn’t taken seriously. The movie is well-paced and manages to depict a grim future without overdoing it to the point of being depressing. It’s both entertaining and serious, and at times genuinely tense. The acting is great all around, especially on the part of Charlton Heston, who is less cocky and has a slightly broader emotional range in this than in most of his other roles.
Analysis:
The world will be grossly overpopulated. At the beginning of Soylent Green, we’re told that New York City’s population has grown from roughly 8 million the year the film was released (1973) to 40 million in 2022. Population figures for other parts of the U.S. or for other countries are never given, but at one point Heston says other cities are “all like this,” implying the rest of the world is similarly overpopulated.
The U.S. population in 1973 was about 205 million, and the world population that year was 3.7 billion. If they quintupled like New York City, then in the film, the U.S. population in 2022 was 1 billion, and the world population was 18.5 billion.
Mercifully, the real figures are much lower: New York City has 8.8 million residents, the U.S. has 330 million, and the world has 7.9 billion. Soylent Green‘s prediction that Earth would be grossly overpopulated by 2022 was wrong, and the city in which it is set, New York, has only 11% more inhabitants now than it did in 1973. Instead of it being “standing room only,” the city is but marginally denser.
Outside of the tropical countries and Muslim world, population is growing very little and is even shrinking
Ironically, a growing number of thinkers and journalists today are worried about the opposite problem: population decline. The populations of rich countries are mostly shrinking, or are only slowly expanding thanks to immigration and immigrants having kids. Even middle income countries like China, Thailand and Brazil have seen sharp drops in birthrates and have almost stopped growing. While shrinking a shrinking population has benefits (more space per person, cheaper real estate, less traffic, less pollution created), they are probably outweighed by the downsides of economic decline.
That said, it would be a mistake to simply extrapolate current demographic trends into the future indefinitely and to conclude that the human race is doomed to extinction because people will refuse to have kids. A slew of technologies that will come into existence this century will raise birthrates in various ways: Existing assisted reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization (IVF) will get cheaper, putting them within reach of lower income people. New reproduction technologies will be invented, allowing more people with fertility problems to have healthy kids. For example, post-menopausal women with no eggs will be able to have fertility labs synthesize ova for them that contain their DNA, and to insert it into themselves, younger surrogate mothers or, in the far future, artificial wombs. Robot servants will also ease household workloads, giving parents more time for child-rearing and making parenthood more appealing.
Along with raising birthrates, future technologies will let us grow the human population through the opposite mechanism, which is lowering mortality rates. Disease cures, therapeutic cloning of human organs, cybernetic replacements for organs and limbs, stem cell therapies that regenerate ageing tissues and organs inside the patient’s body, and many other medical advances, will slowly raise lifespans, and to such an extent that “medical immortality” will probably be available to well-resourced people by the end of this century. If people don’t die, then even a very low birthrate among them will lead to Soylent Green levels of overpopulation, though it might take centuries.
The environment will be devastated by pollution. The other aspect of Soylent Green‘s dystopian reality is severe pollution and concomitant environmental devastation. The outdoor scenes–which are already bleak-looking since they are full of derelict buildings, trash-strewn streets and crowds of poor people–are shrouded in a sickly greenish haze, which is certainly smog. New York City is devoid of trees, except a few saplings in a small, sealed arboretum (presumably necessary to protect them from air toxins) that only privileged people can enter.
A sealed arboretum containing NYC’s only trees
The oceans are also so poisoned and overfished that plankton are the only remaining edible sea life. The Soylent company processes harvested plankton into green crackers for human consumption, and the film’s big reveal is that it has been secretly transitioning their content to human flesh because even plankton is dying out. In other words, “SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!”
Manhattan in 2021
This depiction of 2022 is almost totally wrong. New York City still has trees growing outdoors–notably in the massive Central Park. Additionally, the U.S. actually had more trees in 2021 than it did in 1921! The amount of global tree cover also increased by 8% from 1982 to 2016.
Instead of disappearing, global seafood harvests have risen since Soylent Green was in theaters, and there are no signs of an impending collapse of wild fisheries, though fish catches have been flat since the 1990s, suggesting we’ve reached the limit of how many wild calories the seas can sustainably provide us. Fortunately, the human race has proven itself more competent at surmounting this barrier than it was in the movie, and a large and growing share of fish are now “farmed” instead of caught wild.
Though the oceans still supply us with plenty of calories, a large and growing share of seafood comes from “fish farms,” labeled “aquaculture” in this graph.
New York City’s air is not full of smog, and its air quality is in fact substantially better than it was when the film was released. As just one example, sulfur dioxide (SO2) concentrations in the City’s air have sharply dropped, from an average of 155 μg/m3 from 1970-72, to a mere 6.8 μg/m3 today (January 24, 2022). (SO2 is the main component of “smog,” and has an opaque appearance. It causes respiratory problems and acid rain.) Every other type of air pollution (i.e. – PM 2.5, ozone, lead, nitrogen dioxide (NO2)) has sharply dropped in New York City, the rest of America, and the rest of the developed world over the same timeframe, meaning they breathe cleaner air today than people did when Soylent Green was in theaters. This is due to a slew of environmental laws being enacted, including the U.S. Clean Air Act of 1963 and the Clean Water Act of 1972. (U.S. air and water pollution levels had actually been trending down for a short time before Soylent Green‘s 1973 release.)
Delhi, India during its November 2021 smog emergency
Unfortunately, those things aren’t true for the poorer half of the global population, and hundreds of millions of people in India and China endure toxic air, mostly due to weak air pollution laws or to lax enforcement of relevant laws. In fact, in November 2021, Delhi had a smog emergency lasting several days, during which the air became so poisonous that the government shut down the city’s schools. The news images of opaque air, crowded streets, poverty, and decay bear striking similarities to the dystopian New York of Soylent Green. The suffering of people in polluted places like northern India is why I judged “This depiction of 2022 is almost totally wrong.”
Winters in temperate areas will be warm thanks to global warming. Though the movie indicates it is set in the year 2022, no clues are given about the exact dates of its events. Based on the facts that most of the characters wear light clothing, and there are several scenes where they are visibly sweating, it would seem it is set in the summer. However, that assumption is upended by a remark Heston makes when contemplating whether to turn on an air conditioner (a rare luxury): “All the way up. We’ll make it cold. Like winter used to be.”
Evidently, global warming has gotten so severe that even in places with slightly cold climates like New York City are hot in the winter!
Fortunately, this prediction about 2022 also fell flat. Global warming has only had a tiny effect on the city’s temperature. According to NOAA data taken from a weather station that has been operating in Central Park since 1869, NYC’s average temperature for all of 1973 (the year Soylent Green was released) was 56.1°F, and the average for that December was 39.0°F. The average temperature for 2020 (the last year for which full data have been published) was 57.3°F, and that December’s average temperature was 39.2°F.
And on the day I analyzed this prediction (January 26, 2022), New York City’s high temperature was 29°F, and it was bracing for a major snowstorm.
There will be tablet computers. Though we never get a good look at them or see how they work, there appear to be simple tablet computers and PDAs in the film. Heston keeps one of them in his apartment, and in the film’s first scene, Sol reads notes about criminal cases off of it. The device is a piece of transparent plastic, about the size and shape of a magazine, with an opaque layer embedded within it bearing written characters.
It is strongly reminiscent of an actual tablet computer that lets users handwrite digital notes on its screen by using metal styluses. This prediction about 2022 was right.
The “ReMarkable 2” tablet, displaying something more cheerful than a suicide note. It is new for 2022.
People will have computer game machines in their homes. Early in the film, there’s a scene set in Simonson’s luxury condo suite. There we see an arcade-style video game. To be exact, it is “Computer Space,” which was the first commercially successful video game in history, and only made its debut two years before Soylent Green was released.
A privately-owned computer arcade game
In 2022, it is very common for people to have video game consoles in their homes and to play games on their computing devices. If anything, the film’s prediction is too conservative since it depicts video games as being only available to rich people, whereas in reality, even a teenager working a part-time job today could afford a quality console and several games.
The government will ration essential goods. Due to dwindling natural resources, an excessive population, and widespread poverty that leaves most people unable to afford anything, the government rations essential goods, notably food and water. Citizens visit government offices where clerks give them their allotments of money or ration cards, which they exchange with other people in New York to get essential goods. In other scenes, we see private merchants selling Soylent food products in an open-air market, and men in official uniforms using an outdoor water tap to fill the jugs belonging to people who need their daily water rations. The film also implies that other basics, like soap, writing paper, and pencils, are also very hard to get.
A rationing office run by the government
For the U.S. and the developed world more broadly, this is inaccurate. Staple foods, potable water, and everyday items like soap are very cheap. For example, by cooking their own meals at home, an adult could easily get their food budget under $10 per day, and by drinking only tap water or some type of beverage mix like “Tang,” get their daily drink budget below $1. A bar of personal soap cost $1.50, and will last a person for weeks.
A visit to a typical American grocery store in 2022, even in poorer parts of the country, will reveal a cornucopia of food and merchandise at low prices. Additionally, thrift stores are practically everywhere, and are bursting with wide varieties of decent-quality secondhand goods at very low prices. Electronic resources like Craigslist.org, Facebook Marketplace, and Freecycle are also major sources of cheap or even free items available locally. If anything, most of the world is now contending with a surfeit of essential goods, which too often are wasted, thrown out, or allowed to accumulate as unused clutter. Growth of the self-storage industry bears further testimony to this reality. People, Americans in particular, have too much stuff, not too little.
Prostitution will be legal. One of Soylent Green’s main characters is “Shirl” (pronounced almost the same as “Cheryl”), a young woman prostitute who is compensated with free housing and amenities in Mr. Simonson’s luxury condo. The arrangement is legal and accepted as normal, and it is later revealed that the condo building has several other prostitutes, euphemistically termed “furniture,” living in other units. Having a live-in prostitute is an expensive marker of high status, and Heston’s suspicions are raised when, while investigating Simonson’s death, he discovers the latter’s bodyguard has “furniture” in his own apartment in spite of a salary that should be insufficient.
Prostitutes having a party
In real life, prostitution is illegal in New York City, and in the rest of the U.S. except Nevada. There, it is confined to a small number of heavily regulated brothel houses. With varying restrictions, prostitution is legal in about 15 countries, mostly in Europe. Nevertheless, as the revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s high-end prostitution ring–which included sex parties at his luxury Manhattan townhouse–show, it’s still easy for rich men to buy sex in New York.
A small number of industrial food companies will control the global food supply. “Soylent” is clearly the dominant food producer in the U.S., and perhaps the world. As Sol says after researching it: “Soylent controls the food supply for half the world.” It’s unclear who produces the other half, but other big companies and government agricultural agencies probably dominate it.
A small number of food processing companies own many common food and beverage brands. But does that mean they “control the global food supply”?
The world is certainly full of large, highly profitable food processing companies, but none is so big that it controls anywhere near half of the global food supply. Consider the top ten food and drink companies of 2020, along with their food sales for that year:
PepsiCo, Inc. – $70.3 billion
Nestle – $67.7 billion
JBS – $50.7 billion
Anheuser-Busch – $46.9 billion
Tyson Foods – $43.2 billion
Mars – $37.0
Archer Daniels Midland – 35.4 billion
The Coca-Cola Company – $34.3 billion
Cargill – $32.4 billion
Danone – $26.9 billion
If we assume that these ten companies produced all the calories consumed by all humans in 2020, and use revenues as a proxy for calories each produced, then the largest, PepsiCo, only controls 15.8% of the food supply.
Of course, the top 10 food processing companies aren’t really the only ones in existence. The source from which I got the above data actually lists revenue figures for the top 100 companies in the sector. If we include them in the calculation (BTW, rank #100 goes to the “Kewpie Corporation,” which made $3.6 billion in 2020 selling mostly mayonnaise, salad dressing, and baby food in Japan), then big companies sold $1,316 billion of food and beverages in 2020, and the biggest one, PepsiCo, only controls 5.3% of the global market. The top ten combined only control 33.8%.
The darkness of the country indicates what share of its population is engaged in sustenance farming.
Additionally, sustenance farming and the consumption of food made by small, local farms still provides most of the calories for large fractions of the population in Africa and southern Asia. These people eat little or nothing made by the big food processing companies, meaning PepsiCo’s control over global calories should be even lower than the paltry 5.3%.
In rich countries with declining culinary traditions, like the U.S., it is probably common for people to get most of their daily calories from processed foods. However, the foods are still made by several different, competing food processing companies, so there is no monopoly and hence no real-world equivalent to “Soylent.” Even if the biggest one of those companies decided to start secretly blending calories derived from corpses into its food products, only a minority of the U.S. population would end up eating it.
New York City’s population will be 90% white. All of Soylent Green‘s main characters and seemingly 90% of its extras are white. This includes rich, working-class, and poor people.
The reality is very different. The U.S. Census estimated that, in 2021, only 32.1% of New Yorkers were both white and non-Hispanic. Blacks were 24.3%, Asians were 14.1%, and multiracial people were 3.6%. It is surely one of the most racially diverse cities on Earth.
There will be mass unemployment. In the first scene, Heston remarks “There are 20 million guys out of work in Manhattan alone.” Even if this is exaggerated and the real number is only half that figure, and even if “guys” refers to both sexes, it would indicate a staggeringly high unemployment rate.
To be generous, let’s assume that Soylent Green‘s New York had an excellent dependency ratio of 80, meaning 80% of its population was in good health and able to work (children, old people, and disabled people comprise the other 20%). For comparison, NYC’s actual dependency ratio in 2021 was 54.7, and dependency ratios in the 80s have only happened after periods of extraordinary population growth, such as when the post-WWII baby boom generations in India and South Korea hit adulthood.
Eighty percent of 40 million is 32 million, meaning there were 32 million potential adult workers in the city. If 10 million of them (half of Heston’s figure) couldn’t find jobs, that equates to a 31.25% unemployment rate. To put that into perspective, during the Great Depression, the U.S. national unemployment rate peaked at 24.9%. Remarkably, even with optimistic assumptions, the job picture was worse than it had ever been in real life!
What happens if we adjust the calculations to be more bleak? For example what if we lower the dependency ratio to 65 (many of the New Yorkers looked unhealthy and seemed to have motivation problems, both of which would leave them unable to work) and accept Heston’s “20 million guys out of work” figure?
We get a 76.9% unemployment rate, which is unheard of. I can’t imagine a situation where that many willing people wouldn’t be able to find jobs, except maybe the first few weeks following a massive nuclear war. That said, I foresee a day when 76.9% of healthy adults won’t have gainful jobs due to machines doing the work for them, but most of those people won’t be “unemployed” since they’ll embrace (or at least, deal with) the new reality by devoting their time to things other than work, like socializing, video gaming, doing drugs, traveling, or indulging in personal hobbies and niche interests. You don’t count as “unemployed” if you’re not interested in working.
Oh, and what’s New York City’s actual unemployment rate? In December 2021, it was 8.8%, which is high by real-world U.S. standards, but absolutely stellar by Soylent Green‘s.
There will be mass homelessness. Along with lacking jobs, most of the people in the film seem to lack homes. Every morning, Heston has to literally jump over poor people who sleep on the staircase of his apartment. Many of New York’s streets are clogged with broken-down cars that people live in, and sleeping people literally cover the whole floor of his local church at night. Most of the city’s population might be chronically homeless.
Heston jumping over poor people
In reality, no more than 1% of New York City’s population is truly homeless, meaning they either sleep in public spaces or in homeless shelters. And unlike in Soylent Green, most of them only go without proper housing for brief lengths of time, and aren’t “chronically” homeless.
New York City will have epidemic levels of violent crime.Soylent Green begins with a murder, later in the film there’s a street riot where several police officers are attacked and people are shot, and in one scene, the police chief says there were 137 murders in the city over the previous 24 hours. In short, New York City is extremely violent. How accurate was this depiction?
If we assume 137 murders a day is typical, that’s equivalent to 50,005 per year, and a homicide rate of 125 per 100,000 residents. In reality, New York City had 485 murders for all of 2021, meaning its homicide rate is a mere 5.5 per 100,000 residents.
Among big American cities, the most murderous is Louisville, Kentucky, which had 188 murders in 2021, equating to a homicide rate of 30 per 100,000. That means no major urban area in the U.S. comes close to being as violent as Soylent Green‘s New York was.
That said, there are cities outside the U.S. that approach its heights of murder. In 2020, three Mexican cities–Celaya, Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez–had the highest murder rates in the world, at 109, 105, and 103 murders per 100,000 residents, respectively. So if the movie had been Soylent Verde and set just one country away, it would have been grimly accurate in this regard.
People will have battery banks in their homes. The small apartment that Heston and Sol share has a bank of what look like car batteries for storing electricity. A stationary bicycle connected to the batteries can be pedaled to recharge them. It’s unclear whether the battery bank is their sole source of electricity, or if it’s merely a backup power source in case of grid failures, and it’s also unclear how common the batteries are in other homes.
The battery bank
Batteries are much cheaper and more energy-dense today than they were when Soylent Green was in theaters. However, home battery banks remain uncommon due to the reliability of the electric grid and because the batteries are still too expensive to be worth it.
For example, a typical American home consumes 30 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity per day. A person who valued efficiency could reasonably reduce that to 24 kWh / day by buying high-efficiency appliances and by doing things like wearing sweaters instead of turning the heat up so high in the winter. A typical home storage battery such as the “Growatt 6 KW,” costs $4,490 and can only store 6 kWh of electricity, so four of the batteries would be needed to store just one day’s worth of power, for a total cost of $17,960, plus installation costs. The batteries’ storage capacities also degrade with time, meaning they usually need to be replaced after 10-15 years.
The “Growatt 6KW” residential battery
A better option for backup power is a gas-powered generator. While portable generators with wheels are the most familiar versions of the machines, the types generally used for residential backup power are stationary and look like large boxes right outside the houses they provide power to. One high-quality standby generator capable of meeting the 24 kWh / day requirement is the “Generac 72101,” and it costs $5,997 plus more for installation. It is connected to the house’s natural gas plumbing and automatically turns on whenever it detects an electrical grid outage. Best of all, if properly maintained and not overused, such a generator can last 20 years or more before needing replacement.
A Generac 24 kW backup generator installed outside a home
This means a home battery backup system costs three times more than an equivalent backup gas generator. Battery prices will need to drop by 66% to achieve parity. Such an improvement might be possible: Between 2010 and 2019, lithium-ion battery pack prices dropped 87%. However, the rate of yearly cost-improvement declined over that period and continues to do so, suggesting we’ve picked the low-hanging fruits for improving battery cost-performance, so don’t expect another 87% decline over the next 10 years. To get our 66% improvement, which might cause battery banks to become common in houses and apartments, I think 20 years or more of research and industrial efficiencies will be needed.
Assisted suicide will be legal. Discovering the awful truth about Soylent Green pushes Sol–already an old and world-weary man–over the edge, so he signs up for assisted suicide, which is euphemistically called “Going home.” Not only is it legal, it is barely regulated, and Sol merely has to walk into the nearest euthanasia clinic and sign a form to have it done. There’s no wait time, no “cool down period,” and no requirement for suicide requests to be vetted by a court, doctors, mental health specialists, or the applicant’s family.
Sol committing assisted suicide
This depiction of 2022 was partly accurate. Physician-assisted suicide is legal in 10 American states and Washington, DC. While the laws only allow their residents the right of suicide, it is easy for people from other parts of America to satisfy the requirement by moving in and living there for a short period of time.
Additionally, in those 10 states and DC, the applicant must provide medical evidence that he probably has six months or less to live thanks to poor health, and there are processes for adjudicating that evidence. (In effect, legal doctor-assisted suicide is available to anyone in the U.S. who can prove he has six months or less to live.) Professing that one is sick of living–even if the person can prove they are sincere–is insufficient. This means Sol, were he alive in the real world of 2022, would not be able to commit assisted suicide.
The procedure is also not legal in New York, though it is in neighboring New Jersey, and it’s possible the euthanasia clinic in the film was in the latter state. Less than a mile of water separates Manhattan from Jersey City, and Sol could have easily made the journey.
Cannibalism will be widespread. Like “Luke, I am your father,” the line “Soylent Green is people” has long been in our cultural consciousness, and is known even to those who haven’t seen the latter film. With that in mind, I feel no guilt exposing the movie’s climactic reveal: the Soylent company has been secretly turning corpses into crackers that millions (possibly billions) of unsuspecting people have been eating.
Soylent Green crackers been scooped into a bag at a food market
Again, and very fortunately, this prediction was wrong. Cannibalism is not widespread in 2022, or even practiced by anything but a miniscule number of disturbed people. It is probably as culturally taboo as it was in 1973, and even in rare cases where a person voluntarily allows themselves to be killed and eaten by a cannibal, the latter is arrested and charged with a crime.
However, as I’ve predicted, in vitro meat technology should be advanced enough by 2100 to let us grow human flesh and organs in labs, which would provide people a legal way to indulge in “cannibalism” without breaking laws related to murder or desecration of a corpse. As a result, a small number of people will eat human flesh, mostly for novelty, like how people try weird meats like alligator today, but some will eat it routinely because they like the taste or have a cannibal fetish.
“The Relation of Air Pollution to Mortality” (1976) determined that New York City’s average SO2 concentration from 1970-72 was 155 μg/m3. https://www.jstor.org/stable/45002384
NOAA webpage featuring data from the weather station in Central Park, which has been operating since 1869. It shows how little average temperatures have risen in NYC since 1972. https://www.weather.gov/okx/CentralParkHistorical
On any given day, about 1% of New Yorkers are homeless, meaning they spent the night sleeping in public or in a homeless shelter. https://www.bowery.org/homelessness/
If it’s January, it means it’s time for me to update my big list of future predictions! I used the 2021 version of this document as a template, and made edits to it as needed. For the sake of transparency, I’ve indicated recently added content by bolding it, and have indicated deleted or moved content with strikethrough.
Like any futurist worth his salt, I’m going to put my credibility on the line by publishing a list of my future predictions. I won’t modify or delete this particular blog entry once it is published, and if my thinking about anything on the list changes, I’ll instead create a new, revised blog entry. Furthermore, as the deadlines for my predictions pass, I’ll reexamine them.
I’ve broken down my predictions by the decade. Any prediction listed under a specific decade will happen by the end of that decade, unless I specify some other date (e.g. – “X will happen early in this decade.”).
2020s
Better, cheaper solar panels and batteries (for grid power storage and cars) will make clean energy as cheap and as reliable as fossil fuel power for entire regions of the world, including some temperate zones. As cost “tipping points” are reached, it will make financial sense for tens of millions of private homeowners and electricity utility companies to install solar panels on their rooftops and on ground arrays, respectively. This will be the case even after government clean energy subsidies are inevitably retracted. However, a 100% transition to clean energy won’t finish in rich countries until the middle of the century, and poor countries will use dirty energy well into the second half of the century.
Fracking and the exploitation of tar sands in the U.S. and Canada will together ensure growth in global oil production until around 2030, at which time the installed base of clean energy and batteries will be big enough to take up the slack. There will be no global energy crisis.
This will be a bad decade for Russia as its overall population shrinks, its dependency ratio rises, and as low fossil fuel prices and sanctions keep hurting its economy. Russia will fall farther behind the U.S., China, and other leading countries in terms of economic, military, and technological might.
China’s GDP will surpass America’s, India’s population will surpass China’s, and China will never claim the glorious title of being both the richest and most populous country.
Improvements to smartphone cameras, mirrorless cameras, and perhaps light-field cameras will make D-SLRs obsolete.
Augmented reality (AR) glasses that are much cheaper and better than the original Google Glass will make their market debuts and will find success in niche applications. Some will grant wearers superhuman visual abilities in the forms of zoom-in and night vision.
Virtual reality (VR) gaming will go mainstream as the devices get better and cheaper. It will stop being the sole domain of hardcore gamers willing to spend over $1,000 on hardware.
Vastly improved VR goggles with better graphics and no need to be plugged into desktop PCs will hit the market. They won’t display perfectly lifelike footage, but they will be much better than what we have today, and portable.
“Full-immersion” audiovisual VR will be commercially available by the end of the decade. These VR devices will be capable of displaying video that is visually indistinguishable from real reality: They will have display resolutions (at least 60 pixels per degree of field of view), refresh rates, head tracking sensitivities, and wide fields of view (210 degrees wide by 150 degrees high) that together deliver a visual experience that matches or exceeds the limits of human vision. These high-end goggles won’t be truly “portable” devices because their high processing and energy requirements will probably make them bulky, give them only a few hours of battery life (or maybe none at all), or even require them to be plugged into another computer. Moreover, the tactile, olfactory, and physical movement/interaction aspects of the experience will remain underdeveloped.
“Deepfake” pornography will reach new levels of sophistication and perversion as it becomes possible to seamlessly graft the heads of real people onto still photos and videos of nude bodies that closely match the physiques of the actual people. New technology for doing this will let amateurs make high-quality deepfakes, meaning any person could be targeted. It will even become possible to wear AR glasses that interpolate nude, virtual bodies over the bodies real people in the wearer’s field of view to provide a sort of fake “X-ray-vision.” The AR glasses could also be used to apply other types of visual filters that degraded real people within the field of view.
LED light bulbs will become as cheap as CFL and even incandescent bulbs. It won’t make economic sense NOT to buy LEDs, and they will establish market dominance. [Came true in 2021]
“Smart home”/”Wired home” technology will become mature and widespread in developed countries.
Video gaming will dispense with physical media, and games will be completely streamed from the internet or digitally downloaded. Business that exist just to sell game discs (Gamestop) will shut down.
Instead of a typical home entertainment system having a whole bunch of media discs, different media players and cable boxes, there will be one small, multipurpose box that, among other things, boosts WiFi to ensure the TV and all nearby devices can get signals at multi-Gb/s speeds.
Self-driving vehicles will start hitting the roads in large numbers in rich countries. The vehicles won’t drive as efficiently as humans (a lot of hesitation and slowing down for little or no reason), but they’ll be as safe as human drivers. Long-haul trucks that ply simple highway routes will be the first category of vehicles to be fully automated. The transition will be heralded by a big company like Wal-Mart buying 5,000 self-driving tractor trailers to move goods between its distribution centers and stores. Last-mile delivery–involving weaving through side streets, cities and neighborhoods, and physically carrying packages to peoples’ doors–won’t be automated until after this decade. Self-driving, privately owned passenger cars will stay few in number and will be owned by technophiles, rich people, and taxi cab companies.
Thanks to improvements in battery energy density and cost, and in fast-charging technology, electric cars will become cost-competitive with gas-powered cars this decade without government subsidies, leading to their rapid adoption. Electric cars are mechanically simpler and more reliable than gas-powered ones, which will hurt the car repair industry. Many gas stations will also go bankrupt or convert to fast charging stations.
Most new power equipment will be battery-powered, so machines like lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and chainsaws will be much quieter and less polluting than they are today. Batteries will be energy-dense enough to compete with gasoline in these use cases, and differences in overall equipment weight and running time will be insignificant. The notion of a neighbor shattering your sense of peace and quiet with loud yard work will get increasingly alien.
A machine will pass the Turing Test by the end of this decade. The milestone will attract enormous amounts of attention and will lead to several retests, some of which the machine will fail, proving that it lacks the full range of human intelligence. It will lead to debate over the Turing Test’s validity as a measure of true intelligence (Ray Kurzweil actually talked about this phenomenon of “moving the goalposts” whenever we think about how smart computers are), and many AI experts will point out the existence of decades-long skepticism in the Turing Test in their community.
The best AIs circa 2029 won’t be able to understand and upgrade their own source codes. They will still be narrow AIs, albeit an order of magnitude better than the ones we have today.
Machines will become better than humans at the vast majority of computer, card, and board games. The only exceptions will be very obscure games or recently created games that no one has bothered to program an AI to play yet. But even for those games, there will be AIs with general intelligence and learning abilities that will be “good enough” to play as well as average humans by reading the instruction manuals and teaching themselves through simulated self-play.
The cost of getting your genome sequenced and expertly interpreted will drop below $1,000, and enough about the human genome will have been deciphered to make the cost worth the benefit for everyone. By the end of the decade, it will be common for newborns in rich countries to have their genomes sequenced.
Better technology will also let pregnant women noninvasively obtain their fetuses’ DNA, at affordable cost.
Cheap DNA tests that can measure a person’s innate IQ and core personality traits with high accuracy will become widely available. There is the potential for this to cause social problems.
At-home medical testing kits and diagnostic devices like swallowable camera-pills will become vastly better and more common.
Space tourism will become routine thanks to privately owned spacecraft.
Marijuana will be effectively decriminalized in the U.S. Either the federal government will overturn its marijuana prohibitions, or some patchwork of state and federal bans will remain but be so weakened and lightly enforced that there will be no real government barriers to obtaining and using marijuana.
By the end of this decade, photos of almost every living person will be available online (mostly on social media). Apps will exist that can scan through trillions of photos to find your doppelgangers.
In 2029, the youngest Baby Boomer and the oldest Gen Xer will turn 65.
Drones will be used in an attempted or successful assassination of at least one major world leader (Note: Venezuela’s Nicholas Maduro wasn’t high profile enough).
2030s
VR and AR goggles will become refined technologies and probably merge into a single type of lightweight device. Like smartphones today, anyone who wants the glasses in 2030 will have them. Even poor people in Africa will be able to buy them. A set of the glasses will last a day on a single charge under normal use.
Augmented reality contact lenses will enter mass production and become widely available, though they won’t be as good as AR glasses and they might need remotely linked, body-worn hardware to provide them with power and data. https://www.inverse.com/article/31034-augmented-reality-contact-lenses
The bulky VR goggles of the 2020s will transform into lightweight, portable V.R. glasses thanks to improved technology. The glasses will display lifelike footage. However, the best VR goggles will still need to be plugged into other devices, like routers or PCs.
Wall-sized, thin, 8K or even 16K TVs will become common in homes in rich countries, and the TVs will be able to display 3D picture without the use of glasses. A sort of virtual reality chamber could be created at moderate cost by installing those TVs on all the walls of a room to create a single, wraparound screen.
It will be common for celebrities of all kinds to make money by “hanging out” with paying customers in virtual reality. For some lower-tier celebrities, this will be their sole source of income.
Functional CRT TVs and computer monitors will only exist in museums and in the hands of antique collectors. This will also be true for DLP TVs.
The video game industry will be bigger than ever and considered high art.
It will be standard practice for AIs to be doing hyperrealistic video game renderings, and for NPCs to behave very intelligently thanks to better AI.
Books and computer tablets will merge into a single type of device that could be thought of as a “digital book.” It will be a book with several hundred pages made of thin, flexible digital displays (perhaps using ultra-energy efficient e-ink) instead of paper. At the tap of a button, the text on all of the pages will instantly change to display whichever book the user wanted to read at that moment. They could also be used as notebooks in which the user could hand write or draw things with a stylus, which would be saved as image or text files. The devices will fuse the tactile appeal of old-fashioned books with the content flexibility of tablet computers.
Loose-leaf sheets of “digital paper” will also exist thanks to the same technology.
Commercially available, head-worn, brain-computer-interface devices (BCIs) linked to augmented reality eyewear will gift humans with crude forms of telepathy and telekinesis. For example, a person wearing the devices could compose a short sentence merely by thinking about it, see the text projected across his augmented field of view, use his thoughts to make any needed edits, and then transmit the sentence to another person or machine, merely by thinking a “Send” command. The human recipient of the message with the same BCI/eyewear setup would see the text projected across his field of view and could compose a response through the same process the first person used. BCIs will also let humans send commands to a machines, like printers. For almost all use cases, this type of communication will be less efficient than traditional alternatives, like manually typing a text message or clicking the “Print” button at the top of a word processing application, but it will be an important proof of concept demonstration that will point to what is to come later in the century.
Loneliness, social isolation, and other problems caused by overuse of technology and the atomized structure of modern life will be, ironically, cured to a large extent by technology. Chatbots that can hold friendly (and even funny and amusing) conversations with humans for extended periods, diagnose and treat mental illnesses as well as human therapists, and customize themselves to meet the needs of humans will become ubiquitous. The AIs will become adept at analyzing human personalities and matching lonely people with friends and lovers, at matching them with social gatherings (including some created by machines), and at recommending daily activities that will satisfy them, hour-by-hour. Machines will come to understand that constant technology use is antithetical to human nature, so in order to promote human wellness, they find ways to impel humans to get out of their houses, interact with other humans, and be in nature. Autonomous taxis will also be widespread and will have low fares, making it easier for people who are isolated due to low income or poor health (such as many elderly people) to go out.
Chatbots will steadily improve their “humanness” over the decade. The instances when AIs say or do something nonsensical will get less and less frequent. Dumber people, children, and people with some types of mental illness will be the first ones to start insisting their AIs are intelligent like humans. Later, average people will start claiming the same. By the end of the decade, a personal assistant AI like “Samantha” from the movie Her will be commercially available. AI personal assistants will have convincing, simulated personalities that seem to have the same depth as humans. Users will be able to pick from among personality profiles or to build their own.
Chatbots will be able to have intelligent conversations with humans about politics and culture, to identify factually wrong beliefs, biases, and cognitive blind spots in individuals, and to effectively challenge them through verbal discussion and debate. The potential will exist for technology to significantly enlighten the human population and to reduce sociopolitical polarization. However, it’s unclear how many people will choose to use this technology.
Turing-Test-capable chatbots will also supercharge the problem of online harassment, character assassination, and deliberate disinformation by spamming the internet with negative reviews, bullying messages, emails to bosses, and humiliating “deepfake” photos and videos of targeted people. Today’s “troll farms” where humans sit at computer terminals following instructions to write bad reviews for specific people or businesses will be replaced by AI trolls that can pump out orders of magnitude more content per day. And just as people today can “buy likes” for their social media accounts or business webpages, people in the future will be able, at low cost, to buy harassment campaigns against other people and organizations they dislike. Discerning between machine-generated and human-generated internet content will be harder and more important than ever.
House robots will start becoming common in rich countries. They will be slower at doing household tasks than humans, but will still save people hours of labor per week. They may or may not be humanoid. For the sake of safety and minimizing annoyance, most robots will do their work when humans aren’t around. As in, you would come home from work every day and find the floors vacuumed, the lawn mowed, and your laundered clothes in your dresser, with nary a robot in sight since it will have gone back into its closet to recharge. You would never hear the commotion of a clothes washing machine, a vacuum cleaner or a lawnmower. All the work would get done when you were away, as if by magic.
People will start having genuine personal relationships with AIs and robots. For example, people will resist upgrading to new personal assistant AIs because they will have emotional attachments to their old ones. The destruction of a helper robot or AI might be as emotionally traumatic to some people as the death of a human relative.
Farm robots that are better than humans at fine motor tasks like picking strawberries humans will start becoming widespread.
Self-driving cars will become cheap enough and practical enough for average income people to buy, and their driving behavior will become as efficient as an average human. Over the course of this decade, there will be rapid adoption of self-driving cars in rich countries. Freed from driving, people will switch to doing things like watching movies/TV and eating. Car interiors will change accordingly. Road fatalities, and the concomitant demands for traffic police, paramedics, E.R. doctors, car mechanics, and lawyers will sharply decrease. The car insurance industry will shrivel, forcing consolidation. (Humans in those occupations will also face increasing levels of direct job competition from machines over the course of the decade.)
Private owners of autonomous cars will start renting them out while not in use as taxis and package delivery vehicles. Your personal, autonomous car will drive you to work, then spend eight hours making money for you doing side jobs, and will be waiting for you outside your building at the end of the day.
The “big box” business model will start taking over the transportation and car repair industry thanks to the rise of electric, self-driving vehicles and autonomous taxis in place of personal car ownership. The multitudes of small, scattered car repair shops will be replaced by large, centralized car repair facilities that themselves resemble factory assembly lines. Self-driving vehicles will drive to them to have their problems diagnosed and fixed, sparing their human owners from having to waste their time sitting in waiting rooms.
The same kinds of facilities will make inroads into the junk yard industry, as they would have all the right tooling to cheaply and rapidly disassemble old vehicles, test the parts for functionality, and shunt them to disposal or individual resale. (The days of hunting through junkyards by yourself for a car part you need will eventually end–it will all be on eBay. )
Car ownership won’t die out because it will still be a status symbol, and having a car ready in your driveway will always be more convenient than having to wait even just two minutes for an Uber cab to arrive at the curb. People are lazy.
The ad hoc car rental model exemplified by autonomous Uber cabs and private people renting out their autonomous cars when not in use faces a challenge since daily demand for cars peaks during morning rush hour and afternoon rush hour. In other words, everyone needs a car at the same time each day, so the ratio of cars : people can’t deviate much from, say, 1:2. Of course, if more people telecommuted (almost certain in the future thanks to better VR, faster broadband, and tech-savvy Millennials reaching middle age and taking over the workplace), and if flexible schedules became more widespread (also likely, but within certain limits since most offices can’t function efficiently unless they have “all hands on deck” for at least a few hours each day), the ratio could go even lower. However, there’s still a bottom limit to how few cars a country will need to provide adequate daily transportation for its people.
Private delivery services will get cheaper and faster thanks to autonomous vehicles.
Automation will start having a major impact on the global economy. Machines will compensate for the shrinkage of the working-age human population in the developed world. Countries with “graying” populations like Japan and Germany will experience a new wave of economic growth. Demand for immigrant laborers will decrease across the world because of machines.
There will be a worldwide increase in the structural unemployment rate thanks to better and cheaper narrow AIs and robots. A plausible scenario would be for the U.S. unemployment rate to be 10%–which was last the case at the nadir of the Great Recession–but for every other economic indicator to be strong. The clear message would be that human labor is becoming decoupled from the economy.
Combining all the best AI and robotics technologies, it will be possible to create general-purpose androids that could function better in the real world (e.g. – perform in the workplace, learn new things, interact with humans, navigate public spaces, manage personal affairs) than the bottom 10% of humans (e.g. – elderly people, the disabled, criminals, the mentally ill, people with poor language abilities or low IQs), and in some narrow domains, the androids will be superhuman (e.g. – physical strength, memory, math abilities). Note that businesses will still find it better to employ task-specific, non-human-looking robots instead of general purpose androids.
By the end of this decade, only poor people, lazy people, and conspiracy theorists (like anti-vaxxers) won’t have their genomes sequenced. It will be trivially cheap, and in fact free for many people (some socialized health care systems will fully subsidize it), and enough will be known about the human genome to make it worthwhile to have the information.
Computers will be able to accurately deduce a human’s outward appearance based on only a DNA sample. This will aid police detectives, and will have other interesting uses, such as allowing parents to see what their unborn children will look like as adults, or allowing anyone to see what they’d look like if they were of the opposite sex (one sex chromosome replaced).
Trivially cheap gene sequencing and vastly improved knowledge of the human genome will give rise to a “human genome black market,” in which people secretly obtain DNA samples from others, sequence them, and use the data for their own ends. For example, a politician could be blackmailed by an enemy who threatened to publish a list of his genetic defects or the identities of his illegitimate children. Stalkers (of celebrities and ordinary people) would also be interested in obtaining the genetic information of the people they were obsessed with. It is practically impossible to prevent the release of one’s DNA since every discarded cup, bottle, or utensil has a sample.
Markets will become brutally competitive and efficient thanks to AIs. Companies will sharply grasp consumer demand through real-time surveillance, and consumers will be alerted to bargains by their personal AIs and devices (e.g. – your AR glasses will visually highlight good deals as you walk through the aisles of a store). Your personal assistant AIs and robots will look out for your self-interest by countering the efforts of other AIs to sway your spending habits in ways that benefit companies and not you.
“Digital immortality” will become possible for average people. Personal assistant AIs, robot servants, and other monitoring devices will be able, through observation alone, to create highly accurate personality profiles of individual humans, and to anticipate their behavior with high fidelity. Voices, mannerisms and other biometrics will be digitally reproducible without any hint of error. Digital simulacra of individual humans will be further refined by having them take voluntary personality tests, and by uploading their genomes, brain scans and other body scans. Even if all of the genetic and biological data couldn’t be made sense of at the moment it was uploaded to an individual’s digital profile, there will be value in saving it since it might be decipherable in the future. (Note that “digital immortality” is not the same as “mind uploading.”)
Life expectancy will have increased by a few years thanks to pills and therapies that slightly extend human lifespan. Like, you take a $20 pill each day starting at age 20 and you end up dying at age 87 instead of age 84.
Global oil consumption will peak as people continue switching to other power sources.
Earliest possible date for the first manned Mars mission.
Movie subtitles and the very notion of there being “foreign language films” will become obsolete. Computers will be able to perfectly translate any human language into another, to create perfect digital imitations of any human voice, and to automatically apply CGI so that the mouth movements of people in video footage matches the translated words they’re speaking. The machines will also be able to reproduce detailed aspects of an actor’s speech, such as cadence, rhythm, tone and timbre, emotion, and accent, and to convey them accurately in another language.
Computers will also be able to automatically enhance and upscale old films by accurately colorizing them, removing defects like scratches, and sharpening or focusing footage (one technique will involve interpolating high-res still photos of long-dead actors onto the faces of those same actors in low-res moving footage). Computer enhancement will be so good that we’ll be able to watch films from the early 20th century with near-perfect image and audio clarity.
CGI will get so refined than moviegoers with 20/20 vision won’t be able to see the difference between footage of unaltered human actors and footage of 100% CGI actors.
Lifelike CGI and “performance capture” will enable “digital resurrections” of dead actors. Computers will be able to scan through every scrap of footage with, say, John Wayne in it, and to produce a perfect CGI simulacrum of him that even speaks with his natural voice, and it will be seamlessly inserted into future movies. Elderly actors might also license movie studios to create and use digital simulacra of their younger selves in new movies. The results will be very fascinating, but might also worsen Hollywood’s problem with making formulaic content.
China’s military will get strong enough to defeat U.S. forces in the western Pacific. This means that, in a conventional war for control of the Spratly Islands and/or Taiwan, China would have >50% odds of winning. This shift in the local balance of power does not mean China will start a conflict.
The quality and sophistication of China’s best military technology will surpass Russia’s best technology in all or almost all categories. However, it will still lag the U.S.
2040s
The world and peoples’ outlooks and priorities will be very different than they were in 2019. Cheap renewable energy will have become widespread and totally negated any worries about an “energy crisis” ever happening, except in exotic, hypothetical scenarios about the distant future. There will be little need for immigration thanks to machine labor and cross-border telecommuting (VR, telepresence, and remote-controlled robots will be so advanced that even blue-collar jobs involving manual labor will be outsourced to workers living across borders). Moreover, there will be a strong sense in most Western countries that they’re already “diverse enough,” and that there are no further cultural benefits to letting in more foreigners since large communities of most foreign ethnic groups will already exist within their borders. There will be more need than ever for strong social safety nets and entitlement programs thanks to technological unemployment. AI will be a central political and social issue. It won’t be the borderline sci-fi, fringe issue it was in 2019.
Automation, mass unemployment, wealth inequalities between the owners of capital and everyone else, and differential access to expensive human augmentation technologies (like genetic engineering) will produce overwhelming political pressure for some kind of wealth redistribution and social safety net expansion. Countries that have diligently made small, additive reforms as necessary over the preceding decades will be untroubled. However, countries that failed to adapt their political and economic systems will face upheaval.
2045 will pass without the Technological Singularity happening. Ray Kurzweil will either celebrate his 97th birthday in a wheelchair, or as a popsicle frozen at the Alcor Foundation.
Supercomputers that match or surpass upper-level estimates of the human brain’s computational capabilities will cost a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars apiece, meaning tech companies and universities will be able to afford large numbers of them for AI R&D projects, accelerating progress in the field. Hardware will no longer be the limiting factor to building AGI. If it hasn’t been built yet, it will be due to failure to figure out how to arrange the hardware in the right way to support intelligent thought, and/or to a failure to develop the necessary software.
With robots running the economy, it will be common for businesses to operate 24/7: restaurants will never close, online orders made at 3:00 am will be packed in boxes by 3:10 am, and autonomous delivery trucks will only stop to refuel, exchange cargo, or get preventative maintenance.
Advanced energy technology, robot servants, 3D printers, telepresence, and other technologies will allow people to live largely “off-grid” if they choose, while still enjoying a level of comfort that 2019 people would envy.
Recycling will become much more efficient and practical thanks to house robots properly cleaning, sorting, and crushing/compacting waste before disposing of it. Automated sorting machines at recycling centers will also be much better than they are today. Today, recycling programs are hobbled because even well-meaning humans struggle to remember which of their trash items are recyclable and which aren’t since the acceptable items vary from one municipality to the next, and as a result, recycling centers get large amounts of unusable material, which they must filter out at great cost. House robots would remember it perfectly.
Thanks to this diligence, house robots will also increase backyard composting, easing the burden on municipal trash services.
It will be common for cities, towns and states to heavily restrict or ban human-driven vehicles within their boundaries. A sea change in thinking will happen as autonomous cars become accepted as “the norm,” and human-driven cars start being thought of as unusual and dangerous.
Over 90% of new car sales in developed countries will be for electric vehicles. Just as the invention of the automobile transformed horses into status goods used for leisure, the rise of electric vehicles will transform internal combustion vehicles into a niche market for richer people.
A global “family tree” showing how all humans are related will be built using written genealogical records and genomic data from the billions of people who have had their DNA sequenced. It will become impossible to hide illegitimate children, and it will also become possible for people to find “genetic doppelgangers”–other people they have no familial relationship to, but with whom, by some coincidence, they share a very large number of genes.
Improved knowledge of human genetics and its relevance to personality traits and interests will strengthen AI’s ability to match humans with friends, lovers, and careers. Rising technological unemployment will create a need for machines to match human workers with the remaining jobs in as efficient a manner as possible.
People with distinctive personalities (particularly vibrant, funny, or sexy) will routinely sell “digital copies” of themselves for other people to download and use as AI personal assistants. This will be analogous to today’s ability to select different voices for personal GPS devices. Additionally, users will be able to tweak “base versions” of downloaded personalities to suit their unique preferences.
The digital personalities of fictitious people, like movie and cartoon characters, and of long-dead people, will also be downloadable.
Realistic robot sex bots that can move and talk will exist. They won’t perfectly mimic humans, but will be “good enough” for most users. Using them will be considered weird and “for losers” at first, but in coming decades it will go mainstream, following the same pattern as Internet dating. [If we think of sex as a type of task, and if we agree that machines will someday be able to do all tasks better than humans, then it follows that robots will be better than humans at sex.]
Augmented reality contact lenses will give people superhuman vision.
2050s
This is the earliest possible time that AGI/SAI will be invented. It will not be able to instantly change everything in the world or to initiate a Singularity, but it will rapidly grow in intelligence, wealth, and power. It will probably be preceded by successful computer simulations of the brains of progressively more complex model organisms, such as flatworms, fruit flies, and lab rats.
Humans will be heavily dependent upon their machines for almost everything (e.g. – friendship, planning the day, random questions to be answered, career advice, legal counseling, medical checkups, driving cars), and the dependency will be so ingrained that humans will reflexively assume that “The Machines are always right.” Consciously and unconsciously, people will yield more and more of their decision-making and opinion-forming to machines, and find that they and the world writ large are better off for it. This will be akin to having an angel on your shoulder watching your surroundings and watching you, and giving you constructive advice all the time.
In the developed world, less than 50% of people between age 22 and 65 will have gainful full-time jobs. However, if unprofitable full-time jobs that only persist thanks to government subsidies (such as someone running a small coffee shop and paying the bills with their monthly UBI check) and full-time volunteer “jobs” (such as picking up trash in the neighborhood) are counted, most people in that age cohort will be “doing stuff” on a full-time basis.
The doomsaying about Global Warming will start to quiet down as the world’s transition to clean energy hits full stride and predictions about catastrophes from people like Al Gore fail to pan out by their deadlines. Sadly, people will just switch to worrying about and arguing about some new set of doomsday prophecies about something else.
By almost all measures, standards of living will be better in 2050 than today. People will commonly have all types of wonderful consumer devices and appliances that we can’t even fathom. However, some narrow aspects of daily life are likely to worsen, such as overcrowding and further erosion of the human character. Just as people today have short memories and take too many things for granted, so shall people in the 2050s fail to appreciate how much the standard of living has risen since today, and they will ignore all the steady triumphs humanity has made over its problems, and by default, people will still believe the world is constantly on the verge of collapsing and that things are always getting worse.
Cheap desalination will provide humanity with unlimited amounts of drinking water and end the prospect of “water wars.”
Mass surveillance and ubiquitous technology will have minimized violent crime and property crime in developed countries: It will be almost impossible to commit such crimes without a surveillance camera or some other type of sensor detecting the act, or without some device recording the criminal’s presence in the area at the time of the act. House robots will contribute by effectively standing guard over your property at night while you sleep.
It will be common for people to have health monitoring devices on and inside of their bodies that continuously track things like their heart rate, blood pressure, respiration rate, and gene expression. If a person has a health emergency or appears likely to have one, his or her devices will send out a distress signal alerting EMS and nearby random citizens. If you walked up to such a person while wearing AR glasses, you would see their vital statistics and would receive instructions on how to assist them (i.e. – How to do CPR). Robots will also be able to render medical aid.
Cities and their suburbs across the world will have experienced massive growth since 2019. Telepresence, relatively easy off-grid living, and technological unemployment will not, on balance, have driven more people out of metro areas than have migrated into them. Farming areas full of flat, boring land will have been depopulated, and many farms will be 100% automated. The people who choose to leave the metro areas for the “wilderness” will concentrate in rural areas (including national parks) where the climate is good, the natural scenery is nice, and there are opportunities for outdoor recreation. Real estate prices will, in inflation-adjusted terms, be much higher in most metro areas and places with natural beauty than they were in 2020 because the “supply” of those prime locations is almost fixed, whereas the demand for them is elastic and will rise thanks to population growth, rising incomes, and the aforementioned technology advancements.
Therapeutic cloning and stem cell therapies will become useful and will effectively extend human lifespan. For example, a 70-year-old with a failing heart will be able to have a new one grown in a lab using his own DNA, and then implanted into his chest to replace the failing original organ. The new heart will be equivalent to what he had when at age 18 years, so it will last another 52 years before it too fails. In a sense, this will represent age reversal to one part of his body. In a sense, this will represent age reversal to one part of his body.
As a result of the above technologies, it will be much rarer for people in rich countries to die waiting for organ transplants than it is now, in 2022.
The first healthy clone of an adult human will be born.
Many factories, farms, and supply chains will be 100% automated, and it will be common for goods to not be touched by a human being’s hands until they reach their buyers. Robots will deliver Amazon packages to your doorstep and even carry them into your house. Items ordered off the internet will appear inside your house a few hours later, as if by magic.
Smaller versions of the robots used on automated farms will be available at low cost to average people, letting them effortlessly create backyard gardens. This will boost global food production and let people have greater control over where their food comes from and what it contains.
The last of America’s Cold War-era weapon platforms (e.g. – the B-52 bomber, F-15 fighter, M1 Abrams tank, Nimitz aircraft carrier) will finally be retired from service. There will be instances where four generations of people from the same military family served on the same type of plane or ship.
Cheap guided bullets, which can make midair course changes and be fired out of conventional man-portable rifles, will become common in advanced armies.
Personal “cloaking devices” made of clothes studded with pinhole cameras and thin, flexible sheets of LEDs, colored e-ink, or some metamaterial with similar abilities will be commercially available. The cameras will monitor the appearance of the person’s surroundings and tell the display pixels to change their colors to match.
The “cloaking” outfits will also have benign applications related to fashion and everyday utility. People wearing them could use them to display morphing patterns and colors of their choice. It would even be possible to become a “walking TV.” The pixels could also be made to glow bright white, allowing the wearer to turn any part of his body into a flashlight. Ski masks made of the same material would let wearers change their facial features, fooling most face recognition cameras and certainly fooling the unaided eyes of humans, at least at a distance.
Powered exoskeletons will become practical for a wide range of applications, mainly due to improvements in batteries. For example, a disabled person could use a lightweight exoskeleton with a battery the size of a purse to walk around for a whole day on a single charge, and a soldier in a heavy-duty exoskeleton with a large backpack battery could do a day of marching on a single charge. (Note: Even though it will be technologically possible to equip infantrymen with combat exoskeletons, armies might reject the idea due to other impracticalities.)
There will be no technological or financial barrier to building powered combat exoskeletons that have cloaking devices.
The richest person alive will achieve a $1 trillion net worth.
It will be technologically and financially feasible for small aircraft to produce zero net carbon emissions. The aircraft might use conventional engines powered by carbon-neutral synthetic fossil fuels that cost no more than normal fossil fuels, or they might have electric engines and very energy-dense batteries or fuel cells.
Cheap guided bullets, capable of midair course changes to hit targets and of being fired out of conventional rifles, will become common in advanced armies. Practical, affordable rifles capable of limited self-aiming will also exist (similar to the “Smartgun” from the movie Aliens). Thanks to these technologies, an ordinary rifleman of the 2050s will be like the snipers of today.
2060s
Machines will be better at satisfyingly matching humans with fields of study, jobs, friends, romantic partners, hobbies, and daily activities than most humans can do for themselves. Machines themselves will make better friends, confidants, advisers, and even lovers than humans. Additionally, machines will be smarter and more skilled at humans in most areas of knowledge and types of work. A cultural sea change will happen, in which most humans come to trust, rely upon, defend, and love machines.
House robots and human-sized worker robots will be as strong, agile, and dexterous as most humans, and their batteries will be energy-dense enough to power them for most of the day. A typical American family might have multiple robot servants that physically follow around the humans each day to help with tasks. The family members will also be continuously monitored and “followed” by A.I.s embedded in their portable personal computing devices and possibly in their bodies.
Cheap home delivery of groceries, robot chefs, and a vast trove of free online recipes will enable people in average households to eat restaurant-quality meals at home every day, at low cost. Predictive algorithms that can appropriately choose new meals for humans based on their known taste preferences and other factors will determine the menu, and many people will face a culinary “satisfaction paradox.”
Average people will have access to high-quality meals that only rich people can have today at fancy restaurants.
Machines will understand humans individually and at the species level better than humans understand themselves. They will have highly accurate personality models of most humans along with a comprehensive grasp of human sociology, human decision-making, human psychology, human cognitive biases, and human nature, and will pool the information to accurately predict human behavior. A nascent version of a 1:1 computer simulation of the Earth–with the human population modeled in great detail–will be created.
Machines will be better teachers than most trained humans. The former will have much sharper grasps of their pupils’ individual strengths, weaknesses, interests, and learning styles, and will be able to create and grade tests in a much fairer and less biased manner than humans. Every person will have his own tutor.
There will be a small, permanent human presence on the Moon.
If a manned Mars mission hasn’t happened yet, then there will be intense pressure to do so by the centennial of the first Moon landing (1969).
The worldwide number of supercentenarians–people who are at least 110 years old–will be sharply higher than it was in 2019: Their population size could be 10 times bigger or more.
Advances in a variety of technologies will make it possible to cryonically freeze humans in a manner that doesn’t pulverize their tissue. However, the technology needed to safely thaw them out won’t be invented for decades.
China will effectively close the technological, military, and standard of living gaps with other developed countries. Aside from the unpleasantness of being a more crowded place, life in China won’t be worse overall than life in Japan or the average European country. Importantly, China’s pollution levels will be much lower than they are today thanks to a variety of factors.
Small drones (mostly aerial) will have revolutionized warfare, terrorism, assassinations, and crime and will be mature technologies. An average person will be able to get a drone of some kind that can follow his orders to find and kill other people or to destroy things.
Countermeasures against those small drones will also have evolved, and might include defensive drones and mass surveillance networks to detect drone attacks early on. The networks would warn people via their body-worn devices of incoming drone attacks or of sightings of potentially hostile drones. The body-worn devices, such as smartphones and AR glasses, might even have their own abilities to automatically detect drones by sight and sound and to alert their wearers.
2070s
100 years after the U.S. “declared war” on cancer, there still will not be a “cure” for most types of cancer, but vaccination, early detection, treatment, and management of cancer will be vastly better, and in countries with modern healthcare systems, most cancer diagnoses will not reduce a person’s life expectancy. Consider that diabetes and AIDS were once considered “death sentences” that would invariably kill people within a few years of diagnosis, until medicines were developed that transformed them into treatable, chronic health conditions.
Hospital-acquired infections will be far less of a problem than they are in 2020 thanks to better sterilization practices, mostly made possible by robots.
It will be technologically and financially feasible for large commercial aircraft to produce zero net carbon emissions. The aircraft might use conventional engines powered by synthetic fossil fuels, or they might have electric engines and very energy-dense batteries or fuel cells.
Digital or robotic companions that seem (or actually are) intelligent, funny, and loving will be easier for humans to associate with than other humans.
Technology will enable the creation of absolute surveillance states, where all human behavior is either constantly monitored or is inferred with high accuracy based on available information. Even a person’s innermost thoughts will be knowable thanks to technologies that monitor him or her for the slightest things like microexpressions, twitches, changes in voice tone, and eye gazes. When combined with other data regarding how the person spends their time and money, it will be possible to read their minds. The Thought Police will be a reality in some countries.
Thanks to advanced lab synthesis of foods, new spices, hybrid fruits and vegetables, and meats with entirely new taste profiles will be brought into existence. Swaths of the “landscape of all possible flavors” that are currently unexplored will be.
Many heavily automated farms (including indoor farms and gardens on suburban plots of land) will produce food that is noticeably tastier and measurably more nutritious that most of today’s food because the advanced farms won’t need to use pesticides or to favor crop varieties that are hardy enough to endure transport over long supply chains. At low cost and for little effort, communities and individuals with small amounts of land will be able to meet their own food needs locally. People who value “natural” lifestyles might, ironically, find it most beneficial to rely on robots to make their food for them.
2100
Humans probably won’t be the dominant intelligent life forms on Earth.
Latest possible time that AGI/SAI will be invented. By this point, computer hardware will so powerful that we could do 1:1 digital simulations of human brains. If our AI still falls far short of human-like general intelligence and creativity, then it might be that only organic substrates have the necessary properties to support them.
The worst case scenario is that AGI/Strong AI will have not been invented yet, but thousands of different types of highly efficient, task-specific Narrow AIs will have (often coupled to robot bodies), and they will fill almost every labor niche better than human workers ever could (“Death by a Thousand Cuts” job automation scenario). Humans grow up in a world where no one has to work, and the notion of drudge work, suffering through a daily commute, and involuntarily waking up at 6:00 am five days a week is unfathomable. Every human will have machines that constantly monitor them or follow them around, and meet practically all their needs.
Telepresence technology will also be very advanced, allowing humans to do nearly any task remotely, from any other place in the world, in safety and comfort. This will include cognitive tasks and hands-on tasks. If any humans still have jobs, they’ll be able to work from anywhere.
Sophisticated narrow AI will be integrated into the telepresence technology, providing human workers with real-time assistance with tasks. An illustrative scenario would have a human in Nigeria using a VR rig to remotely control a robot that is fixing an air conditioner in England. Software programs monitoring the live video feed would recognize all of the objects in the robot’s field of view and would also understand what the human worker was trying to accomplish, and the programs would help him by visually highlighting tools or air conditioner components, or by giving him verbal advice on what to do.
The use of robotic surrogate bodies for remote work will also erase any employment gaps caused by physical strength and endurance differences between the sexes and between the elderly and the young. Small men, old people, and women of average stature will be just as good at performing hard manual labor as big men. The easing of physical strain associated with work will also allow people to work past today’s retirement age. However, most serious physical work will be best left to autonomous machines.
The world could in many ways resemble Ray Kurzweil’s predicted Post-Singularity world. However, the improvements and changes will have accrued thanks to decades of AGI/Strong AI steady effort. Everything will not instantly change on DD/MM/2045 as Kurzweil suggests it will.
Hundreds of millions, and possibly billions, of “digitally immortal avatars” of dead humans will exist, and you will be able to interact with them through a variety of means (in FIVR, through devices like earpieces and TV screens, in the real world if the avatar takes over an android body resembling the human it was based on).
A weak sort of immortality will be available thanks to self-cloning, immortal digital avatars, and perhaps mind uploading. You could clone yourself and instruct your digital avatar–which would be a machine programmed with your personality and memories–to raise the clone and ensure it developed to resemble you. Your digital avatar might have an android body or could exist in a disembodied state.
It will be possible to make clones of humans using only their digital format genomic data. In other words, if you had a .txt file containing a person’s full genetic code, you could use that by itself to make a living, breathing clone. Having samples of their cells would not be necessary.
The “DNA black market” that arose in the 2030s will pose an even bigger threat since it will be now possible to use DNA samples alone or their corresponding .txt files to clone a person or to produce a sperm or egg cell and, in turn, a child. Potential abuses include random people cloning or having the children of celebrities they are obsessed with, or cloning billionaires in the hopes of milking the clones for money. Important people who might be targets of such thefts will go to pains to prevent their DNA from being known. Since dead people have no rights, third parties might be able to get away with cloning or making gametes of the deceased.
Life expectancy escape velocity and perhaps medical immortality will be achieved. It will come not from magical, all-purpose nanomachines that fix all your body’s cells and DNA, but from a combination of technologies, including therapeutic cloning of human organs, cybernetic replacements for organs and limbs, and stem cell therapies that regenerate ageing tissues and organs inside the patient’s body. The treatments will be affordable in large part thanks to robot doctors and surgeons who work almost for free, and to medical patents expiring.
All other aspects of medicine and healthcare will have radically advanced. There will be vaccines and cures for almost all contagious diseases. We will be masters of human genetic engineering and know exactly how to produce people that today represent the top 1% of the human race (holistically combining IQ, genetic health, physical attractiveness, and likable/prosocial personality traits). However, the value of even a genius-IQ human will be questionable since intelligent machines will be so much smarter.
Augmentative cybernetics (including direct brain-to-computer links) will exist and be in common use.
While the traditional, “pure” races of humans will all still exist, notions of “race” and racial identity will be scrambled by the large numbers of mixed-race people who will be alive, and by widespread genetic engineering that will give people combinations of physical traits that were almost unachievable through normal human breeding. Examples might include black people with naturally blue eyes, or East Asians with naturally blonde hair. (Voluntary genetic engineering will also ensure that redheads don’t ever die out.) Some people will even have totally new genes, either synthesized in labs or borrowed from animals, that give them physical traits not found in any preexisting human race, like red eyes or purple hair.
Full-immersion virtual reality (FIVR) will exist wherein AI game masters constantly tailor environments, NPCs and events to suit each player’s needs and to keep them entertained. Every human will have his own virtual game universe where he’s #1. With no jobs in the real world to occupy them, it’s quite possible that a large fraction of the human race will willingly choose to live in FIVR. (Related to the satisfaction paradox) Elements of these virtual environments could be pornographic and sexual, allowing people to gratify any type of sexual fetish or urge with computer-generated scenarios and partners.
More generally, AIs and humans whose creativity is turbocharged by machines will create enjoyable, consumable content (e.g. – films, TV shows, songs, artwork, jokes, new types of meals) faster than non-augmented humans can consume it. As a simple example of what this will be like, assume you have 15 hours of free time per day, that you love spending it listening to music, and each day, your favorite bands produce 16 hours worth of new songs that you really like.
The vast majority of unaugmented human beings will no longer be assets that can invent things and do useful work: they will be liabilities that do (almost) everything worse than intelligent machines and augmented humans. Ergo, the size of a nation’s human population will subtract from its economic and military power, and radical shifts in geopolitics are possible. Geographically large but sparsely populated countries like Russia, Australia and Canada might become very strong.
The transition to green energy sources will be complete, and humans will no longer be net emitters of greenhouse gases. The means will exist to start reducing global temperatures to restore the Earth to its pre-industrial state, but people will resist because they will have gotten used to the warmer climate. People living in Canada and Russia won’t want their countries to get cold again.
Synthetic meat will taste no different from animal meat, and will be at least as cheap to make. The raising and/or killing of animals for food will be be illegal in many countries, and trends will clearly show the practice heading for worldwide ban.
Meats that are expensive and/or rare today, like Kobe beef steaks, snakes, bats, or even human flesh, will be cheap and widely available thanks to meat synthesis technology.
Cheap, synthetic chicken eggs will also exist and will taste no different from natural eggs.
The means to radical alter human bodies, alter memories, and alter brain structures will be available. The fundamental bases of human existence and human social dynamics will change unpredictably once differences in appearance/attractiveness, intelligence, and personality traits can be eliminated at will. Individuals won’t be defined by fixed attributes anymore.
Brain implants will make “telepathy” possible between humans, machines and animals. Computers, sensors and displays will be embedded everywhere in the built environment and in nature, allowing humans with brain implants to interface with and control things around them through thought alone.
Brain implants and brain surgeries will also be used to enhance IQ, change personality traits, and strengthen many types of skills.
Using brain-computer interfaces, people will be able to make sophisticated songs and pieces of artwork with their thoughts alone.
Technologically augmented humans and androids will have many abilities and qualities that ancient people considered “Godlike,” such as medical immortality, the ability to control objects by thought, telepathy, perfect memories, and superhuman senses.
Flying cars designed to carry humans could be common, but they will be flown by machines, not humans. Ground vehicles will retain many important advantages (fuel efficiency, cargo capacity, safety, noise level, and more) and won’t become obsolete. Instead of flying cars, it’s more likely that there will be millions of small, autonomous helicopters and VTOL aircraft that will cheaply ferry people through dense, national networks of helipads and airstrips. Autonomous land vehicles would take take passengers to and from the landing sites. (https://www.militantfuturist.com/why-flying-cars-never-took-off-and-probably-never-will/)
The notion of vehicles (e.g. – cars, planes, and boats) polluting the air will be an alien concept.
Advanced nanomachines could exist.
Vastly improved materials and routine use of very advanced computer design simulations (including simulations done in quantum computers) will mean that manufactured objects of all types will be optimally engineered in every respect, and might seem to have “magical” properties. For example, a car will be made of hundreds of different types of alloys, plastics, and glass, each optimized for a different part of the vehicle, and car recalls will never happen since the vehicles will undergo vast amounts of simulated testing in every conceivable driving condition in 1:1 virtual simulations of the real world.
Design optimization and the rise of AGI consumption will virtually eliminate planned obsolescence. Products that were deliberately engineered to fail after needlessly short periods, and “new” product lines that were no better than what they replaced, but had non-interchangeable part sizes would be exposed for what they were, and AGI consumers would refuse to buy them. Production will become much more efficient and far fewer things will be thrown out.
Relatively cheap interplanetary travel (probably just to Mars and to space stations and moons that are about as far as Mars) will exist.
Androids that are outwardly indistinguishable from humans will exist, and humans will hold no advantages over them (e.g. – physical dexterity, fine motor control, appropriateness of facial expressions, capacity for creative thought). Some androids will also be indistinguishable to the touch, meaning they will seem to be made of supple flesh and will be the same temperature as human bodies. However, their body parts will not be organic.
Sex robots will be indistinguishable from humans.
Android assassins like the T-800s from the Terminator films will exist. They will look identical to humans, will be able to blend into human populations, track down targets, and kill or abduct them. As in the films, these androids will be stronger, more durable, and more skilled with weapons than we are.
Robots that are outwardly identical to sci-fi and fantasy characters and extinct animals, like grey aliens, elves, fairies, giant house cats, and dinosaurs, will exist and will occasionally be seen in public. Some weird person will want their robot butler to look like bigfoot, and at least one hobbyist will build a life-sized robotic dragon that can fly and spit fire. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/503967/could-game-throness-dragons-really-fly-we-asked-some-experts
Humans interested in extreme body modifications will be able to surgically alter themselves to look like many of those creatures.
Machines that are outwardly indistinguishable from animals will also exist, and they will have surveillance and military applications.
Drones, miniaturized smart weapons, and AIs will dominate warfare, from the top level of national strategy down to the simplest act of combat. The world’s strongest military could, with conventional weapons alone, destroy most of the world’s human population in a short period of time.
The construction and daily operation of prisons will have been fully automated, lowering the monetary costs of incarceration. As such, state prosecutors and judges will no longer feel pressure to let accused criminals have plea deals or to give them shorter prison sentences to ease the burdens of prison overcrowding and high overhead costs.
The term “millionaire” will fall out of use in the U.S. and other Western countries since inflation will have rendered $1 million USD only as valuable as $90,000 USD was in 2019 (assuming a constant inflation rate of 3.0%).
There will still be major wealth and income inequality across the human race. However, wealth redistribution, better government services, advances in industrial productivity, and better technologies will ensure that even people in the bottom 1% have all their basic and intermediate life needs meet. In many ways, the poor people of 2100 will have better lives than the rich people of 2020.
2101 – 2200 AD
Humans will definitely stop being the dominant intelligent life forms on Earth.
Many “humans” will be heavily augmented through genetic engineering, other forms of bioengineering, and cybernetics. People who outwardly look like the normal humans of today might actually have extensive internal modifications that give them superhuman abilities. Non-augmented, entirely “natural” humans like people in 2019 will be looked down upon in the same way you might today look at a very low IQ person with sensory impairments. Being forced by your biology to incapacitate yourself for 1/3 of each day to sleep will be tantamount to having a medical disability.
Due to a reduced or nonexistent need for sleep among intelligent machines and augmented humans and to the increased interconnectedness of the planet, global time zones will become much less relevant. It will be common for machines, humans, businesses, and groups to use the same clock–probably Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)–and for activity to proceed on a 24/7 basis, with little regard of Earth’s day/night cycle.
Physical disabilities and defects of appearance that cause untold anguish to people in 2019 will be easily and cheaply fixable. For example, male-pattern baldness and obesity will be completely ameliorated with minor medical interventions like pills or outpatient surgery. Missing or deformed limbs will be easily replaced, all types of plastic surgery (including sex reassignment) will be vastly better and cheaper than today, and spinal cord damage will be totally repairable. The global “obesity epidemic” will disappear. Transsexual people will be able to seamlessly alter their bodies to conform with their preferred genders, or to alter their brains so their gender identities conform with the bodies they were born with.
All sleep disorders will be curable thanks to cybernetics that can use electrical pulses to quickly initiate sleep states in human brains. The same kinds of technologies will also reduce or eliminate the need for humans to sleep, and for people to control their dreams.
Brain-computer interfaces will let people control, pre-program, and, to a limited extent, record their dreams.
Through electrical signaling and chemical releases, the brain implants will be able to induce any type of mental or emotional state. This will include altered states of consciousness, like lucid dreaming, meditation, or intoxication. A person might have to go through a “calibration period” where the implants would monitor and record their brain activity while they experienced different things, and then, the user would experiment with the implant to see how well it could induce the recorded brain states. Through a process of guided trial and error, they would become masters of their own minds. This ability would make human life richer and more productive, as people could have valuable experiences during portions of the day when they would otherwise be bored or “switched off,” and to even do useful problem-solving tasks in their sleep.
Direct brain-to-computer interfaces and other advanced technologies will let humans enter virtual reality worlds that seem no different from the real world (the “Matrix scenario”), and to remotely control robot bodies located anywhere in the real world, with fully lifelike levels of sensory richness and fusion. Able to control perfect robot bodies of any design in the real world, and to take on any form in virtual worlds, some humans will have no use for real, fixed-form bodies, and will dispense with them, instead existing as “brains in jars.”
Some “humans” will lack fixed, corporeal forms; they will be able to extensively modify their original bodies or to switch bodies at will. A person could take the form of something nonhuman, like a terrestrial squid.
Almost all of today’s diseases will be cured.
The means to halt and reverse human aging will be created. The human population will come to be dominated by people who are eternally young and beautiful.
Humans and machines will be immortal. Intelligent beings will find it terrifying and tragic to contemplate what it was like for humans in the past, who lived their lives knowing they were doomed to deteriorate and die.
Extreme longevity, better reproductive technologies that eliminate the need for a human partner to have children, and robots that do domestic work and provide companionship (including sex) will weaken the institution of marriage more than any time in human history. An indefinite lifetime of monogamy will be impossible for most people to commit to.
At reasonable cost, it will be possible for women to create healthy, genetically related children at any point in their lives, and without using the 2019-era, pre-menopausal egg freezing technique. For example, a 90-year-old, menopausal woman will be able to use reproductive technologies to make a baby that shares 50% of her DNA.
Opposite-sex human clones will exist. Such a clone would share 22-1/2 of their 23 chromosome pairs with their “original.” Only the final sex chromosome, which would be either a “Y” or a second “X”, would differ.
Immortality, the automation of work, and widespread material abundance will completely transform lifestyles. With eternity to look forward to, people won’t feel pressured to get as rich as possible as quickly as possible. As stated, marriage will no longer be viewed as a lifetime commitment, and serial monogamy will probably become the norm. Relationships between parents and offspring will change as longevity erases the disparities in generational outlook and maturity that traditionally characterize parent-child interpersonal dynamics (e.g. – 300-year-old dad doesn’t know any better than his 270-year-old son). The “factory model” of public education–defined by conformity, rote memorization, frequent intelligence testing, and curricula structured to serve the needs of the job market–will disappear. The process of education will be custom-tailored to each person in terms of content, pacing, and style of instruction. Students will be much freer to explore subjects that interest them and to pursue those that best match their talents and interests.
Radically extended human lifespans mean it will become much more common to have great-grandparents around. A cure for aging will also lead to families where members separated in age by many decades look the same age and have the same health. Additionally, older family members won’t be burdensome since they will be healthy.
The human population might start growing again thanks to medical immortality, to advanced fertility technologies including artificial wombs and cloning, and to robots that help raise children, reducing the workload for human parents. The human race won’t die out thanks to persistently low birthrates.
Thanks to radical genetic engineering, there will be “human-looking,” biological people among us that don’t belong to our species, Homo sapiens. Examples could include engineered people who have 48 chromosomes instead of 46, people whose genomes have been shortened thanks to the deletion of junk DNA, or people who look outwardly human but who have radically different genes within their 46 chromosomes, so they have different numbers or arrangements of internal organs (like two hearts), or even new types of internal organs, such as bird-like lung. Such people wouldn’t be able to naturally breed with Homo sapiens, and would belong to new hominid species.
Extinct species for which we have DNA samples (ex – from passenger pigeons on display in a museum) will “resurrected” using genetic technology.
The global mass surveillance network will encompass unpopulated areas and wilderness areas, protecting animals from poaching. Extinctions of large, wild animals will stop.
The technology for safely thawing humans out of cryostasis and returning them to good health will be created.
Suspended animation will become a viable alternative to suicide. Miserable people could “put themselves under,” with instructions to not be revived until the ill circumstances that tormented them had disappeared or until cures for their mental and medical problems were found.
A sort of “time travel” will become possible thanks to technology. Suspended animation will let people turn off their consciousnesses until any arbitrary date in the future. From their perspective, no time will have elapsed between being frozen and being thawed out, even if hundreds of years actually passed between those two events, meaning the suspended animation machine will subjectively be no different from a time machine to them. FIVR paired with data from the global surveillance networks will let people enter highly accurate computer simulations of the past. The data will come from sources like old maps, photos, videos, and the digital avatars of people, living and dead. The computers simulations of past eras will get less accurate as the dates get more distant and the data scarcer.
It will be possible to upload human minds to computers. The uploads will not share the same consciousness as their human progenitors, and will be thought of as “copies.” Mind uploads will be much more sophisticated than the digitally immortal avatars that will come into existence in the 2030s.
Different types of AGIs with fundamentally different mental architectures will exist. For example, some AGIs will be computer simulations of real human brains, while others will have totally alien inner workings. Just as a jetpack and a helicopter enable flight through totally different approaches, so will different types of AGIs be capable of intelligent thought.
Gold, silver, and many other “precious metals” will be worth far less than today, adjusting for inflation, because better ways of extracting (including from seawater) them will have been developed. Space mining might also massively boost supplies of the metals, depressing prices. Diamonds will be nearly worthless thanks to better techniques for making them artificially.
The first non-token quantities of minerals derived from asteroid mining will be delivered to the Earth’s surface. (Finding an asteroid that contains valuable minerals, altering its orbit to bring it closer to Earth, and then waiting for it to get here will take decades. No one will become a trillionaire from asteroid mining until well into the 22nd century.)
Synthetic life forms will colonize parts of the world uninhabitable to humans, like mountaintops, oceans (both on the surface and under it), and maybe even underground regions. Intelligent and semi-intelligent machines will be common sights, even in remote areas.
Intelligent life from Earth will colonize the entire Solar System, all dangerous space objects in our System will be found, the means to deflect or destroy them will be created, and intelligent machines will redesign themselves to be immune to the effects of radiation, solar flares, gamma rays, and EMP. As such, natural phenomena (including global warming) will no longer threaten the existence of civilization. Intelligent beings will find it terrifying and tragic to contemplate what it was like for humans in the past, who were confined to Earth and at the mercy of planet-killing disasters.
“End of the World” prophecies will become far less relevant since civilization will have spread beyond Earth and could be indefinitely self-sustaining even if Earth were destroyed. Some conspiracy theorists and religious people would deal with this by moving on to belief in “End of the Solar System” prophecies, but these will be based on extremely tenuous reasoning.
The locus of civilization and power in our Solar System will shift away from Earth. The vast majority of intelligent life forms outside of Earth will be nonhuman.
A self-sustaining, off-world industrial base will be created.
Spy satellites with lenses big enough to read license plates and discern facial features will be in Earth orbit.
Space probes made in our Solar System and traveling at sub-light speeds will reach nearby stars.
All of the useful knowledge and great works of art that our civilization has produced or discovered could fit into an advanced memory storage device the size of a thumb drive. It will be possible to pair this with something like a self-replicating Von Neumann Probe, creating small, long-lived machines that would know how to rebuild something exactly like our civilization from scratch. Among other data, they would have files on how to build intelligent machines and cloning labs, and files containing the genomes and mind uploads of billions of unique humans and non-human organisms. Copies of existing beings and of long-dead beings could be “manufactured” anywhere, and loaded with the personality traits and memories of their predecessors. Such machines could be distributed throughout our Solar System as an “insurance policy” against our extinction, or sent to other star systems to seed them with life. Some of the probes could also be hidden in remote, protected locations on Earth.
We will find out whether alien life exists on Mars and the other celestial bodies in our Solar System.
Intelligent machines will get strong enough to destroy the human race, though it’s impossible to assign odds to whether they’ll choose to do so.
If the “Zoo Hypothesis” is right, and if intelligent aliens have decided not to talk to humans until we’ve reached a high level of intellect, ethics, and culture, then the machine-dominated civilization that will exist on Earth this century might be advanced enough to meet their standards. Uncontrollable emotions and impulses, illogical thinking, tribalism, self-destructive behavior, and fear of the unknown will no longer govern individual and group behavior. Aliens could reveal their existence knowing it wouldn’t cause pandemonium.
The government will no longer be synonymous with slowness and incompetence since all bureaucrats will be replaced by machines.
Technology will be seamlessly fused with humans, other biological organisms, and the environment itself.
It will be cheaper and more energy-efficient to grow or synthesize almost all types of food in labs or factories than to grow and harvest it in traditional, open-air farms. Shielded from the weather and pests and not dependent on soil quality, the amounts and prices of foods will be highly consistent over time, and worries about farmland muscling out or polluting natural ecosystems will vanish. Animals will no longer be raised for food. Not only will this benefit animals, but it will benefit humans since it will eliminate a a major source of communicable disease (e.g. – new influenza strains originate in farm animals and, thanks to close contact with human farmers, evolve to infect people thanks to a process called “zoonosis”).
Additionally, the means will exist to cheaply and artificially produce non-edible organic products, like wool and wood, in industrial quantities. This means anyone will be able to buy animal products that are very expensive today, like snakeskin boots or bear rugs. Unlimited quantities of perfectly simulated animal products that have useful properties, like pillow feathers (softness) or high-grade wool (heat insulation), will be available, and no animals will need to be harmed to make them. Lab-synthesized wood that is superior to “old-growth” timber will also exist.
A global network of sensors and drones will identify and track every non-microscopic species on the planet. Cryptids like “bigfoot” and the “Loch Ness Monster” will be definitively proven to not exist. The monitoring network will also make it possible to get highly accurate, real-time counts of entire species populations. Mass gathering of DNA samples–either taken directly from organisms or from biological residue they leave behind–will also allow the full genetic diversity of all non-microscopic species to be known.
That same network of sensors and machines will let us monitor the health of all the planet’s ecosystems and to intervene to protect any species. Interventions could include mass, painless sterilizations of species that are throwing the local ecology out of balance, mass vaccinations of species suffering through disease epidemics, reintroductions of extinct species, or widescale genetic engineering of a species.
The technology and means to implement David Pearce’s global “benign stewardship” of nonhuman organic life will become available. (https://youtu.be/KDZ3MtC5Et8) After millennia of inflicting damage and pain to the environment and other species, humanity will have a chance to inaugurate an era free of suffering.
The mass surveillance network will also look skyward and see all anomalous atmospheric phenomena and UFOs.
Robots will clean up all of the garbage created in human history.
Every significant archaeological site will be excavated and every shipwreck found. There will be no work left for people in the antiquities.
Dynamic traffic lane reversal will become the default for all major roadways, sharply increasing road capacity without compromising safety. Autonomous cars that can instantly adapt to changes in traffic direction and that can easily avoid hitting each other even at high speeds will enable the transformation.
The Imperial system of weights and measures will fall out of use worldwide. Intelligent machines and posthumans will be able to switch to Metric without a problem.
The hideous East German helmet has an interesting history. It was designed during WWII as a replacement for the iconic M35 “Stahlhelm,” and tests showed it was stronger yet cheaper to make. In spite of that, Hitler rejected the adoption of the new helmets because they lacked the distinctive “German” appearance that the world had come to know and love. After the War, the Soviets made the new East German Army divest itself of weapons and equipment from the Nazi era, which meant the Stahlhelm was out. Luckily, the East Germans found the data sheets for the ugly helmet Hitler didn’t like, so they made it. https://equipment.fandom.com/wiki/Stahlhelm_M1945
“If the Japanese had sunk every ship at Pearl Harbor and destroyed every plane in the Hawaiian Islands, we still would have been in a situation where our economy was 10 times larger than theirs. We had already begun building this enormous new fleet, and I believe the result — it might have taken us longer to win the war — but there’s no doubt that the (United States) would have reacted much like it did — (a) unified sense of rage and purpose. and as soon as that happened, I think Japan was finished.” https://www.joplinglobe.com/news/local_news/acclaimed-historian-says-japan-lost-the-war-on-dec-7-1941/article_59862a68-52d4-11ec-8410-c31d1abee0fb.html
The “Bailey Bridge” was a modular bridge invented in WWII. Crews could assemble it in the field by lining up the components and hammering thick, metal pegs through their corresponding holes. They also used permanent clamps to hold the parts together. I think we should assemble modular houses like this. After the concrete foundation was poured and dried, several 18-wheeler trucks and a small crane would arrive at the site. Each truck would carry a different, box-like section of the house. The crane would stack them in the right order, and construction workers would do the careful work of lining up the holes on the edges of each section’s frame with its neighbors, and then hammer pegs through the holes to secure them. All the “framing” work could be done in a day. The different components might even come with plumbing and electric wiring, only making it necessary for the workers to join the short gaps between each section. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaNOuVgwPos
Here’s a fascinating analysis of how the Allies gained the upper hand against the Axis Powers in 1942 with weapons production and readiness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKCScYZoEj4
The Soviet T-55 tank began production in 1958, and the vehicles are still being remanufactured, upgraded and traded. Though much worse than modern main battle tanks, upgraded T-55s are still effective against lighter armored vehicles and against enemies that lack armor. Pakistan just bought them for such a role. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7vKHiygopk
‘A solar balloon is a balloon that gains buoyancy when the air inside is heated by solar radiation, usually with the help of black or dark balloon material. The heated air inside the solar balloon expands and has lower density than the surrounding air. As such, a solar balloon is similar to a hot air balloon.’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_balloon
Whether life exists on Venus, it’s interesting that our scientists can conceive of life forms that could theoretically survive there. We could someday synthesize such microbes in cloning labs on Earth, and then send them to Venus on space rockets to seed that planet with life (some people think aliens did that to Earth billions of years ago). I don’t think we should do it yet, though. We should build stations orbiting Venus to slowly siphon its thick atmosphere into space for whatever industrial uses we have, until the atmosphere is about as thick as Earth’s. At that point, we could seed the planet with a greater abundance of engineered life forms, and of greater biological complexity. https://news.mit.edu/2021/habitable-venus-clouds-acid-neutralizing-1220
The “greater male variability hypothesis” says that human males are more genetically diverse than females because males have only one “X” chromosome whereas females have two. Any recessive traits and/or extreme traits that may be on a person’s X chromosome are expressed in males, but tend to be muffled in females because of the effect of the second X chromosome. A growing body of evidence from human medical studies supports the Hypothesis, and now, it seems the same effect applies to chimpanzees. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2019.2858
“Intellectual disability,” formerly termed “mental retardation,” is a condition where a person’s IQ is lower than 70. It has many different causes, including the inheritance of genes from naturally low-IQ parents, totally random genetic mutations in the womb (Down Syndrome), brain damage during difficult births (Cerebral Palsy), and severe neglect/abuse during early childhood. As a result, while intellectually disabled adults might seem the same, they can have low IQs for diverse reasons. This study filtered out the intellectually disabled people who were so due to random genetic mutations, birthing accidents, and early childhood trauma. It determined that low IQ is very heritable, just as other studies have shown high IQ is very heritable. Also, an unusually high number of genes coding for IQ are located on the X-chromosome, which explains why the population “bell curve” for IQ is narrower for women than it is for men. Men are likelier to be intellectually disabled and also likelier to be geniuses than women. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jcpp.13560
‘We found evidence that most countertop microwaves sold in the US are manufactured by just one company, Midea. We confirmed with Midea that it makes and sells Toshiba, Comfee, and Black+Decker ovens. We’re also confident that GE, Whirlpool, Sharp, Breville, Insignia, Magic Chef, Hamilton Beach, and others also sell microwaves that were originally built and probably designed in large part by Midea, though all parties that we contacted declined to comment.’ https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-microwave/#most-microwaves-come-from-the-same-factory
In August of 2020, Bill Gates predicted that “for the rich world, we should largely be able to end [the COVID-19 epidemic] by the end of 2021, and for the world at large by the end of 2022.” At least in the U.S., the prediction would have been right had people continued getting vaccinated at the rate they were during April 2021. https://www.wired.com/story/bill-gates-on-covid-most-us-tests-are-completely-garbage/
Yesterday, a massive wildfire suddenly erupted on the Colorado grassland and destroyed hundreds of structures. It capped a year when wildfires burned 7.13 million acres of land in the U.S., which is actually slightly below the average of 7.47 million acres. Recent years have been much worse, including 2015 when a record-breaking 10.1 million acres burned, and 2018 when the figure was 8.8 million acres, and the “Camp Fire” in northern California killed 85 people.
It’s widely accepted among Americans that global warming is making wildfires bigger and more frequent, and will continue doing so as time passes, and that wildfire damage to infrastructure is unpreventable. To the first point, while it’s true anthropogenic global warming is making fires in many parts of the world worse, its impact is much smaller than the news media has led people to believe. A vastly greater contributor to the problem is human suppression of all forest fires, which allows dead vegetation, underbrush, and dead trees to build up to unnaturally high levels, laying the groundwork for inevitable mega-fires that can’t be controlled.
For example, before white settlement of what is now California, 4.5 million acres of the state’s forests usually burned each year thanks to lightning strikes and Native American land clearing. During 2018, a year that modern people consider catastrophic for California wildfires, only 1.9 million acres of the state burned. Many decades of fire suppression have resulted in the state’s forests having up to 100 times as much woody biomass as they should. Other parts of the U.S. that are prone to wildfires have the same problem.
To the second point, it is actually possible to significantly reduce the damage wildfires do to human infrastructure. Most ecologists recommend having “prescribed burns” (also called “controlled burns”), which are deliberately set wildfires meant to combust excess wood and underbrush. A large area to be burned is marked off, the fire is lit, and firefighters patrol the edges of it to make sure the flames don’t escape. Problematically, these planned fires are expensive, take a long time to get legal authorization to proceed, and are opposed by local people who only care about the short-term impacts of smoke and the threat of the fires getting out of control.
So what solution is left? Well, I have one proposal, and like so many ideas that spring from my mind, it is just as logical as it is crazy-sounding: We use thousands of teams of goats and robots to roam through America’s forests to destroy excess wood and plants. I like it because it fuses something natural and prehistoric (animal grazing) with something futuristic.
A “fuel break” is a natural area that people have cleared of combustible dead wood, underbrush, small trees, and low-hanging branches. It’s hard for wildfires to sweep through fuel breaks, and when they do, whatever flammable material there still is on the forest floor quickly burns up.
Each team would consist of two “sub teams”: a herd of goats that would first eat all the light vegetation and small sticks, and a group of “robot lumberjacks” that would then gather and burn all the larger pieces of wood the goats weren’t able to consume. Between the two of them, they would create a “fuel break,” which is an area where excess biomass has been removed from the ground and the trees have been thinned. Wildfires can still burn fuel breaks, but since there is little combustible material in them, the fires spread through them slowly, don’t get as intense, and are easier for firefighters to extinguish.
The goat/robot teams would roam the forests and grasslands at the fringes of human-populated areas, creating fuel breaks. Since the biomass would either be eaten or burned piecemeal in portable stoves, there would be no risk of the teams’ activities significantly damaging local air quality, or setting fires that got out of control. With mildly intelligent AI, the teams could be almost totally automated, needing very little human oversight.
To understand in detail how the system would work, imagine we’re in a government-owned forest that abuts a suburban development somewhere in California. To make things simple, let’s say the edge of the suburb is a straight line several kilometers long. Looking at it from above, all the back lawns of the houses on one edge of the suburb end at a straight line of trees marking the start of a forest. The part of the forest touching the lawns is divided into imaginary, one-acre squares of land, with each square measuring 63 meters to a side.
A herd of goats arrives in one of the imaginary square acres. Over several days, they eat the living vegetation, leaving behind only dead wood on the forest floor. Their droppings also fertilize the soil.
The goats would wear electronic collars containing GPS locators and metal prods for delivering mild electric shocks. As with an invisible fence meant to keep pet dogs from roaming outside their owners’ yards, the collars would shock goats that started to stray from the designated one-acre zone.
A few different robots would watch the herd and move with it. They would do things like supply the goats with water, help them if they got physically trapped or injured, and fend off predators by using nonlethal means like pepper spray. The machines would also monitor the goats’ health and nutrition status.
After eating the bushes, small plants and low-hanging branches, the dead wood remains and is easy to see and grab
A herd of 30 goats takes roughly six days to eat an acre’s worth of vegetation, and that sounds like a manageable number of animals for the robot shepherds to keep track of, so let’s choose that for the size of our herd. After the goats graze in the 63 meter square of land for six days, the robots visually confirm that the animals have eaten all they can, and then they slowly shift the boundaries of the “electric fence” to drive the herd into the next one-acre box of land to start eating the vegetation there. The shepherd robots move with them.
Some early cars like this 1919 Stanley Steam car, were powered by steam engines (the silver object under the hood). An engine like this, connected to a wood stove, could be small enough to fit in something like an ATV that could drive through the woods.
An all-robot crew then moves into the acre of land that the goats just vacated. Their job is to eliminate any dead wood that remained on the ground, as well as cut down dead trees and excess saplings, and trim all branches up to a height of 3 meters above the ground. A crucial piece of equipment they has is a combination wood-burning stove and steam engine mounted in a small, off-road vehicle. Dead wood gathered from the square acre would be burned in the stove, and the heat from the flames would boil water inside the steam engine, which in turn would spin a turbine and generate electricity. The electricity would recharge the batteries of the vehicle, of the robot crewmen, and of their power tools. The system would be energy self-sufficient, reducing costs. The other robots that were tasked with taking care of the goats would walk to the stove/steam engine to recharge their own batteries when needed, and then go back to the goats.
The all-robot crew’s first on-site task would be to set up the wood stove / steam engine. For obvious reasons, it would probably be moved to the geographic center of the acre. A chimney would be attached to its top to catch sparks and filter the most poisonous gases from the smoke. For the second task, the chimney would contain a removable “catalytic combustor,” which is a common feature in modern American wood-burning stoves.
The robot lumberjacks would then get to work. Thanks to the goats consuming most of the underbrush and low-hanging tree branches, it would be easy for the robots to move around the area, see pieces of dead wood on the ground, and pick them up. All of the biomass marked for removal would be put in the stove and burned. The robots would use electric chainsaws, log splitters, and other tools to cut anything too large to fit into the stove into sufficiently small pieces.
The opportunity would also be used to remove human-created trash from the acre. Anything that was safely combustible would be thrown in the stove while the rest would be bundled in a pile and geotagged for eventual pickup.
Over the course of six days, the robot crew would slowly feed all of the acre’s dead wood and excess vegetation into the stove. They would periodically remove wood ash from the stove, wait until it was no longer hot enough to cause a fire, and sprinkle it on the ground to fertilize the soil. One member of the robot crew would be a small vehicle meant to carry water and spray it on fires accidentally lit by sparks from the stove, as well as douse the ashes before they were spread on the ground. It would use local bodies of water like streams and lakes to replenish its reservoir, and might also provide the goats with drinking water.
What would the other robots look like? To move around over uneven forest terrain, between closely-spaced trees, and under branches, they would need legs, and they couldn’t be much bigger than human adults. Some of the robots in the crew would also need to have body layouts that gave them general-purpose work abilities so they could do things like assemble and disassemble the stove / steam engine, pick up large pieces of wood, replace chainsaw blades, and make minor repairs to themselves and other robots. With those requirements in mind, I think most of the robot crew would be humanoid or centaur-like, and would have one or two pairs of arms and hands for grasping tools and objects. (For a deeper discussion of this topic, read my blog entry “What would a human-equivalent robot look like?”)
Once the excess wood in the area was all burned, the robots would dump the last of their ashes, configure the stove/steam engine and any other equipment for travel mode, and move the system to the next burn site a few hundred meters away, again moving into the new acre square as the goat herd moved out. This process would repeat itself indefinitely, with the goats and robots slowly creating a 63-meter-wide “line” of thinned trees, trimmed branches, and debris-free forest floor. Assuming the goat/robot system spends 50% of its time working and 50% out of action due to adverse weather, maintenance, and other factors, it could transform 26 acres of forest into fuel breaks over the course of one year, making the “line” 1,638 meters long (almost exactly 1 mile).
To stay effective, fuel breaks need full maintenance once every 10 years, which means that one crew of 30 goats and maybe 10 robots could create and sustain a fuel break 16 kilometers (10 miles) long and 63 meters wide. Put into perspective, it would take 116 crews to make a straight fuel brake extending from the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego to the U.S.-Canada border near Seattle.
Of course, one fuel break paralleling the West Coast won’t solve America’s wildfire problem. We’d probably need fuel breaks 100 times longer than that, scattered all over the country, and in irregular configurations around the fringes of towns and suburbs, to significantly cut the amount of damage wildfires cause each year. It might sound like a lot, but doing the math, it’s feasible, at least with the technology we’ll have later this century.
11,600 fuel break crews would require 116,000 robots, which on average would be the sizes of adult humans (the water carrier vehicles, which should be thought of as autonomous vehicles designed for off-road use, would be larger and heavier). That might sound like a lot of robots, until you consider there were 245 million passenger vehicles in the U.S. in 2018. If we can afford to build and maintain that many large, complicated machines, then it should be possible to create a vastly smaller fleet of lighter and less complicated machines.
The crews would also need 348,000 goats, which is indeed a large number, but achievable when you consider the total goat population of the U.S. was 2.66 million in 2020. It would take only a few years of more intensively breeding the existing goat population to expand it by 13%–the amount needed to populate the fuel break crews.
Automation would keep the system’s costs low, and it would be rare for human staff to have to travel to work sites (reasons might include veterinary care for the goats, or major repairs to broken robots). The amount of human deaths and property losses averted by the system would, hopefully, more than pay for its costs. According to my own estimates, AI and robotics should be advanced enough to make the first goat / robot crews sometime in the late 2030s. However, due to public skepticism of the idea (if it is even known to a non-token segment of the public by then), I think this idea or any variant of it won’t come to fruition for decades after that.
‘By some estimates, many of [California’s] forests have up to 100 times the amount of small trees and underbrush than what grew prior to white settlement. Meanwhile, researchers estimate that prior to 1800, some 4.5 million acres of the state’s forests burned in a typical year — more than the 1.9 million acres that burned in 2018, the most in modern history. Yet in a state with more than 30 million acres of forest, only about 87,000 acres of California land were treated with prescribed burns last year to reduce undergrowth prior to the state’s deadly fire season, according to data from Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.’ https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/science/californias-history-of-drought-repeats.html
