Time for…another Ray Kurzweil analysis. It’s funny how I keep swearing to myself I won’t write another one about him, but end up doing so anyway. I’m sorry. For sure, there won’t be anything more about him until next year or later.
In my last blog post, “Will Kurzweil’s 2019 be our 2029?”, I mentioned that several of his predictions for 2019 were wrong, and would probably still be wrong in 2029, but that it didn’t matter since they pertained to inconsequential things. Rather than leave all two of you who read my blog hanging in suspense, I’d like to go over those and explain my thoughts. As before, these predictions are taken from Kurzweil’s 1998 book The Age of Spiritual Machines.
The augmented reality / virtual reality glasses will work by projecting images onto the retinas of the people wearing them.
To be clear, by 2030, standalone AR and VR eyewear will have the levels of capability Kurzweil envisioned for 2019. However, it’s unknowable whether retinal projection will be the dominant technology they will use to show images to the people wearing them. Other technologies like lenses made of transparent LCD screens, or beamed images onto semitransparent lenses, could end up dominant. Whichever gains the most traction by 2030 is irrelevant to the consumer–they will only care about how smooth and convincing the digital images displays in front of them look.
“Keyboards are rare, although they still exist. Most interaction with computing is through gestures using hands, fingers, and facial expressions and through two-way natural-language spoken communication.”
The first sentence was wrong in 2019 and still will be in 2029. As old-fashioned as they may be, keyboards have many advantages over other modes of interacting with computers:
Keyboards are physically large and have big buttons, meaning you’re less likely to push the wrong one than you are on a tiny smartphone keyboard.
They have many keys corresponding not only to letters and numbers, but to functions, meaning you can easily use a basic keyboard to input a vast range of text and commands into a computer. Imagine how inefficient it would be to input a long URL into a browser toolbar or to write computer code if you had to open all kinds of side menus on your input device to find and select every written symbol, including colons, semicolons, and dollar symbols. Worse, imagine doing that using “hand gestures” and “facial expressions.”
Keyboards are also very ergonomic to use and require nothing more than tiny finger movements and flexions of the wrists. By contrast, inputting characters and commands into your computer through some combination of body movements, gestures and facial expressions that it would see would take you much more time and physical energy (compare the amount of energy it takes you to push the “A” button on your keyboard with how much it takes to raise both of your arms up and link your hands over your head with your elbows bent to turn your body into something resembling an “A” shape). And you’d have to go to extra trouble to make sure the device’s camera had a full view of your body and that you were properly lit. This is why something like the gestural interface Tom Cruise used in Minority Report will never become common.
Furthermore, two-way voice communication with computers has its place, but won’t replace keyboards. First, talking with machines sacrifices your privacy and annoys the people within earshot of you. Imagine a world where keyboards are banned and people must issue voice commands to their computers when searching for pornography, and where workers in open-concept offices have to dictate all their emails. Second, verbal communication works poorly in noisy environments since you and your machine have problems understanding each other. It’s simply not a substitute for using keyboards.
Even verbal communication plus gestures, facial expressions, and anything else won’t be enough to render keyboards obsolete. If you want to get any kind of serious work done, you need one.
This will still hold true in 2029, and keyboards will not be “rare” then, or even in 2079. Kurzweil will still be wrong. But so what? The keyboard won’t be “blocking” any other technology, and given its advantages over other modes of data and command input, its continued use is unavoidable and necessary.
Let me conclude this section by saying I can only imagine keyboards becoming obsolete in exotic future scenarios. For example, in a space ship crewed entirely by robots, keyboards, mice, and even display screens might be absent since the robots and the ship would be able to directly communicate through electronic signals. If the captain wanted to turn left, it would think the command, and the ship’s sensors would receive it and respond. And in his mind’s eye, the captain would see live footage from external ship cameras.
“Cables have largely disappeared.”
As I wrote in the analysis, it will still be common for control devices and peripheral devices to have data cables in 2029 due to better information security and slightly lower costs. Moreover, in many cases there will be no functional disadvantage to having corded devices, as they never need to leave the vicinity of whatever they are connected to. Consider, if you have a PC at your work desk, why would you ever need to move your keyboard to anyplace other than the desk’s surface? To use your computer, you need to be close to it and the monitor, which means the keyboard has to stay close to them as well. In such a case, a keyboard with a standard, 5 foot long cord would serve you just as well as a wireless keyboard that could connect to your PC from a mile away.
“Of the total computing capacity of the human species (that is, all human brains), combined with the computing technology the species has created, more than 10 percent is nonhuman.”
This was badly wrong in 2019, and in 2029, the “nonhuman” portion of all computation on Earth will probably be no higher than 1%, so it will still be wrong. But so what? Comparisons of how much raw thinking humans and machines do are misleading since they are “apples to oranges,” and they provide almost no useful insights into the overall state of computer technology or automation.
When it comes to computation, quantity does not equal quality. Consider this example: I estimated that, in 2019, all the world’s computing devices combined did a total of 3.5794 x 1021 flops of computation. Now, if someone invented an AGI that was running on a supercomputer that was, say, ten times as powerful as a human brain, the AGI would be capable of 200 petaflops, or 2.0 x 1017 flops. Looking at the raw figures for global computation, it would seem like the addition of that AI changed nothing: the one supercomputer it was running on wouldn’t even make the global computation count of 3.5794 x 1021 flops increase by one significant digit! However, anyone who has done the slightest thinking about AI’s consequences knows that one machine would be revolutionary, able to divide its attention in many directions at once, and would have inaugurated a new era of much faster economic, scientific, and technological growth that would have been felt by people across the world.
“Rotating memories and other electromechanical computing devices have been fully replaced with electronic devices.”
Rotating computer memories–also called “hard disk drives” (HDD)–were still common in 2019, and will still be in 2029, though less so. This is because HDDs have important advantages over their main competitor, solid-state drives (SSDs), often called “flash drives,” and those advantages will not disappear over this decade.
HDDs are cheaper on a per-bit basis and are less likely to suffer data corruption or data loss. SSDs, on the other hand, are more physically robust since they lack moving parts, and allow much faster access to the data stored in them since they don’t contain disks that have to “spin up.” Given the tradeoffs, in 2029, HDDs will still be widely used in data centers and electronic archive facilities, where they will store important data which needs to be preserved for long periods, but which isn’t so crucial that users need instantaneous access to it. Small consumer electronic devices, including smartphones, smart watches, and other wearables, will continue to exclusively have SSD memory, and finding newly manufactured laptops with anything but SSDs might be impossible. Only a small fraction of desktop computers will have HDDs by then.
So rotating memories will still be around in 2029, meaning the prediction will still be wrong since it contains the absolute term “fully replaced.” But again, so what? All of the data that average people need to see on a day-to-day basis will be stored on SSDs, ensuring they will have instantaneous access to it. The cost of HDD and SSD memory will have continued its long-running, exponential improvement, making both trivially cheap by 2029 (it was already so cheap in 2019 that even poor people could buy enough to meet all their reasonable personal needs). The HDDs that still exist will be out of sight, either in server farms or in big, immobile boxes that are on or under peoples’ work desks. The failure of the prediction will have no noticeable impact, and if you could teleport to a parallel universe where HDDs didn’t exist anymore, nothing about day-to-day life would seem more futuristic.
“A new computer-controlled optical-imaging technology using quantum-based diffraction devices has replaced most lenses with tiny devices that can detect light waves from any angle. These pinhead-sized cameras are everywhere.”
The cameras that make use of quantum effects and reflected light never got good enough to exit the lab, and it’s an open question whether they will be commercialized by 2029. I doubt it, but don’t see why it should matter. Billions of cameras–most of them tiny enough to fit on smartphones–already are practically everywhere and will be even more ubiquitous in 2029. It’s not relevant whether they make use of exotic principles to capture video and still images or whether they use through conventional methods involving the capture of visible light. The important aspects of the prediction–that cameras will be very small and all over the place–was right in 2019 and will be even more right in 2029.
“People read documents either on the hand-held displays or, more commonly, from text that is projected into the ever present virtual environment using the ubiquitous direct-eye displays. Paper books and documents are rarely used or accessed.”
This prediction was technologically possible in 2019, but didn’t come to pass because many people showed a (perhaps unpredictable) preference for paper books and documents. It turns out there’s something appealing about the tactile experience of leafing through books and magazines and being able to carry them around that PDFs and tablet computers can’t duplicate. Personal computing devices had to become widely available before we could realize old fashioned books and sheets of paper had some advantages.
Come 2029, paper books, magazines, journals, newspapers, memos, and letters will still be commonly encountered in everyday life, so the prediction will still be wrong. Fortunately, the persistence of paper isn’t a significant stumbling block in any way since all important paper documents from the pre-computer era have been scanned and are available over the internet for free or at low cost, and all important new written documents originate in electronic format.
“Three-dimensional holography displays have also emerged. In either case, users feel as if they are physically near the other person. The resolution equals or exceeds optimal human visual acuity. Thus a person can be fooled as to whether or not another person is physically present or is being projected through electronic communication.”
3D volumetric displays didn’t advance nearly as fast as Kuzweil predicted, so this was wrong in 2019, and the technology doesn’t look poised for a breakthrough, so it will still be wrong in 2029. However, it doesn’t matter since VR goggles and probably AR glasses as well will let people have the same holographic experiences. By 2029, you will be able to put on eyewear that displays lifelike, moving images of other people, giving the false impression they are around you. Among other things, this technology will be used for video calls.
“The all-enveloping tactile environment is now widely available and fully convincing. Its resolution equals or exceeds that of human touch and can simulate (and stimulate) all the facets of the tactile sense, including the senses of pressure, temperature, textures, and moistness…the ‘total touch’ haptic environment requires entering a virtual reality booth.”
The haptic/kinetic/touch aspect of virtual reality is very underdeveloped compared to its audio and visual aspects, and will still lag far behind in 2029, but little will be lost thanks to this. After all, if you’re playing a VR game, do you want to be able to feel bullets hitting you, or to feel the extreme temperatures of whatever exotic virtual environment you’re in? Even if we had skintight catsuits that could replicate physical sensations accurately, would we want to wear them? Slipping on a VR headset that covers your eyes and ears is fast and easy–and will become even more so as the devices miniaturize thanks to better technology–but taking off all your clothes to put on a VR catsuit is much more trouble.
A VR headset is made of smooth metal and high-impact plastic, making it easy to clean with a damp a rag. By contrast, a catsuit made of stretchy material and studded with hard servos, sensors and other little machines would soak up sweat, dirt and odors, and couldn’t be thrown in the washing machine or dryer like a regular garment since its parts would get damaged if banged around inside. It’s impractical.
“These technologies are popular for medical examinations, as well as sensual and sexual interactions…”
I doubt that VR body suits and VR “booths” will be able to satisfactorily replicate anything but a narrow range of sex acts. Given the extreme importance of tactile stimulation, the setup would have to include a more expensive catsuit. There would also need to be devices for the genitals, adding more costs, and possibly other contraptions to apply various types of physical force (thrust, pull, resistance, etc.) to the user. Cleanup would be even more of a hassle. [Shakes head]
The fundamental limits to this technology are such that I don’t think it will ever become “popular” since VR sex will fall so far short of the real thing. That said, I believe another technology, androids, will be able to someday “do it” as well as humans. Once they can, androids will become some of the most popular consumer devices of all time, with major repercussions for dating, marriage, gender relations, and laws relating to sex and prostitution. They would let any person, regardless of social status, looks, or personality, to have unlimited amounts of “sex,” which is unheard of in human history. Just don’t expect it until near the end of this century!
“The vast majority of transactions include a simulated person, featuring a realistic animated personality and two-way voice communication with high-quality natural-language understanding.”
As with replacing all books with PDFs on computer displays, there was no technological barrier to this in 2019, but it didn’t happen because most transactions remained face-to-face, and because people preferred online transactions involving simple button-clicks rather than drawn-out conversations with fake human salesmen. The consumer preferences were not clear when the prediction was made in 1998.
By 2029, the prediction will still be wrong, though it won’t matter, since buying things by simply clicking on buttons and typing a few characters is faster and much less aggravating than doing the same transactions through a “simulated person.” Anyone who has dealt with a robot operator on the phone that laboriously enunciates menu options and obtusely talks over you when you are responding will agree. It would be a step backwards if that technology became more widespread by 2029.
“Automated driving systems have been found to be highly reliable and have now been installed in nearly all roads. While humans are still allowed to drive on local roads (although not on highways), the automated driving systems are always engaged and are ready to take control when necessary to prevent accidents.”
Sensors and transmitters that could guide cars were never installed along roadways, but it didn’t turn out to be a problem since we found that cars could use GPS and their own onboard sensors to navigate just as well. So the prediction was wrong, and the expensive roadside networks will still not exist in 2029, but it won’t matter.
The second part of the prediction will be half right by 2029, and it’s failure to be 100% right will be consequential. By then, autonomous cars will be statistically safer than the average human driver and will be in the “human range” of “efficiency,” albeit towards the bottom of the range: they will still be overly cautious, slowing down and even stopping whenever they detect slightly dangerous conditions (e.g. – erratic human driver nearby, pedestrian who looks like they might be about to cross the road illegally, heavy rain, dead leaves blowing across the road surface). In short, they’ll drive like old ladies, which will be annoying at times.
While the technology will be cheaper and more widely accepted, it will still be a luxury feature in 2029 that only a minority of cars in rich countries have. At best, a token number of public roads worldwide will ban human-driven vehicles. Enormous numbers of lives will be lost in accidents, and billions of dollars wasted in traffic jams each year thanks to autonomous car technology not advancing as fast as Kurzweil predicted.
“The type of artistic and entertainment product in greatest demand (as measured by revenue generated) continues to be virtual-experience software, which ranges from simulations of ‘real’ experiences to abstract environments with little or no corollary in the physical world.”
In 2019, the sports industry had the highest revenues in the entertainment sector, totaling $480 – $620 billion. That year, the VR gaming industry generated a paltry $1.2 billion in revenue, so the prediction was badly wrong for 2019. And even if the latter grows twentyfold over this decade, which I think is plausible, it won’t come close to challenging the dominance of sports.
That said, looking at revenues is kind of arbitrary. The spirit of the prediction, which is that VR gaming will become a very popular and common means of entertainment, will be right by 2029 in rich countries, and it will only get more widespread with time.
“Computerized health monitors built into watches, jewelry, and clothing which diagnose both acute and chronic health conditions are widely used. In addition to diagnosis, these monitors provide a range of remedial recommendations and interventions.”
The devices are already built into some smartwatches, and will be “widely used” by any reasonable metric by 2029. I don’t think they will be shrunk to the sizes of jewelry like rings and earrings, but that won’t have any real consequences since the watches will be available. No one in 2029 will say “I’m really concerned about my heart problem and want to buy a wearable monitoring device, but my health is not so important that I would want to trouble myself with a watch. However, I’d be OK with a ring.”
Health monitoring devices won’t be built into articles of clothing for the same reasons that other types of computers won’t be built into them: 1) laundering and drying the clothes would be a hassle since water, heat and being banged around would damage their electronic parts and 2) you’d have to remember to always wear your one shirt with the heartbeat monitor sewn into it, regardless of how appropriate it was for the occasion and weather, or how dirty it was from wearing it day after day. It makes much more sense to consolidate all your computing needs into one or two devices that are fully portable and easy to keep clean, like a smartphone and smartwatch, which is why we’ve done that.
Donald Trump completed one term of office as U.S. President this month, and the position was transferred to Joe Biden. Again, this blog is NOT about partisan politics, and as a general rule I don’t mention it, but this is a rare instance where it’s worth listing the noteworthy failed predictions about the Trump presidency:
“Trump’s presidency is effectively over. Would be amazed if he survives till end of the year. More likely resigns by fall, if not sooner.” –Tony Schwartz (ghostwriter of Trump: The Art of the Deal turned enemy of Trump), August 16, 2017 https://twitter.com/tonyschwartz/status/897900928023412736
“He will not finish his first term…I would be very surprised if he made it to 18 months…my best guess is within six months.” –Cenk Uygur, August 16, 2017 https://youtu.be/ScgVbT_fry0
“I’ve been saying this from day one of his presidency but apparently most people still don’t get it – there is no way Donald Trump finishes his first term. Mark my words: He is out of office by 2019. He is not bright enough to be able to get himself out of the trouble he is in.” –Cenk Uygur, December 22, 2018 https://twitter.com/cenkuygur/status/1076600316286590976
“I do not think the President will survive this term…I think the amount of heat that is going to come down on Mr. Trump in connection with his personal attorney of ten years [Michael Cohen] turning on him and rolling on him will be insurmountable, and I think his only exit, in an effort to save whatever face he may have left at that time, will be to resign the office.” –Michael Avenatti, April 23, 2018 https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/stormy-daniels-lawyer-explains-why-he-thinks-trump-will-resign-his-term
“I think it’s just going to get so tight and it’s going to close in and then everybody is going to be indicted around this president, and then he is going to realize he is probably next on the list. And I think he is going to come up with an excuse like ‘somebody is trying to kill Barron, and so I’m going to resign.” –Congresswoman Frederica Wilson (Florida), November 3, 2017 https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rep-wilson-predicts-trump-will-pretend-somebody-trying-kill-barron-resign/
“In any case, it seems likely that Donald Trump will be leaving the Presidency at some point, likely between the 31 days of William Henry Harrison in 1841 (dying of pneumonia) and the 199 days of James A. Garfield in 1881 (dying of an assassin’s bullet after 79 days of terrible suffering and medical malpractice). At the most, it certainly seems likely, even if dragged out, that Trump will not last 16 months and 5 days, as occurred with Zachary Taylor in 1850 (dying of a digestive ailment). The Pence Presidency seems inevitable.” –Presidential historian Ronald L. Feinman, February 18, 2017 https://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/presidential-historian-predicts-trumps-term-will-last-less-than-200-days-the-second-shortest-ever/
“For a while now, I have thought the Trump presidency would end suddenly…For weeks now I have been anticipating that Trump’s last day in office will dawn like all the others, and then around dinnertime it will suddenly break that he is about to resign…I don’t know if that’s next Tuesday or next year, but I think whenever it is, that is what it will feel like.” –Keith Olbermann, August 23, 2017 http://www.newsweek.com/trump-resign-russia-olbermann-president-654209
“He’s gonna drop out of the race because it’s gonna become very clear. Okay, it’ll be March of 2020. He’ll likely drop out by March of 2020. It’s gonna become very clear that it’s impossible for him to win.” –Anthony Scaramucci, August 16, 2019 https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/anthony-scaramucci-interview-trump
LED walls are made up of many smaller LED panels arranged in a grid to form one, giant display of arbitrary size. I just saw one of them in an airport and was impressed. This might become common in homes starting in 10 years as prices drop and people demand TVs that would be too big to fit through the front doors of their houses if made of one, rigid screen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQxa8VruNJg&feature=emb_title
Here’s an interesting desalination plant. It uses solar power, pumps, a 90-meter tall hill, and reverse osmosis to make drinking water from seawater. https://youtu.be/B4irlTMk_Os
Here’s a big roundup of predictions for the 2020s by a bright guy I’ve never heard of. I respect his thoroughness, though I need to more time to decide if I agree with him. https://elidourado.com/blog/notes-on-technology-2020s/
Were the earliest plants purple instead of green? Are there alien planets covered in purple plants? ‘Because retinal is a simpler molecule than chlorophyll, then it could be more commonly found in life in the Universe…’ https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/was-life-on-the-early-earth-purple
Nobel Prizewinner Paul Cruzen died. He was a pioneer in global warming research, and later advocated geoengineering as a way to keep the phenomenon from getting out of control. https://www.mpic.de/4677594/trauer-um-paul-crutzen
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis might be wrong. ‘On the other side of the debate are those who say that although language is indeed linked with cognition, it derives from thought, rather than preceding it. You can certainly think about things that you have no labels for, they point out, or you would be unable to learn new words. Supposedly “untranslatable” words from other tongues—which seem to suggest that without the right language, comprehension is impossible—are not really inscrutable; they can usually be explained in longer expressions. One-word labels are not the sole way to grasp things.’ https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2020/10/15/does-naming-a-thing-help-you-understand-it
Autonomous vehicles only designed to transport cargo could look very different from normal cars, as they wouldn’t need seats or safety features to protect humans during crashes. For those same reasons, they could be lighter and cheaper than regular cars. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-autonomous-safety-idUSKBN29J29Z
“AI video compression” sharply reduces the amount of data needed for video calls. The means by which this is accomplished is very interesting, and has other uses. https://youtu.be/NqmMnjJ6GEg
Microsoft has patented a chatbot that would be able to mimic dead people after analyzing their “images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages” and other data. I’ve predicted that this kind of technology will get advanced enough to let people achieve “digital immortality” during the 2030s. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/microsoft-chatbot-patent-dead-b1789979.html
OpenAI’s latest boundary-pushing computer program is “Dall-E,” which can generate clear drawings based on user-submitted written descriptions of what they should look like. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55559463
Algorithms that can edit video footage are getting frighteningly advanced. Objects, including moving objects like humans and cars, can be easily deleted from video footage without anything looking amiss. Whatever was behind them is filled in. https://youtu.be/86QU7_SF16Q
Most of the world’s top AI researchers go to universities in the U.S. and then get jobs there. China produces the most top AI researchers of any country (unsurprising given its large population), but few of them stay there. https://macropolo.org/digital-projects/the-global-ai-talent-tracker/
‘Star lifting is any of several hypothetical processes by which a sufficiently advanced civilization…could remove a substantial portion of a star’s matter which can then be re-purposed, while possibly optimizing the star’s energy output and lifespan at the same time.’ https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Star_lifting
Scientists have identified the types of cells that let some animals sense magnetic fields, and have observed them doing that for the first time. I think posthumans will have this extra sense. “[We’ve] observed a purely quantum mechanical process affecting chemical activity at the cellular level.” https://newatlas.com/biology/live-cells-respond-magnetic-fields/
Machine learning can optimize factories by studying ultra hi-res photos of their products at various stages in the manufacturing process. Something like a screw missing from a circuit board would be seen by the computer before the board left the building. https://youtu.be/MOh55-TF6LQ
Are Silicon Valley’s days as the world’s tech hub over? Mandatory teleworking imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic has worked out better than many tech workers and founders expected, and they will push to make the arrangements permanent, leading many to leave the Bay Area for cheaper locales. https://blog.initialized.com/2021/01/data-post-pandemic-silicon-valley-isnt-a-place/
We have no idea how many people COVID-19 has killed in sub-Saharan Africa. ‘In 2017, only 10 percent of deaths were registered in Nigeria, by far Africa’s biggest country by population — down from 13.5 percent a decade before. In other African countries, like Niger, the percentage is even lower.’ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/02/world/africa/africa-coronavirus-deaths-underreporting.html
In September, the University of Washington COVID-19 model (IHME) predicted 410,000 Americans would be dead by January 1: ‘Jha says his disagreement with IHME’s methodology amounts to much more than a technical debate. “The problem here is if we come in at 250,000 or 300,000 dead [by year’s end in the United States] — which is still just enormously awful — political leaders are going to be able to do a victory dance and say, ‘Look, we were supposed to have 400,000 deaths. And because of all the great stuff we did, only 300,000 Americans died.'” says Jha.’ The actual outcome didn’t satisfy anyone. The U.S. death toll hit 354,000 by the January 1 deadline, which made both the IHME and the skeptics like Jha all look dumb. At the same time, no politicians did a victory dance. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/09/04/909783162/new-global-coronavirus-death-forecast-is-chilling-and-controversial
Mutant versions of COVID-19 have emerged in Britain and South Africa. They spread faster among people, and as such will kill higher numbers of people overall, even if they are not more lethal to any individual than the older strains of the virus. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/01/04/variants-and-vaccines
If it’s January, it means it’s time for me to update my big list of future predictions! I used the 2020 version of this document as a template, and made edits to it as needed. For the sake of transparency, I’ve indicated recently added content by bolding it, and have indicated deleted or moved content with strikethrough.
Like any futurist worth his salt, I’m going to put my credibility on the line by publishing a list of my future predictions. I won’t modify or delete this particular blog entry once it is published, and if my thinking about anything on the list changes, I’ll instead create a new, revised blog entry. Furthermore, as the deadlines for my predictions pass, I’ll reexamine them.
I’ve broken down my predictions by the decade. Any prediction listed under a specific decade will happen by the end of that decade, unless I specify some other date (e.g. – “X will happen early in this decade.”).
2020s
Better, cheaper solar panels and batteries (for grid power storage and cars) will make clean energy as cheap and as reliable as fossil fuel power for entire regions of the world, including some temperate zones. As cost “tipping points” are reached, it will make financial sense for tens of millions of private homeowners and electricity utility companies to install solar panels on their rooftops and on ground arrays, respectively. This will be the case even after government clean energy subsidies are inevitably retracted. However, a 100% transition to clean energy won’t finish in rich countries until the middle of the century, and poor countries will use dirty energy well into the second half of the century.
Fracking and the exploitation of tar sands in the U.S. and Canada will together ensure growth in global oil production until around 2030, at which time the installed base of clean energy and batteries will be big enough to take up the slack. There will be no global energy crisis.
This will be a bad decade for Russia as its overall population shrinks, its dependency ratio rises, and as low fossil fuel prices and sanctions keep hurting its economy. Russia will fall farther behind the U.S., China, and other leading countries in terms of economic, military, and technological might.
China’s GDP will surpass America’s, India’s population will surpass China’s, and China will never claim the glorious title of being both the richest and most populous country.
Improvements to smartphone cameras, mirrorless cameras, and perhaps light-field cameras will make D-SLRs obsolete.
Augmented reality (AR) glasses that are much cheaper and better than the original Google Glass will make their market debuts and will find success in niche applications.
Virtual reality (VR) gaming will go mainstream as the devices get better and cheaper. It will stop being the sole domain of hardcore gamers willing to spend over $1,000 on hardware.
Vastly improved VR goggles with better graphics and no need to be plugged into desktop PCs will hit the market. They won’t display perfectly lifelike footage, but they will be much better than what we have today, and portable.
“Full-immersion” audiovisual VR will be commercially available by the end of the decade. These VR devices will be capable of displaying video that is visually indistinguishable from real reality: They will have display resolutions (at least 60 pixels per degree of field of view), refresh rates, head tracking sensitivities, and wide fields of view (210 degrees wide by 150 degrees high) that together deliver a visual experience that matches or exceeds the limits of human vision. These high-end goggles won’t be truly “portable” devices because their high processing and energy requirements will probably make them bulky, give them only a few hours of battery life (or maybe none at all), or even require them to be plugged into another computer. Moreover, the tactile, olfactory, and physical movement/interaction aspects of the experience will remain underdeveloped.
“Deepfake” pornography will reach new levels of sophistication and perversion as it becomes possible to seamlessly graft the heads of real people onto still photos and videos of nude bodies that closely match the physiques of the actual people. New technology for doing this will let amateurs make high-quality deepfakes, meaning any person could be targeted. It will even become possible to wear AR glasses that interpolate nude, virtual bodies over the bodies real people in the wearer’s field of view to provide a sort of fake “X-ray-vision.” The AR glasses could also be used to apply other types of visual filters that degraded real people within the field of view.
LED light bulbs will become as cheap as CFL and even incandescent bulbs. It won’t make economic sense NOT to buy LEDs, and they will establish market dominance.
“Smart home”/”Wired home” technology will become mature and widespread in developed countries.
Video gaming will dispense with physical media, and games will be completely streamed from the internet or digitally downloaded. Business that exist just to sell game discs (Gamestop) will shut down.
Instead of a typical home entertainment system having a whole bunch of media discs, different media players and cable boxes, there will be one small, multipurpose box that, among other things, boosts WiFi to ensure the TV and all nearby devices can get signals at multi-Gb/s speeds.
Self-driving vehicles will start hitting the roads in large numbers in rich countries. The vehicles won’t drive as efficiently as humans (a lot of hesitation and slowing down for little or no reason), but they’ll be as safe as human drivers. Long-haul trucks that ply simple highway routes will be the first category of vehicles to be fully automated. The transition will be heralded by a big company like Wal-Mart buying 5,000 self-driving tractor trailers to move goods between its distribution centers and stores. Last-mile delivery–involving weaving through side streets, cities and neighborhoods, and physically carrying packages to peoples’ doors–won’t be automated until after this decade. Self-driving, privately owned passenger cars will stay few in number and will be owned by technophiles, rich people, and taxi cab companies.
Thanks to improvements in battery energy density and cost, and in fast-charging technology, electric cars will become cost-competitive with gas-powered cars this decade without government subsidies, leading to their rapid adoption. Electric cars are mechanically simpler and more reliable than gas-powered ones, which will hurt the car repair industry. Many gas stations will also go bankrupt or convert to fast charging stations.
Most new power equipment will be battery-powered, so machines like lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and chainsaws will be much quieter and less polluting than they are today. Batteries will be energy-dense enough to compete with gasoline in these use cases, and differences in overall equipment weight and running time will be insignificant. The notion of a neighbor shattering your sense of peace and quiet with loud yard work will get increasingly alien.
A machine will pass the Turing Test by the end of this decade. The milestone will attract enormous amounts of attention and will lead to several retests, some of which the machine will fail, proving that it lacks the full range of human intelligence. It will lead to debate over the Turing Test’s validity as a measure of true intelligence (Ray Kurzweil actually talked about this phenomenon of “moving the goalposts” whenever we think about how smart computers are), and many AI experts will point out the existence of decades-long skepticism in the Turing Test in their community.
The best AIs circa 2029 won’t be able to understand and upgrade their own source codes. They will still be narrow AIs, albeit an order of magnitude better than the ones we have today.
Machines will become better than humans at the vast majority of computer, card, and board games. The only exceptions will be very obscure games or recently created games that no one has bothered to program an AI to play yet. But even for those games, there will be AIs with general intelligence and learning abilities that will be “good enough” to play as well as average humans by reading the instruction manuals and teaching themselves through simulated self-play.
The cost of getting your genome sequenced and expertly interpreted will drop below $1,000, and enough about the human genome will have been deciphered to make the cost worth the benefit for everyone. By the end of the decade, it will be common for newborns in rich countries to have their genomes sequenced.
Cheap DNA tests that can measure a person’s innate IQ and core personality traits with high accuracy will become widely available. There is the potential for this to cause social problems.
At-home medical testing kits and diagnostic devices like swallowable camera-pills will become vastly better and more common.
Space tourism will become routine thanks to privately owned spacecraft.
Marijuana will be effectively decriminalized in the U.S. Either the federal government will overturn its marijuana prohibitions, or some patchwork of state and federal bans will remain but be so weakened and lightly enforced that there will be no real government barriers to obtaining and using marijuana.
By the end of this decade, photos of almost every living person will be available online (mostly on social media). Apps will exist that can scan through trillions of photos to find your doppelgangers.
In 2029, the youngest Baby Boomer and the oldest Gen Xer will turn 65.
Drones will be used in an attempted or successful assassination of at least one major world leader (Note: Venezuela’s Nicholas Maduro wasn’t high profile enough).
2030s
VR and AR goggles will become refined technologies and probably merge into a single type of lightweight device. Like smartphones today, anyone who wants the glasses in 2030 will have them. Even poor people in Africa will be able to buy them. A set of the glasses will last a day on a single charge under normal use.
Augmented reality contact lenses will enter mass production and become widely available, though they won’t be as good as AR glasses and they might need remotely linked, body-worn hardware to provide them with power and data. https://www.inverse.com/article/31034-augmented-reality-contact-lenses
The bulky VR goggles of the 2020s will transform into lightweight, portable V.R. glasses thanks to improved technology. The glasses will display lifelike footage. However, the best VR goggles will still need to be plugged into other devices, like routers or PCs.
Wall-sized, thin, 8K or even 16K TVs will become common in homes in rich countries, and the TVs will be able to display 3D picture without the use of glasses. A sort of virtual reality chamber could be created at moderate cost by installing those TVs on all the walls of a room to create a single, wraparound screen.
Functional CRT TVs and computer monitors will only exist in museums and in the hands of antique collectors. This will also be true for DLP TVs.
The video game industry will be bigger than ever and considered high art.
It will be standard practice for AIs to be doing hyperrealistic video game renderings, and for NPCs to behave very intelligently thanks to better AI.
Books and computer tablets will merge into a single type of device that could be thought of as a “digital book.” It will be a book with several hundred pages made of thin, flexible digital displays (perhaps using ultra-energy efficient e-ink) instead of paper. At the tap of a button, the text on all of the pages will instantly change to display whichever book the user wanted to read at that moment. They could also be used as notebooks in which the user could hand write or draw things with a stylus, which would be saved as image or text files. The devices will fuse the tactile appeal of old-fashioned books with the content flexibility of tablet computers.
Loose-leaf sheets of “digital paper” will also exist thanks to the same technology.
Loneliness, social isolation, and other problems caused by overuse of technology and the atomized structure of modern life will be, ironically, cured to a large extent by technology. Chatbots that can hold friendly (and even funny and amusing) conversations with humans for extended periods, diagnose and treat mental illnesses as well as human therapists, and customize themselves to meet the needs of humans will become ubiquitous. The AIs will become adept at analyzing human personalities and matching lonely people with friends and lovers, at matching them with social gatherings (including some created by machines), and at recommending daily activities that will satisfy them, hour-by-hour. Machines will come to understand that constant technology use is antithetical to human nature, so in order to promote human wellness, they find ways to impel humans to get out of their houses, interact with other humans, and be in nature. Autonomous taxis will also be widespread and will have low fares, making it easier for people who are isolated due to low income or poor health (such as many elderly people) to go out.
Chatbots will steadily improve their “humanness” over the decade. The instances when AIs say or do something nonsensical will get less and less frequent. Dumber people, children, and people with some types of mental illness will be the first ones to start insisting their AIs are intelligent like humans. Later, average people will start claiming the same. By the end of the decade, a personal assistant AI like “Samantha” from the movie Her will be commercially available. AI personal assistants will have convincing, simulated personalities that seem to have the same depth as humans. Users will be able to pick from among personality profiles or to build their own.
Chatbots will be able to have intelligent conversations with humans about politics and culture, to identify factually wrong beliefs, biases, and cognitive blind spots in individuals, and to effectively challenge them through verbal discussion and debate. The potential will exist for technology to significantly enlighten the human population and to reduce sociopolitical polarization. However, it’s unclear how many people will choose to use this technology.
Turing-Test-capable chatbots will also supercharge the problem of online harassment, character assassination, and deliberate disinformation by spamming the internet with negative reviews, bullying messages, emails to bosses, and humiliating “deepfake” photos and videos of targeted people. Today’s “troll farms” where humans sit at computer terminals following instructions to write bad reviews for specific people or businesses will be replaced by AI trolls that can pump out orders of magnitude more content per day. And just as people today can “buy likes” for their social media accounts or business webpages, people in the future will be able, at low cost, to buy harassment campaigns against other people and organizations they dislike. Discerning between machine-generated and human-generated internet content will be harder and more important than ever.
House robots will start becoming common in rich countries. They will be slower at doing household tasks than humans, but will still save people hours of labor per week. They may or may not be humanoid. For the sake of safety and minimizing annoyance, most robots will do their work when humans aren’t around. As in, you would come home from work every day and find the floors vacuumed, the lawn mowed, and your laundered clothes in your dresser, with nary a robot in sight since it will have gone back into its closet to recharge. You would never hear the commotion of a clothes washing machine, a vacuum cleaner or a lawnmower. All the work would get done when you were away, as if by magic.
People will start having genuine personal relationships with AIs and robots. For example, people will resist upgrading to new personal assistant AIs because they will have emotional attachments to their old ones. The destruction of a helper robot or AI might be as emotionally traumatic to some people as the death of a human relative.
Farm robots that are better than humans at fine motor tasks like picking strawberries humans will start becoming widespread.
Self-driving cars will become cheap enough and practical enough for average income people to buy, and their driving behavior will become as efficient as an average human. Over the course of this decade, there will be rapid adoption of self-driving cars in rich countries. Freed from driving, people will switch to doing things like watching movies/TV and eating. Car interiors will change accordingly. Road fatalities, and the concomitant demands for traffic police, paramedics, E.R. doctors, car mechanics, and lawyers will sharply decrease. The car insurance industry will shrivel, forcing consolidation. (Humans in those occupations will also face increasing levels of direct job competition from machines over the course of the decade.)
Private owners of autonomous cars will start renting them out while not in use as taxis and package delivery vehicles. Your personal, autonomous car will drive you to work, then spend eight hours making money for you doing side jobs, and will be waiting for you outside your building at the end of the day.
The “big box” business model will start taking over the transportation and car repair industry thanks to the rise of electric, self-driving vehicles and autonomous taxis in place of personal car ownership. The multitudes of small, scattered car repair shops will be replaced by large, centralized car repair facilities that themselves resemble factory assembly lines. Self-driving vehicles will drive to them to have their problems diagnosed and fixed, sparing their human owners from having to waste their time sitting in waiting rooms.
The same kinds of facilities will make inroads into the junk yard industry, as they would have all the right tooling to cheaply and rapidly disassemble old vehicles, test the parts for functionality, and shunt them to disposal or individual resale. (The days of hunting through junkyards by yourself for a car part you need will eventually end–it will all be on eBay. )
Car ownership won’t die out because it will still be a status symbol, and having a car ready in your driveway will always be more convenient than having to wait even just two minutes for an Uber cab to arrive at the curb. People are lazy.
The ad hoc car rental model exemplified by autonomous Uber cabs and private people renting out their autonomous cars when not in use faces a challenge since daily demand for cars peaks during morning rush hour and afternoon rush hour. In other words, everyone needs a car at the same time each day, so the ratio of cars : people can’t deviate much from, say, 1:2. Of course, if more people telecommuted (almost certain in the future thanks to better VR, faster broadband, and tech-savvy Millennials reaching middle age and taking over the workplace), and if flexible schedules became more widespread (also likely, but within certain limits since most offices can’t function efficiently unless they have “all hands on deck” for at least a few hours each day), the ratio could go even lower. However, there’s still a bottom limit to how few cars a country will need to provide adequate daily transportation for its people.
Private delivery services will get cheaper and faster thanks to autonomous vehicles.
Automation will start having a major impact on the global economy. Machines will compensate for the shrinkage of the working-age human population in the developed world. Countries with “graying” populations like Japan and Germany will experience a new wave of economic growth. Demand for immigrant laborers will decrease across the world because of machines.
There will be a worldwide increase in the structural unemployment rate thanks to better and cheaper narrow AIs and robots. A plausible scenario would be for the U.S. unemployment rate to be 10%–which was last the case at the nadir of the Great Recession–but for every other economic indicator to be strong. The clear message would be that human labor is becoming decoupled from the economy.
Combining all the best AI and robotics technologies, it will be possible to create general-purpose androids that could function better in the real world (e.g. – perform in the workplace, learn new things, interact with humans, navigate public spaces, manage personal affairs) than the bottom 10% of humans (e.g. – elderly people, the disabled, criminals, the mentally ill, people with poor language abilities or low IQs), and in some narrow domains, the androids will be superhuman (e.g. – physical strength, memory, math abilities). Note that businesses will still find it better to employ task-specific, non-human-looking robots instead of general purpose androids.
By the end of this decade, only poor people, lazy people, and conspiracy theorists (like anti-vaxxers) won’t have their genomes sequenced. It will be trivially cheap, and in fact free for many people (some socialized health care systems will fully subsidize it), and enough will be known about the human genome to make it worthwhile to have the information.
Computers will be able to accurately deduce a human’s outward appearance based on only a DNA sample. This will aid police detectives, and will have other interesting uses, such as allowing parents to see what their unborn children will look like as adults, or allowing anyone to see what they’d look like if they were of the opposite sex (one sex chromosome replaced).
Trivially cheap gene sequencing and vastly improved knowledge of the human genome will give rise to a “human genome black market,” in which people secretly obtain DNA samples from others, sequence them, and use the data for their own ends. For example, a politician could be blackmailed by an enemy who threatened to publish a list of his genetic defects or the identities of his illegitimate children. Stalkers (of celebrities and ordinary people) would also be interested in obtaining the genetic information of the people they were obsessed with. It is practically impossible to prevent the release of one’s DNA since every discarded cup, bottle, or utensil has a sample.
Markets will become brutally competitive and efficient thanks to AIs. Companies will sharply grasp consumer demand through real-time surveillance, and consumers will be alerted to bargains by their personal AIs and devices (e.g. – your AR glasses will visually highlight good deals as you walk through the aisles of a store). Your personal assistant AIs and robots will look out for your self-interest by countering the efforts of other AIs to sway your spending habits in ways that benefit companies and not you.
“Digital immortality” will become possible for average people. Personal assistant AIs, robot servants, and other monitoring devices will be able, through observation alone, to create highly accurate personality profiles of individual humans, and to anticipate their behavior with high fidelity. Voices, mannerisms and other biometrics will be digitally reproducible without any hint of error. Digital simulacra of individual humans will be further refined by having them take voluntary personality tests, and by uploading their genomes, brain scans and other body scans. Even if all of the genetic and biological data couldn’t be made sense of at the moment it was uploaded to an individual’s digital profile, there will be value in saving it since it might be decipherable in the future. (Note that “digital immortality” is not the same as “mind uploading.”)
Life expectancy will have increased by a few years thanks to pills and therapies that slightly extend human lifespan. Like, you take a $20 pill each day starting at age 20 and you end up dying at age 87 instead of age 84.
Global oil consumption will peak as people continue switching to other power sources.
Earliest possible date for the first manned Mars mission.
Movie subtitles and the very notion of there being “foreign language films” will become obsolete. Computers will be able to perfectly translate any human language into another, to create perfect digital imitations of any human voice, and to automatically apply CGI so that the mouth movements of people in video footage matches the translated words they’re speaking. The machines will also be able to reproduce detailed aspects of an actor’s speech, such as cadence, rhythm, tone and timbre, emotion, and accent, and to convey them accurately in another language.
Computers will also be able to automatically enhance and upscale old films by accurately colorizing them, removing defects like scratches, and sharpening or focusing footage (one technique will involve interpolating high-res still photos of long-dead actors onto the faces of those same actors in low-res moving footage). Computer enhancement will be so good that we’ll be able to watch films from the early 20th century with near-perfect image and audio clarity.
CGI will get so refined than moviegoers with 20/20 vision won’t be able to see the difference between footage of unaltered human actors and footage of 100% CGI actors.
Lifelike CGI and “performance capture” will enable “digital resurrections” of dead actors. Computers will be able to scan through every scrap of footage with, say, John Wayne in it, and to produce a perfect CGI simulacrum of him that even speaks with his natural voice, and it will be seamlessly inserted into future movies. Elderly actors might also license movie studios to create and use digital simulacra of their younger selves in new movies. The results will be very fascinating, but might also worsen Hollywood’s problem with making formulaic content.
China’s military will get strong enough to defeat U.S. forces in the western Pacific. This means that, in a conventional war for control of the Spratly Islands and/or Taiwan, China would have >50% odds of winning. This shift in the local balance of power does not mean China will start a conflict.
The quality and sophistication of China’s best military technology will surpass Russia’s best technology in all or almost all categories. However, it will still lag the U.S.
2040s
The world and peoples’ outlooks and priorities will be very different than they were in 2019. Cheap renewable energy will have become widespread and totally negated any worries about an “energy crisis” ever happening, except in exotic, hypothetical scenarios about the distant future. There will be little need for immigration thanks to machine labor and cross-border telecommuting (VR, telepresence, and remote-controlled robots will be so advanced that even blue-collar jobs involving manual labor will be outsourced to workers living across borders). Moreover, there will be a strong sense in most Western countries that they’re already “diverse enough,” and that there are no further cultural benefits to letting in more foreigners since large communities of most foreign ethnic groups will already exist within their borders. There will be more need than ever for strong social safety nets and entitlement programs thanks to technological unemployment. AI will be a central political and social issue. It won’t be the borderline sci-fi, fringe issue it was in 2019.
Automation, mass unemployment, wealth inequalities between the owners of capital and everyone else, and differential access to expensive human augmentation technologies (like genetic engineering) will produce overwhelming political pressure for some kind of wealth redistribution and social safety net expansion. Countries that have diligently made small, additive reforms as necessary over the preceding decades will be untroubled. However, countries that failed to adapt their political and economic systems will face upheaval.
2045 will pass without the Technological Singularity happening. Ray Kurzweil will either celebrate his 97th birthday in a wheelchair, or as a popsicle frozen at the Alcor Foundation.
Supercomputers that match or surpass upper-level estimates of the human brain’s computational capabilities will cost a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars apiece, meaning tech companies and universities will be able to afford large numbers of them for AI R&D projects, accelerating progress in the field. Hardware will no longer be the limiting factor to building AGI. If it hasn’t been built yet, it will be due to failure to figure out how to arrange the hardware in the right way to support intelligent thought, and/or to a failure to develop the necessary software.
With robots running the economy, it will be common for businesses to operate 24/7: restaurants will never close, online orders made at 3:00 am will be packed in boxes by 3:10 am, and autonomous delivery trucks will only stop to refuel, exchange cargo, or get preventative maintenance.
Advanced energy technology, robot servants, 3D printers, telepresence, and other technologies will allow people to live largely “off-grid” if they choose, while still enjoying a level of comfort that 2019 people would envy.
Recycling will become much more efficient and practical thanks to house robots properly cleaning, sorting, and crushing/compacting waste before disposing of it. Automated sorting machines at recycling centers will also be much better than they are today. Today, recycling programs are hobbled because even well-meaning humans struggle to remember which of their trash items are recyclable and which aren’t since the acceptable items vary from one municipality to the next, and as a result, recycling centers get large amounts of unusable material, which they must filter out at great cost. House robots would remember it perfectly.
Thanks to this diligence, house robots will also increase backyard composting, easing the burden on municipal trash services.
It will be common for cities, towns and states to heavily restrict or ban human-driven vehicles within their boundaries. A sea change in thinking will happen as autonomous cars become accepted as “the norm,” and human-driven cars start being thought of as unusual and dangerous.
Over 90% of new car sales in developed countries will be for electric vehicles. Just as the invention of the automobile transformed horses into status goods used for leisure, the rise of electric vehicles will transform internal combustion vehicles into a niche market for richer people.
A global “family tree” showing how all humans are related will be built using written genealogical records and genomic data from the billions of people who have had their DNA sequenced. It will become impossible to hide illegitimate children, and it will also become possible for people to find “genetic doppelgangers”–other people they have no familial relationship to, but with whom, by some coincidence, they share a very large number of genes.
Improved knowledge of human genetics and its relevance to personality traits and interests will strengthen AI’s ability to match humans with friends, lovers, and careers. Rising technological unemployment will create a need for machines to match human workers with the remaining jobs in as efficient a manner as possible.
Realistic robot sex bots that can move and talk will exist. They won’t perfectly mimic humans, but will be “good enough” for most users. Using them will be considered weird and “for losers” at first, but in coming decades it will go mainstream, following the same pattern as Internet dating. [If we think of sex as a type of task, and if we agree that machines will someday be able to do all tasks better than humans, then it follows that robots will be better than humans at sex.]
2050s
This is the earliest possible time that AGI/SAI will be invented. It will not be able to instantly change everything in the world or to initiate a Singularity, but it will rapidly grow in intelligence, wealth, and power. It will probably be preceded by successful computer simulations of the brains of progressively more complex model organisms, such as flatworms, fruit flies, and lab rats.
Humans will be heavily dependent upon their machines for almost everything (e.g. – friendship, planning the day, random questions to be answered, career advice, legal counseling, medical checkups, driving cars), and the dependency will be so ingrained that humans will reflexively assume that “The Machines are always right.” Consciously and unconsciously, people will yield more and more of their decision-making and opinion-forming to machines, and find that they and the world writ large are better off for it. This will be akin to having an angel on your shoulder watching your surroundings and watching you, and giving you constructive advice all the time.
In the developed world, less than 50% of people between age 22 and 65 will have gainful full-time jobs. However, if unprofitable full-time jobs that only persist thanks to government subsidies (such as someone running a small coffee shop and paying the bills with their monthly UBI check) and full-time volunteer “jobs” (such as picking up trash in the neighborhood) are counted, most people in that age cohort will be “doing stuff” on a full-time basis.
The doomsaying about Global Warming will start to quiet down as the world’s transition to clean energy hits full stride and predictions about catastrophes from people like Al Gore fail to pan out by their deadlines. Sadly, people will just switch to worrying about and arguing about some new set of doomsday prophecies about something else.
By almost all measures, standards of living will be better in 2050 than today. People will commonly have all types of wonderful consumer devices and appliances that we can’t even fathom. However, some narrow aspects of daily life are likely to worsen, such as overcrowding and further erosion of the human character. Just as people today have short memories and take too many things for granted, so shall people in the 2050s fail to appreciate how much the standard of living has risen since today, and they will ignore all the steady triumphs humanity has made over its problems, and by default, people will still believe the world is constantly on the verge of collapsing and that things are always getting worse.
Cheap desalination will provide humanity with unlimited amounts of drinking water and end the prospect of “water wars.”
Mass surveillance and ubiquitous technology will have minimized violent crime and property crime in developed countries: It will be almost impossible to commit such crimes without a surveillance camera or some other type of sensor detecting the act, or without some device recording the criminal’s presence in the area at the time of the act. House robots will contribute by effectively standing guard over your property at night while you sleep.
It will be common for people to have health monitoring devices on and inside of their bodies that continuously track things like their heart rate, blood pressure, respiration rate, and gene expression. If a person has a health emergency or appears likely to have one, his or her devices will send out a distress signal alerting EMS and nearby random citizens. If you walked up to such a person while wearing AR glasses, you would see their vital statistics and would receive instructions on how to assist them (i.e. – How to do CPR). Robots will also be able to render medical aid.
Cities and their suburbs across the world will have experienced massive growth since 2019. Telepresence, relatively easy off-grid living, and technological unemployment will not, on balance, have driven more people out of metro areas than have migrated into them. Farming areas full of flat, boring land will have been depopulated, and many farms will be 100% automated. The people who choose to leave the metro areas for the “wilderness” will concentrate in rural areas (including national parks) where the climate is good, the natural scenery is nice, and there are opportunities for outdoor recreation. Real estate prices will, in inflation-adjusted terms, be much higher in most metro areas and places with natural beauty than they were in 2020 because the “supply” of those prime locations is almost fixed, whereas the demand for them is elastic and will rise thanks to population growth, rising incomes, and the aforementioned technology advancements.
Therapeutic cloning and stem cell therapies will become useful and will effectively extend human lifespan. For example, a 70-year-old with a failing heart will be able to have a new one grown in a lab using his own DNA, and then implanted into his chest to replace the failing original organ. The new heart will be equivalent to what he had when at age 18 years, so it will last another 52 years before it too fails. In a sense, this will represent age reversal to one part of his body.
The first healthy clone of an adult human will be born.
Many factories, farms, and supply chains will be 100% automated, and it will be common for goods to not be touched by a human being’s hands until they reach their buyers. Robots will deliver Amazon packages to your doorstep and even carry them into your house. Items ordered off the internet will appear inside your house a few hours later, as if by magic.
Smaller versions of the robots used on automated farms will be available at low cost to average people, letting them effortlessly create backyard gardens. This will boost global food production and let people have greater control over where their food comes from and what it contains.
The last of America’s Cold War-era weapon platforms (e.g. – the B-52 bomber, F-15 fighter, M1 Abrams tank, Nimitz aircraft carrier) will finally be retired from service. There will be instances where four generations of people from the same military family served on the same type of plane or ship.
Cheap guided bullets, which can make midair course changes and be fired out of conventional man-portable rifles, will become common in advanced armies.
Personal “cloaking devices” made of clothes studded with pinhole cameras and thin, flexible sheets of LEDs, colored e-ink, or some metamaterial with similar abilities will be commercially available. The cameras will monitor the appearance of the person’s surroundings and tell the display pixels to change their colors to match. Ski masks made of the same material would let wearers change their facial features, fooling most face recognition cameras and certainly fooling the unaided eyes of humans. The pixels could also be made to glow bright white, allowing the wearer to turn any part of his body into a flashlight.
Powered exoskeletons will become practical for a wide range of applications, mainly due to improvements in batteries. For example, a disabled person could use a lightweight exoskeleton with a battery the size of a purse to walk around for a whole day on a single charge, and a soldier in a heavy-duty exoskeleton with a large backpack battery could do a day of marching on a single charge. (Note: Even though it will be technologically possible to equip infantrymen with combat exoskeletons, armies might reject the idea due to other impracticalities.)
There will be no technological or financial barrier to building powered combat exoskeletons that have cloaking devices.
The richest person alive will achieve a $1 trillion net worth.
It will be technologically and financially feasible for small aircraft to produce zero net carbon emissions. The aircraft might use conventional engines powered by carbon-neutral synthetic fossil fuels that cost no more than normal fossil fuels, or they might have electric engines and very energy-dense batteries or fuel cells.
2060s
Machines will be better at satisfyingly matching humans with fields of study, jobs, friends, romantic partners, hobbies, and daily activities than most humans can do for themselves. Machines themselves will make better friends, confidants, advisers, and even lovers than humans. Additionally, machines will be smarter and more skilled at humans in most areas of knowledge and types of work. A cultural sea change will happen, in which most humans come to trust, rely upon, defend, and love machines.
House robots and human-sized worker robots will be as strong, agile, and dexterous as most humans, and their batteries will be energy-dense enough to power them for most of the day. A typical American family might have multiple robot servants that physically follow around the humans each day to help with tasks. The family members will also be continuously monitored and “followed” by A.I.s embedded in their portable personal computing devices and possibly in their bodies.
Cheap home delivery of groceries, robot chefs, and a vast trove of free online recipes will enable people in average households to eat restaurant-quality meals at home every day, at low cost. Predictive algorithms that can appropriately choose new meals for humans based on their known taste preferences and other factors will determine the menu, and many people will face a culinary “satisfaction paradox.”
Machines will understand humans individually and at the species level better than humans understand themselves. They will have highly accurate personality models of most humans along with a comprehensive grasp of human sociology, human decision-making, human psychology, human cognitive biases, and human nature, and will pool the information to accurately predict human behavior. A nascent version of a 1:1 computer simulation of the Earth–with the human population modeled in great detail–will be created.
Machines will be better teachers than most trained humans. The former will have much sharper grasps of their pupils’ individual strengths, weaknesses, interests, and learning styles, and will be able to create and grade tests in a much fairer and less biased manner than humans. Every person will have his own tutor.
There will be a small, permanent human presence on the Moon.
If a manned Mars mission hasn’t happened yet, then there will be intense pressure to do so by the centennial of the first Moon landing (1969).
The worldwide number of supercentenarians–people who are at least 110 years old–will be sharply higher than it was in 2019: Their population size could be 10 times bigger or more.
Advances in a variety of technologies will make it possible to cryonically freeze humans in a manner that doesn’t pulverize their tissue. However, the technology needed to safely thaw them out won’t be invented for decades.
China will effectively close the technological, military, and standard of living gaps with other developed countries. Aside from the unpleasantness of being a more crowded place, life in China won’t be worse overall than life in Japan or the average European country. Importantly, China’s pollution levels will be much lower than they are today thanks to a variety of factors.
Small drones (mostly aerial) will have revolutionized warfare, terrorism, assassinations, and crime and will be mature technologies. An average person will be able to get a drone of some kind that can follow his orders to find and kill other people or to destroy things.
Countermeasures against those small drones will also have evolved, and might include defensive drones and mass surveillance networks to detect drone attacks early on. The networks would warn people via their body-worn devices of incoming drone attacks or of sightings of potentially hostile drones. The body-worn devices, such as smartphones and AR glasses, might even have their own abilities to automatically detect drones by sight and sound and to alert their wearers.
2070s
100 years after the U.S. “declared war” on cancer, there still will not be a “cure” for most types of cancer, but vaccination, early detection, treatment, and management of cancer will be vastly better, and in countries with modern healthcare systems, most cancer diagnoses will not reduce a person’s life expectancy. Consider that diabetes and AIDS were once considered “death sentences” that would invariably kill people within a few years of diagnosis, until medicines were developed that transformed them into treatable, chronic health conditions.
Hospital-acquired infections will be far less of a problem than they are in 2020 thanks to better sterilization practices, mostly made possible by robots.
It will be technologically and financially feasible for large commercial aircraft to produce zero net carbon emissions. The aircraft might use conventional engines powered by synthetic fossil fuels, or they might have electric engines and very energy-dense batteries or fuel cells.
Digital or robotic companions that seem (or actually are) intelligent, funny, and loving will be easier for humans to associate with than other humans.
Technology will enable the creation of absolute surveillance states, where all human behavior is either constantly monitored or is inferred with high accuracy based on available information. Even a person’s innermost thoughts will be knowable thanks to technologies that monitor him or her for the slightest things like microexpressions, twitches, changes in voice tone, and eye gazes. When combined with other data regarding how the person spends their time and money, it will be possible to read their minds. The Thought Police will be a reality in some countries.
2100
Humans probably won’t be the dominant intelligent life forms on Earth.
Latest possible time that AGI/SAI will be invented. By this point, computer hardware will so powerful that we could do 1:1 digital simulations of human brains. If our AI still falls far short of human-like general intelligence and creativity, then it might be that only organic substrates have the necessary properties to support them.
The worst case scenario is that AGI/Strong AI will have not been invented yet, but thousands of different types of highly efficient, task-specific Narrow AIs will have (often coupled to robot bodies), and they will fill almost every labor niche better than human workers ever could (“Death by a Thousand Cuts” job automation scenario). Humans grow up in a world where no one has to work, and the notion of drudge work, suffering through a daily commute, and involuntarily waking up at 6:00 am five days a week is unfathomable. Every human will have machines that constantly monitor them or follow them around, and meet practically all their needs.
Telepresence technology will also be very advanced, allowing humans to do nearly any task remotely, from any other place in the world, in safety and comfort. This will include cognitive tasks and hands-on tasks. If any humans still have jobs, they’ll be able to work from anywhere.
The world could in many ways resemble Ray Kurzweil’s predicted Post-Singularity world. However, the improvements and changes will have accrued thanks to decades of AGI/Strong AI steady effort. Everything will not instantly change on DD/MM/2045 as Kurzweil suggests it will.
Hundreds of millions, and possibly billions, of “digitally immortal avatars” of dead humans will exist, and you will be able to interact with them through a variety of means (in FIVR, through devices like earpieces and TV screens, in the real world if the avatar takes over an android body resembling the human it was based on).
A weak sort of immortality will be available thanks to self-cloning, immortal digital avatars, and perhaps mind uploading. You could clone yourself and instruct your digital avatar–which would be a machine programmed with your personality and memories–to raise the clone and ensure it developed to resemble you. Your digital avatar might have an android body or could exist in a disembodied state.
It will be possible to make clones of humans using only their digital format genomic data. In other words, if you had a .txt file containing a person’s full genetic code, you could use that by itself to make a living, breathing clone. Having samples of their cells would not be necessary.
The “DNA black market” that arose in the 2030s will pose an even bigger threat since it will be now possible to use DNA samples alone or their corresponding .txt files to clone a person or to produce a sperm or egg cell and, in turn, a child. Potential abuses include random people cloning or having the children of celebrities they are obsessed with, or cloning billionaires in the hopes of milking the clones for money. Important people who might be targets of such thefts will go to pains to prevent their DNA from being known. Since dead people have no rights, third parties might be able to get away with cloning or making gametes of the deceased.
Life expectancy escape velocity and perhaps medical immortality will be achieved. It will come not from magical, all-purpose nanomachines that fix all your body’s cells and DNA, but from a combination of technologies, including therapeutic cloning of human organs, cybernetic replacements for organs and limbs, and stem cell therapies that regenerate ageing tissues and organs inside the patient’s body. The treatments will be affordable in large part thanks to robot doctors and surgeons who work almost for free, and to medical patents expiring.
All other aspects of medicine and healthcare will have radically advanced. There will be vaccines and cures for almost all contagious diseases. We will be masters of human genetic engineering and know exactly how to produce people that today represent the top 1% of the human race (holistically combining IQ, genetic health, physical attractiveness, and likable/prosocial personality traits). However, the value of even a genius-IQ human will be questionable since intelligent machines will be so much smarter.
Augmentative cybernetics (including direct brain-to-computer links) will exist and be in common use.
Full-immersion virtual reality (FIVR) will exist wherein AI game masters constantly tailor environments, NPCs and events to suit each player’s needs and to keep them entertained. Every human will have his own virtual game universe where he’s #1. With no jobs in the real world to occupy them, it’s quite possible that a large fraction of the human race will willingly choose to live in FIVR. (Related to the satisfaction paradox) Elements of these virtual environments could be pornographic and sexual, allowing people to gratify any type of sexual fetish or urge with computer-generated scenarios and partners.
More generally, AIs and humans whose creativity is turbocharged by machines will create enjoyable, consumable content (e.g. – films, TV shows, songs, artwork, jokes, new types of meals) faster than non-augmented humans can consume it. As a simple example of what this will be like, assume you have 15 hours of free time per day, that you love spending it listening to music, and each day, your favorite bands produce 16 hours worth of new songs that you really like.
The vast majority of unaugmented human beings will no longer be assets that can invent things and do useful work: they will be liabilities that do (almost) everything worse than intelligent machines and augmented humans. Ergo, the size of a nation’s human population will subtract from its economic and military power, and radical shifts in geopolitics are possible. Geographically large but sparsely populated countries like Russia, Australia and Canada might become very strong.
The transition to green energy sources will be complete, and humans will no longer be net emitters of greenhouse gases. The means will exist to start reducing global temperatures to restore the Earth to its pre-industrial state, but people will resist because they will have gotten used to the warmer climate. People living in Canada and Russia won’t want their countries to get cold again.
Synthetic meat will taste no different from animal meat, and will be at least as cheap to make. The raising and/or killing of animals for food will be be illegal in many countries, and trends will clearly show the practice heading for worldwide ban.
The means to radical alter human bodies, alter memories, and alter brain structures will be available. The fundamental bases of human existence and human social dynamics will change unpredictably once differences in appearance/attractiveness, intelligence, and personality traits can be eliminated at will. Individuals won’t be defined by fixed attributes anymore.
Brain implants will make “telepathy” possible between humans, machines and animals. Computers, sensors and displays will be embedded everywhere in the built environment and in nature, allowing humans with brain implants to interface with and control things around them through thought alone.
Brain implants and brain surgeries will also be used to enhance IQ, change personality traits, and strengthen many types of skills.
Technologically augmented humans and androids will have many abilities and qualities that ancient people considered “Godlike,” such as medical immortality, the ability to control objects by thought, telepathy, perfect memories, and superhuman senses.
Flying cars designed to carry humans could be common, but they will be flown by machines, not humans. Ground vehicles will retain many important advantages (fuel efficiency, cargo capacity, safety, noise level, and more) and won’t become obsolete. Instead of flying cars, it’s more likely that there will be millions of small, autonomous helicopters and VTOL aircraft that will cheaply ferry people through dense, national networks of helipads and airstrips. Autonomous land vehicles would take take passengers to and from the landing sites. (https://www.militantfuturist.com/why-flying-cars-never-took-off-and-probably-never-will/)
The notion of vehicles (e.g. – cars, planes, and boats) polluting the air will be an alien concept.
Advanced nanomachines could exist.
Vastly improved materials and routine use of very advanced computer design simulations (including simulations done in quantum computers) will mean that manufactured objects of all types will be optimally engineered in every respect, and might seem to have “magical” properties. For example, a car will be made of hundreds of different types of alloys, plastics, and glass, each optimized for a different part of the vehicle, and car recalls will never happen since the vehicles will undergo vast amounts of simulated testing in every conceivable driving condition in 1:1 virtual simulations of the real world.
Design optimization and the rise of AGI consumption will virtually eliminate planned obsolescence. Products that were deliberately engineered to fail after needlessly short periods, and “new” product lines that were no better than what they replaced, but had non-interchangeable part sizes would be exposed for what they were, and AGI consumers would refuse to buy them. Production will become much more efficient and far fewer things will be thrown out.
Relatively cheap interplanetary travel (probably just to Mars and to space stations and moons that are about as far as Mars) will exist.
Androids that are outwardly indistinguishable from humans will exist, and humans will hold no advantages over them (e.g. – physical dexterity, fine motor control, appropriateness of facial expressions, capacity for creative thought). Some androids will also be indistinguishable to the touch, meaning they will seem to be made of supple flesh and will be the same temperature as human bodies. However, their body parts will not be organic.
Sex robots will be indistinguishable from humans.
Robots that are outwardly identical to sci-fi and fantasy characters and extinct animals, like grey aliens, elves, and dinosaurs, will exist and will occasionally be seen in public. Some weird person will want their robot butler to look like bigfoot.
Machines that are outwardly indistinguishable from animals will also exist, and they will have surveillance and military applications.
Drones, miniaturized smart weapons, and AIs will dominate warfare, from the top level of national strategy down to the simplest act of combat. The world’s strongest military could, with conventional weapons alone, destroy most of the world’s human population in a short period of time.
The construction and daily operation of prisons will have been fully automated, lowering the monetary costs of incarceration. As such, state prosecutors and judges will no longer feel pressure to let accused criminals have plea deals or to give them shorter prison sentences to ease the burdens of prison overcrowding and high overhead costs.
The term “millionaire” will fall out of use in the U.S. and other Western countries since inflation will have rendered $1 million USD only as valuable as $90,000 USD was in 2019 (assuming a constant inflation rate of 3.0%).
There will still be major wealth and income inequality across the human race. However, wealth redistribution, better government services, advances in industrial productivity, and better technologies will ensure that even people in the bottom 1% have all their basic and intermediate life needs meet. In many ways, the poor people of 2100 will have better lives than the rich people of 2020.
2101 – 2200 AD
Humans will definitely stop being the dominant intelligent life forms on Earth.
Many “humans” will be heavily augmented through genetic engineering, other forms of bioengineering, and cybernetics. People who outwardly look like the normal humans of today might actually have extensive internal modifications that give them superhuman abilities. Non-augmented, entirely “natural” humans like people in 2019 will be looked down upon in the same way you might today look at a very low IQ person with sensory impairments. Being forced by your biology to incapacitate yourself for 1/3 of each day to sleep will be tantamount to having a medical disability.
Due to a reduced or nonexistent need for sleep among intelligent machines and augmented humans and to the increased interconnectedness of the planet, global time zones will become much less relevant. It will be common for machines, humans, businesses, and groups to use the same clock–probably Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)–and for activity to proceed on a 24/7 basis, with little regard of Earth’s day/night cycle.
Physical disabilities and defects of appearance that cause untold anguish to people in 2019 will be easily and cheaply fixable. For example, male-pattern baldness and obesity will be completely ameliorated with minor medical interventions like pills or outpatient surgery. Missing or deformed limbs will be easily replaced, all types of plastic surgery (including sex reassignment) will be vastly better and cheaper than today, and spinal cord damage will be totally repairable. The global “obesity epidemic” will disappear. Transsexual people will be able to seamlessly alter their bodies to conform with their preferred genders, or to alter their brains so their gender identities conform with the bodies they were born with.
All sleep disorders will be curable thanks to cybernetics that can use electrical pulses to quickly initiate sleep states in human brains. The same kinds of technologies will also reduce or eliminate the need for humans to sleep, and for people to control their dreams.
Brain-computer interfaces will let people control, pre-program, and, to a limited extent, record their dreams.
Almost all of today’s diseases will be cured.
The means to halt and reverse human aging will be created. The human population will come to be dominated by people who are eternally young and beautiful.
Humans and machines will be immortal. Intelligent beings will find it terrifying and tragic to contemplate what it was like for humans in the past, who lived their lives knowing they were doomed to deteriorate and die.
Extreme longevity, better reproductive technologies that eliminate the need for a human partner to have children, and robots that do domestic work and provide companionship (including sex) will weaken the institution of marriage more than any time in human history. An indefinite lifetime of monogamy will be impossible for most people to commit to.
At reasonable cost, it will be possible for women to create healthy, genetically related children at any point in their lives, and without using the 2019-era, pre-menopausal egg freezing technique. For example, a 90-year-old, menopausal woman will be able to use reproductive technologies to make a baby that shares 50% of her DNA.
Immortality, the automation of work, and widespread material abundance will completely transform lifestyles. With eternity to look forward to, people won’t feel pressured to get as rich as possible as quickly as possible. As stated, marriage will no longer be viewed as a lifetime commitment, and serial monogamy will probably become the norm. Relationships between parents and offspring will change as longevity erases the disparities in generational outlook and maturity that traditionally characterize parent-child interpersonal dynamics (e.g. – 300-year-old dad doesn’t know any better than his 270-year-old son). The “factory model” of public education–defined by conformity, rote memorization, frequent intelligence testing, and curricula structured to serve the needs of the job market–will disappear. The process of education will be custom-tailored to each person in terms of content, pacing, and style of instruction. Students will be much freer to explore subjects that interest them and to pursue those that best match their talents and interests.
Radically extended human lifespans mean it will become much more common to have great-grandparents around. A cure for aging will also lead to families where members separated in age by many decades look the same age and have the same health. Additionally, older family members won’t be burdensome since they will be healthy.
Thanks to radical genetic engineering, there will be “human-looking,” biological people among us that don’t belong to our species, Homo sapiens. Examples could include engineered people who have 48 chromosomes instead of 46, people whose genomes have been shortened thanks to the deletion of junk DNA, or people who look outwardly human but who have radically different genes within their 46 chromosomes, so they have bird-like lungs. Such people wouldn’t be able to naturally breed with Homo sapiens, and would belong to new hominid species.
Extinct species for which we have DNA samples (ex – from passenger pigeons on display in a museum) will “resurrected” using genetic technology.
The technology for safely thawing humans out of cryostasis and returning them to good health will be created.
Suspended animation will become a viable alternative to suicide. Miserable people could “put themselves under,” with instructions to not be revived until the ill circumstances that tormented them had disappeared or until cures for their mental and medical problems were found.
A sort of “time travel” will become possible thanks to technology. Suspended animation will let people turn off their consciousnesses until any arbitrary date in the future. From their perspective, no time will have elapsed between being frozen and being thawed out, even if hundreds of years actually passed between those two events, meaning the suspended animation machine will subjectively be no different from a time machine to them. FIVR paired with data from the global surveillance networks will let people enter highly accurate computer simulations of the past. The data will come from sources like old maps, photos, videos, and the digital avatars of people, living and dead. The computers simulations of past eras will get less accurate as the dates get more distant thanks to a paucity of data.
It will be possible to upload human minds to computers. The uploads will not share the same consciousness as their human progenitors, and will be thought of as “copies.” Mind uploads will be much more sophisticated than the digitally immortal avatars that will come into existence in the 2030s.
Different types of AGIs with fundamentally different mental architectures will exist. For example, some AGIs will be computer simulations of real human brains, while others will have totally alien inner workings. Just as a jetpack and a helicopter enable flight through totally different approaches, so will different types of AGIs be capable of intelligent thought.
Gold, silver, and many other “precious metals” will be worth far less than today, adjusting for inflation, because better ways of extracting (including from seawater) them will have been developed. Space mining might also massively boost supplies of the metals, depressing prices. Diamonds will be nearly worthless thanks to better techniques for making them artificially.
The first non-token quantities of minerals derived from asteroid mining will be delivered to the Earth’s surface. (Finding an asteroid that contains valuable minerals, altering its orbit to bring it closer to Earth, and then waiting for it to get here will take decades. No one will become a trillionaire from asteroid mining until well into the 22nd century.)
Intelligent life from Earth will colonize the entire Solar System, all dangerous space objects in our System will be found, the means to deflect or destroy them will be created, and intelligent machines will redesign themselves to be immune to the effects of radiation, solar flares, gamma rays, and EMP. As such, natural phenomena (including global warming) will no longer threaten the existence of civilization. Intelligent beings will find it terrifying and tragic to contemplate what it was like for humans in the past, who were confined to Earth and at the mercy of planet-killing disasters.
“End of the World” prophecies will become far less relevant since civilization will have spread beyond Earth and could be indefinitely self-sustaining even if Earth were destroyed. Some conspiracy theorists and religious people would deal with this by moving on to belief in “End of the Solar System” prophecies, but these will be based on extremely tenuous reasoning.
The locus of civilization and power in our Solar System will shift away from Earth. The vast majority of intelligent life forms outside of Earth will be nonhuman.
A self-sustaining, off-world industrial base will be created.
Spy satellites with lenses big enough to read license plates and discern facial features will be in Earth orbit.
Space probes made in our Solar System and traveling at sub-light speeds will reach nearby stars.
All of the useful knowledge and great works of art that our civilization has produced or discovered could fit into an advanced memory storage device the size of a thumb drive. It will be possible to pair this with something like a self-replicating Von Neumann Probe, creating small, long-lived machines that would know how to rebuild something exactly like our civilization from scratch. Among other data, they would have files on how to build intelligent machines and cloning labs, and files containing the genomes and mind uploads of billions of unique humans and non-human organisms. Copies of existing beings and of long-dead beings could be “manufactured” anywhere, and loaded with the personality traits and memories of their predecessors. Such machines could be distributed throughout our Solar System as an “insurance policy” against our extinction, or sent to other star systems to seed them with life. Some of the probes could also be hidden in remote, protected locations on Earth.
We will find out whether alien life exists on Mars and the other celestial bodies in our Solar System.
Intelligent machines will get strong enough to destroy the human race, though it’s impossible to assign odds to whether they’ll choose to do so.
If the “Zoo Hypothesis” is right, and if intelligent aliens have decided not to talk to humans until we’ve reached a high level of intellect, ethics, and culture, then the machine-dominated civilization that will exist on Earth this century might be advanced enough to meet their standards. Uncontrollable emotions and impulses, illogical thinking, tribalism, self-destructive behavior, and fear of the unknown will no longer govern individual and group behavior. Aliens could reveal their existence knowing it wouldn’t cause pandemonium.
The government will no longer be synonymous with slowness and incompetence since all bureaucrats will be replaced by machines.
Technology will be seamlessly fused with humans, other biological organisms, and the environment itself.
It will be cheaper and more energy-efficient to grow or synthesize almost all types of food in labs or factories than to grow and harvest it in traditional, open-air farms. Shielded from the weather and pests and not dependent on soil quality, the amounts and prices of foods will be highly consistent over time, and worries about farmland muscling out or polluting natural ecosystems will vanish. Animals will no longer be raised for food. Not only will this benefit animals, but it will benefit humans since it will eliminate a a major source of communicable disease (e.g. – new influenza strains originate in farm animals and, thanks to close contact with human farmers, evolve to infect people thanks to a process called “zoonosis”). Additionally, the means will exist to cheaply and artificially produce organic products, like wool and wood.
A global network of sensors and drones will identify and track every non-microscopic species on the planet. Cryptids like “bigfoot” and the “Loch Ness Monster” will be definitively proven to not exist. The monitoring network will also make it possible to get highly accurate, real-time counts of entire species populations. Mass gathering of DNA samples–either taken directly from organisms or from biological residue they leave behind–will also allow the full genetic diversity of all non-microscopic species to be known.
That same network of sensors and machines will let us monitor the health of all the planet’s ecosystems and to intervene to protect any species. Interventions could include mass, painless sterilizations of species that are throwing the local ecology out of balance, mass vaccinations of species suffering through disease epidemics, reintroductions of extinct species, or widescale genetic engineering of a species.
The technology and means to implement David Pearce’s global “benign stewardship” of nonhuman organic life will become available. (https://youtu.be/KDZ3MtC5Et8) After millennia of inflicting damage and pain to the environment and other species, humanity will have a chance to inaugurate an era free of suffering.
The mass surveillance network will also look skyward and see all anomalous atmospheric phenomena and UFOs.
Robots will clean up all of the garbage created in human history.
Every significant archaeological site will be excavated and every shipwreck found. There will be no work left for people in the antiquities.
Dynamic traffic lane reversal will become the default for all major roadways, sharply increasing road capacity without compromising safety. Autonomous cars that can instantly adapt to changes in traffic direction and that can easily avoid hitting each other even at high speeds will enable the transformation.
This is the fourth…and LAST…entry in my series of blog posts analyzing the accuracy of Ray Kurzweil’s predictions about what things would be like in 2019. These predictions come from his 1998 book The Age of Spiritual Machines. You can view the previous installments of this series here:
“An undercurrent of concern is developing with regard to the influence of machine intelligence. There continue to be differences between human and machine intelligence, but the advantages of human intelligence are becoming more difficult to identify and articulate. Computer intelligence is thoroughly interwoven into the mechanisms of civilization and is designed to be outwardly subservient to apparent human control. On the one hand, human transactions and decisions require by law a human agent of responsibility, even if fully initiated by machine intelligence. On the other hand, few decisions are made without significant involvement and consultation with machine-based intelligence.”
MOSTLY RIGHT
Technological advances have moved concerns over the influence of machine intelligence to the fore in developed countries. In many domains of skill previously considered hallmarks of intelligent thinking, such as driving vehicles, recognizing images and faces, analyzing data, writing short documents, and even diagnosing diseases, machines had achieved human levels of performance by the end of 2019. And in a few niche tasks, such as playing Go, chess, or poker, machines were superhuman. Eroded human dominance in these and other fields did indeed force philosophers and scientists to grapple with the meaning of “intelligence” and “creativity,” and made it harder yet more important to define how human thinking was still special and useful.
While the prospect of artificial general intelligence was still viewed with skepticism, there was no real doubt among experts and laypeople in 2019 that task-specific AIs and robots would continue improving, and without any clear upper limit to their performance. This made technological unemployment and the solutions for it frequent topics of public discussion across the developed world. In 2019, one of the candidates for the upcoming U.S. Presidential election, Andrew Yang, even made these issues central to his political platform.
If “algorithms” is another name for “computer intelligence” in the prediction’s text, then yes, it is woven into the mechanisms of civilization and is ostensibly under human control, but in fact drives human thinking and behavior. To the latter point, great alarm has been raised over how algorithms used by social media companies and advertisers affect sociopolitical beliefs (particularly, conspiracy thinking and closedmindedness), spending decisions, and mental health.
Human transactions and decisions still require a “human agent of responsibility”: Autonomous cars aren’t allowed to drive unless a human is in the driver’s seat, human beings ultimately own and trade (or authorize the trading of) all assets, and no military lets its autonomous fighting machines kill people without orders from a human. The only part of the prediction that seems wrong is the last sentence. Probably most decisions that humans make are done without consulting a “machine-based intelligence.” Consider that most daily purchases (e.g. – where to go for lunch, where to get gas, whether and how to pay a utility bill) involve little thought or analysis. A frighteningly large share of investment choices are also made instinctively, with benefit of little or no research. However, it should be noted that one area of human decision-making, dating, has become much more data-driven, and it was common in 2019 for people to use sorting algorithms, personality test results, and other filters to choose potential mates.
“Public and private spaces are routinely monitored by machine intelligence to prevent interpersonal violence.”
MOSTLY RIGHT
Gunfire detection systems, which are comprised of networks of microphones emplaced across an area and which use machine intelligence to recognize the sounds of gunshots and to triangulate their origins, were emplaced in over 100 cities at the end of 2019. The dominant company in this niche industry, “ShotSpotter,” used human analysts to review its systems’ results before forwarding alerts to local police departments, so the systems were not truly automated, but nonetheless they made heavy use of machine intelligence.
Automated license plate reader cameras, which are commonly mounted next to roads or on police cars, also use machine intelligence and are widespread. The technology has definitely reduced violent crime, as it has allowed police to track down stolen vehicles and cars belonging to violent criminals faster than would have otherwise been possible.
In some countries, surveillance cameras with facial recognition technology monitor many public spaces. The cameras compare the people they see to mugshots of criminals, and alert the local police whenever a wanted person is seen. China is probably the world leader in facial recognition surveillance, and in a famous 2018 case, it used the technology to find one criminal among 60,000 people who attended a concert in Nanchang.
At the end of 2019, several organizations were researching ways to use machine learning for real-time recognition of violent behavior in surveillance camera feeds, but the systems were not accurate enough for commercial use.
“People attempt to protect their privacy with near-unbreakable encryption technologies, but privacy continues to be a major political and social issue with each individual’s practically every move stored in a database somewhere.”
RIGHT
In 2013, National Security Agency (NSA) analyst Edward Snowden leaked a massive number of secret documents, revealing the true extent of his employer’s global electronic surveillance. The world was shocked to learn that the NSA was routinely tracking the locations and cell phone call traffic of millions of people, and gathering enormous volumes of data from personal emails, internet browsing histories, and other electronic communications by forcing private telecom and internet companies (e.g. – Verizon, Google, Apple) to let it secretly search through their databases. Together with British intelligence, the NSA has the tools to spy on the electronic devices and internet usage of almost anyone on Earth.
Edward Snowden
Snowden also revealed that the NSA unsurprisingly had sophisticated means for cracking encrypted communications, which it routinely deployed against people it was spying on, but that even its capabilities had limits. Because some commercially available encryption tools were too time-consuming or too technically challenging to crack, the NSA secretly pressured software companies and computing hardware manufacturers to install “backdoors” in their products, which would allow the Agency to bypass any encryption their owners implemented.
During the 2010s, big tech titans like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple also came under major scrutiny for quietly gathering vast amounts of personal data from their users, and reselling it to third parties to make hundreds of billions of dollars. The decade also saw many epic thefts of sensitive personal data from corporate and government databases, affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
With these events in mind, it’s quite true that concerns over digital privacy and confidentiality of personal data have become “major political and social issues,” and that there’s growing displeasure at the fact that “each individual’s practically every move stored in a database somewhere.” The response has been strongest in the European Union, which, in 2018, enacted the most stringent and impactful law to protect the digital rights of individuals–the “General Data Protection Regulation” (GDPR).
Widespread awareness of secret government surveillance programs and of the risk of personal electronic messages being made public thanks to hacks have also bolstered interest in commercial encryption. “Whatsapp” is a common text messaging app with built-in end-to-end encryption. It was invented in 2016 and had 1.5 billion users by 2019. “Tor” is a web browser with built-in encryption that became relatively common during the 2010s after it was learned even the NSA couldn’t spy on people who used it. Additionally, virtual private networks (VPNs), which provide an intermediate level of data privacy protection for little expense and hassle, are in common use.
“The existence of the human underclass continues as an issue. While there is sufficient prosperity to provide basic necessities (secure housing and food, among others) without significant strain to the economy, old controversies persist regarding issues of responsibility and opportunity.”
RIGHT
It’s unclear whether this prediction pertained to the U.S., to rich countries in aggregate, or to the world as a whole, and “underclass” is not defined, so we can’t say whether it refers only to desperately poor people who are literally starving, or to people who are better off than that but still under major daily stress due to lack of money. Whatever the case, by any reasonable definition, there is an “underclass” of people in almost every country.
In the U.S. and other rich countries, welfare states provide even the poorest people with access to housing, food, and other needs, though there are still those who go without because severe mental illness and/or drug addiction keep them stuck in homeless lifestyles and render them too behaviorally disorganized to apply for government help or to be admitted into free group housing. Some people also live in destitution in rich countries because they are illegal immigrants or fugitives with arrest warrants, and contacting the authorities for welfare assistance would lead to their detection and imprisonment. Political controversy over the causes of and solutions to extreme poverty continues to rage in rich countries, and the fault line usually is about “responsibility” and “opportunity.”
The fact that poor people are likelier to be obese in most OECD countries and that starvation is practically nonexistent there shows that the market, state, and private charity have collectively met the caloric needs of even the poorest people in the rich world, and without straining national economies enough to halt growth. Indeed, across the world writ large, obesity-related health problems have become much more common and more expensive than problems caused by malnutrition. The human race is not financially struggling to feed itself, and would derive net economic benefits from reallocating calories from obese people to people living in the remaining pockets of land (such as war-torn Syria) where malnutrition is still a problem.
There’s also a growing body of evidence from the U.S. and Canada that providing free apartments to homeless people (the “housing first” strategy) might actually save taxpayer money, since removing those people from unsafe and unhealthy street lifestyles would make them less likely to need expensive emergency services and hospitalizations. The issue needs to be studied in further depth before we can reach a firm conclusion, but it’s probably the case that rich countries could give free, basic housing to their homeless without significant additional strain to their economies once the aforementioned types of savings to other government services are accounted for.
“This issue is complicated by the growing component of most employment’s being concerned with the employee’s own learning and skill acquisition. In other words, the difference between those ‘productively’ engaged and those who are not is not always clear.”
PARTLY RIGHT
As I said in part 2 of this review, Kurzweil’s prediction that people in 2019 would be spending most of their time at work acquiring new skills and knowledge to keep up with new technologies was wrong. The vast majority of people have predictable jobs where they do the same sets of tasks over and over. On-the-job training and mandatory refresher training is very common, but most workers devote small shares of their time to them, and the fraction of time spent doing workplace training doesn’t seem significantly different from what it was when the book was published.
From years of personal experience working in large organizations, I can say that it’s common for people to take workplace training courses or work-sponsored night classes (either voluntarily or because their organizations require it) that provide few or no skills or items of knowledge that are relevant to their jobs. Employees who are undergoing these non-value-added training programs have the superficial appearance of being “productively engaged” even if the effort is really a waste, or so inefficient that the training course could have been 90% shorter if taught better. But again, this doesn’t seem different from how things were in past decades.
This means the prediction was partly right, but also of questionable significance in the first place.
“Virtual artists in all of the arts are emerging and are taken seriously. These cybernetic visual artists, musicians, and authors are usually affiliated with humans or organizations (which in turn are comprised of collaborations of humans and machines) that have contributed to their knowledge base and techniques. However, interest in the output of these creative machines has gone beyond the mere novelty of machines being creative.”
MOSTLY RIGHT
The “Deep Dream” computer program made this surrealist portrait.
In 2019, computers could indeed produce paintings, songs, and poetry with human levels of artistry and skill. For example, Google’s “Deep Dream” program is a neural network that can transform almost any image into something resembling a surrealist painting. Deep Dream’s products captured international media attention for how striking, and in many cases, disturbing, they looked.
“Portrait of Edmond de Belamy”
In 2018, a different computer program produced a painting–“Portrait of Edmond de Belamy”–that fetched a record-breaking $423,500 at an art auction. The program was a generative adversarial network (GAN) designed and operated by a small team of people who described themselves as “a collective of researchers, artists, and friends, working with the latest models of deep learning to explore the creative potential of artificial intelligence.” That seems to fulfill the second part of the prediction (“These cybernetic visual artists, musicians, and authors are usually affiliated with humans or organizations (which in turn are comprised of collaborations of humans and machines) that have contributed to their knowledge base and techniques.”)
Machines are also respectable songwriters, and are able to produce original songs based on the styles of human artists. For example, a computer program called “EMMY” (an acronym for “Experiments in Musical Intelligence”) is able to make instrumental musical scores that accurately mimic those of famous human musicians, like Bach and Mozart (fittingly, Ray Kurzweil made a simpler computer program that did essentially the same thing when he was a teenager). Listen to a few of the songs and judge their quality for yourself:
Computer scientists at Google have built a neural network called “JukeBox” that is even more advanced than EMMY, and which can produce songs that are complete with simulated human lyrics. While the words don’t always make sense and there’s much room for improvement, most humans have no creative musical talent at all and couldn’t do any better, and the quality, sophistication and coherence of the entirely machine-generated songs is very impressive (audio samples are available online).
Also at Google, an artificial intelligence program called the “Generative Pretrained Transformer” was invented to understand and write text. In 2019, the second version of the program, “GPT-2,” made its debut, and showed impressive skill writing poetry, short news articles and other content, with minimal prompting from humans (it was also able to correctly answer basic questions about text it was shown and to summarize the key points, demonstrating some degree of reading comprehension). While often clunky and sometimes nonsensical, the passages that GPT-2 generates nonetheless fall within the “human range” of writing ability since they are very hard to tell apart from the writings of a child, or of an adult with a mental or cognitive disability. Some of the machine-written passages also read like choppy translations of text that was well-written in whatever its original language was.
Much of GPT-2’s poetry is also as good as–or, as bad as–that written by its human counterparts:
And they have seen the last light fail; By day they kneel and pray; But, still they turn and gaze upon The face of God to-day.
And God is touched and weeps anew For the lost souls around; And sorrow turns their pale and blue, And comfort is not found.
They have not mourned in the world of men, But their hearts beat fast and sore, And their eyes are filled with grief again, And they cease to shed no tear.
And the old men stand at the bridge in tears, And the old men stand and groan, And the gaunt grey keepers by the cross And the spent men hold the crown.
And their eyes are filled with tears, And their staves are full of woe. And no light brings them any cheer, For the Lord of all is dead
In conclusion, the prediction is right that there were “virtual artists” in 2019 in multiple fields of artistic endeavor. Their works were of high enough quality and “humanness” to be of interest for reasons other than the novelties of their origins. They’ve raised serious questions among humans about the nature of creative thinking, and whether machines are capable or soon will be. Finally, the virtual artists were “affiliated with” or, more accurately, owned and controlled by groups of humans.
“Visual, musical, and literary art created by human artists typically involve a collaboration between human and machine intelligence.”
UNCLEAR
It’s impossible to assess this prediction’s veracity because the meanings of “collaboration” and “machine intelligence” are undefined (also, note that the phrase “virtual artists” is not used in this prediction). If I use an Instagram filter to transform one of the mundane photos I took with my camera phone into a moody, sepia-toned, artistic-looking image, does the filter’s algorithm count as a “machine intelligence”? Does my mere use of it, which involves pushing a button on my smartphone, count as a “collaboration” with it?
Likewise, do recording studios and amateur musicians “collaborate with machine intelligence” when they use computers for post-production editing of their songs? When you consider how thoroughly computer programs like “Auto-Tune” can transform human vocals, it’s hard to argue that such programs don’t possess “machine intelligence.” This instructional video shows how it can make any mediocre singer’s voice sound melodious, and raises the question of how “good” the most famous singers of 2019 actually are: Can Anyone Sing With Autotune?! (Real Voice Vs. Autotune)
If I type a short story or fictional novel on my computer, and the word processing program points out spelling and usage mistakes, and even makes sophisticated recommendations for improving my writing style and grammar, am I collaborating with machine intelligence? Even free word processing programs have automatic spelling checkers, and affordable apps like Microsoft Word, Grammarly and ProWritingAid have all of the more advanced functions, meaning it’s fair to assume that most fiction writers interact with “machine intelligence” in the course of their work, or at least have the option to. Microsoft Word also has a “thesaurus” feature that lets users easily alter the wordings of their stories.
“The type of artistic and entertainment product in greatest demand (as measured by revenue generated) continues to be virtual-experience software, which ranges from simulations of ‘real’ experiences to abstract environments with little or no corollary in the physical world.”
WRONG
Analyzing this prediction first requires us to know what “virtual-experience software” refers to. As indicated by the phrase “continues to be,” Kurzweil used it earlier, specifically, in the “2009” chapter where he issued predictions for that year. There, he indicates that “virtual-experience software” is another name for “virtual reality software.” With that in mind, the prediction is wrong. As I showed previously in this analysis, the VR industry and its technology didn’t progress nearly as fast as Kurzweil forecast.
That said, the video game industry’s revenues exceed those of nearly all other art and entertainment industries. Globally for 2019, video games generated about $152.1 billion in revenue, compared to $41.7 billion for the film. The music industry’s 2018 figures were $19.1 billion. Only the sports industry, whose global revenues were between $480 billion and $620 billion, was bigger than video games (note that the two cross over in the form of “E-Sports”).
Revenues from virtual reality games totaled $1.2 billion in 2019, meaning 99% of the video game industry’s revenues that year DID NOT come from “virtual-experience software.” The overwhelming majority of video games were viewed on flat TV screens and monitors that display 2D images only. However, the graphics, sound effects, gameplay dynamics, and plots have become so high quality that even these games can feel immersive, as if you’re actually there in the simulated environment. While they don’t meet the technical definition of being “virtual reality” games, some of them are so engrossing that they might as well be.
“The primary threat to [national] security comes from small groups combining human and machine intelligence using unbreakable encrypted communication. These include (1) disruptions to public information channels using software viruses, and (2) bioengineered disease agents.”
MOSTLY WRONG
Terrorism, cyberterrorism, and cyberwarfare were serious and growing problems in 2019, but it isn’t accurate to say they were the “primary” threats to the national security of any country. Consider that the U.S., the world’s dominant and most advanced military power, spent $16.6 billion on cybersecurity in FY 2019–half of which went to its military and the other half to its civilian government agencies. As enormous as that sum is, it’s only a tiny fraction of America’s overall defense spending that fiscal year, which was a $726.2 billion “base budget,” plus an extra $77 billion for “overseas contingency operations,” which is another name for combat and nation-building in Iraq, Afghanistan, and to a lesser extent, in Syria.
In other words, the world’s greatest military power only allocates 2% of its defense-related spending to cybersecurity. That means hackers are clearly not considered to be “the primary threat” to U.S. national security. There’s also no reason to assume that the share is much different in other countries, so it’s fair to conclude that it is not the primary threat to international security, either.
Also consider that the U.S. spent about $33.6 billion on its nuclear weapons forces in FY2019. Nuclear weapon arsenals exist to deter and defeat aggression from powerful, hostile countries, and the weapons are unsuited for use against terrorists or computer hackers. If spending provides any indication of priorities, then the U.S. government considers traditional interstate warfare to be twice as big of a threat as cyberattackers. In fact, most of military spending and training in the U.S. and all other countries is still devoted to preparing for traditional warfare between nation-states, as evidenced by things like the huge numbers of tanks, air-to-air fighter planes, attack subs, and ballistic missiles still in global arsenals, and time spent practicing for large battles between organized foes.
“Small groups” of terrorists inflict disproportionate amounts of damage against society (terrorists killed 14,300 people across the world in 2017), as do cyberwarfare and cyberterrorism, but the numbers don’t bear out the contention that they are the “primary” threats to global security.
Whether “bioengineered disease agents” are the primary (inter)national security threat is more debatable. Aside from the 2001 Anthrax Attacks (which only killed five people, but nonetheless bore some testament to Kurzweil’s assessment of bioterrorism’s potential threat), there have been no known releases of biological weapons. However, the COVID-19 pandemic, which started in late 2019, has caused human and economic damage comparable to the World Wars, and has highlighted the world’s frightening vulnerability to novel infectious diseases. This has not gone unnoticed by terrorists and crazed individuals, and it could easily inspire some of them to make biological weapons, perhaps by using COVID-19 as a template. Modifications that made it more lethal and able to evade the early vaccines would be devastating to the world. Samples of unmodified COVID-19 could also be employed for biowarfare if disseminated in crowded places at some point in the future, when herd immunity has weakened.
Just because the general public, and even most military planners, don’t appreciate how dire bioterrorism’s threat is doesn’t mean it is not, in fact, the primary threat to international security. In 2030, we might look back at the carnage caused by the “COVID-23 Attack” and shake our collective heads at our failure to learn from the COVID-19 pandemic a few years earlier and prepare while we had time.
“Most flying weapons are tiny–some as small as insects–with microscopic flying weapons being researched.”
UNCLEAR
What counts as a “flying weapon”? Aircraft designed for unlimited reuse like planes and helicopters, or single-use flying munitions like missiles, or both? Should military aircraft that are unsuited for combat (e.g. – jet trainers, cargo planes, scout helicopters, refueling tankers) be counted as flying weapons? They fly, they often go into combat environments where they might be attacked, but they don’t carry weapons. This is important because it affects how we calculate what “most”/”the majority” is.
What counts as “tiny”? The prediction’s wording sets “insect” size as the bottom limit of the “tiny” size range, but sets no upper bound to how big a flying weapon can be and still be considered “tiny.” It’s up to us to do it.
A “Phantom” ultralight plane. Is it fair to call this “tiny”?
“Ultralights” are a legally recognized category of aircraft in the U.S. that weigh less than 254 lbs unloaded. Most people would take one look at such an aircraft and consider it to be terrifyingly small to fly in, and would describe it as “tiny.” Military aviators probably would as well: The Saab Gripen is one of the smallest modern fighter planes and still weighs 14,991 lbs unloaded, and each of the U.S. military’s MH-6 light observation helicopters weigh 1,591 lbs unloaded (the diminutive Smart Car Fortwo weighs about 2,050 lbs, unloaded).
With those relative sizes in mind, let’s accept the Phantom X1 ultralight plane as the upper bound of “tiny.” It weighs 250 lbs unloaded, is 17 feet long and has a 28 foot wingspan, so a “flying weapon” counts as being “tiny” if it is smaller than that.
If we also count missiles as “flying weapons,” then the prediction is right since most missiles are smaller than the Phantom X1, and the number of missiles far exceeds the number of “non-tiny” combat aircraft. A Hellfire missile, which is fired by an aircraft and homes in on a ground target, is 100 lbs and 5 feet long. A Stinger missile, which does the opposite (launched from the ground and blows up aircraft) is even smaller. Air-to-air Sidewinder missiles also meet our “tiny” classification. In 2019, the U.S. Air Force had 5,182 manned aircraft and wanted to buy 10,264 new guided missiles to bolster whatever stocks of missiles it already had in its inventory. There’s no reason to think the ratio is different for the other branches of the U.S. military (i.e. – the Navy probably has several guided missiles for every one of its carrier-borne aircraft), or that it is different in other countries’ armed forces. Under these criteria, we can say that most flying weapons are tiny.
The RQ-11B Raven drone could be considered a “tiny flying weapon.”
If we don’t count missiles as “flying weapons” and only count “tiny” reusable UAVs, then the prediction is wrong. The U.S. military has several types of these, including the “Scan Eagle,” RQ-11B “Raven,” RQ-12A “Wasp,” RQ-20 “Puma,” RQ-21 “Blackjack,” and the insect-sized PD-100 Black Hornet. Up-to-date numbers of how many of these aircraft the U.S. has in its military inventory are not available (partly because they are classified), but the data I’ve found suggest they number in the hundreds of units. In contrast, the U.S. military has over 12,000 manned aircraft.
At 100mm long and 120mm wide along its main rotor, the PD-100 drone is as small as a large dragonfly.
The last part of the prediction, that “microscopic” flying weapons would be the subject of research by 2019, seems to be wrong. The smallest flying drones in existence at that time were about as big as bees, which are not microscopic since we can see them with the naked eye. Moreover, I couldn’t find any scientific papers about microscopic flying machines, indicating that no one is actually researching them. However, since such devices would have clear espionage and military uses, it’s possible that the research existed in 2019, but was classified. If, at some point in the future, some government announces that its secret military labs had made impractical, proof-of-concept-only microscopic flying machines as early as 2019, then Kurzweil will be able to say he was right.
Anyway, the deep problems with this prediction’s wording have been made clear. Something like “Most aircraft in the military’s inventory are small and autonomous, with some being no bigger than flying insects” would have been much easier to evaluate.
“Many of the life processes encoded in the human genome, which was deciphered more than ten years earlier, are now largely understood, along with the information-processing mechanisms underlying aging and degenerative conditions such as cancer and heart disease.”
PARTLY RIGHT
The words “many” and “largely” are subjective, and provide Kurzweil with another escape hatch against a critical analysis of this prediction’s accuracy. This problem has occurred so many times up to now that I won’t belabor you with further explanation.
The human genome was indeed “deciphered” more than ten years before 2019, in the sense that scientists discovered how many genes there were and where they were physically located on each chromosome. To be specific, this happened in 2003, when the Human Genome Project published its first, fully sequenced human genome. Thanks to this work, the number of genetic disorders whose associated defective genes are known to science rose from 60 to 2,200. In the years since Human Genome Project finished, that climbed further, to 5,000 genetic disorders.
The cost of sequencing a human genome sharply dropped, making it possible to do genome-wide association studies, and for middle income people to have their personal genomes sequenced.
However, we still don’t know what most of our genes do, or which trait(s) each one codes for, so in an important sense, the human genome has not been deciphered. Since 1998, we’ve learned that human genetics is more complicated than suspected, and that it’s rare for a disease or a physical trait to be caused by only one gene. Rather, each trait (such as height) and disease risk is typically influenced by the summed, small effects of many different genes. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which can measure the subtle effects of multiple genes at once and connect them to the traits they code for, are powerful new tools for understanding human genetics. We also now know that epigenetics and environmental factors have large roles determining how a human being’s genes are expressed and how he or she develops in biological but non-genetic ways. In short just understanding what genes themselves do is not enough to understand human development or disease susceptibility.
Returning to the text of the prediction, the meaning of “information-processing mechanisms” probably refers to the ways that human cells gather information about their external surroundings and internal state, and adaptively respond to it. An intricate network of organic machinery made of proteins, fat structures, RNA, and other molecules handles this task, and works hand-in-hand with the DNA “blueprints” stored in the cell’s nucleus. It is now known that defects in this cellular-level machinery can lead to health problems like cancer and heart disease, and advances have been made uncovering the exact mechanics by which those defects cause disease. For example, in the last few years, we discovered how a mutation in the “SF3B1” gene raises the risk of a cell developing cancer. While the link between mutations to that gene and heightened cancer risk had long been known, it wasn’t until the advent of CRISPR that we found out exactly how the cellular machinery was malfunctioning, in turn raising hopes of developing a treatment.
The aging process is more well-understood than ever, and is known to have many separate causes. While most aging is rooted in genetics and is hence inevitable, the speed at which a cell or organism ages can be affected at the margins by how much “stress” it experiences. That stress can come in the form of exposure to extreme temperatures, physical exertion, and ingestion of specific chemicals like oxidants. Over the last 10 years, considerable progress has been made uncovering exactly how those and other stressors affect cellular machinery in ways that change how fast the cell ages. This has also shed light on a phenomenon called “hormesis,” in which mild levels of stress actually make cells healthier and slow their aging.
“The expected life span…[is now] over one hundred.”
WRONG
The expected life span for an average American born in 2018 was 76.2 years for males and 81.2 years for females. Japan had the highest figures that year out of all countries, at 81.25 years for men and 87.32 years for women.
“There is increasing recognition of the danger of the widespread availability of bioengineering technology. The means exist for anyone with the level of knowledge and equipment available to a typical graduate student to create disease agents with enormous destructive potential.”
WRONG
Among the general public and national security experts, there has been no upward trend in how urgently the biological weapons threat is viewed. The issue received a large amount of attention following the 2001 Anthrax Attacks, but since then has receded from view, while traditional concerns about terrorism (involving the use of conventional weapons) and interstate conflict have returned to the forefront. Anecdotally, cyberwarfare and hacking by nonstate actors clearly got more attention than biowarfare in 2019, even though the latter probably has much greater destructive potential.
Top national security experts in the U.S. also assigned biological weapons low priority, as evidenced in the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment, a collaborative document written by the chiefs of the various U.S. intelligence agencies. The 42-page report only mentions “biological weapons/warfare” twice. By contrast, “migration/migrants/immigration” appears 11 times, “nuclear weapon” eight times, and “ISIS” 29 times.
As I stated earlier, the damage wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic could (and should) raise the world’s appreciation of the biowarfare / bioterrorism threat…or it could not. Sadly, only a successful and highly destructive bioweapon attack is guaranteed to make the world treat it with the seriousness it deserves.
Thanks to better and cheaper lab technologies (notably, CRISPR), making a biological weapon is easier than ever. However, it’s unclear if the “bar” has gotten low enough for a graduate student to do it. Making a pathogen in a lab that has the qualities necessary for a biological weapon, verifying its effects, purifying it, creating a delivery system for it, and disseminating it–all without being caught before completion or inadvertently infecting yourself with it before the final step–is much harder than hysterical news articles and self-interested talking head “experts” suggest. From research I did several years ago, I concluded that it is within the means of mid-tier adversaries like the North Korean government to create biological weapons, but doing so would still require a team of people from various technical backgrounds and with levels of expertise exceeding a typical graduate student, years of work, and millions of dollars.
“That this potential is offset to some extent by comparable gains in bioengineered antiviral treatments constitutes an uneasy balance, and is a major focus of international security agencies.”
RIGHT
The development of several vaccines against COVID-19 within months of that disease’s emergence showed how quickly global health authorities can develop antiviral treatments, given enough money and cooperation from government regulators. Pfizer’s successful vaccine, which is the first in history to make use of mRNA, also represents a major improvement to vaccine technology that has occurred since the book’s publication. Indeed, the lessons learned from developing the COVID-19 vaccines could lead to lasting improvements in the field of vaccine research, saving millions of people in the future who would have otherwise died from infectious diseases, and giving governments better tools for mitigating any bioweapon attacks.
Put simply, the prediction is right. Technology has made it easier to make biological weapons, but also easier to make cures for those diseases.
“Computerized health monitors built into watches, jewelry, and clothing which diagnose both acute and chronic health conditions are widely used. In addition to diagnosis, these monitors provide a range of remedial recommendations and interventions.”
MOSTLY RIGHT
Many smart watches have health monitoring features, and though some of them are government-approved health devices, they aren’t considered accurate enough to “diagnose” health conditions. Rather, their role is to detect and alert wearers to signs of potential health problems, whereupon the latter consult a medical professionals with more advanced machinery and receive a diagnosis.
The Apple Watch Series 5
By the end of 2019, common smart watches such as the “Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2,” and the “Apple Watch Series 4 and 5” had FDA-approved electrocardiogram (ECG) features that were considered accurate enough to reliably detect irregular heartbeats in wearers. Out of 400,000 Apple Watch owners subject to such monitoring, 2,000 received alerts in 2018 from their devices of possible heartbeat problems. Fifty-seven percent of people in that subset sought medical help upon getting alerts from their watches, which is proof that the devices affect health care decisions, and ultimately, 84% of people in the subset were confirmed to have atrial fibrillation.
The Apple Watches also have “hard fall” detection features, which use accelerometers to recognize when their wearers suddenly fall down and then don’t move. The devices can be easily programmed to automatically call local emergency services in such cases, and there have been recent case where this probably saved the lives of injured people (does suffering a serious injury due to a fall count as an “acute health condition” per the prediction’s text?).
A few smart watches available in late 2019, including the “Garmin Forerunner 245,” also had built-in pulse oximeters, but none were FDA-approved, and their accuracy was questionable. Several tech companies were also actively developing blood pressure monitoring features for their devices, but only the “HeartGuide” watch, made by a small company called “Omron Healthcare,” was commercially available and had received any type of official medical sanction. Frequent, automated monitoring and analysis of blood oxygen levels and blood pressure would be of great benefit to millions of people.
Smartphones also had some health tracking capabilities. The commonest and most useful were physical activity monitoring apps, which count the number of steps their owners take and how much distance they traverse during a jog or hike. The devices are reasonably accurate, and are typically strapped to the wearer’s upper arm or waist if they are jogging, or kept in a pocket when doing other types of activity. Having a smartphone in your pocket isn’t literally the same as having it “built into [your] clothing” as the prediction says, but it’s close enough to satisfy the spirit of the prediction. In fact, being able to easily insert and remove a device into any article of clothing with a pocket is better than having a device integrated into the clothing since it allows for much more flexibility of attire–if you want to try out a new jogging route and also want to measure how long it is, you don’t have to remember to wear your one and only T-shirt with the built-in activity monitoring devices.
Millions of people use smart watches with health tracking features and smartphones with activity detection apps, which counts as “widely used” by any reasonable definition. However, no items of jewelry with embedded health tracking capabilities were available in 2019, so that part of the prediction is wrong.
“There are prevalent reports of computers passing the Turing Test, although these instances do not meet the criteria (with regard to sophistication of the human judge, the length of time for the interviews, etcetera) established by knowledgeable observers. There is a consensus that computers have not yet passed a valid Turing Test, but there is growing controversy on this point.”
RIGHT
In 2014, a chatbot named “Eugene Goostman” made global headlines by “passing the Turing Test” at an event held at the University of Reading. However, AI experts soon determined it was invalid because the dialog between the human judges and the machine only lasted five minutes. Ray Kurzweil himself even interacted with Eugene Goostman and posted the conversation on his website to show the machine could not correctly answer questions that probe commonsense reasoning and other aspects of intelligent thinking:
Kurzweil: How old are you? Eugene: I’m a little boy. 13 years old.
Kurzweil: How much is two plus two? Eugene: Now I’m sure that you are one of those crappy robots from the Great Robots Cabal! And I know your password: 2 + 2=4.0! Now divide by zero and die!!!!
Kurzweil: If I have two marbles in a bowl and I add two more how many marbles are in the bowl now? Eugene: Not too many. But I can’t tell you the exact number, I forgot it. If I’m not mistaken – you still didn’t tell me where you live. OR it’s a secret?:-)
Kurzweil: I live in the capital of the United States. Do you know where that is? Eugene: Every nerd knows that the capital of The United States is Washington.
Kurzweil: I live in the capital of the country that put a man on the moon. Eugene: Well, if you want it, the capital of The United States is Washington.
Kurzweil: I live in the capital of the country that built the great wall. Eugene: Tell me more about Capital. I like to learn about different places!
In 2018, a Google AI program called “Duplex” also made headlines for “passing the Turing Test” in phone calls where it made restaurant reservations without the human workers on the other end of the line realizing they were talking to a machine. While an impressive technological feat, experts again disagreed with the media’s portrayal of its capabilities, and pointed out that in human-machine interactions weren’t valid Turing Tests because they were too short and focused on a narrow subject of conversation.
“The subjective experience of computer-based intelligence is seriously discussed, although the rights of machine intelligence have not yet entered mainstream debate.”
RIGHT
The prospect of computers becoming intelligent and conscious has been a topic of increasing discussion in the public sphere, and experts treat it with seriousness. A few recent examples of this include:
Those are all thoughtful articles written by experts whose credentials are relevant to the subject of machine consciousness. There are countless more articles, essays, speeches, and panel discussions about it available on the internet.
“Sophia” the robot
Machines, including the most advanced “A.I.s” that existed at the end of 2019, had no legal rights anywhere in the world, except perhaps in two countries: In 2017, the Saudis granted citizenship to an animatronic robot called “Sophia,” and Japan granted a residence permit to a video chatbot named “Shibuya Mirai.” Both of these actions appear to be government publicity stunts that would be nullified if anyone in either country decided to file a lawsuit.
“Machine intelligence is still largely the product of a collaboration between humans and machines, and has been programmed to maintain a subservient relationship to the species that created it.”
RIGHT
Critics often–and rightly–point out that the most impressive “A.I.s” owe their formidable capabilities to the legions of humans who laboriously and judiciously fed them training data, set their parameters, corrected their mistakes, and debugged their codes. For example, image-recognition algorithms are trained by showing them millions of photographs that humans have already organized or attached descriptive metadata to. Thus, the impressive ability of machines to identify what is shown in an image is ultimately the product of human-machine collaboration, with the human contribution playing the bigger role.
Finally, even the smartest and most capable machines can’t turn themselves on without human help, and still have very “brittle” and task-specific capabilities, so they are fundamentally subservient to humans. A more specific example of engineered subservience is seen in autonomous cars, where the computers were smart enough to drive safely by themselves in almost all road conditions, but laws required the vehicles to watch the human in the driver’s seat and stop if he or she wasn’t paying attention to the road and touching the controls.
Well, well, well…that’s it. I have finally come to the end of my project to review Ray Kurzweil’s predictions for 2019. This has been the longest single effort in the history of my blog, and I’m glad the next round of his predictions pertains to 2029, so I can have time to catch my breath. I would say the experience has been great, but like the whole year of 2020, I’m relieved to be able to turn the page and move on.
Happy New Year!
Links:
Advances in AI during the 2010s forced humans to examine the specialness of human thinking, whether machines could also be intelligent and creative and what it would mean for humans if they could. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47700701
In 2005, obesity became a cause of more childhood deaths than malnourishment. The disparity was surely even greater by 2019. There’s no financial reason why anyone on Earth should starve. https://www.factcheck.org/2013/03/bloombergs-obesity-claim/
“Auto-Tune” is a widely used song editing software program that can seamlessly alter the pitch and tone of a singer’s voice, allowing almost anyone to sound on-key. Most of the world’s top-selling songs were made with Auto-Tune or something similar to it. Are the most popular songs now products of “collaboration between human and machine intelligence”? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-Tune
The actions by Japan and Saudi Arabia to grant some rights to machines are probably invalid under their own legal frameworks. https://www.ersj.eu/journal/1245
‘”I don’t think Britain could have won the Falklands conflict without GCHQ,” Prof Ferris told the BBC. He said because GCHQ was able to intercept and break Argentine messages, British commanders were able to know within hours what orders were being given to their opponents, which offered a major advantage in the battle at sea and in retaking the islands.’ https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-54604895
‘Second, the violence in Ladakh has also allowed Beijing to examine the degree of coordination that exists within the Indo-US strategic partnership. As Indian and Chinese soldiers clashed with medieval-style weapons in the Galwan Valley, Beijing paid close attention to how the United States reacted.’ https://www.9dashline.com/article/india-china-rivalry-towards-a-two-front-war-in-the-himalayas
Warships need near-constant maintenance to stay at sea. Keeping the hull from rusting is an ongoing task, along with watching out for and fixing small leaks inside the ship. This means that, even on 100% automated ships, there will need to be mobile robots that can climb all over the outsides and inside spaces to scrub, paint, and dry surfaces. They would also probably have roles doing repairs caused by combat or by accidents. A big difference between “robot crewman” and humans is that the former won’t need much in the way of self-support infrastructure inside the ship: there won’t need to be bathrooms, kitchens, laundries, rec rooms, bunks, mail rooms, etc. The robots would probably spend all their time at their posts, like you spending your whole life at your work desk, never needing to sleep. This means automated ships could be smaller, simpler, and cheaper than manned ships without sacrificing any firepower, speed, or other capabilities. And in spite of considerable design differences, automated ships would still have internal spaces like rooms and hallways. If you went inside, you’d see robots of some kind moving around, doing tasks. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37094/check-out-how-rusty-and-battered-uss-stout-looks-after-spending-a-record-215-days-at-sea
‘The μINS is the world’s smallest sensor module of its kind—approximately the size of 3 stacked US dimes. It provides high-quality direction, position, and velocity data for multiple applications by intelligently fusing sensor data from GPS (GNSS), gyros, accelerometers, magnetometers, and a barometric pressure sensor.’ https://insideunmannedsystems.com/worlds-smallest-better-gps-inertial-navigation-system-now-available/
In India, a couple gave birth to a boy who had a fatal genetic defect involving his blood. After learning that a bone marrow transplant could permanently cure him, the couple used IVF to create a second child that would be genetically similar enough to the son to serve as a marrow donor. They didn’t want to have the new child for any reason other than to save the first. They gestated the new child–a daughter–and transplanted some of her bone marrow, curing the son. Additionally, to ensure the daughter didn’t carry the same bone marrow defect that the son had, the couple did genetic testing on her while she was still an embryo. This technique, called “preimplantation genetic diagnosis,” is only one step down from genetic engineering. The ethics of this case are indeed questionable. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-54658007
‘The successful cloning of DNA collected 40 years is meant to introduce key genetic diversity into the species that could benefit its survival. The zoo said the cloned Przewalski’s horse will eventually be transferred to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park and integrated into a herd of other Przewalski’s horses for breeding.’ https://time.com/5886467/clone-endangered-przewalskis-horse-zoo/
Because of the twisted ways in which our cells develop at the embryonic stage, the average person’s facial features are slightly shifted to the left side of his head. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6557252/
A computer simulation suggests that geographical differences caused the rise of many ethnicities and small countries in Europe, while a single ethnic group and country grew to encompass the vast area today known as China. Mountains, peninsulas, islands, and deserts are barriers to human movement and settlement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbGOXnElJeU
On the set of the sci-fi show The Mandalorian, the sets have replaced green screens with gigantic wraparound TV screens that display high-def footage. The footage of them being manipulated by special effects crewmen is trippy. (I’ve predicted devices like this will become common in U.S. households in the 2030s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufp8weYYDE8&feature=emb_title
My prediction: ‘[By 2030] “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.”’ https://www.militantfuturist.com/my-future-predictions-2020-iteration/
Disney made a wonderful, horrifying android that has human-like eye movements and gazes. (To be fair to Disney, human faces also look frightening without their skin.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8_VmWWRJgE
Three months ago, economist Robert Reich made this (totally failed) prediction: “Brace yourself. The wave of evictions and foreclosures in next 2 months will be unlike anything America has experienced since the Great Depression. And unless Congress extends extra unemployment benefits beyond July 31, we’re also going to have unparalleled hunger.” https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1277641135368724483
Bird brains are radically different from mammalian brains, but produce similar levels of intelligent thought. Bird brains might actually be superior since they are made of smaller, more densely-packed neurons, meaning a bird would be smarter than a mammal whose brain had the same volume. Hundreds of years from now, “humans” might have denser brains and smarter minds thanks to radical genetic engineering that takes inspiration from other organisms. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6511/1567
In 1991, Joe Biden predicted that “[By the year 2020] I’ll be dead and gone in all probability.” Three months remain in this year so… https://youtu.be/i4TuxvhoMs4
Using genetic engineering, scientists were able to transplant sperm from one male farm animal to a sterile male of the same species so that the recipient male produced the same sperm as the donor male. This could make it cheaper and easier to breed prized farm animals by using genetically inferior males as “surrogate fathers” for their offspring, and it could let us resurrect extinct species for which we have frozen sperm samples. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/39/24195
World-renowned scientist Stephen Wolfram gave a wide-ranging, four-hour interview. I set this up to play at what seemed like a particularly interesting moment, but you should watch it from the beginning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t1_ffaFXao&t=2862s
A recent experiment with an underwater server farm went well. Cooling costs were much lower because the capsule was immersed in cold seawater, and few of the servers failed because the atmospheric content in the capsule could be controlled better (a pure nitrogen atmosphere helped because oxygen corrodes computer circuits and cables). For this and other reasons, I think intelligent machines might live in the oceans. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54146718
Many common, manmade objects could be made more durable and longer-lasting, for relatively small up-front cost. However, this is rarely done since it goes against the interests of manufacturers, who want consumers to buy replacement goods often. Planned obsolescence is real and pervasive. It’s disturbing to think about how big a share of global economic activity is people buying replacements things that shouldn’t have needed to be thrown out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdh7_PA8GZU
The human backup driver was found criminally responsible for the infamous 2018 crash of a self-driving car that killed a homeless woman. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54175359
‘“Inertial navigation was perhaps the pinnacle of mechanical engineering and among the most complicated objects ever manufactured”…But in the 1990s these were superseded by micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS)—chips with vibrating mechanical structures that detect angular motion. MEMS technology is cheap and ubiquitous (it is used in car airbags and toy drones). That makes it hard to restrict by way of military-export controls.’ https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/01/16/irans-attack-on-iraq-shows-how-precise-missiles-have-become
And the worst “aircraft carriers” ever were the CAM Ships of WWII. The planes were violently catapulted/rocketed into the air, did their thing, and were then expected to crash land in the water next to a friendly ship, whereupon the pilot would be rescued. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=CAM_ship&oldid=961354276
The Congressional Budget Office predicts the pandemic’s human and economic impact will be felt for decades. Declining birthrates and higher mortality will lead to the U.S. population being 11 million people smaller in 2050 than it otherwise would have been. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56598
The MiG-29 has excellent aeronautical performance, had an advanced missile system for the 1980s and 90s, but is inferior to Western counterparts like the F-16 in every other way (inefficient engines that are a hassle to fix; weak radar; short range, old-fashioned cockpit that forces the pilot to constantly look at gauges, dials, and paper maps in his lap instead of looking out the canopy for enemies). https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/truth-about-mig-29-180952403/
The USS Yorktown was a U.S. aircraft carrier that sank during the pivotal Battle of Midway in 1942. After being bombed by Japanese planes, it started filling with water and leaning to one side. At 2:28 pm on June 4, all of its crew abandoned ship, convinced it would soon sink.
They were wrong. The damage was not fatal, and from the safety of another U.S. warship, they saw that the Yorktown was still afloat hours later. Fourteen hours after leaving, they started returning to the stricken carrier to fix it. They worked feverishly for the next 24 hours, and were making progress pumping water out of the ship, reducing its tilt. Unfortunately, a Japanese sub spotted them and torpedoed the carrier, this time destroying it for good. The sub also blew up another U.S. ship.
This makes me wonder what would have happened if the crew had never abandoned the Yorktown in the first place. That extra 14 hours of time might have enabled them to sufficiently repair and move the ship out of the area to prevent it from falling prey to the sub. https://navylive.dodlive.mil/2013/06/02/battle-of-midway-timeline-of-significant-events/
It costs $10.9 million to train a pilot how to fly an F-22 fighter, and $1.1 million to train one to fly a C-17 cargo plane. All the USAF’s costs for training pilots for its other types of planes are in between. Of course, that’s not the end of it. Those are only the costs of getting a new person UP TO the level of being able to fly their plane. Since people forget things, the pilots have to frequently undergo retraining and re-certification, which means more money spent each year (the RAND analysis doesn’t show those figures) as a continual expense. This means the cost savings of inventing computers that can fly warplanes as well as humans will be massive. There will also be no risk of pilots being shot down over enemy territory, captured, and used as political pawns. https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/04/09/the-cost-of-training-u-s-air-force-fighter-pilots-infographic/
Are aliens hibernating until the day the universe gets colder? If they are intelligent machines, then they would generate a lot of heat, and a colder environment would let them radiate that heat more efficiently, allowing them to do more computation. “[If such aliens hibernated until the universe’s temperature dropped from 3 Kelvin to less than 1 Kelvin] they could achieve up to 10^30 times more than if done today.” https://getpocket.com/explore/item/a-new-theory-on-why-we-haven-t-found-aliens-yet
Turing Award-winner John Hopcroft thinks machines will make human workers obsolete, and he points out that, just because humans have been able to climb up the skills ladder in the past faster than machines could automate old jobs, doesn’t mean we will be able to do that forever. Past trends don’t continue indefinitely, and there’s no reason why we couldn’t get into a situation where machines took over 1 million human jobs in a given year, but only 900,000 new jobs for humans were created during that same period. Hopcroft suggests dealing with this by spreading out the remaining jobs among more humans by finding ways to shorten the amount of time the average person works. https://youtu.be/htfNuoJ3Ecc
Elon Musk is still scared of AI. He thinks they could get smarter than humans in five years, and that things would get “unstable or weird” shortly after. I think his prediction is way too optimistic, and what might happen in five years is a machine passing the Turing Test, meaning it can carry on conversations with people and answer questions as well as a human. Things will get “weird” after that because many people dealing with such machines will mistakenly assume that they are “intelligent,” and perhaps even smarter than humans (e.g. – you’ll be able to ask a machine to do a complex math problem, and it will give you the solution right away). But the Turing Test machines and the autonomous cars we’ll have by the end of this decade will not actually be intelligent, self-aware, or capable of creative thought. Only at the surface level will they seem so. I doubt a true AI will be built earlier than midcentury. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-maureen-dowd-ai-google-deepmind-wargames-2020-7
Musk is one of the world’s richest men, and his business achievements have been extraordinary, but he also has many stalled and failed ventures. Also, Tesla’s high stock price is probably unjustified, and Musk’s claims about future growth and the introduction of fully autonomous car models are likely too optimistic. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-07-22/why-the-stock-market-is-so-high-and-tesla-even-higher
Flooding has become a worse problem in New Orleans and some other coastal areas because of “land subsidence.” As humans pump aquifer water, oil, and natural gas out of the ground, all the little voids empty out, the dirt compacts, and the ground level sinks. This problem is not connected to global warming, and shows that some flooding is not due to rising sea levels or worsening storms. https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0518/How-fast-is-New-Orleans-sinking-Faster-and-faster-says-new-study
Genetic studies of black people in the Americas have revealed new information about the slave trade, and about the pervasiveness of white masters raping their female slaves. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-53527405
Cosmic rays are responsible for the right-handed chirality of DNA. If the rays are omnipresent in the galaxy and have the same energetic properties everywhere, alien DNA should share our chirality.
Silicon-based, ORGANIC life forms are unlikely to exist. ‘Only a tiny fraction of the theoretical chemical space of silicon chemistry can be stable in water (Section 3.2.1). In fact, some of the commonly held views about the low diversity of silicon chemistry come directly from the instability of silicon chemistry in water. Silicon chemistry in water also requires substantially more energy to access than equivalent carbon chemistry (Section 3.3). For all of the above reasons, we argue in this subsection that silicon is unlikely to be a scaffold element or a common heteroatom element in water.’ https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/10/6/84
Here’s an amazing upscaling of footage of Tokyo street scenes from the 1910s. Even better video reconstructions than this will be available in the future. https://youtu.be/MQAmZ_kR8S8
In 1969, Richard Nixon’s speechwriters prepared an address for him to read to the nation in case the Apollo 11 moon landing failed. Using deepfake technology, we can see what it would have looked like. https://youtu.be/LWLadJFI8Pk
In the 1970s, there was an ambitious project to compile a 6 million-page history of America from its founding to WWI into a document called the Library of American Civilization. It would have been in “ultrafiche” format, with each ultrafiche being 3″ x 5″ and containing up to 1,000 page images, shrunk from original size by a factor of 55 to 90. The idea was to distribute the document, along with ultrafiche readers, to every major library in America. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED082753.pdf
This prediction from May turned out wrong: ‘Professor Carl Heneghan from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University said: “I think by the end of June we’ll be looking at the data and finding it difficult to find people [in Britain] with [COVID-19], if the current trends continue in the deaths.”‘
Interesting facts about the Space Shuttle: -It was originally supposed to be a fully reusable, two-stage craft. That design would have been more expensive but probably better. -The notion that the Shuttle would be a cheaper way to launch cargo into orbit that traditional rockets was never supported by data. Politicians just made it up to sell the idea to the public. -The Soviet “Buran” craft was more advanced than the U.S. Shuttle, and fixed some of the latter’s known flaws. https://gizmodo.com/the-space-shuttle-was-a-beautiful-but-terrible-idea-1842732042
Interesting details about the V-22: -“Many of the challenges in developing and operating the V-22 are the result of designing a fairly large platform to operate within the confines of US Marine Corps amphibious ships. This caused several compromises, such as a smaller proprotor diameter, which increases the download and reduces the hover efficiency, and a shorter wing, which reduces the amount of lift and range.” -“These engineering lessons and the lack of shipboard size constraints enabled Bell to reduce the downwash from the rotors, design the rotors to tilt from horizontal to vertical without rotating the engines, and improve the reliability and availability of components. The V-22’s downwash, or high velocity air from the two tilting proprotors producing 22,680 kg of thrust to keep the aircraft aloft, can damage objects or injure people below. It also means the Osprey must burn more fuel to hover.” -“In addition, the V-22 required a rear-ramp exit to avoid hot-engine exhaust blasting onto ship decks and grassy landing zones. As the V-280’s engines do not rotate, this solves the hot engine exhaust issue, which can start brush fires, and means troops can ingress and egress via side doors.” https://www.janes.com/article/95609/forty-years-on-from-the-v-22-s-conception-bell-applies-engineering-lessons-learned-to-the-v-280
An interesting video about the downsides of upgrading tanks. Adding weight in the form of applique armor or a bigger gun can push the tank’s engine and suspension past their design limits, increasing the odds of a breakdown. Drilling holes through tank armor to run new wires to create mounting points for gadgets can also make the armor much weaker. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvSpMtulunU
Almost half of the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle’s crew got infected with COVID-19. The ship’s crowded conditions proved ideal for disease transmission. https://apnews.com/fd1996b64f4cc3aeaa92b352bb7f5cce
For the first time on record, and probably for the first time since the era of Mao’s Mickey Mouse Economics, the Chinese economy shrank. The pandemic was the obvious cause. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52319936
“The process of globalization, powerful as it is, could be substantially slowed or even stopped. Short of a major global conflict, which we regard as improbable, another large-scale development that we believe could stop globalization would be a pandemic…”
That is probably the most chillingly prescient passage from Mapping the Global Future, a report written 16 years ago by experts working for the U.S. National Intelligence Council, describing coming developments in geopolitics, culture, technology, and the economy out to 2020. With the year in question having arrived, I thought it was worthwhile to review the accuracy of it’s predictions, and overall, I was impressed. Mapping the Global Future correctly identified most of the megatrends that shaped the world from 2004-20, (though it was somewhat less accurate forecasting the degrees to which those factors would change things):
No significant expansion or strengthening of liberal democracy. From 2004-20, for every Myanmar there was a Turkey, and the number of “real” democracies across the world didn’t significantly change. Contrast this to the 15 years preceding the report’s publication, in which communism fell in Europe and Central Asia, along with many dictatorships in Latin America and Africa. The report’s authors correctly gauged that conditions were not ripe for another wave of international democratization.
Solid growth of global economy. The report failed to predict the Great Recession, but so did all other experts. Nevertheless, report’s estimate that the 2020 gross world product (GWP) would be 80% larger than it was in 2000 was very close to being right: it actually rose by 74% (adjusted for inflation).
Massive growth in China, and to a lesser extent, India. This was not the hardest prediction to make, though it should be noted that a minority of foreign policy experts in 2004 thought China might fall apart by 2020, probably thanks to political problems. I think the extent to which China’s growth (economic, military, technological, average living standards) ended up surpassing India’s would have surprised the authors.
Little or no weakening of Islamic extremism and terrorism. At this moment, there is a relative lull in the level of violence, but just three years ago, ISIS was at its peak, and nothing is stopping an “ISIS-level” resurgence of Islamic violence (Africa is likeliest to be the next hotbed). While the U.S. has dodged a sequel to 9/11, the total number of people killed worldwide by Muslim fanatics might actually be higher now than it was in 2004. The conditions that gave rise to Islamic terrorism in 2004 still exist in large parts of the world. Finally, the report made the frighteningly accurate predictions that al Qaeda would be replaced by new terrorist groups (ISIS and Boko Haram), and that the formation of an Islamic caliphate spanning multiple countries was even possible.
Very low likelihood of war between the great powers. Russia, China, and the U.S. didn’t even come close to fighting. A lot of ink has been spilled since 2004 about accidents–like U.S. and Russian planes shooting each other down over Syria–spiraling into all-out war, but I think cooler heads would have prevailed.
Weakening of U.S. global supremacy. The report correctly predicted that the U.S. would still be the world’s strongest country overall in 2020, but the gap between it and its nearest competitors–chiefly China–would be narrower. It was also right to forecast the weakening of the U.S.-led international banking and trade system.
Backlash against globalization and concomitant rise of populism and nationalism. From the election of Donald Trump, to Brexit, to the breakdown of the Doha Free Trade talks and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to near-constant angst over the erosion of the middle class due to outsourcing and illegal immigrant laborers, to the rise of chauvinist strongmen across the world, we see clear proof of these trends. The struggle between liberal globalists and conservative nationalists became THE cultural and political fissure during the 2004-20 time frame.
Major impact of internet on culture, self-identity, business, and other aspects of life. As the report predicted, the expansion of the internet to most of the human race has empower global movements like the Arab Spring, fragmented and upended the news media landscape, and facilitated the rise of more complex human identities and group loyalties that transcend national borders, making national governance and consensus-forming harder.
World vulnerability to pandemic. This isn’t explored in great detail, but the report makes it clear that the threat of a pandemic bad enough to halt globalization is real.
Of course, the report also had a few failed predictions and omissions, which are important to mention, but in my opinion, outweighed by what the report got right:
Didn’t foresee the Great Recession. I noted this before, and also how it had little effect on the report’s accuracy forecasting 2000-2020 global wealth growth. The report’s authors were also in good company, since no expert in 2004 predicted the Great Recession.
Didn’t foresee fracking. While the report doesn’t predict anything as calamitous as the world running out of oil by 2020, it says that oil prices could be significantly higher than they were in 2004 due to tighter supplies, leading to the usual fare of anxieties, political problems, and small-scale wars. Had fracking not been invented, this could well have been the case. Fracking has revolutionized the global energy landscape by boosting oil and natural gas supplies well beyond what almost all energy experts thought possible in 2004. More than anything, this failure should highlight the perils of trying to predict the future of the energy markets.
Didn’t foresee Venezuela’s near-implosion (could it still happen?). To be fair, Venezuela’s economy collapsed because their socialist government badly managed its oil industry after nationalizing it and because fracking then caused a sharp drop in world oil prices. The report’s experts couldn’t have foreseen how bad the mismanagement would get, and as noted, they also didn’t predict the rise of fracking.
Thought North Korea would “come to a head.” It’s unclear what the report’s authors were envisioning here (North Korea democratization? North Korea chaotic implosion? One Korea–possibly with the help of a superpower ally–annexing the other?), other than the status quo of a divided Korean peninsula with a hostile dictatorship in the North ending by 2020. That didn’t happen, and it’s crucial to remember that there’s a clear and now long-running pattern of “experts” making wrong predictions about this. (https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/the-long-history-of-wrongly-predicting-north-koreas-collapse/260769/) It raises the possibility that North Korea could continue to endure for much longer than we expect, in spite of the reports of how brittle and strange the regime is and how desperate its citizens are.
Thought Taiwan would “come to a head.” The authors surely meant either a successful Taiwanese declaration of independence or annexation to China (probably by force). This also didn’t happen, and can also be added to the long list of wrong predictions about this issue.
Russia predictions were not great, not terrible. While the report’s authors correctly predicted that corruption, lack of foreign investment, population shrinkage, conflicts with its neighbors would leave Russia “stuck in neutral” in terms of absolute power and declining in terms of relative global stature, they didn’t predict how badly relations would deteriorate with the West, and foresaw Central Asia as Russia’s likeliest battleground when in fact it was Ukraine and the Caucuses. My guess is that they underestimated how skillful of a leader Putin would turn out to be, and also underestimated the Russians’ resolve to not let any more of their satellite states slip away to the Western camp.
Overestimated the risks of bioterrorism and nuclear terrorism. Contrary to the report’s fears, no terrorists have used, or to our knowledge obtained, biological or nuclear weapons since 2004. Overestimating the threat is understandable given the contemporaneous problem of loose Russian nuclear weapons and widespread fear of and misinformation about bioterrorism following the 2001 Anthrax Attacks. Russia’s recovery from the chaotic 1990s allowed them to secure all of their nuclear weapons, and biological weapons are actually much harder to create and successfully use than popular fiction and biased “experts” who got most of the attention around 2004 led the public to believe. (Note: Unfortunately, I think weaponized COVID-19 could make bioterrorism much likelier)
Thinking about what the expert authors of Mapping the Global Future got right and wrong leads me to following general conclusions about the course of world events, and about making predictions:
The status quo is strong. Slow, plodding megatrends and entrenched systems are very resistant to change, regardless of how outdated, suboptimal, or undesirable they may be. The fact that hand-wringing and doomsaying about issues like the divided Korean peninsula, contested status of Taiwan, unsustainable European welfare states, American global primacy, and nation-state model has been going on for decades without resolution should give us pause whenever we hear someone predict a shift in some paradigm. The “inevitability” of another American Civil War is a good example. The stodgy status quo is probably stronger and more resilient to shocks than you think, can ruthlessly destroy upstarts, and might be able to use little reforms to muddle its way through some problem that was widely believed to be unsolvable and fatal.
Some dictatorships are smart. Though the report was upbeat about China’s prospects, if anything, it underestimated how strong the country and its regime would become by 2020. China has of course averted collapse, and its communist government has skillfully suppressed democracy and ethnic minority discontent. In short, the dictatorship proved smarter and more competent than even most experts thought in 2004. The use of technology for mass surveillance will entrench it even more in the future. The report’s authors would also have been surprised at how nimble and strong of a leader Putin proved to be, and how well he’s played his country’s diminished hand on the world stage.
Not everyone is ready for democracy. The report correctly recognized that conditions were not right for significant expansions of liberal democracy from 2004-20. The disappointing results of the democratization experiments the U.S. ran in Afghanistan and Iraq, the failure of the Arab Spring, and the rise–with majority voter support–of populist strongmen across the world have been valuable, if painful, reminders that not every group of people is ready for or wants liberal democracy. Growing political dysfunction in the U.S. is also damaging the brand.
Rational actors are in charge and they suck the fun out of everything. The hard truth is that every major country, including the U.S., China, Russia, and even North Korea, is led by a rational actor–or, more accurately, by groups of people who cancel out each other’s worst ideas so that the resulting consensus decisions are adequately rational and informed. They all have an accurate grasp of the world and of their own interests, and base their key decisions on cost-benefit calculations, which is why North Korea doesn’t invade the South, China doesn’t invade Taiwan, the U.S. and Russia don’t start WWIII, etc.
Expert views are good, and usually better than non-experts, but never perfect. As I wrote earlier, I was impressed with the overall accuracy of the report’s predictions, and think the things they got right in aggregate outweigh the things they got wrong. The report’s accuracy probably owes mostly to the fact that it solicited views from “25 leading outside experts from a wide variety of disciplines and backgrounds to engage in a broad-gauged discussion with Intelligence Community analysts.” In other words, experts were invited to make predictions about things in their areas of expertise, which is Rule #1 in my Rules for Good Futurism.
In conclusion, I enjoyed this report and think the authors used a sound methodology for making future predictions. As a result, I’m planning to write a blog analysis of the latest sequel, the DNI’s 2017 Global trends: Paradox of progress, which predicts world events out to 2035.
If you’re interested in learning more about the 2020 report, read my notes on it below and key quotes I copied (which I’ve organized by country and subject), or read the report in full.
“The United States, too, will see its relative power position eroded, though it will remain in 2020 the most important single country across all the dimensions of power.” Yes, but an easy prediction to make.
“While no single country looks within striking distance of rivaling US military power by 2020…” Right.
“US dependence on foreign oil supplies also makes it more vulnerable as the competition for secure access grows and the risks of supply side disruptions increase.” Missed fracking! Also mentioned this in a non-U.S. section: “Thus sharper demand-driven competition for resources, perhaps accompanied by a major disruption of oil supplies, is among the key uncertainties.”
East and South Asia.
Right about rapid growth in China and India. Report correctly predicted that China would grow faster than India from 2005-20. Size of that gap might have surprised them. Not a good idea to constantly mention “China and India” together.
Predictions about huge growth in China’s middle class, overall purchasing power, and standards of living (like car ownership levels and frequency of overseas travel) were right.
“Meanwhile, the crisis over North Korea is likely to come to a head sometime over the next 15 years.” Another in a long history of failed predictions about its collapse.
“The possession of chemical, biological, and/or nuclear weapons by Iran and North Korea and the possible acquisition of such weapons by others by 2020 also increase the potential cost of any military action by the US against them or their allies.” North Korea did first nuclear test in October 2006. Iran has been dissuaded thanks to hardball diplomacy and direct intervention (nuclear computer virus, assassinations of leading people)–for now.
“By 2020, globalization could be equated in the popular mind with a rising Asia, replacing its current association with Americanization.” Accurate. The U.S. is retrenching under Trump, but China’s global reach is still expanding through its Belt and Road Initiative (created in 2013) and other large investments in Africa and almost everywhere else.
“What Would An Asian Face on Globalization Look Like? …Asian finance ministers have considered establishing an Asian monetary fund that would operate along different lines from IMF, attaching fewer strings on currency swaps and giving Asian decision-makers more leeway from the “Washington macro-economic consensus.”” China founded the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in 2015 as a direct rival to the IMF. …An expanded Asian-centric cultural identity may be the most profound effect of a rising Asia. Asians have already begun to reduce the percentage of students who travel to Europe and North America with Japan and—most striking—China becoming educational magnets. A new, more Asian cultural identity is likely to be rapidly packaged and distributed as incomes rise and communications networks spread. Korean pop singers are already the rage in Japan, Japanese anime have many fans in China, and Chinese kung-fu movies and Bollywood song-and-dance epics are viewed throughout Asia. Even Hollywood has begun to reflect these Asian influences—an effect that is likely to accelerate through 2020.” U.S. pop culture still reigns supreme globally, and in spite of spending huge amounts of money, China has had little success making films, music, or other cultural products that outsiders like. However, China’s influence has grown anyway, and disturbing examples include the recent, high-profile instances of China pressuring U.S. sports and entertainment companies to self-censor.
“The regional experts felt that the possibility of major inter-state conflict remains higher in Asia than in other regions. In their view, the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan Strait crises are likely to come to a head by 2020, risking conflict with global repercussions. At the same time, violence within Southeast Asian states—in the form of separatist insurgencies and terrorism—could intensify. China also could face sustained armed unrest from separatist movements along its western borders.” The crises did not come to a head! Important to pay attention to these failed predictions. Maybe they’ll continue to fail forever, and there will not be violent resolutions to Korea and Taiwan (expert predictions about inevitable U.S.-Soviet war were also wrong). The insurgency in Xinjiang did worsen, but China crushed it with martial law and reeducation camps. Russians also crushed Chechen insurgency. Sad testimony about the effectiveness of government repression? Even more effective in the future thanks to mass surveillance tech?
“Asia is particularly important as an engine for change over the next 15 years…Both the Korea and Taiwan issues are likely to come to a head, and how they are dealt with will be important factors shaping future US-Asia ties as well as the US role in the region…Japan’s position in the region is also likely to be transformed as it faces the challenge of a more independent security role.” None of that happened. Japan never transitioned from its isolationist, defensive posture to an international role that was more active and independent of the U.S. Japan’s alliance with the U.S. remains its most important and defining interstate relationship.
“China and India, which lack adequate domestic energy resources, will have to ensure continued access to outside suppliers; thus, the need for energy will be a major factor in shaping their foreign and defense policies, including expanding naval power. …Beijing’s growing energy requirements are likely to prompt China to increase its activist role in the world—in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Eurasia. In trying to maximize and diversify its energy supplies, China worries about being vulnerable to pressure from the United States which Chinese officials see as having an aggressive energy policy that can be used against Beijing.” Correct. A big reason for the Belt and Road Initiative is to secure oil and gas supply lines from the Middle East and Central Asia to China. China also launched its first aircraft carrier in 2012 and has sharply expanded and improved its navy since then. While some worry the navy is being built up to take over Taiwan, its equally important purpose will be to protect the oil shipping lanes that run from the Persian Gulf to China’s coast.
China’s sex ratio imbalance has not caused major problems as the report suggested might happen. Again, China proved more stable and its government more able to deal with problems than outsiders worried.
Report’s hopes of China taking steps towards democracy were dashed. Instead, Chinese government has effectively placated its populace with economic growth, security, and propagandization. China’s success has put forth what might be a viable political / economic / social alternative to Western liberal democracy, and I believe the former’s appeal is one reason why global democratization has slowed. Dictators see there is another way.
“The so-called “third wave” of democratization may be partially reversed by 2020—particularly among the states of the former Soviet Union and in Southeast Asia, some of which never really embraced democracy.” It happened. The Baltic states remain firmly democratic, Ukraine is a dysfunctional democracy where life is bad for most people, and all the others are undemocratic. Also, in SE Asia, Thailand democracy failed but Myanmar’s blossomed. No overall trend.
Correctly predicted that Russia would be stuck in neutral thanks to demographic decline, corruption, lack of foreign investment, and problems with its neighbors. However, incorrectly predicted that the conflicts would be with its Central Asian neighbors and about radical Islam, when in fact Russia fought with Ukraine and Georgia over geopolitics. (Not the only set of experts from that era who worried about Central Asian stability. Were they all fundamentally wrong, or has the problem just been delayed thanks to luck or some other temporary factor?) Russia’s relations with West got much worse than the report predicted thanks to the latter not tolerating the aggression. The report seems to have underestimated how fast Russia would recover from the torpor of the 90s, and its determination to not let more satellite states slip away to the West.
“In the view of the experts, Central Asian states are weak, with considerable potential for religious and ethnic conflict over the next 15 years. Religious and ethnic movements could have a destabilizing impact across the region.” Hasn’t happened…yet. Broader trend I’m seeing is underestimation of how powerful and competent secular dictatorships are at stamping out dissent. Look at failure of Arab Spring, particularly how it was crushed in Bahrain, and at how the military restored the status quo ante in Egypt. Also note the failure of the Iranian uprisings.
“Eurasia, especially Central Asia and the Caucasus, probably will be an area of growing concern, with its large number of potentially failing states, radicalism in the form of Islamic extremism, and importance as a supplier or conveyor belt for energy supplies to both West and East. The trajectories of these Eurasian states will be affected by external powers such as Russia, Europe, China, India and the United States, which may be able to act as stabilizers. Russia is likely to be particularly active in trying to prevent spillover, even though it has enormous internal problems on its own plate. Farther to the West, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova could offset their vulnerabilities as relatively new states by closer association with Europe and the EU.”
“If Russia fails to diversify its economy, it could well experience the petro-state phenomenon of unbalanced economic development, huge income inequality, capital flight, and increased social problems.” It happened. Russians have rallied around Putin, however, and have endured the effects of Western sanctions admirably. Part of this owes to the effectiveness of Russian government propaganda at convincing Russians to suffer for the Putin’s causes. Sounds like the report underestimated him in 2004.
Europe
“The EU, rather than NATO, will increasingly become the primary institution for Europe, and the role which Europeans shape for themselves on the world stage is most likely to be projected through it.” Right!
The report’s skepticism of E.U. army being created by 2020 was justified. Europeans still have serious problems with military cooperation.
“Over the next 15 years, West European economies will need to find several million workers to fill positions vacated by retiring workers. Either European countries adapt their work forces, reform their social welfare, education, and tax systems, and accommodate growing immigrant populations (chiefly from Muslim countries) or they face a period of protracted economic stasis that could threaten the huge successes made in creating a more United Europe.” They didn’t solve the problem, have protracted economic stasis, and have sharply slowed down the creation of a more United Europe.
“The experts felt that the current welfare state is unsustainable and the lack of any economic revitalization could lead to the splintering or, at worst, disintegration of the European Union, undermining its ambitions to play a heavyweight international role.” Brexit!
Latin America
“Populist themes are likely to emerge as a potent political and social force, especially as globalization risks aggravating social divisions along economic and ethnic lines. In parts of Latin America particularly, the failure of elites to adapt to the evolving demands of free markets and democracy probably will fuel a revival in populism and drive indigenous movements, which so far have sought change through democratic means, to consider more drastic means for seeking what they consider their “fair share” of political power and wealth.” Definitely happened.
Report’s short section on Latin America failed to predict Venezuela’s near-implosion.
Muslim world and Islam
“In particular, political Islam will have a significant global impact leading to 2020, rallying disparate ethnic and national groups and perhaps even creating an authority that transcends national boundaries.” This is an eerily accurate description of ISIS. Since the group was mostly destroyed, the overall threat posed by political Islam at this moment is lower today than it was in 2004, though its unclear if conditions will hold.
“The key factors that spawned international terrorism show no signs of abating over the next 15 years. Facilitated by global communications, the revival of Muslim identity will create a framework for the spread of radical Islamic ideology inside and outside the Middle East, including Southeast Asia, Central Asia and Western Europe, where religious identity has traditionally not been as strong.” The problem has stayed overwhelmingly confined to the Middle East and South Asia. Islamic terrorists have staged high-profile attacks in Europe, but the resulting deaths were dwarfed by the number killed in the Middle East and South Asia.
“Democratic progress could gain ground in key Middle Eastern countries, which thus far have been excluded from the process by repressive regimes. Success in establishing a working democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan—and democratic consolidation in Indonesia—would set an example for other Muslim and Arab states, creating pressures for change.” No real success. Iraq and Afghanistan are highly corrupt democracies that would collapse without direct U.S. military support. Tunisia became democratic, but I have doubts about its long-term survival.
“Reports of growing investment by many Middle Eastern governments in developing high-speed information infrastructures, although they are not yet widely available to the population nor well-connected to the larger world, show obvious potential for the spread of democratic—and undemocratic—ideas.” This happened. The Arab Spring was the “social media revolution,” and ISIS spread its crazed ideas, snuff videos, and terrorist training materials via the internet.
“Most of the regions that will experience gains in religious “activists” also have youth bulges, which experts have correlated with high numbers of radical adherents, including Muslim extremists.
Youth bulges are expected to be especially acute in most Middle Eastern and West African countries until at least 2005-2010, and the effects will linger long after.
In the Middle East, radical Islam’s increasing hold reflects the political and economic alienation of many young Muslims from their unresponsive and unrepresentative governments and related failure of many predominantly Muslim states to reap significant economic gains from globalization.
The spread of radical Islam will have a significant global impact leading to 2020, rallying disparate ethnic and national groups and perhaps even creating an authority that transcends national boundaries. Part of the appeal of radical Islam involves its call for a return by Muslims to earlier roots when Islamic civilization was at the forefront of global change. The collective feelings of alienation and estrangement which radical Islam draws upon are unlikely to dissipate until the Muslim world again appears to be more fully integrated into the world economy.”
The report contains a hypothetical 2020 letter between Muslim fanatics discussing the recent rise of an Islamic caliphate in the Sunni regions of Iraq, and its war against Shi’ites and U.S. military forces. The fictitious letter also says the conflict spurred a million Middle Eastern refugees to flee to the Western world. This is a frighteningly accurate description of actual events in the Middle East and Europe during the 2010s.
“We expect that by 2020 al-Qa’ida will be superceded by similarly inspired Islamic extremist groups, and there is a substantial risk that broad Islamic movements akin to al-Qa’ida will merge with local separatist movements.” Excellent prediction. ISIS and Boko Haram meet the description.
Global terrorism and organized crime
“Strong terrorist interest in acquiring chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons increases the risk of a major terrorist attack involving WMD. Our greatest concern is that terrorists might acquire biological agents or, less likely, a nuclear device, either of which could cause mass casualties. Bioterrorism appears particularly suited to the smaller, better-informed groups. We also expect that terrorists will attempt cyber attacks to disrupt critical information networks and, even more likely, to cause physical damage to information systems.” Terrorists have evidently made no progress on this, though the coronavirus pandemic’s damage will surely inspire terrorists to try harder.
“Over the next 10 to 20 years there is a risk that advances in biotechnology will augment not only defensive measures but also offensive biological warfare (BW) agent development and allow the creation of advanced biological agents designed to target specific systems—human, animal, or crop.” No evidence it happened, though the chaos caused by coronavirus could inspire terrorist groups and crazed individuals to focus on BW. It is possible that Russia, China and other states have used new technology to secretly create deadlier bioweapons. Such weapons programs remain beyond the means of terrorists, but could be supported and concealed by a competent government.
Thankfully, terrorists never got WMDs as the report feared. However, they still wreaked enormous havoc with conventional weapons and tactics–terrorists have killed about 200,000 people since 2004.
“If the growing problem of abject poverty and bad governance in troubled states in Sub-Saharan Africa, Eurasia, the Middle East, and Latin America persists, these areas will become more fertile grounds for terrorism, organized crime, and pandemic disease. Forced migration also is likely to be an important dimension of any downward spiral. The international community is likely to face choices about whether, how, and at what cost to intervene.” Yes, this happened. Muslim fundamentalism like Boko Haram in Africa, Mexican cartels worse than ever, refugee waves going to the U.S. and Europe.
“While vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices will remain popular as asymmetric weapons, terrorists are likely to move up the technology ladder to employ advanced explosives and unmanned aerial vehicles.” Terrorists have tried many times to kill people with UAVs, but been unsuccessful. Our luck won’t hold forever. In 2018, a drone was also used in an attempted assassination of Venezuelan president Maduro.
“We expect that terrorists also will try to acquire and develop the capabilities to conduct cyber attacks to cause physical damage to computer systems and to disrupt critical information networks.” Many small-scale attacks have happened, but we’re still waiting for The Big One. The ability for computer hackers to do things like cause nuclear meltdowns or disable national electric grids has been exaggerated.
“A key cyber battlefield of the future will be the information on computer systems themselves, which is far more valuable and vulnerable than physical systems. New technologies on the horizon provide capabilities for accessing data, either through wireless intercept, intrusion into Internet-connected systems, or through direct access by insiders.” This definitely happened. Since 2004, there have been too many big hacking incidents, in which troves of sensitive data and electronic assets were stolen. Also remember the high-profile data dumps on Wikileaks, including those courtesy of Edward Snowden.
“Organized crime is likely to thrive in resource-rich states undergoing significant political and economic transformation, such as India, China, Russia, Nigeria, and Brazil as well as Cuba, if it sees the end of its one-party system.” If Boko Haram is considered a mafia, then it did indeed get quite bad in Nigeria. Didn’t happen in the others though. Brazil is about as bad as ever. Report missed Mexico becoming a global center of organized crime. Cartel activity and the national murder rate shot up a few years after the report was published.
Globalization, nationalism and populism
“Some aspects of globalization—such as the growing global interconnectedness stemming from the information technology (IT) revolution— almost certainly will be irreversible. Yet it is also possible, although unlikely, that the process of globalization could be slowed or even stopped, just as the era of globalization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was reversed by catastrophic war and global depression.” Globalization has definitely slowed. Consider Trump’s election, Brexit, growing resistance among Europeans to strengthening the E.U., the death of free trade deals like Doha, growing isolation and hostility of Russia.
“The transition will not be painless and will hit the middle classes of the developed world in particular, bringing more rapid job turnover and requiring professional retooling. Outsourcing on a large scale would strengthen the antiglobalization movement. Where these pressures lead will depend on how political leaders respond, how flexible labor markets become, and whether overall economic growth is sufficiently robust to absorb a growing number of displaced workers.” Yes, this is now a major political issue throughout the world. It’s unclear if the U.S. has permanently changed course or if Trump’s election just hit the Pause button on the U.S. outsourcing more jobs and importing more immigrant labor.
“Currently, about two-thirds of the world’s population live in countries that are connected to the global economy. Even by 2020, however, the benefits of globalization won’t be global. Over the next 15 years, gaps will widen between those countries benefiting from globalization—economically, technologically, and socially—and those underdeveloped nations or pockets within nations that are left behind. Indeed, we see the next 15 years as a period in which the perceptions of the contradictions and uncertainties of a globalized world come even more to the fore than is the case today.” Yes. Note the rise of populist, nationalist political parties and talking heads, and the new, near-constant focus on “inequality” in the press.
“Populist themes are likely to emerge as a potent political and social force, especially as globalization risks aggravating social divisions along economic and ethnic lines. In parts of Latin America particularly, the failure of elites to adapt to the evolving demands of free markets and democracy probably will fuel a revival in populism and drive indigenous movements, which so far have sought change through democratic means, to consider more drastic means for seeking what they consider their “fair share” of political power and wealth.” Definitely happened.
“What Could Derail Globalization? The process of globalization, powerful as it is, could be substantially slowed or even stopped. Short of a major global conflict, which we regard as improbable, another large-scale development that we believe could stop globalization would be a pandemic…”
World economy
The report gives figures for “GNP,” but the metric is now known as “GNI.”
“Barring such a turn of events, the world economy is likely to continue growing impressively: by 2020, it is projected to be about 80 percent larger than it was in 2000, and average per capita income will be roughly 50 percent higher. Of course, there will be cyclical ups and downs and periodic financial or other crises, but this basic growth trajectory has powerful momentum behind it.” Missed the 2008 Great Recession, but then again, so did everybody. Regardless, the estimate was basically right. 2000 Gross world product (GWP) was $50 trillion while 2019 GWP was $87 trillion, meaning it grew 74% (note: figures are adjusted for inflation). The extra 6% growth we failed to achieve might owe to the Great Recession.
Technology
“The Internet in particular will spur the creation of even more global movements, which may emerge as a robust force in international affairs.” The Arab Spring was driven by young people with cell phones and social media. More generally, social media empowers people to organize and petition about all kinds of things, big and small, and to effectively pressure powerful people to do things.
“Moreover, future technology trends will be marked not only by accelerating advancements in individual technologies but also by a force-multiplying convergence of the technologies—information, biological, materials, and nanotechnologies—that have the potential to revolutionize all dimensions of life. Materials enabled with nanotechnology’s sensors and facilitated by information technology will produce myriad devices that will enhance health and alter business practices and models. Such materials will provide new knowledge about environment, improve security, and reduce privacy. Such interactions of these technology trends—coupled with agile manufacturing methods and equipment as well as energy, water, and transportation technologies—will help China’s and India’s prospects for joining the “First World.” Both countries are investing in basic research in these fields and are well placed to be leaders in a number of key fields. Europe risks slipping behind Asia in creating some of these technologies. The United States is still in a position to retain its overall lead, although it must increasingly compete with Asia and may lose significant ground in some sectors.” What are “nanotechnology’s sensors”? Can’t really assess the prediction without knowing what that means. The smartphone revolution happened after this was written, and the devices contain many sensors that “have nanotechnology.” Neither China nor India are in the First World yet, but the former has made major strides improving its technology and even taking the lead in some niches.
“New technology applications will foster dramatic improvements in human knowledge and individual well-being. Such benefits include medical breakthroughs that begin to cure or mitigate some common diseases and stretch lifespans, applications that improve food and potable water production, and expansion of wireless communications and language translation technologies that will facilitate transnational business, commercial, and even social and political relationships.” The predicted computer-related advances happened, but progress in medical technology has been disappointing. Over the last 16 years, we’ve discovered that biology is messier, more complex, and less amenable to manipulation than software.
“The media explosion cuts both ways: on the one hand, it makes it potentially harder to build a consensus because the media tends to magnify differences; on the other hand, the media can also facilitate discussions and consensus-building.” The first point has outweighed the other, and misinformation, disagreement, and social fragmentation have probably never been worse. The authors couldn’t have known.
“Growing connectivity also will be accompanied by the proliferation of transnational virtual communities of interest, a trend which may complicate the ability of state and global institutions to generate internal consensus and enforce decisions and could even challenge their authority and legitimacy. Groups based on common religious, cultural, ethnic or other affiliations may be torn between their national loyalties and other identities. The potential is considerable for such groups to drive national and even global political decisionmaking on a wide range of issues normally the purview of governments.” Accurate. It has made people more tribal and fragmented.
Misc.
“The likelihood of great power conflict escalating into total war in the next 15 years is lower than at any time in the past century, unlike during previous centuries when local conflicts sparked world wars.” Quite true. I think it will get slightly higher over the next 15 as China closes some of the military power gap with the U.S.
“Countries without nuclear weapons—especially in the Middle East and Northeast Asia—might decide to seek them as it becomes clear that their neighbors and regional rivals are doing so.” There have been no concrete steps in that direction. The U.S. has successfully assured Japan and South Korea they are under its nuclear umbrella, so they haven’t started their own nuclear programs in response to North Korea getting the bomb. Also, since Iran has been dissuaded/blocked from building nukes (this counter-effort was probably more successful than the report authors would have predicted), its neighbors haven’t tried building their own.
“Both North Korea and Iran probably will have an ICBM capability well before 2020” North Korea does; Iran does not.
“By 2020, China and Nigeria will have some of the largest Christian communities in the world, a shift that will reshape the traditionally Western-based Christian institutions, giving them more of an African or Asian or, more broadly, a developing world face.” I don’t think this happened.
“Over the next 15 years, democratic reform will remain slow and imperfect in many countries due to a host of social and economic problems, but it is highly unlikely that democracy will be challenged as the norm in Africa.” Was right.
“We foresee a more pervasive sense of insecurity, which may be as much based on psychological perceptions as physical threats, by 2020. The psychological aspects, which we have addressed earlier in this paper, include concerns over job security as well as fears revolving around migration among both host populations and migrants.” I wholeheartedly agree that a large share of today’s popular anxiety is psychological and not tangible in nature. Threats are commonly being exaggerated and even manufactured to keep average people fearful, tragically distracting them from the fact that this is the best time to be alive in human history for most types of people. The cause is a toxic nexus between the darker aspects of human nature and the profit-driven incentives of news media outlets.
However, the concept of an intelligent machine uprising dates to 1872, when English writer Samuel Butler published the book Erehwon. In it, the main character visits a futuristic, closed society that banned machines because they were improving too fast and people feared they would become smarter than humans and take over. Butler was inspired by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and by the rapid industrialization he saw in England over his lifetime. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/butler-samuel/1872/erewhon/ch23.htm
“People occlusion” is an awesome new phrase. This technique, coupled with better object recognition algorithms, will lead to a revolution in augmented reality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkS-VqAss4s
A new machine can pump oxygenated blood into donor hearts and lungs, keeping them viable for transplant several hours longer than the current maximum. Technologies like this will someday benefit human cryonics. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-51975351
In the U.S., black people might have higher blood pressure than whites because the former have more skin pigment, which blocks UV light from entering skin cells. When light enters those cells, it triggers the release of nitric oxide into the bloodstream, which lowers blood pressure. The blood pressure disparity partly explains why whites live longer than blacks. https://www.outsideonline.com/2411055/free-fitness-apps-online-classes-programs
More on the project to map all the world’s seafloor by 2030: 75% of it will only be mapped to a measly fidelity of 1 depth measurement per 400 x 400 meter grid square. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3263/8/2/63/html
“There are physical limits to how small we can make [information] storage particles…Once we conquer the ultimate small storage particle, we will be able to set standards – both standards for information and standards for storage.” https://futuristspeaker.com/future-scenarios/the-future-of-libraries/
Self-replicating Bracewell probes might be ideal for exploring and monitoring the galaxy. They would have limited AI and downgraded technology, and would only be able to make copies of themselves, transmit data back to the home planet, and talk to other intelligent species if certain conditions were meant. Such probes would be too handicapped to start thinking for themselves and turn against the home planet, and if one were captured or destroyed, it wouldn’t be much of a loss since it would only contain second-rate technology and no information about the home planet. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bracewell_probe&oldid=908951238
The ongoing coronavirus quarantine reveals how autonomous, electric cars will improve things: in many cities, air pollution and traffic jams have nearly disappeared because people aren’t driving. The skies are bluer in Los Angeles than many residents can remember. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/22/climate/coronavirus-usa-traffic.html
The White House announced at a press conference that coronavirus will probably kill 100,000 – 240,000 Americans. That’s actually not the worst-case scenario, as it is built on assumptions that the strict quarantine measures stay in place. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/31/trump-briefing-coronavirus-158079
In early 2015, Bill Gates gave a TED Talk about the world’s unreadiness for a pandemic. The scenario he described was almost a dead ringer for today’s coronavirus outbreak. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI
Gates was probably citing this statement Elon Musk made three months earlier: “I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.” https://bigthink.com/ideafeed/elon-musk-we-should-be-very-careful-about-artificial-intelligence
The superstructure jutting up from an aircraft carrier’s deck is called it’s “island,” and it is full of human crewmen whose jobs require them to see the vessel’s surroundings. One specialized compartment, called the “island camera room,” is there so a person can video record aircraft takeoffs and landings for safety and training reasons. The latest U.S. carriers have deleted the room and replaced with with CCTV cameras that a person monitors from an office room below decks. Would a fully automated aircraft carrier need anything more than a skeletal tower with cameras and other sensors mounted on it as its island? https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32614/heres-what-this-panoramic-windowed-room-does-on-american-aircraft-carriers
North Korean fighter plane squadrons secretly fought U.S. planes during the Vietnam War. ‘Vietnamese pilot Dinh said of the Koreans: “They kept everything secret, so we didn’t know their loss ratio, but the North Korean pilots claimed 26 American aircraft destroyed. Although they fought very bravely in the aerial battles, they were generally too slow and too mechanical in their reactions when engaged, which is why so many of them were shot down by the Americans. They never followed flight instructions and regulations either.”‘ https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/yes-north-korea-sent-jets-and-pilots-fight-america-vietnam-134227
Smart bombs keep getting smarter. The “BLU-129” is a standard-sized bomb (500 lbs and 7 ft. long), but the size of its explosion can be dialed up or down by the bomber crew, even after they’ve dropped it. This lets us minimize collateral damage if the bomb is dropped, but a few seconds before it hits, a little kid walks into the target area. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/blu-12-bomb-air-forces-new-aerial-sniper-129187
Video of a low-flying, supersonic jet shattering the windows of buildings. Sonic booms are one of the main reasons supersonic passenger jets never became popular. https://youtu.be/2eoTqLnL0WI
‘A former F-16 pilot, Lee also has 1,500 hours in the [F-4] Phantom. He still recalls the first time he took to the air in one. “I was shocked at how much more difficult it was to fly than I thought it would be,” he told me. “When I got home, I told my wife, ‘I think I just traded in a Porsche for a ’72 Cadillac.”‘ https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/where-have-all-the-phantoms-gone-96320627/
Here’s a fascinating article on “rarefaction wave” (RAVEN) guns, which are tank cannons that vent gas out of their backs kind of like recoilless rifles (e.g. – bazookas). If RAVEN weapons are fully developed, they could let small, light tanks fire powerful shells that only today’s heavy tanks can shoot. ‘A general rule of thumb, according to Technology of Tanks, from Jane’s, is that a vehicle needs to weigh about one ton for every nine hundred newtons of force exerted on it. This means for the current 120-millimeter M256 cannon shooting a M829A3 Anti-Tank Shell, a vehicle would have to weigh twenty-five tons to withstand the recoil force.’ Interestingly, that means a tank as small as a T-55 (weighs 36 tons) could be retrofitted with the same, powerful cannon as the U.S. M1 Abrams. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-us-army-wants-put-big-guns-small-tanks-23041
