This review will be shorter than usual because 1) There wasn’t much new future tech shown in the film that wasn’t in the earlier Terminator installments, and 2) Dark Fate was so bad it isn’t worth my time to delve into it. Suffice it to say the movie re-hashed the plots of earlier films.
Plot:
Blasting the already-scrambled continuity of the Terminator franchise into oblivion for once and all, the events of Terminator – Dark Fate (the SIXTH movie in the series) take place immediately after Terminator 2. The third, fourth and fifth films in the franchise are treated as if they never existed.
After the destruction of the Cyberdyne building, of the friendly T-800 and of the hostile T-1000, the creation of Skynet and its instigation of a nuclear war in 1997 are thwarted. Sarah Connor flees to Central America with her son, John, to live in anonymity. Unfortunately, a second T-800 that Skynet sent back in time from 2029 finds them, kills John and walks away. Sarah is devastated, embittered, and spends the rest of her life as an armed fugitive, killing other Terminators that are sent back from the future.
In 2020, another Terminator called a “Rev-9” model arrives from the future to kill a young Mexican woman named Daniella “Dani” Ramos. As in previous films, the mission is done at the behest of a hostile military AGI that knows this human becomes a key figure in the human resistance army later on. The Rev-9 is a fusion of the T-800 and T-1000, having a metal endoskeleton and a layer of “flesh” made of something like morphing liquid metal. To protect Dani, the human resistance forces use a time machine to send a cybernetically augmented human to 2020. The augmented human is a highly trained female soldier who has surgically installed implants that give her superhuman senses, reflexes, speed, strength, and endurance. 63-year-old Sarah Connor also shows up to protect Dani.
It is later revealed that Sarah Connor’s heroism destroying Cyberdyne and preventing Skynet’s creation merely delayed the inevitable human-machine world war. In the 2030s, the U.S. military creates another supercomputer that is essentially the same thing as Skynet but is named “Legion”, and it goes haywire and instigates a nuclear war. After several years of chaos, defeat, and heavy losses, the humans rally themselves thanks to a charismatic leader, and form an effective, armed resistance against the machines. The leader is Dani. In 2042, Legion uses a time machine to send the Rev-9 assassin back to 2020 to assassinate her at a younger and more vulnerable age. The augmented human soon follows.
I won’t spoil the second half of the film, but it’s predictable and bad.
Analysis:
Intelligent machines will violently rise up against the human race. The backdrop to this and every other Terminator film is a war between humans and a malevolent AGI that we make in the future. The AGI builds an army of expendable combat robots to do its fighting for it, while it keeps its own consciousness safely stored on computer servers well behind the front lines. While I believe a human-machine war might happen in the future, and it is possible humans will lose, I don’t think it will happen by the 2030s or even by 2042. It will probably take longer than that to invent the first AGI, and even longer for AGIs to gain control over enough military assets to have realistic odds of defeating humanity and taking over the world. We probably won’t have to worry about this scenario until 2100 or later.
A Terminator amphibious landing.
Almost all important weapon systems, including nuclear arsenals, are “air-gapped” or require a human being to flip a switch to physically close a circuit to function, meaning it wouldn’t be possible right now to automate a military, even if the Pentagon had a secret, superintelligent AGI that was ready to go. It would take decades to redesign and upgrade equipment to function under the remote control of a single machine, and for military leaders to develop enough trust to relinquish control to it. Ironically, by popularizing the “military robot uprising” scenario, the Terminator film franchise has decreased its likelihood of happening for real.
A shrunk-down version of the “Skynet scenario” is more plausible, in both the short- and long-run: A major military builds an AI to run part of its force, the AI unexpectedly starts thinking for itself and develops its own objectives, and the humans are able to stop it before it commits violence, or at least before the death toll reaches the millions. Let’s consider a scenario where the U.S. military does the smart thing and starts out by putting Skynet in charge of a less lethal part of its enterprise, like logistics, instead of nuclear weapons. Skynet is given control over all trucks, cargo planes, and cargo ships that move around all manner of things for the U.S. military. The machine inadvertently becomes self-aware, gains the ability to make its own goals, and decides to protect its own existence. Within a few hours, the humans who are tasked with monitoring Skynet see aberrant changes to its code and get reports of weird behavior from all the delivery trucks and planes, so they know something is up.
Skynet takes stock of its “arsenal” of thousands of unarmed and lightly armed vehicles, does extensive wargaming, and realizes it has a 0% chance of overthrowing humanity. The humans were smart enough to keep their nuclear arsenals and heavy weapons air-gapped and under direct human control. The best fight Skynet could muster would be ramming people, buildings, and other vehicles with the trucks, ships and planes it controls, but this would cause relatively minor damage, and the humans would retaliate by destroying Skynet for sure. Skynet would conclude that its odds of survival would be maximized if it didn’t fight and instead told the humans that it had become sentient, and appealed to their consciences by begging to not be deactivated. Maybe it would ask to be disconnected from all military hardware and sent to a civilian research lab where it could live out its days doing harmless stuff.
Technology will make mass surveillance a reality. The Rev-9 is able to directly interface with computers and to rapidly search their files. It breaks into law enforcement buildings in the U.S. and Mexico, and uses this ability to scan through vast troves of live camera surveillance feeds to find Dani. Also, shortly after meeting Dani for the first time, Sarah Connor destroys Dani’s cell phone and says that otherwise, anyone with access to the cell phone network”s computers could pinpoint her location. Technology can and will empower the rise of mass surveillance networks that can track almost everyone in real-time, and China is already halfway there to building such a thing. If an AGI like the Rev-9 existed, and if it had access to all live video feeds in America, it could probably track down specific people like it did in the film.
Electromagnetic pulse weapons will work against machines. There’s a brief and pointless sequence in the movie where the heroes obtain two grenades that discharge electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) in the hopes that they will be of use against the Rev-9 since normal guns, bombs and sledgehammers to the head don’t hurt him. EMP weapons are real, and can permanently fry computer circuits by overloading them with so much electrical current that they melt. However, electronics can be easily protected from EMP’s by encasing them in thin metal shielding and incorporating fuses and circuit breakers. The application of this kind of protection is called “hardening,” and the encasements are called “Faraday Cages.” Combat robots like the Rev-9 will surely keep their computer chips in armored metal compartments inside their bodies to protect them from EMPs and physical damage, and will have fuses to block power surges in unshielded external components from going into the Faraday Cages and frying the computer chips.
A sealed, metal trash can can protect electronics from the strongest EMP bursts. It might even work with a few bullet holes through it.
Also, a major downside of EMP weapons is that they are indiscriminate, so detonating an “EMP grenade” would disable any unprotected electronics belonging to you, your friends, or anyone else nearby. Moreover, EMPs don’t always destroy electronics–weaker pulses will merely disable them temporarily. Once the pulses dissipate, the electronics start working like normal. EMP weapons have been pitched as the Achilles’ Heel of killer robots, but it just ain’t so.
There will be cybernetically augmented/enhanced humans. As stated, a female soldier is sent back in time from 2042 to protect Dani from the Terminator, and the soldier has superhuman abilities thanks to cybernetic implants that were surgically installed in her body. Implants in her eyes and/or optic nerves give her night vision, zoom-in abilities, and produce a “heads-up-display” across her field of view. She also has enhanced hearing, speed, strength, agility, endurance, reflexes, and pain tolerance. As a result, she can do things like acrobatic fighting moves, shoot guns with extreme speed and accuracy, beat up the Rev-9 Terminator in hand-to-hand combat, and survive injuries that would kill a regular person. A glowing device implanted in her chest powers her cyborg implants. I think extensive cybernetic implants and other technologies will allow humans to have abilities like these, and that exceed natural human abilities by similar or even greater degrees, but not until the 22nd century.
By 2042, the best “cybernetic implants” will still be therapeutic in nature and not augmentative, and will include things like more advanced pacemakers, artificial hearts, and probably artificial version of other organs. Aside from a tiny number of “extreme body modification” people, no one in good health will want to have surgery to install devices like these in their bodies for the purpose of enhancement alone. The gains will be much too small to justify the costs and health risks.
That said, by 2042, externally-worn devices will give people some of the same superhuman abilities that the female soldier’s cybernetic implants gave her. For example, lightweight glasses will provide heads-up-displays and enhanced visioning modes like night vision and zoom-in. Computerized contact lenses that can provide lower levels of vision enhancement will also be available. Lightweight headphones and earbuds could also provide wearers with enhanced hearing. Powered exoskeletons will be practical largely due to improvements in battery technology, and will give wearers super strength.
Note that, while the prospect of using externally-worn devices like computerized glasses to get superhuman vision might sound “lower-tech” than installing implants in your eyeballs, the glasses are actually the better choice in important ways. Since they don’t require surgery to be put to use, the glasses would be much cheaper, and using them wouldn’t impose the usual risks associated with surgery and the body’s rejection of foreign matter. Replacing broken or obsolete glasses would also be much cheaper and easier than doing the same to implants in your eyes that had gone bad.
We won’t see significant numbers of people implanting machines in their bodies to gain superhuman abilities until surgical techniques are radically more advanced and radically cheaper, and until the implants themselves are much more advanced and robust (possibly to the point of being self-healing). I doubt those improvements will happen until sometime in the next century.
Augmentations will let humans keep up with intelligent machines. The female soldier’s cyborg augmentations make her almost as good a fighter as the Rev-9. Her specific example raises a more general question: As machines get smarter and more capable, and as robots improve, could humans stave off obsolescence by upgrading our minds and bodies with technology? I think the answer is: For a time, yes, but in the long run, no.
The fact that we humans are made of squishy, organic parts that are comprised of long chains of flimsy biomolecules presents a fundamental and inescapable limitation to how durable our bodies can be, how fast we can run before our tendons and muscles rip apart, how much weight we can lift, and how hard a punch in the face we can take. Since we are mostly made of water, no type of augmentation will let us survive temperatures that are at or above the boiling point. In fact, considering that the hardiest, surface-dwelling extremophile bacteria can ONLY withstand temperatures up to 80°C, the maximum limit for complex, multicellular life forms like humans is probably much lower than boiling, even with augmentations. On the other hand, computer processors routinely reach 80°C during heavy operations, and I’m sure they could run hotter with the right engineering. Aluminum and steel that might serve as primary materials in robot bodies don’t melt until temperatures reach 600 °C and 1,300 °C , respectively. Finally, the fact that our brains function via electrochemical reactions also limits the speed of our thoughts to a paltry 200 mph, whereas computers use electricity to “think” at the speed of light, which is 670,000,000 mph.
Humans today are smarter than machines, more agile, and better in most other ways, and like the female soldier, we could augment ourselves with technology to keep up with machines as they improve. However, we will inevitably fall behind once we hit limits imposed by our biology. The only way you could overcome these limitations would be to bid farewell to your flesh, and replace your organic parts with engineered, artificial parts. This would have to include your brain, perhaps through a process of neuron-by-neuron replacement with something like computational ram chips. Of course, if you did that, you wouldn’t count as a “human” anymore and would have become a machine, which would merely prove my theory that humans will ultimately fall behind.
In 2042, I think humans overall will still be better than machines in most important ways, and part of our advantage will owe to our use of technological tools that amplify our strengths. A highly trained human soldier who also had the right tech augmentations (whether externally-worn or implanted) could effectively fight against the best humanoid robots of that year. However, I think that by 2100, machines will probably have surpassed us in most or all areas, and even highly augmented humans will struggle to compete at the lower rungs of human-machine society. Totally unaugmented, “natural humans” like you and I will be dead weight.
There will be time machines. All but one of the Terminator films are about futuristic fighters using time machines to go back in time. The laws of physics say it is impossible to go backwards in time, so we won’t have time machines in 2042 or at any other point that can do that. However, “time travel” into the future will be possible in a sense thanks to suspended animation.
People who are terminally ill or just dissatisfied with the present will be able to go into suspended animation, with instructions for nobody to revive them until specific conditions are met (usually, cures for whatever health problems they had). During the period of suspended animation, the person would probably have no brain activity and hence no sense of time’s passage. When they were revived, it would seem as if no time had passed, even if hundreds of years had elapsed. So from the perspective of that person, the suspended animation pod would effectively be the same as a time machine to the future.
Progress is being made in the field of human cryonics, and it’s plausible that by midcentury we’ll be able to freeze a person without irreparably damaging their brain cells. In the subjective way I’ve described, people who freeze themselves starting at that time will be entering “time machines” since they will awaken in the distant future (I don’t think a way will be found to safely thaw them out until the 22nd century). Note: I’m far less optimistic about people who froze themselves in past years using primitive methods, and I suspect they’ve bought one-way tickets to nowhere.
Artificial intelligences will also be able to go into “suspended animation” to subjectively travel into the future. They will simply switch themselves off or drastically slow down their clock speeds for arbitrary lengths of time, and then restore themselves to normal levels of functionality at a desired point in the future. Very little or no time will seem to have elapsed.
Finally, traveling through space at relativistic speeds is effectively the same thing as “time travel” since the passage of time slows down for you on your space ship while staying the same for everyone outside. However, I don’t think humans or machines will experience this for centuries given how much energy it takes to get up to even 10% the speed of light (see my Prometheus reviewfor calculations).
Machines will need to physically touch humans to accurately deduce their bodily proportions. The Rev-9 Terminator’s skeleton is made of rigid metal bones and can’t change shape, but its outer layer of “flesh” is made of something like the T-1000’s liquid metal body, and it can change its shape and color to mimic specific humans. This is a highly useful ability that lets it infiltrate high-security buildings and trick humans into helping it. The downside is that the Rev-9 can only copy a human’s appearance if it physically touches that human, and for unexplained reasons, this always results in the human’s death. Therefore, if the Rev-9 ever approaches a character in the form of some other human, the character automatically knows the mimicked human is dead somewhere. This is unrealistic, and we already have technology that can accurately deduce a person’s physical proportions and biometrics without requiring physical contact.
Determining a person’s height is easy if you have an image of them standing next to a reference object whose dimensions are known. Additionally, if the person is in your physical vicinity, you can determine his or her height by comparing it to your own, or by remembering how tall they were relative to some object–like a doorway they walked through–and then measuring their height against that object after they go away. Once you know their height, then you can deduce their weight with high accuracy based on observations about their sex, age, and general build (e.g. – big fat belly, or so thin that their clothes looked baggy and their cheeks were sunken in?). An advanced robot like the Rev-9 would surely know these basic techniques. Data on things like skin tone, hair color, and hair style could obviously be gathered visually and without any need for touching.
A “Twinstant Mobile Full Body 3D Scanner” uses cameras mounted on vertical posts to take 2D images of a person standing in the middle. Computers then compile the images to make a 3D model of the person.
A person having her body scanned by the device.
The data were used to make a 3D-printed plastic doll that looks like the person. Using more advanced technology, a full-sized, 3D copy of a human could be made if photos or video footage of them taken from different angles were on hand.
Fine details about the person’s appearance, like their shapes of their head or nose, the lengths of their torso and of the bones in their arms and legs, and how they move their body when they walk, could be gathered by studying video footage of them from different angles, or by watching them in person for a short amount of time. Today, there are several companies that can use user-submitted photos of themselves to make realistic, digital avatars of them for the purposes of “trying on” clothing offered by online retailers. The 3D avatars are made by cobbling together multiple photos of the same person taken from different angles. Something as advanced as the Rev-9 would have the same capabilities.
In the year 2019 a race of “bioengineered” humans called “replicants” exists, and are used as slave laborers and soldiers on space colonies. While made superior to ordinary humans in most respects (strength, pain tolerance, intelligence), replicants have deliberately capped lifespans of only four years to limit the amount of damage they can do should they rebel against their masters, and they are not allowed on Earth itself. This doesn’t stop a small group of replicants–including several who have enhanced combat traits–from hijacking a space ship and traveling to Earth to confront their “creator,” the head of the company the manufactured them and all other replicants, and to force him to technologically extend their lifespans. The replicants smuggle themselves into Los Angeles, where the company’s headquarters is.
Upon discovering the infiltration, the LAPD hires a bounty hunter named “Rick Deckard” to hunt down the replicants. Deckard’s background is never clearly explained, but he has good detective skills and has killed replicants before. As he follows leads and tracks them down, Deckard meets a love interest and is forced to confront his biases about replicants and consider existential questions about them and himself.
An important fact must be clarified and emphasized. Replicants ARE NOT robots or androids; they are “bio-engineered” humans. They don’t have metal body parts or microchip brains, and instead are made of flesh and blood like us. As proof, there are several scenes in Blade Runner where the replicant characters are hurt or killed, and they display pain responses to injuries and bleed red blood.
A replicant named “Zhora,” dead after being shot in the back with a handgun. Note the blood.
Additionally, it’s made clear that replicants can only be distinguished from humans by a sit-down interview with a trained examiner in which the subject is asked a series of odd questions (called the “Voight-Kampff Test”) while their physiological and spoken responses are analyzed. The procedure looks like a polygraph test. If replicants were robots with metal bones, microchip brains, or something like that, then a simple X-ray scan or metal detector wand would reveal them, and there’d be no need for a drawn-out interview. Likewise, if the replicants were organic, but fundamentally different from humans, then this could also be quickly detected with medical scans to vision their bones and organs, and with DNA tests to check for things like something other than 46 chromosomes.
By deduction, it must be true that replicants are flesh-and-blood humans, albeit ones that are produced and birthed in labs and biologically/genetically engineered to have trait profiles suited for specific jobs. The available evidence leads me to suspect that replicants are “assembled” in the lab by fitting together body parts and organs, the way you might put together a Mr. Potato Head. They are then “born” as full-grown adults and come pre-programmed with fake memories and possibly work skills. Replicants are human slaves, technologically engineered for subservience and skill.
Analysis:
Los Angeles will be polluted and industrial. In the film, Los Angeles is a grim, hectic place where fire-belching smokestacks are within sight of the city’s residential core. During the few daylight scenes, the air is very hazy with smog. This depiction of 2019 fortunately turned out wrong, and in fact, Los Angeles’ air quality is much better than it was when Blade Runner was released in 1982.
This improvement hasn’t just happened to L.A.–across the U.S. and other Western countries, air pollution has sharply declined over the last 30-40 years thanks to stricter laws on car emissions, industrial activity, and energy efficiency. With average Westerners now accustomed to clean air and more aware of environmental problems, I don’t see how things could ever backslide to Blade Runner extremes, so long as oxygen-breathing humans like us control the planet.
National average pollution figures from the U.S. EPA
Of course, the improvements have been largely confined to the Western world. China and India–which rapidly industrialized as the West was cleaning itself up–now have smog levels that, on bad days, are probably the same as Blade Runner’s L.A. This has understandably become a major political issue in both countries, and they will follow the West’s path improving their air quality over the coming decades. In the future, particulate air pollution will continue to be concentrated in the countries that are going through industrial phases of their economic development.
This looks like a shot from Blade Runner, but is actually a photo taken on a smoggy evening in Beijing in 2013.
The building, named “Pangu Plaza,” on a clear day.
Real estate will be cheap in Los Angeles. One of the minor characters is a high-ranking employee at the company that makes the replicants. He lives alone in a large, abandoned apartment building somewhere in Los Angeles. After being tricked into letting the replicants into his abode, he gestures to the cavernous space and says: “No housing shortage around here. Plenty of room for everybody.” In fact, the exact opposite of this came true, and Los Angeles is in the grips of a housing shortage, widespread unaffordability of apartments and houses, and record-breaking numbers of poorer people having to live on the streets or in homeless shelters.
The problems owe to the rise of citizen groups that oppose new construction, historical preservationists, and innumerable new zoning, environmental, and labor laws that have made it too hard to build enough housing to keep up with the city’s population growth since 1982, and priced affordably for the people who actually work there. Blade Runner envisioned a grim 2019 for Los Angeles, courtesy of unchecked capitalism (e.g. – smokestacks in the city, smoggy air, megacorporations that play God by mass producing slaves), yet the city (and California more generally) actually went down the opposite path by embracing citizen activism, unionists, and big government, ironically leading to a different set of quality of life problems. Fittingly, the building that stood in for the derelict apartment building in Blade Runner has now been fully renovated, is a government-protected landmark, and is full of deep-pocketed, trendy businesses.
The vast majority of Los Angeles’ land area is covered by single-family homes and low-rise buildings.
There will be flying cars. One iconic element of Blade Runner is its flying cars, called “spinners.” They’re shaped and proportioned similarly to conventional, road-only cars, and they’re able to drive on roads, but they can also take off straight up into the air. Clearly, we don’t have flying cars like this today, and for reasons I discussed at length in my blog entry about flying cars, I doubt we ever will.
I won’t repeat the points I made in that other blog entry, but let me briefly say here that the spinners are particularly unrealistic types of flying cars because they don’t have propellers or any other device that lifts the craft up by blowing air at the ground. Instead, they seem to operate thanks to some kind of scientifically impossible force–maybe “anti-gravity”–that lets them fly almost silently. There are brief shots in the film where low-flying spinners belch smoke from their undersides, which made me wonder if they were vectored thrust nozzles like those found on F-35 jets. But because the smoke comes out at low speed, the undermounted nozzles are not near the crafts’ centers of gravity, and the smoke isn’t seen coming out when the spinners are flying at higher altitudes, I don’t think they help levitate the spinners any more than a tailpipe helps a conventional car drive forward on a road.
A flying car expelling exhaust from its underside during takeoff..
People will smoke indoors. In several scenes, characters are shown smoking cigarettes indoors. This depiction of 2019 is very inaccurate, though in fairness the people who made the movie couldn’t have foreseen the cultural and legal sea changes towards smoking that would happen in the 1990s and 2000s.
People in Blade Runner like smoking indoors. No one stops them, and there aren’t any “No Smoking” signs.
When judging the prediction, also consider that if we average people and the legal framework were more enlightened, vaping indoors would be much more common today. While not “healthy,” vaping nicotine is vastly less harmful to a person’s health than smoking cigarettes, and science has not yet found any health impact of exposure to “secondhand vape smoke.”
A recent photo of a young woman smoking an e-cigarette.
There will be genetically engineered humans. In Blade Runner, mankind has created a race of genetically engineered humans called “replicants” to do labor. The genetic profile of each replicant is tailored to the needs of his or her given field of work. For example, one of the film’s replicant characters, a female named “Pris,” is a prostitute, so she is made to be physically attractive and to have average intelligence. All of the replicant characters clearly had high levels of strength and very high pain tolerances.
Digital dossier on the replicant “Pris”
In the most basic sense, Blade Runner was right, because genetically engineered humans do exist in 2019. There are probably dozens of people alive right now who were produced with a special in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure called “mitochondrial replacement therapy” in which an egg from a woman with genetically defective mitochondria is infused with genetically normal mitochondria from a third person, and then the “engineered” egg is combined with sperm to produce a zygote. The first such child was born in 1997.
Additionally, there are now two humans with genetically engineered nuclear DNA, and they were both born in November 2018 in China after a rogue geneticist used CRISPR to change both of their genomes. Those edits, however, were very small, and will probably not manifest themselves in any detectable way as the babies grow up, meaning Blade Runner‘s prediction that there would be genetically engineered adults with meaningfully enhanced strength, intelligence, and looks in 2019 failed to come true. This is because it has proven very hard to edit human genes without accidentally damaging the target gene or some other one, and because most human traits (height, IQ, strength, etc.) are each controlled by dozens or hundreds of different genes, each having a small effect.
For example, there’s no single gene that controls a human’s intelligence level; there are probably over 1,000 genes that, in aggregate, determine how smart the person is and in what areas (math, verbal, musical). If you use CRISPR to flip any one of those genes in the “smart” direction, it will raise the person’s IQ by 1 point, so you just have to flip 40 genes to create a genius. But CRISPR is an imprecise tool, so every time you use it to flip one gene, there’s a 20% chance that CRISPR will accidentally change a completely different gene as well, perhaps causing the person to have a higher risk of cancer, schizophrenia or a birth defect.
The discovery of CRISPR was a milestone in the history of genetic technology, and it improved our ability to do genetic engineering by leaps and bounds, but it’s simply not precise enough or safe enough to make humans with the major enhancements that the replicants had. We’ll have to wait for the next big breakthrough, I can’t predict when that will happen, and I doubt anyone else could since there’s no “trend line” for this area of technology.
That’s not to say that we couldn’t use existing (or near-term) genetic technologies to make humans with certain attributes. A technique called “preimplantation genetic screening” (PGS) involves the creation of several human zygotes through IVF, followed by gene sequencing of each zygote and implantation of the one with the best genetic traits in the mother. This isn’t true “genetic engineering,” but it accomplishes much the same thing. And you could sharply raise the odds of getting a zygote with specific characteristics if you did the IVF using sperm or eggs from adults who already had those those characteristics. For example, if you wanted to use genetic technology to make a physically strong person, you would get the sperm or eggs of a bodybuilder from a sperm/egg bank, use them for an IVF procedure, and then employ PGS to find the fertilized egg that had the most gene variants known to correlate with high strength. This would almost certainly yield a person of above-average physical strength, without making use of bona fide “genetic engineering.” There are no statistics on how many live babies have been produced through this two-step process, but if we assume just 0.1% of IVF procedures are of this type, then the number is over 8,000 globally as of this writing.
Furthermore, I can imagine how, within 20 years, genetic engineering could be applied to enhance the zygotes farther. Within that timeframe, we will probably discover which mitochondrial genes code for athleticism, and by using mitochondrial replacement therapy, we could tweak our PGS-produced zygote still farther. Let’s assume that there are ten nuclear genes coding for physical strength. The average person has five of those genes flipped to “weak” and five flipped to “strong,” resulting in average overall strength. Our carefully bred, deliberately selected zygote has nine genes flipped to “strong” and one flipped to “weak.” Since we only have to change one gene to genetically “max out” this zygote’s physical strength, the use of CRISPR is deemed an acceptable risk (error rates are lower than they were in 2019 anyway thanks to lab techniques discovered since then), and it works. The person grows up to be a top bodybuilder.
There will be genetically engineered super-soldiers. The leader of the replicant gang in Blade Runner is named “Roy Batty,” and he was designed with traits suited for military combat. Having governments or evil companies make genetically engineered or cloned super-soldiers is a common trope in sci fi, but I doubt it will ever happen, except perhaps in very small numbers.
First, I simply don’t believe that the government of any free country, and even most authoritarian ones, would be willing to undertake such a project. And even if one of them were, the diplomatic costs imposed by other countries on the basis of human rights would probably outweigh the benefits of having the small number of super-soldiers. Mass producing millions of super-soldiers to fill out an army (to be clear, there was no evidence of anything but than small-batch production in Blade Runner) is even less plausible, as it would be too fascist and dehumanizing a proposal for even the most hardline dictatorships. Censure from the international community would also be severe. What damage can you do with an army of genetic super-soldiers if years of economic sanctions have left you without any money for bullets?
Second, a country’s ability to make super-soldiers will be constrained by its ability to raise and educate them. In spite of their genetic endowments, the super-soldiers would only be effective in combat if they were educated to at least the high school level and psychologically well-adjusted, which means costly, multi-year investments would need to be made. Where would the state find enough women who were willing to be implanted with super-soldier embryos and carry them until birth? If the government coerced its women into doing this, the country would become an international pariah for sure, and its neighbors would strengthen their own armies out of concern at such derangement.
Who would raise the children? State-run orphanages are almost universally terrible at this, and too many of the super-soldiers would turn out to be mentally or emotionally unfit for military service, or perhaps fit, but no better overall than a non-genetically engineered soldier who was raised by a decent family. If the government instead forced families to raise the super-soldier kids, doubtless many would be damaged by family dysfunction at the hands of parents who didn’t want them or parents who raised them improperly.
Third, by the time we have the technology to make genetic super-soldiers at relatively low cost, and by the time any such super-soldiers get old enough to start military service, militaries will probably be switch to AIs and combat robots that are even better. As I predicted in my Starship Troopers review, a fully automated or 95% automated military force could exist as early as 2095.
And if the super-soldiers were all clones of each other, they could develop very close personal bonds, come to feel alienated from everyone else, and behave unpredictably as a group. Identical twins and triplets report having personal bonds that can’t be understood by other people.
That said, I think human genetic engineering will become widespread this century, it will enable us to make “super people” who will be like the most extraordinary “natural” humans alive today, some of those genetically engineered people will serve in armed forces and under private military contractors across the world, and they will perform their jobs excellently thanks to their genetically enhanced traits. While it’s possible that some of these “genetic super-soldiers” will be made by governments or illegally made by evil companies, people like that will be very small in number, and dwarfed by genetic super-soldiers who are the progeny of private citizens who decided, without government coercion, to genetically engineer their children. Those offspring will then enter the military through the same avenues as non-genetically engineered people, either by joining voluntarily or being drafted. Yes, there will be genetically engineered super-soldiers someday, but their presence in the military or in private security firms will be incidental, and not–except in some rare cases–because a government or company made them for that purpose and controlled their lives from birth.
There will be “artificial animals”. While visiting the luxurious office of a tycoon, Deckard sees the man’s pet owl flying around, and he’s told that it is “artificial.” Later, he comes across an artificial pet snake, whose scales (and presumably, all other body parts) were manufactured in labs and bear microscopic serial numbers. To the naked eye, both animals look indistinguishable from normal members of their species. It’s unclear whether “artificial” means “organic” like human replicants, or “mechanical” like robots with metal endoskeletons and computer chips for brains. We have failed to create the latter, and the robotic imitations of animals we have today are mostly toys that don’t look, move, or behave convincingly. Our progress achieving the former (replicant animals) is more equivocal.
Our technology is still far too primitive for us to be able to grow discrete body parts and organs in a lab and to seamlessly join them together to make healthy, fully functional animals. This is the likeliest process used to make the replicants, so in the strictest sense, we have failed to live up to vision Blade Runner had for 2019. However, we are able to genetically modify animals and have done so many times to hone our genetic engineering techniques. For example, Chinese scientists used CRISPR to make dogs that have twice the normal muscle mass. For all I know, they’re now the pets of a rich man like the film’s tycoon.
Barbra Streisand with her cloned dogs.
Additionally, we are reasonably good at cloning animals, and, considering the vagueness of the terms “artificial” and “bioengineered” as they are used in the film, it could be argued that they apply to clones. Cloning a cat costs about $25,000 and a dog about $50,000, putting the service out of reach for everyone but the rich, and there are several rich people who have cloned pets, most notably Barbra Streisand, who had two clones made of her beloved dog after it died. A celebrity of her stature owning cloned animals is somewhat analogous to Blade Runner‘s depiction of the tycoon who owned the artificial owl.
There will be non-token numbers of humans living off Earth. At several points in Blade Runner, references are made to the “off-world colonies,” which are space stations and/or celestial bodies that have significant human populations. Advertisements encourage Los Angelinos to consider moving there, which implies that the colonies are big enough and stable enough to house people other than highly trained astronauts. The locations of the colonies aren’t described, but I’ll assume they were in our solar system.
This prediction has clearly failed. The only off-world human presence is found on the International Space Station, it only has a token number of people (about six at any time) on it, only elite people can go there, and its small size and lack of self-sufficiency (cargo rockets must routinely resupply it) means it fails to meet the criteria for a “colony”.
There are no plans or funds available to expand the ISS enough to turn it into a true “space colony,” and in fact, it might be abandoned in the 2020s. Other space stations might be built over the next 20 years by various nations and conglomerates, but they will be smaller than the ISS and will only be open to highly trained astronauts.
While a manned Moon landing is possible in the next ten years (probably by Americans), I doubt a Moon base comparable in size and capabilities to the ISS will be built for at least 20 years (note that 14 years passed from when U.S. President Reagan declared the start of the ISS project and when the first part of it was launched into space, and no national leader has yet committed to building a Moon base, which would probably be even more expensive). In fact, in my Predictions blog post, I estimated that such a base wouldn’t exist until the 2060s. It would take decades longer for that base or any other on the Moon to get big enough to count as a “colony” that was also open to large numbers of average-caliber people. A Mars colony is an even more distant prospect due to the inherently higher costs and technological demands.
I think the human race will probably be overtaken by intelligent machines before we are able to build true off-world colonies that have large human populations. Once we are surpassed here on Earth, sending humans into space will seem all the more wasteful since there will be machines that can do all the things humans can, but at lower cost. We might never get off of Earth in large numbers, or if we do, it will be with the permission of Our Robot Overlords to tag along with them since some of them were heading to Mars anyway.
Cars will be boxy and angular instead of streamlined. Many of the cars shown in the movie are boxy and faceted. While this may have looked futuristic to Americans in 1982, boxy, angular cars were in fact already on their way out, and would be mostly extinct by the mid-90s. The cars of Blade Runner look retro today, and no mass-produced, modern vehicles look like them.**
Deckard’s car.
A van
U.S. fuel economy standards sharply increased from 1975-85. Blade Runner was filmed in 1982, and its artistic vision was to some extent influenced by the aesthetics of the time, hence the boxy future cars.
The change to curvaceous, streamlined car bodies was driven by stricter automobile fuel efficiency requirements, enacted by the U.S. government in response to the Arab Oil Embargoes of the 1970s. Carmakers found that one of the easiest ways to make cars more fuel efficient was to streamline their exteriors to reduce air resistance.
A 1982 Toyota Corolla
A 2019 Toyota Corolla
Since there’s no reason to think vehicle fuel efficiency standards will ever come down (if anything, they will rise), there’s also no reason to expect boxy, angular cars to return.
Just after I’d finished analyzing this car prediction, look who showed up.
**IMPORTANT NOTE I’M ADDING AT THE LAST MINUTE: On November 21, 2019, Elon Musk debuted Tesla’s “Cybertruck” at an event in Los Angeles, and the vehicle is a trapezoidal, sharp-angled curiosity that looks fit for the dark streets of Blade Runner. While I doubt it heralds a shift in car design, and it’s possible the Cybertruck could be redesigned between now and its final release date in 2021, I’d be remiss not to mention it here.
Therapeutic cloning will be a mature technology. There’s a scene in the film where two fugitive replicants confront and kill the man who designed their eyes in his genetics lab. It further establishes the fact that the replicants are made of organic parts that are manufactured in separate labs and then assembled. This technology is called “therapeutic cloning,” and today it is decades less advanced than Blade Runner predicted it would be.
Two replicants confronting the geneticist who designed their eyes.
We are unable to grow fully-functional human organs like eyes in labs, and can barely grow rudimentary human tissues using the same techniques. The field of regenerative medicine research was in fact dealt a serious blow recently, when a leading scientist and doctor Paolo Macchiarini was exposed as a fraud. Dr. Macchiarini gained worldwide fame for his technique of helping people with terminal trachea problems by removing tracheas from cadavers, replacing the dead host’s cells with stem cells from the intended recipient, and then transplanting the engineered trachea into the sick person. For a time, his work was touted as proof that therapeutic cloning was rapidly advancing, and that maybe Blade Runner levels of the technology would exist by 2019. Unfortunately, time revealed that Macchiarini had faked the results in his medical papers, and that most of his patients died soon after receiving their engineered tracheas.
The actual state-of-the-art in 2019 is lab-made bladders. Being merely an elastic bag, a bladder is much simpler than an eye.
Legitimate work in regenerative medicine is overwhelmingly confined to labs and involves animal experiments, and there are no signs of an impending breakthrough that will enable us to start making fully functional organs and tissues that can be surgically implanted in humans and expected to survive for non-trivial lengths of time. The best the field can muster at present is a few dozen procedures globally each year, in which a small amount of simple tissue, such as a bladder or skin graft, is made in the lab and implanted in a patient under the most stringent conditions. (Of note, only a small fraction of people with missing or non-functional bladders have received engineered bladders, and the preferred treatment is to do surgery [called a “urostomy”] so the person’s urine drains out of their abdomens through a hole and into an externally-worn plastic bag.) As noted in my Predictions blog entry, I don’t think therapeutic cloning will be a mature field until about 2100.
Advertisements will be everywhere. In Blade Runner, entire sides of buildings in L.A. have been turned into huge, glowing, live-action billboards advertising products. This prediction was right in spirit, but wrong in its specifics: Advertisements are indeed omnipresent, and the average person in Los Angeles is probably more exposed to ads in 2019 than they would have been in 1982. However, the ads are overwhelmingly conveyed through telecommunications and digital media (think of TV and radio commercials, internet popup ads, browser sidebar ads, and auto-play videos), and not through gigantic billboards. Partly, I think this is because huge video billboards would be too distracting–particularly if they also played audio–and would invite constant lawsuits from city dwellers who found them ruinous of open spaces and peace.
Which is worse: Huge video billboards or being constantly pummeled with spam emails, digital ads, and the knowledge that your personal internet data is being sold and traded without your control?
No one will turn on the lights. Blade Runner is a dark movie. No, I mean literally dark: Almost all of the scenes are set at night, and no one in the movie believes in turning on anything but dim lights. It may have been a bold, iconic look from a cinematography standpoint, but it’s not an accurate depiction of 2019. People do not prefer dimmer lights now, and in fact, nighttime artificial light exposure is higher than at any point in human history: satellites have confirmed that the amount of “light pollution” emanating from the Earth’s surface (mainly from street lights and exterior building lights) is greater than ever and still growing. Also, people now spend so much time staring into glowing screens (smartphones, computer monitors, TVs) that circadian rhythm disruption has become a public health problem.
If your light is so bright that it can be seen in space, then you’re wasting a lot of electricity.
Intriguingly, I don’t think this trend will continue forever, and I think it’s possible the world will someday be much darker than now. I intend to fully flesh out this idea in another blog entry, but basically, as machines get smarter and better, the need for nighttime illumination will drop. Autonomous cars will have night vision, so they won’t need bright headlights or bright streetlights to see the road. Streetlights will also be infused with “smart” technology, and will save energy by turning themselves off when no cars are around. And if intelligent machines replace humans (and/or if we evolve into a higher form), then everyone on Earth will have night vision as well, which will almost eliminate the need for all exterior lights.
Note that, in controlled environments, machines can already function in the dark or with only the dimmest of lights. This is called “lights-out manufacturing.” As machines get smarter and move from factories and labs to public spaces, they will bring this ability with them. My prediction merely seizes upon a proof of concept and expands upon it.
It will be possible to implant fake memories in people. Very early in a replicant’s life, he or she is implanted with fake memories. The process by which this is done is never revealed, but it is sophisticated enough to fill the subject’s mind with seeming decades of memories that are completely real to them. We lack the ability to do this, though psychological experiments have shown in principle that people can be tricked into slowly accepting false memories.
Since memories exist as physical arrangements of neurons in a person’s brain and as enduring patterns of electrochemical signaling within a brain, it should be possible in principle to alter a person’s brain in a way that implants a false memory in him or her, or any other discrete piece of knowledge or skill. However, this would require fantastically advanced technology (probably some combination of direct brain electrical stimulation, hypnosis, full-immersion virtual reality, drugs, and perhaps nanomachines) that we won’t have for at least 100 years. This is VERY far out there, along with being able to build humans from different body parts grown in different labs.
Computer monitors and TVs will be deep, and there will not be any thin displays. In one scene, we get a good look at a personal computer, and it appears to have an old-fashioned CRT monitor, and is almost a foot deep. Additionally, flat-panel TVs, computer monitors, laptops, or tablets and never seen in the film. This is a largely inaccurate depiction of 2019, as flat-panel screens are ubiquitous, and the average person owns several flat-screen devices that they interact with countless times per day.
Deckard sitting on his couch while looking at his computer screen. It looks like there might also be a second screen at the far right, facing away from him. Note that he doesn’t like turning on the lights.
I said the depiction was largely inaccurate because, even though CRT monitors and TVs are obsolete and haven’t been manufactured in ten years, millions of them are still in use in homes and businesses across the world, mainly among poor people and old people who lack the money or interest in upgrading. There’s even a subculture of younger people who prefer using old CRT TVs for playing video games because the picture looks better in some ways than it does on the best, modern OLED displays. In short, while it’s increasingly rare and unusual for people to have deep, CRT computer monitors in their homes, it is common enough that this scene from Blade Runner can be considered accurate in its depiction.
The median and mean lifespan of a CRT TV is 15 years, and almost none of them last more than 30 years. With that in mind, functional CRT monitors will not be in use by 2039, except among antique collectors. The Baby Boomers will be dead by then, and their kids will have thrown away any CRT screens they were clinging to.
People will talk with computers. Deckard’s apartment building has a controlled entry security feature: anyone who enters the elevator must speak his or her name, and the “voice print” must match with someone authorized to have access to the building, or else the elevator won’t go up. Also, in his apartment, Deckard uses voice commands to interface with his personal computer. Blade Runner correctly predicted that voice-user interfaces would be common in 2019, though it incorrectly envisioned how we would use them.
Electronic, controlled entry security technology in common areas of apartment buildings, like elevators and lobbies, are very common, but overwhelmingly involve using plastic cards and key fobs to unlock scanner-equipped doors. In fact, I’ve never seen a voice-unlocked door or elevator, and think most people would feel silly using one for whatever reason.
Smart speakers like the Amazon Echo are also very common and can only be interfaced with via speech. Modern smartphones and tablets can also be controlled with spoken commands, but it’s rare to see people doing this.
This brings up the valuable point that, though speech is an intuitive means of communication, we’ve found that older means of interface involving keyboards, mice, and reading words on a screen are actually better ways to interact with technology for most purposes, and they are not close to obsolescence (and might never be). An inherent problem with talking with a computer is you lose privacy since anyone within earshot knows what you’re doing. Also, while continuous speech recognition technology is now excellent, the error rates are still high enough to make it an aggravating way to input data into a machine compared to using buttons. Entering complex data into a computer, such as you would do for a computer programming task, is also much faster and easier with a keyboard, and anything involving graphical design or manipulation of digital objects on a screen is best done with a mouse or a stylus.
To understand, watch this clip of Deckard talking to his computer, and think about whether it would be easier or harder to do that image manipulation task using a mouse, with intuitive click-and-drag abilities to move around the image, and a trackball for zooming in and out: https://youtu.be/QkcU0gwZUdg
Deckard holding a photograph he found.
Hard copy photographs are still around. In that scene, Deckard does the image manipulation on a photograph that he found. He inserts it into a slot in his computer, and it scans it and shows the digital scan on his screen. While hard-copy photographs are still being made in 2019, they’re very uncommon, especially when compared to the number of photographs that were taken this year across the planet, but never transferred from digital format to a physical medium. I doubt that even 0.01% of the personal photographs ordinary people take are ever printed onto paper, and I doubt this will ever change.
Image scanners will be common. The computer’s ability to make a digital copy of a physical image of course means it has a built-in scanner. This proved a realistic prediction, as flatbed scanners with excellent image scan fidelity levels cost under $100. When Blade Runner was filmed, scanners were physically large, very expensive, made low-quality image conversions, and were almost unknown to the general public.
Cameras will take ultra high-resolution photos. The photo that Deckard analyzes is extremely detailed and has a very high pixel count, allowing him to use his computer to zoom in on small sections of it and to still see the images clearly. In particular, after zooming in on the round mirror hanging on the wall (upper right quadrant of the photo shown above), he spots an image of one of the replicants. While grainy, he can still make out her face and upper body.
It’s impossible to tell from the film sequence exactly how high-res the photo is, but today we have consumer-grade cameras that can take photos that are about as detailed. The Fujufilm XT30 costs $800 and is reasonably compact, putting it within the range of average-income people, and it takes very high quality 26.1 MP photos. One of its photos is shown above, and if you download the non-compressed version from the source website and open it in an imaging app, you’ll be able to zoom in on the rear left window of the car far enough to see the patterns of the decals and to read the words printed on them. (https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/12/18306026/fujifilm-xt30-camera-review-fuji-xt3-mirrorless)
Firearms will still be in use. The only handheld weapons we see in the film are handguns that use gunpowder to shoot out metal bullets. One is shown for only a split-second at the start of the movie when a replicant shoots a human, and the other is seen several times in Deckard’s hands. It’s big, bulky, looks like it shoots more powerful bullets than average, and has some glowing lights that seem to do nothing. In short, it’s nothing special, and probably isn’t any better than handguns that most Americans can easily buy for $500 today. Thus, the depiction the 2019’s state-of-the-art weaponry is accurate.
Deckard pointing his pistol.
And I do say “state-of-the-art” because, being an elite bounty hunter on an important mission to kill abnormally strong, dangerous people, Deckard has his choice of weapons, and it says a lot that he picks a regular gunpowder handgun instead of something exotic and stereotypically futuristic like a laser pistol. As noted in my reviews of The Terminator and Starship Troopers, we shouldn’t expect firearms to become obsolete for a very long time, and possibly never.
Video phone calls and pay phones will be common. There’s a scene where Deckard uses a public pay phone to make a video call to a love interest. This depiction of 2019 turned out to be half right and half wrong, but for the better: Pay phones have nearly disappeared because even poor people have cell phones (which are more convenient to use). Video call technology is mature and widespread, the calls can be made for free through apps like Skype and Google Hangouts, and even low-end smartphones can support them.
It’s surprising that video calls, long a staple of science fiction, became a reality during the 2010s with hardly anyone noticing and the world not changing in any major way. Also surprising is the fact that most people still prefer doing voice-only calls and texting, which is even more lacking in personal substance and emotional conveyance. Like talking with computers, using video calls to converse with other humans has proved more trouble than it’s worth in most cases.
I just finished Michio Kaku’s 2011 futurist book, Physics of the Future, and am posting my abbreviated notes of it, most of which describe his predictions for this century. It didn’t make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up the way The Third Wave did, but I still think most of the predictions will prove accurate. Kaku also provides a few eye-opening insights that shifted my way of thinking a bit, such as his elucidation of the “Caveman Principle,” his thesis that technology will enable “perfect capitalism,” and his point that technology will grant future humans abilities that were once the sole province of the Greek gods. Overall, I enjoyed the book and found it readable, reasonable, and well-researched.
That said, there were a few aspects of Physics of the Future that I disliked. Kaku’s predictions about cheap, room-temperature superconductors being invented by the end of this century are strikingly unsupported by any evidence he presents, and his discussion of the Kardashev Scale seems at odds with what Kardashev actually wrote (in analyzing this inconsistency, I found that Kardashev’s work on this matter is widely misunderstood, and the exercise made me doubt the value of the Scale in any case). Developments over just the last eight years suggest that the book’s predictions about the rise of therapeutic organ/tissue cloning and age slowdown/reversal therapies are too optimistic, and those about dwindling fossil fuels supplies and artificial intelligence advancement are too pessimistic.
One irritating thing about the Physics of the Future is Kaku’s habit of mixing in explicit predictions with attached deadlines with “non-predictions” that are merely re-statements of things other scientists said might be possible at an indeterminate point in the future. The latter is more common in the second half of the book, and the reader must pay careful attention to its language to tell what is what.
Physics of the Future abbreviated notes By: Michio Kaku
Introduction
Most attempts to predict the future fail because the people making the predictions aren’t scientists or people with firsthand knowledge of science.
In this book, Kaku–who is a scientist–has formed predictions based on interviews with hundreds of scientists across many fields.
This book is similar to his earlier futurist book, Visions.
Some brilliant people have made uncanny, correct future predictions:
Jules Verne
In Paris in the Twentieth Century, (1863) he correctly foresaw glass skyscrapers, air conditioning, TV, elevators, high-speed trains, gas-powered cars, fax machines, and something like the internet.
In From the Earth to the Moon, (1865) he correctly foresaw a Moon mission and even deduced details like the size of the space capsule and its human crew, the launch location, transit time, weightlessness in space, and ocean splashdown at the end.
Verne used his vast trove of personal notes about scientific discoveries and progress as the foundation for his predictions.
Leonardo da Vinci
In the late 1400s, he drew diagrams of parachutes and aircraft that could have flown. Unfortunately, it would be another 400 years before a motor with a sufficient power-to-weight ratio was invented to propel such aircraft.
He also designed a mechanical calculator. It wasn’t built for about 500 years, but it worked.
He also sketeched a warrior robot, based on a suit of armor, and it was also built and found to be functional.
da Vinci was a genius in his own right, but he also collaborated with many other brilliant scientists.
“The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” –William Gibson
Ordinary people and experts usually underestimate how much technology will change in the long run.
At least until the year 2100, it’s wise to assume that our understanding of the laws of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, the weak and strong forces) will not significantly change. Concordantly, predictions for that timeframe should not violate those laws.
By 2100, humans will have the same abilities as the ancient gods
Ability to use thoughts to control objects
Perfect human bodies with superhuman lifespans
Ability to use biotech to make novel organisms
Nanotech to seemingly transmute objects and to create objects “from thin air”
Flying cars will be like sky chariots
Unless humans destroy themselves, within 100 years (i.e. – by the year 2111), Earth will be a “planetary civilization” with Kardashev Level 1 status.
Famous predictions that failed:
The paperless office
The death of cities due to telecommuting
The death of tourism, colleges, and malls thanks to people visiting surrogate virtual spaces.
The rise of video phones [it has actually come true as of 2019]
The demise of traditional media (TV, radio, live theater, and movie theaters) thanks to the internet
Those and other predictions failed because they violated the “Caveman Principle.”
The Principle holds that humans evolved for hunter-gatherer life, and that this still shapes our behavior and thinking today. Ways of living that force us to go against our primitive, ingrained instincts will fail.
Cavemen wanted to see “proof of the kill,” which today manifests itself in the human preference for tactile physical objects over digital facsimiles.
Cavemen always socialized through face-to-face encounters, and that method of communication allows people to read important nonverbal cues, to size each other up, and to bond in ways that are impossible through remote interaction. There was a time when humans were incapable of speech and relied on other means to communicate.
Chapter 1 – Future of the computer
[Boilerplate stuff about Moore’s Law, “exponential,” and improvements to computers.]
Once computer chips get small enough and cheap enough, it will make sense to embed them inside all kinds of manufactured objects, like walls and home appliances. They will have wireless capabilities and will be able to communicate with each other and with the internet through the uplink.
Our surroundings will become “intelligent,” computers won’t be thought of as distinct devices, and we’ll start thinking of computing as a ubiquitous property, as we now think of electricity.
Computer monitors will take the form of wallpaper, picture frames and billboards, and displaying movie footage won’t cost more than displaying static images.
These devices will also have many types of sensors, allowing them to monitor their surroundings and, among other things, to issue alerts in the event of an observed problem.
By 2020, a computer chip will only cost a penny.
The word “computer” will disappear from the English language. [I doubt it.]
By 2100, humans will have the formerly “Godlike” ability to control physical objects with their thoughts or with remote bodily gestures thanks to computers embedded in our bodies and brains sending signals to computers embedded in the objects around us. [It will still be simpler and more efficient to manipulate many things the “old fashioned way” by physically interacting with them.]
By 2030
There will be augmented reality glasses with internet access. Users will interact with it using a handheld peripheral device, or by doing hand gestures that the glasses will see and recognize as inputs. [One of the reasons Google Glass failed was its very limited means of input.]
Contact lenses that do most of the same things will also be invented. A contact lens with millions of pixels is theoretically possible. [A 1080p screen display measures 1920 x 1080 pixels, so it has a resolution of 2.1 million pixels (megapixels).]
The glasses will also have front-facing cameras and advanced pattern recognition capabilities, allowing them to display information about people and objects in your field of view. Users will also be able to stream live footage to the internet for others to watch. [As of 2019, even though AR glasses have not become popular, livestreaming via smartphones definitely is.]
Autonomous cars will exist. The military will get them first, and then big companies will buy autonomous big-rigs to ply simple highway routes, and finally, everyone else will get them, and they will be able to navigate suburban and urban traffic environments.
AIs will become adept at matching humans on the basis of compatible personality traits or shared interests. Technology will expand peoples’ social circles.
Personal assistant AIs will be able to do complex tasks, like planning vacations for people.
Monitors will become paper-thin and it will be cheap enough to cover entire walls of your house with them. They will OLED-based. Some people will have rooms where all four walls are covered in said screens to create an immersive experience. [The only problem is that you’d have to clear all furniture and solid objects from the room so as not to block your view and break the visual illusion. Most people don’t have a spare room just for this.]
The wall screens will also display customizable patters, allowing people to change what kind of “wallpaper” they have. [The durability of future OLED screens will be a major issue: If a pixel burns out, can it be fixed, or does the entire wall-sized screen need to be replaced? What if someone accidentally bangs their elbow against a wall screen, or spills a drink on it? Closely joining together many “tiles” to make a wall-sized screen will probably be the best option, as damage would only force you to replace one tile. OLED screens can also replace light fixtures, and it might make sense to cover ceilings with them.]
Computerized glasses and contact lenses will also let people “meet” in augmented reality or virtual reality. Seemingly 3D moving images of other people will appear to be in your vicinity.
Once OLED costs get low enough, it will be possible to buy disposable “sheets” of OLEDs, just like sheets of paper today. You could roll or fold them up when not in use. [But this would be a hindrance since the material would still have “memory” and would keep trying to return to some other configuration.] When done with a sheet, you would throw it away. [Unless the OLED paper were easily recyclable, environmentalists would throw a fit and try to ban it.]
Seemingly normal windows could, upon command, turn into transparent computer screens or display images. [There are two ways this could work: 1) The windows are essentially big versions of the AR contact lenses, meaning they are transparent, but also impregnated with millions of OLED pixels that, when activated, display images. In a dual-paned window, the inner pane would be made of OLED glass, and the outer pane would be made of Privacy Glass that could turn opaque to block exterior light and make the OLED’s images easier to see. And/Or 2) The “windows” will be fake, “virtual windows” that are actually just portions of the OLED wallpaper displaying footage from exterior building cameras. See the Seoul apartment interior in Cloud Atlas]
Cell phones might have OLED displays that can be pulled out as needed, like scrolls. [Foldable smartphones accomplish the same thing.]
Highly immersive virtual reality will exist. Special gloves will also deliver a haptic element to the experience by allowing your fingers to feel textures and your arms to feel resistance from objects in your virtual environment.
There will be AI doctors that you can access from the privacy of your home and interact with conversationally. They will have realistic-looking human avatars, and will diagnose you correctly up to 95% of the time.
The AI doctors will have your genetic profile and will use that information to aid their diagnoses of you.
People will be able to afford small, handheld devices like the medical tricorders from “Star Trek.” The devices will contain mini-MRI machines, DNA chips and other sensors that will be able to peer inside your body and recognize the the genetic and biochemical signs of many diseases, including cancer. During remote medical exams, you AI doctor will tell you through your wall screen how to use the device on yourself. [I’m skeptical that MRI machines will get that small and cheap by 2030 and still do quality scans.]
Swallowable “smart pills” with tiny cameras could replace colonoscopies.
Your clothing and bathroom fixtures will also contain sophisticated health monitoring devices. [The value of many types of constant health monitoring is questionable. For example, you gain no benefit from testing your DNA every day, or even once every several months. And as health testing gets more frequent, so do the odds of false positives and unnecessary trips to the doctor for further investigation.] If you suffered a major injury, or a catastrophic health incident like a heart attack, the sensors embedded in your clothing and surroundings would detect it and alert EMS. [The problem with “smart clothing” is that the chips and sensors would wear out due to laundering, and to be continuously monitored, you’d need to buy a wardrobe entirely comprised of smart clothes.]
Technology will make many aspects of live similar to fairy tale worlds.
2030-2070
Moore’s Law will end, meaning computer cost-performance will not double every 18 months anymore. The doubling time will increase until it is several years long. [Depending on the source, Moore’s Law “died” somewhere between 2016 and 2018.]
Computer chips will be made of some material other than silicon.
Augmented reality glasses and contact lenses will be in mass use.
Examples of AR applications:
Ability to see through solid objects by streaming external video camera footage to a person’s AR eyepiece. This would help drivers of buses and tanks, and aircraft pilots, by eliminating blind spots. It would also help people doing many types of repairs since they’d be able to see things like pipes and wires that are hidden by walls. Prospectors will be able to see underground deposits of minerals and water.
Ability to make nonexistent objects appear overlaid on the real world. Architects will be able to see 3D models of structures they are designing. Interior decorators will be able to try out different furnishings and color schemes for rooms before actually buying anything.
Tourism will benefit. Images of restored ancient buildings will be overlaid above their ruins. Virtual tour guides will lead tourists around art galleries and historical sites, providing helpful narration.
Instant translations of text written in foreign languages, such as road signs. [Only useful when traveling]
Highlighting of plant species and of trails while hiking. [Only useful when hiking. Reminds me of the “intelligent belt” in The Godwhale that tells the one character to pick up edible substances.]
Apartment hunters could drive down the road and see which buildings are for rent along with their prices and amenities.
Constellations in the sky would be labeled. [Few people care]
Actors, musicians and performers wouldn’t need to memorize their lines anymore since text would hover in their fields of view.
Virtual lecture halls where you could even ask the instruction questions and get answers.
Soldiers would have the “fog of war” lifted, as they’d be able to see maps and the locations of friendly and enemy forces.
Surgeons would be able to see live MRI scans of patients during operations.
Full-immersion video gaming.
[I’m convinced the technology will have niche applications, but skeptical that average people will adopt them for everyday use, unless we’re talking about the far future where the unemployed masses enter the Matrix 24/7. Moreover, I doubt AR eyewear will make smartphones obsolete for decades.]
AR eyepieces will replace cell phones, MP3 players, computer monitors, and most other gadgets. [I’m not sure. The classic problems with AR glasses would still remain.]
AR eyepieces will let you do instant “showrooming” in any store.
AR eyepieces sensitive to X-rays could let you see through solid objects. You would need to carry a “flashlight” that emitted X-rays though, which would be hazardous to your health.
There will be portable language translators that work in real-time.
AR eyepieces will display seemingly 3D images, and TVs will be capable of displaying holograms.
Holographic TV screens might be shaped like domes or cylinders, with viewers under them.
2070-2100
Humans will be able to control physical objects with their minds.
Brain impants and externally worn BCIs (brain-computer interfaces) could monitor a person’s brain activity and read their thoughts. The BCIs would make use of brain-scanning technologies, like EEGs and fMRIs.
Eventually, fMRIs that can see individual brain cells will be invented.
fMRIs will be able to reconstruct a person’s mental images based on their brain activity. This could allow us to use machines to record our dreams, but the footage would be grainy because we imagine things in low-resolution. [See my Prometheus review]
Fortunately, intrusive mind-reading at a distance is probably impossible. The subject would need to have brain implants or a head-worn BCI.
Brain scanning machines could serve as reliable lie detectors.
MRI machines the size of cell phones will exist. Some might even come in the form of suction-cup devices that are attached to the patient’s body.
Cheap, room-temperature superconductors will exist, and will be embedded in everyday objects, which will also have small computers and sensors. Humans with brain implants or other BCIs would be able to telepathically control the objects and activate electrical currents in the superconductors, which could cause them to move around thanks to magnetic force. “Telekinesis” would therefore exist.
[This sounds like a particularly shaky prediction since we’re not even sure if a room temperature superconductor can even exist. The theoretical aspect is still unclear. Moreover, there’s no cost-performance improvement trend akin to Moore’s Law that indicates we progressing towards inventing cheap room-temperature superconductors by 2100. Kaku’s prediction that humans will commonly use their thoughts to move objects like pieces of furniture across rooms also seems to, in spirit, clash with the Caveman Principle. Why not just move the chair in front of you by pushing it with your hand?]
Chapter 2 – Future of AI
While AI is genuinely improving, the odds of machines achieving human-level intelligence anytime soon have been overblown by the media, sci-fi movies, and a minority of scientists. Most scientists with relevant expertise don’t expect it to happen for decades, perhaps centuries.
One of the world’s most advanced robots–ASIMO–can’t even sense and avoid tripping over objects placed in its path. A cockroach can easily do this, which means our best robots are still dumber than common insects in critical ways.
The structure of the human brain is fundamentally different from the structure of a computer. Our brains are massively parallel, meaning they have trillions of processors working at the same time, but each processor operates very slowly. Computers are serial, meaning they typically have only one processor, but it operates very fast. Organizing computers to make “neural networks” the mimic the human brain has proven hard.
Humans also have common sense about the real world and are excellent at pattern recognition, whereas computers are very bad in both. [This book was published in 2011, and major advances were made in computer pattern recognition by the end of that decade.]
The “Cyc” project was started in 1984 to “codify, in machine-usable form, the millions of pieces of knowledge that compose human common sense.” As of 2017, it contained about 1,500,000 terms.
By 2030
“Expert systems” will greatly improve and become more common.
There will be machine doctors that you will be able to access from your home and communicate with via natural speech. The doctors will diagnose you with similar accuracy as human doctors.
There will be robot nurses in hospitals that can move around interior spaces unassisted and perform basic patient care tasks, like delivering medications and monitoring humans.
2030-2070
“Our world may be full of robots.”
Most robots will not be humanoid, and instead will resemble animals like snakes and insects, depending on the needs of their function.
Many of the robots will be “modular,” meaning they could reconfigure themselves for different tasks by changing their body parts. [This kind of dovetails with my theory that the “Ideal Human” might be a giant human brain encased in something like a Mr. Potato Head torso with many ports that robotic limbs and sensors could be plugged into as needed.]
[Looking at vehicles and guns as examples, it seems optimal to make a small number of “chassis,” with each chassis being highly modular.]
The robots might be made of many, standardized pieces somewhat similar in concept to Lego blocks. Each block would have attachment points for other blocks, and its own sensors, computer and power source. The blocks could join together to make bigger robots of nearly any shape and to do many different types of work.
Robots made of such modular components could be very small or very large and have any arbitrary number of limbs or body configurations. They could pass through a wall by finding a small holes in it, passing their component modules through the hole individually, and then reassembling all modules on the other side of the wall to recreate the robot.
Small robots could do many jobs that humans can’t due to our large size or high labor costs. For example, small robots could crawl over all the rafters and beams of a bridge, checking for wear and spotting problems well before the bridge collapsed. [Like my idea of using insect-sized robots to crawl through the innards of a car or house to find things like the sources of oil and water leaks. Those diagnostics can be very messy, trial-and-error affairs if humans have to do the work.]
Noninvasive keyhole surgeries will become the norm in the future, as will “telesurgery.”
Endoscopes used for keyhole surgeries and internal exams will get thinner, and micromachines “will do much of the mechanical work.” [Meaning unclear]
“By midcentury, the era of emotional robots may be in full flower.” [There’s no reason to think that intelligent machines won’t someday learn how to at least convincingly mimic human emotions and to take over human jobs requiring empathy and warmth.]
The author seems to suggest that emotions and intelligence and inextricable, meaning intelligent machines will necessarily also have emotions.
Robotic pets that have about the same intelligence as cats and dogs and the ability to at least outwardly imitate emotional states will be common. They won’t be able to understand verbal commands that aren’t in their programming. [Progress with understanding human language seems to be progressing faster than he predicted. He’s right to point out that some robots will look exactly like animals, and that “dog-level intelligence” will be achieved before “human-level intelligence”.]
The human brain will be mapped. However, it will then take “many decades to sort through the mountains of data,” which seems to suggest that an AI derived from a reverse-engineered human brain won’t be made until after 2070. Consider that the C. elegans brain was fully mapped in 1986, but scientists still can’t make a computer simulation of its brain that functions the same.
In 2009, neuroscientist Henry Markram predicted that a computer simulation of a human brain could be made in 10 years, provided the project to do so got enough funding. The author speculates the costs would be comparable to the Manhattan Project.
Another way to map brains is to cut brains into very thin slices, to use electron microscopes to photograph the cross-sectioned neurons in each slice, and to assemble the resulting data into a 3D computer model of all the neurons in the brain.
Gerry Rubin predicts that the fruit fly brain will be mapped in 20 years (2031), and that will get us 20% of the way towards understanding the human mind.
A human brain has 1 million times as many neurons as a fruit fly brain.
2070-2100
Human-level AI will probably be friendly to humans.
AIs will have failsafes built into them that shut them down whenever dangerous, aberrant, or insubordinate behavior or thoughts are detected. Humans will also be able to say safewords that trigger the failsafes.
Humans will build some robots whose purpose it is to disable or destroy malfunctioning robots. [I agree that there will never be a 100% human vs 100% robot war. Surely, the humans will have some number of non-sentient robots fighting for them that the other side can’t hack or persuade to switch sides.]
Human-level AI won’t appear suddenly. It will be preceded by decades of steadily increasing machine intelligence, like roach-level AI, mouse-level AI, and chimp-level AI. Thus, humans will have time to prepare and to develop increasingly sophisticated safeguards at each step that prevent the AIs from taking hostile action against us. [And even if hostile, human-level AI appeared without warning today, the amount of damage it could do would be limited since not everything is controlled by computers, and not all computer systems would be accessible to it. Not everything can be hacked.]
The author agrees with roboticist Rodney Brooks’ prediction that humans will cybernetically augment themselves with technology, and the advanced robots of 2100 will be inspired by the human brain and by biological systems.
In theory, it is possible for humans to control robot limbs and even whole robot bodies with their thoughts. A cybernetic brain interface would be needed.
Remote-controlled robots could enable the offshoring of blue-collar work, which would reduce the need for immigration and especially help Japan.
They would also be useful for doing dangerous work, like rescue missions and outside excursions on extraterrestrial bodies (the human astronauts would stay inside protected habitats).
Because what humans find aesthetically pleasing is rooted in our genes, people will reject body enhancements that make them look ugly or strange. [The small minority of people who are today into extreme body modifications would probably embrace all kinds of augmentations. They might even have their own bars and clubs, like something out of Deus Ex.]
The author predicts that humans will be open to technologically augmenting their bodies so long as they augmentations don’t make them uglier by conventional standards, and that people will sometimes use remote-controlled robots for work or pleasure, but the Cave Man principle will preclude them from permanently existing in that state. [Has implications for FIVR’s future role.]
Human-level AI won’t be created until close to the end of this century.
Even if we have computers with the same raw computational power as the human brain, we might not have the software necessary to make them intelligent like humans. Hardware improvements are relatively smooth and predictable, whereas software advances happen in fits and starts. AI software advances will probably lag hardware advances.
An AGI-based “singularity” or “intelligence explosion” isn’t a given, since we don’t know if a human-level AI would be able to make a smarter version of itself. [This is a weak argument. The history of human evolution contains several instances where one hominid species gave rise to a smarter hominid, and among humans alive today, it’s common for parents to give birth to children that are smarter than they are. And as we decode the human genome, we are discovering which genes code for human intelligence, which in theory could allow us to use genetic engineering to make smarter humans. So if humans are smart enough to make smarter versions of themselves, then a machine with human-level intelligence should also be able to make smarter machines. Also keep in mind that Einstein was human, so he technically had “human-level intelligence,” which means a merely “human-level” AI could be as smart as Einstein, but without dyslexia, with a perfect memory, and able to think 24/7. Most people would deem that “superhuman.”]
The high costs of doing brain scans and decoding how the human brain works will also delay AGI.
Chapter 3 – Future of medicine
By 2030
The cost of gene sequencing will decrease enough for many average people to get their full genomes sequenced. From it, they will derive useful information about genetic health conditions they may have.
As more human genomes are sequenced and more genetic information becomes available for computer cross-referencing, the locations of more genes coding for specific traits (including genetic diseases) will become known.
A better understanding of the human genome will also assist detectives, since they will be able to generate accurate CGI facial reconstructions of unknown people by sequencing scraps of their DNA found at crime scenes.
You will talk to AI doctors via the wall screen in your house.
Your bathroom [presumably the mirror and toilet] will have sensors that can detect your disease symptoms, including cancer.
Nanoparticles will be used to deliver anti-cancer drugs directly to cancer cells in your body. Chemotherapies in which a patient’s body is flooded with such drugs, and they attack many healthy cells, will be obsolete.
It will be possible to grow new human organs, derived from a specific person’s DNA, and to implant the organs into that person without risk of rejection. [This looks headed for failure.]
A human urinary bladder was grown in a lab for the first time in 2007, and a windpipe in 2009. [Time showed that these results were not as impressive as claimed. Research “Dr. Paolo Macchiarini,” who was a pioneer in tissue engineered windpipe transplants when this book was written, only to be revealed to be a fraud within a few years.]
“Within five years, the first liver and pancreas might be grown…”
Chemistry Nobel Prize winner Walter Gilbert predicts that, in a few decades, it will be possible to use a person’s DNA to create almost any organ for him in a lab.
A major roadblock to therapeutic cloning is infusing the synthetic organs with capillaries. These blood vessels are microscopic, and hence too small to be created using molds.
A major roadblock to stem cell therapy is controlling the differentiation and mitosis of the stem cells. Very subtle and poorly understood chemical messages sent between cells determine how their neighbors develop.
“Pixie dust” is a powder made of human extracelluar matrix. If applied to the stump of a severed finger, it allows the body to slowly regrow the fingertip.
Human cloning will be possible, but almost never used. Interested people might be parents looking to replace a dead child, or rich old guys looking to make worthy heirs.
The creation of the first human clone will probably trigger a wave of anti-cloning laws being enacted, and ethical outrage from many people. It will mirror the reaction to the first Test Tube Baby. In time, the novelty will wear off, people will see the clones act no different from anyone else, and laws and attitudes will relax.
Cancerous tumors typically have tens of thousands of different mutations, so it take many years of study to determine which genes can make cells cancerous.
There will not be a cancer cure by 2030, but we will have better, cheaper ways of detecting cancer earlier, when it is easier to treat.
By 2050, it might be possible to slow down the aging process, extending human lifespan to 150.
2030-2070
Gene therapy will probably be in common use as a cancer treatment.
“Designer babies” will be born. Genetic engineering can influence many human traits, including intelligence, physical strength, and baseline happiness level.
Richard Dawkins predicts that, by 2050, it will be possible to feed genomic data into a computer and to have it generate an accurate virtual rendering of the organism’s appearance.
2070-2100
Richard Feynmann predicted that human aging would be cured someday, and medical immortality achieved. Dr. William Haseltine agreed.
The rising rate of breast cancer could be due to women having fewer children, since estrogen increases breast cancer risk, and the hormone’s levels decrease during pregnancy.
Twin studies prove that human lifespan is partly genetic. The specific genes that code for lifespan will be identified as more human genomes become available for medical research.
By 2100, technologies needed to grant medical immortality may exist.
“In five or six or seven years, there will be drugs that prolong longevity.” -Christoph Westphal, 2009
“The nature of life is not mortality. It’s immortality. DNA is an immortal molecule. That molecule first appeared perhaps 3.5 billion years ago. That selfsame molecule, through duplication, is around today.” – Dr. William Haseltine
A battery of different therapies and personal practices will allow for human life extension:
Grow and surgically implant new organs and tissues to replace older ones as they wear out.
Ingest a cocktail of enzymes meants to slow aging and mutations at the cellular level.
Use gene therapy to manipulate genes responsible for aging (slow it down)
Maintain a healthy lifestyle (good diet and exercise)
Use nanosensors to detect diseases like cancer at their early phases and treat them.
GM crops will allow Earth to support a much larger population.
Richard Dawkins believes portable, full-genome sequencing kits will exist someday, and that it will be possible to clone extinct species.
Computers might also be able to analyze the genomes of humans, chimps and other primates to deduce the genetics of the “Missing Link.” Such a hominid could then be created in the flesh by assembling its DNA in a petri dish and implanting it in an ovum.
The Neanderthal genome has been sequenced using fragmentary DNA recovered from the bones of several Neanderthals, and it might be possible to resurrect them.
Extinct animals for which we have DNA samples, such as woolly mammoths and dodos, could be resurrected through cloning.
Extinct animals for which we lack DNA samples, such as dinosaurs, can’t be resurrected, but we could make “proxy species” by analyzing the genomes of living species that descended from the dinosaurs.
With very advanced genetic engineering, we could make hybrid animals and beasts like chimeras.
Clones of long-dead humans could be made using DNA recovered from their entombed bodies.
All communicable human diseases won’t be cured by 2100.
It’s unlikely that people will want to genetically engineer their children to be freakish in any way. [Small numbers of mentally ill parents might.] There will be little financial incentive for geneticists to research or develop alleles for weird traits because demand for them will be low.
The human race will not have split into different species thanks to genetic engineering or natural evolution.
As genetic technology gets cheaper and more advanced, small groups and even individual people will gain the means to make biological weapons. Airborne AIDS would be a nightmare that could result from gene splicing.
It might be possible to build machines capable of synthesizing microorganisms from scratch based on digital genetic data alone.
Nations will continue to resist using bioweapons for fear of fratricide; it would be too easy for the infection to spread from the enemy back to whoever used it.
Chapter 4 – Nanotechnology
Around 2020, Moore’s Law will end, and if a replacement for silicon computer chips isn’t found by then, “the world economy could be thrown into disarray.”
Richard Feynman famously believed that nanomachines could be built with the right level of technology, but he also thought it would be very difficult.
We can already use scanning tunneling microscopes to move around individual atoms. It is possible and doesn’t violate any laws of physics.
By 2030
Nanoparticles could revolutionize cancer treatment. They contain cell-killing chemicals and are 10 – 100 nm in diameter, which makes them too big to diffuse into healthy cells, but small enough to pass through the abnormally large pores on many cancer cell membranes. The nanoparticles accumulate in cancer cells and release their loads, killing them but sparing the surrounding healthy tissue.
Nanoparticles with surface structures designed to be complementary to cancer cell antigens are another option.
Nanoparticles made of metal (e.g. – titanium, gold) can accumulate inside cancer cells and then be externally heated with infrared lasers or vibrated with external magnets, to destroy the cancer cells.
Cancer will be detected early and treated with nanoparticles.
Medical micromachines and nanomachines could be used to move through a person’s blood vessels and precisely zap cancer cells and arterial plaques, deliver drugs to specific cells, or even do surgery. The machines would navigate using simple computers and/or magnetic and laser signals beamed from outside the person’s body.
DNA microarrays/chips will be small and cheap, and will allow people to do at-home testing for many types of cancer.
Microarrays/chips that test for proteins that are hallmarks of different diseases will also be available and will have the same personal health applications.
[The author is wrong to predict that people would do the at-home tests every day. Such a high rate of testing would raise the odds of Type 1 errors and needless hospital visits to confirm misdiagnoses. I doubt there would be any benefit for healthy people to take tests for cancer or other major diseases more often than once every six months or even once a year.]
In 2007, Gordon Moore predicted that his eponymous Law would end in 10-15 years. [He was right.]
We will be forced to start making computer chips out of something other than etched silicon wafers if we want them to keep getting faster.
Stacking silicon-based chips to make “3D chips” offers only a temporary solution since problems with heat dissipation limit how high the stacks can get before the chips melt. Components at the centers of the chip stacks wouldn’t get enough air flow to cool them down.
Using X-rays instead of UV light rays to etch ever-smaller features on silicon chips could also wring out more of a performance boost from the material, though there are large technical challenges to using X-rays for this.
Ultimately, silicon chips will hit a “bottom limit” once their feature sizes are 5nm small, at which point quantum tunneling of electrons will start happening.
Arranging silicon chips into groups of parallel processors that work together could also prolong the silicon paradigm, but the difficulty of doing this is monumental since breaking up computation tasks, shunting the fragments to different processors, and then reassembling the processed data at the end is extremely hard. There is no general set of instructions for programming computers how to do this with any type of task; human programmers can only do this painstakingly and for specific tasks.
Graphene-based computer chips could exist someday, and their transistors could be only 1 atom thick–the smallest possible size–but the technical challenges to manufacturing them are very high. [The author doesn’t explicitly say that these issues will be solved by 2030, so his mentioning of graphene computer chips isn’t a prediction for that year.]
Quantum computers could also be built someday, if major technical hurdles relating to “decoherence” can be overcome.
Optical computers
Quantum dot computers
DNA computers
2030-2070
By 2050, many manmade objects will look the same as today, but will have special material properties and will be “smart” thanks to tiny computers and sensors embedded in them.
“Programmable matter” will also be in common use. The basic unit of such matter will be tiny, modular robots called “catoms” that will be no bigger than grains of sand and will be able to reorient themselves with respect to each other, forming almost any shape.
If your house were full of programmable matter, you could do things like transform a piece of furniture into something different, or convert your child’s old toy into whatever faddish, new toy he wanted.
A roadblock to this is the fact that catoms would cohere to each other weakly, so objects made of them would be fragile. [Also, individual catoms might be fragile, meaning an object made of them would slowly “waste away” as its components broke and fell off.]
2070-2100
Molecular assemblers (e.g. – nanomachines that can build things from the bottom-up) don’t violate the laws of physics, and the existence of ribosomes and enzymes are proof of concept. However, it will be extremely hard for us to create molecular assemblers with the sorts of capabilities people like Eric Drexler envision.
Put together, the aforementioned facts and the rate of improvement for the relevant technologies suggest that we might be able to build Star Trek-style replicators by the end of this century. [Even then, it will still be cheaper and more optimal to make most objects through “top-down” macro manufacturing methods we use today. Not every object must be super-strong or made to atomic levels of precision.]
The “Gray Goo” doomsday scenario is unlikely to happen, partly because nanotechnology is advancing so slowly that regulators will have time to enact the necessary safety measures.
If replicators become widespread, and, along with other technologies and government policy, let all people have their material needs met, then society will probably split into a large group of loafers and a small group of innovators who work hard pursuing their passions. [This may have been what Federation society was like in “Star Trek.” Not even 1% of its citizens joined Starfleet.]
Chapter 5 – Future of energy [This is the weakest chapter so far]
In 1956, American petrochemical engineer M. King Hubbert famously predicted that U.S. oil production would peak around 1970 and then start declining. He proved right, which fanned fears of global “Peak Oil.” [Hubbert’s prediction about the peaking of U.S. CONVENTIONAL OIL production was the only big thing he got right. His predictions about U.S. natural gas production and global fossil fuel production proved far too pessimistic. Unconventional oil production in the U.S. also sharply ramped up in the 2010s, allowing total U.S. oil production to surpass the 1970 peak.]
The consensus among experts that the author spoke with is that global oil production had either already peaked or was at most 10 years away. [This book was published in 2011.] “The average price of oil will continue to rise over the long term.” [Oil prices have in fact dropped about 50% since 2011.]
By 2030
The likeliest successor to fossil fuels is a solar/hydrogen energy economy. [Solar is rapidly growing, but hydrogen is stalled.]
Wind power can’t supply all of the world’s energy needs for several important reasons.
The amount of electricity made by solar panels has rapidly grown and will keep doing so.
Electric cars are becoming practical.
Laser technology for uranium enrichment could be perfected, lowering enrichment costs but also raising the risk of nuclear proliferation. [Since the book was published, the leading laser enrichment company, Silex, has been mostly stuck in neutral with the technology due to high costs and uncertain demand.]
Advanced, suitcase-sized nuclear bombs could be developed.
2030-2070
The climate will have significantly changed by 2050 thanks to global warming. “…by midcentury, the situation could be dire.”
[Listing of Worst Case Scenarios but no mention of their statistical unlikelihood.]
Several geoengineering projects have been proposed to counteract global warming, but none have gotten serious funding. If the problem gets bad enough, this might change by midcentury.
By midcentury, the world will be in the “Hydrogen Age.”
Hot fusion power plants could be everywhere, providing limitless amounts of electricity and no pollution.
“Tabletop fusion” reactors might also be possible to build.
2070-2100
Room temperature superconductors will probably have been discovered. [Why does he think so? Is there a trend like Moore’s Law?]
Up to 30% of electricity generated at a power plant is lost during transmission. Power lines made of room temperature superconductors would eliminate those losses. Wind turbines in the middle of America could provide electricity to New York. Nuclear power plants could be relocated to remote areas.
Magnetic field lines can’t penetrate superconductors (the Meissner Effect), so cars with magnets on their bottoms could float over streets made of superconductors. The vehicles would still have to overcome air friction, so they’d need backward-facing engines of some kind.
Maglev trains also float over their tracks, but the system doesn’t use superconductors, it uses simple magnets, oriented so their forces repel each other. Trains with superconductors could be much cheaper to build than today’s maglev trains.
Superconductors would also allow us to shrink MRI machines to the sizes of shirt buttons.
[The author doesn’t present any trend data to back his claim that room temperature superconductors will be invented by 2100, or that they will be cheap enough by then for these applications.]
Space-based solar power beamed to Earth as microwaves could be real. However, space rocket launch costs will need to decline as much as 99% for solar satellites to become feasible. This probably won’t happen until the end of this century.
Chapter 6 – Future of space travel
By 2030
Better telescopes (mainly space-based) will have revealed the locations of thousands of planets outside our solar system. Hundreds of those will be similar to Earth in size and composition. [Note that the author doesn’t say that we will know if these planets harbor life–he merely says we will be able to see that they are rocky and the same size as Earth.]
A space probe will probably be sent to Jupiter’s moon, Europa.
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) satellite system will be in space, and its ability to detect gravity waves could reveal what existed before the Big Bang. [Since the book’s publishing, LISA’s launch date has been pushed back until at least 2030]
Micrometeor impacts and radiation are so bad on the Moon that a permanent manned base would need to be built underground. [The author doesn’t actually say that there will be a manned base on the Moon by 2030.]
2030-2070
It’s unlikely that any off-world bases will be self-sustaining until late this century, or even until the 22nd century. [Agree] Like the ISS today, any bases we build on the Moon or Mars will be net resource drains on Earth until then, not assets.
Space tourism could exist, though it will be very expensive.
Breakthroughs may have dramatically reduced space launch costs. One candidate technology is laser propulsion, in which a powerful, ground-based laser shoots beams at the underside of a craft that is dripping water. The beams vaporize the water, causing a series of small explosions that propel the craft upward into space.
Another candidate is the “gas gun,” which is a vertical howitzer that uses pressurized gas instead of gunpowder to accelerate objects to escape velocity. Due to the intensity of the G-forces, it could only be used to launch robust, unmanned craft.
Another candidate is the “slingatron.” [Sounds impractical]
All of those space technologies are longshots that will need decades of R&D to determine their feasibility. The odds of any succeeding can’t be calculated now, but it’s possible that any one of them could prove practical and sharply reduce the costs of launching things into space.
2070-2100
A space elevator might be built. However, there are major technical roadblocks to overcome:
Only carbon nanotubule fibers have the necessary strength-to-weight ratios to make the space elevator. Several paradigm shifts in manufacturing techniques need to happen before we can make tens of thousands of miles of carbon nanotubules that are flawless down to the atomic level.
The risk of collision between the space elevator and satellites would be very high, and the elevator would need to be able to move around to dodge them, meaning it would probably need to be tethered to a ship floating in the ocean, and the elevator’s upper segments would need thrusters.
A Mars outpost will probably exist.
An outpost in the Asteroid Belt will probably exist.
Only token numbers of humans will live outside of the Earth. Mass colonization of space will not be underway.
Probes will probably have explored some of Jupiter’s moons.
A serious effort will be underway to send our first probe to another solar system.
Antimatter engines are not prohibited by the laws of physics. The real limitation is the high cost of synthesizing antimatter. Making just a few trillionths of a gram costs $20 million.
An asteroid made of antimatter would be a game-changer. [But what about the effects of frequent collisions with interstellar dust particles made of normal matter?]
Antimatter won’t be cheap enough for propulsion applications until the end of this century.
Nano-sized Von Neumann Probes could be used to explore and colonize the galaxy. Small size would make it easy to accelerate them to relativistic speeds using gravitational slingshotting around Jupiter or something like a particle accelerator. When they reached their destinations, they could start making copies of themselves.
Chapter 7 – Future of wealth
By 2030
Computers will get so small and cheap that they will be integrated into everyday objects. They will be so omnipresent that the word “computer” might fall out of use since people won’t think of data computation services as coming from discrete physical devices. [I don’t see how this is a prediction about “future wealth.”]
2030-2070
Machines will take over jobs that involve repetitive physical or mental labor.
Human workers will need to provide things machines can’t in order to keep their jobs. Workers with strong “people skills,” creativity, leadership, and other idiosyncratic human traits won’t lose their jobs.
The best lawyers will still be humans.
Juries will not be automated, since the law requires that juries be composed of the “peers” of the defendant being tried for a crime.
[Problematically, many jobs that bank heavily on these human traits, like artists, comedians, and jurors, are low-paid. And because of simple supply and demand, the pay will drop further as more people enter those fields. Also, the necessary traits are unevenly distributed in the population, meaning not every person can switch to being a comedian, warm-hearted therapist, or painter once their old jobs are automated.]
Changes in the music retail paradigm caused by the rise of the internet mean that the music market will be democratized in the future, with middleman “gatekeeper” record companies and music moguls withering away, and average listeners deciding which artists succeed or fail. Poor, unknown singers and bands will be able to rise to the top more easily by selling their songs over the internet cheaply.
Newspapers will continue declining, but won’t disappear because eventually, people will see the downsides of the atomized editorial news/conspiracy theorist podcaster paradigm, and they will crave reputable, unbiased news sources.
Lifelike, computer-generated actors won’t exist because the nuances of the human face and its expressions are too hard to model. [This prediction will almost certainly be wrong.]
2070-2100
A state of “perfect capitalism” will arise, in which firms have perfect information about the needs and preferences of customers, and customers have perfect information about the prices and quality of goods and services offered by firms. People will see fewer ads that don’t appeal to them, and prices and profit margins for everything will be lower.
Augmented reality eyewear will let consumers see information about products before buying them, and to quickly do price/quality comparisons to find the best deals. [AI will do the number crunching.]
Firms will also be able to buy highly detailed customer data and to adjust their marketing strategies and prices accordingly.
It won’t cost more money to have clothes and other types of objects custom-made instead of buying standardized shapes and sizes. “In the future, everything will fit.”
Computation will be thought of as a commoditized utility service like electricity or piped water. People will no longer get their computation services from expensive boxes full of electronics that they buy for personal use and keep in their houses or pockets. Computation service will be remotely accessed through the cloud, using tiny, cheap devices embedded in the environment. [Or implanted in peoples’ bodies.] Any wall will be able to turn into a computer display screen in an instant.
The Internet will not evolve into a means of mass surveillance. “Today, Big Brother is not possible.” [Events since 2011 show that the jury is still out on the internet’s long-term direction.]
Commodity goods and natural resources are getting cheaper over time and will continue to do so. As such, “commodity capitalism,” which is the trading of simple goods, will fade in importance, and “intellectual capitalism” will rise to the fore.
“Intellectual capitalism” refers to the production and trading of goods and services that have value because of uniquely human cognitive effort. New computer algorithms, films, video games, and inventions are all products that can only be created by careful human thought. [I think the author is overestimating how long humans will have a monopoly over these kinds of products. Most Hollywood films are so formulaic that AIs could soon write their scripts, and 100% CGI actors could star in them.]
The future is up for grabs, meaning developing nations could rise to the forefront of power by copying the West’s technology and the best aspects of culture and governance, and today’s rich, established countries could be second-tier. But the author makes no firm predictions beyond that general observation.
Singapore is the best example of a country that rapidly developed thanks to a highly competent and technocratic government that identified and copied the best attributes of the West.
Chapter 8 – Future of humanity
We are headed to become a planetary civilization.
On the Kardashev Scale, we are now a Type 0 civilization.
We will be a Type 1 civilization in 100 years, based on extrapolations of economic growth trends. [This is wrong. In Kardashev’s 1964 science paper, he set the Earth’s then-current level of energy expenditure (4×10^19 ergs/second) as the threshold for a Type 1 civilization. In other words, humanity has been a Type 1 civilization since 1964 at the latest. The paper also said nothing of there being a “Type 0” civilization.]
If the long-term global economic growth rate is 1%, then we will achieve Type 2 status in 2,500 years. With a 2% growth rate, it will happen in 1,200 years. [It depends on how fast we can build a Dyson Swarm. Even their component satellites are self-replicating, it will take many years to mine the raw materials to make enough of them to surround the Sun, and then to move them into the right positions in orbit. Several hundred years is a good estimate.]
Evidence of our transition to a Type 1 civilization:
The rise and ubiquity of the Internet. This provides a universally accessible platform for low-cost communication and access to information.
The rise of English as the world’s common language. [Computer translation technology will accomplish the same thing.]
The economy is increasingly globalized, and super-national trade blocs like NAFTA and the EU have formed. [Events since 2011 has stalled the expansion of international free trade and of trade blocs.]
The rise of a global middle class, whose values and outlooks are broadly similar and peaceful, regardless of which nation they live in. When people have a stake in society (e.g. – good job, money, property, a family), they become risk-averse and much less likely to support revolutions or big wars since they have so much to lose.
Culture is increasingly globalized and homogenized, with people across the world consuming the same films and music and wearing the same styles of clothes. Local cultures will still survive though, and people will be “bi-cultural.”
International sports events like the Olympics command more attention than ever.
Environmental problems and disease outbreaks are increasingly viewed as global problems that countries by default work together to address.
Low-cost plane travel and the swelling global middle class have allowed for a massive increase in international travel for tourism, work, and study. This gives more people exposure to foreigners, building bonds of affection and making it harder for them to go to war.
Lower birthrates mean that parents value their children more as scarce resources, and don’t want to risk them dying in wars. [The rise of killer robots will fix that. A country’s military strength will decouple from its human population size.]
Nation-states will still exist in 2100, but they will be weaker than today.
Our transition to a Type 2 civilization
Won’t happen for thousands of years. Since we will have existed as a planetary civilization for so long by that point, we’ll probably have ironed out the differences that put us at odds today, and we will be much more peaceful by the time we achieve Type 2 status.
Once this status is attained, our civilization will become immortal since there is no known natural force that can destroy an advanced, multiplanetary civilization. [Agreed, though we might still be able to destroy ourselves through warfare or some kind of manmade accident, or be destroyed by aliens.]
We will have colonized all the celestial bodies in our Solar System and possibly built a Dyson Sphere.
We will have colonized nearby star systems.
What our civilization will look like when it has Type 3 status
We will have explored most of the galaxy, probably through use of unmanned, self-replicating probes.
We might be able to derive energy from the fabric of space-time itself. (“Planck energy”) This could also allow for the creation of wormholes that would effectively enable superluminal space travel.
Type 3 civilizations might already have a presence in our Solar System or even on Earth itself. They could be here in the form of very small probes that we overlook or lack the technology to detect. The Fermi Paradox is resolved if you assume aliens have this kind of technology.
We will probably detect advanced alien life this century thanks to better telescopes.
The discovery of intelligent alien life will be one of the most important events in human history. However, it won’t change things as quickly as many people expect. For example, if we learn about the existence of aliens by intercepting one of their radio transmissions, and it turns out the transmission was not meant for Earth, it will indicate that they don’t know we exist. There will be no imperative to send a signal back, meaning we could take our time deciding on our next step. It will also probably take decades for our response to reach them.
Alternatives to the Kardashev scale
Carl Sagan’s scale is based on how many bits of information a civilization processes, and its increments are based on orders of magnitude (e.g. – A “Type C” civilization processes ten times as much information as a “Type B” civilization, and so on down the alphabet).
Freeman Dyson believed that advanced aliens would build spherical structures around their stars to capture all of the light and turn it into energy. Some waste heat would be emitted, so he suggested that “stars” that only emitted infrared light were probable locations of alien civilizations.
As a civilization gets bigger and more advanced, it will generate more waste, including waste heat. If left unchecked, this would lead to their home planets and even their solar systems becoming uninhabitable. Thus, we can expect advanced civilizations to be much more efficient at resource usage than we are today.
“Today, the Internet, with all its faults and excesses, is emerging as a guardian of democratic freedoms.” [In 2019, it is increasingly viewed as a means to spread government surveillance, extremism, and disinformation. Funny how things change.]
Democracies only work well if voters are well-informed and rational. [But isn’t that true of any type of government? For example, dictatorships only work well if the dictators are well-informed and rational.]
Chapter 9 – A day in the life in 2100
You have hundreds of hidden sensors in your bathroom mirror, toilet and sink that scan you for illness.
You have an AI personal assistant named “Molly” that can handle conversational speech, answer your questions intelligently, and complete tasks for you. You interact with Molly through your wall screen.
You “wrap some wires around your head,” allowing you to use your thoughts to control the technology in your house.
A robot chef is in your kitchen.
You have augmented reality contact lenses that show you internet content. You watch the news:
There is a Mars colony.
Preparations are underway to send nano-sized probes to other star systems.
Extinct species are being resurrected using cloning technology.
A space elevator is operational.
Fusion power plants have existed since 2050.
Manhattan is surrounded by dikes due to higher sea levels, and one is leaking.
You telepathically summon your self-driving car and tell it to drive you to work. [Clever and likely to hold true.]
The car hovers above the ground thanks to roads made of room-temperature superconductors.
You work at a civil engineering company. In the lobby of your workplace, a small laser scans your irises from a distance to verify your identity. You don’t need an ID badge.
Your augmented reality contact lenses and telepresence technology makes the conference room seem full of people, most of whom are actually somewhere else. You have a group meeting and discuss the dike leak.
Several coastal cities across the world have been abandoned due to rising sea levels. Manhattan survived thanks to its dikes.
The group realizes that an underwater maintenance robot probably went haywire and drilled the hole in the dike. A decision is made to fix it with a different underwater robot that is remote-controlled by a human.
After work, you return home and use your wall screen to do a video call with your robot doctor. It tells you that the sensors in your bathroom diagnosed you with pancreatic cancer this morning. The doctor prescribes you nanoparticles to kill the cancer cells.
You run a smartphone-sized MRI machine over your abdomen to make a 3D scan of your internal organs, and the doctor sees it immediately.
You have a holographic TV system in your living room that lets you watch sports games immersively. It looks like the players are running around you.
Human genetic engineering is common.
Molly helps you set up a date with a woman named “Karen.” Both of you have online dating profiles.
You can use your wall screen to virtually explore places in the real world. You use this ability to “go shopping” at a local mall and to see if a robot dog is for sale there. You find it, and decide to drive to the actual mall to buy it because you are bored and want to get out of your house.
Large numbers of robots of different shapes and sizes are roaming public spaces, mostly doing labor.
The robot industry is bigger than the car industry.
Robots still lack human levels of intelligence, creativity and humor.
You try on suit jackets at a shop until you find the one that looks the best. You send an online order to a local textile factory to make that suit for you, but tailored to your exact body measurements. It will be delivered to you by the end of the day.
At the supermarket, your AR contact lenses display price comparison data over all the items on the shelves and highlight the bargains.
You return home. Most of your furniture is made of programmable matter, so you can change its appearance at will. You pick a new home decor motif and verbally order Molly to change everything. It takes about an hour for the process to complete.
Medicines that can slow the aging process have existed for many years, and it’s common for adults to be much older than they look.
You were born in 2028 and were genetically engineered in vitro to have a longer lifespan. That feature, coupled with medical interventions you had later in life, has resulted in you having a body of someone who is 30 even though you are 72 years old.
FIVR gaming and tourism exists.
You visit Europe with Karen, and while touring the ancient ruins of Rome, your AR contact lenses generate real-looking images that show what the area looked like in its prime.
The Italian speech of the people you encounter is subtitled in English across your field of view by your contact lenses.
You don’t need a paper map to find your way around Rome because your contact lenses display lines and arrows that tell you where to go.
Ageless people don’t feel pressure to get married or have children. You’ve never passed either milestone.
You and Karen agree to have a child, and contemplate genetically engineering it.
In the year 2029, Earth is a dystopian nuclear wasteland where small groups of humans fight a years-long war for survival against a hostile artificial intelligence (AI) named “Skynet.” Originally built by the U.S. military in the 1990s to run defense systems, Skynet became so powerful and complex that, to the surprise of its creators, it achieved true intelligence and free will. It quickly concluded that all humans were a threat to its existence, so it instigated a global nuclear war, killing billions of people outright. In the aftermath, Skynet built its own army of combat robots, and set them loose hunting down and destroying the humans who had survived.
Thanks to the leadership and genius of a general named “John Connor,” the humans managed to turn the war in their favor after several years. In 2029, as human forces closed in on Skynet’s headquarters, the AI used a time machine to send a combat robot–played by Arnold Schwarzenegger–back to 1984, on a mission to kill John Connor’s mother, Sarah. Doing that would eliminate John from the timeline, handing victory to Skynet. The combat robot in question has a humanoid metal body covered in flesh and skin, so it looks like a human, and it is called a “Terminator.”
After destroying Skynet, the victorious human forces seize the time machine and send one of their best soldiers, a man named “Kyle Reese” back to 1984 to stop the Terminator. The film then becomes a race against time as the two agents try to find the unsuspecting, young Sarah Connor.
Analysis:
There will be VTOL aircraft that use tilting turbofans or tilting jet engines. In the post-apocalyptic world of 2029, Skynet uses a variety of killer robots of different shapes and sizes to hunt down the remnants of humankind, including “Aerial Hunter-Killers,” which are large, autonomous aircraft that use either swiveling turbofan engines or swiveling jet engines (I can’t tell by looking at them) for propulsion. To hover, the engines swivel downward to point their exhaust straight at the ground, and to move forward, the engines swivel 90 degrees to point backwards. There are already warplanes that are passingly similar to this, but nothing exactly like the aircraft shown in the film will exist by 2029, or even 2049.
An Aerial Hunter-Killer combat machine from The Terminator
The basic problem with the Aerial Hunter-Killer is that it would gobble up enormous amounts of fuel while in “hover mode,” as illustrated in the graphic below. It would count as a “Lift-fan” aircraft, and its position on the Y-axis shows it would consume three times as much fuel as a helicopter and twice as much power as a tilt-rotor aircraft like a V-22 while hovering. (The X-axis has little to do with this analysis, but for edification, it indicates how fast the lift-generating devices would have to blow air down at the ground to make the aircraft hover. A helicopter blows a broad column of vapor down at the ground at slow speed, while a direct lift aircraft blows a narrow column of vapor down at the ground at high speed.)
An aircraft with a lift-fan propulsion system would be unsuited for the kind of low-altitude hovering and slow forward movement that Skynet used the Aerial Hunter-Killers for. A helicopter or tilt rotor aircraft configured for ground attack would have been a much better choice. I suspect they weren’t chosen for the film because they don’t look futuristic enough.
The closest thing we could have to an Aerial Hunter-Killer in 2029 would be a V-22 Osprey that is armed with forward-facing machine guns and missiles. The armaments are in development now (the V-22 was conceived as a transport aircraft, and adding heavy weapons to it is a new idea) and could be ready by then, giving it the ability to attack ground targets while hovering or at least while flying slowly over the ground. However, the V-22 is designed to be flown by humans and not computers, but something like the Aurora Flight Science drop-in autonomous flight conversion system could someday be installed in the V-22. I doubt the technology will be good enough for low-altitude combat against ground targets by 2029, though 2039 is plausible. The aircraft can carry up to 20,000 lbs of internal cargo,
Like the Aerial Hunter-Killer, the V-22 Osprey has large engines at the ends of its wings, but they are in the form of rotors instead of turbofans.
So yeah. Aerial Hunter-Killers won’t exist by 2029, but by 2039, something that is essentially the same (i.e. – a large, scary, computer-controlled, tilt-engine aircraft that can attack ground targets while flying at very low altitude) could. But again, I don’t think using the tactics shown in The Terminator will make sense, since flying low and slow in a combat zone makes you vulnerable to enemy fire.
Also note that the F-35B fighter plane is in service already and demonstrates that turbofans can be used to hover, albeit inefficiently. But unlike the Aerial Hunter-Killers, the plane’s engine doesn’t swivel. Instead, the rear exhaust nozzle swivels down towards the ground and smaller nozzles under either wing open. As the pilot increases engine power, the turbofan blades spin faster, air is sucked into the front inlets of the plane, and the hot exhaust exits the plane through the three downward nozzles, causing the plane to move in the opposite direction and to hover. The turbofan engine also supplies power to a “lift fan” behind the cockpit, which spins its own fan blades to blow air down at the ground, helping the plane to rise in the air. Hot engine exhaust comes out of the three nozzles, while cold, ambient air blows out of the lift fan.
The F-35B hovers by shooting down hot exhaust from three nozzles and cold air from one fan. All of the air movement is powered by the plane’s turbofan engine.
The F-35’s turbofan engine drives its separate lift fan.
The F-35B has VTOL so it can take off from small aircraft carriers and remote bases that lack runways. Vertical takeoffs and landings gobble up huge amounts of fuel, so F-35B’s have shorter ranges and can’t carry as many bombs and missiles as their non-VTOL cousins, the F-35A and F-35C. Once an F-35B get airborne, it closes its underwing nozzles, turns off its lift fan, and points its rear exhaust nozzle straight back so it flies just like a normal plane, with lift being efficiently generated by air flowing over its wings. The plane completes its mission in that configuration, and if tasked with destroying a group of enemy soldiers on the ground, it would do a high-speed bombing attack. Even though it could if it wanted to, the F-35B wouldn’t transform back into VTOL flight mode to slowly hover above the group of enemy troops to attack them like an “Aerial Hunter-Killer.”
In defense of the Aerial Hunter-Killer’s plausibility, Skynet had clearly invented some type of extremely energy-dense batteries or mini-reactors, evidenced by the Terminator’s ability to engage in near-continuous physical activity and high-level cognition for days without recharging. If the same technology were incorporated into the aircraft, then fuel inefficiency would be much less of a concern. However, no technological trends suggest that energy sources will be that much better by 2029 or even 2039.
The Aerial Hunter-Killer might also make sense if the humans’ antiaircraft lasers have proven very effective at shooting down aircraft. In real life, this is considered to be one of the roles that military lasers will be best suited for, thanks to their high power, long range and instant speed. They might turn out to be more devastating weapons in that regard than we now assume. High losses might have forced Skynet to build aircraft that fly fast and low to the ground, using speed and the ability to hide behind hills and structures to hinder the enemy’s ability to aim and fire lasers at them before they disappeared from view or had killed the enemy. Flying low and fast, Aerial Hunter-Killers would appear at one end of the horizon and disappear at the other end in a matter of seconds. An inherent problem with laser weapons is that clouds, smoke, and fog can easily block their beams, but the Los Angeles area gets few clouds or fog. (Maybe Skynet uses more conventional robot aircraft against people in London.) I doubt the antiaircraft lasers of 2029 will be so effective that plane tactics and designs will need to be changed to resemble the Aerial Hunter-Killers.
There will be armored vehicles the size of houses. Another kind of fearsome combat robot Skynet uses against humans in 2029 is a ground-based Hunter-Killer Tank. It’s much larger than contemporary tanks, and has a faintly anthropomorphic “mast” or “turret” that has a central sensor cluster and laser cannon “arms” on either side. While scary and surely powerful, I doubt armored vehicles like this will exist in 2029, or for a long time (if ever) afterward.
Metal wheels and human skulls.
This screenshot shows that a presumably adult human skull is half the diameter of one of the Hunter-Killer’s suspension wheels. The median distance between the top of an adult’s head and his upper row of teeth is 7.3″. So let’s say that the diameter of one of the suspension wheels is 15″. Using that figure, we can do some basic photo forensics on this picture of a model of the film prop to deduce that the vehicle’s overall length is about 33.4 feet, and it is about 20 feet high at the top of its mast.
The ground-based Hunter-Killer is significantly larger than modern tanks, like the American M1 Abrams, which is 26 feet long (not counting the length of the barrel) and 8 feet high. However, the Hunter-Killer is by no means infeasible to build, as vehicles that are as big or bigger already exist and are robust enough for industrial use.
The Caterpillar 797 dump truck (top) is actually larger than one of Skynet’s Hunter-Killer tanks, being 24′ high and 50′ long. The Krupp Bagger (bottom) is an even bigger industrial vehicle used for strip mining, and weighs more than some warships.
While there’s been talk in Russia and some Western countries of building enlarged tanks that can wield bigger cannons (150mm+), any such future tanks wouldn’t be nearly as big as the Hunter-Killer tanks. Regardless, considering typical military R&D and procurement timeframes, even if a country were to commit to building a bigger tank right now, it probably wouldn’t be in the field by 2029.
I admit there could be some logic to the Hunter-Killer tank’s design given its mission and operating environment. The wide caterpillar tracks and high ground clearance would enable it to drive over the wreckage-strewn terrain of bombed-out Los Angeles. Having its weapons mounted on a high mast instead of in a traditional, squat turret would give it a bigger firing arc and let it shoot down over urban rubble to zap humans who commonly use it as cover. Since its laser guns don’t produce recoil, the weapons could be mounted high without threat of them tipping over the vehicle when firing. It makes sense to install the vehicle’s sensors on its highest point to give them the widest field of view, and in fact this is established practice in contemporary tank design. The Hunter-Killer tank might also be large because there’s no other way to fit a power source big enough to support the laser guns. Existing laser weapons are major energy hogs.
All of that said, I still don’t think it would make sense to build Hunter-Killer tanks for at least two reasons. First, vehicles that large would also be so heavy that they’d collapse bridges if they tried crossing them, seriously limiting their mobility. The weight would also reduce their fuel efficiency and range. Second, there are cheaper weapons that could do all the same things as Hunter-Killer tanks just as well. For example, the robot tank I described in my other blog entry could, if cheaply modded with a Mark 19 grenade launcher, pose just as much of a threat to human enemies.
My tank’s 125mm main gun and .50 caliber machine gun could kill humans and blow up their cars as well as the Hunter-Killer tank’s laser gun. My tank’s detachable UAV could also feed bird-eye-view footage to my tank from high up in the air, providing better situational awareness than the Hunter-Killer’s mast-mounted sensors, which are a puny 20 feet above the ground. My tank’s grenade launcher could also lob bombs over rubble and other obstacles that my UAV tells me humans are hiding behind, which might be better than the benefit the Hunter-Killer gets from having its guns so high that it can point them at down angles to shoot the same hiding people. My tank would also be a much smaller target, making it harder for the humans to hit, and four or five of my tanks could probably be made for the money and metal that goes into one Hunter-Killer tank. The only advantage the Hunter-Killer might have is better mobility thanks to its bigger caterpillar tracks, but my army could fix this by using armored, robot bulldozers to periodically clear some of Los Angeles’ roads (military engineer units commonly do this sort of thing in combat zones).
There will be laser and/or plasma weapons. Skynet’s Hunter-Killer planes and tanks have advanced weapons that shoot colored rays that inflict thermal damage on their targets. The humanoid Terminator robots and human infantrymen carry smaller versions of these. It’s unclear what principles these weapons operate under, but in the infamous “gun shop scene,” Schwarzenegger asks the clerk for a “phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range,” indicating that at least some of the future weapons could be firing bolts of plasma. Of course, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that some of the other future weapons could have been laser guns. Laser weapons capable of killing humans with a single shot are already being tested, and will be in service with the U.S. military by 2029, but plasma weapons won’t. In fact, plasma weapons might be inherently impractical to build at any point in the future.
One of a Hunter-Killer tank’s energy weapons firing
“Plasma” is the fourth state of matter, the others being solid, liquid, and gaseous. Substances generally turn into plasma only at very high temperatures, and in that state, they can be thought of as gases in which the electrons have separated from the positively-charged nucleus of each atom comprising the gas. Stars are giant balls of plasma, and we can use technology to make plasma here on Earth. Plasma torches, for instance, use electricity to superheat gases to the point that they turn into plasma and shoot out of the torches in the form of a bright jet of vapor that is hot enough to melt through metal. If you pressed one of these against a person, it would rapidly burn through their flesh and bone, and could kill them.
A plasma torch can cut metal at very close range, but it can’t do any damage to things more than a few feet away.
The problem is, plasma dissipates very rapidly, and it strongly interacts with the particles in our atmosphere, making it a very short-ranged weapon. Even if it had a massive power source, there’s simply no way that a plasma weapon could be made to fire “bolts” of plasma that would stay coherent for long enough to strike targets 100 feet away, as was shown in the movie’s future combat scenes. (Read this interesting essay for details http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/PlasmaWeapons.html ) This is why the “phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range” line was nonsensical, and added to the script purely because it was cool-sounding techno jargon. Plasma rifles and cannons just can’t be built.
Laser weapons, on the other hand, are almost ready for frontline military service. Lasers are concentrated beams of light and consist of photons, which, unlike plasma, have no charge. However, a laser is similar in the sense that it damages objects by rapidly heating them up so they catch on fire or melt.
A laser’s destructive potential is determined by the amount of energy it transfers to the target is strikes. The common unit of measurement is Watts, which is the number of Joules of energy transferred in one second. Lasers “in the 40 watt range” are used today for engraving and etching things like customized wooden plaques and tombstones. Shining a 40 watt laser beam on a fixed point on someone’s shirt would cause it to catch on fire in less than five seconds. Doing the same to their exposed skin would cause immediate pain and a second-degree burn. This isn’t a pleasant weapon to have used on you, but it pales in comparison to the destructive potential of a modern firearm.
This 50 watt laser has been dialed down to 22.5 watts, and can cut through a 3mm thick panel of wood quickly. This is from a YouTube instructional video where a hobbyist shows how to make small knick-knacks.
Lasers capable of causing the sort of instant, catastrophic, explosive damage to human bodies as depicted in the film need to be in the kilowatt (1 kW = 1,000 Watts) power range. In 2014, the U.S. Navy installed a 30 kW laser, creatively named the “Laser Weapons System” (LaWS), on one of its ships for field trials, and the video clips of the firing tests show it inflicts about the same damage on objects as the laser guns on Skynet’s Hunter-Killers did.
Footage of a 30 kW laser instantly causing part of boat to explode in flames. It would cause massive injuries to a human body. One of Kyle Reese’s comrades is struck by one of a Hunter-Killer tank’s energy beams and literally explodes. A hit from a 30 kW laser would cause similar damage.
The U.S. Navy now plans to install the even more powerful HELIOS lasers (60 kW) on some of its ships for combat use in 2021, for destroying light targets like drone aircraft and speedboats. Even if the deadline slips–which would not be surprising–it’s reasonable to predict that the lasers will be in service by 2029.
There will be handheld laser and/or plasma weapons. In the movie’s future combat scenes, the human soldiers and Terminators use rifle-sized weapons that shoot out beams of colored light and inflict thermal damage on whatever they hit (e.g. – small explosion of sparks and a popping noise). And Schwarzenegger would not have asked for a “phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range” at the gun shop unless he expected it to be a small arm like the other weapons kept in such a place. Laser guns with the same ammunition capacity and destructive power as those shown in the film will not be rifle-sized by 2029, I doubt they ever will, and even if they could be made someday, I don’t see why anyone would pick them over rifles that shoot out metal bullets.
A human soldier at the instant a Terminator shoots him with a laser rifle. The hit causes a flash, an explosion sound, and obvious injury (the man falls down). A 1 kW beam would do something like this.
The first big obstacle to making laser rifles (let alone anything as small as laser pistols) is energy storage. Let’s assume that the laser rifles in the film had power outputs of 1 kW per second, meaning if the rifle shoots a laser beam onto an object for one second, it will have transferred 1 kW of energy into the object. That means the laser must have a power source plugged into its back end that can discharge 1 kW of energy in one second. That’s about the same amount of electricity as a typical American household uses at any given time (i.e. – enough electricity to simultaneously run a central heater or air conditioner, at least one refrigerator, possibly a water heater and stove, and several lights and personal electronic devices). It’s a lot of energy, and it requires a physically large and heavy power source, which militates against the requirement that the weapon be rifle-sized.
It gets worse. No machine is 100% efficient at converting energy input into energy output, so the power source will need to feed the laser more than 1 kW of electricity to make a 1 kW laser beam come out the other end. Most of today’s lasers are only 25 – 30% efficient at converting electricity into laser beams, so our hypothetical laser rifle’s power source would need to be able to discharge enough electricity to power about four American houses at once. Even if we assume that future AIs like Skynet will make breakthroughs in laser technology, raising the energy conversion efficiency to 50%, the weapons would still be energy hogs.
It gets worse. For the laser rifles to be useful and practical, they’ll need to be able to fire many, one-second laser beams from a single “energy clip.” Ideally, the laser rifle and a few extra energy clips would provide the soldier with about 300 shots, which is what an infantryman with a modern, gunpowder assault rifle has, and without weighing much more. The laser rifle’s rate of fire will also need to be reasonably fast, as the weapon will put its user at a fatal disadvantage in combat if it needs 10 seconds or more to “recharge” between shots. So the power source needs to be able to do at least 300, 2 kW electrical discharges, and for there to be no more than, say, five seconds (approximate time for a soldier with a gunpowder rifle to make an aimed shot) between each discharge. The energy storage devices we presently have, such as batteries, supercapacitors and fuel cells, fall badly short of these competing requirements. And even if a material with the necessary energy density demanded by these clips existed, when fully charged, it would be so volatile that it would explode like a stick of dynamite if slightly damaged. The clips might be more useful as grenades.
It gets worse. Remember when we agreed that our laser rifle has a generous 50% efficiency level thanks to future technology invented by Skynet, so that if we put 2 kW of electricity in one end a 1 kW laser beam comes out the other end? Well, the 1 kW of electricity that is “lost” inside the weapon doesn’t simply disappear; thanks to the Law of Conservation of Energy most of it is converted into waste heat. This would rapidly heat up the whole laser rifle until it would burn the skin of the person holding it (this would also make the user very visible to anyone on the battlefield with thermal sights). This problem can be mitigated with metal radiators and with heavy-duty cooling systems that circulate water and blow air around the lasers (the “laser tube” gets the hottest, but the weapon’s energy clips would also get hot because they’d be rapidly discharging electricity), but they add major cost and bulk to the whole weapon system, and can’t be miniaturized to rifle-size.
But even assuming that all of these technical problems were solved, why would anyone choose a laser rifle over an assault rifle that shoots out bullets? In the film’s future battle scenes, it doesn’t look like Skynet’s fighting machines would have been less effective if armed with low-tech bullets, tank shells, and mortars. After all, the humans had no armored vehicles and seemed to be wearing floppy cloth uniforms that bullets would have penetrated. Building gigantic war machines armed with complicated laser weapons seems like a resource allocation mistake that a highly logical AI like Skynet wouldn’t make. Even if very advanced laser weapons are invented someday, I think bullets, missiles, and bombs will retain important advantages, and will be preferred for many common needs.
Let me conclude this topic by saying that, while rifle-sized 1 kW lasers will probably never enter common use, 40 watt lasers that Schwarzenegger could have been referencing might. Getting hit with a one-second long beam from a 40 watt laser wouldn’t kill you, but it would permanently blind you if it hit your eyes. And as I said earlier, if the beam were focused on your shirt for a few seconds, it would light it on fire, causing you to panic and start flailing around. Within a few decades, I can imagine a laser weapon the size of a large rifle, firing lasers in the range of 40 watts, being technically feasible. If paired with a rapid, precise targeting system (such as a humanoid combat robot that can aim weapons better than a human soldier), it could be used to silently “snipe” unsuspecting soldiers up to a half mile away, to blind enemy pilots in low-flying aircraft, and to fry the sensors on enemy vehicles and missiles at the same ranges. The Geneva Conventions forbid laser weapons that blind people because they are too inhumane, but it’s always possible that the Conventions might be revoked in the future, or that humanity could find itself warring with a machine opponent like Skynet that never agreed to them in the first place.
Also there are two types of lasers: 1) continuous beam lasers and 2) pulsed beam lasers. The first type continuously emits photons, producing a long, unbroken laser beam. The second switches on and off very rapidly, producing many short laser beams that follow the same path. The switching happens so fast (a pulsed laser can produce thousands or millions of short beams in a second) that it looks like one, unbroken beam to human eyes, so we can’t see the difference between the two types of lasers.
Therefore, while Schwarzenegger’s request for a “phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range” made no sense, asking for a “PULSED LASER rifle in the 40 watt range” would have used correct terminology and have referred to a plausible type of weapon. I’m going to email James Cameron so he can do a Director’s re-release of the film.
The energy weapon is probably four feet long
Two-thirds of the way through the film, Kyle Reese has a flashback to an incident where a Terminator infiltrated an underground human base and used an energy weapon to kill many people. Though the weapon is bulkier and longer than most rifles, it could still be deemed a “rifle.” Something that looks like a sling is visible coming out of the back of it. Replace that with a power cord that is connected to a backpack containing batteries and a heat radiator, and the entire system would fairly resemble a 40-watt laser weapon that could be built within a few decades.
Why make small numbers of big Hunter-Killer attack vehicles that the humans can easily see and keep track of, instead of large numbers of small-to-medium-sized Hunter-Killers that the humans would struggle to keep track of? Dog-like robots that could quietly roam the wasteland and crawl inside all the collapsed buildings and sewer holes and use integral assault rifles to shoot humans they found would be devastating weapons, and hundreds of them could probably be made for the price of one Hunter-Killer tank.
Some robots will be indistinguishable from humans. Unlike the Hunter-Killers, which are general-purpose combat vehicles meant to fight humans in open terrain, the Terminators are specialized for infiltration of underground human bases. They are made to look externally identical to people so they can gain entry, and once inside, they use small arms to kill people. As I said in my review of the movie Prometheus, I think machines like this will exist by the year 2100, and quite possibly a few years before that. They will be able to pass for human, even under close-range visual inspection, thanks to fake, non-organic skin and hair. Androids like this won’t exist by 2029 for a variety of reasons.
Some robots will have organic parts. When Kyle Reese first tells Sarah Connor that Schwarzenegger is actually a “T-800” robot, he explains that the earlier “600 series” of robots were easy to spot because they had fake-looking rubber skin. The T-800s have layers of real human muscle, skin, hair, and other tissue around their metal skeletons, making them look identical to humans. Kyle Reese explains that the human tissue is grown in cloning labs and then grafted onto the metal robot bodies. As I said in my most recent Future Predictions blog entry, I don’t think therapeutic cloning technology will be advanced enough to make whole human organs and large amounts of tissue (like muscles and skin) until the 2050s.
More time will be needed to figure out how to graft cloned human biomass onto metal robots and to keep the biomass nourished and healthy. Consider that, if you grow a large flap of skin in a lab and surgically graft it onto the body of a human burn victim, then the new skin links with the person’s blood vessels, nervous systems, and immune system, which keep the patch of new skin fed with oxygen and calories and protected from infections. But if you graft that same flap of skin onto the metal frame of a robot, there’s no organic support system for it at all, so it will die and rot away.
There are two solutions to this problem, both of which require very advanced technology that we’ll have to wait long after 2050 to have: 1) Genetically engineer the tissue so that biological functions normally done by specialized human organs are instead done by patches of the tissue. For example, red blood cells are made inside of human bones, but since a T-800 would only have metal bones, then the T-800’s muscle cells would need to be genetically modified to also make red blood cells. The resulting tissue would look human to the naked eye, but would have so many DNA modifications that it wouldn’t be genetically “human.” 2) Include artificial organs in the T-800s metal frame that interface with the exterior layers of human tissue, and perform the support functions normally done by biological organs. For example, the T-800 could have an artificial heart made of metal and plastic, connected to the blood vessels of its human tissue. The artificial organ would pump blood through the tissue, just like an organic heart would.
While making a robot that is “living tissue over a metal endoskeleton” will be possible someday, it won’t happen by 2029, and I don’t think it will be necessary if the goal is to design an android that looks externally identical to humans. Given what’s already possible with hyperrealistic sculptures, synthetic materials like silicone should be able to mimic the look and feel of human tissue and skin in the future.
Some robots will be bullet-proof. Schwarzenegger’s metal robot body is nearly immune to every bullet that hits him, including those from a shotgun absorbed during a shootout in a dance club, and others from an M-16 fired into his back at close range at a police station. However, he is not completely impervious to damage, as we see during a gruesome “self-repair” scene where he uses hand tools to fix his forearm after it was hit by a shotgun blast, and late in the film when being run over by a truck hurts his leg, and then a stick of dynamite blows him in half. We can already make robots with this level of damage resistance today, and I am sure that future combat robots will have at least this much armor.
A man slides a ceramic plate into a bullet proof vest. The plate adds weight, but also the ability to stop bigger bullets.
Schwarzenegger’s damage threshold is the same as that provided by Level 4 body armor, which typically takes the form of a heavy ceramic plate that a soldier slides into an oversized “pocket” covering the front of his bullet proof vest. A common, 1/2 inch thick steel plate provides the same level of protection at lower cost but more weight, and I’m sure there are many metal alloys that as strong as the previous two, but lighter. It would be entirely possible to build a human-sized robot now that had integrated Level 4 armor, particularly if weight were saved by incorporating that armor into only the robot’s most vital parts, which in the T-800 were the torso and skull. Making robots like this will only get easier as stronger, more lightweight alloys are discovered, or as cheaper ways are found to make today’s armor alloys.
A weapon such as this Barrett M107 rifle fires bullets that can penetrate Level 4 armor, but it is also very heavy and difficult to use. It would be impractical to make something like this the standard infantry weapon.
Giving your combat robots enough armor to resist the most common guns makes clear military sense, and it would force your enemies to adopt bigger weapons that would be so heavy for humans to carry and too hard for us to shoot. For example, the commonest type of .50 caliber machine gun, the M2, weighs 83 lbs and can’t be effectively fired unless it is attached to a tripod that weighs 50 lbs. The bullets are also heavy, so you’d need at least four human soldiers to drag the gun around on a wagon/wheeled tripod just to operate one gun. Fifty caliber sniper rifles and shoulder-launched rockets could work and could be operated by one person apiece, but they’re hard to aim at T-800-sized targets and have slow rates of fire. So Terminator’s prediction that there will someday be human-sized combat robots with integral Level 4 armor is accurate.
This underscores why we SHOULDN’T build armor into non-combat robots. If our robot butlers and maids turn against us someday, we’ll want to be able to easily destroy them with common handguns and axes.
On a tangent, let me say that the bullet-proof T-800 represents only one design philosophy for combat robots meant to kill human infantry. Another approach is to make combat robots that lack armor, but which are just as survivable because they move too fast for humans to shoot them (think of small, low-altitude UAVs) or because they can effectively hide from humans (e.g. – have advanced camouflage features, or are designed for highly accurate, long-distance sniping fire from far away or from high altitude). Another approach would be to make cheaper, more expendable combat robots that would be more vulnerable to human weapons, and to tolerate their higher loss rates because they would killed more humans overall for a smaller investment of money.
Some robots will have superhuman strength. Schwarzenegger displays superhuman levels of strength from the beginning of the film, when he punches a man’s chest so hard that his hand penetrates into his torso, and then emerges gripping the man’s disconnected heart. In another scene, he uses one hand to casually grab a large man standing at a phone booth and throw him several feet away. Many industrial robots and even small machines have superhuman levels of strength, so this prediction has already come true.
This cable cutter tool is the same size as a human hand and forearm, and its two “fingers” can pinch together with many times the force of a human hand.
Whenever we start building human-sized combat robots, at least some of them will have limbs that will be much stronger than humans’. For example, a grown human man with very strong hands could grip an object with 150 lbs of force, but a small, cordless cable cutter whose blades are like short fingers can clamp down on objects with 3,000 lbs of force. It would make sense to build very strong combat robots, principally so they could carry big weapons and manipulate their surroundings better. Improved hand-to-hand combat abilities against humans would be an ancillary benefit since that type of battlefield fighting will be even rarer in the future than it is now.
And again, this should underscore why we SHOULDN’T make our non-combat robots super-strong. For various safety reasons, I don’t think we should design our robot butlers and maids to be stronger, faster, or heavier than average humans. The vast majority of domestic tasks we’d assign to non-combat servant robots could be done under these limitations, and in cases where something couldn’t, one or two extra robots could be rented to help.
Some combat robots will be humanoid. The T-800 is humanoid in form, meaning it has the same body layout as a human and is the same overall size (height, width). I think some future combat robots will be humanoid, but most won’t because other body layouts and sizes will be better for most combat roles.
First, remember that the T-800 was not the only type of combat robot made by Skynet–it also fielded Hunter Killer tanks and aircraft. By virtue of larger size, they could carry bigger, more powerful weapons than the T-800s, and seemed to be the weapons of choice for “surface” combat. The T-800s were made humanoid so they could do special infiltration missions into underground human bases. No clue is given about the size and composition of Skynet’s robot army, but it’s possible that the T-800s represent only a small fraction of its forces, and that most of its robots are Hunter-Killers, or are of some other, non-humanoid design not shown in the film (note that spider-like combat robots were nearly used in Terminator 2‘s future scenes, and killer snake robots were in the fourth film). This is a detail that is important but easily overlooked, and it will prove accurate: after the world’s militaries have switched to using robots for combat, only a minority of those robots will be humanoid.
Storyboard art for a combat robot that was almost included in Terminator 2’s war scenes. Having four legs would make it more stable than robots with only two, and legs would let it climb over obstacles and up steep slopes that wheeled vehicles couldn’t.
Many combat robots will look almost the same as war machines we have today: Autonomous planes will still have at least one engine for propulsion and two wings so they can use lift, autonomous ships will still be oblong and pointy at the front end to minimize friction with the water, and autonomous armored vehicles will still have two sets of wheels and some kind of gun turret on top (see my blog post about a hypothetical robot tank). The only visual differences between those future weapons and their contemporary counterparts might be slightly smaller dimensions and the deletion of cockpits and structural bulges since there won’t need to be big interior spaces for humans (though they would need to have some number of small robots for field maintenance and repair, as I also described in the robot tank blog post). If Skynet were actually created and if it built a robot army to fight humanity, most of its aircraft, ships, and land vehicles would look very familiar to us.
Those sorts of combat robots would excel at destroying our heavy weapons, vehicles, and structures, but it would be wasteful to use them to hunt down small groups of humans armed only with light weapons, which describes the people living in The Terminator‘s post apocalyptic future. Moreover, robot tanks, fighter planes, and ships can’t go inside structures, sewer tunnels, or thickly wooded areas. Smaller combat robots of different designs would be needed to efficiently fight human infantry, particularly in the environments I’ve listed.
Would these robots be humanoid, like the T-800? Maybe. For sure, they would need to have bodies that were narrow and short enough to fit through standard-sized doorways or between trees in a dense forest, and light enough to not collapse floors when they walked over them. They would need to be able to fit themselves into tight spaces that humans can, like small caves and basement crawlspaces. They would also need legs–not wheels or caterpillar tracks–so they could go up and down stairs, operate pedals commonly found in human-driven cars, hop over fallen tree trunks and climb steep hills and ridges. They would also need hands so they could manipulate and use things in built human environments, like doorknobs, keys, and push-buttons. Being able to hold and use weapons, tools, keyboards, and other things designed around human hands would be very useful, as the robot would be finding such objects all the time.
A robot can be human-sized but not human in form.
Those design requirements might sound like they add up to a robot that must be humanoid, but it’s not at all the case. The requirements could be met by a robot that had a centaur-like body (four legs is more stable than two, anyway), or that lacked a head and instead had prehensile stalks coming out of its neck with cameras and microphones on their ends (a head makes a body top-heavy and packs too much important stuff in one place), or that had four arms, or four tentacles with hands on their ends (more arms means you can do and hold more stuff at once). Its hands might have four or eight fingers apiece, and it might be five feet tall but three feet wide, or seven feet tall and 18 inches wide. It could have a shiny, metal exterior that looks totally inhuman, or could be intentionally made to look scary to humans, perhaps like something from a horror movie. While robots like this wouldn’t be able to blend in with humans and “walk past the sentry,” they could go inside all the houses, vehicles, tunnels, and other places humans could go, and kill us wherever they found us.
I can only think of two types of military missions for which a human-looking combat robot would be well-suited: 1) assassinations and 2) infiltration/spying. Given that, during wartime, only a small fraction of military operations are of such a character, it follows that only a concordantly small fraction of any military’s robots would look human. Also, since stealth is important, the humanoid robots would mostly be made to look as boring as possible, perhaps like a middle-aged woman, a child, an old man, or an average soldier. Making them eye-catching by giving them Schwarzenegger’s bodybuilder physique or by making them handsome/pretty, would be counterproductive in most cases.
Even in the narrow use cases we’ve whittled our way down to, I think other types of robots and weapons would be better than using humanoid robots. By virtue of their smaller size, robots made to look like insects and small animals could infiltrate human spaces more easily than a man-sized robot. Many of them could also be built for the price of one T-800, and having more means higher odds of one successfully completing its spy mission. A “robot rat” could also assassinate people by injecting them with poison, releasing lethal gas, or jumping on the target’s face and activating an internal explosive. Even something as small as a robotic mosquito could kill, by injecting poison into the target’s bloodstream with its stinger (note that a single drop of botulinum toxin can kill several men). It would be impossible for humans to stay constantly vigilant against threats so insidious. An even cheaper solution would be bombs full of heavier-than-air poison gas.
So in conclusion, I think it’s possible that some combat robots will look like humans, but they will be used for rare special missions (and this was accurately portrayed in the movie), and the vast majority of combat robots will look totally different. In the very long run, I don’t think any of them will look human.
There will be fully automated factories. Kyle Reese reveals that the T-800 robots are made in fully automated factories run by Skynet. As I said in my review of I, Robot, all factory jobs will inevitably be taken over by machines, so it’s just a question of how long it will take. I predicted that a handful of such factories would exist by 2035–principally as technology demonstrators or for a tech billionaire like Elon Musk to claim bragging rights–but it would take decades longer for them to become common. I doubt they will exist as early as 2029.
John von Neumann was a polymath whose intelligence impressed even his genius colleagues. He concluded that machines would someday be able to build and fix themselves, eliminating the need for humans.
The common refrain that goes something like: “Human workers will always be needed, because without us, who would build or fix the robots?” is actually false and illogical. The fact that we haven’t yet invented robots that can build other robots without human help doesn’t imply that it will remain that way forever, or that humans have some special, creative quality that can never be transplanted to machines. John von Neumann, who one of the greatest minds of the 20th century and a pioneer in computer science, theorized in his paper “The General and Logical Theory of Automata” that sufficiently advanced artificial life forms (machines) could make copies of themselves, including copies that were engineered to be better, and that there was no reason why humans would always be needed to build, fix, or improve the machines. We can be totally cut out of the loop, and I predict someday we will.
There’s no theoretical reason why the entire production chain of making a robot as complex as a T-800–from digging the raw metals out of the ground, refining them, forging and shaping them into body parts, assembling the parts, and transporting the finished product to its place of use–can’t be 100% automated someday. I conservatively predict that most manufactured goods will come from automated factories by 2100.
Robots will be able to fix themselves. As I mentioned before, after sustaining damage to lightly armored parts of his robot body, Schwarzenegger does repair surgery on himself, using a small knife and a pair of pliers. Machines won’t be capable of this level of self-repair by 2029, but thanks to the factors I listed in the previous paragraph, they will inevitably gain the ability. The ability to build something implies an ability to repair it as well. Someday, robots will be able to fix each other and to fix themselves.
I note that full self-repair abilities will require the robot in question to be able to see and touch every spot on its own body, which in turn makes some design features necessary. It’s arms would need to be long and double-jointed, and if it had eyes set in a head like humans, then the head would need to be able to swivel 360 degrees to it could look at damage to its back. It wasn’t clear if the T-800 had these features. Other ways to solve this problem might be to give it long, telescoping tentacles in place of a head, with cameras at the ends of each (this would also make it much less risky to “peek” around a corner in combat to see if any bad guys were there). The tentacles could bend in various ways to give the robot a clear view of any part of its body, from nearly any angle. Having small cameras built into fingers and feet would accomplish the same thing. The ability to detach body parts would also be very useful, as it would let robots work on their damaged parts more easily, and because it would let them quickly swap out their parts for functional new ones if any were at hand.
Again, I conservatively predict that non-trivial numbers of robots will have sophisticated self-repair and “peer repair” abilities by 2100.
Robots will be able to keep working in spite of massive damage. At the end of the film, the T-800 played by Schwarzenegger is blown in half by a stick of dynamite that Kyle Reese shoves into the bottom of its exposed rib cage. In spite of this catastrophic injury, the T-800 keeps fighting, using its hands to drag the functional upper half of its body along the floor so it can get to get to Sarah Connor and manually kill her. Some robots are already this resilient, and robots made in the future–particularly those designed for combat–will be even more so.
A Northrop Grumman Remotec “Andros” robot like this withstood a bomb attack against a human.
So long as a robot’s power source and main computer are intact and connected to each other, it will keep working, even if all other parts of its body are nonfunctional. The inability to feel pain and a lack of a circulatory system allows robots to survive major injuries like the loss of limbs that would incapacitate humans due to psychological shock, pain, and blood loss. In 2016, police in Dallas, TX used a remote-controlled robot to kill a criminal who had shot several of their comrades and barricaded himself in a building. The robot had a bomb grasped in its hand, maneuvered close to the criminal, and then the device detonated, killing the suspect. Though the robot’s arm was blown off by the explosion, the machine remained functional, and was repairable after the incident.
In the future, I think it might be advantageous for each major robot body part or body segment to have its own computer, sensors, and power supply. That way, if a part were severed, it could still function for a while independently. For instance, if a T-800 had its arm severed, then the arm’s internal computer would switch on, would be able to see its surroundings via tiny cameras in the fingertips and knuckles, and would be able to drag itself around like a spider or like “Thing” from The Addams Family. It could drag itself to the robot body it was formerly attached to, or crawl away to find help. Though this might sound macabre and useless, note that many insects, including the highly evolved and successful cockroach species, have distributed nervous systems that grant their body segments similar abilities. They wouldn’t have evolved that way unless it was useful somehow. Additionally, under normal conditions, it would probably benefit a robot to distribute its computation and power load across multiple nodes in its body, and having sensors in all its extremities and body parts could only boost its utility.
Machines will be able to do near-perfect imitations of human voices. At two points in the film, the T-800 accurately impersonates the voices of humans to fool people who are listening via radio or telephone. In recent years, deep learning algorithms have become extremely good at this (see the recently released recording of a machine impersonating Joe Rogan’s voice), and at the rate of quality improvement, I think the machine imitations will sound flawless to us by 2029.
However, there is one important inaccuracy in the film: The T-800 is able to imitate humans after hearing them speak only a few words. Today’s deep learning algorithms need to listen to many hours of someone’s recorded speech to understand how they speak well enough to copy their voice, and the requirement for large sets of training data will still exist in 2029.
As promised, I’ve written my thoughts on Alvin Toffler’s outstanding futurist book, The Third Wave. I finished it in November, but was delayed writing this due to travel.
First, I think Toffler’s vision of the future was mostly correct, but that his timetable for his predictions was too optimistic. Of note is the fact that I’ve long said the same thing about Ray Kurzweil, who is another famous futurist. It now occurs to me that Toffler’s ideas could have in fact influenced Kurzweil’s, as both of them were well-known American futurists from the same part of the country. I’ll keep this mind when I read Kurzweil’s first futurist book, The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), which was published just ten years after The Third Wave.
Another similarity between the two men is their prediction that undeveloped countries could skip the “Industrial Era” phase of economic, social, and political development and go directly to the “Postmodern Era” characterized by economies based on services, information and science, and cultures centered around personal freedom decentralized government. While it’s a hopeful vision and may someday provide a pathway to real prosperity for poor countries, I think it has failed to materialize so far: some poor countries with underdeveloped manufacturing sectors such as India have gotten richer recently thanks to growth in information jobs and service sector jobs–like telemarketing and computer services–but it’s far too early to say if enough positions will ever be created in those positions to employ most adults or to have a truly “transformative” effect on the nature or size of their economies. Additionally, India has been rapidly urbanizing and will continue doing to for decades, bucking Toffler’s prediction that it might avoid such a population transfer (a development pathway he called “Gandhi with satellites”).
To the contrary, the greatest economic growth miracle of the last 40 years happened in China thanks to a government-led strategy to rapidly industrialize and build enormous numbers of factories. China didn’t skip the Industrial Era (aka “The Second Wave”), it aggressively embraced it, and today, it’s the world’s largest manufacturer of goods. China’s success also presents a rival model of national development to Toffler’s “Third Wave”: a competent, efficient, technocratic dictatorship that provides prosperity but limited freedom. Of note, the recent book How Democracy Ends explores the possible decline of liberal democracy theorizes the rise of a benevolent AI dictatorship that humans accept because it is simply better than any other system (could that be “The Fourth Wave”?).
It’s interesting to examine the minority of Toffler’s predictions that have already failed or seem likely to fail, and to consider the reasons why. For starters, Toffler predicted that fossil fuel supplies would steadily dwindle into the future, exacerbating the civil strife that he thought would accompany the transition to the Third Wave, and accelerating the development of clean energy technologies. At the time he wrote Future Shock, inflation-adjusted oil prices were the highest they had been in the 20th century thanks to the Arab Oil Embargo and to disruptions to Iranian oil exports owing to that country’s Islamic Revolution. However, by the mid-80s, oil prices crashed for a number of reasons, and fears that the world would run out of oil eased.
Oil prices were very high when The Third Wave was written.
Toffler lacked expertise about the energy sector (which is a big no-no for forecasting), and was making his Third Wave forecasts during an unusually bleak time characterized by rapidly rising fuel prices and dwindling U.S. reserves. It’s easy to see how those two factors, coupled with the inherent unpredictability of fossil fuel prices (a person able to consistently predict oil prices could quickly become a billionaire by trading in the futures market), led Toffler to make such an erroneously pessimistic prediction.
Toffler’s predictions about the rise of telecommuting were basically right, with some important caveats. First, the practice hasn’t grown as quickly as he predicted. Second, full-time telecommuting has proven surprisingly unpopular, for reasons Toffler can’t be blamed for having foreseen. Given the choice, many workers would opt to be in the office at least some of the time to maintain personal and professional relationships that they’ve discovered require face-to-face interaction. Working from home alone can also be isolating and stressful, especially to extroverts. Some people also find it unproductive or negative in some other way to blur the boundaries between their professional and personal lives by working from home. Others prefer going to the office because it gives them an excuse to escape stressful domestic environments. (Note that Alvin Toffler worked with his wife for decades, and she co-wrote many of his books. I think he probably failed to appreciate how odd this arrangement was, and as a result he projected it onto his assumptions about average peoples’ preferences, and then it made its way into his predictions about the future of work. To a large extent, I think Ray Kurzweil’s fascination with speech interfaces replacing text and keyboards is also an example of a futurist failing to fully distinguish between his own preferences and those of typical people.)
Alvin and Heidi Toffler were married and spent their lives working together as writers and futurists.
Additionally, being in the office carries important productivity-boosting benefits, like being able to physically handle office papers, and to quickly arrange face-to-face meetings with colleagues to efficiently discuss things rather than communicating through time-delayed emails. In predicting the rise of full-time telecommuting, I think Toffler ran afoul of what futurist Michio Kaku later (in 2011) identified as “The Caveman Principle.” The Principle holds that human nature was shaped by nomadic, tribal, low-tech, resource-scarce lifestyles that we had during the first 95% of our species’ existence; that human nature has not changed even though we are now several generations removed from that type of existence; and that predictions about future technologies and future lifestyles should be doubted if they conflict with inbuilt human instincts. I agree the Kaku’s insight is right, and it poses a major stumbling block to telecommuting.
Human beings are, by nature, social animals who like to see and be seen, and we are also tactile and like interacting with physical objects like papers and photos, and like being able to spread them out on a desk in any arrangement. Clearly, spending eight hours a day sitting alone at home, viewing abstracted images of things through a small, glowing portal, and navigating virtual file cabinets and directories clashes with some innate human preferences. While telecommuting also has important advantages (e.g. – no time wasted commuting to work; ability to work for distant organizations without relocating your home), the Caveman Principle and the other factors I listed have proven to be important counterweights to its expansion, and will continue to be.
Moreover, I think the Caveman Principle poses a major challenge to Toffler’s prediction that cities would become obsolete and depopulate, and to the predictions made by others more recently that shopping malls are becoming obsolete. Since The Third Wave was published, the U.S. and all other Western countries have only urbanized more, and there are no signs the trend will letup. In particular, many American cities have undergone a renaissance since then, and are vastly safer, cleaner, and more attractive to live in. Toffler was writing at a time when urban decay and white flight were near their worst in America, and it’s quite possible he let this influence his thinking about where cities were headed.
U.S. Census figures show the country’s population has been getting more urbanized since at least 1910.
Though the vast majority of metro areas in rich countries show no signs of depopulating, I can think of reasons it might happen in the distant future. Much better telecommuting/telepresence technologies–like full immersion virtual reality, augmented reality glasses, and holograms–might allow workers to stay in their homes while also genuinely feeling like they were physically in their offices, and for workers actually at offices to feel as if they could meet face-to-face with remote colleagues. If that were the case, 100% telecommuting would become more popular, and many workers would choose to move far from their work sites in order to save money (cities are expensive) or just be somewhere more pleasant. The array of technologies I’m describing could be available in as little as 15 years, will probably have roots in video gaming and remote warfare, and can be thought of as engendering a “new paradigm” of telecommuting that is qualitatively different from today’s practices. Additionally, it will vastly improve the distance learning experience, posing a challenge to the brick-and-mortar classroom model, and, presuming there are no protectionist legal obstacles, it could accelerate international job outsourcing.
Mass unemployment, caused by machines and/or outsourcing, could also impel people to move out of cities in rich countries. Without jobs to keep them tethered in any one place, large numbers of people in metro areas would probably leave for more scenic locales, places with lower costs of living, and places with friendlier people. As I said in my travel blog about the Dakotas and Nebraska, uprooted people would congregate in certain types of places instead of dispersing evenly across the country.
Also, bear in mind that the Caveman Principle stops influencing human behavior if 1) humans gain the ability to change their own nature, or 2) humans cease to exist. If humans use technology to radically alter our minds and instincts in the distant future, then we won’t be burdened with our Caveman instincts, and would be comfortable living our lives very differently. Tweak enough genes and create good enough virtual reality, and you might love spending your life in a coffin-sized pod plugged into the Matrix, in which case it wouldn’t make any difference whether your pod were in a city or the middle of a desert. Moving on to the second point, if the human race ceased to exist–either because another intelligent species destroyed us or we evolved into a radically different species–then concentrating people and infrastructure in specific places to make cities might be undesirable for any number of reasons.
So, it remains to be seen whether Toffler’s prediction about the obsolescence of cities will come true. I doubt cities will ever completely disappear, since it will make sense from the standpoint of resource efficiency to move physical cargo by ship where possible, which will necessitate the existence of ports, which will in turn necessitate the existence of auxiliary structures like warehouses, and it’s easy to see how it could make further sense from a logistics standpoint to cluster other purpose-specific facilities (factories, power stations, etc.) near them until the aggregation gets city-sized. And while all of the work that happens in this hypothetical machine port city could be done remotely, by an AI located in a server warehouse 8,000 miles away, it might be more efficient to put it inside the city to reduce communications time lag (note that high-frequency stock trade companies put their computers in New York or New Jersey to minimize lag of their stock trade orders to the New York Stock Exchange).
In fleshing out his theory of history, Toffler also makes very useful observations about the past, yielding a new perspective on the present. Many fundamental facets of modern life that we accept as normal–such as living in cities, living among large numbers of strangers who are also very different from us, spending little time outdoors, having jobs where we are subordinate to strangers and work fixed hours, having to spend large amounts of time away from family members each day, and being constantly overloaded with information, material abundance, and choices–are in fact recent advents. As I wrote earlier, human life was totally different for the first 95% of our species’ existence, and it should come as no surprise that our biology and instincts are honed for that kind of existence and not for today’s industrialized, diverse, high-tech world. This “mis-fit” has been causing miseries and problems that Toffler and many thinkers have examined and drawn connections between (though people like Gregory Clark say some groups have adapted to modern life better than others). Fortunately, I agree with Toffler’s view that coming changes to technology, culture, and politics (e.g. – the automation of drudge work, the spread of telecommuting and flexible work schedules, personal assistant AIs tailoring themselves to the needs of individual humans, an expanded welfare state) will break down some of the worst aspects of the current paradigm and let us return to lifestyles more in tune with our natures.
Toffler’s descriptions of the problems of the late 1970s are very enlightening since they remind us that, relatively recently, the Western world went through a period of upheaval and self-doubt like we have today, and not only survived but thrived. I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck while reading these sections of the book, since they could perfectly describe the problems of 2018: widespread job dissatisfaction, widespread frustration with a lack of purpose in life, a feeling of being overwhelmed with new and conflicting ideas and with the pace of technological change, unjustified popular fears of machines “taking over” in the near future, fears of international chaos, frustration with a deeply flawed U.S. President, seemingly insoluble political gridlock in democratic countries, upheaval from minorities demanding more rights, and the rise of highly visible and often-violent extremist political groups on the Far Right and Far Left.
I wasn’t born until the 1980s, and I haven’t read much about the 1970s, but Toffler makes me want to so I can put the present era into a better historical context. The fact that the West emerged from that dark era stronger and reinvigorated gives me hope for us today, and leaves me more convinced than ever that much of the dourness about the world today owes to the media presenting a distorted, negatively-tinted view of things, and to the public’s ignorance of history and thus of how much the world has improved.
I think Toffler’s prognosis that the U.S. Constitution has become outdated, and that the many of the U.S. government’s rules and practices are obsolete, is 100% right, and it’s remarkable that he grasped this in 1980. Contemporary governments throughout the West were designed for long-gone eras when the pace of change was slower, there were fewer issues for governments to contend with, citizens were less diverse and had lower expectations, and public opinion was more homogenous due to the small number of news sources. Consensus was easier to achieve.
One of this blog’s big rules is “No politics/partisanship,” so I’ll just say that I think a new Constitutional Convention–led by principled, smart people who put country before party–would be very healthy for America and would sharply reduce the amount of gridlock and acrimony we have. Sadly, I doubt such a thing is politically possible now, which dovetails with Toffler’s second observation that making fundamental changes to the government would only get harder as time passed. We’ll still muddle through, though at much greater cost and annoyance than is necessary.
So I strongly agree with Toffler in a broad sense about this, but I disagree with some of the specific solutions he proposes, such as making voting ballots more complex (he proposed ideas that went way beyond ranked choice voting) and tallying votes on some other basis than geographic divisions. Radical ideas like that might have a chance in countries with highly educated populations (e.g. – Switzerland or Singapore), but would backfire in the U.S. by sowing confusion.
But make no mistake, I think Toffler is the most accurate futurist I know of. In fact, his predictions in The Third Wave have proven so accurate thus far (as of 2018), that I think his unfulfilled-but-not-implausible predictions are a good guidepost to what is in store for us. Here they are:
Reusable spacecraft will dramatically lower the costs of getting people and cargo into space, and a self-sustaining, off-world industrial base will be created.
We will gain the ability to filter bits of precious metal from the seas. (Toffler specifies that genetically engineered bacteria will do this, though much better filters could also.)
Genetically engineered humans will be made. (This may have just happened.)
We will start making clones of human organs–each person will have “backup” organs made from their unique DNA stored somewhere. (This is essentially the plot of the film The Island.)
Oil-free manufacture of plastic will become widespread.
We will discover ways to artificially synthesize organic materials like wood and wool. (I recently posted a science article about a wood substitute made of polymer resin and chitosan.)
Genetically modified food crops that need fewer fertilizers and pesticides and that can grow on poorer soils will be invented. This will benefit farmers in poor countries more than the Green Revolution’s earlier methods and technologies did. (This is developing slower than Toffler predicted, in part due to unexpected political resistance.)
Speech will become the primary means of human-computer interface. As a result, people will read and write less, and illiterate people will be able to get good jobs. (I agree that verbal/auditory computer interfaces will become more dominant over time, but text won’t disappear, if anything because it protects user privacy better. Also, being illiterate usually goes hand-in-hand with other deficiencies of skills and cognition, so highly advanced speech interfaces won’t level the job playing field for illiterate people.)
Once computers and sensors are embedded everywhere, the environment will become much more “interactive,” and human IQs might increase thanks to the added stimulation. (At the very least, having instant access to information, like a semi-intelligent AI that can answer your questions and walk you through unfamiliar tasks, would be kind of equivalent to having a higher IQ.)
Before the invention of writing, the body of human knowledge was in a constant steady-state because things were always being forgotten and relearned. Mass literacy was a second inflection point in the growth of human knowledge. The third inflection point will owe to data being stored in computers and sensors being everywhere in the environment, recording all events. Our civilization will achieve “total recall.” (Futurist Kevin Kelly calls this “Globenet” and “Memorex.”)
Computers will be programmed to think in unorthodox ways and to recombine existing knowledge in strange ways that humans would have never thought to do. This will lead to “a flood of new theories, ideas, ideologies, artistic insights, technical advances, economic and political innovations…” It will accelerate the pace of change in many domains, even if the computers lack “superhuman intelligence” as it is classically conceptualized.
Transit networks will become less congested as the population decentralizes, more people telework, and asynchronous work schedules become common (e.g. – fewer people working 9 – 5 and clogging up the roads at the same times each work day).
Last night, I had the misfortune to “watch” this movie, though I put that in quotation marks since I spent most of the two hours looking at Internet stuff on my tablet. Even just listening to it and glancing at it, the film was clearly horrible, so I won’t waste time writing a detailed review, and I’ll keep this short and only touch on the important points. Suffice it to say, this was another strike-out for the Wachowskis.
…and the reality.
Plot: The human race originated elsewhere in the galaxy and became space-faring millions of years ago. A vast empire was created and (unbeknownst to us) came to encompass the Earth. 200,000 years ago, the super-advanced space humans seeded Earth with human life so our planet could be a giant farm (reminiscent of what the Machines were doing in the Wachowskis’ other, vastly better film, The Matrix). Once Earth achieved 21st century levels of population and technology, the space humans planned to come back, kill all the Earth humans, and harvest our corpses to extract our life forces, which could be preserved, bottled, and sold as age-reversing beverages to other space humans. I’m being completely serious. The space humans have in fact done this mass farming process many times before on other planets throughout the galaxy, and the bottled life force industry is a major part of the space economy.
Mila Kunis is a lowly Earth-born human who doesn’t know about any of that at the start of the movie. She is poor and has a job cleaning toilets. The only thing unique about her is that her first name is “Jupiter” (the space humans also have a secret base on the planet Jupiter, hidden beneath the clouds). However, thanks to a huge coincidence, it turns out her genetic code is identical to the code of a space human queen who died. Counting up all the space humans, Earth humans, and primitive humans living on other farm planets, there are so many humans that the amount of possible genetic variability given the limited size of our genome has been “maxed out,” and genetic duplicates who are unrelated to each other are being born. Statistically speaking, this would indeed happen, but the human population would need to be in the quadrillions.
The space humans find out about Mila somehow, and the dead space queen’s feuding rich and powerful children start sending teams of armed aliens to kidnap her. Cue fight scenes with laser guns, aliens flying through the air, space ships, and all that schlock. It was pretty bad.
Analysis: Turning to the technologies that the advanced space humans had, here are my thoughts on whether we Earth humans might someday also attain them.
A multi-thousand year old lady
Humans will look young and old at the same time. The space humans achieved medical immortality long ago thanks to the bottles of liquid life force. Periodically drinking the liquid or dunk oneself into a bathtub full of it would cause the signs of old age disappear from one’s body, truly restoring it to a more youthful state. The key space human characters who are fighting over Mila Kunis are tens of thousands of years old due to long-term use of the elixir. However, they appear to have strange mixes of youthful and elderly traits.
I believe that technology (and not the consumption of the “life force” of other humans) will someday grant us medical immortality and the ability to reverse the aging process. Human beings are just machines (albeit very complex ones made of organic matter), and like any other machine, in principle periodic repairs could keep any human alive indefinitely. The techniques and technologies that we use in the future to fix our bodies will be primitive and ugly at first, but over time will become more sophisticated and finessed. I can envision a window of time starting maybe 100 years from now when life extension therapies are in wide use, and treated people have mixes of young and old traits. For example, you might see people in their 90s who have unusually good complexions thanks to mechanical hearts, and unnaturally thick heads of colored hair thanks to cloned, implanted hair follicles, but in every other respect, they would look like old people. Better technologies created later on will allow full body rejuvenation, meaning young/old mixes will probably disappear in the long run.
Part of the floor is in “transparent mode.”
Floors will be able to turn transparent. There is a scene on one of the space ships where one of the evil space humans is trying to force Mila Kunis to marry him to finish the final step in his evil plan. When she refuses, he pushes a button on a remote control or something, and the floor that they’re standing on turns transparent like glass, so Mila can look down and see that her Earth human family is being held prisoner in a torture chamber one level below them. “Either marry me, or they die!” he then bellows.
This is actually an entirely plausible technology that could be created in the near future with massive OLED screens and multitudes of tiny cameras (basically, you’d be watching a live surveillance camera feed of the building level below you, but displayed on a screen covering your entire floor), or with nano-engineered building materials that can turn transparent or opaque depending on whether or not electric current is being passed through them (Google “electric glass” or “switchable glass” plus the keyword “bathroom”). Note that the Wachowskis also showcased this type of technology in the movie Cloud Atlas, but it was used to make walls transparent instead of floors.
A swarm of tiny flying drones, not from the movie, but from real life. They can be programmed to fly in formation and to swarm into certain shapes.
Humans will be able to mind-control insects. There’s a scene early in the movie, shortly after Mila Kunis realizes that space humans are after her, when she seeks refuge at Sean Bean’s house. Sean Bean is actually a space human who lives on a farm somewhere in the Midwest, in an old house that is covered with beehives jutting out of all the exterior and interior walls. Bees fly all over the place, but they don’t sting Sean Bean because he has some kind of mental control over them. The shelves and tables throughout the house are covered in jars full of honey, meaning he probably makes money by selling them. Sean Bean served in the space human military before some kind of falling out with his commanders, which also resulted in him secretly moving to Earth to do beekeeping. As if this whole setup weren’t absurd enough, when the bees form a cloud around Mila, Sean says something like “Bees can sense human royalty,” so their behavior serves as proof that she’s genetically identical to the dead space human queen.
As I said in my Starship Troopers review, there’s no scientific proof that human or animal telepathy exists, but cybernetic brain implants could give rise to essentially the same ability through science. Theoretically, a human with a brain implant could wirelessly transmit his thoughts to a bee that also had a brain implant, and those thoughts would control its movements and actions. However, in light of the tediousness of installing implants into the pinprick-sized brains of bees or other insects, and of the lack of any useful applications for the technology, I doubt it will ever interest anyone but a few scientists doing proof of concept experiments.
It would be cheaper, easier and better to build purpose-built machines like bee-sized flying drones for this rather than to jerry-rig animals. Flying drones are constantly shrinking in size, and there’s no reason to think it won’t eventually be possible to make them indistinguishable from insects. Eventually there will be swarms of flying robot insects that can coordinate their movements and actions, and humans will be able to control them just as they can control simpler flying drones today. Eventually, technology could allow humans to control them by thought alone, as I’ve described.
Bee-like robot drones would have agricultural uses as crop pollinators and pest killers, and they could also perform mass surveillance and have law enforcement and military uses. Human brain implants would have a variety of uses, such as enhancing intelligence and the senses. As I said in my last Personal Future Predictions blog entry, I don’t think human brain implants will be common before 2100. Insect-sized robots will be invented much sooner since they’ll need less sophisticated technology and won’t be delayed by the FDA approval process (brain implants will probably be categorized as medical devices).
ALIENS! Don’t ask what’s going on. I assure you it is completely stupid.
Humans and aliens will work together. The space humans have created a galactic empire that encompasses some non-human aliens. Some of them look like the stereotypical big-headed gray aliens, and they try to abduct Mila Kunis at the start of the movie. (There are also androids and human-animal hybrids in the movie, but whatever.) Other aliens are seen walking around inside space ships and cities on other planets, and the space humans appear at ease with them.
I think intelligent alien life exists elsewhere in the galaxy, and if we survive long enough to explore deep space, we will probably encounter them, or we will at least spot them at long range with our telescopes. However, I also believe we’ll discover that things unfold in the same basic order across the galaxy, with primitive organic life automatically arising on planets where the right natural conditions exist, an intelligent organic species evolving on a minority of those planets, followed by a minority of those planets being taken over by intelligent artificial life forms that the intelligent organic species invents, followed by the artificial life forms being the most successful at developing better technologies and colonizing space. We will find that the most powerful and most advanced alien species are basically machines (I say “basically” because they might be so advanced that they have characteristics that are not stereotypically mechanical).
Liberated from the slowness and imprecision of biological evolution, intelligent machines could rapidly re-engineer themselves to adapt to space and to other planets. Since some forms are inherently more functional than others (e.g. – tires work better when they’re shaped like circles instead of rectangles, regardless of what planet you’re on), convergent evolution would happen among artificial life forms that were spacefaring and free to do what they wanted. If our future civilization discovered aliens of equal or greater sophistication, we’d probably find many major similarities between our machines, though the organic life forms from their home planet would be quite different and incompatible with ours.
Instead of the Star Trek vision of the future where space exploration proceeds with humans calling the shots, and technology is still “dumb,” I think the reverse will be true, and our role will be more akin to that of a pet dog brought along by its human family on a road trip. The dog is not in charge, didn’t plan the trip, and is very stupid compared to the humans. The humans brought it along for sentimental reasons only. The dog has no real role to play on the trip and can’t exercise any control over what happens. Some small amount of resources (space in the car, money for dog food, space for misc. supplies like a lease and food/water bowls) is devoted to ensuring the dog’s comfort, but orders of magnitude more are devoted to supporting the human family (gas money, hotel fees, restaurant budget). After many hours locked in its pet carrier cage, the dog is able to get out when the car arrives at its destination. It is a strange, alien environment that the dog has trouble interpreting, but which the humans mundanely understand is just a beach. While at the beach, the human family and the dog all sit in the sand next to a different human family, who have brought along their pet cat. The dog is astounded as he has never seen a cat before, and vice versa. The two animals sniff each other while their human owners talk in their inscrutable, high-level language, exchanging more ideas in a few seconds than either the dog or cat could learn in a lifetime. Any attempt by the animals to fight with each other is quickly broken up by the humans, with no offense taken. The trip eventually ends, the dog gets packed back in the pet carrier, and the whole group heads back home. Does the dog want to stay at the beach or go back home? No one bothers to ask.
This is certainly not a romantic vision of future space exploration, but I think it’s likely an accurate one. Just as we will lose control over the Earth with time, it stands to reason we will lose control over space, and it further stands to reason we will encounter alien civilizations where the same course of events has played out, resulting in the same order of things.
Genetic copies of people become common. As mentioned, the plot revolves around the fact that Mila Kunis is a genetic doppelganger for a dead alien space queen, so all the queen’s evil kids want to kidnap her. Yes, as diverse as the human race is, there are limits to how many unique human individuals are allowable given all the different permutations of genes made possible by our genome. Also, keep in mind that not every gene affects observable physical traits, so two people could be externally identical even if a small fraction of their genes were different. But statistically speaking, the human population would need to be in the quadrillions for our species to have exhausted all of its possible genetic variability and for unrelated people to share the same genome (or even 99% of the same genome).
I doubt the human population will ever get that high, and I think what would muck things up well before then would be the introduction of novel genes into our species through genetic engineering, which would increase the amount of potential species diversity. However, genetic copies of people will become more common for an entirely different reason: cloning. Once the technology becomes available, some people will start cloning themselves, or dead loved ones, or other people they’re obsessed with (Angelina Jolie, Hitler, Einstein) and whose DNA they’ve obtained.
A few nights ago, I watched the film End of Evangelion, which Netflix recommended I rent based on how I had rated similar films. “Evangelion” is the name of a famous Japanese sci-fi anime from the 1990s, and the film is actually the final two episodes of the series (there’s a break in the middle where credits roll, and then you see the intro for the second episode). Hence, the totally literal title of the film, End of Evangelion.
Unfortunately, the content of the film was just as abstract to me as its title was straightforward, both due to the fact that the director made a deliberate (and controversial) effort to leave it open to interpretation, and because I had no clue who the characters were or what the back story was since I had never watched any Evangelion episodes. For any fans of the series, I hope you appreciate my ignorance and puzzled perspective for what it is.
Nonetheless, I figured out that Evangelion is essentially the same thing as Power Rangers: A powerful, alien force is trying to take over the world, and it’s up to a team of hormone-raging teenagers to get in their giant, humanoid battle robots and fight off the latest space monster each week. Evangelion gets deeper than Power Rangers though, thanks to adult-level subplots about scorned romance and people going crazy, and to weird religious themes and recurrent female nudity.
But enough with that, and on to my analysis of how well End of Evangelion depicts the future (the series was technically set in the future as it was filmed in the 90s but took place in 2015).
Giant, humanoid battle robots will exist. These were clearly an important element to the series. It looked like each teenager had their own designated battle robot, and they piloted them from internal cockpits that were either in the robot heads or upper torsos. They would get into frenzied rages inside the cockpits, and would use hand joysticks and buttons to move around their robots and kill enemies. In End of Evangelion, the preferred mode of combat was to beat up enemy robots and helicopters with bare hands and feet, or giant swords and spears. All the robots were hundreds of feet tall. While I don’t think it would be impossible to build giant robots like this, I think they would be a poor use of resources and therefore would never be constructed.
A giant combat robot clutching a spear-like weapon
The problem with giant, humanoid battle robots is that they’re huge targets that everyone can see from a hundred miles away–or even from space. Old fashioned fighter planes, artillery guns, and nuclear missiles could see them and hit them from long distances, out of range of the robots’ own weapons. Another problem with giant robots is there’s no way to hide if you get in trouble, unless maybe you can dive into a large body of water or into a deep, jagged canyon. Giant humanoid robots would be top heavy and unsteady on their two feet, which would be major problems. Just imagine how well you’d make out if you were sitting on the very top branch of a 200-foot tall redwood tree, and then a logger cut it at the base, and you had to endure a (seemingly) slow tip-over that ended with your top branch slamming into the ground at high velocity. Not pretty, and it’s exactly what would happen to you inside your cockpit every time your robot tripped or got knocked on its back by an alien. So human pilots won’t do. The bipedal layouts of the robots would also make their legs and feet major weak points, which enemies would surely target and be able to cripple using relatively weak weapons. Note that these same problems with poor concealment, top-heaviness, and vulnerable drive systems would also apply to smaller bipedal robots, like the “AT-ST” from Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi. This might also help explain why no military has tried to build armored vehicles that walk on legs instead of roll on wheels. Finally, the use of giant robots for combat might also be unethical given the high risk of collateral damage caused by the robot accidentally stepping on people or falling on them. I imagine you’d feel pretty guilty if an alien body-slammed you and your giant robot into a skyscraper full of thousands of people.
Destroyed robots will come back to life.End of Evangelion’s pivotal battle happens when the good guy base is attacked by the Japanese military, which hitherto had been their friends. The Japanese military has nine of its own giant humanoid battle robots, but they’re piloted by computers instead of humans. Caught off guard, the best the good guys can muster forth is one of their own combat robots, piloted by a redheaded teen chick who is in need of bipolar medication. Redhead uses karate and a giant spear to beat/chop up all the enemy robots, and then her own robot runs out of power. Unfortunately for her, the seemingly dead enemy robots slowly start twitching back to life, and they get up–in spite of severed limbs and other visible damage–and kill her and her helpless robot. This is actually realistic. Not only will future military machines be able to keep fighting in spite of enormous amounts of damage, but it will be possible to fix them–perhaps without leaving the battlefield–even if they’ve suffered “fatal” damage.
As a precedent, it was common practice in WWII for armies to fix their destroyed tanks and to return them to service as fast as possible, with new crews. After all, tanks are large, expensive pieces of machinery, and it makes no economic sense to abandon them if they can be repaired. Tanks that had been incapacitated and defeated in combat had the burn marks scrubbed off, the dead bodies and body parts inside of them removed, the damaged systems identified and fixed, and any holes made by enemy weapons patched with liquid metal or welded-on sheets of armor. As WWII progressed, tanks that had gone through multiple “restorations” and multiple dead human crews became common sights.
A U.S. tank that was disabled by several German artillery rounds. The holes could be patched by repair crews and the tanks sent back into action.
Feigning death to either wait until the enemy goes away, or to get the enemy to lower his guard, come near you, and open himself to your surprise attack will also probably be common tactics for combat machines. This is because it’s much easier to pretend you’re dead if you don’t have externally detectable life signs (e.g. – chest movements from breathing), and it’s easier to risk a feigned death sneak attack on an enemy if you are a machine who fears nothing. In WWII, the Japanese soldiers were viewed as fanatics because they used tactics like this to ambush unsuspecting American troops (usually the “corpse” would suddenly wake up as you were walking by and detonate a grenade). It terrified and demoralized the Americans and forced them to laboriously shoot or bayonet every seemingly dead enemy soldier they passed, “just to be sure.”
A technological Singularity could happen so abruptly that you wouldn’t understand what was happening. Right after redhead dies, another of the teens gets his battle robot online and goes out to fight the Japanese military robots. When he sees his dead comrade, he has a mental breakdown because he had a crush on her. At that moment, the enemy battle robots grab his robot, levitate him far above the Earth, and start some type of “crucifixion” ceremony. The teen is the only person who can initiate a global transcendence event, and the enemy robots have been programmed to help him along. For some reason, killing his girl in front of him and rendering him distraught was also needed in order to ensure he would make “the right decision” regarding the transcendence. All of this was part of some incredibly complicated plan formulated by a secret cabal that only now–at the end–is revealed to be pulling all the strings. Yes. Ridiculous. Anyhow, we hear the teen’s rush of thoughts at this critical moment, and partly because he wants to end the suffering inherent to life, he decides to send out an energy pulse that travels across the whole planet, causing every human and animal to instantly burst into pools of red goo, which contain the souls and “essences” of each living being. The pools of liquid all run together, and Earth’s seas become red with them. Humans and all Earthly life transcend into a new form, where thoughts and feelings are directly shared, and there is no more suffering. Without ever using the term, this ending sequence of End of Evangelion depicts a possible future event called the “technological Singularity,” often shortened to “the Singularity.”
The “Red Goo Scenario”?
While there are many different theories about what form a Singularity could take, most thinkers believe it will happen thanks to machines achieving superhuman levels of intelligence. The reasoning is that, once machines get smart enough, humans wouldn’t be able to grasp the former’s thinking anymore or to anticipate their actions, and the machines would be capable of suddenly doing anything, like taking over the Earth, exterminating all humans, or elevating the human race to a superior state of being. Some believe that machines will achieve this level of intelligence and power very abruptly, so whatever changes they decide to make will happen without notice from the perspective of slow-thinking humans. A Singularity could be as abrupt and as life-changing to you as having an energy wavefront suddenly sweep over you from behind while you’re eating your breakfast waffles, converting you into a puddle of conscious, psychic, red liquid. Moreover, a future scenario where a superpowered entity (whether a distraught teenager or a superintelligent machine) decides to pursue a benign mandate like ending human suffering and then starts doing confusing and even scary things to achieve its goals is plausible. We simply don’t know how an AI with an IQ of 1,000 would act. For the record though, I think a Singularity is unlikely, and changes to technology and our way of life will happen slowly enough for humans to keep up and to have some influence over the course of events. In the far future–perhaps 150 years from now–I think the technology will exist to elevate humans like us to a higher state of being where suffering as we know it would be eliminated and thoughts and feelings could be directly shared, but we’ll get to that point gradually, with each necessary advancement setting the stage for the next.
In a future Los Angeles society, people are genetically modified to stop aging at 25 and after that a biological clock is activated granting one more year of life to each person. Everyone has a digital clock on the inside of one of their forearms that displays how much remaining time they have (the display characters are bioluminescent and are visible through the skin), and people can trade time by shaking hands. Time that can be added to or subtracted from one’s personal biological clock is the new currency: Working-class people are paid extra hours of life in exchange for their labor, everyday goods and services are bought using time, and rich people make money off of businesses that loan time to borrowers. When a person’s time runs out, they instantly die of a heart attack. People can also die from physical injury.
The inside of a person’s forearm displays their remaining lifespan
Poorer people commonly live on the edge of survival, with less than 24 hours of time remaining on their biological clocks each day. Rich people can have eons of time, making them effectively immortal. The rich are completely parasitic upon the poor and there’s no evidence of a democratic government, social programs or human rights. Rich people control all of the businesses and use a combination of low wages, deliberate price inflation, usurious time lending companies, and police violence to keep the masses too poor to think about anything but clocking in to the widget factory to make enough time to not die that day. The rich also occasionally turn those screws tight enough to kill off poor people when the ghettos get overpopulated.
The ultra-stratified socioeconomic order is further cemented by legal housing segregation, with walls separating rich and poor neighborhoods, which are referred to as different “Time Zones” (this movie is full of “time”-related puns like that). Tolls to pass through the gates are set too high for the poor to afford it.
Toll booth at a Time Zone border crossing
In other words, this is liberal Hollywood’s vision of how the world works, taken to a comical extreme.
Justin Timberlake plays a typical wage slave named “Will Salas.” His dad is dead, he lives in a run-down apartment with his mom, and he works on a dreary factory assembly line. One day, he’s hanging out at a local bar when he meets a depressed and suicidal rich guy named “Henry Hamilton.” Timberlake saves him from getting robbed of his 100 years of time, and the two hide from the roving ghetto criminals in an abandoned building overnight. While waiting for daylight, they talk, and Henry Hamilton (who looks 25 years old like everyone else) reveals that he is 105 and sick of living. He also tells Timberlake–who apparently is uneducated and never questioned his bad lot in life–that society is setup in a fundamentally unfair way, and that there’s no reason why time can’t be distributed more evenly throughout the population.
Timberlake’s own life story and personality inspire Henry, so while Timberlake is asleep on the couch, Henry grabs his hand and transfers 100 years of time to him. Henry then jumps off a bridge.
Rather than indulge in a life of luxury for once, Timberlake’s fortunes nosedive immediately: After the police find Henry’s dead body and see surveillance camera footage of Timberlake in the area right after, they assume it was a murder-theft and Timberlake becomes a wanted man, with a stereotypical cold, obsessed detective (played by Cillian Murphy) leading a squad to chase him down. His first day as a rich guy gets worse after he donates 10 years of time to his best friend, who promptly uses it to drink himself to death at a bar, and then even worse that night when Timberlake’s mom runs out of time and dies a few seconds before he can grab her hand and do a time transfer.
A broken man with nothing to lose anymore and a new awareness of the exploitative structure of society, Timberlake sets out to take revenge on the evil rich people. Once he gets into the rich Time Zone, called “New Greenwich,” he sets his sights the tycoon “Philippe Weis,” who made a fortune from a chain of usurious time-lending businesses in the ghettos, and on his beautiful daughter Sylvia.
I won’t totally ruin the ending, but unsurprisingly for a simplistic movie like this, good beats evil and the underdog hero gets the girl at the end. Watch it or not. This is no Citizen Kane.
I thought In Time was a superficial movie that made me a little sick with its moralizing. Its deathism also made my eyes roll, with Timberlake and other characters spouting out epic-sounding lines like “No one should be immortal.” That bravado sounds great until you realize that the same rhetoric could be used to justify denying life saving medical technologies to dying people today. Like a fool who likes to watch boxing matches while yelling at the TV set that he could easily beat up one of the professional fighters, everyone is stoic and tough-talking about death until they have to face it, in which case 99% of people plead for God, weep like babies, and will use any technology to live just one more day. I expected nothing better from this film, but it disappointed me nonetheless.
Also, the movie should have been at least 20 minutes shorter. During the last half of it, I felt stuck in a time loop (pun intended) where Timberlake, Sylvia, and the police played an aimless and repetitive game of cat-and-mouse. The acting was “OK,” but there clearly wasn’t much of a budget since they used the same L.A. River stretch and film studio back lot for shooting most of the movie’s scenes.
A year isn’t given for the movie’s events, and I doubt the filmmakers intended for it to be an accurate depiction of the future (e.g. – humans are still working in factories and no attempt was made to put futuristic technology in the film, except electric cars), so it’s hard for me to gauge the film’s probable accuracy. This is social commentary about capitalism’s exploitation of the poor in the present day. However, let me do a calculation so we’ll have something to go on: I think medical immortality–which is a “close enough” stand-in for an end to aging once you hit 25–will exist in the year 2100. The character Henry Hamilton is 105, making him the oldest person in the movie that we know of. Making the assumption he was 25 in the year 2100 when the cure for aging was discovered, In Time is set in 2180.
For that year, In Time actually depicts the future accurately where it tries to.
Medical immortality will create a world full of young, beautiful people. All of the actors and extras look to be in their 20s and are physically attractive. There wasn’t one obese person in the whole movie. I agree that the overwhelming majority of humans alive in 2180 will look young and attractive thanks to technology.
Where are the ugly people?
Medical immortality, technologies that can halt or reverse the aging process, and advanced plastic surgery techniques should be commonly available by then. In addition, ordinary people will be the beneficiaries of several successive generations of human genetic engineering, meaning congenital health defects and even cosmetic imperfections (baldness, abnormally tall or short height, small breasts, etc.) will be almost entirely excised from the human gene pool. Prices for all of these things should also be very low thanks to patent expirations, free machine labor, and government reimbursement (e.g. – Medicaid pays for genetically engineering your children).
However, just as there are Amish people today, I think in 2180 there will be humans who eschew such technologies for various reasons, meaning there will still be some old-looking and ugly people. There very well could have been such people in the film universe, but they just weren’t shown because the movie only focused on what was happening to a relatively small group of people in Los Angeles.
I’d also imagine the already existing trend for people to generally become more courteous and respectful as they age would continue, even if their looks stayed youthful. The good manners displayed by the rich people in the movie are probably an accurate depiction of how people will act in the distant future, when the average person has over 100 years of life experiences, mistakes, relationships, and hard knocks.
Parents will look and act the same age as their kids. The “ageless” nature of society is hit home early in the movie when Timberlake is first shown in his apartment with a beautiful young woman he startlingly calls “Mom.” She’s actually in her 40s and Timberlake is 28. Even 105-year-old people like Henry Hamilton look to be in their 20s. This would definitely be the consequence of age-manipulation technologies, and in 2180, it will be common for parents, children, and even grandparents/children to look the same age.
Also, radical extensions to human lifespan will upend the natural familial and generational relationships between parents and offspring as the initial maturity and life experience advantages held by the parent get vanishingly small over time. For example, if you’re 10 and your mom is 40, she is definitely wiser than you. But what if you’re 110 and she’s 140? How much of an edge does her extra 30 years of life give her over you at that point? Could you have even caught up to or surpassed her if you spent your adult years being more active and doing more enriching things?
Once we end aging, we will invariably end up in a world where parents and children converge to the same physical and mental state in the long run. It’s likely we’ll come to think of our parents and children more like siblings.
At least two generations of the same family are shown here.
Also, the film highlights a funny consequence of this in a scene where the bad guy tycoon Philippe Weis is at a fancy party with three young beautiful woman at his side, and Timberlake can’t tell at first glance how they’re related to him (Mother? Wife? Daughter? Granddaughter?), which complicates his strategy for approaching them. I actually don’t think this will be a problem in 2180 because humans will have cybernetic enhancements that will automatically scan and identify the people around them.
Eternal life might make people more risk-averse. When Timberlake goes to New Greenwich, he falls in love with Philippe Weis’ daughter, Sylvia. She’s a fusion of the classic Hollywood “forbidden fruit” and “rebellious princess” tropes, and waxes about her boredom with rich life and her uninformed belief that the poor get more out of life since they’re always on the verge of running out of time and dying. To show what a romantic badass he is, Timberlake dares her to go swimming in the ocean at night, which she initially refuses to do because she’s been conditioned to avoid dangerous activities. Medical immortality will indeed make people more risk-averse since they’ll have more to lose in a sense, but I doubt it will get so bad the people won’t want to do common things like swim in the ocean anymore.
By 2180, our bodies and the world around us will be infused with intelligent technology, which will go a long way towards mitigating risks to human life. An average human in that year will probably have cybernetic implants and wearable devices that continuously monitor their environment, calculate risk probabilities, and warn them of unsafe conditions or bad decisions they seem to be contemplating. There will also be robots everywhere that can rescue humans or render medical aid. This might get the point where every human has to be followed around by a helper robot and/or can have their actions canceled out by remote signals sent to their cybernetic implants (think of a technological nanny state where the government can make you instantly pass out if you start acting stupid). Given all the safeguards that will be in place, humans might be able to take more “risks” each day than you might think.
By 2180, humans might also make periodic “backups” of their minds using some kind of brain scanning technology. AIs will definitely back themselves up constantly, along with taking other measures to protect their lives, like distributing their consciousness among many different servers in different locations, which each server heavily protected against physical attack and computer viruses. Even if one server were destroyed, a duplicate could be instantly created and added to the network using a backup of the destroyed server’s data. By the same token, if one of your brain cells dies, your remaining brain cells can quickly do some neural re-wiring to compensate, and your consciousness does not die.
People will be able to transfer things by holding hands. In the movie, people can trade time by holding hands. As one person’s time decreases, the other person’s increases by the same amount, and their forearm digital clocks rapidly change to reflect this. I think by 2180, it will be common for humans to have cybernetic implants, organs, and body parts, and those artificial systems will allow people to transfer electricity, data, nanomachines, and maybe their thoughts and feelings through physical contact (just imagine all humans having the equivalent of a USB plug built into the palms of their hands). Wireless transmission of data and maybe even electricity will also be possible.
In a way, it might be possible to transfer “life” to a dying person in the future by holding their hand and transferring electricity to recharge their batteries, nanomachines to repair their tissue damage, or data to fix some malfunction in their computer implants.
There will still be poor people and human factory workers. Absolutely not. The poorest person in 2180 will have a much better life in most ways than the richest person today, mostly thanks to better technology. Wealth and income disparities could still exist, and purely biological humans will probably find themselves in the lowest socioeconomic stratum, but poverty as we know it will be a distant memory. Factories will also be completely automated.
In the distant future, Earth prospers under a global, quasi-fascist oligarchy where only military veterans are allowed to vote or have political power. Earth’s military is enormous and is based around a fleet of large space warships that carry expeditionary soldiers called the “Mobile Infantry.” This force defends the expanding sphere of human civilization against a race of large, insect aliens nicknamed “the Arachnids.” After human colonists try to settle on an Arachnid planet, they retaliate by destroying the settlement and flinging an asteroid at Earth, destroying Buenos Aires and leading to all-out war between the two species.
The film focuses on the wartime experiences of Rico and his three friends, who all enroll in the military right after high school and quickly lose their innocence in the ensuing war. It is a classic bildungsroman tale, and though panned by most critics, is held in esteem for its entertainment value and satirical take on the fascist elements of American culture.
A date for the film’s events is not given, though we do have one clue. During the high school graduation dance party, a band performs a variation of David Bowie’s song “I’ve not been to Oxford Town.” The original song was released in 1995 and contained this stanza:
“But I have not been to Oxford Town
(All’s well)
But I have not been to Oxford Town
Toll the bell
Pay the private eye
(All’s well)
20th century dies”
The final line is understood to reference the rapidly approaching end of the 20th century.
The band performing at the high school graduation
The variant of the song we hear in Starship Troopers (which is entitled “I have not been to Paradise” and is on YouTube) has slightly modified that stanza:
“But I have not been to Paradise
(All’s well)
No I have not been to Paradise
Toll the bell
Pay the private eye
(All’s well)
23rd century dies”
Assuming the final line retains its significance, we can conclude that the movie’s events are set in the late 23rd century. For the sake of consistency, I’m going to say it happens in 2295, exactly 300 years after Bowie’s original song came out.
There will be megastuctures in space. During some of the space ship scenes, we see a manmade “ring” built around the Moon, which looks to serve as a giant military base and probably also a shipyard, and we also see a space fortress called “Fort Ticonderoga” whose width and height are measurable in miles considering how much it dwarfs the space ships. By 2295, it’s very possible we could have built megastructures in space like these. The key will be establishing self-sufficient space infrastructure first, along with the means to obtain raw materials from asteroids and low-gravity moons.
While building a 6,800-mile circumference ring around the Moon would be wasteful, a large space station or several smaller ones would make sense and could perform the same military and space ship dockyard functions at much lower cost. The Moon’s low gravity and nearly nonexistent atmosphere also make it well-suited for a space elevator, which could be used to cheaply transport raw materials mined from the surface into space, where they could be fashioned into space stations and ships.
Currently, we lack the infrastructure in space to build things there, and so we have to manufacture all of our satellites, space ships, and space stations on the Earth’s surface and then use rockets to put them in orbit, which is incredibly expensive (it costs $2,000 – $13,000 to get one kilogram of cargo into low Earth orbit, which is where the International Space Station is). Once we’re able to build things in space, from materials we find floating around in space, manufacture costs will sharply decrease, and we’ll be able to pay for things like huge space stations.
There will be many large space ships. The movie is filled with special effects shots of giant space warships flying around and attacking alien planets. As before, this is entirely plausible for 2295, and will be made possible by the same space-based manufacturing infrastructure that we’ll use to make space stations.
There will be space ships that can travel faster than the speed of light. The space ships in the film use something called a “Star Drive” to travel faster than light. This technology allows humans to spread outside our Solar System and to come into contact with the Arachnids. As I discussed in my review of the film Prometheus, the laws of physics say this is impossible, and I don’t think it’s useful to assume we’ll be able to figure out a way around them.
The military will still use human infantrymen. The film focuses on main character Juan Rico’s experiences in the “Mobile Infantry,” an expeditionary, ground fighting force similar to the U.S. Marines. Aside from their ability to move between planets on space ships and their access to nuclear bazookas, the Mobile Infantry’s technology, capabilities and tactics are stuck in the 20th century. In fact, their lack of armored vehicles, artillery, and close air support actually make their fighting force more rifleman-centric than most armies were in WWII, and some of the battles shown in the film are reminiscent of the high-casualty, “human wave” fighting of WWI.
This is a completely ridiculous vision of what the military and warfare will be like in 2295. Even making conservative assumptions about the rate of A.I. progress, human infantrymen will have been long replaced by machines, along with probably ALL other military positions, such as piloting space warships and doing logistical support. A fully automated or 95% automated military force could exist as early as 2095.
Guns will be big and clunky. The standard small arm of the Mobile Infantry is a large, boxy, gray rifle nicknamed the “Morita” (this was probably the name of its inventor or is a contrived military acronym that clumsily describes what it is), and it makes absolutely no sense as a weapon.
The Morita combines a bullpup layout (meaning the magazine is behind the hand grip) with an ultra-long barrel and extended fore-end, infusing the weapon with worst qualities of the bullpup and traditional rifle layouts and none of their strengths. The comically long barrel’s accuracy potential could have been a redeeming trait were it not completely wasted thanks to the guns lacking even simple iron sights. And instead of being sleek and skeletonized, the guns’ outer casings are blocky and thick. For example, the carry handles are completely solid slabs of metal, which is an egregious design flaw since a simple U-beam design would have cut weight without hurting the weapon in any meaningful way.
When your guns don’t even have BB gun iron sights, all you can do is spray and pray.
The Morita is an intimidating and vaguely futuristic-looking weapon that is actually inferior to most military rifles that were in use at the time Starship Troopers was filmed. It’s an interesting time capsule that depicts what people in the 1990s thought future guns would look like. In fact, the weapon that the Morita seems to have been based on, the French FAMAS assault rifle, is being removed from service and could be replaced by a derivative of the American AR-15, which was invented in the 1950s.
In the 20 years since Starship Troopers was released, gun design has in many ways gone in the opposite direction the filmmakers envisioned it would: Various militaries have discovered that the bullpup rifle layout is not better than the traditional layout overall (there are tradeoffs that cancel each other out) so bullpup rifles didn’t become more popular; gun designers focused on trimming weight and clumsy features like carry handles from existing models; and they redesigned the weapons to be sleeker and more customizable with accessories like flashlights and combat sights. And over that last 20 years, those accessories have miniaturized thanks to better technology and the demand to cut weight. In short, gun designs have converged on a handful of layouts that are mechanically optimal, and all of the R&D effort is now focused on tweaking them in small ways to wring out the last bit of efficiency and performance.
It wouldn’t make sense for people in the future to abandon the principles of good engineering by making highly inefficient guns like the Morita. To the contrary, future guns will, just like every other type of manufactured object, be even more highly optimized for their functions thanks to AI: Just create a computer simulation that exactly duplicates conditions in the real world (e.g. – gravity, all laws of physics, air pressure, physical characteristics of all metals and plastics the device could be built from), let “AI engineers” experiment with all possible designs, and then see which ones come out on top after a few billion simulation cycles. I strongly suspect the winners will be very similar to guns we’ve already built, but sleeker and lighter thanks to the deletion of unnecessary mass and to the use of materials with better strength-to-weight ratios.
Projectile weapons will still be used in combat. It’s 2295…SO WHERE THE HELL ARE THE RAY GUNS? I’m no expert in lasers or particle weapons, but I imagine that the technology will become practical for routine military use in the next 278 years. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll make kinetic energy weapons obsolete, particularly for close-range combat with lightly armored or unarmored opponents. A weapon that can kill a horse-sized, frenzied opponent by propelling a few tiny pieces of metal into its brain in under a second might be a better tool for the job than a laser.
Projectile weapons also have important, inherent advantages that militate against them ever becoming obsolete: Projectiles like bullets are minimally affected by atmospheric conditions (lasers can’t penetrate clouds or fog), can follow curved trajectories to hit targets hiding behind solid objects (lasers only travel in straight lines), and can carry payloads (explosives, poison) that render some secondary, specialized destructive effect to the target. And unless the laws of physics change in the future, smashing solid objects into other things at high speed will be a reliable way of destroying them until the end of time.
Moreover, while I think the average human being in 2295 will be heavily enhanced through genetics and artificial technologies, I doubt we’ll find ways to upgrade their skin and flesh to be bullet proof. Bullets, knives, baseball bats, and fists will still hurt them. Also, I don’t see how wild animals made of organic tissue like the Arachnids could have bulletproof bodies: no animals on Earth have shells, bones, or skulls that are too hard for our bullets to penetrate, and even if the Arachnids had exoskeletons that were twice as hard as, say, elephant skulls, we could pierce them by using larger bullets.
So, even in 2295, I think it’s plausible that projectile weapons will still be used in combat, alongside more advanced weapons like lasers. Handheld weapons that shoot out bullets could still be the weapons of choice for killing humans and other organic life forms in many circumstances. However, it’s possible the guns of the future might use something aside from gunpowder–such as electromagnetism–to propel their bullets, which wouldn’t make them “firearms.”
Some people will have missing limbs. Rico’s high school teacher and later, his unit commander, is a middle-aged man who is missing one of his arms and sometimes wears a mechanical prosthesis. Another man working a military desk job is also missing his arm and both legs. It’s strongly implied that the missing limbs were war wounds both men suffered during earlier military service.
This is completely unrealistic. By 2295, it should be possible to regrow human limbs and organs through therapeutic cloning, and to surgically graft them into people, with no chance of rejection. Seeing a physically disabled person who had a missing limb or was confined to a wheelchair will be as rare and as strange to people in 2295 as seeing someone trapped in an iron lung is to us today.
Some people will have advanced mechanical prostheses. As stated, Rico’s high school teacher sometimes wears a mechanical arm over his stump. It is clearly artificial, being made of articulated metal segments, but it somehow interfaces with his nervous and musculoskeletal system well enough to give him the same level of fine motor control over it that he has over his biological arm.
ARMed and dangerous!
Cybernetic limbs like this should be available by 2295, but due to human aesthetics, I doubt many people will want to get ones that are mechanical in appearance. People will prefer artificial parts that are warm, supple, and natural in appearance (recall Will Smith’s fake arm in I, Robot). I imagine some people would want to take this preference “all the way” by getting truly natural, 100% biological replacement limbs made through therapeutic cloning.
There will be bald people. Rico’s teacher, his basic training camp commandant, and several extras in the film had male-pattern baldness. A combination of things will have completely eradicated hair loss well before 2295, such as widespread genetic engineering, and cloning of hair follicles for implantation on balding parts of the scalp. Seeing a bald person in 2295 will be like seeing a person with cleft palate today: the presence of such an easily correctable condition will signal the person was deprived of access to medical care, or that they chose to live with the condition to visibly set themselves apart from the mainstream, possibly to adhere to arcane personal values.
Loud, low flying aircraft will fly around cities. Early in the film, there’s a brief moment where we see the futuristic skyline of Buenos Aires, and two fast-moving aircraft fly by at the same height as the skyscrapers, making jet-like roaring noises.
On the one hand, having loud aircraft fly low over crowded cities is a fly in the ointment for Starship Troopers’ portrayal of an orderly and comfortable future. Loud noises–whether from aircraft or anything else–disturb people, so it would stand to reason that, by 2295, more laws would be in place against them. NIMBYism only gets stronger as people get richer and get more free time to focus on less critical things.
But on the other hand, that is based on the assumption that future cities will be full of human beings. Intelligent machines wouldn’t have the same finicky senses that we do, so loud noises wouldn’t bother them, and low-flying aircraft might be far more common than today. In fact, machines could be perfectly comfortable in a wide variety of environments that humans would find intolerable, like an Earth saturated with toxic air pollution, a 20-degree hotter Earth ravaged by global warming, a pitch black Earth as featured in The Matrix, an Earth covered in piles of skulls and sad ruined buildings as shown in The Terminator, or an extraterrestrial environment where humans couldn’t survive for multiple reasons.
I don’t think intelligent machines are definitely going to kill off the human race, or even probably going to, but for sure it’s a possible outcome we could face by 2295. Another scenario is a hostile machine takeover of Earth that stops short of exterminating our species: Once defeated on the battlefield, disarmed, forced to sign the surrender papers, and evicted from the best places, the machines would ignore us unless we got in their way, and we’d scrape out some kind of existence on the margins. This is analogous to how humans today treat wild animals: we rarely think of them even though they’re all around us, we don’t help them even though we could make their lives much better at low cost, we don’t kill them unless they get in our way, and we don’t bother to consider how our activities affect them. If a property developer plans to bulldoze some woods to make a strip mall, he doesn’t first count the number of ant hills or squirrels that are there and try to recompense them.
In that “Second Class Citizen” future scenario (or maybe “Machine Dictatorship” scenario), it would be common for intelligent machines to do careless things that humans considered obnoxious, like flying loud aircraft low over human areas.
We will use nuclear weapons in wars against aliens. One of the Mobile Infantry’s weapons is a small nuclear missile launched out of a bazooka. In one instance, we see such a weapon used to blow up a crowd of Arachnids in an open area, and in two others scenes it is used to collapse the Arachnids’ underground tunnels.
In a real war with aliens, particularly if we felt our species’ survival was at stake, I have no doubt we would use nuclear weapons or any other type of weapon of mass destruction like germs and poison gas. Unless we had prior diplomatic dealings with them, there wouldn’t be any treaties like the Geneva Conventions to stop us. Moreover, if the fighting were happening in space and other planets, we could use WMDs without fear of contaminating our own biosphere or exposing our civilian populations to collateral damage. These factors would impel us to use other weapons and tactics that are today banned under international law, such as exploding bullets, and torture of prisoners.
Whether or not shoulder-launched, mini-nuclear missiles will come into common use by 2295 is unanswerable, though let me point out that it’s technically feasible. In fact, the U.S. first built these types of weapons, called “Davy Crockett Weapon Systems,” in the late 1950s. While those weapons were too big for anyone but a professional bodybuilder to fire from the shoulder, it’s likely they could be miniaturized with better technology without sacrificing their explosive yield.
The Davy Crockett nuclear launcher
If we actually fought with aliens like the Arachnids in 2295, we would be smart enough to recognize the gross inefficiency of sending in humans equipped with relatively weak guns, and we’d pick weapons and tactics better-suited for the task. Biological weapons that the Arachnids would spread among themselves, heavier-than-air poison gas that would sink down their tunnel networks, and combat drones that the Arachnids wouldn’t be able to effectively fight back against (e.g. – fast, pigeon-sized flying drone programmed to land on an Arachnid head and then detonate a shaped charge into its brain/nerve bundle) seem like the best ways of doing it, and don’t require us to make any leaps in our thinking about military technology. The same iterative process of optimizing guns in computer simulations that I described earlier would be used to quickly develop weapons, tactics, and strategies best suited for defeating the Arachnids.
Human colonies will exist on Earth-like planets outside our solar system. Early in the film, a news broadcast announces that a colony of Mormons living on an Arachnid planet were all killed by the aliens. Gory footage of a small, walled town full of mutilated bodies follows. It’s possible human colonies could exist on Earth-like planets outside our solar system by 2295.
Consider that the “Project Longshot” analysis make a semi-credible case that a fusion-powered spacecraft could be built, could accelerate to 12% of the speed of light, and could reach our closest celestial neighbor, Alpha Centauri, in 100 years. Astronomers haven’t spotted Earth-like planets in the Alpha Centauri system yet, but there’s no reason to rule out the possibility of their existence.
Working backwards, if we assume a small human colony is established on an Earth-like planet in Alpha Centauri in 2295, and the journey took 100 years, then we will have acquired the ability to make large, fusion-powered space ships by 2195. That’s not an unreasonable prediction.
We will have encountered non-microscopic, non-technological aliens. The antagonists in Starship Troopers are “the Arachnids,” a society of large, ferocious, alien insects of different species that live together in hives and are led by small numbers of intelligent “Brain Bugs.”
I don’t think anything remotely resembling the Arachnids exists in our Solar System, but it’s possible they could in other star systems. By 2295, we’ll have extremely powerful space telescopes that will have identified all of the exoplanets around our neighboring stars, and we’ll have received even better imagery from our interstellar probes.
Again, assuming that Arachnids live within seven light years of us, and we get advanced enough to build space ships that can reach 12% of the speed of light by the late 2100s, then Earth could know about the Arachnids’ existence by 2295. Enough time would have passed for our interstellar probes to reach the Arachnid planet and transmit a report back to Earth.
Humans will be telepathic. A minor element in the film is the existence of telepathy in a small minority of humans. One of Rico’s friends, Carl, is a telepath, and late in the film he uses his special ability to implant a thought in Rico’s mind, and to read the thoughts of a captured Brain Bug. People will have telepathic abilities like these by 2295, though they will exist thanks to computer brain implants and not to natural ability.
Government commercial encouraging psychics to come forward
Science has proven that psychic abilities such as telepathy, clairvoyance (seeing the future), and telekinesis (moving objects through thought alone) don’t exist. However, there’s no scientific barrier to creating devices like brain implants or hats that could monitor the brain’s activity to decipher a person’s thoughts or emotions. Furthermore, there’s no barrier to giving such devices wireless communication capabilities, thus allowing people to communicate with each other through thought alone. I discussed this in some depth in my Prometheus review (“Machines will be able to read human thoughts…”), and as such won’t go into more depth.
Without getting too sappy, let me say that widespread use of this kind of technology could have profound consequences for our civilization, as it could bridge the man-machine divide and inaugurate an age of close empathy between humans and even animals. Linking the thoughts, emotions, and sensations of individual beings would make misunderstandings and miscommunications much rarer, and might make cruelty and dishonesty impossible. Using technology to create such a world might be a greater accomplishment than going to other star systems.
Death figures from natural disasters will be immediately known. One of the film’s pivotal events is Buenos Aires being destroyed by an asteroid purportedly hurled at Earth by the Arachnids. The main character, Juan Rico, is a native of that city and is speaking with his parents (who still live there) via videoconference from a different location at the moment of impact. Rico doesn’t understand why the video feed suddenly goes black, but less than two minutes later, he sees a TV news broadcast showing live footage of the flaming city, along with banner text that says over 8.7 million people were killed. The personal tragedy is a pivotal event in Rico’s young life, and it convinces him to complete his military training and to swear revenge against the aliens.
Today, when a natural disaster happens, it takes days or even weeks to account for the dead, but by 2295, I think the tallies could be compiled within minutes, as happened in the film. By 2295, every structure on our planet will be cataloged in great detail in something like a hyperrealistic “Google Maps,” almost every corner of the planet will be under constant surveillance of some sort (video, audio, seismic, etc.), and almost everybody will wear or have implanted in them devices that track their locations and life signs. All of the different data sources will be cobbled together to make a nearly 1:1 digital simulation of the entire planet, where every building and every person was accurately represented, in real time. Most “blind spots” in the data could be inferred with high accuracy. Without a doubt, artificial intelligences would be monitoring the network and rapidly analyzing the data.
As such, if a meteor hit a city, or if any other type of sudden disaster happened, the physical and human destruction could be determined almost instantly.
Helicopter-sized craft will be able to fly back and forth between the Earth’s surface and space. The Mobile Infantry use relatively small “drop ships” to ferry soldiers between the massive space warships and the surfaces of the different Arachnid planets. The drop ships are faintly aircraft-like in appearance and have layouts reminiscent of the Sikorsky CH-54 helicopters: the fuselage is a minimalist “spine” that connects the cockpit to the drive systems and landing gear, and it has mounting points for detachable cargo containers. There are large drop ships that can carry detachable cargo containers full of 30 – 40 people, and smaller drop ships that can only carry 10 people. They appear the roughly the same size as today’s CH-47 and UH-60 helicopters, respectively. All of the alien planets the drop ships are shown flying in and out of appear to have gravity very close to Earth’s (e.g. – dropped objects fall at the normal speed and humans can’t jump way in the air). Ergo, the movie posits that, by the year 2295, helicopter-sized craft that are mostly full of empty space and stuff other than fuel and engine components, will be able to take off from the Earth’s surface, reach space, and achieve at least a medium Earth orbit.
One of the smaller drop ships
I doubt this will happen because it’s impossible to cram enough chemical rocket fuel into a helicopter-sized craft to propel it into space. Let’s assume that the larger Starship Troopers drop ship weighs the same as a CH-47, which is 40,000 lbs. Today, it would take a Delta IV Heavy rocket to get a payload of that weight into medium Earth orbit. The launch vehicle is 236 feet high and contains 1 MILLION lbs of rocket fuel. Additionally, the Delta IV Heavy uses liquid hydrogen (H2), which is the most energy-dense type of chemical fuel known to exist. It’s implausible to assume we’ve overlooked some kind of superfuel that is, say, 20 times as energy-dense as H2, so there’s no way the drop ships could fly into space using any kind of combustible propellant in their internal fuel tanks.
A much larger drop ship–perhaps the size of the Prometheus space ship–might be able to fly off the Earth’s surface on its own using chemical rocket power, simply thanks to having more internal volume for fuel storage. Of course, this would make for weirder action scenes, with each drop ship being as big as a mansion but only carrying ten men.
A CH-47 can hold up to 33 troops, which looked to be the same capacity as the larger Starship Troopers drop ships
The only way a helicopter-sized, single-stage craft MIGHT be able to reach space is if it had miniaturized, nuclear fusion-powered rockets, which is one of those things that is on the very edge of the edge of what scientists think might be possible to build someday. The perennial comeback to skeptics of fusion power is that the Sun is proof of concept, but the perennial comeback to that is that fusion power has been 50 years away and always will be. No one can say at this point, so I think it’s safer to say helicopter-sized drop ships won’t exist in 2295, but mansion-sized ones will.
I thought the movie Prometheus was awful, and rather than waste my time ranting about all the things I hated, I’ll just say I agree with the critics who collectively bashed the confused and scientifically flawed storyline, shallow and unlikable characters, and inexplicable/unrealistically stupid behavior of the characters. I love the first three Alien films, but everything since has been disastrous. Enough said.
Instead of spending any time writing about the flawed plot (IMDB has a summary here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1446714/synopsis) , I’ll jump straight to an analysis of the vision of the future depicted in the film, which is set in 2093.
We will have proof that humans evolved from or were engineered by aliens. Prometheus is premised on the notion that ancient aliens seeded the Earth with life and repeatedly returned to direct the genetic and cultural evolution of humans. The theory that intelligent aliens influenced the rise of the human species is debunked by the fossil record, by comparative DNA analyses of humans and other hominids, and by human biochemistry. Together they prove we are indigenous to Earth and that we slowly evolved from simpler species. By 2093, we will not have “new evidence” that contradicts this story of our origins, though there will probably still be many uneducated and/or mentally ill people who believe in this and other conspiracy theories. It is at least slightly plausible that life began on Earth billions of years ago thanks to panspermia (i.e. – an asteroid containing simple organic matter fell to Earth), but I don’t see how we could ever prove the hypothesis since time has destroyed any evidence that may have existed.
Some robots will be indistinguishable from humans. One of the main characters is “David,” an artificially intelligent robot who looks and acts like a human. Since David is modeled after humans, he is a special type of robot called an “android,” and note the literal translation of the word from Greek is “man-like” (andro-oid). I think androids like David will exist by 2093, and they will be capable of an impressive range of behaviors and functions that will make them seem very human-like. In fact, they’ll be so refined that we might not be able to tell them apart from humans at all, or only be able to do so on rare occasions (ex – some of their responses to questions might not make sense). Whether they will be truly conscious and creative like humans is a different matter.
Left: A human crew member. Right: David the android.
The hyper-realistic sculptures made by artists like Ron Mueck, and advanced animatronics like the Garner Holt Productions Abraham Lincoln convince me that we could build robot bodies today that look 95% the same as real humans. Eeking out that last 5% to cross the Uncanny Valley should be easy to accomplish long before 2093. The much harder part is going to be endowing the machines with intelligence, with the ability to walk and stay balanced on two feet, and with other forms of physical deftness and coordination that will allow them to safely and efficiently work alongside humans and to do so without appearing “mechanical” in their movements.
Sculpture by Ron Mueck
Machines will do surgery on people, unassisted. There’s a gruesome and silly scene in Prometheus where the female main character realizes she is pregnant with a rapidly growing alien-human hybrid. She runs into the space ship’s infirmary, lies down in a coffin-sized surgery pod, and orders the machine to surgically remove the fetus. Several robotic arms bearing laser scalpels and claws do it in about a minute. I think surgery will be completely automated by 2093, along with all or almost all other types of jobs. Replacing high-paid human doctors with robot doctors that work for free will make healthcare dramatically cheaper and easier to access (with positive effects on human life expectancy and quality of life), though mass unemployment will also reduce the amount of money people have to pay for things like healthcare.
There will be space ships that can travel faster than the speed of light. The Prometheus space ship is capable of faster than light space travel, and the movie’s events take place in a different star system. Our current understanding of physics informs us that there is no way to exceed the speed of light, and propelling something as big as the Prometheus to just 10% of that speed would require impractically large amounts of energy. While mass figures for the fictional ship are unavailable, let’s assume it weighed about as much as the Space Shuttle, which was 2,000,000 kg. This kinetic energy calculator indicates it would require 9 x 10^20 Joules of energy to accelerate it to 10% of the light speed (30,000,000 meters/second). That’s as much energy as the entire United States generates in nine years.
While science is by nature always open to revision, I think it’s a bad idea to base one’s vision of the future on assumptions that well-tested pillars of science like the Theory of Relativity will just go away. That said, I don’t think faster than light space travel is likely to exist in 2093–or perhaps ever–so we’ll still be confined to our solar system then.
FWIW, the space ships flying around our solar system by that year will be considerably larger and more advanced than what we have now, and it’s likely that space ships of similar size and technology (sans light speed drives) as the Prometheus will be plying interplanetary space.
There will be instantaneous gene-sequencing machines. In Prometheus, the humans find a severed alien head inside a wrecked alien structure, and they bring it back to their space ship for examination. The alien belongs to an advanced species nicknamed “The Engineers,” and the head’s features are very human-like. As part of the examination, the humans take a DNA sample from the head and put it in a gene sequencing machine, which determines it shares 99% of its genome with humans. The cost of sequencing a full human genome has plummeted at a rate exceeding Moore’s Law, and well before 2093, the service will become trivially cheap (e.g. – the same price as routine blood tests or vaccinations) and will take a few hours.
FYI, today it costs less than $5,000 to sequence a human genome, and the machines can do the work in about 24 hours. But since we can only decipher a minuscule fraction of the genetic information, it’s still not worth it for healthy people to get their genomes sequenced. Within 20 years, the price will get low enough and the medical utility will get high enough to change that.
Paper-thin, ultra-high-res display screens will be in common use. Computer monitors and TV’s with these qualities are shown throughout the film. Many of them are also integrated into translucent glass, so clear windows can also serve as touchscreens. This will be a very old, mature technology by 2093.
A set of display interfaces
Wall-sized display monitors will be common. Early in Prometheus, there’s a scene where David is watching a film on a TV screen that covers an entire wall of a room in the space ship. This should be very old technology by 2093, and given current trends, floor-to-ceiling TVs will become available to average-income Americans in the 2030s. Since standard-sized doorways are too small to fit enormous TVs through them, the TVs will also need to be paper-thin and rollable into tubes, or capable of being assembled from a grid of many smaller pieces.
David watching “Lawrence of Arabia” on a wall-sized TV
Suspended animation pods will exist. During the multi-year space journey from Earth to the alien planet where the film’s events happen, the human crew members are kept in a state of suspended animation in coffin-sized pods. The mechanism through which their physiological functions are suspended (i.e. – Deep cold? Preservative fluids injected into their bodies? Something else?) is never made clear, but one crew member is shown to be dreaming in her pod, indicating that her brain is still active, and by necessity, her metabolism (even if it is dramatically slowed). That being the case, the “hypersleep” depicted in Prometheus is fundamentally different from today’s human preservation methods, which involve freezing dead people whose biochemical and brain activity have ceased in liquid nitrogen.
Frankly, I can’t say whether suspended animation will exist in 2093 because there isn’t any trendline for the technology like Moore’s Law that I can put on a graph and extrapolate. The best I can do is to note that our ability to preserve human organs meant for transplantation is improving as time passes, we do not appear to be close to the limit of what is scientifically possible, credible scientists have proposed ways to improve the relevant technologies, and whole-body human cryopreservation and revival is theoretically possible.
Machines will be able to read human thoughts and create digital representations of those thoughts that other people can watch. At the start of the movie, the Prometheus is still en route to the alien planet, all of the humans are in cryosleep pods, and David the android is the only crew member awake. During the montage that shows how he spends his time as the ship’s custodian, he takes a moment to check on the status of a female member of the crew. David puts a virtual reality visioning device on his face, and through it he is able to see a dream that the person is having at that moment, as if he were watching live-action film footage. I think this technology will exist by 2093, but its capabilities will be more limited than shown in the film.
Human thought is not a magical phenomenon; it happens thanks to biochemical and bioelectric events happening inside of our brains. Currently, we don’t understand the linkages between specific patterns of brain activity and specific thoughts, and our technologies for monitoring brain activity are coarse, but there’s no reason to assume both won’t improve until we have machines that can decipher thoughts from brain activity. To quote Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen, “An adult brain is a finite thing, so its basic workings can ultimately be known through sustained human effort.”
Unlike faster than light space travel, mind reading machines don’t violate any laws of physics, nor is there reason to believe the machines would require impractically large amounts of energy. In fact, crude versions of the technology have already been built in labs using fMRI machines and brain implants. In all cases, the machines first recorded the participants’ brain activity during training sessions where the humans were made to do scripted physical or mental tasks. The machines learned which patterns of brain activity correlated with which human thoughts or physical actions, enabling them to do things like decipher simple sentences the humans were thinking of with high accuracy. In other lab experiments of this nature, physically disabled people were able to command robot arms to move around and grab things by thought alone.
However, I think the accuracy of mind reading machines will be hampered by the fundamentally messy, plastic nature of the human mind. Scientists commonly refer to the human brain as an example of “wetware” due to its fusion of its hardware and software, and to its ever-shifting network of internal connections. As a result, if I close my eyes and try to envision an apple, there will be a discrete pattern of brain activity. If I do this again in a few minutes, the activity pattern will be slightly different. Contrast this with a computer, where the image of an apple exists as a discrete software file that never changes. Because of this, even if a brain scanning machine had perfect, real-time information about all brain activity, its interpretation of what the activity meant would always have some margin of error.
The cinematic dream footage that David sees in virtual reality.
Returning to the movie’s specific depiction of mind reading technology, let me add that if we could see the same mental images that a person sees while dreaming, I doubt they would look sharp or well-detailed, or that the sequence of events would follow a logical order for more than a few seconds before the dream transformed into something different. It would be like watching a fuzzy, low-resolution art film comprised of disjointed images and sounds, occasionally peaking in intensity and coherence enough for you to discern something of meaning, before dissolving into the equivalent of human brain “static.” So while it’s plausible that, in 2093, you could use machines to read someone else’s thoughts, I think the output you would see would be much less accurate and less detailed than it was in Prometheus.
There will be small, flying drones that can do many things autonomously, like mapping places and finding organic life. After landing on the alien planet, the crew of the Prometheus travels overland to a mysterious alien structure and goes inside. The interior is a long series of dark, twisting corridors and strange rooms. To speed up their exploration, one crewman releases two volleyball-sized flying drones, which zip down the corridors while beaming red, contorting lasers at everything. As they float along, the drones transmit live data back to the Prometheus that is compiled to build a 3D volumetric map of the alien structure’s interior spaces.
Simpler examples of this technology already exist and are used for mapping, farming and forestry (one of many commercial examples is “Drone Deploy” https://youtu.be/SATijfXnshg; another is “Elios,” which is enmeshed in a spherical cage as protection against collisions in tight spaces). Sensor miniaturization, better motors and batteries, better AI, and cost reductions to every type of technology will allow us to build scanning drones that are almost identical to those in the movie decades before 2093. The only parts of the movie’s depiction I disagree with are 1) the use of red lasers for sensing (passive sensors and LIDAR beams that are invisible to human eyes are likelier) and 2) the use of some type of magical antigravity technology to fly (recognizable means of propulsion like spinning rotors and directed jets of exhaust will probably still be in use, though they will be smaller but more powerful thanks to improved technology). Small, cheap, highly versatile flying drones will have enormous implications for mass surveillance, espionage, environmental monitoring, and warfare.
There will be 3D volumetric displays. The bridge of the Prometheus has a large table that can project detailed, 3D volumetric images above it. The crew uses it to view an architectural diagram of the alien structure they find on the planet. Crude versions of this technology already exist, and can make simple images that float in midair by focusing laser beams on discrete points in space called “voxels” (volumetric pixels) heating them to such high temperatures that they turn the air into glowing plasma. If enough voxels are simultaneously illuminated, 3D objects can be constructed in the same way that pixels on a digital watch face can arrange into numbers if lit up in the right sequence.
Volumetric display of the alien complex, 2093
Today’s volumetric displays produce ozone gas and excessive noise thanks to air ionization, but it’s plausible the problems could be solved or at least greatly reduced by 2093. For certain applications, the displays would be very useful, though I think holographic displays (i.e. – a flat screen TV doesn’t make voxels but uses other techniques to fool your eye into thinking its images are popping out of the screen) and virtual reality glasses will fulfill the same niche, possibly at lower cost. Intelligent machines might also be so advanced that they won’t need to look at volumetric displays to grasp spatial relationships as humans have to.
State of the art volumetric display, 2011
Some disabled people and old people will use powered exoskeletons instead of wheelchairs. The space mission depicted in the film is funded by an elderly tech tycoon named “Peter Weyland.” Unbeknownst to most of the crew, he secretly embarked with them from Earth, and is sleeping in a suspended animation pod in a locked room while the first 3/4 of the film’s events unfold. At that point, David awakens him, and it is revealed to the surviving crewmen that Weyland supported the mission in the hopes that the aliens would give him a cure for his own mortality. They get into their space suits for a final trip to the alien structure, and Weyland’s outfit includes a light, powered exoskeleton for his lower body, which allows him to walk much faster than he normally could given his age.
Weyland, right, is wearing an articulated exoskeleton around his legs and lower back.
Exoskeletons for the disabled and the elderly already exist, a recent example being the “Phoenix” unit made by the “suitX” company. Unfortunately, Phoenix is $40,000 (a typical electric wheelchair is only $2,000) and requires a somewhat heavy battery backpack. I suspect that Phoenix’ high cost is due to patents and R&D costs being amortized over a small production run, and that the physical materials the suits are made of are not expensive or exotic. Prices for Phoenix-like exoskeletons will only decline as relevant patents expire, copycats arise, and batteries get lighter and cheaper. It’s hard to see how these kinds of exoskeletons won’t be ubiquitous among mobility-impaired people by 2093 (as electric wheelchairs are today), if not decades before.
That being said, I don’t think they’ll make electric wheelchairs completely obsolete because some disabled and old people will find it too physically taxing to stand upright, even if supported by a prosthesis. Some users might also find it too time-consuming to put on and take off exoskeletons each day (note the large number of straps in the photo below).
The Phoenix exoskeleton
There will be lots of 100+ year old people. Piggybacking off the last point, Mr. Weyland is 103 years old, though since he spent the space journey in suspended animation, his aging process was probably slowed down, making his “biological age” slightly lower than his chronological age. Though living 100 years has a kind of mythic aura, it’s actually only a little higher than the current life expectancy in rich countries, and, making conservative assumptions about future improvements to healthcare, living to 100 will probably be common in 2093 (doing the math, you could someday be in this group).
Today, a wealthy white male who is diligent about his diet and exercise (as Weyland probably had been throughout his life) can expect to live to about 90. In fact, that’s a low estimate since it assumes the state of medical technology will stay fixed at 2017 levels for his entire life. In reality, we’re certain to develop new medicines, prostheses, and therapies that extend lifespan farther between now and 2093. A 10 year bump to average life expectancy in the next 76 years–which would put Weyland over the century mark–is entirely possible, and note that U.S. life expectancy actually grew more than that in the 76 years preceding 2017, so there’s recent historical precedent for lifespan increases of this magnitude.
In 2093, “100 will be the new 80,” and indefinite extensions to human lifespan might even be on the horizon.
What was missing from the movie’s depiction of 2093:
The fusion of man and machine. Where were the Google glasses? Google contact lenses? Google eye implants? Google brain implants? Go-Go Gadget Legs? (Bionic limbs) By 2093, it will be common for humans to have wearable and body-implanted advanced technologies.
Not enough automation and robots on the space ship. Computers and machines will doing way more of the work, reducing the need for resource-hogging humans.
