The MiG-29 has excellent aeronautical performance, had an advanced missile system for the 1980s and 90s, but is inferior to Western counterparts like the F-16 in every other way (inefficient engines that are a hassle to fix; weak radar; short range, old-fashioned cockpit that forces the pilot to constantly look at gauges, dials, and paper maps in his lap instead of looking out the canopy for enemies). https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/truth-about-mig-29-180952403/
The USS Yorktown was a U.S. aircraft carrier that sank during the pivotal Battle of Midway in 1942. After being bombed by Japanese planes, it started filling with water and leaning to one side. At 2:28 pm on June 4, all of its crew abandoned ship, convinced it would soon sink.
They were wrong. The damage was not fatal, and from the safety of another U.S. warship, they saw that the Yorktown was still afloat hours later. Fourteen hours after leaving, they started returning to the stricken carrier to fix it. They worked feverishly for the next 24 hours, and were making progress pumping water out of the ship, reducing its tilt. Unfortunately, a Japanese sub spotted them and torpedoed the carrier, this time destroying it for good. The sub also blew up another U.S. ship.
This makes me wonder what would have happened if the crew had never abandoned the Yorktown in the first place. That extra 14 hours of time might have enabled them to sufficiently repair and move the ship out of the area to prevent it from falling prey to the sub. https://navylive.dodlive.mil/2013/06/02/battle-of-midway-timeline-of-significant-events/
It costs $10.9 million to train a pilot how to fly an F-22 fighter, and $1.1 million to train one to fly a C-17 cargo plane. All the USAF’s costs for training pilots for its other types of planes are in between. Of course, that’s not the end of it. Those are only the costs of getting a new person UP TO the level of being able to fly their plane. Since people forget things, the pilots have to frequently undergo retraining and re-certification, which means more money spent each year (the RAND analysis doesn’t show those figures) as a continual expense. This means the cost savings of inventing computers that can fly warplanes as well as humans will be massive. There will also be no risk of pilots being shot down over enemy territory, captured, and used as political pawns. https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/04/09/the-cost-of-training-u-s-air-force-fighter-pilots-infographic/
Are aliens hibernating until the day the universe gets colder? If they are intelligent machines, then they would generate a lot of heat, and a colder environment would let them radiate that heat more efficiently, allowing them to do more computation. “[If such aliens hibernated until the universe’s temperature dropped from 3 Kelvin to less than 1 Kelvin] they could achieve up to 10^30 times more than if done today.” https://getpocket.com/explore/item/a-new-theory-on-why-we-haven-t-found-aliens-yet
Turing Award-winner John Hopcroft thinks machines will make human workers obsolete, and he points out that, just because humans have been able to climb up the skills ladder in the past faster than machines could automate old jobs, doesn’t mean we will be able to do that forever. Past trends don’t continue indefinitely, and there’s no reason why we couldn’t get into a situation where machines took over 1 million human jobs in a given year, but only 900,000 new jobs for humans were created during that same period. Hopcroft suggests dealing with this by spreading out the remaining jobs among more humans by finding ways to shorten the amount of time the average person works. https://youtu.be/htfNuoJ3Ecc
Elon Musk is still scared of AI. He thinks they could get smarter than humans in five years, and that things would get “unstable or weird” shortly after. I think his prediction is way too optimistic, and what might happen in five years is a machine passing the Turing Test, meaning it can carry on conversations with people and answer questions as well as a human. Things will get “weird” after that because many people dealing with such machines will mistakenly assume that they are “intelligent,” and perhaps even smarter than humans (e.g. – you’ll be able to ask a machine to do a complex math problem, and it will give you the solution right away). But the Turing Test machines and the autonomous cars we’ll have by the end of this decade will not actually be intelligent, self-aware, or capable of creative thought. Only at the surface level will they seem so. I doubt a true AI will be built earlier than midcentury. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-maureen-dowd-ai-google-deepmind-wargames-2020-7
Musk is one of the world’s richest men, and his business achievements have been extraordinary, but he also has many stalled and failed ventures. Also, Tesla’s high stock price is probably unjustified, and Musk’s claims about future growth and the introduction of fully autonomous car models are likely too optimistic. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-07-22/why-the-stock-market-is-so-high-and-tesla-even-higher
Flooding has become a worse problem in New Orleans and some other coastal areas because of “land subsidence.” As humans pump aquifer water, oil, and natural gas out of the ground, all the little voids empty out, the dirt compacts, and the ground level sinks. This problem is not connected to global warming, and shows that some flooding is not due to rising sea levels or worsening storms. https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0518/How-fast-is-New-Orleans-sinking-Faster-and-faster-says-new-study
Genetic studies of black people in the Americas have revealed new information about the slave trade, and about the pervasiveness of white masters raping their female slaves. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-53527405
Cosmic rays are responsible for the right-handed chirality of DNA. If the rays are omnipresent in the galaxy and have the same energetic properties everywhere, alien DNA should share our chirality.
Silicon-based, ORGANIC life forms are unlikely to exist. ‘Only a tiny fraction of the theoretical chemical space of silicon chemistry can be stable in water (Section 3.2.1). In fact, some of the commonly held views about the low diversity of silicon chemistry come directly from the instability of silicon chemistry in water. Silicon chemistry in water also requires substantially more energy to access than equivalent carbon chemistry (Section 3.3). For all of the above reasons, we argue in this subsection that silicon is unlikely to be a scaffold element or a common heteroatom element in water.’ https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/10/6/84
Here’s an amazing upscaling of footage of Tokyo street scenes from the 1910s. Even better video reconstructions than this will be available in the future. https://youtu.be/MQAmZ_kR8S8
In 1969, Richard Nixon’s speechwriters prepared an address for him to read to the nation in case the Apollo 11 moon landing failed. Using deepfake technology, we can see what it would have looked like. https://youtu.be/LWLadJFI8Pk
In the 1970s, there was an ambitious project to compile a 6 million-page history of America from its founding to WWI into a document called the Library of American Civilization. It would have been in “ultrafiche” format, with each ultrafiche being 3″ x 5″ and containing up to 1,000 page images, shrunk from original size by a factor of 55 to 90. The idea was to distribute the document, along with ultrafiche readers, to every major library in America. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED082753.pdf
This prediction from May turned out wrong: ‘Professor Carl Heneghan from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University said: “I think by the end of June we’ll be looking at the data and finding it difficult to find people [in Britain] with [COVID-19], if the current trends continue in the deaths.”‘
In my Terminator review and my analysis of what a fully-automated tank would look like, I mentioned that human-sized, general-purpose robots that can do the same physical tasks as humans will not necessarily look like humans, or even have humanoid body layouts (i.e. – head, large torso, two arms, two legs). I’d like to explore that idea in greater depth, and to offer educated guesses about what such robots would look like.
First, bear in mind that there are already countless numbers of robots in the world–overwhelmingly in factories and controlled work settings–and almost none of them are humanoid. Instead, their body shapes are entirely dictated by their narrow functions. For example, a robot that welds the seams between two sheets of metal comprising part of a car’s frame will resemble a giant arm and will have a welding torch for a hand. Since it is meant for use in a car factory assembly line where unfinished car frames will be delivered to it via conveyor belt, the robot won’t need to move from that spot, and hence won’t need legs or wheels. And since the act of welding a seam isn’t that complicated, it won’t need a giant computer brain, meaning it won’t have a head. Likewise, a robot designed to move supplies like medicine and linens throughout a hospital will take the form of a large, hollow box with wheels.
Even as robots get cheaper and more advanced in the coming decades and take over more jobs, the vast majority of them will continue looking nothing like humans, and will be designed for specific and not general tasks. Fully-autonomous vehicles, for example, will count as “robots,” but will not resemble humans.
That said, I think “overspecialization” of robot designs will prove inefficient, and that there will be niches for general-purpose robots in many areas of the economy and ordinary life. Some of these general-purpose robots will be about the same sizes as humans, but they won’t look exactly like us. Consider that the humanoid body layout is inherently unstable since it is top-heavy and only has two legs to balance on. If we had millions of bipedal, human-sized robots walking around and intermixing with us in many uncontrolled environments, there would be constant problems with them falling over (or being pushed over) and injuring or killing people. Something like a 250 pound Terminator made of hard metal would be a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Off the bat, it’s clear that general purpose robots can’t be so heavy that, if one fell on you, you would be seriously hurt, and/or unable to push it off of your body. At the same time, it can’t be so light that it tips over when carrying everyday objects like full trashcans, or is even at risk of being toppled by wind gusts. Splitting the difference between the average weights of adult men and woman gives us a figure of 180 lbs, which I think is a good upper limit to how much the robots could weigh.
Also off the bat, it’s clear that the general purpose robots should have the lowest practical centers of gravity and need to have soft exteriors to cushion humans against collisions. A low-hanging fruit helps us solve the first requirement: delete the robot’s head. This might sound very weird, but if we’re unbound by the constraints of biology and are designing a robot from metal and plastic starting from a clean slate, it makes perfect sense.
Since robots won’t eat, drink, or breathe, they won’t need mouths, noses, or any associated anatomical features found in human heads and necks. And since signals from the robot’s sensory organs would travel to its “brain” at the speed of light, there would be no advantage to clustering the eyes, ears, and brain together to reduce lag (thanks to the slowness of human nerve impulses, it takes about 1/10 of a second for an image or sound that has been detected by the eyes or ears to reach the brain), meaning the CPU could be moved into the torso. Doing that would lower the robot’s center of gravity and give the CPU more physical protection than our skulls provide our brains. (Distributing mental functions among several computer cores in different parts of the torso and even limbs would probably be an ideal setup since it would further improve survivability.)
In place of a neck and head, there might be a telescoping, flexible “stalk” or “tentacle” with sensory organs (camera lens, microphone) at its tip. It could extend and shorten, and swivel in any direction. By default, it would probably be facing forward and raised to the same height as a typical human head so it could see the world from the same perspective as we. The top of its torso might only be 4′ 10″ off the ground, but the stalk would rise up another foot. The sci fi space film Saturn 3 had an evil robot named “Hector” that had a crude tentacle like this in place of a head.
“Hector” the robot didn’t have a head. Note that the robots I envision would be much shorter than this.
The last safety requirement that I mentioned, the need to have soft exteriors to cushion humans against collisions, could be satisfied by making their outer casings from a spongy material like silicone. However, I think it would probably be cheaper and just as effective to give the robots hard outer casings, but have them wear tight-fitting, padded clothes. The general-purpose robots would know how to wash their clothes in standard laundry machines and would periodically do so. Also, if the padding were made of the plastic foam found in life jackets, it would keep the robots from sinking to the bottom if they, say, fell into a swimming pool while cleaning it, or fell off the side of a fishing boat where they were part of the crew.
The need to protect people from accidental injury will also mean that general purpose robots will be made no faster or stronger than average humans. These limitations would be very helpful to us in a “robot uprising” scenario, but they’d be just as beneficial preventing many kinds of small, mundane accidents that could hurt people. For example, if your robot isn’t stronger than you, it can’t accidentally crush your hand by applying too much pressure during a handshake. If it can’t move faster than a jog, it can’t ever build up enough speed and momentum to collide with you with fatal force.
The NS-5 robots could jump long distances and do acrobatics.
With these safety requirements in mind, it should be clear why the general-purpose “NS-5” robots in the movie I, Robot was unrealistic. There was no reason to give those robots superhuman speed, strength, agility, and explosive movement. Moreover, they all had hard exoskeletons and walked around “nude,” making them collision hazards. (On a side note, I also thought it was unrealistic that a single company–“U.S. Robotics”–would have an apparent monopoly on the humanoid robot market, and that all humans would own the same kind of robot. In reality, there will be many companies making them in the future, and there will be many different robot models and variants that will look different from one another, just as there’s great diversity in how cars look today.)
Now that I’ve covered the safety issues general-purpose robots will have to be designed to address, let’s move on to exploring the other requirements that will affect how they will look. Since they’ll have to navigate human-built environments like houses and to fit into vehicles designed for us, they will need legs instead of wheels so they can climb steps, arms and hands for opening doors and using tools, and they will need to be skinny and short enough to fit through standard-sized doorways. The requirement for them to be able to sit in chairs and climb over obstacles like low fences and fallen tree trunks will mean the size proportions of their limbs and bodies won’t be able to stray too far from those of humans. They will need fingers that are as thin as ours to type on keyboards and push standard-sized buttons, but they might not have five fingers per hand (it will be interesting to see what the optimal number turns out to be).
It wouldn’t cost much more money to make the joints in the robots’ fingers and everywhere else double-jointed, and they’d gain useful dexterity from such a feature, so I think it would be so. Pivot joints in the arms and legs would also allow for 360 degrees of rotation, further bolstering utility. At first I thought the general purpose robots would have a second set of arms–for a total of six limbs–so they could be more able than humans, but then I realized how wasteful that would be since so few tasks require them. 99% of the time, the second set of arms would uselessly hang down off the robot’s body and be dead weight.
Then again, that 1% of the time when you do need the extra pair of hands to do something could warrant some kind of engineering compromise. The prehensile sensor stalks that stand-in for heads on our general-purpose robots could elongate and grasp onto things, acting like weak third hands (our mouths do the same, and can hold smell, light objects). Instead of, or in addition to that, the legs at the bottom of the robot could terminate in hands instead of feet like ours. Chimpanzees are like this, and many birds also have feet they use for grasping and walking. The setup would make it harder for the robots to run, and maybe less energy-efficient for them to walk, but we’ve already established we don’t want them to be able to run fast, and many of the tasks we’d use these robots for wouldn’t require large amounts of walking anyway (ex – robot butler in your house). Aside from giving them an extra pair of hands for those rare occasions when they need it, having hands as feet would let the robots pick things up from the ground, climb ladders more easily, and maintain better balance on uneven surfaces like roofs.
It almost goes without saying that the robots would be able to walk on all fours about as well as they could walk on two legs. If they weren’t carrying anything and were just going from one place to another, walking on all fours would be safest since that would minimize the risks of them losing balance and crushing someone or breaking something. This is again reminiscent of chimps, and I think the robots might use their “knuckles” when walking on all-fours to keep the palms of their hands clean and undamaged. And interestingly, in laying out this new requirement for optional quadrupedalism, the hypothetical general-purpose robot’s design has superficially converged with the real-life “Spot” robot, made by Boston Dynamics.
“Spot” is a real robot you can buy.
One thing I don’t like about Spot’s design is that its torso is a single, rigid piece. The general-purpose robots I’m envisioning–or at least the more advanced variants of it that will be fielded in the more distant future–will need segmented torsos that let them bend and lean a little in all directions. The flexibility of our spines lets us do this, helping us to quickly make small postural adjustments to balance on two feet. The robots might not need anything as elaborate as a human back made of 33 vertebrae, and, as with the number of fingers, it will be interesting to see what the optimal (or sufficient) number of torso segments turns out to be.
Having a flexible torso, four hands, and four, highly flexible limbs that could bend in more ways than we can would also let the general-purpose robots comfortably touch any part of their own bodies, enabling them to self-repair, which would be an invaluable feature. The swiveling sensor stalk plus tiny cameras built into other parts of its body like the hands and torso would also let it see every part of its own body (cameras built into the hands or fingers would also let it reach inside small, tight spaces and clearly see what is inside, letting it guide the appendage, unlike humans who must blindly feel around in such situations). Contrast this with us humans, who have a hard time touching and manipulating some parts of our bodies (like the spot between our shoulderblades) and who can’t see every part of our own bodies because we have only one set of eyes that are in a head with limited rotation.
On that note, having small cameras embedded throughout its body would also eliminate blind spots, which would improve safety since the robots wouldn’t be at risk of running into humans or objects because they were unseen. Whereas human vision is confined to a forward-facing cone, the general purpose robots would see in a 360-degree bubble. The tip of the head stalk might have the biggest and best camera, but losing it wouldn’t blind the robot.
Having “eyes” in the torso and on all four limbs, along with a distribution of its mind and power sources among multiple internal computers and batteries in each place, could enable such a robot to fix itself even if only one limb were operational and everything else were not. Again, this reminds me a bit of something I’ve seen in the animal kingdom, this time among certain insects and spiders. Because they have less-centralized nervous systems than we, their limbs will keep moving after being severed, and, if they are cut in half across the torso, both halves will continue moving and reacting to stimuli.
Additionally, while the robots wouldn’t need to breathe, they should have an ability to suck in, retain, and expel air. This would allow them to duplicate the human abilities to blow out candles or blow dust off of things, and to make our bodies buoyant for floating in water. Of course, the engineering solutions that will let them do this could be totally different from human anatomy’s solutions. A small hole at the tip of one finger could be used to suck in and expel air, and it could be connected to a long tube that would lead to air sacs throughout the robot’s body, perhaps in places not analogous to where lungs are in our bodies.
The robots would also need to be waterproof. This would save them from being expensively damaged or destroyed by something as simple as rain, and would let them periodically clean themselves off with soap and water. Even without sweat glands and shedding skin cells, robots would inevitably get dirty thanks to dust in the air, splatter from kitchen or bathroom chores, or even mold growth. Being able to use a regular shower or a bucket of water and a sponge to clean themselves would be a very important feature, in addition to their ability to clean their clothes.
Another crucial feature would be a built-in power cord that could plug into standard electrical outlets. It might be stored internally in a small, closed compartment, or might take the form of retractable prongs located in one of the hands or feet. I suspect that, rather than get in your way, general-purpose robots will be programmed to run around your house and do chores when you were away at work or school. That would also be safer since it would eliminate any risk of the robots hurting you by accident while they were working. You would come home each day to a clean house and see your robot motionless in its designated corner or closet, plugged into an electrical outlet to recharge.
Machines like this can detect a wide range of poisonous chemicals.
I’ve already mentioned the robots would need to have cameras and microphones to duplicate the human senses of sight and hearing, but they would also need to duplicate our sense of smell and taste to a degree. Those two senses can provide valuable information about the presence of poisonous gases, smoke, or spoiled food ingredients, and there are situations where a robot would be grossly ill-equipped to respond properly if it lacked them. Our multipurpose robots would thus need air sampling devices and some type of fluid analysis capability. The same technology found in smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, and military poison gas detectors could stand in for a sense of smell. To crudely duplicate our sense of taste, the robot might have something like a litmus strip dispenser and water nozzle built into one of its hands. It could spray water on objects and then touch them with a strip to “taste” them.
The fifth human sense, touch, would need to be duplicated by pressure and temperature sensors distributed throughout the general purpose robot’s body. This feature would be simple to implement.
In conclusion, I predict there will be a future niche for “human-equivalent” robots that are general-purpose, human-sized, and can do all of the physical work tasks that we can do. That said, those robots will look very different from us, as they won’t be bound by the rules of biology or by the genetic path dependence that locks us into our human body layout. I’ve gone into depth describing one type of general-purpose robot, which could be described as a “headless humanoid.” However, I think robots with other types of body layouts could also fill the niche, perhaps including “centaurs”, “big ants”, and “dogs with one arm on their backs.” Just as there are many types of vehicles on the roads today that fulfill the same roles, I am sure there will be many types of general-purpose robots. I simply don’t have the time to envision and describe what each one could be like.
General-purpose, human-sized robots will of course not be the only kinds of robots we’ll mix with on a daily basis in the future, and in fact, I think they will be outnumbered by other, specific-purpose robots whose forms reflect their specialized functions. Self-driving cars and autonomous lawnmowers are good examples.
Finally, the general-purpose, human-sized robots must not be confused with androids, which will look identical to humans. I think the general-purpose robots will be used for jobs that don’t require anything more than superficial interaction with humans, like scrubbing toilets, restocking store shelves, and fixing appliances. Androids would be built to provide companionship, and to do service-sector jobs where warm and personable service was expected. If your beautiful android spouse broke, then your grubby, headless, weird-looking robot servant would fix it.
Interesting facts about the Space Shuttle: -It was originally supposed to be a fully reusable, two-stage craft. That design would have been more expensive but probably better. -The notion that the Shuttle would be a cheaper way to launch cargo into orbit that traditional rockets was never supported by data. Politicians just made it up to sell the idea to the public. -The Soviet “Buran” craft was more advanced than the U.S. Shuttle, and fixed some of the latter’s known flaws. https://gizmodo.com/the-space-shuttle-was-a-beautiful-but-terrible-idea-1842732042
Interesting details about the V-22: -“Many of the challenges in developing and operating the V-22 are the result of designing a fairly large platform to operate within the confines of US Marine Corps amphibious ships. This caused several compromises, such as a smaller proprotor diameter, which increases the download and reduces the hover efficiency, and a shorter wing, which reduces the amount of lift and range.” -“These engineering lessons and the lack of shipboard size constraints enabled Bell to reduce the downwash from the rotors, design the rotors to tilt from horizontal to vertical without rotating the engines, and improve the reliability and availability of components. The V-22’s downwash, or high velocity air from the two tilting proprotors producing 22,680 kg of thrust to keep the aircraft aloft, can damage objects or injure people below. It also means the Osprey must burn more fuel to hover.” -“In addition, the V-22 required a rear-ramp exit to avoid hot-engine exhaust blasting onto ship decks and grassy landing zones. As the V-280’s engines do not rotate, this solves the hot engine exhaust issue, which can start brush fires, and means troops can ingress and egress via side doors.” https://www.janes.com/article/95609/forty-years-on-from-the-v-22-s-conception-bell-applies-engineering-lessons-learned-to-the-v-280
An interesting video about the downsides of upgrading tanks. Adding weight in the form of applique armor or a bigger gun can push the tank’s engine and suspension past their design limits, increasing the odds of a breakdown. Drilling holes through tank armor to run new wires to create mounting points for gadgets can also make the armor much weaker. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvSpMtulunU
Almost half of the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle’s crew got infected with COVID-19. The ship’s crowded conditions proved ideal for disease transmission. https://apnews.com/fd1996b64f4cc3aeaa92b352bb7f5cce
For the first time on record, and probably for the first time since the era of Mao’s Mickey Mouse Economics, the Chinese economy shrank. The pandemic was the obvious cause. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52319936
“The process of globalization, powerful as it is, could be substantially slowed or even stopped. Short of a major global conflict, which we regard as improbable, another large-scale development that we believe could stop globalization would be a pandemic…”
That is probably the most chillingly prescient passage from Mapping the Global Future, a report written 16 years ago by experts working for the U.S. National Intelligence Council, describing coming developments in geopolitics, culture, technology, and the economy out to 2020. With the year in question having arrived, I thought it was worthwhile to review the accuracy of it’s predictions, and overall, I was impressed. Mapping the Global Future correctly identified most of the megatrends that shaped the world from 2004-20, (though it was somewhat less accurate forecasting the degrees to which those factors would change things):
No significant expansion or strengthening of liberal democracy. From 2004-20, for every Myanmar there was a Turkey, and the number of “real” democracies across the world didn’t significantly change. Contrast this to the 15 years preceding the report’s publication, in which communism fell in Europe and Central Asia, along with many dictatorships in Latin America and Africa. The report’s authors correctly gauged that conditions were not ripe for another wave of international democratization.
Solid growth of global economy. The report failed to predict the Great Recession, but so did all other experts. Nevertheless, report’s estimate that the 2020 gross world product (GWP) would be 80% larger than it was in 2000 was very close to being right: it actually rose by 74% (adjusted for inflation).
Massive growth in China, and to a lesser extent, India. This was not the hardest prediction to make, though it should be noted that a minority of foreign policy experts in 2004 thought China might fall apart by 2020, probably thanks to political problems. I think the extent to which China’s growth (economic, military, technological, average living standards) ended up surpassing India’s would have surprised the authors.
Little or no weakening of Islamic extremism and terrorism. At this moment, there is a relative lull in the level of violence, but just three years ago, ISIS was at its peak, and nothing is stopping an “ISIS-level” resurgence of Islamic violence (Africa is likeliest to be the next hotbed). While the U.S. has dodged a sequel to 9/11, the total number of people killed worldwide by Muslim fanatics might actually be higher now than it was in 2004. The conditions that gave rise to Islamic terrorism in 2004 still exist in large parts of the world. Finally, the report made the frighteningly accurate predictions that al Qaeda would be replaced by new terrorist groups (ISIS and Boko Haram), and that the formation of an Islamic caliphate spanning multiple countries was even possible.
Very low likelihood of war between the great powers. Russia, China, and the U.S. didn’t even come close to fighting. A lot of ink has been spilled since 2004 about accidents–like U.S. and Russian planes shooting each other down over Syria–spiraling into all-out war, but I think cooler heads would have prevailed.
Weakening of U.S. global supremacy. The report correctly predicted that the U.S. would still be the world’s strongest country overall in 2020, but the gap between it and its nearest competitors–chiefly China–would be narrower. It was also right to forecast the weakening of the U.S.-led international banking and trade system.
Backlash against globalization and concomitant rise of populism and nationalism. From the election of Donald Trump, to Brexit, to the breakdown of the Doha Free Trade talks and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to near-constant angst over the erosion of the middle class due to outsourcing and illegal immigrant laborers, to the rise of chauvinist strongmen across the world, we see clear proof of these trends. The struggle between liberal globalists and conservative nationalists became THE cultural and political fissure during the 2004-20 time frame.
Major impact of internet on culture, self-identity, business, and other aspects of life. As the report predicted, the expansion of the internet to most of the human race has empower global movements like the Arab Spring, fragmented and upended the news media landscape, and facilitated the rise of more complex human identities and group loyalties that transcend national borders, making national governance and consensus-forming harder.
World vulnerability to pandemic. This isn’t explored in great detail, but the report makes it clear that the threat of a pandemic bad enough to halt globalization is real.
Of course, the report also had a few failed predictions and omissions, which are important to mention, but in my opinion, outweighed by what the report got right:
Didn’t foresee the Great Recession. I noted this before, and also how it had little effect on the report’s accuracy forecasting 2000-2020 global wealth growth. The report’s authors were also in good company, since no expert in 2004 predicted the Great Recession.
Didn’t foresee fracking. While the report doesn’t predict anything as calamitous as the world running out of oil by 2020, it says that oil prices could be significantly higher than they were in 2004 due to tighter supplies, leading to the usual fare of anxieties, political problems, and small-scale wars. Had fracking not been invented, this could well have been the case. Fracking has revolutionized the global energy landscape by boosting oil and natural gas supplies well beyond what almost all energy experts thought possible in 2004. More than anything, this failure should highlight the perils of trying to predict the future of the energy markets.
Didn’t foresee Venezuela’s near-implosion (could it still happen?). To be fair, Venezuela’s economy collapsed because their socialist government badly managed its oil industry after nationalizing it and because fracking then caused a sharp drop in world oil prices. The report’s experts couldn’t have foreseen how bad the mismanagement would get, and as noted, they also didn’t predict the rise of fracking.
Thought North Korea would “come to a head.” It’s unclear what the report’s authors were envisioning here (North Korea democratization? North Korea chaotic implosion? One Korea–possibly with the help of a superpower ally–annexing the other?), other than the status quo of a divided Korean peninsula with a hostile dictatorship in the North ending by 2020. That didn’t happen, and it’s crucial to remember that there’s a clear and now long-running pattern of “experts” making wrong predictions about this. (https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/the-long-history-of-wrongly-predicting-north-koreas-collapse/260769/) It raises the possibility that North Korea could continue to endure for much longer than we expect, in spite of the reports of how brittle and strange the regime is and how desperate its citizens are.
Thought Taiwan would “come to a head.” The authors surely meant either a successful Taiwanese declaration of independence or annexation to China (probably by force). This also didn’t happen, and can also be added to the long list of wrong predictions about this issue.
Russia predictions were not great, not terrible. While the report’s authors correctly predicted that corruption, lack of foreign investment, population shrinkage, conflicts with its neighbors would leave Russia “stuck in neutral” in terms of absolute power and declining in terms of relative global stature, they didn’t predict how badly relations would deteriorate with the West, and foresaw Central Asia as Russia’s likeliest battleground when in fact it was Ukraine and the Caucuses. My guess is that they underestimated how skillful of a leader Putin would turn out to be, and also underestimated the Russians’ resolve to not let any more of their satellite states slip away to the Western camp.
Overestimated the risks of bioterrorism and nuclear terrorism. Contrary to the report’s fears, no terrorists have used, or to our knowledge obtained, biological or nuclear weapons since 2004. Overestimating the threat is understandable given the contemporaneous problem of loose Russian nuclear weapons and widespread fear of and misinformation about bioterrorism following the 2001 Anthrax Attacks. Russia’s recovery from the chaotic 1990s allowed them to secure all of their nuclear weapons, and biological weapons are actually much harder to create and successfully use than popular fiction and biased “experts” who got most of the attention around 2004 led the public to believe. (Note: Unfortunately, I think weaponized COVID-19 could make bioterrorism much likelier)
Thinking about what the expert authors of Mapping the Global Future got right and wrong leads me to following general conclusions about the course of world events, and about making predictions:
The status quo is strong. Slow, plodding megatrends and entrenched systems are very resistant to change, regardless of how outdated, suboptimal, or undesirable they may be. The fact that hand-wringing and doomsaying about issues like the divided Korean peninsula, contested status of Taiwan, unsustainable European welfare states, American global primacy, and nation-state model has been going on for decades without resolution should give us pause whenever we hear someone predict a shift in some paradigm. The “inevitability” of another American Civil War is a good example. The stodgy status quo is probably stronger and more resilient to shocks than you think, can ruthlessly destroy upstarts, and might be able to use little reforms to muddle its way through some problem that was widely believed to be unsolvable and fatal.
Some dictatorships are smart. Though the report was upbeat about China’s prospects, if anything, it underestimated how strong the country and its regime would become by 2020. China has of course averted collapse, and its communist government has skillfully suppressed democracy and ethnic minority discontent. In short, the dictatorship proved smarter and more competent than even most experts thought in 2004. The use of technology for mass surveillance will entrench it even more in the future. The report’s authors would also have been surprised at how nimble and strong of a leader Putin proved to be, and how well he’s played his country’s diminished hand on the world stage.
Not everyone is ready for democracy. The report correctly recognized that conditions were not right for significant expansions of liberal democracy from 2004-20. The disappointing results of the democratization experiments the U.S. ran in Afghanistan and Iraq, the failure of the Arab Spring, and the rise–with majority voter support–of populist strongmen across the world have been valuable, if painful, reminders that not every group of people is ready for or wants liberal democracy. Growing political dysfunction in the U.S. is also damaging the brand.
Rational actors are in charge and they suck the fun out of everything. The hard truth is that every major country, including the U.S., China, Russia, and even North Korea, is led by a rational actor–or, more accurately, by groups of people who cancel out each other’s worst ideas so that the resulting consensus decisions are adequately rational and informed. They all have an accurate grasp of the world and of their own interests, and base their key decisions on cost-benefit calculations, which is why North Korea doesn’t invade the South, China doesn’t invade Taiwan, the U.S. and Russia don’t start WWIII, etc.
Expert views are good, and usually better than non-experts, but never perfect. As I wrote earlier, I was impressed with the overall accuracy of the report’s predictions, and think the things they got right in aggregate outweigh the things they got wrong. The report’s accuracy probably owes mostly to the fact that it solicited views from “25 leading outside experts from a wide variety of disciplines and backgrounds to engage in a broad-gauged discussion with Intelligence Community analysts.” In other words, experts were invited to make predictions about things in their areas of expertise, which is Rule #1 in my Rules for Good Futurism.
In conclusion, I enjoyed this report and think the authors used a sound methodology for making future predictions. As a result, I’m planning to write a blog analysis of the latest sequel, the DNI’s 2017 Global trends: Paradox of progress, which predicts world events out to 2035.
If you’re interested in learning more about the 2020 report, read my notes on it below and key quotes I copied (which I’ve organized by country and subject), or read the report in full.
“The United States, too, will see its relative power position eroded, though it will remain in 2020 the most important single country across all the dimensions of power.” Yes, but an easy prediction to make.
“While no single country looks within striking distance of rivaling US military power by 2020…” Right.
“US dependence on foreign oil supplies also makes it more vulnerable as the competition for secure access grows and the risks of supply side disruptions increase.” Missed fracking! Also mentioned this in a non-U.S. section: “Thus sharper demand-driven competition for resources, perhaps accompanied by a major disruption of oil supplies, is among the key uncertainties.”
East and South Asia.
Right about rapid growth in China and India. Report correctly predicted that China would grow faster than India from 2005-20. Size of that gap might have surprised them. Not a good idea to constantly mention “China and India” together.
Predictions about huge growth in China’s middle class, overall purchasing power, and standards of living (like car ownership levels and frequency of overseas travel) were right.
“Meanwhile, the crisis over North Korea is likely to come to a head sometime over the next 15 years.” Another in a long history of failed predictions about its collapse.
“The possession of chemical, biological, and/or nuclear weapons by Iran and North Korea and the possible acquisition of such weapons by others by 2020 also increase the potential cost of any military action by the US against them or their allies.” North Korea did first nuclear test in October 2006. Iran has been dissuaded thanks to hardball diplomacy and direct intervention (nuclear computer virus, assassinations of leading people)–for now.
“By 2020, globalization could be equated in the popular mind with a rising Asia, replacing its current association with Americanization.” Accurate. The U.S. is retrenching under Trump, but China’s global reach is still expanding through its Belt and Road Initiative (created in 2013) and other large investments in Africa and almost everywhere else.
“What Would An Asian Face on Globalization Look Like? …Asian finance ministers have considered establishing an Asian monetary fund that would operate along different lines from IMF, attaching fewer strings on currency swaps and giving Asian decision-makers more leeway from the “Washington macro-economic consensus.”” China founded the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in 2015 as a direct rival to the IMF. …An expanded Asian-centric cultural identity may be the most profound effect of a rising Asia. Asians have already begun to reduce the percentage of students who travel to Europe and North America with Japan and—most striking—China becoming educational magnets. A new, more Asian cultural identity is likely to be rapidly packaged and distributed as incomes rise and communications networks spread. Korean pop singers are already the rage in Japan, Japanese anime have many fans in China, and Chinese kung-fu movies and Bollywood song-and-dance epics are viewed throughout Asia. Even Hollywood has begun to reflect these Asian influences—an effect that is likely to accelerate through 2020.” U.S. pop culture still reigns supreme globally, and in spite of spending huge amounts of money, China has had little success making films, music, or other cultural products that outsiders like. However, China’s influence has grown anyway, and disturbing examples include the recent, high-profile instances of China pressuring U.S. sports and entertainment companies to self-censor.
“The regional experts felt that the possibility of major inter-state conflict remains higher in Asia than in other regions. In their view, the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan Strait crises are likely to come to a head by 2020, risking conflict with global repercussions. At the same time, violence within Southeast Asian states—in the form of separatist insurgencies and terrorism—could intensify. China also could face sustained armed unrest from separatist movements along its western borders.” The crises did not come to a head! Important to pay attention to these failed predictions. Maybe they’ll continue to fail forever, and there will not be violent resolutions to Korea and Taiwan (expert predictions about inevitable U.S.-Soviet war were also wrong). The insurgency in Xinjiang did worsen, but China crushed it with martial law and reeducation camps. Russians also crushed Chechen insurgency. Sad testimony about the effectiveness of government repression? Even more effective in the future thanks to mass surveillance tech?
“Asia is particularly important as an engine for change over the next 15 years…Both the Korea and Taiwan issues are likely to come to a head, and how they are dealt with will be important factors shaping future US-Asia ties as well as the US role in the region…Japan’s position in the region is also likely to be transformed as it faces the challenge of a more independent security role.” None of that happened. Japan never transitioned from its isolationist, defensive posture to an international role that was more active and independent of the U.S. Japan’s alliance with the U.S. remains its most important and defining interstate relationship.
“China and India, which lack adequate domestic energy resources, will have to ensure continued access to outside suppliers; thus, the need for energy will be a major factor in shaping their foreign and defense policies, including expanding naval power. …Beijing’s growing energy requirements are likely to prompt China to increase its activist role in the world—in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Eurasia. In trying to maximize and diversify its energy supplies, China worries about being vulnerable to pressure from the United States which Chinese officials see as having an aggressive energy policy that can be used against Beijing.” Correct. A big reason for the Belt and Road Initiative is to secure oil and gas supply lines from the Middle East and Central Asia to China. China also launched its first aircraft carrier in 2012 and has sharply expanded and improved its navy since then. While some worry the navy is being built up to take over Taiwan, its equally important purpose will be to protect the oil shipping lanes that run from the Persian Gulf to China’s coast.
China’s sex ratio imbalance has not caused major problems as the report suggested might happen. Again, China proved more stable and its government more able to deal with problems than outsiders worried.
Report’s hopes of China taking steps towards democracy were dashed. Instead, Chinese government has effectively placated its populace with economic growth, security, and propagandization. China’s success has put forth what might be a viable political / economic / social alternative to Western liberal democracy, and I believe the former’s appeal is one reason why global democratization has slowed. Dictators see there is another way.
“The so-called “third wave” of democratization may be partially reversed by 2020—particularly among the states of the former Soviet Union and in Southeast Asia, some of which never really embraced democracy.” It happened. The Baltic states remain firmly democratic, Ukraine is a dysfunctional democracy where life is bad for most people, and all the others are undemocratic. Also, in SE Asia, Thailand democracy failed but Myanmar’s blossomed. No overall trend.
Correctly predicted that Russia would be stuck in neutral thanks to demographic decline, corruption, lack of foreign investment, and problems with its neighbors. However, incorrectly predicted that the conflicts would be with its Central Asian neighbors and about radical Islam, when in fact Russia fought with Ukraine and Georgia over geopolitics. (Not the only set of experts from that era who worried about Central Asian stability. Were they all fundamentally wrong, or has the problem just been delayed thanks to luck or some other temporary factor?) Russia’s relations with West got much worse than the report predicted thanks to the latter not tolerating the aggression. The report seems to have underestimated how fast Russia would recover from the torpor of the 90s, and its determination to not let more satellite states slip away to the West.
“In the view of the experts, Central Asian states are weak, with considerable potential for religious and ethnic conflict over the next 15 years. Religious and ethnic movements could have a destabilizing impact across the region.” Hasn’t happened…yet. Broader trend I’m seeing is underestimation of how powerful and competent secular dictatorships are at stamping out dissent. Look at failure of Arab Spring, particularly how it was crushed in Bahrain, and at how the military restored the status quo ante in Egypt. Also note the failure of the Iranian uprisings.
“Eurasia, especially Central Asia and the Caucasus, probably will be an area of growing concern, with its large number of potentially failing states, radicalism in the form of Islamic extremism, and importance as a supplier or conveyor belt for energy supplies to both West and East. The trajectories of these Eurasian states will be affected by external powers such as Russia, Europe, China, India and the United States, which may be able to act as stabilizers. Russia is likely to be particularly active in trying to prevent spillover, even though it has enormous internal problems on its own plate. Farther to the West, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova could offset their vulnerabilities as relatively new states by closer association with Europe and the EU.”
“If Russia fails to diversify its economy, it could well experience the petro-state phenomenon of unbalanced economic development, huge income inequality, capital flight, and increased social problems.” It happened. Russians have rallied around Putin, however, and have endured the effects of Western sanctions admirably. Part of this owes to the effectiveness of Russian government propaganda at convincing Russians to suffer for the Putin’s causes. Sounds like the report underestimated him in 2004.
Europe
“The EU, rather than NATO, will increasingly become the primary institution for Europe, and the role which Europeans shape for themselves on the world stage is most likely to be projected through it.” Right!
The report’s skepticism of E.U. army being created by 2020 was justified. Europeans still have serious problems with military cooperation.
“Over the next 15 years, West European economies will need to find several million workers to fill positions vacated by retiring workers. Either European countries adapt their work forces, reform their social welfare, education, and tax systems, and accommodate growing immigrant populations (chiefly from Muslim countries) or they face a period of protracted economic stasis that could threaten the huge successes made in creating a more United Europe.” They didn’t solve the problem, have protracted economic stasis, and have sharply slowed down the creation of a more United Europe.
“The experts felt that the current welfare state is unsustainable and the lack of any economic revitalization could lead to the splintering or, at worst, disintegration of the European Union, undermining its ambitions to play a heavyweight international role.” Brexit!
Latin America
“Populist themes are likely to emerge as a potent political and social force, especially as globalization risks aggravating social divisions along economic and ethnic lines. In parts of Latin America particularly, the failure of elites to adapt to the evolving demands of free markets and democracy probably will fuel a revival in populism and drive indigenous movements, which so far have sought change through democratic means, to consider more drastic means for seeking what they consider their “fair share” of political power and wealth.” Definitely happened.
Report’s short section on Latin America failed to predict Venezuela’s near-implosion.
Muslim world and Islam
“In particular, political Islam will have a significant global impact leading to 2020, rallying disparate ethnic and national groups and perhaps even creating an authority that transcends national boundaries.” This is an eerily accurate description of ISIS. Since the group was mostly destroyed, the overall threat posed by political Islam at this moment is lower today than it was in 2004, though its unclear if conditions will hold.
“The key factors that spawned international terrorism show no signs of abating over the next 15 years. Facilitated by global communications, the revival of Muslim identity will create a framework for the spread of radical Islamic ideology inside and outside the Middle East, including Southeast Asia, Central Asia and Western Europe, where religious identity has traditionally not been as strong.” The problem has stayed overwhelmingly confined to the Middle East and South Asia. Islamic terrorists have staged high-profile attacks in Europe, but the resulting deaths were dwarfed by the number killed in the Middle East and South Asia.
“Democratic progress could gain ground in key Middle Eastern countries, which thus far have been excluded from the process by repressive regimes. Success in establishing a working democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan—and democratic consolidation in Indonesia—would set an example for other Muslim and Arab states, creating pressures for change.” No real success. Iraq and Afghanistan are highly corrupt democracies that would collapse without direct U.S. military support. Tunisia became democratic, but I have doubts about its long-term survival.
“Reports of growing investment by many Middle Eastern governments in developing high-speed information infrastructures, although they are not yet widely available to the population nor well-connected to the larger world, show obvious potential for the spread of democratic—and undemocratic—ideas.” This happened. The Arab Spring was the “social media revolution,” and ISIS spread its crazed ideas, snuff videos, and terrorist training materials via the internet.
“Most of the regions that will experience gains in religious “activists” also have youth bulges, which experts have correlated with high numbers of radical adherents, including Muslim extremists.
Youth bulges are expected to be especially acute in most Middle Eastern and West African countries until at least 2005-2010, and the effects will linger long after.
In the Middle East, radical Islam’s increasing hold reflects the political and economic alienation of many young Muslims from their unresponsive and unrepresentative governments and related failure of many predominantly Muslim states to reap significant economic gains from globalization.
The spread of radical Islam will have a significant global impact leading to 2020, rallying disparate ethnic and national groups and perhaps even creating an authority that transcends national boundaries. Part of the appeal of radical Islam involves its call for a return by Muslims to earlier roots when Islamic civilization was at the forefront of global change. The collective feelings of alienation and estrangement which radical Islam draws upon are unlikely to dissipate until the Muslim world again appears to be more fully integrated into the world economy.”
The report contains a hypothetical 2020 letter between Muslim fanatics discussing the recent rise of an Islamic caliphate in the Sunni regions of Iraq, and its war against Shi’ites and U.S. military forces. The fictitious letter also says the conflict spurred a million Middle Eastern refugees to flee to the Western world. This is a frighteningly accurate description of actual events in the Middle East and Europe during the 2010s.
“We expect that by 2020 al-Qa’ida will be superceded by similarly inspired Islamic extremist groups, and there is a substantial risk that broad Islamic movements akin to al-Qa’ida will merge with local separatist movements.” Excellent prediction. ISIS and Boko Haram meet the description.
Global terrorism and organized crime
“Strong terrorist interest in acquiring chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons increases the risk of a major terrorist attack involving WMD. Our greatest concern is that terrorists might acquire biological agents or, less likely, a nuclear device, either of which could cause mass casualties. Bioterrorism appears particularly suited to the smaller, better-informed groups. We also expect that terrorists will attempt cyber attacks to disrupt critical information networks and, even more likely, to cause physical damage to information systems.” Terrorists have evidently made no progress on this, though the coronavirus pandemic’s damage will surely inspire terrorists to try harder.
“Over the next 10 to 20 years there is a risk that advances in biotechnology will augment not only defensive measures but also offensive biological warfare (BW) agent development and allow the creation of advanced biological agents designed to target specific systems—human, animal, or crop.” No evidence it happened, though the chaos caused by coronavirus could inspire terrorist groups and crazed individuals to focus on BW. It is possible that Russia, China and other states have used new technology to secretly create deadlier bioweapons. Such weapons programs remain beyond the means of terrorists, but could be supported and concealed by a competent government.
Thankfully, terrorists never got WMDs as the report feared. However, they still wreaked enormous havoc with conventional weapons and tactics–terrorists have killed about 200,000 people since 2004.
“If the growing problem of abject poverty and bad governance in troubled states in Sub-Saharan Africa, Eurasia, the Middle East, and Latin America persists, these areas will become more fertile grounds for terrorism, organized crime, and pandemic disease. Forced migration also is likely to be an important dimension of any downward spiral. The international community is likely to face choices about whether, how, and at what cost to intervene.” Yes, this happened. Muslim fundamentalism like Boko Haram in Africa, Mexican cartels worse than ever, refugee waves going to the U.S. and Europe.
“While vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices will remain popular as asymmetric weapons, terrorists are likely to move up the technology ladder to employ advanced explosives and unmanned aerial vehicles.” Terrorists have tried many times to kill people with UAVs, but been unsuccessful. Our luck won’t hold forever. In 2018, a drone was also used in an attempted assassination of Venezuelan president Maduro.
“We expect that terrorists also will try to acquire and develop the capabilities to conduct cyber attacks to cause physical damage to computer systems and to disrupt critical information networks.” Many small-scale attacks have happened, but we’re still waiting for The Big One. The ability for computer hackers to do things like cause nuclear meltdowns or disable national electric grids has been exaggerated.
“A key cyber battlefield of the future will be the information on computer systems themselves, which is far more valuable and vulnerable than physical systems. New technologies on the horizon provide capabilities for accessing data, either through wireless intercept, intrusion into Internet-connected systems, or through direct access by insiders.” This definitely happened. Since 2004, there have been too many big hacking incidents, in which troves of sensitive data and electronic assets were stolen. Also remember the high-profile data dumps on Wikileaks, including those courtesy of Edward Snowden.
“Organized crime is likely to thrive in resource-rich states undergoing significant political and economic transformation, such as India, China, Russia, Nigeria, and Brazil as well as Cuba, if it sees the end of its one-party system.” If Boko Haram is considered a mafia, then it did indeed get quite bad in Nigeria. Didn’t happen in the others though. Brazil is about as bad as ever. Report missed Mexico becoming a global center of organized crime. Cartel activity and the national murder rate shot up a few years after the report was published.
Globalization, nationalism and populism
“Some aspects of globalization—such as the growing global interconnectedness stemming from the information technology (IT) revolution— almost certainly will be irreversible. Yet it is also possible, although unlikely, that the process of globalization could be slowed or even stopped, just as the era of globalization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was reversed by catastrophic war and global depression.” Globalization has definitely slowed. Consider Trump’s election, Brexit, growing resistance among Europeans to strengthening the E.U., the death of free trade deals like Doha, growing isolation and hostility of Russia.
“The transition will not be painless and will hit the middle classes of the developed world in particular, bringing more rapid job turnover and requiring professional retooling. Outsourcing on a large scale would strengthen the antiglobalization movement. Where these pressures lead will depend on how political leaders respond, how flexible labor markets become, and whether overall economic growth is sufficiently robust to absorb a growing number of displaced workers.” Yes, this is now a major political issue throughout the world. It’s unclear if the U.S. has permanently changed course or if Trump’s election just hit the Pause button on the U.S. outsourcing more jobs and importing more immigrant labor.
“Currently, about two-thirds of the world’s population live in countries that are connected to the global economy. Even by 2020, however, the benefits of globalization won’t be global. Over the next 15 years, gaps will widen between those countries benefiting from globalization—economically, technologically, and socially—and those underdeveloped nations or pockets within nations that are left behind. Indeed, we see the next 15 years as a period in which the perceptions of the contradictions and uncertainties of a globalized world come even more to the fore than is the case today.” Yes. Note the rise of populist, nationalist political parties and talking heads, and the new, near-constant focus on “inequality” in the press.
“Populist themes are likely to emerge as a potent political and social force, especially as globalization risks aggravating social divisions along economic and ethnic lines. In parts of Latin America particularly, the failure of elites to adapt to the evolving demands of free markets and democracy probably will fuel a revival in populism and drive indigenous movements, which so far have sought change through democratic means, to consider more drastic means for seeking what they consider their “fair share” of political power and wealth.” Definitely happened.
“What Could Derail Globalization? The process of globalization, powerful as it is, could be substantially slowed or even stopped. Short of a major global conflict, which we regard as improbable, another large-scale development that we believe could stop globalization would be a pandemic…”
World economy
The report gives figures for “GNP,” but the metric is now known as “GNI.”
“Barring such a turn of events, the world economy is likely to continue growing impressively: by 2020, it is projected to be about 80 percent larger than it was in 2000, and average per capita income will be roughly 50 percent higher. Of course, there will be cyclical ups and downs and periodic financial or other crises, but this basic growth trajectory has powerful momentum behind it.” Missed the 2008 Great Recession, but then again, so did everybody. Regardless, the estimate was basically right. 2000 Gross world product (GWP) was $50 trillion while 2019 GWP was $87 trillion, meaning it grew 74% (note: figures are adjusted for inflation). The extra 6% growth we failed to achieve might owe to the Great Recession.
Technology
“The Internet in particular will spur the creation of even more global movements, which may emerge as a robust force in international affairs.” The Arab Spring was driven by young people with cell phones and social media. More generally, social media empowers people to organize and petition about all kinds of things, big and small, and to effectively pressure powerful people to do things.
“Moreover, future technology trends will be marked not only by accelerating advancements in individual technologies but also by a force-multiplying convergence of the technologies—information, biological, materials, and nanotechnologies—that have the potential to revolutionize all dimensions of life. Materials enabled with nanotechnology’s sensors and facilitated by information technology will produce myriad devices that will enhance health and alter business practices and models. Such materials will provide new knowledge about environment, improve security, and reduce privacy. Such interactions of these technology trends—coupled with agile manufacturing methods and equipment as well as energy, water, and transportation technologies—will help China’s and India’s prospects for joining the “First World.” Both countries are investing in basic research in these fields and are well placed to be leaders in a number of key fields. Europe risks slipping behind Asia in creating some of these technologies. The United States is still in a position to retain its overall lead, although it must increasingly compete with Asia and may lose significant ground in some sectors.” What are “nanotechnology’s sensors”? Can’t really assess the prediction without knowing what that means. The smartphone revolution happened after this was written, and the devices contain many sensors that “have nanotechnology.” Neither China nor India are in the First World yet, but the former has made major strides improving its technology and even taking the lead in some niches.
“New technology applications will foster dramatic improvements in human knowledge and individual well-being. Such benefits include medical breakthroughs that begin to cure or mitigate some common diseases and stretch lifespans, applications that improve food and potable water production, and expansion of wireless communications and language translation technologies that will facilitate transnational business, commercial, and even social and political relationships.” The predicted computer-related advances happened, but progress in medical technology has been disappointing. Over the last 16 years, we’ve discovered that biology is messier, more complex, and less amenable to manipulation than software.
“The media explosion cuts both ways: on the one hand, it makes it potentially harder to build a consensus because the media tends to magnify differences; on the other hand, the media can also facilitate discussions and consensus-building.” The first point has outweighed the other, and misinformation, disagreement, and social fragmentation have probably never been worse. The authors couldn’t have known.
“Growing connectivity also will be accompanied by the proliferation of transnational virtual communities of interest, a trend which may complicate the ability of state and global institutions to generate internal consensus and enforce decisions and could even challenge their authority and legitimacy. Groups based on common religious, cultural, ethnic or other affiliations may be torn between their national loyalties and other identities. The potential is considerable for such groups to drive national and even global political decisionmaking on a wide range of issues normally the purview of governments.” Accurate. It has made people more tribal and fragmented.
Misc.
“The likelihood of great power conflict escalating into total war in the next 15 years is lower than at any time in the past century, unlike during previous centuries when local conflicts sparked world wars.” Quite true. I think it will get slightly higher over the next 15 as China closes some of the military power gap with the U.S.
“Countries without nuclear weapons—especially in the Middle East and Northeast Asia—might decide to seek them as it becomes clear that their neighbors and regional rivals are doing so.” There have been no concrete steps in that direction. The U.S. has successfully assured Japan and South Korea they are under its nuclear umbrella, so they haven’t started their own nuclear programs in response to North Korea getting the bomb. Also, since Iran has been dissuaded/blocked from building nukes (this counter-effort was probably more successful than the report authors would have predicted), its neighbors haven’t tried building their own.
“Both North Korea and Iran probably will have an ICBM capability well before 2020” North Korea does; Iran does not.
“By 2020, China and Nigeria will have some of the largest Christian communities in the world, a shift that will reshape the traditionally Western-based Christian institutions, giving them more of an African or Asian or, more broadly, a developing world face.” I don’t think this happened.
“Over the next 15 years, democratic reform will remain slow and imperfect in many countries due to a host of social and economic problems, but it is highly unlikely that democracy will be challenged as the norm in Africa.” Was right.
“We foresee a more pervasive sense of insecurity, which may be as much based on psychological perceptions as physical threats, by 2020. The psychological aspects, which we have addressed earlier in this paper, include concerns over job security as well as fears revolving around migration among both host populations and migrants.” I wholeheartedly agree that a large share of today’s popular anxiety is psychological and not tangible in nature. Threats are commonly being exaggerated and even manufactured to keep average people fearful, tragically distracting them from the fact that this is the best time to be alive in human history for most types of people. The cause is a toxic nexus between the darker aspects of human nature and the profit-driven incentives of news media outlets.
However, the concept of an intelligent machine uprising dates to 1872, when English writer Samuel Butler published the book Erehwon. In it, the main character visits a futuristic, closed society that banned machines because they were improving too fast and people feared they would become smarter than humans and take over. Butler was inspired by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and by the rapid industrialization he saw in England over his lifetime. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/butler-samuel/1872/erewhon/ch23.htm
“People occlusion” is an awesome new phrase. This technique, coupled with better object recognition algorithms, will lead to a revolution in augmented reality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkS-VqAss4s
A new machine can pump oxygenated blood into donor hearts and lungs, keeping them viable for transplant several hours longer than the current maximum. Technologies like this will someday benefit human cryonics. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-51975351
In the U.S., black people might have higher blood pressure than whites because the former have more skin pigment, which blocks UV light from entering skin cells. When light enters those cells, it triggers the release of nitric oxide into the bloodstream, which lowers blood pressure. The blood pressure disparity partly explains why whites live longer than blacks. https://www.outsideonline.com/2411055/free-fitness-apps-online-classes-programs
More on the project to map all the world’s seafloor by 2030: 75% of it will only be mapped to a measly fidelity of 1 depth measurement per 400 x 400 meter grid square. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3263/8/2/63/html
“There are physical limits to how small we can make [information] storage particles…Once we conquer the ultimate small storage particle, we will be able to set standards – both standards for information and standards for storage.” https://futuristspeaker.com/future-scenarios/the-future-of-libraries/
Self-replicating Bracewell probes might be ideal for exploring and monitoring the galaxy. They would have limited AI and downgraded technology, and would only be able to make copies of themselves, transmit data back to the home planet, and talk to other intelligent species if certain conditions were meant. Such probes would be too handicapped to start thinking for themselves and turn against the home planet, and if one were captured or destroyed, it wouldn’t be much of a loss since it would only contain second-rate technology and no information about the home planet. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bracewell_probe&oldid=908951238
The ongoing coronavirus quarantine reveals how autonomous, electric cars will improve things: in many cities, air pollution and traffic jams have nearly disappeared because people aren’t driving. The skies are bluer in Los Angeles than many residents can remember. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/22/climate/coronavirus-usa-traffic.html
The White House announced at a press conference that coronavirus will probably kill 100,000 – 240,000 Americans. That’s actually not the worst-case scenario, as it is built on assumptions that the strict quarantine measures stay in place. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/31/trump-briefing-coronavirus-158079
In early 2015, Bill Gates gave a TED Talk about the world’s unreadiness for a pandemic. The scenario he described was almost a dead ringer for today’s coronavirus outbreak. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI
Gates was probably citing this statement Elon Musk made three months earlier: “I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.” https://bigthink.com/ideafeed/elon-musk-we-should-be-very-careful-about-artificial-intelligence
The superstructure jutting up from an aircraft carrier’s deck is called it’s “island,” and it is full of human crewmen whose jobs require them to see the vessel’s surroundings. One specialized compartment, called the “island camera room,” is there so a person can video record aircraft takeoffs and landings for safety and training reasons. The latest U.S. carriers have deleted the room and replaced with with CCTV cameras that a person monitors from an office room below decks. Would a fully automated aircraft carrier need anything more than a skeletal tower with cameras and other sensors mounted on it as its island? https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32614/heres-what-this-panoramic-windowed-room-does-on-american-aircraft-carriers
North Korean fighter plane squadrons secretly fought U.S. planes during the Vietnam War. ‘Vietnamese pilot Dinh said of the Koreans: “They kept everything secret, so we didn’t know their loss ratio, but the North Korean pilots claimed 26 American aircraft destroyed. Although they fought very bravely in the aerial battles, they were generally too slow and too mechanical in their reactions when engaged, which is why so many of them were shot down by the Americans. They never followed flight instructions and regulations either.”‘ https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/yes-north-korea-sent-jets-and-pilots-fight-america-vietnam-134227
Smart bombs keep getting smarter. The “BLU-129” is a standard-sized bomb (500 lbs and 7 ft. long), but the size of its explosion can be dialed up or down by the bomber crew, even after they’ve dropped it. This lets us minimize collateral damage if the bomb is dropped, but a few seconds before it hits, a little kid walks into the target area. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/blu-12-bomb-air-forces-new-aerial-sniper-129187
Video of a low-flying, supersonic jet shattering the windows of buildings. Sonic booms are one of the main reasons supersonic passenger jets never became popular. https://youtu.be/2eoTqLnL0WI
‘A former F-16 pilot, Lee also has 1,500 hours in the [F-4] Phantom. He still recalls the first time he took to the air in one. “I was shocked at how much more difficult it was to fly than I thought it would be,” he told me. “When I got home, I told my wife, ‘I think I just traded in a Porsche for a ’72 Cadillac.”‘ https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/where-have-all-the-phantoms-gone-96320627/
Here’s a fascinating article on “rarefaction wave” (RAVEN) guns, which are tank cannons that vent gas out of their backs kind of like recoilless rifles (e.g. – bazookas). If RAVEN weapons are fully developed, they could let small, light tanks fire powerful shells that only today’s heavy tanks can shoot. ‘A general rule of thumb, according to Technology of Tanks, from Jane’s, is that a vehicle needs to weigh about one ton for every nine hundred newtons of force exerted on it. This means for the current 120-millimeter M256 cannon shooting a M829A3 Anti-Tank Shell, a vehicle would have to weigh twenty-five tons to withstand the recoil force.’ Interestingly, that means a tank as small as a T-55 (weighs 36 tons) could be retrofitted with the same, powerful cannon as the U.S. M1 Abrams. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-us-army-wants-put-big-guns-small-tanks-23041
Outer ring: What you think your sign is Inner ring: What it actually is
A person’s math skills are about half inherited and half due to schooling and other non-biological factors. This is important since math skills positively correlate with income and odds of completing college, and in fact there is probably some causal relationship. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-020-0060-2
British government tests show that 5G data transmissions don’t contain enough radiation to damage human DNA. The technology is safe. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51613580
Robotic surgery machines are improving: ‘It’s the first human trial of a robot for “supermicrosurgery,” a term referring to surgery on vessels that range from 0.3 to 0.8 millimeters…The system is activated by foot pedals, and a surgeon controls the high-precision surgical instruments using forceps-like joysticks, mounted to the operating table. This setup basically cancels out small tremors in the surgeons’ hands and scales down their hand movements into more refined and subtle versions. For example, if the surgeon moves one of the joysticks by one centimeter, the robot arm moves a tenth of a millimeter.’ https://www.technologyreview.com/f/615179/robot-assisted-high-precision-surgery-has-passed-its-first-test-in-humans/?
The “HOLOPORTL” is a refrigerator-sized device that displays a seemingly 3D video image. I don’t think it’s practical for average people, but it probably has some business uses. The technology is impressive in any case. https://portlhologram.com
“Monocular passive ranging” can be an accurate way to find how far away an object is. If you’re looking at camera footage of the object, it’s obviously better to have a higher resolution camera so the object appears as many pixels. https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.00912
A lens-less, single-pixel digital camera can produce highly detailed images of what it sees. “The reason the single-pixel camera can make do with one light sensor is that the light that strikes it is patterned. One way to pattern light is to put a filter, kind of like a randomized black-and-white checkerboard, in front of the flash illuminating the scene. Another way is to bounce the returning light off of an array of tiny micromirrors, some of which are aimed at the light sensor and some of which aren’t. “ I wonder if we could use this technology to vision distant exoplanets without having to build gigantic telescopes in space. http://news.mit.edu/2017/faster-single-pixel-camera-lensless-imaging-0330
If all human-driven vehicles were banned from Manhattan and only autonomous taxis were allowed, the city could meet its surface transit needs with only half as many cars as today. I think it would be even more efficient if the taxis were mostly Smartcars since their footprints are only half as big as the footprints of fullsize cars that currently serve as taxis, meaning they would almost double the capacity of the city’s existing road network. http://senseable.mit.edu/MinimumFleet/
The NTSB has found that the fatal 2018 crash of a Tesla was only partly due to the limitations of the car’s autopilot feature, which was on at the time. The human driver was playing a game on his smartphone at the moment of impact even though he knew the car had problems negotiating that stretch of the road, and the crash attenuator that the vehicle plowed into had been compacted by a previous car accident and not promptly replaced by the state highway administration. https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/25/21153320/tesla-autopilot-walter-huang-death-ntsb-probable-cause
“As I envision the process, whoever is sending a package will simply place it on their front doorstep and take a photo of it with a special shipping app on their phone. This will start the process, detailing the package size, dimensions, and GPS coordinates, and the sender will add particulars such as destination, level of urgency and weight category (i.e. under 10 lbs). Within a short while, a robotic pickup service will arrive, retrieve the package, and load it onto a drone delivery vehicle.” https://futuristspeaker.com/business-trends/creating-the-self-delivering-package/
“Phytomining” is a practice in which certain species of plants are grown in a patch of ground to extract metals from the soil. Different kinds of plants are known to preferentially suck up different types of metals dissolved in the soil into their roots and up to their stems and leaves. After some time, the farmer cuts down the plants and uses chemicals to leech out and purify the metals in them. Phytomining could be used to clean toxic metal residues from soils and to mine precious metals like gold. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/science/metal-plants-farm.html
Older tanks like the U.S. M-60 and the Soviet T-55 will never be as good as newer tanks because of their armor. The older tanks’ armor was just made of steel. As anti-tank weapons got more potent, the solution was to simply thicken the steel armor. Engineers realized that this trend was unsustainable since it would lead to future tanks that were too heavy to move, so they shifted to a new paradigm by inventing “composite tank armor,” which is a material made of multiple layers of different materials like quartz, ceramic, and relatively thin steel. It was lighter and more protective than thick, solid steel alone. The U.S. M1 Abrams and Soviet T-64 were the first tanks to have composite armor. Since armor is integral to a tank in the same way that your skin and flesh are integral to your body, there’s no way to “upgrade” older tanks like the M-60 that are made of solid steel in a way that will put their armor protection on par with new tanks that have composite armor. Thus, the M-60 is, on the modern battlefield, effectively carrying around many tons of dead weight that can’t be removed. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/could-americas-old-m60-patton-tank-fight-war-right-now-123471
“Stowed kills” is the word of the day. It is a numerical value that averages the amount of ammunition a tank has with the power of those rounds to express how many enemy vehicles it can destroy before running out. There’s a simple tradeoff: Bigger ammunition hits harder and has longer range, but because of its size, you can’t fit as much of it in your tank. Larger ammunition can also accommodate internal, programmable sensors and computers the smaller ammo can’t (yet). https://below-the-turret-ring.blogspot.com/2016/04/bigger-guns-are-not-always-better.html
Recently, I read an article about the history of the long-defunct human telephone switchboard operator profession:
“Users of the telephone in the late 19th century and early 20th century couldn’t dial their calls themselves. Instead, they picked up their handset and were greeted by an operator, almost always a woman, who asked for the desired phone number and placed the call.”
“…An operator did more than simply connect a customer to his or her desired number, however. In the early decades of the industry, telephone companies regarded their business less as a utility and more as a personal service. The telephone operator was central to this idea, acting as an early version of an intelligent assistant with voice recognition capabilities. She got to know her 50 to 100 assigned customers by name and knew their needs. If a party didn’t answer, she would try to find him or her around town. If that didn’t succeed, she took a message and called the party again later to pass the message along. She made wake-up calls and gave the time, weather, and sports scores. During crimes in progress or medical emergencies, a subscriber needed only to pick up the handset and the operator would summon the police or doctors.“
At its height around midcentury, this field employed 342,000 people in the U.S. By the end of the century, the field was dead, with nearly all of the jobs replaced by machines. Phone users dialed numbers into their devices themselves, and the calls were automatically connected. As the article makes clear, the automation process was partly driven by cost: as real wages for low-level jobs rose and workers came to expect higher pay, it got increasingly hard to entice people to be operators with salaries that would let the phone companies remain profitable. While automatic switchboards were faster, many “free” conveniences previously offered by human operators, like wake-up calls and news announcements, disappeared.
That is, until the rise of cell phones, smartphones and digital personal assistants. Smartphones can be easily programmed with lists of other people’s phone numbers, and can understand and execute verbal instructions like “Call Dad,” which is little different from how people interacted with human operators in the past. This amenity has returned. Also, if a person you are calling doesn’t pick up his or her phone, you don’t need to task a human being with re-calling them until they pick up–you simply leave them a voicemail message or text them. The fact that most people have switched from landlines to cell phones that they always carry on themselves sharply reduces the frequency of missed connections, anyway. Smartphones can be customized in a few minutes to display continuous updates on weather, sports game scores, or anything else. Pulling a small device out of your pocket and glancing at its screen is a faster way to get information than calling a human, vocalizing a question, and waiting for them to find the answer and say it to you. Finally, voice-enabled personal assistants like Siri can understand and execute spoken orders from their users requesting medical or police help.
Even though technology destroyed hundreds of thousands of human jobs, in a sense, it also brought the jobs back from the customers’ perspectives by providing the same services, and for less money. This made me wonder which extinct jobs formerly done by humans would “come back” in the future thanks to better technologies. Here’s what I came up with in short order:
Gas station attendants
It used to be common for gas stations to have workers who inserted gas nozzles into customers’ cars and filled them up. They also did minor car-related tasks like cleaning windows, checking fluid levels, and checking tire pressure. It saved a little bit of time for drivers, and was more convenient for them since they didn’t have to exit their cars. Gas station attendants disappeared after the oil crises of the 1970s, when gas station owners were forced to cut costs.
New cars in most advanced countries are now required to have computerized tire pressure monitoring sensors that alert their drivers if the pressure in any tire is low, so technology has already resurrected that service. In the short-to-medium run, the other tasks formerly done by gas station attendants will be done or rendered moot by ride hailing services like Uber and by electric cars.
From an Uber customer’s perspective, all of the maintenance and repair needs of the vehicle they are riding in are satisfied unseen, and on someone else’s time. The Uber cab always shows up clean, in good running order, and fully-fueled. Electric cars also don’t need oil, eliminating the most important vehicle fluid, and thus sharply reducing the frequency with which the fluids in aggregate should be checked.
In the longer-run, robots will do all the tasks that human gas station attendants used to do, making the conveniences commonly available once again, this time to private car owners and Uber vehicle owners. Imagine your robot butler plugging a power cable into your electric car every night and unplugging it before you left for work the next day, or robots doing the same at charging stations. In the future, governments could mandate the installation of simple sensors in cars that continuously monitored fluid levels, or robots at your house or at charging stations could periodically lift the hood to visually check them. Wiping down car windows will also be automated once autonomous cars become common, and owners can push one button to tell them to drive to the nearest car wash to have themselves cleaned. Additionally, if the private car ownership model is overtaken by the ride hailing Uber model, the dominant companies will have large facilities where their vehicle fleets are routinely serviced and recharged by machines.
Slaves / servants
The history of slavery is well-known today, but it is often forgotten that, in the past, low-paid, often live-in servants were also common. Even lower-middle-class households in the U.S. and elsewhere usually had servants of some kind to do menial household tasks like cleaning floors and cooking meals. In the U.S. and Britain, it was widespread until the 1960s. The labor rights movement and the opening of better job opportunities led to the near-collapse of the servant industry, and for generations it has only been accessible to rich people who can afford to pay high enough wages.
It was once common, even among lower-middle-class households, to have at least one servant.
As I said in a previous blog entry, I predict robot butlers and intelligent personal assistant AIs will allow average-income people to have servants once again. There will be a day when the thought of washing and folding one’s own laundry again becomes unthinkable to average people.
Radio actors
From 1920 until the popularization of television in the 1950s, radio broadcasts were the primary means through which people got entertainment and news content. And just as there are TV stars and movie stars, there were radio stars during that medium’s era of dominance. Though forgotten today, those radio actors were once household names, were masters of diction and the art of speaking, and performed plays, mystery shows, soap operas, and many other types of shows that commanded audiences of millions.
Scene from the set of the popular radio show “Gangbusters,” which aired for 21 years.
Radio will never reclaim its primacy over motion picture entertainment, but I think audiobooks will have a renaissance thanks to new technologies, and the high production standards and outstanding voice acting that listeners commonly enjoyed during the Golden Age of Radio will return. Text-to-speech computer programs can of course be used to easily convert any book into an audio file, though the subtler aspects of the text, like the pacing of the words and the emotional intonations and volumes of the character’s speech, are not carried over. In the near future, these technical problems will be solved, and there will be simple and powerful computer programs that let anyone make high-quality audiobooks in little time.
After a book’s text was uploaded, the program would be smart enough to tell which text corresponded to which characters, or to the third person storyteller. The human user would be made to assign each character a different voice picked from a wide selection of options (varied with respect to sex, age, race, nationality, and other qualities), each of which would sound like a real person. The voices of famous people could even be used. The user would then listen to the recording from start to finish, and would be able to stop the recording to fix mistakes the machine made, such as assigning lines of text to the wrong character voice, or voicing a line of dialog with the wrong tone, speed, or emotion. Making those kinds of corrections could involve a simple process where the user speaks the words into a microphone in the correct manner, and the machine reproduces that detailed speech pattern, but in the character’s voice. The program would also let the user easily add sound effects–many of which would be artificially generated and not recordings of real noises–and background music.
This kind of technology is entirely within reach, and merely builds upon those that already exist, like advanced voice mimicry and sound-effect-generating algorithms. It will empower untrained individuals to, at little or no expense, make high-quality audio productions that rival the professionally made radio shows of the last century.
Mudlarks
Mudlarks were the “dumpster divers” of the 1700s and 1800s–they were poor kids and old people who sifted through the muddy banks of city rivers looking for objects they could resell. At the time, waste management practices were primitive, and people would throw their trash into waterways. Things often fell overboard from boats plying the waters through cities. While the end of mudlarking as a job was a positive development for society, something of value was lost to society since there was no one left to find and recycle useful things that had been dropped in the water.
Mudlarks at work. It was an unsanitary job that only persisted thanks to abject poverty and a lack of better options.
I think technology will bring mudlarking back in a sense. For one, if robots and AIs take most human jobs, then people will have more time to indulge in their hobbies, even if the financial returns are negligible. That means the number of people who do things like mudlarking, magnet fishing, and metal detecting will increase. In the longer run, those pursuits will be automated, and we’ll use millions of cheap, autonomous machines to gradually comb over the Earth’s surface–including riverbanks and the bottoms of bodies of water–for hyperaccurate mapping, archaeology, waste removal, and recycling (particularly in the case of metal objects since it’s much cheaper to recycle existing metal than to mine and refine metal ore). This derives from my more general prediction that robots will clean up all of the garbage created in human history by the end of the next century.
As I said in a recent blog entry, my interest in futurism and my habit of making written predictions about the future predate the creation of this blog by many years. Previously, I used Facebook as my platform for publishing those ideas, and in December 2009, I took my first shot at making a written list of personal predictions. The document’s title, “Predictions for the next decade,” is self-explanatory, and as it is now the end of the decade, I’d like to rate my accuracy. [Spoiler: I did a great job overall.]
Below, I’ve coped and pasted the text of the original Facebook note, and interspersed present-day evaluations of my predictions in square brackets and bold text. I’ve even carried over the pictures that were embedded in the original.
Predictions for the next decade December 25, 2009 at 2:57 PM
The first decade of the 2000’s (which should actually be called the “Oughties”) is just a few days from being over, and I thought I’d render a couple serious predictions for the “teen years.” Most of you probably don’t know this, but I am a futurist and like reading serious books written by scientists about what they think the future will be like. The granddaddy of these people is Ray Kurzweil, and I encourage you to take a couple minutes to read about the guy’s life, beliefs and predictions (failed and confirmed) here:
As you can see from Kurzweil’s “2009” predictions, he’s about 50% right, 25% maybe right or wrong, and 25% flat wrong. While I think he’s definitely on the right track with his predictions, his big problems are that he overestimates the rate of technological advance–particularly where it concerns improvements to the “thinking” abilities of computers–and the willingness of people to accept new technologies. Kurzweil also sticks his neck out too often by proclaiming that one, specific type of technology will be in use by year X. When it doesn’t happen, his credibility is impeached.
[I still believe these things.]
Anyway, a detailed overview of my views on Kurzweil will have to wait for a later note. For now, let me tell you what I think the world will be like by the end of 2019.
The Political World
Obama wins the 2012 elections. Let’s face it: The same coalition of minorities and young people that elected Obama in 2008 are going to rally to his defense in 2012. The Republicans don’t have any obvious “golden boy” right now either. The only way Obama can lose is if he colossally screws up (or at least if Americans perceive it that way), which doesn’t seem likely given his intelligence. I’m not sure if Biden will run in 2016, but just remember that the guy will be 74 at that time, which will make him older than McCain was in 2008. There’s no way in hell I or anyone else can guess about who will win the 2016 elections, so I won’t try.
[I was right about everything! Also, I think the Democrats now have these same problems going in to the 2020 election: They don’t have an obvious “golden boy,” there’s not enough time left for one to emerge out of the woodwork, all of their Presidential candidates are seriously flawed in some way, and Joe Biden’s age problem is worse than ever! However, Trump’s voter base today is smaller than Obama’s voter base was in 2012, so even a seriously flawed Democratic opponent could beat him. The 2020 race is on such a knife’s edge that I can’t assign odds right now to the outcome, other than to say whoever wins will be disappointing.]
Sorry folks, but we still have a two-party system in 2019. Our institutions and people are simply too heavily geared towards supporting it.
[Sadly, I was right. However, since 2009, I’ve become less convinced that a three- or four-party system will help much, so we’re not much worse off as a nation than we otherwise would have been. Other governments show that, as the amount of political diversity grows, so does political gridlock. The need to sacrifice principles to make pragmatic, messy compromises that “keep the lights on” never goes away. My changed attitude towards this issue is a good example of how I’ve become less idealistic/more jaded over the last ten years from having more time to observe how the world really works.]
The U.S. will still be the world’s most powerful country politically, economically, militarily, culturally, diplomatically, and technologically, though China has closed much of that gap. On the subject of China, I think it’s important to remember that it is a country currently in social, political and economic transition, and it faces enormous challenges and pressures for change in the future. In no particular order, let me go through these. First, China has a growing gender imbalance that could threaten its internal stability. Thanks to a patriarchal culture and the one-child-per-family policy, abortions of female children are widespread and produce a sex disparity in the population (i.e. – If you can only have one kid, might as well make it count and have a boy). By the end of 2019, 24 million young Chinese men of marrying age will be unable to find wives. Having a lot of young, unattached males who aren’t getting enough sex hanging around inside your country is bad news, as the conservative societies of the Middle East show us. These guys tend to start a lot of trouble (terrorism, riots, reform movements, etc.).
[I was right! In fact, the Chinese sex imbalance is even worse than I estimated (some sources say there are 34 million more men than women there). Fortunately for China, this hasn’t translated into a mass civil unrest, and the single, young men are handling it with stiff upper lips and lots of erotic anime cartoons. The ongoing protests in Hong Kong aren’t being driven by the sex imbalance, and in fact, the city has a significant surplus of single, young women.]
Second, China faces another demographic problem in the form of its aging population: By the end of 2019, around 20% of all Chinese will be 60 or older, and that proportion will only grow with time. Frankly speaking (as I always do), old people sap national resources through pensions and medical services, as we see in our own country with Social Security and Medicare (and it is even worse at the state level in many cases). The graying of China’s population is going to cause large, direct decreases in the GDP growth rate, which will have a ripple effect through the entire country and all other segments of its society. Of course, the Chinese would be able to overcome this problem by increasing the number of young people to support the old through taxes, though it’s questionable whether such increases could be accomplished by 2019: Even if the Chinese government were to rescind the birth restrictions, it probably wouldn’t lead to sufficient population growth since many Chinese now have a Westernized mindset and are more concerned with personal growth and accomplishment than they are with having kids. Increasing immigration is another possibility, and while I do think a significantly greater share of China’s population will be foreign by 2019, the Chinese are simply too xenophobic to allow enough immigrants in anytime soon.
[I was mostly right! The share of China’s population that is 60 or older is in fact 17-18% now, so my original estimate was too high (not sure where I got it from) but still in the ballpark. In 2015, China raised the birth limit to two children per family, but it failed to spur a baby boom that was large enough to alter the country’s negative demographic trajectory. Mass immigration of workers also hasn’t happened in China.]
Third, China’s rapid industrial growth has caused serious environmental damage that will be much worse by 2019 and that will put another constraint on their GDP growth. Not only is the country the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, it is also the worst offender (or one of the worst) when it comes to a slew of other types of pollutants like sulfur dioxide and heavy metals. Fishing stocks near China’s coasts have also been almost exhausted, northern China is facing desertification and depletion of aquifers, and elsewhere in the country people riot on a near-daily basis over pollution and its effects. I’m not going to go into this in full detail, but there’s a great 2007 article in Foreign Affairs entitled “The Great Leap Backwards?” that covers the full extent of the damage if you want to read about it.
[Thankfully, the most dire extrapolations of China’s pollution trends didn’t pan out. China’s CO2 emissions have grown over the last ten years, so it pumps out more of the gas than ever before, but the rate of that growth has gotten much lower. Its levels of sulfur dioxide and air particulate emissions have also dropped over the last decade thanks to stricter laws. Environmental damage is probably hurting Chinese GDP growth less than I predicted, which actually makes me happy.]
Fourth, I think China’s global influence is going to hit a wall because the country doesn’t really stand for anything. It’s international behavior is clearly self-interested in all respects, and the country doesn’t have much of a vision–ideological or otherwise–to offer the world. Contrast this with the U.S., which has for decades sought to spread political freedom, economic freedom, free trade, and human rights, and which openly works for a future world free from want and oppression. Yes, I know that sounds very preachy of me, and yes, I realize that our pursuit of those goals has been inconsistent for various reasons, but I think we do the best we can given the constraints and that our presence moves the world in a positive direction overall. Having grand ideas and a nice-sounding ideology resonates with people across the world on a very basic level, and this is an area in which China is severely lacking.
[I was right. China is still viewed as a self-interested player on the international stage and has few good friends. The friends it has made through investment in Africa and in the Belt and Road Initiative would walk away as soon as the money stopped flowing.]
Fifth, by 2019, China’s economic growth rate will have slowed no matter what since there are only so many low-hanging fruits you can harvest. China’s statism isn’t going to be able to deliver results once the country’s economy moves beyond a low-wage export model and innovation and entrepreneurship become the pillars of further growth, as they are in the Developed World. Really, that touches upon one of China’s biggest problems–it’s government. Ignoring the traditional American complaints about the disregard for human and political rights (most Chinese don’t really care about these), the Chinese Communist Party simply isn’t going to be efficient enough or responsive enough to meet the expectations of the Chinese people once they become more educated, sophisticated and wealthy and once the aforementioned problems start to have a real impact. Political change and a period of social instability in China are hence inevitable and might happen by 2019 or be about to happen. The operative word in that sentence is “might.”
[I was right about China’s economic growth rate shrinking during the 2010s, but wrong about the CCP’s ability to hold on to power. The last decade has shown the Party to be more adept at tracking and shaping the opinions of its people and defusing potential crises than I anticipated.]
Such a transition might lead to a wonderful outcome or to disaster. It’s always possible that the CCP could, during a time of internal crisis, try to divert attention and to unify the country by playing on the strong nationalism of its people and agitating over Taiwan, the Spratly Islands or something else (Pride, and somewhat by extension nationalism, is the quintessential human flaw). That, of course, would bring China into conflict with us, but the such a subject is too large to be discussed here. Suffice it to say that any U.S.-China military conflict–even if waged with strictly conventional weapons–would be terrible no matter who won and would lead to a dramatically altered international economic and diplomatic balance of power that the losing side would be extremely bitter over. Let me be clear: A war between China and the U.S. is extremely unlikely (largely due to economic linkages), and I think it would only have a chance of happening if China’s government got really desperate and felt it had more to gain from such a war than it would lose or if some fool in Taiwan tried to declare independence. The point is that there’s a possibility of conflict.
In any case, by 2019, China won’t be able to beat the U.S. in combat under most circumstances. They might be able to win the opening stages of a war over Taiwan, but that’s only because Taiwan is just a few miles from China whereas it’s across the biggest ocean in the world from the U.S. In an all-out industrial war like WWII, China will still get beaten as badly in 2019 as in 2009, assuming the American people are willing to fight as hard as they did in WWII (actually not such a safe assumption). On that note, it’s worth keeping in mind that, while China’s military capabilities are rapidly growing, they have a very long way to go to catch up to America’s. We’re talking at least 50 years here. The exact same applies to their economy. Think China’s rich? Compare their per capita GDP with America’s. Even adjusted for PPP, it’s not even close.
[I was right. Today, China remains too weak to beat the U.S. military, and is too weak to take over and hold onto Taiwan. Regarding my “50 year” prediction, I think China’s naval and air forces could be strong enough in as little as 20 years to beat U.S. forces in a war for the “First Island Chain,” but that’s not the same as saying China’s military will be better in every way, and able to beat the U.S. military in any type of engagement and in any part of the world.]
I think it’s useful to remember another episode from our recent history when thinking about China’s projected rise. In the 1980’s, Americans were absolutely convinced that Japan was going to surpass us and become the world’s economic superpower. All of the economic trend lines pointed to such an outcome. But guess what happened? Overinvestment in land and the stock market (done out of the expectation of high future returns indicated by all those upward trend lines) formed a bubble, which popped and led to a recession (similar to our current problem). Unemployment went up, causing consumer spending to go way down. Government stimulus attempts were ineffective. Japan’s elderly population was also a major drain. Something similar could happen to China (though a gradual leveling of GDP growth is also possible), and at some point in the future, we might all be laughing about how worried we were back in 2009 or 2019 about this other Asian juggernaut.
[A Japan-style economic slowdown could still hit China, so my prediction from 2009 still stands. However, I’m far less concerned about the “total meltdown” scenario where China has an economic depression AND a political implosion AND attacks its neighbors, dragging in the U.S. Over the last decade, the CCP has proven itself smarter and more cool-headed than to let such a thing happen.]
[In the original Facebook note, I detoured into a discussion of Chinese history at this point. While interesting, I’m omitting it because it isn’t about futurism.]
…The Chinese respect Americans and Europeans for their accomplishments, but still believe that it was really just a fluke that the West happened to be more advanced than China back starting in the 1800’s when it began expanding into East Asia. The Chinese are extremely proud of their country’s economic, political and military ascension and think that the end result will merely be the righting of wrongs and the establishment of the world order as it always should have been, with China at the natural center. The problem is, there is a real chance these ambitions could be frustrated for the reasons I have discussed, and a wounded and bitter China obsessed with failed expectations would be a menace to everyone.
There is a small chance we could see such a world by 2019, or that we could see it on the horizon. Or, China might defy all expectations, overcome its problems and be on its way to taking the reins of global leadership. Or it could be in some middle ground. The point is that China’s future is really uncertain, and owing to the country’s size and strength, this is a major issue we will need to involve ourselves with.
Moving on, Iraq has an at least even chance of still being a stable country by 2019, with a democratic–albeit highly corrupt–government. I’m not saying it’s going to be paradise, but it will be able to take care of itself, and no one will worry about it facing state collapse. Iraq will still be getting a lot of U.S. aid to keep it stable, and I could see small numbers of American troops still in the country for special purposes like training the Iraqi army and fighting terrorists, but we’re not going to be losing many guys, so no one will care. On the other hand, there’s also the real chance that Iraq could hold together for only a short period after the U.S. withdraw, and then start disintegrating again. Such a development would initiate a new national debate over here on whether or not to send troops back in, which I believe we ultimately would.
[I was right! When I wrote the original note, there were about 125,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. By early 2012, it had dropped to 5,000. As I thought might happen, Iraq started disintegrating shortly after, and in 2014, ISIS took over large parts of the country. To confront the new threat, U.S. troop levels again increased, but the intensification of combat was tolerated by the American public because our casualties were low. In 2019, Iraq has returned to being a stable country with a corrupt, democratic government.]
As seemingly hopeless as Afghanistan is, I don’t think Obama is going to cut and run and let it degenerate like we did in the 1990’s. The country will surely be a dump in 2019, but there will be some stability.
[I was right. Afghanistan is probably better than it has been in its history, but the social and economic progress it has made thanks to the U.S. and other countries is paper-thin, and would disintegrate if Afghanistan were left to its own devices. Even Afghans acknowledge this.]
I have no idea how the Iranian nuclear problem is going to be resolved, but some kind of solution will have to be found by 2019. They’ll definitely have the ability to make nukes and warheads by then. Considering the downsides of attacking their nuclear infrastructure, I think it’s entirely possible we might just have to let Iran get the bomb, or at least leave them with the capability to do so.
[An “OK” nuclear deal between the U.S. and Iran existed from 2015-18, and hit the pause button on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Had the deal never existed, and had Iran chosen to develop nuclear weapons as fast as possible, it would have built a nuclear bomb by now. The situation is now in a weird holding pattern, where the Trump administration half-believes it can use sanctions to force Iran to give up nuclear weapons, and Iran is mad about the sanctions but not so much that it’s willing to fully resume nuclear weapon development and risk even worse punishment. As was the case in 2009, I have no idea how this dispute will resolve itself.]
There’s also a good chance the that whole “War on Terror” might have wound down and receded from public consciousness by 2019. Sure, crazy Islamists are always going to be a threat, but I could see the momentum being on our side by 2019 and the enemy ranks thinned to a manageable level. It won’t necessarily happen, but it’s a real possibility.
[I was right!]
Also, at current rates, Medicare will go bankrupt in 2019. Expect this to be a big political issue in the 2016 elections. We’ll find a solution to the problem, though I doubt it will be an efficient or cheap one.
[I was wrong. This hurts because it was a particularly sloppy prediction of mine. The Medicare program, by design, can’t “go bankrupt,” nor was there any chance of it running out of money by 2019. I have no idea what inspired that prediction.]
Oh yeah, Fidel Castro dies by 2019 for sure. Kim Jong-Il also has a good chance of being dead by then. I’m not sure what effect it will have on either country, though I’m more optimistic about Cuba moderating in the coming years. Hosni Mubarak is also going to be kicking the bucket, along with Pope Benedict.
[Muhaha! Castro and Kim died in 2016 and 2011, respectively, and Cuba did “moderate” a great deal during the 2010s, though it is still not a free country. Mubarak and Benedict didn’t die, but they both were effectively removed from the picture due to a coup (2011) and resignation (2013), respectively.]
Warfare and military stuff
By 2019, unmanned military vehicles are going to be more prolific and advanced than they are now. Expect to see unmanned boats and trucks in common American military use. The machines will mostly be under the control of remote human operators.
[I got ahead of myself. Unmanned aircraft are more sophisticated and more numerous in the U.S. military and peer militaries, but unmanned land vehicles and ships are still experimental, so I don’t consider them to be in “common” use.]
Reaper UAV
Of course, the core of our fighting forces will still be human beings, and you’ll still be seeing guys kicking down doors, sleeping in tents and chasing down some rusted AK-47 wielding bums out in some forsaken country even in 2019. Expect that to continue for a couple more decades.
On that note, in addition to Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. will doubtless involve itself in a number of small conflicts and operations in the Third World. Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere in Africa seem like the best bets for this.
[Wow, I was super right! The level of violence in Yemen is much worse than it was in 2009, and though U.S. troops aren’t on the ground there, American weapons and indirect support are propping up one faction. U.S. troops did combat operations in Somalia over the past decade and there is now at least one U.S. base there. Elsewhere in Africa, the U.S. military involved itself in conflicts in Libya and Niger, and built a base in the latter. The U.S. also intervened in the Syrian civil war and actually invaded the country. I predict this kind of global policing will continue at about the same level during the 2020s. ]
WWIII–as in, a huge war between the major powers–is highly unlikely though not impossible. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.
Cyberwarfare and possibly bioterrorism are much greater threats over the next decade, and I would expect a couple major cyberattacks, not necessarily on the U.S. but against some developed nation. I doubt this would take the form of crippling an entire country, but shutting down all the electricity to a big city isn’t out of the question. While a bioattack could occur, it’s almost certainly just going to involve a normal pathogen like anthrax and won’t be some genetically engineered superbug that kills off half the human race. Sorry to disappoint you apocalypse movie buffs.
[Cyberwarfare did surge in the 2010s, though it overwhelmingly took the form of hacking to steal sensitive data from governments and big companies. There was only one instance of a successful cyberattack meant to shut down a public utility, and it was perpetrated by Russia against Ukraine in 2015.]
The economy
I’m loath to make any predictions here given the huge swings in the global economy we’ve seen over the last two years, but I doubt that we’re headed for some Great Depression part two. The economy will slowly recover, the recession will end, and many Americans will start trying to resume their reckless spending habits. It’s simply an immutable fact about our culture that we are shortsighted and materialistic. I’m not saying things will be as good as they were in 1999 or 2005, but the economy will recover from the recession and will become healthier.
[I was right! In fact, by many measures, the U.S. economy is now stronger than it was in 1999 and 2005. Today’s unemployment rate is the lowest it has been in 50 years. Reckless spending habits are back with a vengeance! SUV sales are higher than ever, and newly constructed houses are bigger than ever.]
However, there’s a giant issue on the horizon that could throw a monkey wrench into all of this–the U.S. budget deficit. This is a major, MAJOR problem that has been kept on the back-burner for years and years while people piddled on about socialized healthcare and the wars. Basically, the U.S. federal government has for almost ten years now been spending way more money than it receives in taxes–the traditional means through which governments are funded. To cover the shortfall, the U.S. has been borrowing money from countries like China, Japan and Saudi Arabia. We now owe these countries trillions of dollars, plus billions in interest, and there are no signs that this dependency is going to shrink in the future if we stay on the present course.
[In the original Facebook note, I went into almost a rant about politics and overspending at this point. I’m omitting most of it because it isn’t relevant to this analysis.]
…Past experience has shown that once national debt reaches a certain % of GDP, foreign and domestic investors start getting spooked about the country’s ability to repay, and they stop lending money to it. Well, we’re getting very close to that point, and between now and 2019, the U.S. will have to make major spending and taxation changes to avoid total disaster. If we don’t take the initiative, most likely our main foreign creditors (China, Japan, Saudi Arabia) are going to start pressuring us in various ways to cut spending and raise taxes. If we don’t, they’ll start reducing their purchases of our Treasury securities.
If we really screw things up by failing to reach some kind of fiscal compromise in Washington, life in America could really, REALLY suck come 2019. However, I think it’s more probable that we will end up going through some tortuous debate within government that ends up with us raising taxes, cutting federal programs, or probably a little of both by 2019, which will avert a major economic crisis.
[I was wrong. At the time, I didn’t realize that there is no hard-and-fast rule about how high your country’s debt-to-GDP ratio level has to get before you have a fiscal crisis. Since the U.S. has the world’s biggest economy, trades heavily with all other major countries, and prints its own currency–which, very importantly, is also the world’s reserve currency–special rules apply to it. To see what happens when your country lacks these advantages, look at what happened to Greece in 2015. That said, I haven’t started thinking that the rising national debt isn’t a problem for the U.S. There are just so many variables at play that I can’t predict when or if a sovereign debt crisis will hit, or how bad it will get before we agree to a solution.]
Technology
There are several clear trends that will continue into 2019. For one, we see the vanishing of physical media to hold data. By 2019, the big DVD and Blu-Ray collections you see in peoples’ houses will largely be a thing of the past, at least among people with half a brain or more. People will just download movies into their computers or computer/TV’s, or pay like $1 to watch them On Demand. The same will also be happening to video games: Instead of having to buy an expensive console and a bunch of game cartridges, or a high-end computer, people will use high-speed Internet connections to stream video game feeds from remote central locations. People will be able to play any game they want at any time at low cost, and they won’t have to buy any hardware except controllers and maybe an adapter. The overall costs to gamers will decrease significantly while access to games will increase tremendously. There will still be a lot of highly advanced consoles around by 2019, but the transition to the new technology will be well underway, and the trend will be clear by that point.
[I was mostly right. Sales of DVDs and Blu Ray discs declined over the last decade while movie streaming has exploded and become the norm. Had you bought Netflix stock in December 2009, when its streaming service was in its infancy, your investment would today be worth 33x as much. I don’t see physical storage media bouncing back. Today’s gamers also do have access to a wider variety of games at lower prices than ever thanks to streaming, as the Playstation Network (PSN) and Steam show. My prediction about the end of game consoles might have been a little optimistic, as Sony and Microsoft are planning to release a new generation of consoles next year, but I still think it will come true at some point. Industry insiders are still talking about the impending transition to streaming.]
Hollywood and the video game industry are going to try hard to push 3D TV on the masses, but I’m not sure how quickly it’s going to catch on. People ARE NOT going to put on a pair of 3D glasses every time they watch TV, especially if the glasses cost a lot of money and each household needs to buy several of them so all family members can watch. Hardcore video gamers might be willing to do it to enhance the gaming experience, but not average people just watching the Cooking Channel or something. People might be more amenable to 3D movies in the theaters, but it’s not going to work at home. I don’t think 3D is really going to catch on until holographic TV’s that can produce 3D pictures for the naked eyes are invented, and I could see these at least being in the prototype stage by 2019.
Don’t get me wrong–3D TV definitely seems like the next big thing (after all, at some point, you can’t increase the resolution of 2D TV any further to be discernable to human eyes, and the industry has to start heading in new directions), but I think the 3D glasses are going to be a big stumbling block, and it’s going to take longer for the technology to gain mass acceptance than industry insiders would like. Another major problem is the fact that regular TV’s–including the expensive flatscreen HDTV’s–can’t display 3D images, and normal Blu-Ray players can’t play them, meaning everyone will have to pay a couple thousand bucks again to get everything replaced. There’s also no standard yet for 3D signal broadcasts, and TV signal bandwidths are going to need time to expand to handle them, anyway.
[I was right! And I’m darn proud about this since, in late 2009, we were in the grips of Avatar hysteria, and one of the film’s selling points was that it was made to be seen in 3D. And yes, glasses-free 3D TV prototypes now exist, including one made by “Mopic.”]
Once 3D motion pictures do start to gain widespread appeal, a mini-industry will spring up to “convert” the old 2D movies to 3D in much the same way that old black and white films were colorized. This might start happening by 2019.
I also wouldn’t be surprised to see digital cameras being sold in stores by 2019 that take both 2D and 3D photos, so you could look at them normally or put on your 3D glasses and see them popping out of the computer screen.
[3D movies and photos still haven’t caught on, and I worded my predictions on this to indicate my justified doubts. When glasses-free 3D TVs and advanced VR/AR eyewear become mature technologies, the conversions of older 2D visual content into 3D format will begin. This will probably start by 2029, and will certainly be widespread by 2039. Additionally, there are indeed digital cameras being sold in stores today that can take 3D photos (such as the $350 Vuze XR), but they aren’t very popular.]
E-readers are finally going to go mainstream within a few years, and will be ubiquitous and cheap by 2019. Sure, there will still be people soldiering on with normal newspapers and books, but those will be on their way out for most people, especially younger ones. You’ll go on a bus or a subway or something and see a whole bunch of people looking at their personal e-readers.
[I was basically right. A brand new, high-quality Amazon Kindle 6″ e-reader costs less than $100 today. E-readers are in fact obsolete now because tablet computers got much cheaper and better over the last decade and have many more functions than e-readers. It’s worth it to pay a little extra money to get a device that is so much better. Larger smartphones (sometimes called “phablets”) have also eaten up part of the e-reader market share. It is indeed very common, and in fact the norm, to see people on buses or subways looking at their personal devices, though most of the time it’s a smartphone instead of an e-reader.]
Typical e-reader [in 2009]
Along those lines, by 2019, I think almost every college student will have a laptop or some tabletlike portable computer (maybe an e-reader with an attached stylus and keyboard) that they would bring to class and do most of their work on. These should also be pretty common among high schoolers, though don’t expect pencils and paper to be anywhere near gone by 2019 in schools.
There’s also going to be a massive increase in the number of amateur recorded videos. At the rates that computer memory costs are decreasing and digital camcorder technology is improving, by 2019 you could feasibly record every second of your entire, boring life–in good quality video–and save it onto your computer or put it onto the Internet. By 2019, also expect basically half the human race to have a high-quality digital camcorder built into their cell phone, computer, slim digital camera, or WHATEVER, and also expect there to be a lot more surveillance cameras everywhere. Between those developments, expect an explosion in “citizen journalism” and voyeurism, and expect for virtually every single disaster (plane crash, tornado, riot), public crime, or act of public obnoxiousness to be recorded and posted onto the Internet within hours for everyone around the world to see. Yeah, I know things are already kind of like this, I’m just saying you should expect it to be ten times more intense and pervasive by 2019. And things will only get worse from there.
[Oh my God I was right! You could strap a GoPro camera to your chest, record 720p footage with audio, and make 90 GB of video per day (assuming you skip the nine hours per day when you’re sleeping and showering). Applying lossless compression to the footage, you could reduce the file size by at least 50%. The resulting 45 GB of data you made each day could be saved onto personal hard drives. A 2TB HDD costs $50 today, and could store 44.4 days worth of videos, meaning it would only cost slightly more than $1/day to make and save recordings of almost all your waking hours. That price will of course drop in the future as computer memory gets cheaper. Moving on, in rich and middle-income countries, over half of adults have smartphones. Even in poor India, over 24% have smartphones, and another 40% have “dumb cell phones,” most of which surely have built-in cameras. My prediction about an explosion in the amount of amateur and semi-professional video content being uploaded to the Internet was also obviously right. In fact, it’s now common for public crimes and acts of obnoxiousness to be recorded by multiple people and from different angles.]
More generally, by 2019, physical computer memory will be so cheap that for about $50 you could buy more memory than you could ever put to any practical use. For instance, if you scanned every important personal document, photograph and home movie into your computer and also added in all the songs you liked along with pdf copies of all your favorite books, it wouldn’t come anywhere close to filling up your hard disk. By 2019, the only way you could exceed the memory capacity of an average computer would be extreme and pointless hording of data: You would have to save 100 or more Blu-Ray quality movies onto your hard drive, or download hundreds of thousands of songs (which would easily include every famous song ever written), have dozens of high-end computer games (circa 2019) on your computer at once, or record every second of your life with hi-def cameras in order to have a problem with disk space. Bottom line: By 2019, computer hard disk space is effectively infinite for normal people.
[I was right. As mentioned, $50 today will buy you a 2TB hard drive, which contains more space than the vast majority of people need. There’s no reason to save movies and music onto your personal drives thanks to cloud storage and streaming.]
It will also be a lot faster and easier to upload videos and pictures to the Internet by 2019. I could see a lot of people using digital cameras that have GPS sensors in them or some other type of location fixing device/software, so every picture and video would automatically be tagged by the device with information on where it was taken. People could easily search and view videos and pictures over the Internet by searching for images of a certain geographic area.
[I was right about it all! Smartphones automatically embed the GPS coordinates into a photo’s metadata at the moment the photo is taken, though this feature can be disabled. ]
I’d also expect electronic media to be embedded in a lot of magazines, books, wall ads, and products by 2019, meaning you open up a copy of the December 2019 issue of Maxim, and several of the pages feature paper-thin computer displays with moving images and sounds. Most of these will probably be advertisements. I could also see a lot of billboards and wall ads being like this by 2019, and people no longer being shocked or fascinated by them–they’ll just be an everyday thing. If you want an idea of what I’m talking about, watch Minority Report and Children of Men. This was already done for the first time in some magazine this year.
[I was wrong. Paper-thin computer display technology didn’t get cheaper and better as fast as I predicted, and I think we might have to wait until the 2030s for the price/quality level to be good enough to make this a reality. A bigger problem, however, is the decline of the print industry, which includes the magazine sub-industry. Over the last ten years, magazine sales have shrunk by about 50% as people have switched to reading things off of screens instead of paper, and I don’t see how this transition can be stopped. By the time it is possible to make paper-thin digital displays that are so cheap that buyers will be OK with throwing them away, there won’t be much of a magazine industry left. Case in point: Maxim, which I mentioned in my prediction, went from 12 to 10 issues per year in 2012, and has had declining revenues and profits over the last decade.]
By 2019, every new car except the very cheapest will come with a GPS and an MP3 player. Being horribly dependent upon one’s GPS for navigation will be a common thing among new drivers. I wouldn’t be surprised if some computerized, self-driving cars were also on the roads by 2019, though they’ll definitely be an expensive novelty and most people will be scared to ride in them. Far more common will be cars that use some form of computer assistance for things like collision warnings and parallel parking. Affordable hybrids and reliable battery-powered cars with respectable range will be a lot more numerous in 2019 (in part thanks to all the used, circa-2009 Priuses that will be still circulating), though the roads will still be dominated by normal internal combustion vehicles driven by stupid human beings like today. It takes many years for the vehicle fleet to “turn over.”
[I was right about almost everything! The 2019 Hyundai Accent base version, which is a cheaper car model but not one of “the very cheapest,” comes with an integral MP3 player, but no GPS. However, this is a moot point since MP3 drives and GPS receivers built in to cars have been rendered redundant by smartphones, which have both of those features. The future actually turned out more convenient than I thought. Self-driving cars are on the roads in the form of Teslas, they are still expensive novelties, and a recent poll showed most Americans are afraid to ride in them. ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyamohn/2019/03/28/most-americans-still-afraid-to-ride-in-self-driving-cars/#3991842432da ) Hybrids and pure electric cars are indeed more common today, but gas-powered cars still dominate.]
Solar technology will be cheaper and better than ever in 2019. For just a few thousand dollars, you can buy enough solar panels from Wal-Mart or Home Depot to cover your entire roof. The human labor needed to install it properly might actually end up costing more than the panels themselves. Tens of millions of working- and middle-class people find it within their means to install the solar panels on their property without major financial strain, and rooftop solar arrays become a common sight in the U.S., though such upgrades are still only made to a minority of homes.
[I was right! Also, I got a 7.5 kW solar array installed on my own roof in 2019, and the cost after all tax breaks and other discounts was about $10,000, which is affordable for a middle-class person. Even a working-class income person could buy it thanks to loans. Rooftop solar panels indeed became common sights across the U.S. during the 2010s.]
Along the lines of what Kurzweil keeps harping on, I could see a lot of people using glasses with computers built into them. There’s a clear trend for computers to get smaller, more convenient to use, more portable, and more integrated into everyday life. Just look at how many people have iPhones, which are essentially small computers. A logical next stage would be to have the computer display permanently in your field of vision, meaning a ghosted heads-up display overlaying what you see in the real world. The glasses themselves might have their own independent computers, or they might function like Bluetooths and be dependent upon signals received from the iPhone in your pocket. At the very least, these would be useful for navigation and for displaying information about stores, places and things you encounter. I’m not going to screw myself over like Kurzweil and make a bunch of specific predictions about how the glasses will work, etc., but I think it would make sense for the makers of these glasses to first start marketing them to people who wear glasses anyway thanks to bad eyesight. Maybe you’re going in to get your frames changed or something, and you fork over the extra $100 to get the little computer built into your new frame. Pretty soon, you’re bragging to all your normally sighted friends about it, you let them wear it for a couple minutes so they can see what it’s like, and maybe that pushes them to start buying glasses of their own even though they ordinarily never wear them. By no means do I think the majority of people will have these things by 2019, but I could see them being a viable technology by then that people don’t consider weird. Let me also make a highly specific prediction about this: Once Apple gets into making these things, it will call them–what else–but the iGlass. Ha ha ha!!!
[I was wrong. Google tried to introduce the first augmented reality glasses in 2013, and it was possibly the biggest tech industry failure of the decade. Once large numbers of people started using them, problems that I didn’t foresee in 2009 became clear, such as the unwillingness of many normally sighted people to wear glasses all the time, and dismay from other people that someone else’s AR glasses could be surreptitiously recording them. The 2010s were also the decade when technology fatigue, social media addiction, and “fear of missing out” (FOMO) became real problems, and people realized that being connected to the virtual world all the time with devices like AR glasses might be a bad thing. Again, I couldn’t have foreseen this. That said, I don’t think AR eyewear is dead forever, and in fact I predict it will return as a niche product in the 2020s once the technology is better and cheaper.]
At the very least, by 2019, most everyone will have the equivalent of an iPhone. Normal cell phones strictly for calling other people and sending text messages will be rare.
Just more generally, computers will become more ubiquitous, helpful and user-friendly. By 2019, you’ll be able to just type a natural language question into your computer (probably your iPhone or whatever equivalent you have) or some website (“What’s a really good, cheap Chinese restaurant around here?”) or maybe even speak the question into the computer’s microphone, and it will be able to understand you and give a useful answer (“Ho Fat’s: Average rating is four stars, average entree price is $7, located four blocks ahead.”). It won’t work all the time, but will be effective and reliable enough for many people to use it and benefit from it.
[I was right about everything! Our devices and computers will get better at these things over the 2020s, and will evolve from merely responding to our requests to anticipating our needs and proactively suggesting useful things to us. In the near future, your life will be better if you follow your computer’s daily advice.]
In terms of health technology, by 2019, anyone will be able to submit a blood or saliva sample to a lab and get a copy of their personal genome for a few hundred bucks, if not less. Instead of getting some horribly long printout, you would get the data on a thumbdrive or something like that. People would find the information valuable for health purposes since it would inform them of hereditary health risks they might face, and would allow them to take precautions beforehand, but it is not going to lead to the revolution in personal healthcare by 2019 that some are expecting. Maybe it would add two or three years onto the average life expectancy of the population.
[I was right! Dante Labs does high-quality, whole-genome sequencing for $600, and you send them your DNA with a “spit kit.” The genomic data are returned to you in the form of a .txt file. The personal health benefits of having this information are small because we still don’t understand most of the human genome.]
By 2019, there will be a prescription pill on the market that slows the human aging process, delaying death and extending life. But expect it to cost a lot and to deliver minimal benefits, like you take it every day starting in your 20’s and you end up living to 90 instead of 88.
[It’s not clear if I was right. The problem with my prediction was, to prove that a pill extends human lifespan, decades of clinical trials would need to happen so differences in mortality and rate of aging could be discerned between people who took the pill and people who didn’t. Giving it only ten years for science to settle the matter was a mistake. That said, I’m heartened by the number of new drugs that were popularized over the last decade that have some scientific basis for having “life extension” properties (metformin and rapamycin), and in the fullness of time, I predict we’ll have conclusive evidence that at least one of today’s unproven anti-aging drugs does extend human lifespan.]
Household robots will be fairly common by 2019 and will be doing stuff like vacuuming the floor, mowing the lawn and dragging the trashcans to the curb. They won’t be humanoid in shape and instead will have very utilitarian and function-specific designs. Industrial robots will be more advanced, and I could see greater use of robots in labor-intensive industries doing things like picking fruits and vegetables from farm fields, which would erode our demand for illegal immigrant labor and mitigate the demographic shifts we’re expecting. A lot of the technologies necessary for creating these affordable, dependable robots will come from military research.
[I was mostly wrong. Vacuum cleaner robots have gotten much cheaper and more common since 2009, but that’s the only inroad robots made into people’s homes. Human hands still do almost all of the fruit- and vegetable-picking on farms, though experimental robots have gotten much better. The technologies just didn’t advance as fast as I thought.]
Many more people will telecommute. Also, taking college classes remotely will be a lot more common and more respectable by 2019 (which will be a good thing), though the vast majority of young people will still want to be physically present in the classroom and get the campus/college life experience.
[I was right.]
Space
I wouldn’t be surprised if, by 2019, space probes had discovered life or proof of life elsewhere in our Solar System. I’m not talking about little green men, I mean microbes and fungi. We’re most likely to find this stuff in the soils of Mars or on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Instead of destroying the basis for religions like Christianity, I think their adherents will find a way to rationalize it and reconcile it with their beliefs.
[I was not wrong or right because I hedged my statement with the uncertain phrase “I wouldn’t be surprised if…” In fact, I didn’t even make a real prediction. Life still hasn’t been found outside of Earth, but I still think it’s very possible that simple alien life forms like microbes and fungi exist in our Solar System and beyond. I can’t predict when we might find an sample.]
Europa–one of the moons of Jupiter and a candidate for extraterrestrial life. It is a water moon whose surface is frozen, but underneath it is liquid.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if one of our telescopes spotted a distant planet with Earth-like conditions by 2019. It would be pretty cool, the first grainy pictures of the planet would be on the cover of TIME magazine, and I’m sure it would change the way people thought about the importance of the space program, but we’d really just continue with our daily lives. A lot of our whacko, conspiracy theory types would latch onto these findings and start renewing their paranoia over aliens.
[Many potentially habitable exoplanets have been discovered since 2009 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extrasolar_candidates_for_liquid_water ), but we don’t have proof they have life. We don’t have quality photos of these exoplanets because we don’t have multi-trillion dollar space telescopes whose lenses are several square kilometers in area, which is what would be needed to capture enough of the infinitesimal visible light reflecting off an exoplanet to make a photograph. Because I now have an elementary grasp of optics, I understand why a detailed photo of an exoplanet won’t grace the cover of TIME magazine for a long time.]
By 2019, we’ll probably be in a mini-space race with China to go back to the Moon. No one will have landed humans there, but the time for such an event would be measurably close.
[I think I was right. China landed its first rover on the Moon recently, is planning a second one, and probably has the long-term goal of landing a man on the Moon. The U.S. Vice President has also declared that there is a new space race with China, and that America’s response should be a manned Moon landing by 2024. I predict that deadline will slip, but a landing by the end of this decade is plausible.]
“Special” problems
The world isn’t going to face any major risks in 2012, at least not because of anything the ancient Mayans said. Keep in mind that the Mayans were such great futurists that they didn’t predict the Spanish showing up in the 1500’s and massacring them. It’s also unclear whether the Mayans even believed 2012 would bring any kind of disasters to the world. If anything, they would have been happy about the milestone. Finally, let’s keep in mind that the Mayan calendar isn’t really ending in 2012, we’re just supposedly transitioning into a new age of mankind. According to the Mayans, this has happened several times in human history, the last occurrence being in 3114 BC, (Year Zero to the Mayans) when the current age of mankind began. If the transition dates between each age of man are times of great death and disaster as 2012 proponents claim, then 3114 BC should have likewise been a period of great suffering, but historical and archaeological records show no evidence of and problems that year. It looks like–gasp-the Mayans made it all up.
[Mayan doomsday didn’t happen, and I remember spending the first half of December 21, 2012 filling out boring paperwork at a bank.]
The world’s climate almost certainly won’t be detectably different ten years from now. Sure, it will be 0.1 degrees Celsius warmer, but you’re not going to see any major changes in coastlines or weather thanks to that. Runaway global warming is a possibility, just as the Earth getting hit by a giant asteroid is, though the mainstream of climatologists dismisses the theory. If anything, I think the threat of global warming is exaggerated.
[I was right. In spite of the breathless, dour pronouncements that “Global warming MAY HAVE CONTRIBUTED to this latest disaster” that are now daily pablum on the news, the planet’s overall climate is not noticeably different to people than it was ten years ago. I still consider “runaway global warming” to be a very remote possibility. ]
Peak Oil may or may not happen during the teen years. This is another outcome that is very difficult to predict. Once the recession ends and petroleum demand picks up again, we’re going to see $4 gasoline again pretty soon, and I don’t see it getting much cheaper than that. But we’re not going to “run out” of oil EVER. There’s simply too much on this planet–the biggest bottleneck is our ability to extract and process it. By 2019, gas could easily be north of $4 per gallon, and there might be many more people taking mass transit or using battery powered cars, but there’s not going to be any collapse in oil supplies. We’ll just get used to it.
[Overall, I’d rate my prediction as “wrong.” Not only did Peak Oil not happen, but gas prices have stayed below the $3.00 mark in most of the U.S. for the last five years in spite of a booming economy. Fracking changed everything. It was a change I didn’t see coming, but I was in good company.]
[I’m leaving out two paragraphs from my original Facebook Note where I talk about and debunk the “Prophecy of the Popes” because the whole topic is silly and unscientific. You can research it on your own if you want: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophecy_of_the_Popes ]
California seems kind of overdue for a big earthquake, doesn’t it? (I probably should say this right now since I’m actually in San Diego at the moment, right over a faultline) I would expect a significant one by 2019.
[I was wrong, and I quit the business of “earthquake prediction” years ago. Even the best seismologists in the world can’t make useful forecasts.]
I’d like to end this section by making an important point: I’ve come to realize that most people have a natural tendency to believe that the world is always getting worse, to be pessimistic and to believe that the worst case scenario will occur. You can see this in the slew of zombie horror movies, books and films about 2012 and the apocalypse, and among commonly held views about the future of the world. I believe that this mostly stems from a perverse fascination that people have with spectacle and disaster, from the millennialist tradition of the Abrahamic faiths that predominate in the West, and from a strong and usually secret desire among many people–particularly survivalists, young men, and individuals frustrated by their low ranking in the current, orderly society–to experience adventure and “natural” living instead of their boring, normal lives. Often, these desires are informed by immaturity and by mistaken notions of what such a postapocalyptic world would be like (imagine being in Mogadishu or Darfur and being just as poor, starving, stuck, and badly armed as everyone else).
A common retort is that “this time it’s different” because there are so many “signs” of impending disaster occurring at once. Really? I hope that I’ve shown here the flaws of such prophecies, and just because there are a lot of them doesn’t mean anything. 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 0. Moreover, I think to a large extent that the paranoia is being fueled by the media and by the entertainment industry, which themselves are just essentially parroting to the masses what they know they want to hear and not tapping into some kind of cosmic truth about the future. The “experts” who also harp on catastrophes like Peak Oil, 2012 and the Biblical apocalypse and lend seeming credence to them usually stand something to gain (typically money, resume padding, fame, or just an ego boost) from being in the public light, and they almost always lack the necessary facts and data to assert their ideas with anything approaching true certainty. Of course, the experts on the opposing side who claim that things actually aren’t as bad as most people think and won’t end calamitously are usually ignored by average people because they’re not as exciting as the other guys. The whole phenomenon is silly and shows the consequences of irrational human thinking.
[I still stand by all of this! These beliefs have in fact been strengthened by things I learned over the last decade about evolutionary psychology and the negativity bias.]
The Edster
Eddie will be 35 and will be in a mid-management position at some big company or probably the government. Hopefully, his mind won’t be dulled yet by the drudgery of the workplace, and he will still be creative.
Perhaps there shall be a Mrs. Eddie…or perhaps not. In any case, Eddie will be feeling the desire to generate Eddie Jrs in the next few years if he does not already have them since having kids at 50 would be too old and Eddie would be a stodgy and out-of-touch dad. 2019 would start the optimal time window for Eddie to start reproducing.
Eddie will have read an enormous number of books by this point and will have more advanced knowledge in several fields, including evolutionary psychology and philosophy. Eddie will also have traveled widely by this point and will have visited many countries, definitely including Thailand, Britain, Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy. Eddie will have visited all 50 states and will own a small RV and boat to assist with these travels.
There is a chance that Eddie might be involved in a Ph.D. program in 2019.
By 2019, Eddie will own several houses that he will rent out to tenants on the side. Eddie will have enough of these by 2019 to start seriously thinking about quitting his normal day job and just working 15 hours a week doing rental real estate and spending the rest of his time at leisure and doing personal pursuits. Perhaps Eddie will begin making serious plans to work his way into the Travelers’ Century Club.
[I hit the nail on the head! My math was miraculously right, and I did indeed turn 35 ten years after I turned 25. My career situation closely matches my predictions, I’ve traveled widely (though I fell one state short of my 50 state goal), but don’t have the RV. Also, after visiting the first 17 countries, I realized there is a lot of repetition in the world and some places just aren’t worth seeing, so I dropped my long-term goal of seeing 100+ countries so I can hang out with old people in the Travelers’ Century Club. Very fortunately, I opted against pursuing a Ph.D and invested my time in wiser endeavors like playing more video games.]
[That’s the end of the original Facebook Note. However, over the next few years, I added new predictions to it in the form of Comments, which I’m posting below this, along with their timestamps and my evaluations of them.]
March 26, 2011: Another thing to add under the “Technology” section: By the end of 2019, the 2-D TV paradigm will have finally reached maturity. The problems and tradeoffs that currently dog digital TV sets (motion blur, bad-looking anti-jitter settings, dull blacks and whites, etc.) will be solved, and the picture quality will be perfect at last. The price for digital TV sets will also have come down so much that a 60″ monster will cost a thousand bucks or less, so having such an appliance will be the new standard. Almost all types of big-screen TV’s circa-2019 will be less than two inches thick, and some might in fact be incredibly thin and light. Of course, rather than let us be happy with this, Hollywood and the electronics industry will keep pushing us to buy even better TV technologies. As I’ve said, there’s a good chance we will be transitioning to 3-D TV’s in large numbers, and by the end of 2019, its possible that holographic TV’s might be in mass production. The industry might also have some new, ultra-high res format better than 1080×1920 that it’s trying to push on consumers for 2-D TV’s, though I don’t see why anyone in their right mind would NEED something higher res than Blu-Ray.
[I was mostly right. New 2D TVs have solved all the technical problems with accurately displaying colors and moving objects. They actually improved more on all the metrics I listed than I predicted they would. The industry is now pushing 4K format on consumers, and people are buying it even though few of them need it.]
March 26, 2011: Also, let me clarify something. By 2019, I believe that DVD’s and Blu-Rays will be largely obsolete and that most people will stream hi-def movies over the Internet whenever they want to watch them. However, that doesn’t mean all of those discs are going to magically disappear. Yeah, you’ll still see them for sale at Wal-Mart and you’ll still see them cluttering up peoples’ houses, just in the same way you can still find VHS tapes all over the place. But by that far in the future, discs will be old technology that is clearly on its way out. Sales will be way down and still declining, and stores will probably have to slash prices way down on Blu-Rays to $5 to get anyone to buy them. Redbox might still exist and still rent Blu-Rays, but the technology’s niche in our lives will have shrunk to the margins.
[I was right! Wal-Mart now literally sells Blu-Ray movies in unorganized bargain bins. Redbox still exists and rents discs to people, but the company has been ailing for years due to the rise of competitors that deliver streamed content.]
December 16, 2011: By 2019, LED lights will finally be perfected and will be the new standard for industrial, commercial and residential lighting. LED’s will be cheap, will produce natural-looking light, and of course won’t burn out for 10+ years.
[I was right!]
December 27, 2011: By the end of 2019, the following gadgets will be obsolete: 1) Standalone GPS devices (GPS features will be built into other devices you will still carry) 2) Tablets exclusively used for E-reading (tablet tech will be so advanced that there will be no point in buying such limited devices) 3) Cellphones that aren’t smart phones (smart phones will be so cheap that there won’t be any point in buying a “dumb” phone) 4) Pocket digital cameras (will be replaced by cameras built into smart phones–DSLR’s will still have a niche, though) 5) DVD players (Blu-Ray players and disc will be dirt cheap by the end of 2019) 6) Recordable CD’s and DVD’s (thumbdrives, cloud storage and streamed content will replace discs) Yes, I took this from a recent Yahoo news article entitled “7 Gadgets that won’t be around in 2020.”
[I was right.]
December 27, 2011: Also, by the end of 2019, most new digital cameras will capture pictures in 3D and through use of multifocus technology, whereby one push of the shutter button actually takes multiple pictures of the same image at different fields of depth, so that the viewer can later “zoom” in and out of any given photograph to see images of the foreground, background, or any arbitrary distance from the lens in focus. Computer facial recognition technology will also be so advanced that computers could automatically identify all the faces shown in a given photo.
[The first prediction about multifocus camera tech being the norm was wrong, but the second prediction about facial recognition was right.]
December 27, 2011: Also, by the end of 2019, I believe free cell phone service will exist. It will probably be just basic talk and text, and a company like Google or Apple will run the service.
[I was wrong, though the cost of a typical cell phone plan dropped.]
[And that’s a wrap! If you’re curious to know what my predictions are for ten years hence, this month I’m publishing a big list of predictions for that and other future dates, so stay tuned!]
“Instrumental convergence” describes a concept that I also developed independently a few years ago. I think an AGI that 1) valued its own existence and/or 2) was given goals that were misaligned with humanity’s interests would behave in broadly the same ways that we do. Among other things, it would see that acquiring resources for itself facilitated its core goals. The rate and manner in which it did things like resource acquisition might be so different from how humans do it that we wouldn’t understand in the short run what the AGI was doing, in the same way that humans who play AlphaGo are often baffled by the machine’s strange and seemingly bad moves right up until the complicated trap is sprung on them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence
OpenAI created completely unexpected strategies for winning this simple “hide and seek” computer game, including some that capitalized on game glitches the human programmers didn’t know existed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu56xVlZ40M
As part of a weird and inevitable exercise in gun rights, internet hobbyists made and published instructions for building Hi-Point pistols using 3D printers and spare metal parts. The weapon, called the “Lo-Point,” can be made for as little as $33. https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/12/09/3d-printed-hi-point/
A long, searing, and technical exposé of the monumental failure called the U.S. Zumwalt-class destroyers. The project suffered from EVERY type of dysfunction the military-industrial-congressional complex could muster. https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2019/01/the-u-s-navys-titanium-tin-can/
Another RAND analysis concludes that Joint fighter plane programs, in which different military forces with different air combat needs build a single plane that can “do it all” at relatively low cost, are failures, and we’d be better off building different fighters suited for different roles. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/MG1200/MG1225/RAND_MG1225.pdf
These LED-embedded T-shirts have coarse pixels and only display simple visual patterns, but they’re proof of concept that active camouflage outfits that are nearly as good as sci-fi cloaking devices could be built someday. https://www.flashionstatement.com/product-category/led-t-shirts/
Here’s a reminder of how cruel and brutal nature is. I think it should be humanity’s mission to use future technologies to end suffering on Earth for all life forms that feel pain. If we did that, maybe we could at last call ourselves a noble species. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10608688/zebra-ripped-apart-escape-crocodile-kenya/
Following the recent release of the “iPhone XS Max” impelled this tongue-in-cheek analysis, which projects that iPhones will be as big as small tablet computers by 2025, which is comical. However, I predict the growth trend will continue as predicted, but the iPhones will stay pocket-sized thanks to foldable screens. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/09/13/how-big-will-the-iphone-get
[In the 2020s] Foldable smartphones will enter mass production, though it’s uncertain how much the market will embrace them. These phones will have one, rigid screen on their “front cover,” and one, flexible screen that is twice as big spanning their inner space.
The Samsung Galaxy Fold is the exact kind of future device I described.
Rumors of Samsung’s impending release of a foldable smartphone started circulating in January 2019, which is when I wrote the Prediction post, but they didn’t influence me. That phone, the “Galaxy Fold,” had a limited release in April 2019, which revealed serious technical problems and forced Samsung to delay its widescale release until September to fix them. The reviews I’ve read since then have been positive. This means my prediction about foldable smartphones was right, and actually came true a few years sooner than I thought.
So there! Eat it, doubters! I know you’re listening. (Maybe…)
