In 2012, long before I started this blog but a few years into my unofficial side career as a futurist, I predicted that 1 terabyte (TB) thumb drives would cost no more than $20 apiece by the end of 2019. I was wrong.
I made that prediction in the form of a Facebook Note, which I’ve copied and pasted to the end of this blog entry (see far below). At the time, I used Kryder’s Law (the observation, first made in 2005, that hard drive density doubles every 13 months) and did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to extrapolate price trends in solid state memory, leading to my 2019 date. Prices didn’t come down as fast as I predicted, and today $20 will at best get you a 256 GB thumb drive. I saw that offer during a Black Friday sale, when retailers usually offer the lowest prices of the year, and in this case, of 2019. This means I fell two price-doublings short.
On Black Friday 2019, the 256 GB “Patriot Memory” thumbdrive was $20 on Newegg.com.
(Quick aside: Other solid-state memory deals I saw on Black Friday 2019:
1 TB Western Digital EasyStore external hard drive – $40 (Best Buy)
128 GB SanDisk MicroSD card – $14 (Walmart))
I mistakenly assumed that Kryder’s Law applied to the sorts of solid-state computer memory chips found in thumb drives. In fact, the Law only applies to the older type of rotating, magnetic hard disk memory drives, meaning I had even less of a foundation for my trend calculations. If there is no fundamental force of science, technology, industry, or nature undergirding an observed phenomenon, then there’s no reason to expect the phenomenon to continue. I had correctly observed that thumb drives were getting cheaper year over year, but assumed without basis that the improvement would continue at that same rate until 2019.
However, even if Kryder’s Law had applied to solid-state memory, it wouldn’t have saved my 2012 prediction since, in the years after, the Law stopped holding true. The graph below shows the average cost-per-byte of HDD space from 1990 – 2005. Note the graph has a logarithmic scale, and the blue price points neatly form into a non-horizontal line, indicating an exponential trend. You can understand why Mark Kryder looked at the data in 2005 and created his eponymous Law of exponentially improving price performance (specifically, with a doubling every 13 months). Extrapolating the Law into the future, as indicated by the red line, a 1GB HDD should have only cost one cent by the end of 2019. This means a 1TB HDD should have cost $10.
2019 is now nearly over, and the cheapest, newly manufactured 1TB HDD I found in my research cost $35. The difference is because, after 2005, HDD prices stopped decreasing at the rates Kryder had observed.
The trend’s downward slope flattens a little from 2005-2011, and then flattens A LOT from 2012 onward. Muddling the data is the fact that massive floods hit Thailand in 2011, which disabled several important computer chip factories, reducing global HDD supplies and spiking their prices. However, after the last of those factories was restarted in 2013, the cost-per-byte trend didn’t return to its pre-2011 downward slope. The slope since 2013 has been much shallower.
The sharp slowdown in progress is thanks to the current HDD technological paradigm, called “perpendicular magnetic recording” (PMR), reaching the limits of what it can achieve. The next technological paradigm, called “heat-assisted magnetic recording” (HAMR), has been delayed by several years because various engineering and reliability problems have proven harder to solve than expected. In fairness, Mark Kryder couldn’t have foreseen this in 2005.
So yup, I was wrong. I own up to it, understand the reasons for my mistake, and won’t repeat it. So let me do a new prediction, this time based on more relevant data, and more cautiously couched. Here are historical price data for flash memory:
Eyeballing the scatterplot, the rate of price-performance improvement slowed down a lot around 2010. I don’t know what happened then, but there’s enough of a disconnect for me to say that the trend could best be represented with two, downward-sloping straight LSRLs (least-square regression lines):
The horizontal purple line represents the $20 mark. The yellow line depicts the old cost trend, and had it continued, a the cost of a 1TB flash drive would have dropped to $20 in 2014. However, for reasons unknown, we’re now operating under the shallower red line, and it doesn’t intersect with the purple line until the middle of 2022, which suggests that the 1TB/$20 milestone will happen by the end of that year.
I believe that the red line trend will persist until at least 2022 because it is being largely driven by advances in 3D NAND “chip stacking” techniques, and the technological paradigm doesn’t seem like it will reach its limits in the next three years. Thumb drives, like the one made by “Patriot Memory” I showed a picture of, have about 64 flat memory chips, stacked vertically like a pack of cards. Adding an extra layer increases the device’s overall memory storage capacity, while raising the cost of manufacture by a disproportionately small amount. This year, semiconductor companies started mass producing flash drives with 128 layers of chips, and it shouldn’t be long before they are incorporated into common thumb drives, resulting in a near-doubling of price-performance. It’s unclear how far the “layer stacking” method can go before it hits a technical/cost wall (at some point, the marginal downsides of adding a new chip layer exceed the benefits thanks to longer manufacturing times, higher costs, and unacceptably high defect rates), but for what it’s worth, experiments are now underway to make 176 layer chips, and some semiconductor engineers believe the ultimate practical limit is somewhere in the hundreds of chip layers.
Even if the practical limit to the height of the chip stacks arrives before the end of 2023, another doubling of 3D NAND price-performance could be had by finding ways to shrink the sizes of the individual cells that store bits of data on each chip. Shrinking cell sizes from the current 40nm to an entirely doable 30nm would almost double the price-performance. (Older, single-layer flash chips have 15nm cells, which are much harder to make than 30nm cells.)
In summary, I think the current rate of price-performance improvement for thumb drives will continue until a 1TB thumb drive costs only $20. They will probably be that cheap by the end of 2022, but because I’m cautious, I predict the milestone will be reached by the end of 2023.
(My original prediction, published on November 23, 2012)
2019: Your life on a cheap thumbdrive
Left: A little more than a month ago Right: Today (Black Friday)
In late 2005, I bought my first thumbdrive. It cost $20 and only had 1 GB.
That means that, in seven years, the cost-performance of flash memory has undergone about 5.5 doublings.
If the trend continues, in another seven years (2019), $20 will buy you a 1 terabyte (TB) thumbdrive. A terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes.
So what? Why care? Think about how big 1 TB is:
You could fit more than 300,000 high-res digital JPEG photos from a good D-SLR, or 250,000 full-length MP3 songs onto 1 TB. As massive as your digital photo and music collections are, they don’t come anywhere close to maxing out 1 TB. Go check your files now if you don’t believe me. You’d be lucky to break the 100 GB mark.
Let’s go a step farther and assume that you scanned all of your old film photos into your computer as well. Even doing color scans at 600 DPI (which is very hi-res), each individual photo will be at most 6 MB in size. Even if you had 10,000 old photos from the pre-digital days (which you almost certainly don’t), it would all take up only 60 GB.
Now, go a step farther: Tally up the filesize of all your email accounts, all your saved Word documents and misc personal files on your PC hard drive, your Facebook account, and any other worthwhile personal digital data you have. Add it to all the rest, and I’ll bet you’re still not close to the 1 TB mark.
Take another step and also estimate how big your stock of important personal papers (i.e. – Social Security card, driver’s license and other forms of ID, old report cards, old handwritten letters, drawings, diaries, financial statements, medical records, etc.) would be if you scanned them all. Assume each page is 8.5″ x 11″, color scanned, and done at a 300 DPI resolution (which is more than adequate for written documents). Let’s be generous and assume that each resulting JPEG file is 1 MB. Even 10,000 pages of scanned stuff only takes up 10 GB.
Throw in all your scanned VHS home movies, and any other barely relevant archives of your life, and you’re probably still not close to the 1 TB mark.
So, by 2019, you’ll be able to fit almost all the documents that describe who you are, what you like, and what you did onto a $20 device that is smaller than your pinkie finger. And as needed you could copy all that data onto other cheap backup devices in the space of a few minutes. There’s something truly surreal about that, and it really drives home how much our technology is surging past the familiar human pace of thinking, living, and generating meaningful content.
The only way you could easily break the 1 TB barrier for personally relevant computer files is if you started constantly recording your life with cameras in hi-def 1080p. If you set up such cameras throughout your house, in your car, and maybe on your person in order to permanently record every boring second of your existence, then you would blow past 1 TB pretty fast.
Such a practice is called “lifelogging,” and I think it will become common in the 2020’s as hard disk prices drop orders of magnitude lower than the $20 per TB example discussed in this Note, and as hi-res cameras become tiny and dirt cheap. If we’re wearing augmented reality glasses by then, they will be embedded with 1080p cameras and microphones, and you could easily set it to constantly record everything and upload it onto some central hard drive where you keep all your files. AI by that point should be good enough to actually understand much of what’s going on in your recordings, so you could verbally ask your Google Glasses something like: “Hey, what was the name of that guy with the red hair and leather jacket that I met last month at that dinner?” and it would be able to scan through your past recordings and find the answer for you.
But I’ve gotten off-track…just know that we are entering an age in which everything will be recorded and stored digitally forever. Near-perfect records of everything that happened, everything that was written, and everything that was said will exist by 2030. With instantaneous access to their lifelogs, no one would ever forget anything. The fuzziness and subjectivity of human memory would be superseded by clear, objective recordings. And with cameras all over the place and being constantly carried around by random people, it will be very hard to escape detection and to live anonymously.
Comment added later: I forgot something: By 2019, you will also be able to get you personal genome sequenced for less than $1,000 and store it digitally in your $20 thumbdrive. Your DNA should take up at most 2 GB of storage space if compressed.
U.S. life expectancy peaked in 2014 and has been declining since then due to an increase in middle-aged deaths from drug overdoses, alcohol, suicide, obesity, and smoking. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2756187
Preimplantation genetic diagnosis done on a round of ten human embryos could, at best, allow the selection of a child whose IQ was 3 points higher and whose height was 3 cm greater than average. This makes clear how much we have yet to learn about human genetics, and how little the first generation of genetically engineered humans will change things. https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0092867419312103
All Earthly DNA and RNA is made of five nucleic acids (G, A, T, C, U), but there are at least one million alternative nucleic acids that have different molecular structures but similar chemical properties. (Though I suspect we evolved to use the nucleic acids that were the most stable and least energy-intensive to make.) https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jcim.9b00632
No one knows how big the largest possible element is. The low estimate is one with an atomic weight of 126, and the high estimate is that there is no maximum size at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_periodic_table
For a long time, I’ve been meaning to read The Size of Nations, which uses mathematical modeling to explain why today’s countries are as big as they are. Well, at least I’ve read this excellent critique of that book, which raises the interesting argument that economies of scale don’t keep growing as a nation’s size and population grow, and that in fact, it might start suffering from diseconomies of scale past a certain size and diversity level. https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=550
Russian troops have taken control of the Sirrin Air Base in northern Syria following the evacuation of U.S. troops. Syria’s government never gave U.S. troops permission to be in their country, but Russia’s troops were invited in. https://www.rt.com/news/473504-russia-secures-us-base-syria/
Here’s a review of the “Sierra 3 BDX,” a “smart scope” that crunches data from a pocket-sized rangefinder to tell you how to aim your rifle. The farther away the target is, the higher it will tell you to aim to compensate for bullet drop. Technology like this and guided bullets will someday turn any soldier into a sniper. https://youtu.be/kzZpNot2FfQ
In the year 2019 a race of “bioengineered” humans called “replicants” exists, and are used as slave laborers and soldiers on space colonies. While made superior to ordinary humans in most respects (strength, pain tolerance, intelligence), replicants have deliberately capped lifespans of only four years to limit the amount of damage they can do should they rebel against their masters, and they are not allowed on Earth itself. This doesn’t stop a small group of replicants–including several who have enhanced combat traits–from hijacking a space ship and traveling to Earth to confront their “creator,” the head of the company the manufactured them and all other replicants, and to force him to technologically extend their lifespans. The replicants smuggle themselves into Los Angeles, where the company’s headquarters is.
Upon discovering the infiltration, the LAPD hires a bounty hunter named “Rick Deckard” to hunt down the replicants. Deckard’s background is never clearly explained, but he has good detective skills and has killed replicants before. As he follows leads and tracks them down, Deckard meets a love interest and is forced to confront his biases about replicants and consider existential questions about them and himself.
An important fact must be clarified and emphasized. Replicants ARE NOT robots or androids; they are “bio-engineered” humans. They don’t have metal body parts or microchip brains, and instead are made of flesh and blood like us. As proof, there are several scenes in Blade Runner where the replicant characters are hurt or killed, and they display pain responses to injuries and bleed red blood.
A replicant named “Zhora,” dead after being shot in the back with a handgun. Note the blood.
Additionally, it’s made clear that replicants can only be distinguished from humans by a sit-down interview with a trained examiner in which the subject is asked a series of odd questions (called the “Voight-Kampff Test”) while their physiological and spoken responses are analyzed. The procedure looks like a polygraph test. If replicants were robots with metal bones, microchip brains, or something like that, then a simple X-ray scan or metal detector wand would reveal them, and there’d be no need for a drawn-out interview. Likewise, if the replicants were organic, but fundamentally different from humans, then this could also be quickly detected with medical scans to vision their bones and organs, and with DNA tests to check for things like something other than 46 chromosomes.
By deduction, it must be true that replicants are flesh-and-blood humans, albeit ones that are produced and birthed in labs and biologically/genetically engineered to have trait profiles suited for specific jobs. The available evidence leads me to suspect that replicants are “assembled” in the lab by fitting together body parts and organs, the way you might put together a Mr. Potato Head. They are then “born” as full-grown adults and come pre-programmed with fake memories and possibly work skills. Replicants are human slaves, technologically engineered for subservience and skill.
Analysis:
Los Angeles will be polluted and industrial. In the film, Los Angeles is a grim, hectic place where fire-belching smokestacks are within sight of the city’s residential core. During the few daylight scenes, the air is very hazy with smog. This depiction of 2019 fortunately turned out wrong, and in fact, Los Angeles’ air quality is much better than it was when Blade Runner was released in 1982.
This improvement hasn’t just happened to L.A.–across the U.S. and other Western countries, air pollution has sharply declined over the last 30-40 years thanks to stricter laws on car emissions, industrial activity, and energy efficiency. With average Westerners now accustomed to clean air and more aware of environmental problems, I don’t see how things could ever backslide to Blade Runner extremes, so long as oxygen-breathing humans like us control the planet.
National average pollution figures from the U.S. EPA
Of course, the improvements have been largely confined to the Western world. China and India–which rapidly industrialized as the West was cleaning itself up–now have smog levels that, on bad days, are probably the same as Blade Runner’s L.A. This has understandably become a major political issue in both countries, and they will follow the West’s path improving their air quality over the coming decades. In the future, particulate air pollution will continue to be concentrated in the countries that are going through industrial phases of their economic development.
This looks like a shot from Blade Runner, but is actually a photo taken on a smoggy evening in Beijing in 2013.
The building, named “Pangu Plaza,” on a clear day.
Real estate will be cheap in Los Angeles. One of the minor characters is a high-ranking employee at the company that makes the replicants. He lives alone in a large, abandoned apartment building somewhere in Los Angeles. After being tricked into letting the replicants into his abode, he gestures to the cavernous space and says: “No housing shortage around here. Plenty of room for everybody.” In fact, the exact opposite of this came true, and Los Angeles is in the grips of a housing shortage, widespread unaffordability of apartments and houses, and record-breaking numbers of poorer people having to live on the streets or in homeless shelters.
The problems owe to the rise of citizen groups that oppose new construction, historical preservationists, and innumerable new zoning, environmental, and labor laws that have made it too hard to build enough housing to keep up with the city’s population growth since 1982, and priced affordably for the people who actually work there. Blade Runner envisioned a grim 2019 for Los Angeles, courtesy of unchecked capitalism (e.g. – smokestacks in the city, smoggy air, megacorporations that play God by mass producing slaves), yet the city (and California more generally) actually went down the opposite path by embracing citizen activism, unionists, and big government, ironically leading to a different set of quality of life problems. Fittingly, the building that stood in for the derelict apartment building in Blade Runner has now been fully renovated, is a government-protected landmark, and is full of deep-pocketed, trendy businesses.
The vast majority of Los Angeles’ land area is covered by single-family homes and low-rise buildings.
There will be flying cars. One iconic element of Blade Runner is its flying cars, called “spinners.” They’re shaped and proportioned similarly to conventional, road-only cars, and they’re able to drive on roads, but they can also take off straight up into the air. Clearly, we don’t have flying cars like this today, and for reasons I discussed at length in my blog entry about flying cars, I doubt we ever will.
I won’t repeat the points I made in that other blog entry, but let me briefly say here that the spinners are particularly unrealistic types of flying cars because they don’t have propellers or any other device that lifts the craft up by blowing air at the ground. Instead, they seem to operate thanks to some kind of scientifically impossible force–maybe “anti-gravity”–that lets them fly almost silently. There are brief shots in the film where low-flying spinners belch smoke from their undersides, which made me wonder if they were vectored thrust nozzles like those found on F-35 jets. But because the smoke comes out at low speed, the undermounted nozzles are not near the crafts’ centers of gravity, and the smoke isn’t seen coming out when the spinners are flying at higher altitudes, I don’t think they help levitate the spinners any more than a tailpipe helps a conventional car drive forward on a road.
A flying car expelling exhaust from its underside during takeoff..
People will smoke indoors. In several scenes, characters are shown smoking cigarettes indoors. This depiction of 2019 is very inaccurate, though in fairness the people who made the movie couldn’t have foreseen the cultural and legal sea changes towards smoking that would happen in the 1990s and 2000s.
People in Blade Runner like smoking indoors. No one stops them, and there aren’t any “No Smoking” signs.
When judging the prediction, also consider that if we average people and the legal framework were more enlightened, vaping indoors would be much more common today. While not “healthy,” vaping nicotine is vastly less harmful to a person’s health than smoking cigarettes, and science has not yet found any health impact of exposure to “secondhand vape smoke.”
A recent photo of a young woman smoking an e-cigarette.
There will be genetically engineered humans. In Blade Runner, mankind has created a race of genetically engineered humans called “replicants” to do labor. The genetic profile of each replicant is tailored to the needs of his or her given field of work. For example, one of the film’s replicant characters, a female named “Pris,” is a prostitute, so she is made to be physically attractive and to have average intelligence. All of the replicant characters clearly had high levels of strength and very high pain tolerances.
Digital dossier on the replicant “Pris”
In the most basic sense, Blade Runner was right, because genetically engineered humans do exist in 2019. There are probably dozens of people alive right now who were produced with a special in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure called “mitochondrial replacement therapy” in which an egg from a woman with genetically defective mitochondria is infused with genetically normal mitochondria from a third person, and then the “engineered” egg is combined with sperm to produce a zygote. The first such child was born in 1997.
Additionally, there are now two humans with genetically engineered nuclear DNA, and they were both born in November 2018 in China after a rogue geneticist used CRISPR to change both of their genomes. Those edits, however, were very small, and will probably not manifest themselves in any detectable way as the babies grow up, meaning Blade Runner‘s prediction that there would be genetically engineered adults with meaningfully enhanced strength, intelligence, and looks in 2019 failed to come true. This is because it has proven very hard to edit human genes without accidentally damaging the target gene or some other one, and because most human traits (height, IQ, strength, etc.) are each controlled by dozens or hundreds of different genes, each having a small effect.
For example, there’s no single gene that controls a human’s intelligence level; there are probably over 1,000 genes that, in aggregate, determine how smart the person is and in what areas (math, verbal, musical). If you use CRISPR to flip any one of those genes in the “smart” direction, it will raise the person’s IQ by 1 point, so you just have to flip 40 genes to create a genius. But CRISPR is an imprecise tool, so every time you use it to flip one gene, there’s a 20% chance that CRISPR will accidentally change a completely different gene as well, perhaps causing the person to have a higher risk of cancer, schizophrenia or a birth defect.
The discovery of CRISPR was a milestone in the history of genetic technology, and it improved our ability to do genetic engineering by leaps and bounds, but it’s simply not precise enough or safe enough to make humans with the major enhancements that the replicants had. We’ll have to wait for the next big breakthrough, I can’t predict when that will happen, and I doubt anyone else could since there’s no “trend line” for this area of technology.
That’s not to say that we couldn’t use existing (or near-term) genetic technologies to make humans with certain attributes. A technique called “preimplantation genetic screening” (PGS) involves the creation of several human zygotes through IVF, followed by gene sequencing of each zygote and implantation of the one with the best genetic traits in the mother. This isn’t true “genetic engineering,” but it accomplishes much the same thing. And you could sharply raise the odds of getting a zygote with specific characteristics if you did the IVF using sperm or eggs from adults who already had those those characteristics. For example, if you wanted to use genetic technology to make a physically strong person, you would get the sperm or eggs of a bodybuilder from a sperm/egg bank, use them for an IVF procedure, and then employ PGS to find the fertilized egg that had the most gene variants known to correlate with high strength. This would almost certainly yield a person of above-average physical strength, without making use of bona fide “genetic engineering.” There are no statistics on how many live babies have been produced through this two-step process, but if we assume just 0.1% of IVF procedures are of this type, then the number is over 8,000 globally as of this writing.
Furthermore, I can imagine how, within 20 years, genetic engineering could be applied to enhance the zygotes farther. Within that timeframe, we will probably discover which mitochondrial genes code for athleticism, and by using mitochondrial replacement therapy, we could tweak our PGS-produced zygote still farther. Let’s assume that there are ten nuclear genes coding for physical strength. The average person has five of those genes flipped to “weak” and five flipped to “strong,” resulting in average overall strength. Our carefully bred, deliberately selected zygote has nine genes flipped to “strong” and one flipped to “weak.” Since we only have to change one gene to genetically “max out” this zygote’s physical strength, the use of CRISPR is deemed an acceptable risk (error rates are lower than they were in 2019 anyway thanks to lab techniques discovered since then), and it works. The person grows up to be a top bodybuilder.
There will be genetically engineered super-soldiers. The leader of the replicant gang in Blade Runner is named “Roy Batty,” and he was designed with traits suited for military combat. Having governments or evil companies make genetically engineered or cloned super-soldiers is a common trope in sci fi, but I doubt it will ever happen, except perhaps in very small numbers.
First, I simply don’t believe that the government of any free country, and even most authoritarian ones, would be willing to undertake such a project. And even if one of them were, the diplomatic costs imposed by other countries on the basis of human rights would probably outweigh the benefits of having the small number of super-soldiers. Mass producing millions of super-soldiers to fill out an army (to be clear, there was no evidence of anything but than small-batch production in Blade Runner) is even less plausible, as it would be too fascist and dehumanizing a proposal for even the most hardline dictatorships. Censure from the international community would also be severe. What damage can you do with an army of genetic super-soldiers if years of economic sanctions have left you without any money for bullets?
Second, a country’s ability to make super-soldiers will be constrained by its ability to raise and educate them. In spite of their genetic endowments, the super-soldiers would only be effective in combat if they were educated to at least the high school level and psychologically well-adjusted, which means costly, multi-year investments would need to be made. Where would the state find enough women who were willing to be implanted with super-soldier embryos and carry them until birth? If the government coerced its women into doing this, the country would become an international pariah for sure, and its neighbors would strengthen their own armies out of concern at such derangement.
Who would raise the children? State-run orphanages are almost universally terrible at this, and too many of the super-soldiers would turn out to be mentally or emotionally unfit for military service, or perhaps fit, but no better overall than a non-genetically engineered soldier who was raised by a decent family. If the government instead forced families to raise the super-soldier kids, doubtless many would be damaged by family dysfunction at the hands of parents who didn’t want them or parents who raised them improperly.
Third, by the time we have the technology to make genetic super-soldiers at relatively low cost, and by the time any such super-soldiers get old enough to start military service, militaries will probably be switch to AIs and combat robots that are even better. As I predicted in my Starship Troopers review, a fully automated or 95% automated military force could exist as early as 2095.
And if the super-soldiers were all clones of each other, they could develop very close personal bonds, come to feel alienated from everyone else, and behave unpredictably as a group. Identical twins and triplets report having personal bonds that can’t be understood by other people.
That said, I think human genetic engineering will become widespread this century, it will enable us to make “super people” who will be like the most extraordinary “natural” humans alive today, some of those genetically engineered people will serve in armed forces and under private military contractors across the world, and they will perform their jobs excellently thanks to their genetically enhanced traits. While it’s possible that some of these “genetic super-soldiers” will be made by governments or illegally made by evil companies, people like that will be very small in number, and dwarfed by genetic super-soldiers who are the progeny of private citizens who decided, without government coercion, to genetically engineer their children. Those offspring will then enter the military through the same avenues as non-genetically engineered people, either by joining voluntarily or being drafted. Yes, there will be genetically engineered super-soldiers someday, but their presence in the military or in private security firms will be incidental, and not–except in some rare cases–because a government or company made them for that purpose and controlled their lives from birth.
There will be “artificial animals”. While visiting the luxurious office of a tycoon, Deckard sees the man’s pet owl flying around, and he’s told that it is “artificial.” Later, he comes across an artificial pet snake, whose scales (and presumably, all other body parts) were manufactured in labs and bear microscopic serial numbers. To the naked eye, both animals look indistinguishable from normal members of their species. It’s unclear whether “artificial” means “organic” like human replicants, or “mechanical” like robots with metal endoskeletons and computer chips for brains. We have failed to create the latter, and the robotic imitations of animals we have today are mostly toys that don’t look, move, or behave convincingly. Our progress achieving the former (replicant animals) is more equivocal.
Our technology is still far too primitive for us to be able to grow discrete body parts and organs in a lab and to seamlessly join them together to make healthy, fully functional animals. This is the likeliest process used to make the replicants, so in the strictest sense, we have failed to live up to vision Blade Runner had for 2019. However, we are able to genetically modify animals and have done so many times to hone our genetic engineering techniques. For example, Chinese scientists used CRISPR to make dogs that have twice the normal muscle mass. For all I know, they’re now the pets of a rich man like the film’s tycoon.
Barbra Streisand with her cloned dogs.
Additionally, we are reasonably good at cloning animals, and, considering the vagueness of the terms “artificial” and “bioengineered” as they are used in the film, it could be argued that they apply to clones. Cloning a cat costs about $25,000 and a dog about $50,000, putting the service out of reach for everyone but the rich, and there are several rich people who have cloned pets, most notably Barbra Streisand, who had two clones made of her beloved dog after it died. A celebrity of her stature owning cloned animals is somewhat analogous to Blade Runner‘s depiction of the tycoon who owned the artificial owl.
There will be non-token numbers of humans living off Earth. At several points in Blade Runner, references are made to the “off-world colonies,” which are space stations and/or celestial bodies that have significant human populations. Advertisements encourage Los Angelinos to consider moving there, which implies that the colonies are big enough and stable enough to house people other than highly trained astronauts. The locations of the colonies aren’t described, but I’ll assume they were in our solar system.
This prediction has clearly failed. The only off-world human presence is found on the International Space Station, it only has a token number of people (about six at any time) on it, only elite people can go there, and its small size and lack of self-sufficiency (cargo rockets must routinely resupply it) means it fails to meet the criteria for a “colony”.
There are no plans or funds available to expand the ISS enough to turn it into a true “space colony,” and in fact, it might be abandoned in the 2020s. Other space stations might be built over the next 20 years by various nations and conglomerates, but they will be smaller than the ISS and will only be open to highly trained astronauts.
While a manned Moon landing is possible in the next ten years (probably by Americans), I doubt a Moon base comparable in size and capabilities to the ISS will be built for at least 20 years (note that 14 years passed from when U.S. President Reagan declared the start of the ISS project and when the first part of it was launched into space, and no national leader has yet committed to building a Moon base, which would probably be even more expensive). In fact, in my Predictions blog post, I estimated that such a base wouldn’t exist until the 2060s. It would take decades longer for that base or any other on the Moon to get big enough to count as a “colony” that was also open to large numbers of average-caliber people. A Mars colony is an even more distant prospect due to the inherently higher costs and technological demands.
I think the human race will probably be overtaken by intelligent machines before we are able to build true off-world colonies that have large human populations. Once we are surpassed here on Earth, sending humans into space will seem all the more wasteful since there will be machines that can do all the things humans can, but at lower cost. We might never get off of Earth in large numbers, or if we do, it will be with the permission of Our Robot Overlords to tag along with them since some of them were heading to Mars anyway.
Cars will be boxy and angular instead of streamlined. Many of the cars shown in the movie are boxy and faceted. While this may have looked futuristic to Americans in 1982, boxy, angular cars were in fact already on their way out, and would be mostly extinct by the mid-90s. The cars of Blade Runner look retro today, and no mass-produced, modern vehicles look like them.**
Deckard’s car.
A van
U.S. fuel economy standards sharply increased from 1975-85. Blade Runner was filmed in 1982, and its artistic vision was to some extent influenced by the aesthetics of the time, hence the boxy future cars.
The change to curvaceous, streamlined car bodies was driven by stricter automobile fuel efficiency requirements, enacted by the U.S. government in response to the Arab Oil Embargoes of the 1970s. Carmakers found that one of the easiest ways to make cars more fuel efficient was to streamline their exteriors to reduce air resistance.
A 1982 Toyota Corolla
A 2019 Toyota Corolla
Since there’s no reason to think vehicle fuel efficiency standards will ever come down (if anything, they will rise), there’s also no reason to expect boxy, angular cars to return.
Just after I’d finished analyzing this car prediction, look who showed up.
**IMPORTANT NOTE I’M ADDING AT THE LAST MINUTE: On November 21, 2019, Elon Musk debuted Tesla’s “Cybertruck” at an event in Los Angeles, and the vehicle is a trapezoidal, sharp-angled curiosity that looks fit for the dark streets of Blade Runner. While I doubt it heralds a shift in car design, and it’s possible the Cybertruck could be redesigned between now and its final release date in 2021, I’d be remiss not to mention it here.
Therapeutic cloning will be a mature technology. There’s a scene in the film where two fugitive replicants confront and kill the man who designed their eyes in his genetics lab. It further establishes the fact that the replicants are made of organic parts that are manufactured in separate labs and then assembled. This technology is called “therapeutic cloning,” and today it is decades less advanced than Blade Runner predicted it would be.
Two replicants confronting the geneticist who designed their eyes.
We are unable to grow fully-functional human organs like eyes in labs, and can barely grow rudimentary human tissues using the same techniques. The field of regenerative medicine research was in fact dealt a serious blow recently, when a leading scientist and doctor Paolo Macchiarini was exposed as a fraud. Dr. Macchiarini gained worldwide fame for his technique of helping people with terminal trachea problems by removing tracheas from cadavers, replacing the dead host’s cells with stem cells from the intended recipient, and then transplanting the engineered trachea into the sick person. For a time, his work was touted as proof that therapeutic cloning was rapidly advancing, and that maybe Blade Runner levels of the technology would exist by 2019. Unfortunately, time revealed that Macchiarini had faked the results in his medical papers, and that most of his patients died soon after receiving their engineered tracheas.
The actual state-of-the-art in 2019 is lab-made bladders. Being merely an elastic bag, a bladder is much simpler than an eye.
Legitimate work in regenerative medicine is overwhelmingly confined to labs and involves animal experiments, and there are no signs of an impending breakthrough that will enable us to start making fully functional organs and tissues that can be surgically implanted in humans and expected to survive for non-trivial lengths of time. The best the field can muster at present is a few dozen procedures globally each year, in which a small amount of simple tissue, such as a bladder or skin graft, is made in the lab and implanted in a patient under the most stringent conditions. (Of note, only a small fraction of people with missing or non-functional bladders have received engineered bladders, and the preferred treatment is to do surgery [called a “urostomy”] so the person’s urine drains out of their abdomens through a hole and into an externally-worn plastic bag.) As noted in my Predictions blog entry, I don’t think therapeutic cloning will be a mature field until about 2100.
Advertisements will be everywhere. In Blade Runner, entire sides of buildings in L.A. have been turned into huge, glowing, live-action billboards advertising products. This prediction was right in spirit, but wrong in its specifics: Advertisements are indeed omnipresent, and the average person in Los Angeles is probably more exposed to ads in 2019 than they would have been in 1982. However, the ads are overwhelmingly conveyed through telecommunications and digital media (think of TV and radio commercials, internet popup ads, browser sidebar ads, and auto-play videos), and not through gigantic billboards. Partly, I think this is because huge video billboards would be too distracting–particularly if they also played audio–and would invite constant lawsuits from city dwellers who found them ruinous of open spaces and peace.
Which is worse: Huge video billboards or being constantly pummeled with spam emails, digital ads, and the knowledge that your personal internet data is being sold and traded without your control?
No one will turn on the lights. Blade Runner is a dark movie. No, I mean literally dark: Almost all of the scenes are set at night, and no one in the movie believes in turning on anything but dim lights. It may have been a bold, iconic look from a cinematography standpoint, but it’s not an accurate depiction of 2019. People do not prefer dimmer lights now, and in fact, nighttime artificial light exposure is higher than at any point in human history: satellites have confirmed that the amount of “light pollution” emanating from the Earth’s surface (mainly from street lights and exterior building lights) is greater than ever and still growing. Also, people now spend so much time staring into glowing screens (smartphones, computer monitors, TVs) that circadian rhythm disruption has become a public health problem.
If your light is so bright that it can be seen in space, then you’re wasting a lot of electricity.
Intriguingly, I don’t think this trend will continue forever, and I think it’s possible the world will someday be much darker than now. I intend to fully flesh out this idea in another blog entry, but basically, as machines get smarter and better, the need for nighttime illumination will drop. Autonomous cars will have night vision, so they won’t need bright headlights or bright streetlights to see the road. Streetlights will also be infused with “smart” technology, and will save energy by turning themselves off when no cars are around. And if intelligent machines replace humans (and/or if we evolve into a higher form), then everyone on Earth will have night vision as well, which will almost eliminate the need for all exterior lights.
Note that, in controlled environments, machines can already function in the dark or with only the dimmest of lights. This is called “lights-out manufacturing.” As machines get smarter and move from factories and labs to public spaces, they will bring this ability with them. My prediction merely seizes upon a proof of concept and expands upon it.
It will be possible to implant fake memories in people. Very early in a replicant’s life, he or she is implanted with fake memories. The process by which this is done is never revealed, but it is sophisticated enough to fill the subject’s mind with seeming decades of memories that are completely real to them. We lack the ability to do this, though psychological experiments have shown in principle that people can be tricked into slowly accepting false memories.
Since memories exist as physical arrangements of neurons in a person’s brain and as enduring patterns of electrochemical signaling within a brain, it should be possible in principle to alter a person’s brain in a way that implants a false memory in him or her, or any other discrete piece of knowledge or skill. However, this would require fantastically advanced technology (probably some combination of direct brain electrical stimulation, hypnosis, full-immersion virtual reality, drugs, and perhaps nanomachines) that we won’t have for at least 100 years. This is VERY far out there, along with being able to build humans from different body parts grown in different labs.
Computer monitors and TVs will be deep, and there will not be any thin displays. In one scene, we get a good look at a personal computer, and it appears to have an old-fashioned CRT monitor, and is almost a foot deep. Additionally, flat-panel TVs, computer monitors, laptops, or tablets and never seen in the film. This is a largely inaccurate depiction of 2019, as flat-panel screens are ubiquitous, and the average person owns several flat-screen devices that they interact with countless times per day.
Deckard sitting on his couch while looking at his computer screen. It looks like there might also be a second screen at the far right, facing away from him. Note that he doesn’t like turning on the lights.
I said the depiction was largely inaccurate because, even though CRT monitors and TVs are obsolete and haven’t been manufactured in ten years, millions of them are still in use in homes and businesses across the world, mainly among poor people and old people who lack the money or interest in upgrading. There’s even a subculture of younger people who prefer using old CRT TVs for playing video games because the picture looks better in some ways than it does on the best, modern OLED displays. In short, while it’s increasingly rare and unusual for people to have deep, CRT computer monitors in their homes, it is common enough that this scene from Blade Runner can be considered accurate in its depiction.
The median and mean lifespan of a CRT TV is 15 years, and almost none of them last more than 30 years. With that in mind, functional CRT monitors will not be in use by 2039, except among antique collectors. The Baby Boomers will be dead by then, and their kids will have thrown away any CRT screens they were clinging to.
People will talk with computers. Deckard’s apartment building has a controlled entry security feature: anyone who enters the elevator must speak his or her name, and the “voice print” must match with someone authorized to have access to the building, or else the elevator won’t go up. Also, in his apartment, Deckard uses voice commands to interface with his personal computer. Blade Runner correctly predicted that voice-user interfaces would be common in 2019, though it incorrectly envisioned how we would use them.
Electronic, controlled entry security technology in common areas of apartment buildings, like elevators and lobbies, are very common, but overwhelmingly involve using plastic cards and key fobs to unlock scanner-equipped doors. In fact, I’ve never seen a voice-unlocked door or elevator, and think most people would feel silly using one for whatever reason.
Smart speakers like the Amazon Echo are also very common and can only be interfaced with via speech. Modern smartphones and tablets can also be controlled with spoken commands, but it’s rare to see people doing this.
This brings up the valuable point that, though speech is an intuitive means of communication, we’ve found that older means of interface involving keyboards, mice, and reading words on a screen are actually better ways to interact with technology for most purposes, and they are not close to obsolescence (and might never be). An inherent problem with talking with a computer is you lose privacy since anyone within earshot knows what you’re doing. Also, while continuous speech recognition technology is now excellent, the error rates are still high enough to make it an aggravating way to input data into a machine compared to using buttons. Entering complex data into a computer, such as you would do for a computer programming task, is also much faster and easier with a keyboard, and anything involving graphical design or manipulation of digital objects on a screen is best done with a mouse or a stylus.
To understand, watch this clip of Deckard talking to his computer, and think about whether it would be easier or harder to do that image manipulation task using a mouse, with intuitive click-and-drag abilities to move around the image, and a trackball for zooming in and out: https://youtu.be/QkcU0gwZUdg
Deckard holding a photograph he found.
Hard copy photographs are still around. In that scene, Deckard does the image manipulation on a photograph that he found. He inserts it into a slot in his computer, and it scans it and shows the digital scan on his screen. While hard-copy photographs are still being made in 2019, they’re very uncommon, especially when compared to the number of photographs that were taken this year across the planet, but never transferred from digital format to a physical medium. I doubt that even 0.01% of the personal photographs ordinary people take are ever printed onto paper, and I doubt this will ever change.
Image scanners will be common. The computer’s ability to make a digital copy of a physical image of course means it has a built-in scanner. This proved a realistic prediction, as flatbed scanners with excellent image scan fidelity levels cost under $100. When Blade Runner was filmed, scanners were physically large, very expensive, made low-quality image conversions, and were almost unknown to the general public.
Cameras will take ultra high-resolution photos. The photo that Deckard analyzes is extremely detailed and has a very high pixel count, allowing him to use his computer to zoom in on small sections of it and to still see the images clearly. In particular, after zooming in on the round mirror hanging on the wall (upper right quadrant of the photo shown above), he spots an image of one of the replicants. While grainy, he can still make out her face and upper body.
It’s impossible to tell from the film sequence exactly how high-res the photo is, but today we have consumer-grade cameras that can take photos that are about as detailed. The Fujufilm XT30 costs $800 and is reasonably compact, putting it within the range of average-income people, and it takes very high quality 26.1 MP photos. One of its photos is shown above, and if you download the non-compressed version from the source website and open it in an imaging app, you’ll be able to zoom in on the rear left window of the car far enough to see the patterns of the decals and to read the words printed on them. (https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/12/18306026/fujifilm-xt30-camera-review-fuji-xt3-mirrorless)
Firearms will still be in use. The only handheld weapons we see in the film are handguns that use gunpowder to shoot out metal bullets. One is shown for only a split-second at the start of the movie when a replicant shoots a human, and the other is seen several times in Deckard’s hands. It’s big, bulky, looks like it shoots more powerful bullets than average, and has some glowing lights that seem to do nothing. In short, it’s nothing special, and probably isn’t any better than handguns that most Americans can easily buy for $500 today. Thus, the depiction the 2019’s state-of-the-art weaponry is accurate.
Deckard pointing his pistol.
And I do say “state-of-the-art” because, being an elite bounty hunter on an important mission to kill abnormally strong, dangerous people, Deckard has his choice of weapons, and it says a lot that he picks a regular gunpowder handgun instead of something exotic and stereotypically futuristic like a laser pistol. As noted in my reviews of The Terminator and Starship Troopers, we shouldn’t expect firearms to become obsolete for a very long time, and possibly never.
Video phone calls and pay phones will be common. There’s a scene where Deckard uses a public pay phone to make a video call to a love interest. This depiction of 2019 turned out to be half right and half wrong, but for the better: Pay phones have nearly disappeared because even poor people have cell phones (which are more convenient to use). Video call technology is mature and widespread, the calls can be made for free through apps like Skype and Google Hangouts, and even low-end smartphones can support them.
It’s surprising that video calls, long a staple of science fiction, became a reality during the 2010s with hardly anyone noticing and the world not changing in any major way. Also surprising is the fact that most people still prefer doing voice-only calls and texting, which is even more lacking in personal substance and emotional conveyance. Like talking with computers, using video calls to converse with other humans has proved more trouble than it’s worth in most cases.
Geneticists have made “hornless bulls.” This benefits animal welfare since it’s harder for the bulls to hurt each other, and because chopping off horns is painful. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49962130
Facebook and Google scan any alphanumerical characters they find in user-uploaded photos, and then embed those characters in the image file’s description. That means you can type in a car license plate number or a gun’s serial number into the Google or FB search bar, and find any photos of the car or gun. https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/10/22/google-firearm-serial-numbers/
Objects made of polystyrene plastic break down into CO2 on scales measurable in as little as decades, not millennia as is commonly believed. I predict that all the trash produced by humans will someday be cleaned up. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.9b00532
After the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown, Japan temporarily shut down all its other reactors for safety inspections. This caused the price of energy in Japan to skyrocket, and many people couldn’t afford to pay their heating bills. The number of people–overwhelmingly poorer elderly people–who froze to death as a result far exceeded the death toll from the meltdown itself (only one person dead from radiation exposure). https://www.nber.org/papers/w26395
“Smart plugs” are a versatile device I’ve never heard of: They’re small, Wifi-connected plugs that you insert into your electrical outlets, letting you remotely turn the electricity on or off in those outlets, in turn controlling any devices plugged into them. https://www.amazon.com/Gosund-Compatible-Required-appliances-Certified/dp/B079MFTYMV/
Google’s DeepMind AI just became a “grandmaster” in StarCraft 2, meaning it can beat 99.8% of humans. When the company started this project two years ago, its AI could barely perform basic in-game functions and couldn’t beat anyone. Note that DeepMind has been handicapped in that it can’t issue commands during games faster than human players can (about 264 actions per minute). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1724-z
Google says it has achieved quantum supremacy by building a quantum computer that can do a specific type of math calculation in 200 seconds that the best classical computer would take 10,000 years to do. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1666-5
And Scott Aaronson, a world-renowned theoretical computer scientist, wrote a blog post about both of those press releases, which essentially says Google is right, but by a narrower margin than they claimed, and that all disagreement about this issue will vanish in a few years once quantum computers improve so much that the performance gulf between them and classical computers gets too wide for anyone to contest. https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4372
Here’s an awesome mini-documentary about “extreme ultraviolet lithography”–a new technique for making computer chips even smaller and better than they are. I wish everything on TV were this intelligent and polished. https://youtu.be/f0gMdGrVteI
China has nearly finished a massive new military shipyard that it will use as an aircraft carrier factory. I predict that in about 20 years, China’s military will be strong enough to have at least a 50% chance of defeating the U.S. military in the western Pacific. However, it’s unclear if China will choose to fight even if it has the advantage. They’d much prefer to get what they want through diplomatic and economic pressure, and military intimidation. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-military-carrier-exclusive-idUSKBN1WW0KM
Here’s a fascinating exploration of the different WWII-era design and manufacturing philosophies of the Americans, Germans, and Soviets. It might be unfairly critical of the Germans since it forgets that their smaller pool of manpower might have rightly forced them to focus on making their tanks higher in quality at the expense of quantity. https://www.historynet.com/profiles-cold-steel-making-tanks.htm
Thin, flexible LED sheets like this will someday be incorporated into clothing. I predict this will lead to personal “cloaking devices” made of clothes studded with the LEDs, e-ink sheets, or some other metamaterial and pinhole cameras colored e-ink. The cameras will monitor the appearance of the person’s surroundings and tell the display pixels to change their colors to match. Ski masks made of the same material would let wearers change their facial features, fooling most face recognition cameras and certainly fooling the unaided eyes of humans. The pixels could also be made to glow bright white, allowing the wearer to turn any part of his body into a flashlight. https://youtu.be/5fy91AdzfJw
An important weakness of small, flying drones is that they won’t be able to fly when it’s windy, raining or snowing. This reliability problem will dash any plans to create an economy where the drones have replaced ground vehicles for delivering goods, and seriously hinder efforts to make a military force comprised mainly of small attack drones. https://now.tufts.edu/articles/how-do-birds-survive-storms-and-other-harsh-weather
While writing my recent blog entry on The Physics of the Future, I discovered that author Michio Kaku’s description of the “Kardashev Scale” was wrong. Kaku said that a “Type 1” civilization on the Kardashev Scale was one that was “planetary” in scope, character and energy consumption, and that trends suggested humans wouldn’t achieve this rank until the year 2111. Kaku said that, we were in fact so pitiful at the time of the book’s writing that our civilization was only “Type 0.”
However, in Dr. Nikolai Kardashev’s science paper that established the Scale, he defined a “Type 1” civilization as being one that consumed as much energy as humans did at that time. That means humanity has been a Type 1 civilization since 1964! Kardashev also didn’t say anything about there being a “Type 0” classification.
Convinced that I alone knew of an embarrassing mistake made by one of the world’s foremost pop-science talking heads, I set out to write a blog entry about it titled “The misused and useless Kardashev Scale.” I spent an afternoon reading Kardashev’s original paper and its cited articles to actually understand it, and in other research found online articles and videos where even more smart people had cluelessly espoused a flawed definition of the Scale. This thing was even bigger than I had thought, and I was about to blow the lid off of it! This would finally put my lousy blog on the map!
And then, I found out someone else had already written about this very subject, and had done so with superior prose than I could probably write. J.N. “Nick” Nielsen beat me by five years with his article “What Kardashev Really Said.”
What a waste of my time.
It got me thinking about how much human effort is duplicative, and how much more efficient and creative we would be if we didn’t needlessly reinvent the wheel. Of course, this is impossible for mere humans since never being derivative requires perfect knowledge of everything that everyone else has already said, done, or created, and our minds are incapable of holding that much information. However, it’s easy to see how technology could change this.
Google Image search results for “red robin bird”
Imagine a smartphone app that was connected to the device’s camera. I’ll call the app “Copycat.” Every time you turn on your camera, Copycat starts watching what’s visible through the viewfinder. Once it detects that you’re steadying the camera to prepare to take a still photo, the app would compare the scene in front of you with trillions of other photos available for free on the internet. If you were about to take a picture that looked identical or nearly identical to one that already existed, Copycat would warn you, show you an image of the other picture, and tell you if there were any ways you could, standing there, produce a new type of image. Maybe snap the photo of the songbird from low on the ground, or walk 10 feet to the right to photograph it with that stone building in the background.
This level of technology is well within reach: the image analysis and recognition feature is no different from Google’s “reverse image search.” The second feature could easily arise from a set of deep learning programs that are trained to recognize visually well-composed and aesthetically pleasing photo compositions, and to come up with ways to reposition the elements within an image to raise or maximize those values. Upload enough training data, and it will figure it out.
Copycat is a highly specific example, but it illustrates technology’s potential to help people make better use of their time by warning them before they do something that has already been done. And an important ancillary benefit is that it will remind us of valuable and interesting things people have already done, but which may have been largely forgotten. In showing you images, Copycat might make you aware of long-dead bird photographers you had never heard of, spurring you to research them further and to beautify your house with framed prints of their (free) artwork.
Along with boosting the originality of artwork, music, and writing, this sort of technology would be invaluable to scientists and engineers who are deciding how to spend their scarce time and R&D money. A machine that had memorized the full body of scientific literature and patents could, respectively, tell a scientist which things had not been researched and tell an engineer which things had not been invented. The result would be no resources wasted on duplicative projects, and an acceleration of scientific and technological advancement, merely due to a sharper grasp of what is already known.
Electric cars have fewer parts than gas-powered cars, so they are simpler and faster to build, and break less often. This is bad news for people who work at car factories and mechanic shops. https://apnews.com/c70d4274a69643bba37667585dbee7aa
Amazon has just announced a bulk buy of 100,000 electric delivery trucks, which will jump-start that whole vehicle sector. I’ve predicted before that, once a big company does a bulk buy of thousands of autonomous delivery trucks, the writing will be on the wall for human truck drivers. https://qz.com/1712151/amazon-orders-100000-electric-delivery-trucks/
One guy has taken it upon himself to drive around his native Zimbabwe to fill in Google Street View imagery. I like his spirit, but it’s kind of pointless since all the blank spots in Street View will very rapidly fill in once autonomous cars become common. The cars will bristle with cameras pointed in every direction, and opting to sell the footage to Google will be a matter of clicking one button. https://www.npr.org/2019/09/22/760572640/hes-trying-to-fill-in-the-gaps-on-google-street-view-starting-with-zimbabwe
Chinese police used flying drones to find a fugitive who had been at large for 17 years. He was living in a remote camp in the wilderness. Autonomous aircraft will be able to map parts of the planet inaccessible to cars, and hence will be integral to mapping and surveillance. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-49874969
A “vacuum airship” would be a dirigible filled with nothing instead of helium or hydrogen. The exterior air pressure would be so great that its skin would need to be built of super-strong, nano-engineered materials. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_airship
President Trump accidentally Tweeted a classified photo taken by one of America’s best spy satellites, giving insights into how high-res their cameras are. Contrary to urban myth, license plates and facial features can’t be resolved, but individual humans on the ground could be seen (and counted) as small blobs of color. https://www.npr.org/2019/08/30/755994591/president-trump-tweets-sensitive-surveillance-image-of-iran
The Kardashev Scale is widely misquoted and misunderstood: 1) According to Kardashev’s original science paper on the matter, humanity had ALREADY achieved “Type 1” status in 1964. 2) The paper only had three civilization classifications: Type 1 (most energy on the planet being consumed by the civilization), Type 2 (all of the star’s energy harnessed), and Type 3 (all of the galaxy’s energy harnessed). Nothing was said of “Type 0” or “Type 4” status. https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2014/03/21/what-kardashev-really-said/
When we meet intelligent aliens, even if we can’t understand each others’ languages, we’ll be able to use math and chemistry to agree on what “right” and “left” mean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_experiment
The CIA was out of control in the 50s and 60s, and Fort Detrick, MD was its secret base for developing and testing mind-control drugs, poisons, and biological weapons. https://politi.co/2I7zNfE
Doctors found a way to triple the time that human livers can be preserved outside a body for transplantation. It involves injecting the organs with preservative fluid and cooling them to below freezing. Don’t write off the possibility of whole-body human cryopresevation in the future. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-49632609
Using donor eggs and IVF, a 74-year-old woman in India got pregnant and gave birth to twins, making her the oldest known mother. (While postmenopausal women’s ovaries don’t make eggs anymore, their uteri remain functional) The physical and mental strain of childbirth was so great that it caused her a stroke and gave her husband a heart attack, and both were sent to the ICU right afterward. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=12267791
The Sahara region oscillates between wet and dry epochs once every 20,000 years. Also, the current Sahara Desert wouldn’t be as large as it is if not for millennia of human-owned livestock overgrazing at its margins. We could “green” parts of it today, with existing technology and relatively little money. https://phys.org/news/2019-01-sahara-swung-lush-conditions-years.html
Facebook’s virtual reality group has made impressive progress making what they call “Codec Avatars.” A person wears a visor over his face, which has cameras that record the movements of his head, face muscles, eyes, and mouth, and then the footage is streamed to a second person also wearing a visor, who sees the disembodied image of the first person’s head floating in front of them. Various algorithms are used to correct for camera distortions and blank spots. https://twitter.com/pacrimgirl/status/1176937590756270080
Scientists invented a device that can convert a flat plate’s excess heat into electricity to power an LED bulb. In the future, we’ll do a lot of wring energy out of waste heat. https://www.cell.com/joule/abstract/S2542-4351(19)30412-X
Here’s more evidence that body weight and obesity are partly genetic: Thin adults tend to have more mitochondria in their fat cells, and different mitochondrial DNA, than average-weight adults. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31374571
It’s actually not true that all siblings share 50% of their genes. Thanks to the random reassortment of genes that happens during meiosis (the biological process that makes sperm and eggs), it’s quite possible for two full siblings to share as little as 40% and as much as 60% of their DNA. 50% is merely the population-wide average (3.6% is the standard deviation). http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/02/why-siblings-differ-differently/#.XZJTyihKiUl
The facts that Earthly life forms have four DNA nucleotides and that a series of three nucleotides codes for each amino acid could mean that ‘a quantum-mechanical process is actually somehow at the root of molecular biology.’ By extension, it also means that the way we store genetic information and translate it into molecules is the most efficient way possible in an organic substrate. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/09/18/and-now-for-a-bit-of-quantum-mechanics
Eighteen drones and 7 cruise missiles were launched at Saudi Arabia during the recent attack that disabled much of the country’s oil industry. The wreckage shows the weapons were Iranian-made. Iran’s government denies involvement, and they do have a slender reed to lean on since it’s possible that anti-Saudi rebels launched the weapons from outside Iran. https://apnews.com/9fb95c0d28c84fd0bf10817dea3ddaab
‘There are some clear tactical benefits to [Egypt’s military HQ building] design. Spreading the MoD’s functionality across multiple interconnected facilities offers survivability from limited attacks. Giving each service two well-spaced octagons also offers some redundancy should one be struck, at least depending on the functions and systems each one holds. Like America’s Pentagon, having three distinct ‘nested’ structures within each octagon also provides resiliency if one part of the facility is attacked.’ https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29762/egypts-new-octagon-ministry-of-defense-complex-looks-like-an-alien-base-from-space
Eighty years ago, the Nazis invaded Poland, sparking WWII. What is often forgotten is that the Soviets also invaded Poland from the east. Britain and France only declared war on Germany for this offense. https://youtu.be/oFTtuHxxBLo
A Finnish space company called “Iceye” has launched radar satellites that produce sub-meter fidelity images of the Earth, at a fraction of the price of any competitor. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49253951
During the Apollo program era, NASA considered building a gigantic space rocket that would be towed out to sea and launched while half-submerged in water. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket)
Russia is experimenting with converting some of its old T-72 tanks into autonomous vehicles. As I’ve said before, robot crews could breathe new life into older weapons and keep them in service longer, but they’d be inferior to newer weapons not designed around the human form at all. https://www.janes.com/article/90554/russia-develops-unmanned-t-72s
Britain once had the world’s best army. Today, it can’t even muster 75,000 men (out of a population of 66 million). https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-49365599
‘[U.S. Navy] Sailors “overwhelmingly” preferred to control ships with wheels and throttles [instead of touchscreen displays], surveys of crew found.’ https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49319450
This is a simple but informative video about the U.S. Navy’s new “Radar Modular Assemblies.” A simple but very useful design. https://youtu.be/BPGcW4Lj4fc
There’s no evidence that microplastics in our food and water hurt human health. They simply pass through the human digestive system. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-49430038
Most of the people who say they are over 110 years old are actually lying or mistaken thanks to poor birth certificate recordkeeping. “As soon as a state starts keeping good records of when people are born, there’s a 69 to 82 percent fall in the number of people who live to the age of 110.” https://www.vox.com/2019/8/8/20758813/secrets-ultra-elderly-supercentenarians-fraud-error
It’s now possible to use deepfake technology to synthesize anyone’s voice and have them read an entire audiobook. Listeners can pick which voice they prefer. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49329650
Deepfake technology is also being used to make customized teaching lessons for people. Someday, it will be possible to put on augmented reality eyewear with headphones and a forward-facing camera, and to see a semi-intelligent AI teacher in front of you. Virtual objects would appear in front of you, and real-world objects in your field of view would be highlighted, so your machine teacher could do something like walk you through a complex car repair task. (Is this how the Borg started out?) https://www.fanaticalfuturist.com/2019/08/edtech-company-udacity-uses-deepfake-tech-to-create-educational-videos-automatically/
All the obsolete and disused electronic devices stashed in peoples’ houses collectively contain a large amount of rare earth metals that could be recycled. (Makes me think of my theory that robot butlers will help people out by selling or recycling unused possessions and trash.) https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49409055
I just finished Michio Kaku’s 2011 futurist book, Physics of the Future, and am posting my abbreviated notes of it, most of which describe his predictions for this century. It didn’t make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up the way The Third Wave did, but I still think most of the predictions will prove accurate. Kaku also provides a few eye-opening insights that shifted my way of thinking a bit, such as his elucidation of the “Caveman Principle,” his thesis that technology will enable “perfect capitalism,” and his point that technology will grant future humans abilities that were once the sole province of the Greek gods. Overall, I enjoyed the book and found it readable, reasonable, and well-researched.
That said, there were a few aspects of Physics of the Future that I disliked. Kaku’s predictions about cheap, room-temperature superconductors being invented by the end of this century are strikingly unsupported by any evidence he presents, and his discussion of the Kardashev Scale seems at odds with what Kardashev actually wrote (in analyzing this inconsistency, I found that Kardashev’s work on this matter is widely misunderstood, and the exercise made me doubt the value of the Scale in any case). Developments over just the last eight years suggest that the book’s predictions about the rise of therapeutic organ/tissue cloning and age slowdown/reversal therapies are too optimistic, and those about dwindling fossil fuels supplies and artificial intelligence advancement are too pessimistic.
One irritating thing about the Physics of the Future is Kaku’s habit of mixing in explicit predictions with attached deadlines with “non-predictions” that are merely re-statements of things other scientists said might be possible at an indeterminate point in the future. The latter is more common in the second half of the book, and the reader must pay careful attention to its language to tell what is what.
Physics of the Future abbreviated notes By: Michio Kaku
Introduction
Most attempts to predict the future fail because the people making the predictions aren’t scientists or people with firsthand knowledge of science.
In this book, Kaku–who is a scientist–has formed predictions based on interviews with hundreds of scientists across many fields.
This book is similar to his earlier futurist book, Visions.
Some brilliant people have made uncanny, correct future predictions:
Jules Verne
In Paris in the Twentieth Century, (1863) he correctly foresaw glass skyscrapers, air conditioning, TV, elevators, high-speed trains, gas-powered cars, fax machines, and something like the internet.
In From the Earth to the Moon, (1865) he correctly foresaw a Moon mission and even deduced details like the size of the space capsule and its human crew, the launch location, transit time, weightlessness in space, and ocean splashdown at the end.
Verne used his vast trove of personal notes about scientific discoveries and progress as the foundation for his predictions.
Leonardo da Vinci
In the late 1400s, he drew diagrams of parachutes and aircraft that could have flown. Unfortunately, it would be another 400 years before a motor with a sufficient power-to-weight ratio was invented to propel such aircraft.
He also designed a mechanical calculator. It wasn’t built for about 500 years, but it worked.
He also sketeched a warrior robot, based on a suit of armor, and it was also built and found to be functional.
da Vinci was a genius in his own right, but he also collaborated with many other brilliant scientists.
“The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” –William Gibson
Ordinary people and experts usually underestimate how much technology will change in the long run.
At least until the year 2100, it’s wise to assume that our understanding of the laws of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, the weak and strong forces) will not significantly change. Concordantly, predictions for that timeframe should not violate those laws.
By 2100, humans will have the same abilities as the ancient gods
Ability to use thoughts to control objects
Perfect human bodies with superhuman lifespans
Ability to use biotech to make novel organisms
Nanotech to seemingly transmute objects and to create objects “from thin air”
Flying cars will be like sky chariots
Unless humans destroy themselves, within 100 years (i.e. – by the year 2111), Earth will be a “planetary civilization” with Kardashev Level 1 status.
Famous predictions that failed:
The paperless office
The death of cities due to telecommuting
The death of tourism, colleges, and malls thanks to people visiting surrogate virtual spaces.
The rise of video phones [it has actually come true as of 2019]
The demise of traditional media (TV, radio, live theater, and movie theaters) thanks to the internet
Those and other predictions failed because they violated the “Caveman Principle.”
The Principle holds that humans evolved for hunter-gatherer life, and that this still shapes our behavior and thinking today. Ways of living that force us to go against our primitive, ingrained instincts will fail.
Cavemen wanted to see “proof of the kill,” which today manifests itself in the human preference for tactile physical objects over digital facsimiles.
Cavemen always socialized through face-to-face encounters, and that method of communication allows people to read important nonverbal cues, to size each other up, and to bond in ways that are impossible through remote interaction. There was a time when humans were incapable of speech and relied on other means to communicate.
Chapter 1 – Future of the computer
[Boilerplate stuff about Moore’s Law, “exponential,” and improvements to computers.]
Once computer chips get small enough and cheap enough, it will make sense to embed them inside all kinds of manufactured objects, like walls and home appliances. They will have wireless capabilities and will be able to communicate with each other and with the internet through the uplink.
Our surroundings will become “intelligent,” computers won’t be thought of as distinct devices, and we’ll start thinking of computing as a ubiquitous property, as we now think of electricity.
Computer monitors will take the form of wallpaper, picture frames and billboards, and displaying movie footage won’t cost more than displaying static images.
These devices will also have many types of sensors, allowing them to monitor their surroundings and, among other things, to issue alerts in the event of an observed problem.
By 2020, a computer chip will only cost a penny.
The word “computer” will disappear from the English language. [I doubt it.]
By 2100, humans will have the formerly “Godlike” ability to control physical objects with their thoughts or with remote bodily gestures thanks to computers embedded in our bodies and brains sending signals to computers embedded in the objects around us. [It will still be simpler and more efficient to manipulate many things the “old fashioned way” by physically interacting with them.]
By 2030
There will be augmented reality glasses with internet access. Users will interact with it using a handheld peripheral device, or by doing hand gestures that the glasses will see and recognize as inputs. [One of the reasons Google Glass failed was its very limited means of input.]
Contact lenses that do most of the same things will also be invented. A contact lens with millions of pixels is theoretically possible. [A 1080p screen display measures 1920 x 1080 pixels, so it has a resolution of 2.1 million pixels (megapixels).]
The glasses will also have front-facing cameras and advanced pattern recognition capabilities, allowing them to display information about people and objects in your field of view. Users will also be able to stream live footage to the internet for others to watch. [As of 2019, even though AR glasses have not become popular, livestreaming via smartphones definitely is.]
Autonomous cars will exist. The military will get them first, and then big companies will buy autonomous big-rigs to ply simple highway routes, and finally, everyone else will get them, and they will be able to navigate suburban and urban traffic environments.
AIs will become adept at matching humans on the basis of compatible personality traits or shared interests. Technology will expand peoples’ social circles.
Personal assistant AIs will be able to do complex tasks, like planning vacations for people.
Monitors will become paper-thin and it will be cheap enough to cover entire walls of your house with them. They will OLED-based. Some people will have rooms where all four walls are covered in said screens to create an immersive experience. [The only problem is that you’d have to clear all furniture and solid objects from the room so as not to block your view and break the visual illusion. Most people don’t have a spare room just for this.]
The wall screens will also display customizable patters, allowing people to change what kind of “wallpaper” they have. [The durability of future OLED screens will be a major issue: If a pixel burns out, can it be fixed, or does the entire wall-sized screen need to be replaced? What if someone accidentally bangs their elbow against a wall screen, or spills a drink on it? Closely joining together many “tiles” to make a wall-sized screen will probably be the best option, as damage would only force you to replace one tile. OLED screens can also replace light fixtures, and it might make sense to cover ceilings with them.]
Computerized glasses and contact lenses will also let people “meet” in augmented reality or virtual reality. Seemingly 3D moving images of other people will appear to be in your vicinity.
Once OLED costs get low enough, it will be possible to buy disposable “sheets” of OLEDs, just like sheets of paper today. You could roll or fold them up when not in use. [But this would be a hindrance since the material would still have “memory” and would keep trying to return to some other configuration.] When done with a sheet, you would throw it away. [Unless the OLED paper were easily recyclable, environmentalists would throw a fit and try to ban it.]
Seemingly normal windows could, upon command, turn into transparent computer screens or display images. [There are two ways this could work: 1) The windows are essentially big versions of the AR contact lenses, meaning they are transparent, but also impregnated with millions of OLED pixels that, when activated, display images. In a dual-paned window, the inner pane would be made of OLED glass, and the outer pane would be made of Privacy Glass that could turn opaque to block exterior light and make the OLED’s images easier to see. And/Or 2) The “windows” will be fake, “virtual windows” that are actually just portions of the OLED wallpaper displaying footage from exterior building cameras. See the Seoul apartment interior in Cloud Atlas]
Cell phones might have OLED displays that can be pulled out as needed, like scrolls. [Foldable smartphones accomplish the same thing.]
Highly immersive virtual reality will exist. Special gloves will also deliver a haptic element to the experience by allowing your fingers to feel textures and your arms to feel resistance from objects in your virtual environment.
There will be AI doctors that you can access from the privacy of your home and interact with conversationally. They will have realistic-looking human avatars, and will diagnose you correctly up to 95% of the time.
The AI doctors will have your genetic profile and will use that information to aid their diagnoses of you.
People will be able to afford small, handheld devices like the medical tricorders from “Star Trek.” The devices will contain mini-MRI machines, DNA chips and other sensors that will be able to peer inside your body and recognize the the genetic and biochemical signs of many diseases, including cancer. During remote medical exams, you AI doctor will tell you through your wall screen how to use the device on yourself. [I’m skeptical that MRI machines will get that small and cheap by 2030 and still do quality scans.]
Swallowable “smart pills” with tiny cameras could replace colonoscopies.
Your clothing and bathroom fixtures will also contain sophisticated health monitoring devices. [The value of many types of constant health monitoring is questionable. For example, you gain no benefit from testing your DNA every day, or even once every several months. And as health testing gets more frequent, so do the odds of false positives and unnecessary trips to the doctor for further investigation.] If you suffered a major injury, or a catastrophic health incident like a heart attack, the sensors embedded in your clothing and surroundings would detect it and alert EMS. [The problem with “smart clothing” is that the chips and sensors would wear out due to laundering, and to be continuously monitored, you’d need to buy a wardrobe entirely comprised of smart clothes.]
Technology will make many aspects of live similar to fairy tale worlds.
2030-2070
Moore’s Law will end, meaning computer cost-performance will not double every 18 months anymore. The doubling time will increase until it is several years long. [Depending on the source, Moore’s Law “died” somewhere between 2016 and 2018.]
Computer chips will be made of some material other than silicon.
Augmented reality glasses and contact lenses will be in mass use.
Examples of AR applications:
Ability to see through solid objects by streaming external video camera footage to a person’s AR eyepiece. This would help drivers of buses and tanks, and aircraft pilots, by eliminating blind spots. It would also help people doing many types of repairs since they’d be able to see things like pipes and wires that are hidden by walls. Prospectors will be able to see underground deposits of minerals and water.
Ability to make nonexistent objects appear overlaid on the real world. Architects will be able to see 3D models of structures they are designing. Interior decorators will be able to try out different furnishings and color schemes for rooms before actually buying anything.
Tourism will benefit. Images of restored ancient buildings will be overlaid above their ruins. Virtual tour guides will lead tourists around art galleries and historical sites, providing helpful narration.
Instant translations of text written in foreign languages, such as road signs. [Only useful when traveling]
Highlighting of plant species and of trails while hiking. [Only useful when hiking. Reminds me of the “intelligent belt” in The Godwhale that tells the one character to pick up edible substances.]
Apartment hunters could drive down the road and see which buildings are for rent along with their prices and amenities.
Constellations in the sky would be labeled. [Few people care]
Actors, musicians and performers wouldn’t need to memorize their lines anymore since text would hover in their fields of view.
Virtual lecture halls where you could even ask the instruction questions and get answers.
Soldiers would have the “fog of war” lifted, as they’d be able to see maps and the locations of friendly and enemy forces.
Surgeons would be able to see live MRI scans of patients during operations.
Full-immersion video gaming.
[I’m convinced the technology will have niche applications, but skeptical that average people will adopt them for everyday use, unless we’re talking about the far future where the unemployed masses enter the Matrix 24/7. Moreover, I doubt AR eyewear will make smartphones obsolete for decades.]
AR eyepieces will replace cell phones, MP3 players, computer monitors, and most other gadgets. [I’m not sure. The classic problems with AR glasses would still remain.]
AR eyepieces will let you do instant “showrooming” in any store.
AR eyepieces sensitive to X-rays could let you see through solid objects. You would need to carry a “flashlight” that emitted X-rays though, which would be hazardous to your health.
There will be portable language translators that work in real-time.
AR eyepieces will display seemingly 3D images, and TVs will be capable of displaying holograms.
Holographic TV screens might be shaped like domes or cylinders, with viewers under them.
2070-2100
Humans will be able to control physical objects with their minds.
Brain impants and externally worn BCIs (brain-computer interfaces) could monitor a person’s brain activity and read their thoughts. The BCIs would make use of brain-scanning technologies, like EEGs and fMRIs.
Eventually, fMRIs that can see individual brain cells will be invented.
fMRIs will be able to reconstruct a person’s mental images based on their brain activity. This could allow us to use machines to record our dreams, but the footage would be grainy because we imagine things in low-resolution. [See my Prometheus review]
Fortunately, intrusive mind-reading at a distance is probably impossible. The subject would need to have brain implants or a head-worn BCI.
Brain scanning machines could serve as reliable lie detectors.
MRI machines the size of cell phones will exist. Some might even come in the form of suction-cup devices that are attached to the patient’s body.
Cheap, room-temperature superconductors will exist, and will be embedded in everyday objects, which will also have small computers and sensors. Humans with brain implants or other BCIs would be able to telepathically control the objects and activate electrical currents in the superconductors, which could cause them to move around thanks to magnetic force. “Telekinesis” would therefore exist.
[This sounds like a particularly shaky prediction since we’re not even sure if a room temperature superconductor can even exist. The theoretical aspect is still unclear. Moreover, there’s no cost-performance improvement trend akin to Moore’s Law that indicates we progressing towards inventing cheap room-temperature superconductors by 2100. Kaku’s prediction that humans will commonly use their thoughts to move objects like pieces of furniture across rooms also seems to, in spirit, clash with the Caveman Principle. Why not just move the chair in front of you by pushing it with your hand?]
Chapter 2 – Future of AI
While AI is genuinely improving, the odds of machines achieving human-level intelligence anytime soon have been overblown by the media, sci-fi movies, and a minority of scientists. Most scientists with relevant expertise don’t expect it to happen for decades, perhaps centuries.
One of the world’s most advanced robots–ASIMO–can’t even sense and avoid tripping over objects placed in its path. A cockroach can easily do this, which means our best robots are still dumber than common insects in critical ways.
The structure of the human brain is fundamentally different from the structure of a computer. Our brains are massively parallel, meaning they have trillions of processors working at the same time, but each processor operates very slowly. Computers are serial, meaning they typically have only one processor, but it operates very fast. Organizing computers to make “neural networks” the mimic the human brain has proven hard.
Humans also have common sense about the real world and are excellent at pattern recognition, whereas computers are very bad in both. [This book was published in 2011, and major advances were made in computer pattern recognition by the end of that decade.]
The “Cyc” project was started in 1984 to “codify, in machine-usable form, the millions of pieces of knowledge that compose human common sense.” As of 2017, it contained about 1,500,000 terms.
By 2030
“Expert systems” will greatly improve and become more common.
There will be machine doctors that you will be able to access from your home and communicate with via natural speech. The doctors will diagnose you with similar accuracy as human doctors.
There will be robot nurses in hospitals that can move around interior spaces unassisted and perform basic patient care tasks, like delivering medications and monitoring humans.
2030-2070
“Our world may be full of robots.”
Most robots will not be humanoid, and instead will resemble animals like snakes and insects, depending on the needs of their function.
Many of the robots will be “modular,” meaning they could reconfigure themselves for different tasks by changing their body parts. [This kind of dovetails with my theory that the “Ideal Human” might be a giant human brain encased in something like a Mr. Potato Head torso with many ports that robotic limbs and sensors could be plugged into as needed.]
[Looking at vehicles and guns as examples, it seems optimal to make a small number of “chassis,” with each chassis being highly modular.]
The robots might be made of many, standardized pieces somewhat similar in concept to Lego blocks. Each block would have attachment points for other blocks, and its own sensors, computer and power source. The blocks could join together to make bigger robots of nearly any shape and to do many different types of work.
Robots made of such modular components could be very small or very large and have any arbitrary number of limbs or body configurations. They could pass through a wall by finding a small holes in it, passing their component modules through the hole individually, and then reassembling all modules on the other side of the wall to recreate the robot.
Small robots could do many jobs that humans can’t due to our large size or high labor costs. For example, small robots could crawl over all the rafters and beams of a bridge, checking for wear and spotting problems well before the bridge collapsed. [Like my idea of using insect-sized robots to crawl through the innards of a car or house to find things like the sources of oil and water leaks. Those diagnostics can be very messy, trial-and-error affairs if humans have to do the work.]
Noninvasive keyhole surgeries will become the norm in the future, as will “telesurgery.”
Endoscopes used for keyhole surgeries and internal exams will get thinner, and micromachines “will do much of the mechanical work.” [Meaning unclear]
“By midcentury, the era of emotional robots may be in full flower.” [There’s no reason to think that intelligent machines won’t someday learn how to at least convincingly mimic human emotions and to take over human jobs requiring empathy and warmth.]
The author seems to suggest that emotions and intelligence and inextricable, meaning intelligent machines will necessarily also have emotions.
Robotic pets that have about the same intelligence as cats and dogs and the ability to at least outwardly imitate emotional states will be common. They won’t be able to understand verbal commands that aren’t in their programming. [Progress with understanding human language seems to be progressing faster than he predicted. He’s right to point out that some robots will look exactly like animals, and that “dog-level intelligence” will be achieved before “human-level intelligence”.]
The human brain will be mapped. However, it will then take “many decades to sort through the mountains of data,” which seems to suggest that an AI derived from a reverse-engineered human brain won’t be made until after 2070. Consider that the C. elegans brain was fully mapped in 1986, but scientists still can’t make a computer simulation of its brain that functions the same.
In 2009, neuroscientist Henry Markram predicted that a computer simulation of a human brain could be made in 10 years, provided the project to do so got enough funding. The author speculates the costs would be comparable to the Manhattan Project.
Another way to map brains is to cut brains into very thin slices, to use electron microscopes to photograph the cross-sectioned neurons in each slice, and to assemble the resulting data into a 3D computer model of all the neurons in the brain.
Gerry Rubin predicts that the fruit fly brain will be mapped in 20 years (2031), and that will get us 20% of the way towards understanding the human mind.
A human brain has 1 million times as many neurons as a fruit fly brain.
2070-2100
Human-level AI will probably be friendly to humans.
AIs will have failsafes built into them that shut them down whenever dangerous, aberrant, or insubordinate behavior or thoughts are detected. Humans will also be able to say safewords that trigger the failsafes.
Humans will build some robots whose purpose it is to disable or destroy malfunctioning robots. [I agree that there will never be a 100% human vs 100% robot war. Surely, the humans will have some number of non-sentient robots fighting for them that the other side can’t hack or persuade to switch sides.]
Human-level AI won’t appear suddenly. It will be preceded by decades of steadily increasing machine intelligence, like roach-level AI, mouse-level AI, and chimp-level AI. Thus, humans will have time to prepare and to develop increasingly sophisticated safeguards at each step that prevent the AIs from taking hostile action against us. [And even if hostile, human-level AI appeared without warning today, the amount of damage it could do would be limited since not everything is controlled by computers, and not all computer systems would be accessible to it. Not everything can be hacked.]
The author agrees with roboticist Rodney Brooks’ prediction that humans will cybernetically augment themselves with technology, and the advanced robots of 2100 will be inspired by the human brain and by biological systems.
In theory, it is possible for humans to control robot limbs and even whole robot bodies with their thoughts. A cybernetic brain interface would be needed.
Remote-controlled robots could enable the offshoring of blue-collar work, which would reduce the need for immigration and especially help Japan.
They would also be useful for doing dangerous work, like rescue missions and outside excursions on extraterrestrial bodies (the human astronauts would stay inside protected habitats).
Because what humans find aesthetically pleasing is rooted in our genes, people will reject body enhancements that make them look ugly or strange. [The small minority of people who are today into extreme body modifications would probably embrace all kinds of augmentations. They might even have their own bars and clubs, like something out of Deus Ex.]
The author predicts that humans will be open to technologically augmenting their bodies so long as they augmentations don’t make them uglier by conventional standards, and that people will sometimes use remote-controlled robots for work or pleasure, but the Cave Man principle will preclude them from permanently existing in that state. [Has implications for FIVR’s future role.]
Human-level AI won’t be created until close to the end of this century.
Even if we have computers with the same raw computational power as the human brain, we might not have the software necessary to make them intelligent like humans. Hardware improvements are relatively smooth and predictable, whereas software advances happen in fits and starts. AI software advances will probably lag hardware advances.
An AGI-based “singularity” or “intelligence explosion” isn’t a given, since we don’t know if a human-level AI would be able to make a smarter version of itself. [This is a weak argument. The history of human evolution contains several instances where one hominid species gave rise to a smarter hominid, and among humans alive today, it’s common for parents to give birth to children that are smarter than they are. And as we decode the human genome, we are discovering which genes code for human intelligence, which in theory could allow us to use genetic engineering to make smarter humans. So if humans are smart enough to make smarter versions of themselves, then a machine with human-level intelligence should also be able to make smarter machines. Also keep in mind that Einstein was human, so he technically had “human-level intelligence,” which means a merely “human-level” AI could be as smart as Einstein, but without dyslexia, with a perfect memory, and able to think 24/7. Most people would deem that “superhuman.”]
The high costs of doing brain scans and decoding how the human brain works will also delay AGI.
Chapter 3 – Future of medicine
By 2030
The cost of gene sequencing will decrease enough for many average people to get their full genomes sequenced. From it, they will derive useful information about genetic health conditions they may have.
As more human genomes are sequenced and more genetic information becomes available for computer cross-referencing, the locations of more genes coding for specific traits (including genetic diseases) will become known.
A better understanding of the human genome will also assist detectives, since they will be able to generate accurate CGI facial reconstructions of unknown people by sequencing scraps of their DNA found at crime scenes.
You will talk to AI doctors via the wall screen in your house.
Your bathroom [presumably the mirror and toilet] will have sensors that can detect your disease symptoms, including cancer.
Nanoparticles will be used to deliver anti-cancer drugs directly to cancer cells in your body. Chemotherapies in which a patient’s body is flooded with such drugs, and they attack many healthy cells, will be obsolete.
It will be possible to grow new human organs, derived from a specific person’s DNA, and to implant the organs into that person without risk of rejection. [This looks headed for failure.]
A human urinary bladder was grown in a lab for the first time in 2007, and a windpipe in 2009. [Time showed that these results were not as impressive as claimed. Research “Dr. Paolo Macchiarini,” who was a pioneer in tissue engineered windpipe transplants when this book was written, only to be revealed to be a fraud within a few years.]
“Within five years, the first liver and pancreas might be grown…”
Chemistry Nobel Prize winner Walter Gilbert predicts that, in a few decades, it will be possible to use a person’s DNA to create almost any organ for him in a lab.
A major roadblock to therapeutic cloning is infusing the synthetic organs with capillaries. These blood vessels are microscopic, and hence too small to be created using molds.
A major roadblock to stem cell therapy is controlling the differentiation and mitosis of the stem cells. Very subtle and poorly understood chemical messages sent between cells determine how their neighbors develop.
“Pixie dust” is a powder made of human extracelluar matrix. If applied to the stump of a severed finger, it allows the body to slowly regrow the fingertip.
Human cloning will be possible, but almost never used. Interested people might be parents looking to replace a dead child, or rich old guys looking to make worthy heirs.
The creation of the first human clone will probably trigger a wave of anti-cloning laws being enacted, and ethical outrage from many people. It will mirror the reaction to the first Test Tube Baby. In time, the novelty will wear off, people will see the clones act no different from anyone else, and laws and attitudes will relax.
Cancerous tumors typically have tens of thousands of different mutations, so it take many years of study to determine which genes can make cells cancerous.
There will not be a cancer cure by 2030, but we will have better, cheaper ways of detecting cancer earlier, when it is easier to treat.
By 2050, it might be possible to slow down the aging process, extending human lifespan to 150.
2030-2070
Gene therapy will probably be in common use as a cancer treatment.
“Designer babies” will be born. Genetic engineering can influence many human traits, including intelligence, physical strength, and baseline happiness level.
Richard Dawkins predicts that, by 2050, it will be possible to feed genomic data into a computer and to have it generate an accurate virtual rendering of the organism’s appearance.
2070-2100
Richard Feynmann predicted that human aging would be cured someday, and medical immortality achieved. Dr. William Haseltine agreed.
The rising rate of breast cancer could be due to women having fewer children, since estrogen increases breast cancer risk, and the hormone’s levels decrease during pregnancy.
Twin studies prove that human lifespan is partly genetic. The specific genes that code for lifespan will be identified as more human genomes become available for medical research.
By 2100, technologies needed to grant medical immortality may exist.
“In five or six or seven years, there will be drugs that prolong longevity.” -Christoph Westphal, 2009
“The nature of life is not mortality. It’s immortality. DNA is an immortal molecule. That molecule first appeared perhaps 3.5 billion years ago. That selfsame molecule, through duplication, is around today.” – Dr. William Haseltine
A battery of different therapies and personal practices will allow for human life extension:
Grow and surgically implant new organs and tissues to replace older ones as they wear out.
Ingest a cocktail of enzymes meants to slow aging and mutations at the cellular level.
Use gene therapy to manipulate genes responsible for aging (slow it down)
Maintain a healthy lifestyle (good diet and exercise)
Use nanosensors to detect diseases like cancer at their early phases and treat them.
GM crops will allow Earth to support a much larger population.
Richard Dawkins believes portable, full-genome sequencing kits will exist someday, and that it will be possible to clone extinct species.
Computers might also be able to analyze the genomes of humans, chimps and other primates to deduce the genetics of the “Missing Link.” Such a hominid could then be created in the flesh by assembling its DNA in a petri dish and implanting it in an ovum.
The Neanderthal genome has been sequenced using fragmentary DNA recovered from the bones of several Neanderthals, and it might be possible to resurrect them.
Extinct animals for which we have DNA samples, such as woolly mammoths and dodos, could be resurrected through cloning.
Extinct animals for which we lack DNA samples, such as dinosaurs, can’t be resurrected, but we could make “proxy species” by analyzing the genomes of living species that descended from the dinosaurs.
With very advanced genetic engineering, we could make hybrid animals and beasts like chimeras.
Clones of long-dead humans could be made using DNA recovered from their entombed bodies.
All communicable human diseases won’t be cured by 2100.
It’s unlikely that people will want to genetically engineer their children to be freakish in any way. [Small numbers of mentally ill parents might.] There will be little financial incentive for geneticists to research or develop alleles for weird traits because demand for them will be low.
The human race will not have split into different species thanks to genetic engineering or natural evolution.
As genetic technology gets cheaper and more advanced, small groups and even individual people will gain the means to make biological weapons. Airborne AIDS would be a nightmare that could result from gene splicing.
It might be possible to build machines capable of synthesizing microorganisms from scratch based on digital genetic data alone.
Nations will continue to resist using bioweapons for fear of fratricide; it would be too easy for the infection to spread from the enemy back to whoever used it.
Chapter 4 – Nanotechnology
Around 2020, Moore’s Law will end, and if a replacement for silicon computer chips isn’t found by then, “the world economy could be thrown into disarray.”
Richard Feynman famously believed that nanomachines could be built with the right level of technology, but he also thought it would be very difficult.
We can already use scanning tunneling microscopes to move around individual atoms. It is possible and doesn’t violate any laws of physics.
By 2030
Nanoparticles could revolutionize cancer treatment. They contain cell-killing chemicals and are 10 – 100 nm in diameter, which makes them too big to diffuse into healthy cells, but small enough to pass through the abnormally large pores on many cancer cell membranes. The nanoparticles accumulate in cancer cells and release their loads, killing them but sparing the surrounding healthy tissue.
Nanoparticles with surface structures designed to be complementary to cancer cell antigens are another option.
Nanoparticles made of metal (e.g. – titanium, gold) can accumulate inside cancer cells and then be externally heated with infrared lasers or vibrated with external magnets, to destroy the cancer cells.
Cancer will be detected early and treated with nanoparticles.
Medical micromachines and nanomachines could be used to move through a person’s blood vessels and precisely zap cancer cells and arterial plaques, deliver drugs to specific cells, or even do surgery. The machines would navigate using simple computers and/or magnetic and laser signals beamed from outside the person’s body.
DNA microarrays/chips will be small and cheap, and will allow people to do at-home testing for many types of cancer.
Microarrays/chips that test for proteins that are hallmarks of different diseases will also be available and will have the same personal health applications.
[The author is wrong to predict that people would do the at-home tests every day. Such a high rate of testing would raise the odds of Type 1 errors and needless hospital visits to confirm misdiagnoses. I doubt there would be any benefit for healthy people to take tests for cancer or other major diseases more often than once every six months or even once a year.]
In 2007, Gordon Moore predicted that his eponymous Law would end in 10-15 years. [He was right.]
We will be forced to start making computer chips out of something other than etched silicon wafers if we want them to keep getting faster.
Stacking silicon-based chips to make “3D chips” offers only a temporary solution since problems with heat dissipation limit how high the stacks can get before the chips melt. Components at the centers of the chip stacks wouldn’t get enough air flow to cool them down.
Using X-rays instead of UV light rays to etch ever-smaller features on silicon chips could also wring out more of a performance boost from the material, though there are large technical challenges to using X-rays for this.
Ultimately, silicon chips will hit a “bottom limit” once their feature sizes are 5nm small, at which point quantum tunneling of electrons will start happening.
Arranging silicon chips into groups of parallel processors that work together could also prolong the silicon paradigm, but the difficulty of doing this is monumental since breaking up computation tasks, shunting the fragments to different processors, and then reassembling the processed data at the end is extremely hard. There is no general set of instructions for programming computers how to do this with any type of task; human programmers can only do this painstakingly and for specific tasks.
Graphene-based computer chips could exist someday, and their transistors could be only 1 atom thick–the smallest possible size–but the technical challenges to manufacturing them are very high. [The author doesn’t explicitly say that these issues will be solved by 2030, so his mentioning of graphene computer chips isn’t a prediction for that year.]
Quantum computers could also be built someday, if major technical hurdles relating to “decoherence” can be overcome.
Optical computers
Quantum dot computers
DNA computers
2030-2070
By 2050, many manmade objects will look the same as today, but will have special material properties and will be “smart” thanks to tiny computers and sensors embedded in them.
“Programmable matter” will also be in common use. The basic unit of such matter will be tiny, modular robots called “catoms” that will be no bigger than grains of sand and will be able to reorient themselves with respect to each other, forming almost any shape.
If your house were full of programmable matter, you could do things like transform a piece of furniture into something different, or convert your child’s old toy into whatever faddish, new toy he wanted.
A roadblock to this is the fact that catoms would cohere to each other weakly, so objects made of them would be fragile. [Also, individual catoms might be fragile, meaning an object made of them would slowly “waste away” as its components broke and fell off.]
2070-2100
Molecular assemblers (e.g. – nanomachines that can build things from the bottom-up) don’t violate the laws of physics, and the existence of ribosomes and enzymes are proof of concept. However, it will be extremely hard for us to create molecular assemblers with the sorts of capabilities people like Eric Drexler envision.
Put together, the aforementioned facts and the rate of improvement for the relevant technologies suggest that we might be able to build Star Trek-style replicators by the end of this century. [Even then, it will still be cheaper and more optimal to make most objects through “top-down” macro manufacturing methods we use today. Not every object must be super-strong or made to atomic levels of precision.]
The “Gray Goo” doomsday scenario is unlikely to happen, partly because nanotechnology is advancing so slowly that regulators will have time to enact the necessary safety measures.
If replicators become widespread, and, along with other technologies and government policy, let all people have their material needs met, then society will probably split into a large group of loafers and a small group of innovators who work hard pursuing their passions. [This may have been what Federation society was like in “Star Trek.” Not even 1% of its citizens joined Starfleet.]
Chapter 5 – Future of energy [This is the weakest chapter so far]
In 1956, American petrochemical engineer M. King Hubbert famously predicted that U.S. oil production would peak around 1970 and then start declining. He proved right, which fanned fears of global “Peak Oil.” [Hubbert’s prediction about the peaking of U.S. CONVENTIONAL OIL production was the only big thing he got right. His predictions about U.S. natural gas production and global fossil fuel production proved far too pessimistic. Unconventional oil production in the U.S. also sharply ramped up in the 2010s, allowing total U.S. oil production to surpass the 1970 peak.]
The consensus among experts that the author spoke with is that global oil production had either already peaked or was at most 10 years away. [This book was published in 2011.] “The average price of oil will continue to rise over the long term.” [Oil prices have in fact dropped about 50% since 2011.]
By 2030
The likeliest successor to fossil fuels is a solar/hydrogen energy economy. [Solar is rapidly growing, but hydrogen is stalled.]
Wind power can’t supply all of the world’s energy needs for several important reasons.
The amount of electricity made by solar panels has rapidly grown and will keep doing so.
Electric cars are becoming practical.
Laser technology for uranium enrichment could be perfected, lowering enrichment costs but also raising the risk of nuclear proliferation. [Since the book was published, the leading laser enrichment company, Silex, has been mostly stuck in neutral with the technology due to high costs and uncertain demand.]
Advanced, suitcase-sized nuclear bombs could be developed.
2030-2070
The climate will have significantly changed by 2050 thanks to global warming. “…by midcentury, the situation could be dire.”
[Listing of Worst Case Scenarios but no mention of their statistical unlikelihood.]
Several geoengineering projects have been proposed to counteract global warming, but none have gotten serious funding. If the problem gets bad enough, this might change by midcentury.
By midcentury, the world will be in the “Hydrogen Age.”
Hot fusion power plants could be everywhere, providing limitless amounts of electricity and no pollution.
“Tabletop fusion” reactors might also be possible to build.
2070-2100
Room temperature superconductors will probably have been discovered. [Why does he think so? Is there a trend like Moore’s Law?]
Up to 30% of electricity generated at a power plant is lost during transmission. Power lines made of room temperature superconductors would eliminate those losses. Wind turbines in the middle of America could provide electricity to New York. Nuclear power plants could be relocated to remote areas.
Magnetic field lines can’t penetrate superconductors (the Meissner Effect), so cars with magnets on their bottoms could float over streets made of superconductors. The vehicles would still have to overcome air friction, so they’d need backward-facing engines of some kind.
Maglev trains also float over their tracks, but the system doesn’t use superconductors, it uses simple magnets, oriented so their forces repel each other. Trains with superconductors could be much cheaper to build than today’s maglev trains.
Superconductors would also allow us to shrink MRI machines to the sizes of shirt buttons.
[The author doesn’t present any trend data to back his claim that room temperature superconductors will be invented by 2100, or that they will be cheap enough by then for these applications.]
Space-based solar power beamed to Earth as microwaves could be real. However, space rocket launch costs will need to decline as much as 99% for solar satellites to become feasible. This probably won’t happen until the end of this century.
Chapter 6 – Future of space travel
By 2030
Better telescopes (mainly space-based) will have revealed the locations of thousands of planets outside our solar system. Hundreds of those will be similar to Earth in size and composition. [Note that the author doesn’t say that we will know if these planets harbor life–he merely says we will be able to see that they are rocky and the same size as Earth.]
A space probe will probably be sent to Jupiter’s moon, Europa.
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) satellite system will be in space, and its ability to detect gravity waves could reveal what existed before the Big Bang. [Since the book’s publishing, LISA’s launch date has been pushed back until at least 2030]
Micrometeor impacts and radiation are so bad on the Moon that a permanent manned base would need to be built underground. [The author doesn’t actually say that there will be a manned base on the Moon by 2030.]
2030-2070
It’s unlikely that any off-world bases will be self-sustaining until late this century, or even until the 22nd century. [Agree] Like the ISS today, any bases we build on the Moon or Mars will be net resource drains on Earth until then, not assets.
Space tourism could exist, though it will be very expensive.
Breakthroughs may have dramatically reduced space launch costs. One candidate technology is laser propulsion, in which a powerful, ground-based laser shoots beams at the underside of a craft that is dripping water. The beams vaporize the water, causing a series of small explosions that propel the craft upward into space.
Another candidate is the “gas gun,” which is a vertical howitzer that uses pressurized gas instead of gunpowder to accelerate objects to escape velocity. Due to the intensity of the G-forces, it could only be used to launch robust, unmanned craft.
Another candidate is the “slingatron.” [Sounds impractical]
All of those space technologies are longshots that will need decades of R&D to determine their feasibility. The odds of any succeeding can’t be calculated now, but it’s possible that any one of them could prove practical and sharply reduce the costs of launching things into space.
2070-2100
A space elevator might be built. However, there are major technical roadblocks to overcome:
Only carbon nanotubule fibers have the necessary strength-to-weight ratios to make the space elevator. Several paradigm shifts in manufacturing techniques need to happen before we can make tens of thousands of miles of carbon nanotubules that are flawless down to the atomic level.
The risk of collision between the space elevator and satellites would be very high, and the elevator would need to be able to move around to dodge them, meaning it would probably need to be tethered to a ship floating in the ocean, and the elevator’s upper segments would need thrusters.
A Mars outpost will probably exist.
An outpost in the Asteroid Belt will probably exist.
Only token numbers of humans will live outside of the Earth. Mass colonization of space will not be underway.
Probes will probably have explored some of Jupiter’s moons.
A serious effort will be underway to send our first probe to another solar system.
Antimatter engines are not prohibited by the laws of physics. The real limitation is the high cost of synthesizing antimatter. Making just a few trillionths of a gram costs $20 million.
An asteroid made of antimatter would be a game-changer. [But what about the effects of frequent collisions with interstellar dust particles made of normal matter?]
Antimatter won’t be cheap enough for propulsion applications until the end of this century.
Nano-sized Von Neumann Probes could be used to explore and colonize the galaxy. Small size would make it easy to accelerate them to relativistic speeds using gravitational slingshotting around Jupiter or something like a particle accelerator. When they reached their destinations, they could start making copies of themselves.
Chapter 7 – Future of wealth
By 2030
Computers will get so small and cheap that they will be integrated into everyday objects. They will be so omnipresent that the word “computer” might fall out of use since people won’t think of data computation services as coming from discrete physical devices. [I don’t see how this is a prediction about “future wealth.”]
2030-2070
Machines will take over jobs that involve repetitive physical or mental labor.
Human workers will need to provide things machines can’t in order to keep their jobs. Workers with strong “people skills,” creativity, leadership, and other idiosyncratic human traits won’t lose their jobs.
The best lawyers will still be humans.
Juries will not be automated, since the law requires that juries be composed of the “peers” of the defendant being tried for a crime.
[Problematically, many jobs that bank heavily on these human traits, like artists, comedians, and jurors, are low-paid. And because of simple supply and demand, the pay will drop further as more people enter those fields. Also, the necessary traits are unevenly distributed in the population, meaning not every person can switch to being a comedian, warm-hearted therapist, or painter once their old jobs are automated.]
Changes in the music retail paradigm caused by the rise of the internet mean that the music market will be democratized in the future, with middleman “gatekeeper” record companies and music moguls withering away, and average listeners deciding which artists succeed or fail. Poor, unknown singers and bands will be able to rise to the top more easily by selling their songs over the internet cheaply.
Newspapers will continue declining, but won’t disappear because eventually, people will see the downsides of the atomized editorial news/conspiracy theorist podcaster paradigm, and they will crave reputable, unbiased news sources.
Lifelike, computer-generated actors won’t exist because the nuances of the human face and its expressions are too hard to model. [This prediction will almost certainly be wrong.]
2070-2100
A state of “perfect capitalism” will arise, in which firms have perfect information about the needs and preferences of customers, and customers have perfect information about the prices and quality of goods and services offered by firms. People will see fewer ads that don’t appeal to them, and prices and profit margins for everything will be lower.
Augmented reality eyewear will let consumers see information about products before buying them, and to quickly do price/quality comparisons to find the best deals. [AI will do the number crunching.]
Firms will also be able to buy highly detailed customer data and to adjust their marketing strategies and prices accordingly.
It won’t cost more money to have clothes and other types of objects custom-made instead of buying standardized shapes and sizes. “In the future, everything will fit.”
Computation will be thought of as a commoditized utility service like electricity or piped water. People will no longer get their computation services from expensive boxes full of electronics that they buy for personal use and keep in their houses or pockets. Computation service will be remotely accessed through the cloud, using tiny, cheap devices embedded in the environment. [Or implanted in peoples’ bodies.] Any wall will be able to turn into a computer display screen in an instant.
The Internet will not evolve into a means of mass surveillance. “Today, Big Brother is not possible.” [Events since 2011 show that the jury is still out on the internet’s long-term direction.]
Commodity goods and natural resources are getting cheaper over time and will continue to do so. As such, “commodity capitalism,” which is the trading of simple goods, will fade in importance, and “intellectual capitalism” will rise to the fore.
“Intellectual capitalism” refers to the production and trading of goods and services that have value because of uniquely human cognitive effort. New computer algorithms, films, video games, and inventions are all products that can only be created by careful human thought. [I think the author is overestimating how long humans will have a monopoly over these kinds of products. Most Hollywood films are so formulaic that AIs could soon write their scripts, and 100% CGI actors could star in them.]
The future is up for grabs, meaning developing nations could rise to the forefront of power by copying the West’s technology and the best aspects of culture and governance, and today’s rich, established countries could be second-tier. But the author makes no firm predictions beyond that general observation.
Singapore is the best example of a country that rapidly developed thanks to a highly competent and technocratic government that identified and copied the best attributes of the West.
Chapter 8 – Future of humanity
We are headed to become a planetary civilization.
On the Kardashev Scale, we are now a Type 0 civilization.
We will be a Type 1 civilization in 100 years, based on extrapolations of economic growth trends. [This is wrong. In Kardashev’s 1964 science paper, he set the Earth’s then-current level of energy expenditure (4×10^19 ergs/second) as the threshold for a Type 1 civilization. In other words, humanity has been a Type 1 civilization since 1964 at the latest. The paper also said nothing of there being a “Type 0” civilization.]
If the long-term global economic growth rate is 1%, then we will achieve Type 2 status in 2,500 years. With a 2% growth rate, it will happen in 1,200 years. [It depends on how fast we can build a Dyson Swarm. Even their component satellites are self-replicating, it will take many years to mine the raw materials to make enough of them to surround the Sun, and then to move them into the right positions in orbit. Several hundred years is a good estimate.]
Evidence of our transition to a Type 1 civilization:
The rise and ubiquity of the Internet. This provides a universally accessible platform for low-cost communication and access to information.
The rise of English as the world’s common language. [Computer translation technology will accomplish the same thing.]
The economy is increasingly globalized, and super-national trade blocs like NAFTA and the EU have formed. [Events since 2011 has stalled the expansion of international free trade and of trade blocs.]
The rise of a global middle class, whose values and outlooks are broadly similar and peaceful, regardless of which nation they live in. When people have a stake in society (e.g. – good job, money, property, a family), they become risk-averse and much less likely to support revolutions or big wars since they have so much to lose.
Culture is increasingly globalized and homogenized, with people across the world consuming the same films and music and wearing the same styles of clothes. Local cultures will still survive though, and people will be “bi-cultural.”
International sports events like the Olympics command more attention than ever.
Environmental problems and disease outbreaks are increasingly viewed as global problems that countries by default work together to address.
Low-cost plane travel and the swelling global middle class have allowed for a massive increase in international travel for tourism, work, and study. This gives more people exposure to foreigners, building bonds of affection and making it harder for them to go to war.
Lower birthrates mean that parents value their children more as scarce resources, and don’t want to risk them dying in wars. [The rise of killer robots will fix that. A country’s military strength will decouple from its human population size.]
Nation-states will still exist in 2100, but they will be weaker than today.
Our transition to a Type 2 civilization
Won’t happen for thousands of years. Since we will have existed as a planetary civilization for so long by that point, we’ll probably have ironed out the differences that put us at odds today, and we will be much more peaceful by the time we achieve Type 2 status.
Once this status is attained, our civilization will become immortal since there is no known natural force that can destroy an advanced, multiplanetary civilization. [Agreed, though we might still be able to destroy ourselves through warfare or some kind of manmade accident, or be destroyed by aliens.]
We will have colonized all the celestial bodies in our Solar System and possibly built a Dyson Sphere.
We will have colonized nearby star systems.
What our civilization will look like when it has Type 3 status
We will have explored most of the galaxy, probably through use of unmanned, self-replicating probes.
We might be able to derive energy from the fabric of space-time itself. (“Planck energy”) This could also allow for the creation of wormholes that would effectively enable superluminal space travel.
Type 3 civilizations might already have a presence in our Solar System or even on Earth itself. They could be here in the form of very small probes that we overlook or lack the technology to detect. The Fermi Paradox is resolved if you assume aliens have this kind of technology.
We will probably detect advanced alien life this century thanks to better telescopes.
The discovery of intelligent alien life will be one of the most important events in human history. However, it won’t change things as quickly as many people expect. For example, if we learn about the existence of aliens by intercepting one of their radio transmissions, and it turns out the transmission was not meant for Earth, it will indicate that they don’t know we exist. There will be no imperative to send a signal back, meaning we could take our time deciding on our next step. It will also probably take decades for our response to reach them.
Alternatives to the Kardashev scale
Carl Sagan’s scale is based on how many bits of information a civilization processes, and its increments are based on orders of magnitude (e.g. – A “Type C” civilization processes ten times as much information as a “Type B” civilization, and so on down the alphabet).
Freeman Dyson believed that advanced aliens would build spherical structures around their stars to capture all of the light and turn it into energy. Some waste heat would be emitted, so he suggested that “stars” that only emitted infrared light were probable locations of alien civilizations.
As a civilization gets bigger and more advanced, it will generate more waste, including waste heat. If left unchecked, this would lead to their home planets and even their solar systems becoming uninhabitable. Thus, we can expect advanced civilizations to be much more efficient at resource usage than we are today.
“Today, the Internet, with all its faults and excesses, is emerging as a guardian of democratic freedoms.” [In 2019, it is increasingly viewed as a means to spread government surveillance, extremism, and disinformation. Funny how things change.]
Democracies only work well if voters are well-informed and rational. [But isn’t that true of any type of government? For example, dictatorships only work well if the dictators are well-informed and rational.]
Chapter 9 – A day in the life in 2100
You have hundreds of hidden sensors in your bathroom mirror, toilet and sink that scan you for illness.
You have an AI personal assistant named “Molly” that can handle conversational speech, answer your questions intelligently, and complete tasks for you. You interact with Molly through your wall screen.
You “wrap some wires around your head,” allowing you to use your thoughts to control the technology in your house.
A robot chef is in your kitchen.
You have augmented reality contact lenses that show you internet content. You watch the news:
There is a Mars colony.
Preparations are underway to send nano-sized probes to other star systems.
Extinct species are being resurrected using cloning technology.
A space elevator is operational.
Fusion power plants have existed since 2050.
Manhattan is surrounded by dikes due to higher sea levels, and one is leaking.
You telepathically summon your self-driving car and tell it to drive you to work. [Clever and likely to hold true.]
The car hovers above the ground thanks to roads made of room-temperature superconductors.
You work at a civil engineering company. In the lobby of your workplace, a small laser scans your irises from a distance to verify your identity. You don’t need an ID badge.
Your augmented reality contact lenses and telepresence technology makes the conference room seem full of people, most of whom are actually somewhere else. You have a group meeting and discuss the dike leak.
Several coastal cities across the world have been abandoned due to rising sea levels. Manhattan survived thanks to its dikes.
The group realizes that an underwater maintenance robot probably went haywire and drilled the hole in the dike. A decision is made to fix it with a different underwater robot that is remote-controlled by a human.
After work, you return home and use your wall screen to do a video call with your robot doctor. It tells you that the sensors in your bathroom diagnosed you with pancreatic cancer this morning. The doctor prescribes you nanoparticles to kill the cancer cells.
You run a smartphone-sized MRI machine over your abdomen to make a 3D scan of your internal organs, and the doctor sees it immediately.
You have a holographic TV system in your living room that lets you watch sports games immersively. It looks like the players are running around you.
Human genetic engineering is common.
Molly helps you set up a date with a woman named “Karen.” Both of you have online dating profiles.
You can use your wall screen to virtually explore places in the real world. You use this ability to “go shopping” at a local mall and to see if a robot dog is for sale there. You find it, and decide to drive to the actual mall to buy it because you are bored and want to get out of your house.
Large numbers of robots of different shapes and sizes are roaming public spaces, mostly doing labor.
The robot industry is bigger than the car industry.
Robots still lack human levels of intelligence, creativity and humor.
You try on suit jackets at a shop until you find the one that looks the best. You send an online order to a local textile factory to make that suit for you, but tailored to your exact body measurements. It will be delivered to you by the end of the day.
At the supermarket, your AR contact lenses display price comparison data over all the items on the shelves and highlight the bargains.
You return home. Most of your furniture is made of programmable matter, so you can change its appearance at will. You pick a new home decor motif and verbally order Molly to change everything. It takes about an hour for the process to complete.
Medicines that can slow the aging process have existed for many years, and it’s common for adults to be much older than they look.
You were born in 2028 and were genetically engineered in vitro to have a longer lifespan. That feature, coupled with medical interventions you had later in life, has resulted in you having a body of someone who is 30 even though you are 72 years old.
FIVR gaming and tourism exists.
You visit Europe with Karen, and while touring the ancient ruins of Rome, your AR contact lenses generate real-looking images that show what the area looked like in its prime.
The Italian speech of the people you encounter is subtitled in English across your field of view by your contact lenses.
You don’t need a paper map to find your way around Rome because your contact lenses display lines and arrows that tell you where to go.
Ageless people don’t feel pressure to get married or have children. You’ve never passed either milestone.
You and Karen agree to have a child, and contemplate genetically engineering it.
Here’s an awesome, long-lost Joe Rogan interview with sci-fi writer Daniel H. Wilson. Unlike many other guests on the show, Wilson isn’t a kook, and I see he shares my view that robot butlers will be made smaller, weaker, and slower than humans to prevent accidental injuries to us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5fH-o-258Y
Elon Musk’s OpenAI company and Microsoft are partnering to build an AGI. It’s funny how this news got no reaction. https://openai.com/blog/microsoft/
Ten years ago, brain scientist Henry Markram said: “It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8164060.stm
A machine-learning program that has a limited natural language understanding ability can scan through chemistry papers and predict unknown properties of molecules. This has the potential to speed up discoveries in the field by directing human research chemists to focus on the most promising things. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/07/15/machine-mining-the-literature
AIs will learn your taste preferences so well that they’ll be able to create individualized meal recipes for you. With so much focus on how robots will end the era of mass-produced clothing and let anyone afford tailored outfits, we’ve overlooked the fact that the customization will spread to all kinds of other goods and services. https://www.france24.com/en/20190721-kitchen-disruption-better-food-through-artificial-intelligence
Deep fake technology is now being used to replace characters in movies. Some recently subbed Sylvester Stallone into Terminator 2‘s lead role, and the footage looks great. I predict someday it will be common for TV shows and movies to have multiple “variations” appealing to different segments of their audiences, with the plots diverging at key points and the characters played by different actors. This will get easier to do once lifelike CGI actors exist and once AIs can at least help to write scripts. The endpoint will be entertainment content (including VR worlds) custom-tailored to individual people. https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/ctrl-shift-face-deepfake-changing-hollywood-history/
Facebook used AI to scan high-res satellite photos of Thailand and to add more than 300,000 miles of roads to official maps of the country. Instead of satellites, why don’t we use fleets of small, autonomous drone planes with belly cameras? https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49091093
“This conjecture has stood as one of the most frustrating and embarrassing open problems in all of combinatorics and theoretical computer science,” wrote Scott Aaronson of the University of Texas, Austin, in a blog post. “The list of people who tried to solve it and failed is like a who’s who of discrete math and theoretical computer science.” https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematician-solves-computer-science-conjecture-in-two-pages-20190725/
In the 1960s and 70s, an experiment was conducted at Brookhaven Lab to study the effects of radiation on the natural environment. ‘It was like walking up a mountain. The higher up you climb, the smaller and fewer the trees. Eventually, the trees drop out completely and you reach a zone of low shrubs, then a tundra zone of smaller ground plants and, finally, if the mountain is high enough, no life at all.’ https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jun-10-op-8635-story.html
100 years ago almost exactly, sailors aboard the captured German Fleet interned in British waters simultaneously sunk their own ships. Out of 74 ships, 52 sank that day. However, since it happened in shallow waters, all but seven of them were eventually re-floated and re-used for scrap metal. https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-scuttling-of-the-german-fleet-1919
The plastic parts of guns can be made transparent, like glass. Wouldn’t this be the best way to camouflage them since other people looking at you would see through (most of) your gun as if it weren’t there, and instead see whatever was on the other side of it (e.g. – your camouflaged uniform, a tree trunk, a bush). https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/02/13/the-transparent-heckler-koch-g36/
Even if we used genetic engineering to purge all disorders from the human genome, we would have to genetically screen each new generation of humans for new disorders caused by random genetic mutations. https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/apert-syndrome
The first baby has been born in the U.S. from a dead donor’s transplanted womb. I’m obviously a fan of assisted reproduction technologies, but I don’t see a justification for this. https://apnews.com/c328217fa0ba43afa258067701ba3aee
40-60% of all fertilized human eggs don’t survive long enough to be born. Most are miscarried while still microscopic in size, and the woman has no clue she ever had a zygote inside her. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5443340/
And for the first 99.9% of the human race’s existence, the child mortality rate was about 60%, meaning that, if you were lucky enough to survive the womb and to be born, there were better-than-even odds that you would die before age 16. https://amechanicalart.blogspot.com/2013/09/infant-mortality-then-and-now.html
Instantaneous communication and constant access to Breaking News is doing more harm than good. “Slow news” is better because the people releasing it have time to confirm that it is real and to carefully word it. Also, people should ask themselves how they’d be worse off if there were, say, a 12-hour time delay in having access to news reports on things that didn’t immediately impact their lives. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/twitter-pause-button/592762/
The U.S. Secret Service has a forensic lab with samples of 85,000 different types of inks, which they use to figure out where threatening letters and counterfeit money came from. https://apnews.com/b541d7175ef64358a1e63a5cc3e5aeba
It’s been 20 years since Segways were invented, so the patent has expired and anyone can make and sell them. The Segway’s concept (small, motorized personal transport) was right, but the form factor was wrong, and the company’s sales strategy was bad. Rentable e-scooters succeeded instead, and do all the things Segways did. https://www.kimt.com/content/national/499023511.html
Using data from user-submitted photos, scientists were able to make a 3D model of a 3,000 year old statue that ISIS destroyed a few years ago, and to make a copy of it using a 3D printer. As time passes, it will get easier and easier to make scans of objects and places, and to recreate them in the physical world or in virtual reality. The past will never die. https://apnews.com/dbca5e23519f44c4a881c9cd69f41cd6
I recently read The Accidental Superpower, and thought I’d write a brief review, as many of the book’s points align with the purpose of this blog. The first five chapters are great, and should be standard reading for anyone wanting a basic grasp of how accidents of natural geography help determine where nations form and what their fates are. Thanks to physics and to the demands of human biology, parts of the world with the following qualities are the best at supporting human populations:
Mild climates. Humans struggle to live in places that are too hot or too cold. This is why there was never a powerful civilization centered in the Arctic regions or Sahara desert. Only small numbers of hyper-specialized nomadic people were able to live in those harsh places, their constant struggle for survival meant they never had the spare time and resources to get advanced, and they were conquered by other groups of people who originated in neighboring temperate climate zones that could support larger populations and bigger resource surpluses.
Natural harbors and navigable waterways. Moving cargo by boat requires much less energy than it does to move it by pack animal, railroad, or truck. This means that parts of the world blessed with coastlines that have natural harbors–where ships could be protected from rough seas–could participate in trade and get richer than those that lacked them. Rivers are also very important because they provide drinking water, are convenient ways to get rid of waste, and can also be very cheap avenues of transportation, again bolstering trade. Importantly, not all rivers are created equal, and if they are too turbulent, shallow, or full of rapids, they aren’t useful for transit.
Flat land. Flat land is, for obvious reasons, more useful as farmland, and it is faster, easier, and cheaper for people and cargo to move across it. Flat land can be colonized quickly, and it can support a larger, richer population because of the higher agricultural potential and lower energy costs of moving people and cargo around (the less money you spend on moving things around, the more money you have left over for buying things you want). As mentioned, the most energy-efficient way to move cargo is by boat, but railroad trains are a respectable second-place, while moving things by automobile is a distant third. However, the energy-efficiency of railroad transportation sharply drops if a train has to go uphill even at a 1% grade, or if its track has a lot of curves in it. Thus, flat land is much more conducive to railroad networks.
Energy resources. Mostly, this means underground fossil fuel reserves.
There are three more key points worth mentioning:
Mountains (or “highlands” as the author calls them) are usually low-population zones because they can’t support much human life. They also block the flow of people, which can be a good thing (forms a natural barrier between your people and a neighboring group of foreign people) or a bad thing (impedes the movement of your people within your own country and naturally encourages them to develop cultural differences that might undermine shared national identity).
In general, the bigger a country’s population is, the stronger and richer it is. This is because most humans are productive assets that can build and invent things and aggregate into armies. However, important exceptions include humans that are very young, very old, or disabled. Those types of humans can’t do work, and are net drains on national resources. If they get to be too big a percentage of a country’s population, then the country will have all kinds of problems. The U.S. is one of the few major countries that has and will continue to have a favorable balance of productive humans vs. unproductive humans.
All of the advantages and disadvantages conferred by geography can be partly ameliorated with technology. Useless cerrados can be turned into farmland, artificial harbors can be built and turbid rivers dammed or dredged, railroad and road networks can be built in areas lacking navigable waterways, energy can be imported or derived from an increasingly diverse array of sources (e.g. – a small country lacking fossil fuels might be ideally situated for dams, nuclear power, solar power, or wind power), and tunnels can be bored through mountain ranges.
I’m much less of a fan of the second part of the book, where the author makes predictions about how different countries will fare up to 2040. He posits many indisputable facts that are well-known to any student of international affairs, geopolitics, and economics, but then leaps from those to many unfounded and provocative conclusions about what’s ahead. Here are those I strongly disagree with:
U.S./Canadian fossil fuels production will stay at high levels. The extent to which fracking has bolstered North American energy supplies, and by extension, changed the world’s energy market (oil and natural gas prices are low across the board now) is clear and remarkable. However, I don’t think it’s safe for the author to assume that U.S./Canadian production levels will stay at current levels until 2040. We don’t know how much recoverable shale oil and gas there is in North America, and production could level off as early as the mid-2020s, and then start declining a few years later.
Citi Bank has a good track record predicting fossil fuel markets, and they seem to forecast a plateau in U.S. shale oil production in the mid-2020s.
This scenario isn’t a certainty, and the author could be right, but it’s important to point out that a nearer-term peak is just as plausible as what he thinks. This is not just an academic issue; long-term North American energy independence and the ripple effect of low global fossil fuel prices underpin the author’s assumptions that the U.S. will have the economic luxury of disengaging from the world, particularly the Middle East.
The U.S. will disengage from the rest of the world, creating a destructive power vacuum. The author predicts that, once the U.S. becomes a net energy exporter, the infamous trade deficit with countries like China and Japan will shrink to the point that the U.S. could cut itself off from them at minimal economic cost. Advances in 3D printing (particularly metal printing) will also allow the U.S. to make its own goods instead of relying on foreign factories. Lacking any interest in affairs outside North America, the U.S. will withdraw from its military and trade alliances, bring all of its troops and ships home, and let high-seas pirates and undemocratic regional powers like Iran fill the vacuum.
Problematically, trends over the last five years since The Accidental Superpower‘s publishing haven’t gone the way the author predicted, which suggests the U.S. isn’t on track to being able to economically detach itself from the rest of the world. For example, even though the U.S. became the world’s #1 natural gas producer in 2013 and its #1 oil producer in 2018 and is now breaking all-time export records for both, the country;s trade deficit has gotten WORSE over that period.
A country has a “trade deficit” when the value of the things that it buys from other countries exceeds the value of the things that those countries buy from it. If your country has a trade deficit, then it means you can’t detach from the world economy without suffering serious pain.
Moreover, 3D printers have not improved to the extent that the author seems to have predicted, nor are they starting to replace traditional manufacturing machines (e.g. – looms, presses, lathes) in factories that mass produce goods. Furthermore, there’s no indication that this will change anytime soon. Looking back, it’s clear now that the author wrote the book during a period of hype about 3D printers, and that rosy predictions in pop-sci articles and financial magazines about how the machines were poised to revolutionize the manufacturing industry probably influenced his thinking.
3D printers failed to live up to the hype, at least in the short-run.
Additionally, since 2014, the U.S. has not become isolationist, in spite of the election of President Trump, whom many policy experts considered a “worst-case scenario” for continuing the U.S. foreign policy status quo. Putting aside the “America First” slogan and countless insulting Tweets aimed at foreign leaders and international alliances, Trump’s concrete policy changes have barely reduced the U.S.’ overseas commitments. Trump has (justifiably) berated other NATO countries for their low defense spending and has “hinted” that he might-possibly-be-thinking-about leaving the alliance, but no real steps have been taken to do so, like shutting down U.S. bases in Europe. Levels of American troops in places that are clearly not core U.S. interests, like Syria and Africa, have little changed since the “globalist” President Obama was in charge. U.S. defense spending is up, and there’s no sign that the military brass or a majority of U.S. politicians want to shrink it.
Where international trade policy is concerned, Trump’s impact has been more substantive as he has replaced NAFTA with a trade pact that favors the U.S. slightly more, refused to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and put tariffs on many Chinese imports. But all at worst these policies collectively put a tiny dent in the flow of U.S.-foreign trade.
Since 2014, there has simply been no sign of the U.S. retrenching for its then-existing global commitments, even in spite of the fact that the U.S. elected a more isolationist President in 2016 than the author (or most other experts) probably expected. I don’t think this will change, either, for several reasons. First, even if the U.S. doesn’t consume Middle Eastern oil, many other important countries do and will continue doing so. Allowing the Middle East’s petrostates to fall into chaos will disrupt oil supplies outside of North America, damaging economies across the world, and in turn reducing demand for U.S. exports to those countries. Thus, it will remain in the U.S.’ economic interest to stay engaged in the Middle East indefinitely, and to use its diplomatic and military power to protect the petrostates and Persian Gulf shipping lanes.
Second, the U.S. will stay diplomatically and militarily engaged in seemingly unimportant countries like Afghanistan and the Philippines to keep them from becoming terrorist bases and to prevent them from allying themselves with rivals like Russia or China. Remember that the 9/11 attacks cost the U.S. economy $200 billion at a minimum, and that the attacks were only made possible by al Qaeda having free reign in Afghanistan for bases and planning.
Third, as I hinted earlier, the U.S. military-industrial complex has taken on a life of its own, and pursues its own self-interests and protects its assets (including overseas bases) regardless of America’s actual defense needs. It has become the mother of all entrenched bureaucracies, it’s career suicide for any elected politician to propose serious cuts to it, and fixing military overspending and winding down foreign military alliances is not a priority for most American voters.
China will just, like, fall apart. Arguably the most extreme and least credible prediction in the book is that China will economically and politically implode due to internal and external pressures, it will stop being a world power, and will fragment along ethnolinguistic lines. While the author is right to note that China faces major challenges in the near-to-mid future, he makes elementary errors when he assumes they will lead to national calamity.
I don’t contend the author’s point that China has a corrupt, opaquely run banking sector, and that the country hundreds of billions of dollars in bad debts, but it’s impossible for anyone to know if it will lead to a financial crisis that will wreck the country’s economy. The author’s prediction primarily hinges on this unproven assumption, and is thus bad futurism. The author also rightly points out that China’s working-age population is shrinking due to the defunct One Child policy, and that this will exert serious drag on their economy as the number of unproductive elderly people continues increasing. But again, the author jumps to a conclusion when he predicts this will lead to economic collapse and widespread starvation in rural China. I think it’s much likelier that China’s economic growth rate will continue gradually slowing until it settles near the boundary between “middle” and “high” income countries over the next 20 years. How long it takes them to get out of the “Middle Income Trap” is an open question, but in the long run, they will.
The author’s prediction that the U.S. will help to bankrupt China by ending trade with it ignores the fact that this would be against American interests (the ongoing U.S.-China trade war notwithstanding), and his suggestion that Japan will rearm, magically stop caring about possible nuclear retaliation, and wage a ruinous war against China (along with India and perhaps other Asian countries joining in to block the sea lanes China uses to get oil from the Mideast) is completely silly. Moreover, the notion that China will splinter along ethnolinguistic lines like the Soviet Union did rests on badly flawed assumptions about the Chinese Communist Party’s willingness and ability to use force to put down internal rebellions. The recent 30th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square Massacre gives testimony to the opposite. There are no credible secessionist movements in China, and no rivals to the CCP’s grip on power, and both are unlikely to change.
And now for something completely different.
While reading The Accidental Superpower, I had the lucky…accident…of going on a trip to Ecuador, which is a country dominated by the Andes Mountain range. While there, I climbed a dormant volcano called “Mt. Pichincha,” which is on Quito’s outskirts. That experience in particular and the trip more generally hit home for me some of the book’s important points, and made me think about what they meant the future of intelligent life on Earth and beyond.
Quito sits in a valley that is 9,350 ft (2,850 meters) above sea level, which is already higher than the highest point in any U.S. state east of the Rocky mountains. Most foreigners can feel the tiring physical effects of the thinner air when they simply walk down the street in Quito. Hiking uphill at an even higher altitude is much worse, as I’d soon discover. The first step to climbing Mt. Pichincha is to take a gondola from the edge of the city to a point 12,943 ft (3,945 meters) up the mountain. After that, you walk on a trail to the summit, called “Rucu Pichincha”, 15,696 ft (4,784 meters) high.
Looking down at the city from the gondola station.
Right after exiting the gondola, I noticed it was several degrees colder than in the city, and low-hanging clouds blocked the sunlight. By contrast, Quito far below was mostly bathed in light, and I realized that Mt. Pichincha had its own climate distinct from the valley’s. I hiked out of the gondola station towards the summit, and after only about 20 minutes, passed the last tree along the trail. I was above the treeline, and the only vegetation was wild grass, bushes, and lichens.
Soon after that, I got to what you might call “the cloud line,” meaning I had hiked high enough to be inside that low-hanging cloud layer I noticed at the gondola station. The climate became harsher and more volatile, one minute being still, the next minute being almost clear, and the next being dark and windy. There were actually three distinct “sleet storms” during my hike (keep in mind this was in mid-July, and I was only a few miles from the equator!).
Being in such an environment hit home for me a key point made in The Accidental Superpower: mountains are barriers to human movement, and they form natural borders between human groups. During the first 99.8% of our species’ existence, before Industrial-era technology existed, mountains like Pichincha would have been nearly impassable and almost uninhabitable. Merely building a shelter to escape the harsh climate would have been hard thanks to the lack of wood (remember, I quickly got above the treeline during the hike). Stones would need to be used, which imposes various inefficiencies. Even the crucial ability to make fire for warmth or for cooking would be handicapped by the lack of wood and the moist atmosphere.
If you want an otherworldly experience, explore a large abandoned building, hike a mountain above the treeline, or do hallucinogenic drugs.
The low temperatures (it got bitingly cold and my hands went numb at one point), low sunlight, rocky soil, and sloped land would have made farming impossible. Hunting and gathering on Mt. Pichincha wouldn’t have worked since the animals were so few (I only saw a few small birds and one rabbit) and the vegetation so sparse–the calories you’d burn chasing down animals and walking around to find edible plants would probably exceed the calories you’d get from eating them. Growing food in the arable land in the Quito valley and then shipping it up the mountain on mules or wagons to feed people living there would doubtless be too expensive (unless the mountain people had something really valuable to trade for food, like gold they were getting from a mine), and would ultimately be limited by the same “balance of calories burned vs. obtained” phenomenon. As I realized during my climb, you burn a lot of calories when walking uphill.
The only way a permanent human settlement might have been able to feed itself on Mt. Pichincha would have been if it had domesticated mountain goats or maybe llamas and alpacas (it depends on how sure-footed they are on steep slopes). They could have grazed on the wild grasses and bushes. Even still, I doubt there would have been enough vegetation to support anything but small herds of the animals, which in turn would have kept the number of humans living on the mountain small. The comparatively fertile and benign environment in the Quito valley would have inevitably come to support a much larger, richer population. Imagining a topographical map of the world in my mind’s eye with this new knowledge, many patterns of human settlement and many national boundaries suddenly made more sense to me.
In the town of Da Lat, Vietnam, several hills have been terraced and covered with greenhouses.
As I hiked further, I considered another important point from The Accidental Superpower–technology allows humans to overcome problems imposed by geography–and I thought about how modern technology could make Mt. Pichincha habitable. Paved roads could be built on all but the steepest parts of the mountain, making most points on it accessible to humans from Quito without physical exertion (the gondola could also be extended). The sloped land could be leveled, graded, and terraced in order to build structures above it, where humans could live and work. Greenhouses could be built on the flattened land, and crops grown inside with much greater efficiency than they would grow outside, particularly if the greenhouses contained transplanted soil and used artificial lighting to counter the mountain’s cloudiness. Water supplies could be assured by building a system of rain catchments and cisterns, and by building simple devices that condensed cloud vapor into water. People living on the mountain could produce some of their own food, though it would be cheaper to buy it from a more fertile place and have it shipped up.
Likewise, people living on Mt. Pichincha could generate their own energy, or build power lines to Quito and buy it from them. As noted, the mountain was windy most of the time, so wind turbines would be an efficient power source. And since Pichincha is a dormant volcano, there are good odds that a geothermal power plant could by sited there.
The only real barriers to building towns or even cities at high altitudes like Mt. Pichincha are cost of living and quality of life. Most things would cost more money since they would be scarcer or would have to be trucked in from Quito. The mountain’s harsh and volatile climate would also be repellent to most humans, though the fact the people still willingly live in Iceland and northern Alaska proves that some people could take it. And even at the peak of Mt. Pichincha, 15,696 ft high, the air is thick enough for humans to breathe without difficulty after a few months of acclimatization. In fact, the highest human town is in neighboring Peru and is 1,000 ft higher than Pichincha’s summit, and professional mountaineers have found that the air remains thick enough for humans to breathe up to 26,247 ft (8,000 m). Thus, modern technology has overcome the natural impediments to human settlement on anything but the world’s very tallest mountains.
One of Facebook’s massive data centers is in Sweden, close to the Arctic Circle. It was sited there partly because the cold temperatures can cool the servers.
I kept hiking, and in spite of worsening physical exhaustion and the thinning air, I had more insights. What would even more advanced technologies mean for the habitability of Mt. Pichincha and other desolate places in the future? Extending the logic from The Accidental Superpower, it would stand to reason that they would open even more to settlement, especially if the settlement were being done by intelligent machines that didn’t have the same biological limitations and inbuilt preferences as humans like us. The colder, windy climate would actually be beneficial since it would help the AIs to cool their computer chips. The thinness of the air and poor quality of the soil wouldn’t pose problems since machines don’t breathe or eat. The bleakness of the landscape wouldn’t bother machines since they would lack the inbuilt genetic programming that humans have, which makes us crave sunny, green environments and blue skies.
All that AIs would need to survive on Mt. Pichincha would be electricity, building materials, and roads to get up and down the mountain. As I noted earlier, the electricity problem could be solved easily, there’s no engineering reason why roads couldn’t be built on all but the steepest parts of the mountain, and building materials could be shipped in from Quito, or even made by pulverizing some of the stones comprising the mountain itself and turning them into concrete. Intelligent machines could probably thrive there. And if they had radically advanced technologies like fusion power and nanomachine-based replicators, they’d have no need for anything aside from periodic refills of fusion reactor fuel and small amounts of trace elements they couldn’t extract from the mountain’s soil or from the air.
Additionally, it struck me that living on Mt. Pichincha or another remote, inhospitable place would be an ethical choice for intelligent machines since their presence wouldn’t displace any humans, and since constructing server farms and structures wouldn’t destroy much animal or plant life. As I noted, I only saw a handful of small animals during my hike, and few of the plants were higher than my knees. Perhaps it will be the fate of intelligent machines to build their cities on mountaintops, cold deserts, or floating on the seas.
And extending this train of thinking by assuming ever-better technology and intelligent machines moving to ever-more-remote places, we are inevitably led to the prospect of space colonization, von Neumann probes, and the conversion of whole celestial bodies into computronium, as Ray Kurzweil predicts (and maybe in the very far future, if our understanding of Physics evolves, our civilization might find ways to “live” in the very fabric of space-time and be invisible but everywhere, or to expand beyond our universe). The well-established point in The Accidental Superpower that technology allows humans to overcome problems imposed by geography and to spread to formerly inhospitable parts of the world (e.g. – Florida before air conditioning was invented) has major implications for the future, and buttresses ideas about space colonization that are now the purview of science fiction. The rule should be rephrased as: Technology allows intelligent life forms to overcome problems imposed by geography and to spread to formerly inhospitable places.
Right as I was making this wonderful conceptual breakthrough, I got so dizzy from the effects of thin air and physical exertion that I fell on my face. Fortunately, I was wearing my backpack around the front of my body like a weirdo, so it cushioned the impact, and I was unhurt. I took stock of my condition and my surroundings: the trail had become narrow and treacherous (the segment I was on was named “Paso de la Muerte” or “Step of the Dead”), I couldn’t see far because I was enveloped in the clouds, and stumbling to the right thanks to another loss of balance or a strong gust of wind would have meant rolling far down a nearly vertical cliff. No, I was not prepared for this climb, so I turned back about 30 minutes short of reaching the summit of Rucu Pichincha. Yes, it was a bit disappointed, but I didn’t want to die, and I consoled myself with my new bit of knowledge and with the fact that I’d managed to hike to about 14,500 ft, which, other than the times I’ve flown in airplanes, is the highest I’ve been in my life.
