Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge, futurists argues that the technological singularity is near. The singularity refers to a point in time where humans are able to create a robot that is sufficently equal or smarter then a human. When that is reached, the robot would then be able to create even smarter robots that create smarter robots at an ever increasing rate.
They use it by arguing that moore’s law would ensure that processing speed of a transistor doubles every 18 months. Even after 2010 when the transistor has reached its limit, they argue that other forms of energy would continue the tradition. Vernor Vinge said that the singularity will come in 2030. Kurzweil said 2045.
I do not know what to make of this. Though what I do know is that by 2050 the world will radically change alot.
Things we would have likely done by mid century:
Real stealth technology.
Travel to mars.
Automous travel by driverless cars( maybe even flying cars ).
Able to replicate anything with an object replicator using nanomaterials.
Create a virtual reality environment close to what is potrayed in “the matrix”.
Able to regrow limbs and organs.
implants that greatly increase human abilities( e.g store memory ) We could learn everything in an encylocepedia by uploading it to our memory.
Resurrect an extinct animal.
Some of the points I can think from the top of my head. It would be an interesting world.
I don’t know, but I think it’s a mistake to assume technology will continue increasing at the (accelerating) rate it has been for the past 20-30 years or so. Keep in mind humanity has seen 1000+ year stretches with little to no new technological innovations. Now you can argue that society is generally freer to pursue the scientific disciplines now than it has been in the past, and you’d be right, but our very recent history has still been something of an anomaly. An exciting and mostly pleasant anomaly, but it would be impossible to sustain the exponentially increasing gains we’ve seen so far.
More seriously, I think the trend in predicting future technology is this:
Initial implementation is very expensive and special-purpose (military, the space program, etc.)
There is a huge barrier to anything that can’t build on an existing infrastructure, even if the technology itself is feasible (for example, where would the Internet be without phone and existing data lines to get it going?)
The most significant advances of the future will be things we will never think of (for example, in hundreds of years of writing about going to moon, no author thought the world might be watching on live TV).
The things we think are a shoo-in will still not be implemented the way we think they will (my money says no mass usage of flying cars… flying cars are already 60 years overdue according to the thinkers circa 1900.)
Things that are staples of science fiction will still be impossible (true stealth, matter transmission/replication, antigravity, hyperspeed, time travel)
As for projects like travel to Mars… that has been achievable for at least 20 years. What we need is a reason to go.
Physical limitations of the materials we currently use. While it might not be impossible, to use better materials across the board would be prohibitively expensive.
Of course, perhaps tomorrow someone will invent something. That’s why reading into the future is tricky business.
Those who can afford it will be able to create genetically modified babies. It’s conceivable that *Homo sapiens *may split into two or more branches. Also, those who can afford it will be able to extend their lifespan indefinitely (incrementally, but staying just ahead of death with the advancement of technology). And drunk scientists will be able to ask Multivac questions.
I would have thought that inventing better materials once they limit technology was a given. After all we’ve done it up to now. Basically it seems like your saying that we can’t continue inventing things because we won’t be able to continue inventing things.
Not only better materials, but cheaper, smaller ‘devices’ using plentiful (rather than rare) raw materials. It is more than likely that we will be ‘mining’ substances from dumps, under roads and from demolished buildings.
My guess is that the next major technological development will be an ‘unknown unknown’ - which makes it sort of … difficult to predict.
At any rate, I suggested no such thing. Indeed, I made a specific allowance for the fact that tomorrow someone might invent something to make it economically doable. I find it hard to imagine how when I said, “Of course, perhaps tomorrow someone will invent something.” you took that to mean “fuck, man, like, you know, this problem will never get fixed because humans never invent shit, ya dig?”.
However, whether or not someone invents something tomorrow, or in ten years, or never isn’t relevant to what we can predict now. When making predictions about what will happen in the future, we kind of have to rely on what we have in the world now. Otherwise, it’s science fiction. Well, maybe our replicators will just whip up some new, fancy super efficient low heat jobbies, and the like. While we might one day have such technology and may well be able to say that we can just get the replicator to do it, until we have it, it’s a dream.
As it stands today, the reason that we don’t expect the current and past rates of increase to remain the same is simply because of the physical limitations of the materials we have today.
But, and I’ll say it again since you missed it, tomorrow someone might invent something. But it’s today, so let’s dwell with what we have at the moment while understanding that some new invention of tomorrow can revolutionize the field.
So you’re saying that it would be impossible to sustain the exponentially increasing technological gains we’ve seen so far, unless we mange to sustain the exponentially increasing technological gains we’ve seen so far.
Well, my argument has never been that it’s impossible to do, even now. My argument is that it’s economically prohibitive, yet possible. Reading comprehension is our friend.
2050 is roughly 40 years from now. How accurately would someone 40 years ago (right around 1970) have been able to predict daily life now?
There would likely have been some hits. It wouldn’t have been much of a stretch to imagine that microwaves would be common in kitchens, for instance, because they already existed, though they were too expensive for many families. If anything an enthusiastic futurist might have gone too far and predicted that they would replace the electric or gas range for all cooking purposes. Similarly, early home VCRs were on the market and better ones in development, and TV studios had been using similar devices for years, so someone who knew something about technology might imagine that it would be common to record favorite television programs to be watched at the viewer’s convenience. That’s not the same as predicting the birth of DVRs and TiVo, of course, but the general concept would have been accurate.
On the other hand, flying cars and videophones have been predicted to be Coming Real Soon Now for decades, and I’d be surprised if a 1970ish prediction of the future didn’t include at least one. (For example, 2001: A Space Odyssey, filmed in 1968, included a scene in which Dr Floyd talks to his young daughter on a videophone.) They’ve never come to be, and may never. Designing a flying car that can be safely controlled by the average driver has been elusive, and the best prototypes would be expensive to buy, run, and maintain. And the general public is not interested enough in videophones to make the upgrade in infrastructure worthwhile, especially not when interested folks can get webcams and Skype.
Specific to 1970 or so is the problem of the space race. People were so gung-ho about space that it just seemed to be a given that we’d be living on the Moon by now. But things changed, and government priorities changed with them.
Having looked at all of that, there’s no way I’m going to pretend I can make an accurate prediction about forty years in the future!
So your response to a question of why it is impossible to sustain technological growth is to state that there are physical limitations making it impossible.
But you’ve never made an argument that it’s impossible.
You don’t read well, nor are you apt at quotations. For those who are curious, the entire quote is thus: “Physical limitations of the materials we currently use. While it might not be impossible, to use better materials across the board would be prohibitively expensive.”
I fail to see how the obvious manages escape our intrepid reader here.
In case the point escaped you, the argument is roughly that we have materials which can, at least for a while, sustain the progress we see now. But we’re rapidly approaching a point where what we commonly use will no longer be able to support such progress. That means we’d have to resort to other materials. These materials exist, but they aren’t cheap. So, it’s not impossible, just economically prohibitive.
I think the suggestion that technological advances have been exponential is inaccurate.
New technologies take time to find their place. Then they develop in fifty new directions, only a couple of which will firmly take hold in the culture.
What we are seeing now is refining of existing and recently developed technologies, rather than the mass invention that came around 100 years ago (telephone, film, transport, etc).
I’m not sure I agree with that. DVDs or even TV are only as related to film as film was to stage plays. They’re all visual entertainment media, but from a technological viewpoint that’s where the similarity stops. Sure DVD shares some common features with film, but it shares the same features with stage plays, so they’re more features that we demand of technology rather than products of that technology.
The same is true to a greater or lesser extent of transport and telephones.
In contrast you can look at things like computers, electronics generally, digital information storage, genetics technology, lasers, polymer science, sattellite communications and so forth that are every bit as revolutionary as telephones or film but are as independent of 100 year old technology as that technology was of flint.
I agree that in some areas (road transport might be the best example) we are truly just refining 100 year old technology. But in many areas we are truly developing new technology that at most replaces that old technology and is often totally unrelated.
It’s hard to prove that technology is advancing exponentially, but you could certainly make a good case for it.
