In the next 30 years your children will look at you like you are oboslete. They will have computers in everything. Clothing, watches that talk, GPS PDA’s, laptops with wireless technology. They will be immersed in a world of games and data. They will likely be taught programming classes and networking basics in classes along side English and Mathmatics.
They will be using different cars, I think. Hybrids, or electric cars. More than likely a social shift will happen and people will be more into the indivdualized transportation like mopeds, and small two seaters. The internet will be everything to them, more so than even myself. I cannot hardly live without it, and I remember it before it was around. Likely kids in 30 years will not be able to imagine it. Like we find it hard to imagine life without telephones.
I think the gap between them and you will be much GREATER than the gap between you and your father and his father. Of course, only time will tell, and it is next to impossible to predict the future. I merely parrot those that spend quite a bit of time imagining the future, sociologists, scientists, and authors. Not that they are right, but I think they consider more than just what you have observed with your grandfather.
A TV show I enjoy is about to come on, so I am going to cut this a bit short, I will come back in a bit to recommend you some reading, if you actually interested in learning about the change that has happened in the last 20 years. Or what people think is in store for us in the future. I think this is in line with the OP because the snowballing effect is mentioned quite often in many of these types of books.
Not necessarily snowballing forever, since our ressources aren’t infinite. The more knowledge we have, the more people are needed to exploit them and make further progress. Scientists are more and more specialized, and we don’t have an infinite pool to draw them from. The world population growth rate is slowing down and will soon, according to the most recent estimate, reach a peak. Besides, people are more and more educated all over the world. So, there’s less and less “unexploited human ressources” (the guy who could have made incredible discoveries if he had been to school instead of being an illiterate shepherd).
Also, the material cost of new advances is increasing too. To build the most advanced particle accelerators, several wealthy nations have to pool their financial ressources, and to operate it, to pool their intellectual ressources. When phycisists will say : “we’ve an interesting theory to test, but we would need a particle accelerator the size of the solar system”, it might be that we won’t be able to make further progress.
We could also run into another limit : our ability to understand. I’ve no particular reason to believe that we’re potentially able to understand everything which could theorically be understood/discovered. It happens that the intelligence we needed to hunt mamoths more efficiently incidentally allowed us (well…some of us) to understand too some bits of quantum physics, but it doesn’t mean that we’ll never reach its limits.
Though honestly, I don’t think it makes much sense to try to make long-term guesses. And besides, we could manage to eradicate ourselves within the next couple generations.
clairobscur- the limit on our ability to understand only applies as long as we refrain from making AI smarter than ourselves or improving our ownselves. Once we find a way to surpass these limitations, we’ll have another long whiile of snowballing until we come up on constraints on intelligence based upon physical law. I do immagine however, that once we find a way to make ouselves immortal, the pace of innovation will start to slow down to a more sedate pace. People will finally stop running around like they are in some sort of race and start enjoying their lives.
Another area of huge advances in the last three decades has been materials technology. We can produce some stuff these days with almost magical properties. And driven by the need to produce smaller and smaller computer circuits, we are approaching the point of being able to produce objects with an exactly specified configuration of atoms. In the future, our artifacts may all be mechanisms at the molecular level, rather than inert objects.
I read a [largely romanticized] book on an impending technological singularity, “The Spike.” Worth a glance if you need the entertainment.
A fact I like to share-- in 1899, the head of the patent office petitioned for its closure, “as everything that can be concieved by the minds of men has already been invented.”
There are still people making their living by poking seeds in the ground and hoping they turn into wheat, too. But there are also today new businesses which can exist with the Internet, but could not have existed with mere phones. Take Amazon.com, for instance… They couldn’t be in business without automated systems communicating with each other and with customers electronically.
