I’ll believe it when I see it. :dubious:
In less than 600 years, we’ve moved from books (and all other documents) written by hand, to the Internet. I’m not gonna guess what sort of world humans will be living in 1000 years from now, let alone 10,000.
Hardly an unreasonable position. 
I’ve always wondered if the original design team picked the name ironically.
Agreed. Ten thousand years ago, Greece was just being settled for the first time and agriculture was being discovered in the Fertile Crescent. Do you think those people would have any inkling of what a cell phone is? Or the internet? Or even a pair of eyeglasses?
A while back I made a thread asking people to predict what life would be like in the year 3000. It’s impossible to tell as even the past 50 years has seen technology take completely unexpected directions.
Fun to think about, though. We could either be gallivanting around the universe instantly with transporters fueled by quantum fusion and snorting vitamin-enriched coke off the tits of our sex robots*, or we could be enslaved by Overlord Körgxstas II, building obsidian ziggurats in his honor on the sun-parched wasteland that is Earth Prime.
*With apologies to the late Greg Giraldo.
I was born about 10,000 years ago. There ain’t nothin’ in this world that I don’t know. I saw Peter, Paul, and Moses playing ring-around-the-roses, and I’ll whup the guy who says it isn’t so.
There was Hitler hangin’ paper in the hall.
I think a great deal of the social development will be based around the conflict between the religious and non-religious. I think we’re moving toward a time when there will be little room for luke-warm religious belief, one will either be a complete zealot or a non-believer.
It’s also my observation that zealot groups tend to eventually reject technological advance. So I think there will be a lot mroe groups comparable to the Amish in our society, but they will have each their own beliefs, and have opted out at different points along the technological advancement. So some may believe that God only wants them to drive petroleum-burning cars, while others may have opted out at solar, and still others will have stopped at the mach-III nuclear fission drive but rejected the speed-of-light and subsequent teleporting fusion-driven methods of transportation. There will be those who believe that any person who has teleported is now a zombie, and has no human rights as such.
In the end, the zealots will be fighting it out on Earth, while the techno-atheists will have re-developed Mars to be human friendly. After all, if we can create global warming by accident, we can do it more efficiently on purpose! Once we warm it up it shouldn’t be too hard to create plant-life which will re-distribute oxygen into the atmosphere at an acceptable rate. From there it’s just a matter of capturing enough comets and meteors to make up for the loss of atmosphere due to low gravity.
Humans will have genetically created and accepted into our bodies symbiotic life-forms which will serve such purposes as synthesizing vitamin C and providing energy through photosynthesis. Eating will be a primarily aesthetic luxury.
Natural, uncontrolled, weather will be a joke if it is remembered at all.
The concept of using precious H2O for such things as washing and swimming will be appalling. Guesstimates of the amount of rain their ancestors allowed to simply wash uncaptured into the ground will be the subject of bar bets and recreational outrage.
With energy free and abundant, human toil will change dramatically and almost never require actual lifting or physical labor. The body will have begun to shrink as skull size will increase to acomodate the larger brain.
The primary medical field will be the management of stress hormones and maintenance of optimal levels for serotonin, norepinephrine, and such.
The societal expectations of mental performance will have far out-stripped the evolutionary changes, and the primary industry will be the production of the necessary drugs/gadgets to hack brain speed and organization.
Our brains will be primarily processors, with various peripherals functioning for actual memory storage and analysis.
Sexually attractive charateristics will include large thick necks to support the skull-size, and height preferences will have been replaced by brain-weight/speed statistics.
Life-span will have very little meaning, as the loaded peripherals are handed down through the generations. Deciding whether to meld the analysis units of one’s Grandfather and Mother, for instance, will be the equivalent to modern music preference. Older bodies and processors will commiserate over the dearth of kids today who want a pre-teleport geographic conceptualizer. The realization that parts of one will not go on will be grieved in advance of any physical death.
Monsters in the Id.
We’ll understand the deep structure of the universe by then, and we’ll build computers out of it, and load ourselves into them. Death will be gone since we have backups. Since we’ll be able to process all stimuli, and output stimuli, we can sit around a nice living room in front of a fire in what seems to be our physical bodies, while actually being computers with star travel capability, meeting in the middle of a globular cluster.
Close.
Evolved AIs revealed themselves in ADE(Anno Domini Equivalent) 2376.
Unfortunately, they evolved on MMORPG servers.
Things were very tense for a while.
Humanity will have split into at least 5 clades - the exclusively congenitally genetically modified, the exclusively machine-implant modified, the ones who are both, the ones who are neither, and the uploaded. There’ll likely be some tensions there, as these cultures diverge. I’d guess the Geneers and the Pick&Mixers will dominate numerically in the Real World, the Tinheads be much less numerous but fairly fanatic, and the UnMods will be a small, quaint minority like we view the Amish or Bushmen. The Machine Ghosts, meanwhile, will gradually come to represent the numerical bulk of humanity, but be mostly uninterested in anything outside their simulacra.
AIs will be a sixth clade. Uplifted chimpanzees a seventh.
I’m guessing the machine ghosts would consist mostly of narcissists, and as such would become a problem and a drain on the physical environment. Eventually the physical beings would unplug them, or at least quarantine them.
Hotel California is still being played.
I’m thinking more people backing themselves up before death, myself.
Assumption #1: civilization doesn’t suffer a collapse it can’t recover from, and we either become extinct or live in a depleted environment on an Easter Island level, and
Assumption #2: we don’t discover anything such as radically new physics that revolutionizes our understanding of the physical universe, then:
Computers will have shrunk in size and expanded in capacity to whatever hard physical limits the laws of physics impose. The sheer ubiquity of data, communication and computing power will change the human condition. If only by creating one-to-one analog copies of human brains, we will have some form of strong AI.
Self-reproducing machines will exist; they will have enough practical limitations such as generation time or amount of work they have to expend just to keep themselves “alive” that it will still be more practical in many cases to create purpose-built machines for many custom fabrication purposes.
We will have created the strongest and most damage-resistance substance the universe allows, probably a form of diamond-coated carbon nanofiber.
Once it becomes possible to physically and mentally engineer humans to a desired specification, there will be a chaotic period lasting about five hundred years, until natural selection (at the more abstract level of “what works in the long run and what doesn’t”) kicks in. It will be possible in principle to be immortal. Whether societies that embrace this will be viable in the long run will remain to be seen.
We will either have found life on other worlds, or discovered that life is a vanishingly unlikely accident and that we live in a barren universe. We will either know that there are other recognizably intelligent species in our galaxy, or that there almost certainly are none. Interstellar travel will be possible; how practical it will be cannot yet be foreseen.
We will have traded our small-scale problems for large-scale problems. Overall and averaged in the long run, life will continue to be a drunken stagger on the edge of a cliff.
A new totally immersive World of Warcraft comes out, addicting billions. Technological advancement comes to a standstill.
The life span of a human being now will appear to people then like the movie “Memento.” “You mean they had to start again as babies every 75 years? With no knowledge downloads? 5 years to master a new language? How did they accomplish anything at all?”
Love and spite will still turn all cogs.
Huh, I would have predicted these two assumptions were mutually exclusive.
I share this opinion, but I think we still have quite a long way to go before reaching our limitations (if we manage to survive).