Looking at my kid and the hundreds of hours/gigabytes of videos, texts, pictures, messages, and more she has uploaded to Snapchat, Insta, and others… somebody is going to figure out how to make a virtual Sophia, one you can talk to and see via computer only.
There’s some ghoulish possibilities here: your kid dies, will grieving parents pay to create a virtual child? Some will, no doubt about it.
But if the above were to occur… the ability to create virtual personas out of our computing histories… yeah, that would be a game changer.
(I could’ve gone with asteroid mining, quantum computing, etc, but what is the fun in that?)
Ahhh. I worked for a consulting firm (Frost and Sullivan) which worked on prognosticating future technologies a few years ago. Following is a list of what they considered to be the ‘top 50’ technologies to be released in the future (document from 2017).
Yes, that’s a bit ghoulish, but let’s run with it.
I foresee a time in the near future where everyone can order consciousness-mapped A.I robotic versions of their entire family and have the option to interact with them at family time, instead of dealing with the flawed original meat versions.
My Wish List:
Grandparents 2.0: I’d bring my grandparents back to life in A.I format, but the synthetics would be wiped of geezerism. “Hey, Tibs, let’s listen to Pink Floyd and smoke a little weed!”
Parents 2.0: Enhanced approval module. “Son, you far exceeded our expectations! You are, in fact, our favorite child.”
Kids 2.0: Wipe out brattyiness and enhance compliance. “Oh, father, you are tre cool! You are the best dad ever! May we play a little Chopin for you? (my synthetic daughters will be imprinted with the talent and muscle memory of a virtuoso concert pianist).
Wife 2.0: “Tibby, you Adonis, please allow me to @%# your &^!@ again!”
Pets 2.0: I’d map my favorite pets, then euthanize them. No more costly pet food, fleas and emptying litter boxes. Heck, I’d purchase a virtuoso pianist module for them, too. “Meow…Hungarian Rhapsody #2 today, master? Meow. Purrr.”
Kinda like The Stepford Wives on steroids. Who wouldn’t want that?
That’s kind of an odd article. It concludes that giving the children laptops was a bad idea in general, which it may have been – but it’s describing specific laptops which needed to be plugged in, had very little storage, and possibly most importantly couldn’t connect to the net. In other words, giving kids crappy laptops that for most purposes didn’t work anywhere and in some places didn’t work at all was a bad idea; but that doesn’t really say anything about whether giving them good ones would have been helpful.
Some technologies that haven’t been mentioned yet.
Artificial blood. No worries about testing for AIDS, TB, Hep, etc. or shortages during emergencies.
Artificial wombs. Pretty much speaks for itself. Also ideal for when we are ready to start recreating extinct species.
Designer DNA therapy. A more advanced stem cell therapy. No more allergies, diabetes, or other ailments that can be edited out. Double edged sword. Designer bio weapons and genetically targeted assassinations.
I read that 93% of all copies created by Xerox machines are never looked at by anyone. The output is mandated by government regulation, litigation defense, and other non-productive foolishness. So Xerography changed the game by actually bloating the labor cost of doing business.
Nothing becomes a game-changer until human managers apply it to change the game. So AI is the answer? What if AI replies that these truths are not as self-evident as we think they are? That,for example, slavery is the most efficient socio-economic model. Periodic genocide is essential to progress? Who makes the call?
Who ever said either of those things? Slavery ended because it was not cost-effective in the industrial era, and genocide has never been advanced as an economic good by any economist I’ve ever read.
3D printing will, in my view, be the next big breakthrough technology that changes the world.
3D printing can print things as big as cars and houses, and as small as molecules, and everything in between.
You could have a 3D printed house, 3D printed car, eat food made from a 3D printer (you stick the ingredient tubes in the back and it prints the food), have 3D printed furniture and electronics, wear 3D printed clothes and when you get sick you take 3D printed drugs or get 3D printed cells and organs as therapy. In theory, 3D printing could do for manufactured goods what the internet and digital storage did for books and film.
Of course you can’t 3D print everything, but even if you can 3D print 70% of what you need to make a car or a home (and the other 30% needs to come from larger manufacturing facilities), thats still going to affect manufacturing supply chains.
I think in the next few decades stores like walmart will have a section devoted just to 3D printing ingredients and parts that you can’t 3D print at home, and fewer finished manufactured goods due to this.
Solar panels are already pretty cheap. They’re down to $0.50 a watt for the panels, and go even lower.
The issue is installing them still costs a lot of money. A watt of installed solar may cost $3, and 60-70% of that is the installation cost.
When we have plug and play solar (solar panels you can set up in your backyard or nail to the roof, and plug into an electrical outlet) that becomes affordable, that’ll be a game changer.
Stepping away from the personal connection, what if we could create AI’s who could mimic deceased creators? Could we have new songs by John Lennon, new novels by Ernest Hemingway, new concertos by Wolfgang Mozart, new plays by William Shakespeare?
In the article, the takeaway seems to be we should focus on the important stuff, like clean drinking water, in a hierarchy of needs kind of way.
But, in fact, technology like smart phones has been transformative of societies that even do not tick all the lower needs’ boxes.
It’s not that clean drinking water is not important, obviously. But supplying higher-level needs can be important too, and can even play a role in fulfilling the lower needs.
I think my takeaway is more that charities should try to leverage existing technologies and subsidize the existing market, not try to invent their own solution that may not be competitive in a year.
This speaks to my post just above. “Clean drinking water” is not economically feasible. Reliance on plastic bottles for drinking needs has already won the day, from USA well down into the third world. Economic paradigms are shifting so mercurially, every game is open to being changed, in ways that truths are not at all self-evident.
