I think it's really great when people write down bets like this publicly, so we can go back and see what people's expectations of the future are. There are snippets of this kind of speculation from many decades ago, plus of course there's sci-fi to look at, and it's amazing how much further we've advanced than most people expect.
If you look at where we are now vs. 100 years ago, our technology would be utterly unrecognizable to them. When people of that age predicted the future, they didn't do great. I'd like to think we have better foresight, but the reality is we'd probably be just as bad at predicting what things will be like in 100 years.
The thing that amazes me is the exponential nature of human progress. Even if we made linear progress - that is, some "equal" amount of advancement in the next hundred years as we did in the last, that would be incredible. But of course our progress builds on itself, and so if we assign a value of 100 to the amount of progress in the last hundred years, we're likely to have a 200, 300 or 400 over the next hundred years.
Personally, I'm betting on pretty much all computer interfaces being directly connected to the brain and people living off of earth permanently.
Really? I think it will mean more than it does now. The pace at which technology advances seems to be increasing exponentially, at least that's my perception.
I can't imagine what will change even in the next 10 years, let alone the next 50-100 years.
Making technological predictions on such a timescale is folly.
1821 is two centuries away - the minimum necessary to use a plural form of the noun "century". For a person of 1821, the technologies that we rely upon routinely would be completely unknown. What would they recognize? Not cars, not computers, not electrical appliances and light, not pretty much anything in our households save furniture.
Of all the tech that you can meet in an American street of 2021, the only thing that would be somewhat familiar to people of 1821 would be guns.
Yes but also deeply besides the point the post you are replying to is trying to make.
His question is - can your mind wrap around the amount of progress that can happen in 1000 years? If yes, can you imagine that going from "now" to "fully automated cars" is a small amount of progress, relative to progress that's possible on 1000 years? If yes, great - now you can dial back that it probably won't take 1000 years.
This is extremely interesting, but couldn't it be that in 10.000 our technology has advanced so much that we are able to "refill" dying stars for example? I mean, look at how much we have achieved in the past 1000 years, exponential technology growth over a timefrime 10x that can be unimaginable now.
These are cool predictions but they need not be true
perhaps the rate of change is so great that its leading to something completely unrecognisable in 100 years
That seems to be the most likely scenario.
Proof: Hop into your time-machine and try to explain the internet to someone from 100 years ago.
Remember, the first computer (Z1) was invented only 76 years ago. The first commercial TV-sets became available 92 years ago. Our technology is evolving at a mind-bending pace.
I wouldn't be surprised if Star Trek style voice input was the norm by the time I bite the dust. I wonder if my grand-kids will still use keyboards or consider them a relic...
The past 100 years of development are unfathomable already - even though some sci-fi from 100 years ago was accurate, so there was some imagination of what things could be like already. I like to believe I can vaguely predict what the next 100 years will bring, but that's based in a cynicism that the big scientific discoveries have been done already.
But 1000 or more years, unfathomable. It's the one reason where I wish time travel or suspended animation was real, just so I can see what the future might bring. Assuming it meanders on as it has for the past few thousand years, and there's no Great Filter event.
What's interesting is that these illustrations are only 100 years old. The things we have right now, smart phones, robots, the internet, MP3 players, etc. seem far beyond what the futurists of the last century were imagining.
Honestly, the things we have now seem beyond what people were imagining even 50 years ago.
I wonder if we'll see this large of a technological revolution again in the coming 100 years (or an even bigger one [check this video out: http://vimeo.com/2319926 for an interesting take on this])
that technology and progress are going to keep going forward in a more or less linear pattern for thousands of years, after only a few hundred years precedent is a _huge_ assumption. The number of ways progress can slow, be stopped, or reversed, are many - asteroids, viruses, calderas, wars, catastrophic scientific accidents, severe climate change, and of course the influence of governments, both repressive or ineffective, or lack thereof. I sincerely hope progress continues forward but at the same time when I think of "1000 years from now" I can't help but think the planet might be a dystopian wasteland by then.
If you extrapolate from the last hundred years of progress to the next hundred, it's plausible that there will be at least as much technological progress as these ideas would require.
The problem with such prognostication isn't so much that these things can't happen. It is that unexpected events that will happen first turn the future in a different direction.
I don't think anyone can predict more than 20-30 years into the future with any real degree of accuracy.
So yeah, I agree that X might very well be possible (or in widespread usage) in 50 or 100 years, where X is basically anything that seems magical today.
Some of your problem predictions are 100+ years in the future. I generally regard these as nonsense.
Looking at the relative rates of technical growth and computing power, it's incredibly unlikely that we'll be able to accurately pick out what the future is going to bring.
Examples of technologies that are expected in the next 50-100 years: 3D printable organs which can be transplanted, based on your own stem cells; the first smarter-than-human general purpose AI; fusion power; the ability for bioengineering to be done with a home lab kit. (We're actually at the cusp of the first and last of these now.)
That level of bioengineering, computing prowess, and cheap power will have an incredibly hard to predict effect on issues like food production, ecosystem maintenance, etc.
So which of your warnings are only problematic at 100+ years?
That seems like a pretty high number when you consider the exponential rate of technological advancement.
1000 years in the future is probably going to be completely unrecognizable to us given the current rate of change in society/tech.
reply