…in the next decade. Prognostications from Ray Kurzweil. This is the part I like:
We won’t just be able to lengthen our lives; we’ll be able to improve our lifestyles. By 2020, we will be testing drugs that will turn off the fat insulin receptor gene that tells our fat cells to hold on to every calorie. Holding on to every calorie was a good idea thousands of years ago when our genes evolved in the first place. Today it underlies an epidemic of obesity. By 2030, we will have made major strides in our ability to remain alive and healthy – and young – for very long periods of time. At that time, we’ll be adding more than a year every year to our remaining life expectancy, so the sands of time will start running in instead of running out.
For those of us interested in space, we’re going to need it, because one thing that doesn’t seem to be improving over time is government space policy.
I have heard the electronics integrated into clothing, namely fabrics, story for yonks now. It hasn’t happened and I doubt it will happen. Getting rid of the fat gene makes little sense as well. Anything that makes our physical condition more feeble, less resistant to the environment seems like a minus.
Regarding virtual reality 3D glasses, I am still to find a set which does not give me a headache, and I have tried more than a few. Stereoscopic displays have many implementation issues.
Augmented reality glasses will probably be pioneered by the military. We certainly have seen plenty of these in past design concepts. Car windshields are also a possible candidate for this kind of technology.
What he says about solar photovoltaic is true. Costs have been dropping enough that it may start making economic sense in the next decade, let alone the 16 years he is talking about.
I think his healthcare predictions are too optimistic.
Car autopilot would be a nice thing to have. Unlike him, I think most people would not bother using the steering wheel again. In fact, I would not be surprised if human drivers were outlawed in many countries. If you forbid random driving and know the position of every vehicle in the road, autopilot gets remarkably simpler.
A nice side benefit of life-extension will be all the wealth that’s freed up from Social Security’s cancellation. We could do quite a bit of space programming with those trillions.
A nice side benefit of life-extension will be all the wealth that’s freed up from Social Security’s cancellation. We could do quite a bit of space programming with those trillions.
If the elderly do decide to keep working you can count on a dramatic slowdown in technological progress, as younger workers are blocked from positions of influence and their ideas are stifled. As Max Planck put it, “Science advances one funeral at a time.” Cancel the funerals, and you cancel the advances.
Though I disagree with his politics, PZ Myers seems a credible scientist:
More:
Still more here.
From Kurzweil’s prediction for 2009 in his 1999 The Age of Spiritual Machines:
IMO the value of Kurzweil’s middlebrow popularizations is mitigated by his prognostic overreaching.
Kurz’s soul buddy Hans Moravec is equally off in his predictions of robotics progress. Commercially, Roomba continues to be state of the art. Color me unimpressed.
The entire robotics/AI/futurist crew has become a cult, rabidly attacking anyone skeptical of their wild and continuously failing predictions as a Luddite.
If the elderly do decide to keep working you can count on a dramatic slowdown in technological progress, as younger workers are blocked from positions of influence and their ideas are stifled. As Max Planck put it, “Science advances one funeral at a time.” Cancel the funerals, and you cancel the advances.
When you advocate killing people in order to make scientific advances, then something is very wrong and it’s not the old, crusty people. My view is that the problem is tenure. It’s simply a bad idea to have someone “pay their dues”, win the academic lottery (that is, get tenure), and then sit on their duff for the rest of their life. It naturally breeds stagnation.
The high tech industry doesn’t have this problem. It’s more the converse, to be honest with a bias against old people. But it demonstrates how you can have a vibrant society even with the “cancellation” of funerals.
“…younger workers are blocked from positions of influence and their ideas are stifled.”
Which only means that new technologies and products (not quite the same as the same as the acceptance of new physics paradigms) will have to start outside of existing institutions and bureaucracies…a situation that pretty much exists today.
A basic problem with K.’s sort of future, as I see it, is that the brain is (IMO) far more complex than he’d like to think. I bet there’s enormous amounts of important information processing occurring at the sub-cellular level, or even at the level of individual protein molecules. Replicating that would require far, far more computing power than one might think from just naively counting neurons and synapses.
Considering that this was their “second annual” 5 year prediction, they have no track record yet. It will be 4 years before we know if their predictions from last year came true or not.