Category: futurism

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Roundup of interesting internet articles, January 2018 edition

Career chemist sees no reason why chemical synthesis can’t be automated with current levels of technology. This may or may not
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/01/30/automated-chemistry-a-vision

Alternate headline: “Humans can’t beat a simple computer program at predicting crimes.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/equivant-compas-algorithm/550646/

Microsoft’s CEO says that quantum computing will be an indispensable component of AI.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-42797846

The “Nuro” is a Smart Car-sized, remote-piloted delivery vehicle. I think something like this will prove cheaper and more practical than flying drones for autonomous deliveries of cargo.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/30/16936548/nuro-self-driving-delivery-last-mile-google

This is one of those future concepts that I think will 50% completely fail and 50% succeed–albeit taking a different form than the author imagines.
https://hackernoon.com/driverless-hotel-rooms-the-end-of-uber-airbnb-and-human-landlords-e39f92cf16e1

1997 NYT article: When a computer masters the game of Go, “it will be a sign that artificial intelligence is truly beginning to become as good as the real thing,” but don’t worry since “It may be a hundred years before a computer beats humans at Go — maybe even longer.” [It happened in 2016.]
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/29/science/to-test-a-powerful-computer-play-an-ancient-game.html?pagewanted=all

In the 20 years since Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, the Elo scores of the best human chess players have barely improved, whereas machines have gotten vastly better: today’s best player, Magnus Carlsen, has a score of 2834, and the best computer chess programs are in the 3400s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_top_chess_players_throughout_history
http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/rating_list_all.html

‘Once developed, [killer robots] will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend.’
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/opinion/killer-robots-weapons.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftechnology&referer

Just five years after Google’s neural network taught itself to recognize cat faces, the company thinks machines are ready to recognize 5,000 species of plants and animals. How many species could you correctly identify from photos?
https://qz.com/954530/five-years-ago-ai-was-struggling-to-identify-cats-now-its-trying-to-tackle-5000-species/

An article about how AIs will replace human workers slowly, and for the foreseeable future, will not destroy more human jobs than they create.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/artificial-intelligence-augments-human-skills/

One of the clearer descriptions of what a blockchain is.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/01/blockchain-technology-concepts-explained.html

A fascinating description of how a blockchain-based replacement for Uber might work:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/magazine/beyond-the-bitcoin-bubble.html

Did someone say…”Predictions”?
https://qz.com/1171977/ten-2018-predictions-from-the-founder-of-the-blockchain-research-institute/

On the 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive, it’s worth looking back at the weapons of the Vietnam War, and considering the handful of them that are still not obsolete (most notably, the AK-47 rifle).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_the_Vietnam_War

Forty-five years after the end of the Vietnam War, the U.S. is selling warships to its former enemy.
http://www.janes.com/article/76746/vietnam-s-ex-us-coast-guard-cutter-arrives-home

Iraq plans to slap on some upgrades to keep their junker T-55 and Type 69 tanks running. The Type 69 is a Chinese copy of the Soviet T-62, which was an evolutionary upgrade of the T-55, which was an evolutionary upgrade of the T-54. If countries like Iraq keep cheapskating their militaries, will we someday have robot crews driving around 100-year-old tanks?
http://warisboring.com/iraq-learned-tank-lessons-in-the-war-with-islamic-state/

This clunker was commissioned in 1970 and will probably stay in service until 2039.
https://www.stripes.com/news/navy-s-oldest-deployable-warship-comes-out-of-yokosuka-dry-dock-after-19-months-1.508005

The first Cash for Clunkers program
http://warisboring.com/49425-2/

Swarms of small, cheap, semi-intelligent drones will probably dominate future warfare. The WWII-era “Bat Bomb” concept could make a comeback.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/17698/chinas-is-hard-at-work-developing-swarms-of-small-drones-on-multiple-levels

BAE is building microwave weapons that can fry the electronics of enemy planes, ships, and drones at close range. It might be an effective defense against swarms of small, cheap, semi-intelligent drones.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/17796/bae-systems-wants-its-new-microwave-close-in-weapon-system-concept-on-us-navy-ships

India’s aircraft carriers are vanity projects that will have little use in any all-out war with the most likely enemy, Pakistan.
http://warisboring.com/indias-third-aircraft-carrier-is-most-likely-a-waste-of-money/

Nuclear depth charges were a thing: a 30 kiloton underwater detonation (this is a below-average yield tactical nuke) sank dummy subs out to a radius of 1 mile.
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/how-to-nuke-a-submarine-2f0bd50f39e

“The rule of thumb is that vertical takeoff and landing means a 50% reduction in payload.”
http://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/06/politics/us-navy-baby-carrier-deploys-to-pacific-intl/index.html

In spite of the recent saber-rattling and improvements to North Korea’s nuclear missiles, a second Korean War is highly unlikely.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/01/11/should-you-worry-about-a-u-s-war-with-north-korea-not-really/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/01/03/why-nuclear-war-with-north-korea-is-less-likely-than-you-think/

Bill Gates and Steven Pinker agree that the state of humankind is continuing to improve, but only seems to be getting worse thanks to information technology and to an increasing williness of long-marginalized people to speak out, making us hyper-aware of what problems remain.
https://Fmobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/business/mind-meld-bill-gates-steven-pinker.html

Another step towards fleets of cheap, autonomous ships for oceanic and climate monitoring. In time, they would have even more uses.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/01/141674.html

Someone has been photoshopping faces of female celebrities onto nude performers in porn videos. This is only the beginning: It’s only a matter of time before computers can easily make highly accurate, 3-D models of people just by looking at photos and video footage of them. As an intermediate step, the data could be used to find porn stars whose body types best matched each celebrity’s and to digitally graft the celebrity’s face onto each nude doppelganger, but ultimately, it will be possible to make fully lifelike, CGI porn movies starring any person.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjye8a/reddit-fake-porn-app-daisy-ridley

“Average” is beautiful: “Facial averageness” is considered beautiful.
https://labs.la.utexas.edu/langloislab/face-perception/the-beauty-of-averageness/

Chinese geneticists have cloned monkeys, but the failure rate was extremely high: Out of 79 clone embryos they created and implanted into female monkeys, only two were born healthy. All the rest either spontaneously aborted or died shortly after being born. The technique or a slight modification of it could probably be used to clone humans.
http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)30057-6

In the early 1800s, Iceland got its first non-white immigrant: a half black, half white man named “Hans Jonathan.” He had two kids with a white woman, and today, his DNA is found in 788 Icelanders. By sequencing the genomes of 182 of these descendants and cross-referencing them, geneticists were able to reconstruct 19% of Hans’ genome. The task was made easy by the fact that African DNA easily stood out, and by Iceland’s highly detailed genealogical records, but in principle, the same method could be used to reconstruct any ancestor’s DNA. With advanced enough technology, we could make “clones” of long-dead people.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-017-0031-6

Genealogy is kind of meaningless since ultimately, we all share the same ancestors and are from the same place. Stopping your research at one point in the past is an arbitrary choice, and having an ancestor that was famous or royal doesn’t make you special.
http://nautil.us/issue/56/perspective/youre-descended-from-royalty-and-so-is-everybody-else
http://livingstingy.blogspot.com/2010/10/why-genealogy-is-bunk.html

Identical twins also share the same epigenetics.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/not-just-genes-identical-twins-exhibit-supersimilarity

Using frozen human embryos for IVF is just as likely to succeed as using fresh embryos.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1705334

Baseline, subjective happiness level is also highly heritable, which raises the prospect of genetically engineering humans to be happier.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-016-9781-6
https://www.thecut.com/2016/01/classic-study-on-happiness-and-the-lottery.html

More on that: Brain damage and surgical removals of parts of the brain can improve people’s personalities. I wonder if it will be common for people in the future to get brain surgeries that make them happier or nicer.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180108-when-personality-changes-from-bad-to-good

Scientists have developed tiny needles that can inject drugs into the brain. Targeted injection sites can be as small as 1 sq mm.
http://news.mit.edu/2018/ultrathin-needle-can-deliver-drugs-directly-brain-0124

The amino acids and three-unit codons that form the basis of all genetics might be optimally evolved in form and function. Whenever we find organic alien life, its DNA will look and work almost identically to our own. There is, however, a small chance that a clean-sheet genome consisting of more types of amino acids and longer codons might be superior, but there’s no plausible way natural selection could bring it about (we have settled into a local optimum when the global optimum still lurks far off). Ultimately, optimizing biological life forms from the molecular level up is probably a task that only intelligent machines will be able to do in the distant future. All multicellular life forms are so finely-tuned to use the existing genetic alphabet that testing the hypothesis by changing things at the margins probably impossible.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/01/expanding-the-genetic-alphabet/549620/

Is human wealth inequality just a manifestation of broad resource- and genetic-dominance inequality observed in any group of organisms?
http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/114/50/13154.full.pdf

Reality check on a “revolutionary new cancer test” that the media massively overhyped. More health information isn’t always better thanks to the risk of false positives.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/01/22/a-hard-look-at-liquid-biopsies

Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime provide extraordinarily cheap entertainment. Never in human history has it been easier for people to occupy themselves.
http://efficiencyiseverything.com/entertainment-per-dollar/

More on that:
http://empathyeducates.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Costs-For-Americans.png

Fallout 3 is a very highly rated game, takes 23-130 hours to complete, and can be bought for only $5. That averages out to…basically free.
https://howlongtobeat.com/game.php?id=3340
http://www.gamelengths.com/games/playtimes/Fallout+3/

Stephen Spielberg thinks “Ready Player One” is an accurate representation of the future…everyone is unemployed and spends their lives playing virtual reality games.
https://youtu.be/aWz6d1Z6bnU

Rollable TV screens will become mainstream once rigid screens get too big to fit through standard-sized entry doors. I think rollable, 8K resolution TVs that cover entire walls should become common in the 2030s.
http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/08/technology/lg-rollable-display-ces-2018/index.html

Google Glass may have failed, but I’ve always thought augmented reality (AR) glasses were a worthy tech concept that would return in an improved form. The “Vuzix Blade,” which reviewers have described as being an improved version of Google Glass that also makes use of the Alexa voice-activated AI assistant, could herald that return.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/9/16869174/vuzix-blade-ar-glasses-augmented-reality-amazon-alexa-ai-ces-2018

I really like the prediction about the future “on-demand economy.” Someone puts out a gig announcement, and AIs instantly figure out which human can do the gig the best, and they notify the person. If robots are constantly telling you to do one gig after another, it will kind of add up to something like a job.
https://msblob.blob.core.windows.net/ncmedia/2018/01/The-Future-Computed.pdf

Related: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/filling-americas-6-million-job-vacancies/549752/

It’s been one month since the NYT front page article exposing the existence of a secret U.S. government program to study UFOs appeared, and the government has still made NO ATTEMPT to deny its claims.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html

Guillermo del Toro saw a UFO: ‘The UFO, says del Toro, “Went from 1,000 meters away [to much closer] in less than a second — and it was so crappy. It was a flying saucer, so clichéd, with lights [blinking]. It’s so sad: I wish I could reveal they’re not what you think they are. They are what you think they are. And the fear we felt was so primal. I have never been that scared in my life.’
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/guillermo-del-toro-seeing-a-ufo-hearing-ghosts-shaping-water-1068754

A critic breaks down all of the reasons why the Star Wars First Order’s space ships make no design sense. I agree that advanced space ships won’t really have “top” and “bottom” parts, but they could still be asymmetrical.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/news/a28088/star-wars-the-last-jedi-dreadnought-star-destroyer/

The $30 million XPrize award for the first company that landed a private rover on the Moon will go unclaimed.
https://lunar.xprize.org/news/blog/important-update-google-lunar-xprize

It’s possible the recent SpaceX rocket launch was actually successful, but the military satellite they put in orbit is so secret that they had to claim it crashed and the mission failed.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/17612/the-secret-zuma-spacecraft-could-be-alive-and-well-doing-exactly-what-it-was-intended-to

Diesel car engines have been unfairly villified by the Volkswagen emissions scandal.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42666596

 

If New York’s government can sue oil companies for making global warming worse, than can someone else sue New York’s government for shutting down its nuclear power plants, which also made global warming worse?
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/01/new-york-suing-oil-companies-but-how-about-suing-new-york-for-shutting-nuclear-reactors.html

An argument against “geoengineering” turned on its head: Whale feces contains high levels of iron, iron dumped in seawater causes plankton blooms, and plankton blooms sequester CO2. Whale populations are about 70% lower now thanks to human predation than they were in pre-Industrial times. If we dumped iron powder in the oceans, we’d be restoring the natural carbon sequestration mechanism of the ocean rather than doing something unnatural.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/01/iron-fertilization-of-the-ocean-is-as-natural-as-whale-poop-and-it-can-save-the-planet.html

 

 

Transhumanists are overwhelmingly likely to be the oldest children in their families.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/08/fight-me-psychologists-birth-order-effects-exist-and-are-very-strong/

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My future predictions (2018 iteration)

Like any futurist worth his salt, I’m going to put my credibility on the line by publishing a list of my future predictions. I won’t modify or delete this particular blog entry once it is published, and if my thinking about anything on the list changes, I’ll instead create a new, revised blog entry. Furthermore, as the deadlines for my predictions pass, I’ll reexamine them.

I’ve broken down my predictions by the decade. Any prediction listed under a specific decade will happen by the end of that decade, unless I specify some other date (e.g. – “X will happen early in this decade.”).

2020s

  • Better, cheaper solar panels and batteries (for grid power storage and cars) will make clean energy as cheap and as reliable as fossil fuel power for entire regions of the world, including some temperate zones. As cost “tipping points” are reached, it will make financial sense for tens of millions of private homeowners and electricity utility companies to install solar panels on their rooftops and on ground installations, respectively. This will be the case even after government clean energy subsidies are inevitably retracted. However, a 100% transition to clean energy won’t finish in rich countries until the middle of the century, and poor countries will use dirty energy well into the second half of the century.
  • Fracking and the exploitation of tar sands in the U.S. and Canada will together ensure growth in global oil production until around 2030, at which time the installed base of clean energy and batteries will be big enough to take up the slack. There will be no global energy crisis.
  • Vastly improved VR goggles with better graphics and no need to be plugged into desktop PCs will hit the market. Augmented reality (AR) glasses that are much cheaper and better than the original Google Glass will also make their market debuts.
  • “Full-immersion” audiovisual VR will be commercially available by the end of the decade. However, the tactile, olfactory, and physical movement/interaction aspects of the experience will remain underdeveloped.
  • LED light bulbs will become as cheap as CFL and even incandescent bulbs. It won’t make economic sense NOT to buy LEDs, and they will establish market dominance.
  • “Smart home”/”Wired home” technology will become mature and widespread in developed countries.
  • Video gaming will dispense with physical media, and games will be completely streamed from the internet or digitally downloaded. Business that exist just to sell game discs (Gamestop) will shut down.
  • Instead of a typical home entertainment system having a whole bunch of media discs, different media players and cable boxes, there will be one small, multipurpose box that, among other things, boosts WiFi to ensure the TV and all nearby devices can get signals at multi-Gb/s speeds.
  • Self-driving vehicles will start hitting the roads in large numbers in rich countries. The vehicles won’t drive as efficiently as humans (a lot of hesitation and slowing down for little or no reason), but they’ll be as safe as human drivers. Long-haul trucks that ply simple highway routes will be the first category of vehicles to be fully automated. The transition will be heralded by a big company like Wal-Mart buying 5,000 self-driving tractor trailers to move goods between its distribution centers and stores. Last-mile delivery–involving weaving through side streets, cities and neighborhoods, and physically carrying packages to peoples’ doors–won’t be automated until after this decade. Self-driving, privately owned passenger cars will stay few in number and will be owned by technophiles, rich people, and taxi cab companies.
  • A machine will pass the Turing Test by the end of this decade. The milestone will attract enormous amounts of attention and will lead to several retests, some of which the machine will fail, proving that it lacks the full range of human intelligence. It will lead to debate over the Turing Test’s validity as a measure of true intelligence (Ray Kurzweil actually talked about this phenomenon of “moving the goalposts” whenever we think about how smart computers are), and many AI experts will point out the existence of decades-long skepticism in the Turing Test in their community.
  • The best AIs circa 2029 won’t be able to understand and upgrade their own source codes. They will still be narrow AIs, albeit an order of magnitude better than the ones we have today.
  • Machines will become better than humans at the vast majority of computer, card, and board games. The only exceptions will be very obscure games or recently created games that no one has bothered to program an AI to play yet. But even for those games, there will be AIs with general intelligence and learning abilities that will be “good enough” to play as well as average humans by reading the instruction manuals and teaching themselves through simulated self-play.
  • The cost of getting your genome sequenced and expertly interpreted will drop below $1,000, and enough about the human genome will have been deciphered to make the cost worth the benefit. By the end of the decade, it will be common for newborns in rich countries to have their genomes sequenced.
  • At-home medical testing kits and diagnostic devices like swallowable camera-pills will become vastly better and more common.
  • China’s GDP will surpass America’s, India’s population will surpass China’s, and China will never claim the glorious title of being both the richest and most populous country.

2030s

  • VR and AR goggles will become refined technologies and probably merge into a single type of lightweight device. Like smartphones today, anyone who wants the glasses in 2030 will have them. Even poor people in Africa will be able to buy them.
  • Augmented reality contact lenses will be invented, though they won’t be as good as AR glasses and they might need remotely linked, body-worn hardware to provide them with power and data.
  • Wall-sized, thin, 8K or even 16K TVs will become common in homes in rich countries, and the TVs will be able to display 3D picture without the use of glasses. A sort of virtual reality chamber could be created at moderate cost by installing those TVs on all the walls of a room to create a single, wraparound screen.
  • The video game industry will be bigger than ever and considered high art.
  • Loneliness, social isolation, and other problems caused by overuse of technology and the atomized structure of modern life will be, ironically, cured to a large extent by technology. Chatbots that can hold friendly conversations with humans for extended periods, diagnose and treat mental illnesses as well as human therapists, and customize themselves to meet the needs of humans will become ubiquitous. The AIs will become adept at analyzing human personalities and matching lonely people with friends and lovers, and at recommending daily activities that will satisfy them, hour-by-hour. Machines will come to understand that constant technology use is antithetical to human nature, so in order to promote human wellness, they find ways to impel humans to get out of their houses, interact with other humans, and be in nature.
  • House robots will start becoming common in rich countries. They will be slower at doing household tasks than humans, but will still save people hours of labor per week. They may or may not be humanoid. For the sake of safety and minimizing annoyance, most robots will do their work when humans aren’t around. As in, you would come home from work every day and find the floors vacuumed, the lawn mowed, and your laundered clothes in your dresser, with nary a robot in sight since it will have gone back into its closet to recharge. You would never hear the commotion of a clothes washing machine, a vacuum cleaner or a lawnmower. All the work would get done when you were away, as if by magic.
  • Chatbots will steadily improve their “humanness” over the decade. The instances when AIs say or do something nonsensical will get less and less frequent. Dumber people, children, and people with some types of mental illness will be the first ones to start insisting their AIs are intelligent like humans. Later, average people will start claiming the same. By the end of the decade, a personal assistant AI like “Samantha” from the movie Her will be commercially available.
  • People will start having genuine personal relationships with AIs and robots. For example, people will resist upgrading to new personal assistant AIs because they will have emotional attachments to their old ones. The destruction of a helper robot or AI might be as emotionally traumatic to some people as the death of a human relative.
  • Thanks to improvements in battery energy density and cost, and in fast-charging technology, electric cars become cost-competitive with gas-powered cars this decade without government subsidies, leading to their rapid adoption. Electric cars are mechanically simpler and more reliable than gas-powered ones, which will hurt the car repair industry. Many gas stations will also go bankrupt or convert to fast charging stations.
  • Self-driving cars will become cheap enough and practical enough for average income people to buy, and their driving behavior will become as efficient as an average human. Over the course of this decade, there will be rapid adoption of self-driving cars in rich countries. Freed from driving, people will switch to doing things like watching movies/TV and eating. Car interiors will change accordingly. Road fatalities, and the concomitant demands for traffic police, paramedics, E.R. doctors, car mechanics, and lawyers will sharply decrease. The car insurance industry will shrivel, forcing consolidation. (Humans in those occupations will also face increasing levels of direct job competition from machines over the course of the decade.)
  • The “big box” business model will start taking over the transportation and car repair industry thanks to the rise of electric, self-driving vehicles and autonomous taxis in place of personal car ownership. The multitudes of small, scattered car repair shops will be replaced by large, centralized car repair facilities that themselves resemble factory assembly lines. Self-driving vehicles will drive to them to have their problems diagnosed and fixed, sparing their human owners from having to waste their time sitting in waiting rooms.
  • Car ownership won’t die out because it will still be a status symbol, and having a car ready in your driveway will always be more convenient than having to wait even just two minutes for an Uber cab to arrive at the curb. People are lazy.
  • The ad hoc car rental model exemplified by autonomous Uber cabs and private people renting out their autonomous cars when not in use faces a challenge since daily demand for cars peaks during morning rush hour and afternoon rush hour. In other words, everyone needs a car at the same time each day, so the ratio of cars : people can’t deviate much from, say, 1:2. Of course, if more people telecommuted (almost certain in the future thanks to better VR, faster broadband, and tech-savvy Millennials reaching middle age and taking over the workplace), and if flexible schedules became more widespread (also likely, but within certain limits since most offices can’t function efficiently unless they have “all hands on deck” for at least a few hours each day), the ratio could go even lower. However, there’s still a bottom limit to how few cars a country will need to provide adequate daily transportation for its people.
  • Automation will start having a major impact on the global economy. Machines will compensate for the shrinkage of the working-age human population in the developed world. Countries with “graying” populations like Japan and Germany will experience a new wave of economic growth. Demand for immigrant laborers will decrease across the world because of machines.
  • There will be a worldwide increase in the structural unemployment rate thanks to better and cheaper narrow AIs and robots. A plausible scenario would be for the U.S. unemployment rate to be 10%–which was last the case at the nadir of the Great Recession–but for every other economic indicator to be strong. The clear message would be that human labor is becoming decoupled from the economy.
  • Combining all the best AI and robotics technologies, it will be possible to create general-purpose androids that could function better in the real world (e.g. – perform in the workplace, learn new things, interact with humans, navigate public spaces, manage personal affairs) than the bottom 10% of humans (e.g. – elderly people, the disabled, criminals, the mentally ill, people with poor language abilities or low IQs), and in some narrow domains, the androids will be superhuman (e.g. – physical strength, memory, math abilities). Note that businesses will still find it better to employ task-specific, non-human-looking robots instead of general purpose androids.
  • By the end of this decade, only poor people, lazy people, and conspiracy theorists (like anti-vaxxers) won’t have their genomes sequenced. It will be trivially cheap, and in fact free for many people (some socialized health care systems will fully subsidize it), and enough will be known about the human genome to make it worthwhile to have the information.
  • Markets will become brutally competitive and efficient thanks to AIs. Companies will sharply grasp consumer demand through real-time surveillance, and consumers will be alerted to bargains by their personal AIs and devices (e.g. – your AR glasses will visually highlight good deals as you walk through the aisles of a store). Your personal assistant AIs and robots will look out for your self-interest by countering the efforts of other AIs to sway your spending habits in ways that benefit companies and not you.
  • “Digital immortality” will become possible for average people. Personal assistant AIs, robot servants, and other monitoring devices will be able, through observation alone, to create highly accurate personality profiles of individual humans, and to anticipate their behavior with high fidelity. Voices and mannerisms will be digitally reproducible without any hint of error. Digital simulacra of individual humans will be further refined by having them take voluntary personality tests, and by uploading their genomes, brain scans and other body scans. Even if all of the genetic and biological data couldn’t be made sense of at the moment it was uploaded to an individual’s digital profile, there will be value in saving it since it might be decipherable in the future.
  • Life expectancy will have increased by a few years thanks to pills and therapies that slightly extend human lifespan. Like, you take a $20 pill each day starting at age 20 and you end up dying at age 87 instead of age 84.
  • Global oil consumption will peak as people continue switching to other power sources.
  • Earliest possible date for the first manned Mars mission.

2040s

  • The world and peoples’ outlooks and priorities will be very different than they were in 2018. Cheap renewable energy will have become widespread and totally negated any worries about an “energy crisis” ever happening, except in exotic, hypothetical scenarios about the distant future. There will be little need for immigration thanks to machine labor and cross-border telecommuting. Moreover, there will be a strong sense in most Western countries that they’re already “diverse enough,” and that there are no further cultural benefits to letting in more foreigners since large communities of most foreign ethnic groups will already exist within their borders. There will be more need than ever for strong social safety nets and entitlement programs thanks to technological unemployment. AI will be a central political and social issue. It won’t be the borderline sci-fi, fringe issue it was in 2018.
  • Automation, mass unemployment, wealth inequalities between the owners of capital and everyone else, and differential access to expensive human augmentation technologies (such as genetic engineering) will produce overwhelming political pressure for some kind of wealth redistribution and social safety net expansion. Countries that have diligently made small, additive reforms as necessary over the preceding decades will be untroubled. However, countries that failed to adapt their political and economic systems will face upheaval.
  • 2045 will pass without the Technological Singularity happening. Ray Kurzweil will either celebrate his 97th birthday in a wheelchair, or as a popsicle frozen at the Alcor Foundation.
  • With robots running the economy, it will be common for businesses to operate 24/7: restaurants never close, online orders made at 3:00 am are packed in boxes by 3:10 am, and autonomous delivery trucks only stop to refuel.
  • Advanced energy technology, robot servants, 3D printers, telepresence, and other technologies will allow people to live largely “off-grid” if they choose, while still enjoying a level of comfort that 2018 people would envy.
  • It will be common for cities, towns and states to heavily restrict or ban human-driven vehicles within their boundaries. A sea change in thinking happens as autonomous cars become accepted as “the norm,” and human-driven cars are thought of as unusual and dangerous.

2050s

  • This is the earliest possible time that AGI/SAI will be invented. It will not be able to instantly change everything in the world or to initiate a Singularity, but it will rapidly grow in intelligence, wealth, and power.
  • Humans will be heavily dependent upon their machines for almost everything (e.g. – friendship, planning the day, random questions to be answered, career advice, legal counseling, medical checkups, driving cars), and the dependency will be so ingrained that humans will reflexively assume that “The Machines are always right.” Consciously and unconsciously, people will yield more and more of their decision-making and opinion-forming to machines, and find that they and the world writ large are better off for it.
  • The doomsaying about Global Warming will start to quiet down as the world’s transition to clean energy hits full stride and predictions about catastrophes from people like Al Gore fail to pan out by their deadlines. Sadly, people will just switch to worrying about and arguing about some new set of doomsday prophecies about something else.
  • By almost all measures, standards of living will be better in 2050 than today. People will commonly have all types of wonderful consumer devices and appliances that we can’t even fathom. However, some narrow aspects of daily life are likely to worsen, such as overcrowding and further erosion of the human character. Just as people today have short memories and take too many things for granted, so shall people in the 2050s fail to appreciate how much the standard of living has risen since today, and they will ignore all the steady triumphs humanity has made over its problems, and by default, people will still believe the world is constantly on the verge of collapsing and that things are always getting worse.
  • Cities and their suburbs across the world will have experienced massive growth since 2018. Telepresence, relatively easy off-grid living, and technological unemployment will not, on balance, have driven more people out of metro areas than have migrated into them. Farming areas full of flat, boring land will have been depopulated, and many farms will be 100% automated. The people who choose to leave the metro areas for the “wilderness” will concentrate in rural areas (including national parks) where the climate is good, the natural scenery is nice, and there are opportunities for outdoor recreation.
  • Therapeutic cloning and stem cell therapies will become useful and will effectively extend human lifespan. For example, a 70-year-old with a failing heart will be able to have a new one grown in a lab using his own DNA, and then implanted into his chest to replace the failing original organ. The new heart will be equivalent to what he had when at age 18 years, so it will last another 52 years before it too fails. In a sense, this will represent age reversal to one part of his body.
  • Many factories, farms, and supply chains will be 100% automated, and it will be common for goods to not be touched by a human being’s hands until they reach their buyers. Robots will deliver Amazon packages to your doorstep or even carry them into your house.

2060s

  • China will effectively close the technological, military, and standard of living gaps with other developed countries. Aside from the unpleasantness of being a more crowded place, life in China won’t be worse overall than life in Japan or the average European country.
  • House robots and human-sized worker robots will be as strong, agile, and dexterous as most humans, and their batteries will be energy-dense enough to power them for most of the day. A typical American family might have multiple robot servants that physically follow around the humans each day to help with tasks.
  • If a manned Mars mission hasn’t happened yet, then there’s intense pressure to do so by the centennial of the first Moon landing (1969).

2100

  • Latest possible time that AGI/SAI will be invented. By this point, computer hardware will so powerful that we could do 1:1 digital simulations of human brains. If our AI still falls far short of human-like general intelligence and creativity, then it might be that only organic substrates have the necessary properties to support them.
  • Worst case scenario is that AGI/Strong AI hasn’t been invented yet, but thousands of different types of highly efficient, task-specific Narrow AIs have (often coupled to robot bodies), and they fill almost every labor niche better than human workers ever could (“Death by a Thousand Cuts” job automation scenario). Humans grow up in a world where no one has to work, and the notion of drudge work, suffering through a daily commute, and involuntarily waking up at 6:00 am five days a week is unfathomable. Every human will have machines that constantly monitor them or follow them around, and meet practically all their needs.
  • The world could in many ways resemble Ray Kurzweil’s predicted Post-Singularity world. However, the improvements and changes will have accrued thanks to decades of AGI/Strong AI steady effort. Everything will not instantly change on DD/MM/2045 as Kurzweil suggests it will.
  • Life expectancy escape velocity and perhaps medical immortality will be achieved. It will come not from magical, all-purpose nanomachines that fix all your body’s cells and DNA, but from a combination of technologies, including therapeutic cloning of human organs, cybernetic replacements for organs and limbs, and stem cell therapies that regenerate ageing tissues and organs inside the patient’s body. The treatments will be affordable in large part thanks to robot doctors and surgeons who work almost for free, and to medical patents expiring.
  • All other aspects of medicine and healthcare will have radically advanced. There will be vaccines and cures for almost all contagious diseases. We will be masters of human genetic engineering and know exactly how to produce people that today represent the top 1% of the human race (holistically combining IQ, genetic health, physical attractiveness, and likable/prosocial personality traits). However, the value of even a genius-IQ human will be questionable since intelligent machines will be so much smarter.
  • Augmentative cybernetics (including direct brain-to-computer links) will exist and be in common use.
  • FIVR exists wherein AI game masters constantly tailor environments, NPCs and events to suit each player’s needs and to keep them entertained. Every human has his own virtual game universe where he’s #1. With no jobs in the real world to occupy them, it’s quite possible that a large fraction of the human race will willingly choose to live in FIVR.
  • Unaugmented human beings will no longer be assets that can invent things and do useful work: they will be liabilities that do (almost) everything worse than intelligent machines and augmented humans. Ergo, the size of a nation’s human population will subtract from its economic and military power, and radical shifts in geopolitics are possible. Geographically large but sparsely populated countries like Russia, Australia and Canada might become very strong.
  • The transition to green energy sources will be complete, and humans will no longer be net emitters of greenhouse gases. The means will exist to start reducing global temperatures to restore the Earth to its pre-industrial state, but people will resist because they will have gotten used to the warmer climate. People living in Canada and Russia won’t want their countries to get cold again.
  • The means to radical alter human bodies, alter memories, and alter brain structures will be available.
  • Brain implants will make “telepathy” possible between humans, machines and animals.
  • Flying cars designed to carry humans could be common, but they will be flown by machines, not humans. Ground vehicles will retain many important advantages (fuel efficiency, cargo capacity, safety, noise level, and more) and won’t become obsolete.
  • Advanced nanomachines could exist.
  • Relatively cheap interplanetary travel (probably just to Mars and to space stations and moons that are about as far as Mars) will exist.
  • Androids that are outwardly indistinguishable from humans will exist, and humans will hold no advantages over them (e.g. – physical dexterity, fine motor control, appropriateness of facial expressions, capacity for creative thought).
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Roundup of interesting internet articles, December 2017 edition

The U.S. working-age population would be shrinking right now if not for immigrants and the children of immigrants. This will continue until at least 2035.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/08/immigration-projected-to-drive-growth-in-u-s-working-age-population-through-at-least-2035/

East Asia will have to import 275m people between the ages of 15 and 64 by 2030 to keep its working age population stable.
http://econ.st/2jT5FYx

But will demand for immigrant workers slacken once we have robot workers? Ben Goertzel thinks “toddler-level AGI” will be invented by 2030, followed by the Singularity.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/12/ai-researcher-ben-goertzel-launches-singularitynet-marketplace-and-agi-coin-cryptocurrency.html

Skip the first 15 minutes. Greg Brockman believes deep learning isn’t close to hitting the limits of what it can do, and its capabilities will continue radically improving thanks to better, faster hardware. By the end of 2018, he thinks machines will be able to generate artificial audio and video (like imitations of human voices and totally fake video footage) that humans won’t be able to distinguish from reality. Within five years, he thinks a breakthrough will happen in robotics, making them much more capable and practical for use.
https://twimlai.com/twiml-talk-74-towards-artificial-general-intelligence-greg-brockman/

Google claims it can already convincingly fake human voices.
https://qz.com/1165775/googles-voice-generating-ai-is-now-indistinguishable-from-humans/

A timely counterpoint to bellicose declarations that “machines will never replace humans” and “human judgement will always be needed,” etc.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/washington-wreck-positive-train-control/548744/

Self-driving cars might offer people free taxi rides in the future, so long as passengers are willing to endure sales pitches from various corporate sponsors.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/12/self-driving-cars-free-future/548945/

The typical American thinks his personal odds of losing work to machines are 30%, while everyone else’s odds average out to 49%.
http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/10/04/automation-in-everyday-life/#many-americans-expect-a-number-of-professions-to-be-dominated-by-machines-within-their-lifetimes-but-relatively-few-expect-their-own-jobs-or-professions-to-be-impacted

When asked individually, Americans say that they would not feel threatened by the discovery of non-intelligent aliens and it would not shake their religious beliefs, but they assume that would not be true for everyone else. ‘That may be because “most Americans tend to think, on any desirable trait or ability, that they’re better than the average person.”‘
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/04/how-will-humanity-react-to-alien-life-psychologists-have-some-predictions/

An article appeared on the front page of the NYT exposing a secret Pentagon program devoted to studying UFOs. It has evidence of UFOs doing impossible aerial maneuvers and anomalous physical materials recovered at UFO land/crash sites. As of the date of me writing this blog post, the Pentagon has not denied anything in the story.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html

Videos leaked from that UFO program’s trove, showing a 2004 encounter between U.S. fighter planes and a strange object off the coast of California. The pilots could see it with their eyes and it also showed up on their visioning sensors.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/tom-delonge-takes-alien-research-215651746.html\

Humans are genetically programmed to believe bad news over good news, and are likelier to remember bad things. In opinion polls, this expresses itself as overestimation of metrics like the crime rate,  incidence of terrorism, and incidence of poor health.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42329014

Of course, sometimes the conventional wisdom that the world is getting worse is true: People with lower IQs and people who are overweight are breeding faster than everyone else.
https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21732803-it-does-however-no-longer-seem-favour-braininess-data-half-million

‘This may be the most powerful gene-manipulation toolkit that has yet been described, and you can expect to see a lot of work on it in the coming months as other groups give it a shakedown. ‘
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/12/08/crispr-the-latest-edition

The first two “gay genes” have been identified. By themselves, they don’t automatically make men gay, but they’re more common in gays.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2155810-what-do-the-new-gay-genes-tell-us-about-sexual-orientation/

The FDA will make it easier for companies to sell DNA testing kits directly to Americans.
https://gizmodo.com/the-fda-just-made-it-a-lot-easier-for-dna-health-tests-1820216695

The FDA has approved a new wearable medical device: The Kardiaband EKG, which can be attached to an Apple Watch to detect abnormal heart activity with high accuracy.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5138101/FDA-approves-Apple-Watchs-medical-device-accessory.html

‘..So perhaps we’re finally heading for that era of personalized medicine that everyone keeps talking about…as sequencing gets relentlessly cheaper and more widespread.’
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/12/18/genetic-variation-gets-more-real-all-the-time

Woman, 26, gives birth to baby who spent 24 years as frozen embryo

Should society pay for uterus transplants so that infertile women can have “the experience of pregnancy”? The experience of raising a child seems to be what really counts, and it can be had much more cheaply and at lower risk through hiring a surrogate mother.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/12/05/568453168/first-baby-born-to-u-s-uterus-transplant-patient-raises-ethics-questions

‘Public Health England says there is a large amount of evidence that shows e-cigarettes are much less harmful than smoking – at least 95%.’
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-42328236

Metformin is one of the best candidates for a human anti-aging pill.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-42273362

Within your lifetime, the means to make yourself digitally immortal will probably be invented. Here is its nascent form.
https://www.npr.org/2017/12/19/572068474/illinois-holocaust-museum-preserves-survivors-stories-as-holograms

What bad futurism looks like:
Article title: ‘2018 is when something finally gives on North Korea’
At the end of article: ‘It’s possible that a year from now not much will have changed: no war, no talks, no significant results from sanctions.’
https://qz.com/1157919/2018-is-when-something-finally-gives-on-north-korea/

‘“It is beyond me why we think an enemy [like North Korea] would waste a perfectly good nuclear weapon to experiment with a hypothetical EMP when they could destroy an actual city…EMP is a loony idea. Once an enemy uses a nuclear weapon — for any reason — it crosses the nuclear threshold and invites a nuclear response.”’
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/expert-emp-weapons-are-loony-idea-23695

The first atomic bomb–“Little Boy”–was surprisingly simple, and one man was able to build detailed blueprints for it using open source data. https://www.npr.org/2017/12/26/570806064/north-korea-designed-a-nuke-so-did-this-truck-driver

The first stealth aircraft, the F-117, is 40 years old. The U.S. built it thanks to insights gleaned from a Soviet paper on radar reflectivity, which was published 51 years ago.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/stealth-turns-40-looking-back-at-the-first-flight-of-have-blue/

Almost 20 years after the fall of Communism, most of NATO’s Eastern European members are still using Cold War-era weapons whose technology is not compatible with the West’s. A partial, affordable solution might be program to modify the Eastern European weapons.
http://www.janes.com/article/76473/kharkov-morozov-design-bureau-unveils-new-t-72-upgrade

Bulgaria has to send its fighter planes to Russia for maintenance, even though the country is in NATO and would have to use those same aircraft to fight Russia someday. The underfunding and failure to get rid of Soviet-era hardware could be a disaster in a war.
http://www.janes.com/article/76391/bulgaria-turns-to-russia-for-mig-29-logistics

In the U.S., we see problems from the opposite extreme, where the military is overfunded and has the luxury of falling for the siren song of advanced, unproven weapons tech that never get off the ground.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16695/the-navy-is-changing-its-plans-for-its-dumbed-down-zumwalts-and-their-ammoless-guns

Upgrading old clunkers like UH-1 helicopters with autonomous capabilities could keep them in service for decades to come.
http://www.janes.com/article/76439/usmc-onr-conduct-final-autonomously-operated-uh-1-demonstration

Flying drones that are indistinguishable from birds would have great reconnaissance value to militaries. ‘Robirds use flapping wing flight as a means of propulsion, with a flight performance comparable to real birds.’
https://youtu.be/-gc8kBmzOOI

Fleets of cheap, autonomous mini-subs could map the seafloor. Someday, every shipwreck will be known and every chest-o-pirate-gold recovered.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42335230

Google Maps has so comprehensively mapped the Earth’s surface that it’s moving on to cataloging the exact locations of exterior building doors and mailboxes.
https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat

By the end of 2018, the U.S. might be a bigger oil producer than Saudi Arabia or Russia. (U.S.-Canada fossil fuels production won’t peak until around 2030.)
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/12/us-crude-oil-production-could-be-more-than-saudi-arabia-in-january.html

The DoD’s experimental “safe” alternative to cluster bombs was basically a giant nail bomb. (It failed, and we’re just bringing back cluster bombs.)
http://www.janes.com/article/76101/pentagon-reverses-cluster-munition-ban

‘If you asked experts a few years ago when they expected this to happen, they’d have been likely to say in one or two decades. Earlier this year, some experts I polled had revised their forecast to within two to five years. But Martinis’s team at Google recently announced that they hope to achieve quantum supremacy by the end of this year.’
https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/technology/2017/12/how-quantum-computing-will-change-world

Throwing cold water on AlphaGo Zero’s recent gaming milestones:
https://medium.com/@josecamachocollados/is-alphazero-really-a-scientific-breakthrough-in-ai-bf66ae1c84f2

Two years ago, Elon Musk said we’d have autonomous cars in two years.
https://electrek.co/2015/12/21/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-drops-prediction-full-autonomous-driving-from-3-years-to-2/

This year, Elon Musk said he’d build a massive battery farm in Australia within 100 days. He did it in 60.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-42190358

“Space blindness”: The latest monkey wrench thrown into our big plans to go to Mars. “ The Mission has been “Only 20 or 30 years away” since I was a little kid.
At least our killer robots will get there someday.
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2017/dec/02/space-blindness-must-be-solved-before-mission-to-m/

 

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Review: “Starship Troopers”

In the distant future, Earth prospers under a global, quasi-fascist oligarchy where only military veterans are allowed to vote or have political power. Earth’s military is enormous and is based around a fleet of large space warships that carry expeditionary soldiers called the “Mobile Infantry.” This force defends the expanding sphere of human civilization against a race of large, insect aliens nicknamed “the Arachnids.” After human colonists try to settle on an Arachnid planet, they retaliate by destroying the settlement and flinging an asteroid at Earth, destroying Buenos Aires and leading to all-out war between the two species.

The film focuses on the wartime experiences of Rico and his three friends, who all enroll in the military right after high school and quickly lose their innocence in the ensuing war. It is a classic bildungsroman tale, and though panned by most critics, is held in esteem for its entertainment value and satirical take on the fascist elements of American culture.

A date for the film’s events is not given, though we do have one clue. During the high school graduation dance party, a band performs a variation of David Bowie’s song “I’ve not been to Oxford Town.” The original song was released in 1995 and contained this stanza:

“But I have not been to Oxford Town

(All’s well)
But I have not been to Oxford Town
Toll the bell
Pay the private eye
(All’s well)
20th century dies”

The final line is understood to reference the rapidly approaching end of the 20th century.
The band performing at the high school graduation
The variant of the song we hear in Starship Troopers (which is entitled “I have not been to Paradise” and is on YouTube) has slightly modified that stanza:
“But I have not been to Paradise

(All’s well)
No I have not been to Paradise
Toll the bell
Pay the private eye
(All’s well)
23rd century dies”

Assuming the final line retains its significance, we can conclude that the movie’s events are set in the late 23rd century. For the sake of consistency, I’m going to say it happens in 2295, exactly 300 years after Bowie’s original song came out.

There will be megastuctures in space. During some of the space ship scenes, we see a manmade “ring” built around the Moon, which looks to serve as a giant military base and probably also a shipyard, and we also see a space fortress called “Fort Ticonderoga” whose width and height are measurable in miles considering how much it dwarfs the space ships. By 2295, it’s very possible we could have built megastructures in space like these. The key will be establishing self-sufficient space infrastructure first, along with the means to obtain raw materials from asteroids and low-gravity moons.

While building a 6,800-mile circumference ring around the Moon would be wasteful, a large space station or several smaller ones would make sense and could perform the same military and space ship dockyard functions at much lower cost. The Moon’s low gravity and nearly nonexistent atmosphere also make it well-suited for a space elevator, which could be used to cheaply transport raw materials mined from the surface into space, where they could be fashioned into space stations and ships.

Currently, we lack the infrastructure in space to build things there, and so we have to manufacture all of our satellites, space ships, and space stations on the Earth’s surface and then use rockets to put them in orbit, which is incredibly expensive (it costs $2,000 – $13,000 to get one kilogram of cargo into low Earth orbit, which is where the International Space Station is). Once we’re able to build things in space, from materials we find floating around in space, manufacture costs will sharply decrease, and we’ll be able to pay for things like huge space stations.

There will be many large space ships. The movie is filled with special effects shots of giant space warships flying around and attacking alien planets. As before, this is entirely plausible for 2295, and will be made possible by the same space-based manufacturing infrastructure that we’ll use to make space stations.

There will be space ships that can travel faster than the speed of light. The space ships in the film use something called a “Star Drive” to travel faster than light. This technology allows humans to spread outside our Solar System and to come into contact with the Arachnids. As I discussed in my review of the film Prometheus, the laws of physics say this is impossible, and I don’t think it’s useful to assume we’ll be able to figure out a way around them.

The military will still use human infantrymen. The film focuses on main character Juan Rico’s experiences in the “Mobile Infantry,” an expeditionary, ground fighting force similar to the U.S. Marines. Aside from their ability to move between planets on space ships and their access to nuclear bazookas, the Mobile Infantry’s technology, capabilities and tactics are stuck in the 20th century. In fact, their lack of armored vehicles, artillery, and close air support actually make their fighting force more rifleman-centric than most armies were in WWII, and some of the battles shown in the film are reminiscent of the high-casualty, “human wave” fighting of WWI.

This is a completely ridiculous vision of what the military and warfare will be like in 2295. Even making conservative assumptions about the rate of A.I. progress, human infantrymen will have been long replaced by machines, along with probably ALL other military positions, such as piloting space warships and doing logistical support. A fully automated or 95% automated military force could exist as early as 2095.

Guns will be big and clunky. The standard small arm of the Mobile Infantry is a large, boxy, gray rifle nicknamed the “Morita” (this was probably the name of its inventor or is a contrived military acronym that clumsily describes what it is), and it makes absolutely no sense as a weapon.

The Morita combines a bullpup layout (meaning the magazine is behind the hand grip) with an ultra-long barrel and extended fore-end, infusing the weapon with worst qualities of the bullpup and traditional rifle layouts and none of their strengths. The comically long barrel’s accuracy potential could have been a redeeming trait were it not completely wasted thanks to the guns lacking even simple iron sights. And instead of being sleek and skeletonized, the guns’ outer casings are blocky and thick. For example, the carry handles are completely solid slabs of metal, which is an egregious design flaw since a simple U-beam design would have cut weight without hurting the weapon in any meaningful way.

When your guns don’t even have BB gun iron sights, all you can do is spray and pray.

The Morita is an intimidating and vaguely futuristic-looking weapon that is actually inferior to most military rifles that were in use at the time Starship Troopers was filmed. It’s an interesting time capsule that depicts what people in the 1990s thought future guns would look like. In fact, the weapon that the Morita seems to have been based on, the French FAMAS assault rifle, is being removed from service and could be replaced by a derivative of the American AR-15, which was invented in the 1950s.

In the 20 years since Starship Troopers was released, gun design has in many ways gone in the opposite direction the filmmakers envisioned it would: Various militaries have discovered that the bullpup rifle layout is not better than the traditional layout overall (there are tradeoffs that cancel each other out) so bullpup rifles didn’t become more popular; gun designers focused on trimming weight and clumsy features like carry handles from existing models; and they redesigned the weapons to be sleeker and more customizable with accessories like flashlights and combat sights. And over that last 20 years, those accessories have miniaturized thanks to better technology and the demand to cut weight. In short, gun designs have converged on a handful of layouts that are mechanically optimal, and all of the R&D effort is now focused on tweaking them in small ways to wring out the last bit of efficiency and performance.

It wouldn’t make sense for people in the future to abandon the principles of good engineering by making highly inefficient guns like the Morita. To the contrary, future guns will, just like every other type of manufactured object, be even more highly optimized for their functions thanks to AI: Just create a computer simulation that exactly duplicates conditions in the real world (e.g. – gravity, all laws of physics, air pressure, physical characteristics of all metals and plastics the device could be built from), let “AI engineers” experiment with all possible designs, and then see which ones come out on top after a few billion simulation cycles. I strongly suspect the winners will be very similar to guns we’ve already built, but sleeker and lighter thanks to the deletion of unnecessary mass and to the use of materials with better strength-to-weight ratios.

Projectile weapons will still be used in combat. It’s 2295…SO WHERE THE HELL ARE THE RAY GUNS? I’m no expert in lasers or particle weapons, but I imagine that the technology will become practical for routine military use in the next 278 years. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll make kinetic energy weapons obsolete, particularly for close-range combat with lightly armored or unarmored opponents. A weapon that can kill a horse-sized, frenzied opponent by propelling a few tiny pieces of metal into its brain in under a second might be a better tool for the job than a laser.

Projectile weapons also have important, inherent advantages that militate against them ever becoming obsolete: Projectiles like bullets are minimally affected by atmospheric conditions (lasers can’t penetrate clouds or fog), can follow curved trajectories to hit targets hiding behind solid objects (lasers only travel in straight lines), and can carry payloads (explosives, poison) that render some secondary, specialized destructive effect to the target. And unless the laws of physics change in the future, smashing solid objects into other things at high speed will be a reliable way of destroying them until the end of time.

Moreover, while I think the average human being in 2295 will be heavily enhanced through genetics and artificial technologies, I doubt we’ll find ways to upgrade their skin and flesh to be bullet proof. Bullets, knives, baseball bats, and fists will still hurt them. Also, I don’t see how wild animals made of organic tissue like the Arachnids could have bulletproof bodies: no animals on Earth have shells, bones, or skulls that are too hard for our bullets to penetrate, and even if the Arachnids had exoskeletons that were twice as hard as, say, elephant skulls, we could pierce them by using larger bullets.

So, even in 2295, I think it’s plausible that projectile weapons will still be used in combat, alongside more advanced weapons like lasers. Handheld weapons that shoot out bullets could still be the weapons of choice for killing humans and other organic life forms in many circumstances. However, it’s possible the guns of the future might use something aside from gunpowder–such as electromagnetism–to propel their bullets, which wouldn’t make them “firearms.”

Some people will have missing limbs. Rico’s high school teacher and later, his unit commander, is a middle-aged man who is missing one of his arms and sometimes wears a mechanical prosthesis. Another man working a military desk job is also missing his arm and both legs. It’s strongly implied that the missing limbs were war wounds both men suffered during earlier military service.

This is completely unrealistic. By 2295, it should be possible to regrow human limbs and organs through therapeutic cloning, and to surgically graft them into people, with no chance of rejection. Seeing a physically disabled person who had a missing limb or was confined to a wheelchair will be as rare and as strange to people in 2295 as seeing someone trapped in an iron lung is to us today.

Some people will have advanced mechanical prostheses. As stated, Rico’s high school teacher sometimes wears a mechanical arm over his stump. It is clearly artificial, being made of articulated metal segments, but it somehow interfaces with his nervous and musculoskeletal system well enough to give him the same level of fine motor control over it that he has over his biological arm.

ARMed and dangerous!

Cybernetic limbs like this should be available by 2295, but due to human aesthetics, I doubt many people will want to get ones that are mechanical in appearance. People will prefer artificial parts that are warm, supple, and natural in appearance (recall Will Smith’s fake arm in I, Robot). I imagine some people would want to take this preference “all the way” by getting truly natural, 100% biological replacement limbs made through therapeutic cloning.

There will be bald people. Rico’s teacher, his basic training camp commandant, and several extras in the film had male-pattern baldness. A combination of things will have completely eradicated hair loss well before 2295, such as widespread genetic engineering, and cloning of hair follicles for implantation on balding parts of the scalp. Seeing a bald person in 2295 will be like seeing a person with cleft palate today: the presence of such an easily correctable condition will signal the person was deprived of access to medical care, or that they chose to live with the condition to visibly set themselves apart from the mainstream, possibly to adhere to arcane personal values.

Loud, low flying aircraft will fly around cities. Early in the film, there’s a brief moment where we see the futuristic skyline of Buenos Aires, and two fast-moving aircraft fly by at the same height as the skyscrapers, making jet-like roaring noises.

On the one hand, having loud aircraft fly low over crowded cities is a fly in the ointment for Starship Troopers’ portrayal of an orderly and comfortable future. Loud noises–whether from aircraft or anything else–disturb people, so it would stand to reason that, by 2295, more laws would be in place against them. NIMBYism only gets stronger as people get richer and get more free time to focus on less critical things.

But on the other hand, that is based on the assumption that future cities will be full of human beings. Intelligent machines wouldn’t have the same finicky senses that we do, so loud noises wouldn’t bother them, and low-flying aircraft might be far more common than today. In fact, machines could be perfectly comfortable in a wide variety of environments that humans would find intolerable, like an Earth saturated with toxic air pollution, a 20-degree hotter Earth ravaged by global warming, a pitch black Earth as featured in The Matrix, an Earth covered in piles of skulls and sad ruined buildings as shown in The Terminator, or an extraterrestrial environment where humans couldn’t survive for multiple reasons.

I don’t think intelligent machines are definitely going to kill off the human race, or even probably going to, but for sure it’s a possible outcome we could face by 2295. Another scenario is a hostile machine takeover of Earth that stops short of exterminating our species: Once defeated on the battlefield, disarmed, forced to sign the surrender papers, and evicted from the best places, the machines would ignore us unless we got in their way, and we’d scrape out some kind of existence on the margins. This is analogous to how humans today treat wild animals: we rarely think of them even though they’re all around us, we don’t help them even though we could make their lives much better at low cost, we don’t kill them unless they get in our way, and we don’t bother to consider how our activities affect them. If a property developer plans to bulldoze some woods to make a strip mall, he doesn’t first count the number of ant hills or squirrels that are there and try to recompense them.

In that “Second Class Citizen” future scenario (or maybe “Machine Dictatorship” scenario), it would be common for intelligent machines to do careless things that humans considered obnoxious, like flying loud aircraft low over human areas.

We will use nuclear weapons in wars against aliens. One of the Mobile Infantry’s weapons is a small nuclear missile launched out of a bazooka. In one instance, we see such a weapon used to blow up a crowd of Arachnids in an open area, and in two others scenes it is used to collapse the Arachnids’ underground tunnels.

In a real war with aliens, particularly if we felt our species’ survival was at stake, I have no doubt we would use nuclear weapons or any other type of weapon of mass destruction like germs and poison gas. Unless we had prior diplomatic dealings with them, there wouldn’t be any treaties like the Geneva Conventions to stop us. Moreover, if the fighting were happening in space and other planets, we could use WMDs without fear of contaminating our own biosphere or exposing our civilian populations to collateral damage. These factors would impel us to use other weapons and tactics that are today banned under international law, such as exploding bullets, and torture of prisoners.

Whether or not shoulder-launched, mini-nuclear missiles will come into common use by 2295 is unanswerable, though let me point out that it’s technically feasible. In fact, the U.S. first built these types of weapons, called “Davy Crockett Weapon Systems,” in the late 1950s. While those weapons were too big for anyone but a professional bodybuilder to fire from the shoulder, it’s likely they could be miniaturized with better technology without sacrificing their explosive yield.

The Davy Crockett nuclear launcher

If we actually fought with aliens like the Arachnids in 2295, we would be smart enough to recognize the gross inefficiency of sending in humans equipped with relatively weak guns, and we’d pick weapons and tactics better-suited for the task. Biological weapons that the Arachnids would spread among themselves, heavier-than-air poison gas that would sink down their tunnel networks, and combat drones that the Arachnids wouldn’t be able to effectively fight back against (e.g. – fast, pigeon-sized flying drone programmed to land on an Arachnid head and then detonate a shaped charge into its brain/nerve bundle) seem like the best ways of doing it, and don’t require us to make any leaps in our thinking about military technology. The same iterative process of optimizing guns in computer simulations that I described earlier would be used to quickly develop weapons, tactics, and strategies best suited for defeating the Arachnids.

Human colonies will exist on Earth-like planets outside our solar system. Early in the film, a news broadcast announces that a colony of Mormons living on an Arachnid planet were all killed by the aliens. Gory footage of a small, walled town full of mutilated bodies follows. It’s possible human colonies could exist on Earth-like planets outside our solar system by 2295.

Consider that the “Project Longshot” analysis make a semi-credible case that a fusion-powered spacecraft could be built, could accelerate to 12% of the speed of light, and could reach our closest celestial neighbor, Alpha Centauri, in 100 years. Astronomers haven’t spotted Earth-like planets in the Alpha Centauri system yet, but there’s no reason to rule out the possibility of their existence.

Working backwards, if we assume a small human colony is established on an Earth-like planet in Alpha Centauri in 2295, and the journey took 100 years, then we will have acquired the ability to make large, fusion-powered space ships by 2195. That’s not an unreasonable prediction.

We will have encountered non-microscopic, non-technological aliens. The antagonists in Starship Troopers are “the Arachnids,” a society of large, ferocious, alien insects of different species that live together in hives and are led by small numbers of intelligent “Brain Bugs.”

I don’t think anything remotely resembling the Arachnids exists in our Solar System, but it’s possible they could in other star systems. By 2295, we’ll have extremely powerful space telescopes that will have identified all of the exoplanets around our neighboring stars, and we’ll have received even better imagery from our interstellar probes.

Again, assuming that Arachnids live within seven light years of us, and we get advanced enough to build space ships that can reach 12% of the speed of light by the late 2100s, then Earth could know about the Arachnids’ existence by 2295. Enough time would have passed for our interstellar probes to reach the Arachnid planet and transmit a report back to Earth.

Humans will be telepathic. A minor element in the film is the existence of telepathy in a small minority of humans. One of Rico’s friends, Carl, is a telepath, and late in the film he uses his special ability to implant a thought in Rico’s mind, and to read the thoughts of a captured Brain Bug. People will have telepathic abilities like these by 2295, though they will exist thanks to computer brain implants and not to natural ability.

Government commercial encouraging psychics to come forward

Science has proven that psychic abilities such as telepathy, clairvoyance (seeing the future), and telekinesis (moving objects through thought alone) don’t exist. However, there’s no scientific barrier to creating devices like brain implants or hats that could monitor the brain’s activity to decipher a person’s thoughts or emotions. Furthermore, there’s no barrier to giving such devices wireless communication capabilities, thus allowing people to communicate with each other through thought alone. I discussed this in some depth in my Prometheus review (“Machines will be able to read human thoughts…”), and as such won’t go into more depth.

Without getting too sappy, let me say that widespread use of this kind of technology could have profound consequences for our civilization, as it could bridge the man-machine divide and inaugurate an age of close empathy between humans and even animals. Linking the thoughts, emotions, and sensations of individual beings would make misunderstandings and miscommunications much rarer, and might make cruelty and dishonesty impossible. Using technology to create such a world might be a greater accomplishment than going to other star systems.

Death figures from natural disasters will be immediately known. One of the film’s pivotal events is Buenos Aires being destroyed by an asteroid purportedly hurled at Earth by the Arachnids. The main character, Juan Rico, is a native of that city and is speaking with his parents (who still live there) via videoconference from a different location at the moment of impact. Rico doesn’t understand why the video feed suddenly goes black, but less than two minutes later, he sees a TV news broadcast showing live footage of the flaming city, along with banner text that says over 8.7 million people were killed. The personal tragedy is a pivotal event in Rico’s young life, and it convinces him to complete his military training and to swear revenge against the aliens.

Today, when a natural disaster happens, it takes days or even weeks to account for the dead, but by 2295, I think the tallies could be compiled within minutes, as happened in the film. By 2295, every structure on our planet will be cataloged in great detail in something like a hyperrealistic “Google Maps,” almost every corner of the planet will be under constant surveillance of some sort (video, audio, seismic, etc.), and almost everybody will wear or have implanted in them devices that track their locations and life signs. All of the different data sources will be cobbled together to make a nearly 1:1 digital simulation of the entire planet, where every building and every person was accurately represented, in real time. Most “blind spots” in the data could be inferred with high accuracy. Without a doubt, artificial intelligences would be monitoring the network and rapidly analyzing the data.

As such, if a meteor hit a city, or if any other type of sudden disaster happened, the physical and human destruction could be determined almost instantly.

Helicopter-sized craft will be able to fly back and forth between the Earth’s surface and space. The Mobile Infantry use relatively small “drop ships” to ferry soldiers between the massive space warships and the surfaces of the different Arachnid planets. The drop ships are faintly aircraft-like in appearance and have layouts reminiscent of the Sikorsky CH-54 helicopters: the fuselage is a minimalist “spine” that connects the cockpit to the drive systems and landing gear, and it has mounting points for detachable cargo containers. There are large drop ships that can carry detachable cargo containers full of 30 – 40 people, and smaller drop ships that can only carry 10 people. They appear the roughly the same size as today’s CH-47 and UH-60 helicopters, respectively. All of the alien planets the drop ships are shown flying in and out of appear to have gravity very close to Earth’s (e.g. – dropped objects fall at the normal speed and humans can’t jump way in the air). Ergo, the movie posits that, by the year 2295, helicopter-sized craft that are mostly full of empty space and stuff other than fuel and engine components, will be able to take off from the Earth’s surface, reach space, and achieve at least a medium Earth orbit.

One of the smaller drop ships

I doubt this will happen because it’s impossible to cram enough chemical rocket fuel into a helicopter-sized craft to propel it into space. Let’s assume that the larger Starship Troopers drop ship weighs the same as a CH-47, which is 40,000 lbs. Today, it would take a Delta IV Heavy rocket to get a payload of that weight into medium Earth orbit. The launch vehicle is 236 feet high and contains 1 MILLION lbs of rocket fuel. Additionally, the Delta IV Heavy uses liquid hydrogen (H2), which is the most energy-dense type of chemical fuel known to exist. It’s implausible to assume we’ve overlooked some kind of superfuel that is, say, 20 times as energy-dense as H2, so there’s no way the drop ships could fly into space using any kind of combustible propellant in their internal fuel tanks.

A much larger drop ship–perhaps the size of the Prometheus space ship–might be able to fly off the Earth’s surface on its own using chemical rocket power, simply thanks to having more internal volume for fuel storage. Of course, this would make for weirder action scenes, with each drop ship being as big as a mansion but only carrying ten men.

A CH-47 can hold up to 33 troops, which looked to be the same capacity as the larger Starship Troopers drop ships

The only way a helicopter-sized, single-stage craft MIGHT be able to reach space is if it had miniaturized, nuclear fusion-powered rockets, which is one of those things that is on the very edge of the edge of what scientists think might be possible to build someday. The perennial comeback to skeptics of fusion power is that the Sun is proof of concept, but the perennial comeback to that is that fusion power has been 50 years away and always will be. No one can say at this point, so I think it’s safer to say helicopter-sized drop ships won’t exist in 2295, but mansion-sized ones will.

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Roundup of interesting internet articles, November 2017 edition

  1. Another reason why you should always be skeptical of Russian predictions about how strong their military will be within X years.
    http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16175/russia-rolls-out-new-tu-160m2-but-are-moscows-bomber-ambitions-realistic
  2. Russia won’t start mass producing stealth fighters until 2027 at the earliest. (U.S. F-22s started rolling off the assembly line in 2005.)
    http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russias-new-su-57-stealth-fighter-s-500-air-defense-system-23383
  3. Contrary to what is widely believed (thanks to fiction like The Hunt for Red October), the USSR/Russia has always been far behind the U.S. in submarine technology, and the gap is widening.
    http://nationalinterest.org/blog/why-russias-new-stealth-submarines-have-big-problem-22941
  4. The Russians used a spy ship with submersible instruments and winches to raise or destroy their two fighter planes that crashed into the Mediterranean during Syrian support operations. They did this within five days of each crash to prevent American subs from snatching them from the seafloor and examining the technology.
    http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16379/russia-scooped-up-wrecks-of-crashed-naval-fighters-off-sea-floor-near-syria
  5. A tale of two military readiness levels (this has just a little bit to do with differences in how well-funded the two forces are).
    First: http://www.janes.com/article/75790/over-half-of-bundeswehr-s-leopard-2-mbts-are-not-operationally-ready
    Second: http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16366/portlands-142nd-fighter-wing-launches-13-f-15c-ds-eagles-in-rare-snap-readiness-drill
  6. The Air Force is reusing WWII-era shells and 1950s-made barrels for some of their AC-130 gunship cannons. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
    http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16523/the-usaf-is-rebuilding-world-war-ii-era-40mm-shells-for-its-ac-130u-gunships
  7. What happens when you try fixing something that ain’t broke:
    http://warisboring.com/the-u-s-navy-still-hasnt-figured-out-how-to-make-a-decent-uniform/
  8. “Compounding the pain for the N.S.A. is the attackers’ regular online public taunts, written in ersatz broken English. Their posts are a peculiar mash-up of immaturity and sophistication, laced with profane jokes but also savvy cultural and political references. They suggest that their author — if not an American — knows the United States well.”
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/us/nsa-shadow-brokers.html
  9. “The archives were found by veteran security breach hunter UpGuard’s Chris Vickery during a routine scan of open Amazon-hosted data silos, and these ones weren’t exactly hidden. The buckets were named centcom-backup, centcom-archive, and pacom-archive.”
    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/17/us_military_spying_archive_exposed/
  10. We were supposed to have power armor in 2007. http://www.zdnet.com/article/mit-to-make-tech-exoskeleton-for-army/
  11. “As it was, Task Force Rogue One met only five out of the ten performance measures that the U.S. Army uses to evaluate a successful raid.”
    https://angrystaffofficer.com/2017/02/27/no-more-task-force-rogue-ones-a-tactical-analysis-of-the-raid-on-scarif/
  12. There’s no evidence that mandatory health checkups reduce the incidence or severity of diabetes, even when the checkups result in early warnings that patients are developing the disease.
    https://www.cato.org/publications/research-briefs-economic-policy/preventive-care-worth-cost-evidence-mandatory-checkups
  13. A handful of people are still in iron lungs.
    https://www.yahoo.com/news/america-apos-last-iron-lung-222200990.html
  14. Big pharma is less profitable than you probably think, and its profit trajectory is grim.
    http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/11/28/a-grim-future-here-are-the-numbers
  15. A brain exercise has finally been scientifically proven to reduce the odds of getting dementia.
    http://news.medicine.iu.edu/releases/2017/11/brain-exercise-dementia-prevention.shtml
  16. Getting you genome sequenced now costs less than $2,000, but prices haven’t dropped in several years. It still isn’t worth the money for most people since we can’t make sense of what it means.
    https://www.genome.gov/sequencingcostsdata/
  17. The genetic mutation inhibits the PAI-1 enzyme, extends lifespan by 10 years and sharply reduces the risk of Type 2 diabetes. It doesn’t seem to carry any downsides.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/well/live/amish-mutation-protects-against-diabetes-and-may-extend-life.html
  18. The ethical concerns about cloning are almost entirely baseless.
    FYI, some mammal species are harder to clone than others because of their reproductive cycles and chromosome structures. Sheep and cats are easy, but apes and humans are very hard.
    http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42066629
  19. “The Amara hype cycle is unfolding today with respect to machine learning.”
    http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/amaras-law/
  20. Related:
    http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/03/24/the-genomic-revolution-shows-up-late-but-shows-up
  21. An excellent lecture. Deep learning is being overhyped, and by itself will never lead to artificial general intelligence. A.I. research probably needs ten times as much funding as it is getting, spread out across different labs approaching the problem from totally different directions.
    https://youtu.be/7dnN3P2bCJo
  22. Humans still reign supreme over machines in Starcraft 2. I couldn’t find videos of any of the matches, but I suspect most of the Norwegian AI’s astonishing-sounding 19,000 actions per minute (a world-class human player might do 200 actions per minute) were thanks to the machine ordering its units to do useless things like run around in random, constantly changing patterns.
    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609242/humans-are-still-better-than-ai-at-starcraftfor-now/
  23. ‘The twin challenges of too much quantity and too little quality are rooted in the finite neurological capacity of the human mind. Scientists are deriving hypotheses from a smaller and smaller fraction of our collective knowledge and consequently, more and more, asking the wrong questions, or asking ones that have already been answered.’
    https://aeon.co/ideas/science-has-outgrown-the-human-mind-and-its-limited-capacities
  24. Is a stressed-out human phone operator who is trained to suppress and fake their own emotions and to read from a script more “personable” than a machine? Will human advantages in jobs requiring emotional interaction and nurturing endure?
    https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/11/are-humans-actually-more-human-than-robots/545714/
  25. If you had a human friend who had elementary knowledge of 40 languages and could do basic translations between any two of them, would you be laughing in their face at their mistakes, or would you be in awe of their intelligence?
    http://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-42066517/google-pixel-buds-language-translation-tested
  26. Say what you will about Tulsa, Oklahoma, but they’ve enacted outstanding land use laws to minimize the occurrence and damage caused by flooding. Basically, no one can build houses in flood-prone areas, and the city instead builds things like public parks and soccer fields there. Higher sea levels and more frequent floods does not have to mean more deaths.
    https://www.npr.org/2017/11/20/564317854/how-tulsa-became-a-model-for-preventing-floods
  27. Human adaptation to biodiversity loss is also feasible: “Thirty to 40 percent of species may be threatened with extinction in the near future, and their loss may be inevitable. But both the planet and humanity can probably survive or even thrive in a world with fewer species. We don’t depend on polar bears for our survival, and even if their eradication has a domino effect that eventually affects us, we will find a way to adapt. The species that we rely on for food and shelter are a tiny proportion of total biodiversity, and most humans live in — and rely on — areas of only moderate biodiversity, not the Amazon or the Congo Basin.”
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/we-dont-need-to-save-endangered-species-extinction-is-part-of-evolution/2017/11/21/57fc5658-cdb4-11e7-a1a3-0d1e45a6de3d_story.html
  28. An environmentalist professor, Mark Jacobson, who published an absurd article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claiming that the U.S. could switch to 100% clean energy by 2050 is suing other professors that wrote a joint rebuttal article. His actions are not going over well in the scientific community.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/11/03/when-scientists-sue-scientists/
  29. Plants are green because they don’t absorb the green-colored portion of the visible light spectrum. The pink-colored windows absorb the green light and turn it into electricity.
    https://phys.org/news/2017-11-solar-greenhouses-electricity-crops.html
  30. An interesting idea. And if Bitcoin goes extinct, you could rent your server to anyone who needed to do computation (for stuff like protein folding, processing computer game graphics, etc). Two problems though: 1) The economics of this idea are murky since the server would need to be replaced at significant expense every few years as its hardware became obsolete and 2) if everyone had a computer server space heater, then the global supply of server capacity for rent would wildly fluctuate with the seasons. Since most people live in temperate parts of the Northern Hemisphere, available server capacity would spike in the winter and shrivel away in the summer.
    http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2017/11/08/bitcoin-mining-space-heater/
  31. The smartest type of smart home might have only a few smart, centralized components monitoring many dumb ones. Trying to make every appliance and feature in a house smart is actually dumb.
    “The level of detail smart breakers look at is impressive. Mr Holmquist says that his can, for example, measure the revolutions-per-minute of the compressor in a refrigerator. Not only would this let an app monitor how hard the appliance is working, it could also give warning if that appliance was about to break down.”
    https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21731610-old-fuse-box-gets-new-lease-life-smart-circuit-breakers
  32. Why having industry standards and two or three established big guys dominating a market is important:
    https://qz.com/1132657/an-internet-of-things-flop-means-some-connected-lights-wont-work-anymore/
  33. It’s just as likely this discovery will end up as another flash in the (bed)pan that goes nowhere, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
    http://www.janes.com/article/75947/arl-utilises-bodily-fluids-for-power-generation
  34. Bird tracking devices weighing only a gram will exist soon, allowing smaller birds to be tagged. What happens someday when we have pellet-sized tracking implants that cost almost nothing, and robots that can do the work of implanting them in animals for free?
    https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/11/where-the-birds-go/545945/
  35. Why speculate about creepy future surveillance when Facebook is doing it now?
    https://gizmodo.com/how-facebook-figures-out-everyone-youve-ever-met-1819822691
  36. From my “Rules for good futurism”: A prediction can be wrong in its specifics, but right in principle. “But if Second Life promised a future in which people would spend hours each day inhabiting their online identity, haven’t we found ourselves inside it? Only it’s come to pass on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter instead.”
    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/second-life-leslie-jamison/544149/
  37. He’s totally right that 1) most “news” content is garbage designed to be consumed instantly and forgotten within days, 2) reading news articles that are several months old is an invaluable tool for seeing just how much garbage is really garbage, and 3) it takes time and a trained mind to recognize garbage without the benefit of hindsight.
    https://qz.com/1117962/advice-on-how-to-read-from-a-professor-whose-job-is-to-predict-the-future/
  38.  Some rare, creative thinking. “Perhaps hyper-advanced life isn’t just external. Perhaps it’s already all around. It is embedded in what we perceive to be physics itself, from the root behavior of particles and fields to the phenomena of complexity and emergence.”
    http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/is-physical-law-an-alien-intelligence
  39. Telescope capabilities are about to vastly improve. The 2020s will be full of important new astronomy findings.
    https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/11/by-2020-upgrades-to-gravity-wave-detectors-will-detect-one-to-two-neutron-star-collisions-per-month.html
  40. A metaphor for China as a whole.
    https://qz.com/1137026/chinas-first-all-electric-cargo-ship-is-going-to-be-used-to-transport-coal/
  41. 2018 could be the year Venezuela finally implodes. If they run out of foreign currency reserves and default on their loan payments, then that’s it.
    https://qz.com/1128894/venezuela-has-finally-defaulted-on-its-debt-according-to-sp/
  42. I just figured out how robots are going to kill us all in the future. “A baby-aspirin-size amount of powdered toxin is enough to make the global supply of Botox for a year…The LD50 for it in humans is estimated at about 2 nanograms/kilo i.v., 10 nanograms/kilo by inhalation.”
    http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/11/06/theres-toxicity-and-theres-toxicity
  43. Stephen Hawking doesn’t think he’s the smartest person alive, and he thinks people who boast about their high IQs are “losers.”
    https://youtu.be/4lwFK1ImzcA
  44. Do a YouTube search for “how to set a mouse trap”. The earliest video I found was uploaded in 2006–only two years after YouTube was invented–and is perfectly clear. Since then, probably hundreds more instructional videos of this simple task have also been uploaded to the service, the most recent appearing a week ago. What’s the value-add to the videos made after 2006? How much of the ongoing “exponential growth in digital content” is totally redundant?
    The Original: https://youtu.be/QBVOFY7SDOg
    The (latest) Reboot: https://youtu.be/0xriqCJKgYM
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Rules for good futurism

I’ve decided to make a detailed list of rules for judging the credibility of futurists and their predictions. You might notice it re-uses some content from past blog posts of mine. For obvious reasons, I think it’s better to have it all in one place.

From now on, I intend to follow these rules when making my own predictions or when judging those made by others. Having a strong process for this is important enough to me that, if I ever make changes to it, I will dedicate a new blog entry to it, and I’ll repost the entire list just to keep it at the forefront. Remember, I am a “Militant” futurist because I’m a stickler for rigor and process.

Never unquestioningly believe anyone else’s predictions, even if the person making them is famous, smart and seems to know what they’re talking about. Always be skeptical and do the following:

  1. Ensure that the person’s education and professional credentials are relevant to their predictions. A useful measure of a scientist’s area of and level of expertise is the quantity and quality of the peer-reviewed papers they have produced. 
    Example: A scientist with a Nobel prize for work in human biochemistry predicts a nuclear war will happen within ten years. His C.V. shows he lacks any training or accomplishments in fields relevant to the prediction, like foreign policy or nuclear proliferation.
  2. Be suspicious when experts have conflicts of interest that may bias their opinions and predictions. 
    Example: A tech tycoon claims at an open shareholders meeting that his company’s electric car output will increase 500% over the next year. The tycoon owns most of his company’s stock and will profit if people believe his prediction and bid up the stock price.
  3. Remember that experts whose theories fall far outside the scientific mainstream are usually (but not always) wrong.
    Example: A well-credentialed government climatologist writes an academic journal paper predicting the Earth will soon start cooling down because his newly-developed climate model shows that a “negative feedback loop” is triggered once the Earth’s surface temperatures rise to a certain level. Debates within the scientific community about the accuracy of his model are too complex for non-experts to understand and judge for themselves. Only a small minority of his colleagues say it is accurate.
  4. Be very suspicious of scientists and other experts who feel aggrieved or persecuted by the mainstream of their professions. If an expert with an outlier theory or prediction also believes there is a conspiracy against him or her, it should raise a red flag in your mind. 
    Example: An economist who became a multimillionaire through skillful investing and by starting his own financial companies claims on the internet that the banking system is about to collapse, that officials in the government and Wall Street are colluding to conceal the impeding disaster, and that some of his recent business setbacks are due to clandestine retaliation from the powerful men he’s been trying to expose.
  5. Be skeptical of predictions that are unsupported by independently verifiable data. 
    Example: A trained geneticist and retired head of the world’s biggest fertility clinic says that Gattaca-level human genetic engineering will exist in five years thanks to rapid growth in our knowledge of genetics and in the power of our gene editing tools. He provides no documentation that either is improving at the necessary rates (perhaps he claims to have seen secret, proprietary data). Other experts who are familiar with the germane scientific literature and technology say the prediction is far too optimistic, and that it’s implausible any private group could have secret research and technology so far beyond what is publicly available. 
  6. Be very skeptical of predictions that hinge on future discoveries that fundamentally change the laws of science.
    Example: A visionary director makes a film set in the future where people have flying cars that float thanks to some kind of anti-gravity technology as opposed to helicopter rotors or some other device that blows air downward. During promotional interviews, he proudly says that he thinks his movie will prove accurate. When the film is released, all theories and observations about gravity and its mechanics suggest that it can’t be manipulated using any kind of technology, and that no anti-gravity force exists. 

While you’re free to listen to and analyze predictions made by anyone, it’s a better use of time to focus on predictions made by people who have made accurate forecasts in the past. Having such a track record also helps satisfy the “[relevant] education and professional credentials” requirement mentioned earlier. However, determining how accurately a person has predicted the future can be a more complex task than it sounds, and I recommend keeping these pointers in mind:

  • You can be right thanks to luck alone, and “a stopped clock is right twice a day.” 
    Example: An economist who has written several bestselling books about real estate investing correctly predicted in 2005 that the U.S. real estate market was about to peak in value and would then crash a year later. However, in earlier books, articles, and public comments, he made the same predictions for 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004. He is now hailed by some as an “expert” in real estate market trends thanks to his correct 2005 prediction and is routinely interviewed on financial news shows. 
  • A prediction can be wrong in its specifics, but right in principle.
    Example: In 1998, a futurist predicts that, by the year 2009, average people will commonly wear small computers and sensors that will be integrated into their jewelry, clothing, wallets, and other worn accessories, and that those devices will work together through LANs. 2009 comes to an end without this materializing, but not because the devices proved too expensive or technologically infeasible to build: Rather, consumers opted to buy single devices–smartphones–that performed all of the same functions.
  • Don’t penalize futurists for the disruptive effects of Black Swan events.
    Example: A well-regarded historian and political scientist writes a book in the late 1990s predicting that the prosperity and global dominance America enjoyed that decade will last about another 20 years, when China will get strong enough to challenge it. Shortly after that, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and a peculiarly inept U.S. administration plunge the U.S. into a series of costly military campaigns that hurt its economy, morale and global influence, and distract it from China. 

 

Links

  1. https://undark.org/article/cornelia-dean-making-sense-of-science/
Posted on

Roundup of interesting internet articles, October 2017 edition

  1. The U.S. could have beaten the U.S.S.R. into space.
    https://www.popsci.com/interservice-rivalry-that-delayed-americas-first-satellite-launch?ePZmFpuivxk1tpDE.01
  2. Eisenhower bears part of the blame, since newly released documents show that U.S. intelligence had given him good estimates of when Sputnik would be launched, but he grossly underestimated its propaganda value. Could he have done more to speed up the launch of America’s first satellite?
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/science/sputnik-launch-cia.html
  3. Reading this makes me think that humans will never leave Earth in large numbers unless we have Star Trek levels of technology (if such a thing is even possible).
    https://qz.com/1105031/should-humans-colonize-mars-or-the-moon-a-scientific-investigation/
  4. However, there’s nothing stopping us from getting off this berg in token numbers for, say, a Mars mission. But we’ll probably need to simulate gravity during the trip or else the astronauts will develop all kinds of health problems. (Would a mere 25% of Earth gravity do the trick?)
    http://www.theage.com.au/good-weekend/astronaut-scott-kelly-on-the-devastating-effects-of-a-year-in-space-20170922-gyn9iw.html
  5. Earth has five LaGrange Points, two of which would be useful parking places for satellites.
    https://www.space.com/30302-lagrange-points.html#sthash.rNZf8a0K.gbpl
  6. The LaGrange Points might also be good places to search for alien spy probes. That and other creative suggestions about how to find intelligent aliens are in the article.
    http://nautil.us/blog/why-well-have-evidence-of-aliensif-they-existby-2035
  7. What would a planet that was MORE hospitable to organic life than Earth be like?
    https://youtu.be/xrYjXOX9NLg
  8. The War of 1812 dispelled the notion that citizen militias and civilian insta-generals were adequate for American self-defense (idealism was very strong in the early days). A professional, standing military was necessary. Had more pragmatic men been in charge in the years before 1812, Canada might be part of the U.S. today.
    http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/5-times-the-us-navy-was-sunk-battle-22582
  9. Several countries are developing “Guided bullets” that have some ability to steer themselves to home in on targets. For now, the emphasis is on using them to destroy enemy land vehicles and drones at long ranges, but they’ll eventually find anti-personnel uses.
    http://www.janes.com/article/75087/orbital-atk-progresses-new-medium-calibre-munition-development
  10. Would Americans be willing to sacrifice Facebook access to save Taiwan?
    http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2017/10/18/the-next-war-at-sea-will-actually-be-entirely-under-the-sea/
  11. While the U.S. military has practically become a byword for waste and bureaucracy, and the Ford-class aircraft carrier project has been singled out for cost and timeline overruns, one analysis claims the ships actually represent an optimal balance of size, capability, survivability, and cost.
    http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/study-bigger-aircraft-carriers-are-better-22756
  12. The U.S. Army has finally bought Israel’s battle-proven “TROPHY” active protection system for installation on its tanks. This should have been done years ago, but was held up by the Pentagon’s insistence on developing an American-made system that has gotten stuck in the classic rut of spiraling costs and overly ambitious capabilities requirements.
    http://www.janes.com/article/74744/ausa-2017-us-army-buys-trophy-active-protection-system-for-abrams-tank-brigade
  13. The Humvee might be more survivable than its (Bentley-priced) replacement because it has fewer electronic components, making it less vulnerable to EMP weapons.
    https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/10/humvee-has-no-electronics-for-emp-to-damage.html
  14. An improved typhoid vaccine has been created
    http://www.bbc.com/news/health-41724996
  15. An improved shingles vaccine has received a CDC recommendation.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/health/cdc-shingles-vaccine.html
  16. The FDA approved two gene therapies, one to treat blindness (http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/10/12/557183740/fda-panel-endorses-gene-therapy-for-a-form-of-childhood-blindness) and the other to treat blood cancer. (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/health/immunotherapy-cancer-kite.html)
  17. Contaminated cell lines might have corrupted data in tens of thousands of medical studies. Most futurists like to speculate about AI scientists discovering new things, but I think there would be tremendous value to having them re-examine and in many cases redo experiments their human counterparts did long ago.
    http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/10/20/bad-cells-so-many-bad-cells
  18. Chinese scientists have used CRISPR to make genetically engineered pigs that have less fat. This could actually reduce animal suffering and save farmers money since pigs that have less fat are, ironically, less likely to freeze to death in cold weather. FDA approval for sale in the U.S. is unlikely because Americans watch too many horror movies about mutant animals.
    http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/10/23/559060166/crispr-bacon-chinese-scientists-create-genetically-modified-low-fat-pigs 
  19. Organic farming has very few, if any, environmental advantages over conventional farming.
    https://ourworldindata.org/is-organic-agriculture-better-for-the-environment
  20. The Placebo Effect and the related Nocebo Effect are both stronger when test subjects are made to believe the sham substances they’re being exposed to cost a lot of money.
    http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/10/06/expensive-shams-are-the-way-to-go-apparently
  21. California leads the nation! Flame retardant chemicals that the California state government effectively made mandatory for the whole U.S. in 1975 cause a slew of health problems.
    https://qz.com/1098161/the-us-government-is-finally-acknowledging-the-flame-retardants-in-your-furniture-and-baby-products-are-not-just-ineffective-but-also-dangerous/
  22. To stop accidental hot car deaths, Congress might require carmakers to build features into their vehicles that warn drivers if they’ve left their kids inside. This blog post and its links describe three possible engineering solutions, the simplest of which is an algorithm that monitors door opening and closing sequence.
    http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2017/10/26/congress-considering-ordering-cars-to-add-about-1-iq-point-my-2003-idea/
  23. 350 kw charging stations that can recharge electric cars in 10-15 minutes are coming.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/automobiles/wheels/electric-cars-charging.html
  24. Cars windshields and roofs might also someday be made of single pieces of Gorilla Glass, giving people in the front seats completely unobstructed views. More generally speaking, all kinds of objects in the future will look unchanged from today, but will have seemingly magic properties thanks to advanced materials and to sensors and computers being embedded in them.
    https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21730128-soon-gorilla-glass-and-its-descendants-will-be-everywhere-one-worlds
  25. A small hint of the coming advances in materials science.
    http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/10/11/darn-near-flatland
  26. Engineering improvements are in the cards as well. A supercomputer tasked with optimizing the designs of airplane wings created wings with organic-looking arrangements of beams and supports. What kinds of redesigns will machines make to everyday objects, and what kinds of obvious opportunities for improved design efficiency have we missed so far?
    http://www.nature.com/news/supercomputer-redesign-of-aeroplane-wing-mirrors-bird-anatomy-1.22759
  27. Truck tailgating improves the fuel efficiency of the following vehicle AND the lead vehicle. When autonomous trucks become common, I’m sure they’ll use “platooning” all the time.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/are-those-80000-pound-trucks-tailgating-each-other-soon-it-may-be-perfectly-normal–and-safe/2017/10/22/fbbbb0fa-a2de-11e7-b14f-f41773cd5a14_story.html
  28. ‘At very small scales, fixed-wing and multirotor designs become less efficient, and insect-like drones with flapping wings may make more sense. Tiny drones could be used for virtual tourism, letting remote users “fly” around with the aid of virtual-reality goggles. In short, today’s drone designs barely scratch the surface.’
    https://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21723004-pioneer-evolutionary-robotics-borrows-drone-designs-nature-dario-floreano
  29. The “Wave Glider” unmanned drone ship harnesses solar energy and wave power to generate electricity for itself, and could stay at sea indefinitely. (I’m sure mechanical breakdowns impose a limit on endurance.) http://warisboring.com/this-weird-drone-feeds-on-hurricanes/
  30. If everyone will have a robot butler in the future, and if the butlers will be able to download any knowledge or skill, then does that mean they’ll be able to fix anything you own? Wouldn’t they also know how to do preventative maintenance and inspections on all your stuff? Are we headed for a future where things almost never break?
    http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-fixit-20171021-story.html
  31. A new AI “was able to solve reCAPTCHAs at an accuracy rate of 66.6% …, BotDetect at 64.4%, Yahoo at 57.4% and PayPal at 57.1%.” That’s not as good as the 81%+ pass rate typical of humans, but it’s still high enough to render CAPTCHAs obsolete as a means of differentiating between humans and machines. I bet the AIs have entered the “human range” of skill in this narrow task, and can solve CAPTCHAs as well as human children, humans with poor eyesight, and humans with low intelligence.
    http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/10/26/560082659/ai-model-fundamentally-cracks-captchas-scientists-say
  32. …And here’s a domain where AIs have achieved super-superhuman levels of performance: AlphaGo defeated all the world’s best human Go players last year, and AlphaGo Zero just defeated AlphaGo in a 100-game tournament, with no losses.
    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609141/alphago-zero-shows-machines-can-become-superhuman-without-any-help/
  33. Stephen Wolfram gives an impressive talk about the future of AI (you can just feel the genius oozing out of him). It gets really interesting towards the end when he talks about how most “work” we do in rich countries today would seem like the equivalent of playing video games to people from antiquity. Will “work” in the future look like video gaming today?
    https://www.level9news.com/wolfram-discussing-ai-singularity/
  34. A great roundup of quotes from very smart people (including Thomas Edison!) who didn’t think airplanes would work. Makes you wonder about today’s experts who “confidently” predict that machines will never achieve human intelligence, or will only do so hundreds of years from now.
    https://www.xaprb.com/blog/flight-is-impossible/
  35. More on that.
    https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/
  36. And a good counterpoint that throws cold water on the AI hype.
    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609048/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-ai-predictions/
  37. I never thought of this, but yes, magic tricks won’t impress robots since they’ll be able to use their advanced visioning sensors to see what’s actually happening.
    http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2017/10/04/beat-three-card-monte-with-google-glass-and-remotely-located-human-or-artificial-expert/
  38. The Quantified Earth
    http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/news/a28708/earthquakes-fiber-optic-cables/
  39. Long gone are the days when a brilliant person could make a profound scientific discovery working alone in his lab. Science isn’t “over,” but we’ve certainly picked all the low-hanging fruits, and new discoveries can only be made through massive investments of human talent and money. Makes you wonder whether how well Einstein could distinguish himself today.
    https://qz.com/1106745/were-running-out-of-big-ideas/
  40. Blade Runner 2049‘s CGI Rachael looked vastly better than Rogue One‘s CGI Tarkin and Leia, possibly because the special effects team spent a whole year working on Rachael.
    https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-secrets-behind-blade-runner-2049s-most-surprising-s-1819675592
  41. Fascinating questions to ponder: How many stable chemicals are possible, how many of those can useful things for us, and what percentage of the useful chemicals have we already discovered?
    http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/10/10/how-many-natural-products-are-being-found-and-how-many-are-there
  42. Japan’s population has been shrinking since 2010, and the trend won’t stop for the foreseeable future. The good news? More space per person.
    https://qz.com/1112368/abandoned-land-in-japan-will-be-the-size-of-austria-by-2040/
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Review: “Prometheus”

I thought the movie Prometheus was awful, and rather than waste my time ranting about all the things I hated, I’ll just say I agree with the critics who collectively bashed the confused and scientifically flawed storyline, shallow and unlikable characters, and inexplicable/unrealistically stupid behavior of the characters. I love the first three Alien films, but everything since has been disastrous. Enough said.

Instead of spending any time writing about the flawed plot (IMDB has a summary here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1446714/synopsis) , I’ll jump straight to an analysis of the vision of the future depicted in the film, which is set in 2093.

We will have proof that humans evolved from or were engineered by aliens. Prometheus is premised on the notion that ancient aliens seeded the Earth with life and repeatedly returned to direct the genetic and cultural evolution of humans. The theory that intelligent aliens influenced the rise of the human species is debunked by the fossil record, by comparative DNA analyses of humans and other hominids, and by human biochemistry. Together they prove we are indigenous to Earth and that we slowly evolved from simpler species. By 2093, we will not have “new evidence” that contradicts this story of our origins, though there will probably still be many uneducated and/or mentally ill people who believe in this and other conspiracy theories. It is at least slightly plausible that life began on Earth billions of years ago thanks to panspermia (i.e. – an asteroid containing simple organic matter fell to Earth), but I don’t see how we could ever prove the hypothesis since time has destroyed any evidence that may have existed.

Some robots will be indistinguishable from humans. One of the main characters is “David,” an artificially intelligent robot who looks and acts like a human. Since David is modeled after humans, he is a special type of robot called an “android,” and note the literal translation of the word from Greek is “man-like” (andro-oid). I think androids like David will exist by 2093, and they will be capable of an impressive range of behaviors and functions that will make them seem very human-like. In fact, they’ll be so refined that we might not be able to tell them apart from humans at all, or only be able to do so on rare occasions (ex – some of their responses to questions might not make sense). Whether they will be truly conscious and creative like humans is a different matter.

Left: A human crew member.
Right: David the android.

The hyper-realistic sculptures made by artists like Ron Mueck, and advanced animatronics like the Garner Holt Productions Abraham Lincoln convince me that we could build robot bodies today that look 95% the same as real humans. Eeking out that last 5% to cross the Uncanny Valley should be easy to accomplish long before 2093. The much harder part is going to be endowing the machines with intelligence, with the ability to walk and stay balanced on two feet, and with other forms of physical deftness and coordination that will allow them to safely and efficiently work alongside humans and to do so without appearing “mechanical” in their movements.

Sculpture by Ron Mueck

Machines will do surgery on people, unassisted. There’s a gruesome and silly scene in Prometheus where the female main character realizes she is pregnant with a rapidly growing alien-human hybrid. She runs into the space ship’s infirmary, lies down in a coffin-sized surgery pod, and orders the machine to surgically remove the fetus. Several robotic arms bearing laser scalpels and claws do it in about a minute. I think surgery will be completely automated by 2093, along with all or almost all other types of jobs. Replacing high-paid human doctors with robot doctors that work for free will make healthcare dramatically cheaper and easier to access (with positive effects on human life expectancy and quality of life), though mass unemployment will also reduce the amount of money people have to pay for things like healthcare.

There will be space ships that can travel faster than the speed of light. The Prometheus space ship is capable of faster than light space travel, and the movie’s events take place in a different star system. Our current understanding of physics informs us that there is no way to exceed the speed of light, and propelling something as big as the Prometheus to just 10% of that speed would require impractically large amounts of energy. While mass figures for the fictional ship are unavailable, let’s assume it weighed about as much as the Space Shuttle, which was 2,000,000 kg. This kinetic energy calculator indicates it would require 9 x 10^20 Joules of energy to accelerate it to 10% of the light speed (30,000,000 meters/second).  That’s as much energy as the entire United States generates in nine years.

While science is by nature always open to revision, I think it’s a bad idea to base one’s vision of the future on assumptions that well-tested pillars of science like the Theory of Relativity will just go away. That said, I don’t think faster than light space travel is likely to exist in 2093–or perhaps ever–so we’ll still be confined to our solar system then.

FWIW, the space ships flying around our solar system by that year will be considerably larger and more advanced than what we have now, and it’s likely that space ships of similar size and technology (sans light speed drives) as the Prometheus will be plying interplanetary space.

There will be instantaneous gene-sequencing machines. In Prometheus, the humans find a severed alien head inside a wrecked alien structure, and they bring it back to their space ship for examination. The alien belongs to an advanced species nicknamed “The Engineers,” and the head’s features are very human-like. As part of the examination, the humans take a DNA sample from the head and put it in a gene sequencing machine, which determines it shares 99% of its genome with humans. The cost of sequencing a full human genome has plummeted at a rate exceeding Moore’s Law, and well before 2093, the service will become trivially cheap (e.g. – the same price as routine blood tests or vaccinations) and will take a few hours.

FYI, today it costs less than $5,000 to sequence a human genome, and the machines can do the work in about 24 hours. But since we can only decipher a minuscule fraction of the genetic information, it’s still not worth it for healthy people to get their genomes sequenced. Within 20 years, the price will get low enough and the medical utility will get high enough to change that.

Paper-thin, ultra-high-res display screens will be in common use. Computer monitors and TV’s with these qualities are shown throughout the film. Many of them are also integrated into translucent glass, so clear windows can also serve as touchscreens. This will be a very old, mature technology by 2093.

A set of display interfaces

Wall-sized display monitors will be common. Early in Prometheus, there’s a scene where David is watching a film on a TV screen that covers an entire wall of a room in the space ship. This should be very old technology by 2093, and given current trends, floor-to-ceiling TVs will become available to average-income Americans in the 2030s. Since standard-sized doorways are too small to fit enormous TVs through them, the TVs will also need to be paper-thin and rollable into tubes, or capable of being assembled from a grid of many smaller pieces.

David watching “Lawrence of Arabia” on a wall-sized TV

Suspended animation pods will exist. During the multi-year space journey from Earth to the alien planet where the film’s events happen, the human crew members are kept in a state of suspended animation in coffin-sized pods. The mechanism through which their physiological functions are suspended (i.e. – Deep cold? Preservative fluids injected into their bodies? Something else?) is never made clear, but one crew member is shown to be dreaming in her pod, indicating that her brain is still active, and by necessity, her metabolism (even if it is dramatically slowed). That being the case, the “hypersleep” depicted in Prometheus is fundamentally different from today’s human preservation methods, which involve freezing dead people whose biochemical and brain activity have ceased in liquid nitrogen.

Frankly, I can’t say whether suspended animation will exist in 2093 because there isn’t any trendline for the technology like Moore’s Law that I can put on a graph and extrapolate. The best I can do is to note that our ability to preserve human organs meant for transplantation is improving as time passes, we do not appear to be close to the limit of what is scientifically possible, credible scientists have proposed ways to improve the relevant technologies, and whole-body human cryopreservation and revival is theoretically possible.

Machines will be able to read human thoughts and create digital representations of those thoughts that other people can watch. At the start of the movie, the Prometheus is still en route to the alien planet, all of the humans are in cryosleep pods, and David the android is the only crew member awake. During the montage that shows how he spends his time as the ship’s custodian, he takes a moment to check on the status of a female member of the crew. David puts a virtual reality visioning device on his face, and through it he is able to see a dream that the person is having at that moment, as if he were watching live-action film footage. I think this technology will exist by 2093, but its capabilities will be more limited than shown in the film.

Human thought is not a magical phenomenon; it happens thanks to biochemical and bioelectric events happening inside of our brains. Currently, we don’t understand the linkages between specific patterns of brain activity and specific thoughts, and our technologies for monitoring brain activity are coarse, but there’s no reason to assume both won’t improve until we have machines that can decipher thoughts from brain activity. To quote Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen, “An adult brain is a finite thing, so its basic workings can ultimately be known through sustained human effort.”

Unlike faster than light space travel, mind reading machines don’t violate any laws of physics, nor is there reason to believe the machines would require impractically large amounts of energy. In fact, crude versions of the technology have already been built in labs using fMRI machines and brain implants. In all cases, the machines first recorded the participants’ brain activity during training sessions where the humans were made to do scripted physical or mental tasks. The machines learned which patterns of brain activity correlated with which human thoughts or physical actions, enabling them to do things like decipher simple sentences the humans were thinking of with high accuracy. In other lab experiments of this nature, physically disabled people were able to command robot arms to move around and grab things by thought alone.

However, I think the accuracy of mind reading machines will be hampered by the fundamentally messy, plastic nature of the human mind. Scientists commonly refer to the human brain as an example of “wetware” due to its fusion of its hardware and software, and to its ever-shifting network of internal connections. As a result, if I close my eyes and try to envision an apple, there will be a discrete pattern of brain activity. If I do this again in a few minutes, the activity pattern will be slightly different. Contrast this with a computer, where the image of an apple exists as a discrete software file that never changes. Because of this, even if a brain scanning machine had perfect, real-time information about all brain activity, its interpretation of what the activity meant would always have some margin of error.

The cinematic dream footage that David sees in virtual reality.

Returning to the movie’s specific depiction of mind reading technology, let me add that if we could see the same mental images that a person sees while dreaming, I doubt they would look sharp or well-detailed, or that the sequence of events would follow a logical order for more than a few seconds before the dream transformed into something different. It would be like watching a fuzzy, low-resolution art film comprised of disjointed images and sounds, occasionally peaking in intensity and coherence enough for you to discern something of meaning, before dissolving into the equivalent of human brain “static.” So while it’s plausible that, in 2093, you could use machines to read someone else’s thoughts, I think the output you would see would be much less accurate and less detailed than it was in Prometheus.

There will be small, flying drones that can do many things autonomously, like mapping places and finding organic life. After landing on the alien planet, the crew of the Prometheus travels overland to a mysterious alien structure and goes inside. The interior is a long series of dark, twisting corridors and strange rooms. To speed up their exploration, one crewman releases two volleyball-sized flying drones, which zip down the corridors while beaming red, contorting lasers at everything. As they float along, the drones transmit live data back to the Prometheus that is compiled to build a 3D volumetric map of the alien structure’s interior spaces.

Simpler examples of this technology already exist and are used for mapping, farming and forestry (one of many commercial examples is “Drone Deploy” https://youtu.be/SATijfXnshg; another is “Elios,” which is enmeshed in a spherical cage as protection against collisions in tight spaces). Sensor miniaturization, better motors and batteries, better AI, and cost reductions to every type of technology will allow us to build scanning drones that are almost identical to those in the movie decades before 2093. The only parts of the movie’s depiction I disagree with are 1) the use of red lasers for sensing (passive sensors and LIDAR beams that are invisible to human eyes are likelier) and 2) the use of some type of magical antigravity technology to fly (recognizable means of propulsion like spinning rotors and directed jets of exhaust will probably still be in use, though they will be smaller but more powerful thanks to improved technology). Small, cheap, highly versatile flying drones will have enormous implications for mass surveillance, espionage, environmental monitoring, and warfare.

There will be 3D volumetric displays. The bridge of the Prometheus has a large table that can project detailed, 3D volumetric images above it. The crew uses it to view an architectural diagram of the alien structure they find on the planet.  Crude versions of this technology already exist, and can make simple images that float in midair by focusing laser beams on discrete points in space called “voxels” (volumetric pixels) heating them to such high temperatures that they turn the air into glowing plasma. If enough voxels are simultaneously illuminated, 3D objects can be constructed in the same way that pixels on a digital watch face can arrange into numbers if lit up in the right sequence.

Volumetric display of the alien complex, 2093

Today’s volumetric displays produce ozone gas and excessive noise thanks to air ionization, but it’s plausible the problems could be solved or at least greatly reduced by 2093. For certain applications, the displays would be very useful, though I think holographic displays (i.e. – a flat screen TV doesn’t make voxels but uses other techniques to fool your eye into thinking its images are popping out of the screen) and virtual reality glasses will fulfill the same niche, possibly at lower cost. Intelligent machines might also be so advanced that they won’t need to look at volumetric displays to grasp spatial relationships as humans have to.

State of the art volumetric display, 2011

Some disabled people and old people will use powered exoskeletons instead of wheelchairs.  The space mission depicted in the film is funded by an elderly tech tycoon named “Peter Weyland.” Unbeknownst to most of the crew, he secretly embarked with them from Earth, and is sleeping in a suspended animation pod in a locked room while the first 3/4 of the film’s events unfold. At that point, David awakens him, and it is revealed to the surviving crewmen that Weyland supported the mission in the hopes that the aliens would give him a cure for his own mortality. They get into their space suits for a final trip to the alien structure, and Weyland’s outfit includes a light, powered exoskeleton for his lower body, which allows him to walk much faster than he normally could given his age.

Weyland, right, is wearing an articulated exoskeleton around his legs and lower back.

Exoskeletons for the disabled and the elderly already exist, a recent example being the “Phoenix” unit made by the “suitX” company. Unfortunately, Phoenix is $40,000 (a typical electric wheelchair is only $2,000) and requires a somewhat heavy battery backpack. I suspect that Phoenix’ high cost is due to patents and R&D costs being amortized over a small production run,  and that the physical materials the suits are made of are not expensive or exotic. Prices for Phoenix-like exoskeletons will only decline as relevant patents expire, copycats arise, and batteries get lighter and cheaper. It’s hard to see how these kinds of exoskeletons won’t be ubiquitous among mobility-impaired people by 2093 (as electric wheelchairs are today), if not decades before.

That being said, I don’t think they’ll make electric wheelchairs completely obsolete because some disabled and old people will find it too physically taxing to stand upright, even if supported by a prosthesis. Some users might also find it too time-consuming to put on and take off exoskeletons each day (note the large number of straps in the photo below).

The Phoenix exoskeleton

There will be lots of 100+ year old people. Piggybacking off the last point, Mr. Weyland is 103 years old, though since he spent the space journey in suspended animation, his aging process was probably slowed down, making his “biological age” slightly lower than his chronological age. Though living 100 years has a kind of mythic aura, it’s actually only a little higher than the current life expectancy in rich countries, and, making conservative assumptions about future improvements to healthcare, living to 100 will probably be common in 2093 (doing the math, you could someday be in this group).

Today, a wealthy white male who is diligent about his diet and exercise (as Weyland probably had been throughout his life) can expect to live to about 90. In fact, that’s a low estimate since it assumes the state of medical technology will stay fixed at 2017 levels for his entire life. In reality, we’re certain to develop new medicines, prostheses, and therapies that extend lifespan farther between now and 2093. A 10 year bump to average life expectancy in the next 76 years–which would put Weyland over the century mark–is entirely possible, and note that U.S. life expectancy actually grew more than that in the 76 years preceding 2017, so there’s recent historical precedent for lifespan increases of this magnitude.

In 2093, “100 will be the new 80,” and indefinite extensions to human lifespan might even be on the horizon.

What was missing from the movie’s depiction of 2093:

  • The fusion of man and machine. Where were the Google glasses? Google contact lenses? Google eye implants? Google brain implants? Go-Go Gadget Legs? (Bionic limbs) By 2093, it will be common for humans to have wearable and body-implanted advanced technologies.
  • Not enough automation and robots on the space ship. Computers and machines will doing way more of the work, reducing the need for resource-hogging humans.

Links

  1. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/15/health/new-way-to-ensure-accuracy-of-dna-tests-us-announces.html
  2. Holovect volumetric display: https://youtu.be/kPW7ffUr81g
  3. Fairy Light volumetric display: https://youtu.be/AoWi10YVmfE
  4. https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/ai-predicts-what-youre-thinking/
  5. http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/01/health/freezing-organ-donation-nanoparticle-warming-study/index.html
  6. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/546276/this-40000-robotic-exoskeleton-lets-the-paralyzed-walk/
  7. http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/25/health/centenarians-increase/index.html
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Roundup of interesting internet articles, September 2017 edition

Sorry about my long absence, but I promise more blog entries are coming. In the meantime…

  1. High-tech solutions to global poverty still aren’t substitutes for basic infrastructure, good government, property rights, and cultures of trust. Here’s one recent article about it and two older ones:
    https://qz.com/1090693/zipline-drones-in-africa-like-rwanda-and-tanzania-have-an-opportunity-cost/
    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2016-08-30/debunking-microenergy
    https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2016/08/bot-we-trust
  2. GE is working on robots the sizes of small animals and insects that can crawl around inside jet turbines for inspections, and maybe for repairs as well in the future. Are we headed for a future where things never break down?
    https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21729737-robotic-mechanics-can-go-anywhere-tiny-robots-will-inspect-and-fix-jet-engines
  3. ‘Professor Simon Blackmore, head of engineering, argues that an even bigger benefit could be in providing fleets of small, light robots, perhaps aided by drones, to replace vast and heavy tractors that plough the land mainly to undo the damage done by soil compaction caused by . . . vast and heavy tractors. Robot tractors could be smaller mainly because they don’t have to justify the wages of a driver, and they could work all night, and in co-ordinated platoons.’
    http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/robot-farm-machinery/
  4. If machines take all of our jobs and do them better and faster than we can, then it could portend a world where billions of unemployed humans spend their days in hyperrealistic virtual reality games engineered by machines.
    https://youtu.be/jOOB9Q1Nj8Y
    https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/03/economist-explains-24
  5. Many of the action scenes in the superhero movie Logan were done using incredibly lifelike CGI simulacra of the actors. Will actors someday make money by licensing the use of their digital likenesses in movies instead of physically starring in them?
    https://youtu.be/TxWu5Brx_As
  6. I definitely agree with this. I think Elon Musk’s statements about AI and other things are part of a deliberate strategy to keep the public’s attention focused on him. As a businessman dependent upon the faith of his investors to keep his enterprises afloat, he needs to constantly stay in the spotlight and to project an image of being smarter than everyone else to keep the dollars flowing.
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-19/google-s-ai-boss-blasts-musk-s-scare-tactics-on-machine-takeover
  7. Per my previous blog entry, being able to quickly replace 100,000 cars destroyed by a hurricane is a respectable feat, but it would be better to find a way to keep the 100,000 cars from being destroyed at all.
    http://www.npr.org/2017/09/25/553475557/rental-firms-disaster-readiness-may-help-usher-the-age-of-self-driving-cars
  8. Computers make weird mistakes in some object recognition tasks, but so do humans.
    http://www.kurzweilai.net/human-vs-deep-neural-network-performance-in-object-recognition
  9. ‘Distributed ledgers are useful technology, just like banks. As they become a larger part of finance, the temptation to abuse them will be just as great. History instructs that no governance is perfect, and humans are reliably awful.’
    https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2017/09/not-so-novel
  10. Our cells are full of organic nanomachines which support our most basic life functions, and since Richard Feynman’s 1959 lecture on the subject, it has been recognized that this was proof of concept that fully synthetic nanomachines were also feasible. Yet only recently have scientists managed to build crude but functional nanomachines in labs.
    http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/09/25/building-our-own-molecular-machines
  11. Don’t get your hopes up about Amazon flying drone package delivery: there are legal liability issues with packages accidentally dropping on people’s heads, and major noise issues. Flying cars would be handicapped by the same problems. Fortunately, there’s still a lot of room for improving the efficiency of ground transit with technology.
    https://qz.com/1085214/google-moonshot-lab-cofounder-sebastian-thrun-talks-flying-cars-automated-teaching-and-an-ai-arms-race-with-china/
  12. A useful quote to remember when contemplating flying cars: ‘Flying machines are inherently more complicated to operate than ground vehicles, and the consequences of error or malfunction are much greater—because of gravity.’
    https://warisboring.com/u-s-marines-portable-helicopters-were-too-crazy-to-survive/
  13. And in typical form, McKinsey beats this issue to death: ‘Drones require good weather and are now limited to loads of 7.5 kilograms or less and a route of 15 to 20 kilometers. Infrastructure that will support commercial delivery is lacking, and concerns about theft, hacking, crashes, and privacy worry consumers. Finally, drones need a minimum of about two square meters to land, more than many urban households can offer.’
    https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/sustainability-and-resource-productivity/our-insights/urban-commercial-transport-and-the-future-of-mobility
  14. Would aliens 10,000 more advanced than humans have electric motors that are any better than ours? Would they have better mousetraps as well?
    https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21728888-better-motors-go-better-batteries-electric-motors-improve-more-things
  15. Seeing as how so many people vote on the basis of falsehoods, prejudice, or party affiliation and commonly vote against their own self-interests without realizing it, might democracy benefit if machines tried to reason with voters one-on-one before elections?
    http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-40860937
  16. Disreputable peer-reviewed scientific journals are an even bigger problem than thought. Some of the junk papers are written by NIH-funded scientists and by scientists working at prestigious universities like Harvard.
    http://www.nature.com/news/stop-this-waste-of-people-animals-and-money-1.22554
  17. Anytime you’re down on the U.S. Big Pharma industry, consider the massive fraud that exists within China’s equivalent. (Russia is just as bad.)
    http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/clinical-fakes-09272016141438.html
  18. Your month of birth determines a surprising amount about your academic performance, all the way to college.
    https://www.utoronto.ca/news/oldest-kids-class-do-better-even-university-u-t-study
  19. Birth month also affects your odds of becoming an athlete, thanks to the same cutoff date effect.
    http://www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/18891749
  20. An important counterpoint to the growing anti-Vaxx movement is this: Teen vaccination rates for HPV are now over 50% and rising. The vaccine actually prevents several types of cancer.
    https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/health/hpv-vaccine-teenagers.html
  21. Chinese scientists have edited the genomes of human embryos to fix single-point DNA mutations (yes, this appeared in a peer-reviewed journal).
    http://www.bbc.com/news/health-41386849
  22. One more experiment finished showing that humans could bear the psychological stresses of a years-long Mars mission. Now about that space radiation problem…
    https://www.space.com/38180-hi-seas-8-month-mars-simulation-ends.html
  23. Two years ago, Russia and Turkey were at each other’s throats over the latter’s shootdown of the former’s attack plane, and there was talk of all NATO being dragged into war over it. Recently, Turkey turned it back on the the alliance to buy an advanced antiaircraft system from Russia.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/world/europe/turkey-russia-missile-deal.html
  24. The U.S. Army’s first upgraded Stryker rolled off the assembly line.
    http://www.janes.com/article/74356/first-us-army-upgraded-stryker-dvh-rolls-through-production
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Hurricane Harvey and Asimov’s Laws of Robotics

Texas is still tallying up the damage Hurricane Harvey inflicted on it, but it’s already clear that hundreds of thousands of vehicles were destroyed–overwhelmingly by flooding.

‘”We do know that approximately 100,000 claims have come in” as of Thursday, said Matt Stillwell, manager of governmental and regulatory communications at the Insurance Council of Texas, a trade association. He said the number was expected to climb as high as 500,000.

“It is looking to be a huge impact on the auto insurance market,” he said.

While homeowners’ insurance policies almost always exclude flood damage, comprehensive auto policies do cover flooding. The typical household in Houston has two cars, and Mayor Sylvester Turner urged residents to “hunker down” as Hurricane Harvey made landfall, hoping to avoid a replay of the tie-ups and crashes that killed about 100 people fleeing Hurricane Rita in 2005.

That means few people moved their cars out of harm’s way before the flooding started. Texas drivers are not required to have comprehensive auto insurance — the type that covers flood and other types of damage. People holding only the legally required insurance — liability coverage for damage done to other people’s cars — will not have valid claims, Mr. Stillwell said.’    SOURCE

(FYI, floodwaters are bad for cars because they destroy their computers and wiring and fill their cabins with mold. In general, once the water level rises halfway to a car’s roof, it’s totaled.)

This loss is going to cost car insurance companies billions of dollars in payouts, and since there’s no such thing as a free lunch, it will be paid for by raising everyone’s insurance premiums. Alternatively, it’s also possible that the costs of periodic disasters like Harvey are already baked into car insurance rates, so we’ve already paid for it. Either way, the destruction of so many vehicles hurts millions of people who carry car insurance.

I imagine that most of the owners of Harvey-flooded cars just didn’t realize that their vehicles were parked in places that would flood (you never know until it happens). By the time they saw what was happening, the water level might have been too high to safely walk out to the car and move it to higher ground. Surely there were also cases where owners had parked their cars out of view of their homes, leaving them completely unaware that their cars were flooding. Some people probably didn’t realize flooding could destroy their cars at all.

All that being the case, it occurred to me that autonomous cars programmed with something like “Asimov’s Third Law of Robotics” could have mitigated much of the economic loss.

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Put simply, an autonomous car could protect its own existence from floods by moving to higher ground, such as a hill or multi-level parking garage. Maybe FEMA would broadcast a signal to all cars in an area about to get hit by a hurricane to avoid low-lying areas, or maybe the cars would constantly watch their surroundings even when parked and vacant, and be able to recognize rising floodwaters and move (or to recognize other threats like vandals and burglars).

That sounds great until you think about how many humans would be abruptly deprived of personal transportation during a life-threatening natural disaster. Even if this didn’t lead to any loss of life (e.g. – everyone just waits in their living rooms until the waters recede and the cars come back), I think the feeling of helplessness and anxiety it would engender would be unacceptable. Moreover, according to Asimov’s Second Law, if an autonomous car’s owner has parked it in his driveway and left, doesn’t that count as a standing order from a human to stay in that location until told otherwise?

The solution is for autonomous cars to notify their owners of the impending flood risk and to ask for permission to move to safe ground. A tidy solution, right? I think it’s superior to our current way of doing things, but it opens another can of worms for any person who answers “No.” If you do that, force your car to stay parked in your driveway, and a flood destroys it, will your insurance company hold you liable? Should you be?

Let me pose another answer: Car insurance companies should investigate every such case the same way they investigate accident claims today. A representative would go to the scene to interview the car owner, to hear their side of the story, and to gather evidence. If it became clear that the owner’s poor judgement contributed to the loss of the vehicle, they would be held responsible. Claims adjusters would probably have a lot of time for this sort of thing since autonomous cars would make routine car accidents so much rarer.

Finishing up, how do we deal with Asimov’s First Law during natural disasters? Let’s assume a scenario even more distant in the future, where the average person not only has an autonomous car, but a personal assistant AI, robot butler, and other technologies that together constantly keep track of his location and what’s going on around him, and that are smart enough to talk to him. The machines would serve as the untiring voice of reason, and I think they’d persuade a greater percentage of people to leave town before something like a Hurricane Harvey hit (autonomous cars also won’t get in traffic jams, which will facilitate mass evacuations), and they’d coach the people who chose to remain into preparing better and not taking dangerous risks as the disaster unfolded.

The imperative to protect human life poses interesting questions when we consider situations where the humans refuse to listen to reason and endanger themselves. Consider the stubborn old man with mild dementia who ignores the mandatory evacuation order. Will his machines report him to the police to protect him even if it means possible imprisonment? What if there’s no mandatory evacuation order, but the old man’s poor health and the low-lying location of his house combine to create a high likelihood of death? After so many hours of arguing, will his mechanical butler just hog-tie him, toss him in the autonomous car and send him off for a little vacation? Or will the arguing just continue up until the moment the old man’s mouth is gurgling with floodwater and he goes under? I guess at least the butler would have a record of it all to show he did the best job he could.

It’s clear that more intelligent technologies at least have the potential to save human lives, to empower people, and to mitigate property damage and all forms of waste, but human stupidity and our desire for autonomy will remain powerful countervailing forces for the foreseeable future. One step at a time.