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12 jul 06 "My son is 2 years old. Will he have to battle cyborg/terminators or talking apes ( not Republicans) when he is an adult?" adult now-a-days == "post-college." so, 22 years old. 20 years from now == 2026. 20 years before now == 1986. what's happened since 1986? the personal computer has become almost ubiquitous in lower-middle-class-and-up households. the human genome was mapped, giving rise to huge numbers of genome companies, which seemed to have sprung up overnight; who knows what they're researching in there. "smart weapons" in the military. artificial intelligence. nanotechnology, in the baby stages. an electronic internet in public use. i don't think the world is going to change dramatically in 20 years, just as it hasn't changed dramatically since 1986. at least it's not very different in its appearance. computer technology has been developing, arguably since the late 1800s, but it hasn't had any instantaneous advances. this is the nature of technological change -- you don't really notice it while it's going on, and it moves more slowly than you'd like. "what it's going to be like in the future" is never as exciting once you get there. only a few things drastically altered the way things "look" within the past few hundred years, which is how we evaluate technological change. the automobile, even though it went very gradually from a curiosty to a ubiquitous thing. the computer, which crept up on us in a similar way. i dunno -- maybe those were the main two, aside from things like agriculture and the domestication of animals. one of the most pathetic areas of technological change, in my opinion, has been surgery. antibiotics were a big deal, and so was anasthesia, but it pretty much stops there -- we're still chopping people up with knives, and letting things get better on their own. there are a few relatively minor happy places, like orthopedic surgery -- a victim of a massive leg fracture who would have been an amputee 50 years ago, or someone with an arthritic hip who would have ended up wheelchair-bound, are on their feet a few weeks or even days after bone-repair with metal and plastic implants. advances in medicine are tied in to three of the big ones, though: biotechnological advances, pharaceutical advances, and genetic manipulation advances. modern psychopharmacological drugs represent a fairly big advance: now, the brain's neurochemical activity (our personalities, who we are) can be altered. welbutrin and a few others have been around forever, but most of them are really new. oh, and wireless technology (these things keep popping into my head as i write). satellites have been around since before 1986, but weren't widely used for things like credit card transactions, personal GPS systems, phone communication, or possible "dish TV" (the west virginia state flower). something else we need to keep in mind is the widening wealth-gap, and how that effects socio-technological change. for instance, we might picture a world like george jetson's, with robot housekeepers and air-cars. in imagining this jetsons-future, along with making technological predictions based on trends, we have to make social predicions based on trends. we tend not to do this. instead of assuming a future utopia, we should note the millions of disease-ridden subhumans living in ditches and hovels beneath george jetson's techno-penthouse. but i dunno -- maybe aliens drop TV dinners from the sky in 2026. who knows? that's silly, but it illustrates a point: we don't know what's going to happen in the future. we can make reasonable predictions based on the past and the present, but it's possible that something totally catastrophic will come along and change everything in an instant, beyond all recognition, even though this hasn't happened throughout all of human history. but people keep hoping it does -- during the evolution of society, people have been fixated on the end of the world, or the second coming, or something like it -- a revolution in appearance, perhaps because they're bored. i'm bored -- everywhere i look, it's people walking around, cars, buildings, roads and trees. now, the geeks have the "technological singularity", or a snowballing increase in technology that grows exponentially out of control, until humanity itself is no longer recognizable. the most likely causes of a "singularity", according to many futurists, will be either AI or nanotechnology. sure, this (no more humans as we know them) might happen in millions of years, but i really don't think it's going to happen in 2030, as it's (quite seriously) predicted by some futurists. the singularity is the rapture for geeks. dramatic change comes with time -- the advance of technology over thousands of years -- and the presence of "technolocial advancement" in our brains. here's what i mean by that: if a nuclear-chemical-biological holocost wiped out all of civilization, all societies, and 70% of the human population, it wouldn't be too long before someone re-invented the wheel. from there, it's a rather slippery slope back to SCUD missiles. technological development, and technology itself, is something that's inside of us, and something that can't be stopped or erased, a scenario which luddites like ted kasinski desperately wanted to bring about. it's just not possible -- we're stuck with technology, and it's just going to get "worse". but i'm rambling on, and not addressing the bionic orangutan question. let me list those areas of change, within the past 20 years, that i mentioned in the above paragraphs:
the historical pattern is for seperate advances in technology to gradually unify, and augment each other, until they're indistinguishable, a good-but-silly example being "the wheel and the internal combustion engine" making "the car". likewise, i believe the members of the above list will combine, over the next 10, 100, 1,000 and 1,000,000 years, into unimaginable new forms. but it's not going to be anything unimaginable in 20 years, believe me. no cyborg republican chimps. trust me on this one. if there were going to be, we'd at least see the beginnings of terminator gorilla research, unless that's what they're doing behind all of the closed doors in the various genome companies. but seriously, no way. eventually, we'll see intelligent, microscopic nannites repairing genetic defects with viruses, and wireless direct-brain linkeage to a massive biotechnological mind/internet (intermind), and then the eventually evolving of the "earth" into a single techno-organic consciousness six million years from now. plus, other things i can't even begin to imagine; could they have imagined nanotechnology in the year 986? they probably would have called it magic. there was another great scene in "black robe" (see the language question a few down) where a bunch of natives are kneeling in a room watching a clock (bear in mind that it's 1650 or something). finally, it goes "ding ding", and they all gasp in reverence. later, we hear one explaining to his cohort: "their chief is 8 inches tall, and he tells them what to do by going "dong, dong". geekism: "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". the world will be a different place then -- it might not exist, as we know it. we might not exist, in a way we'd now recognize. the change is unfathomable. singularity prophets say this is going to happen in 30 years. i say this is extremely unlikely, because virtually instantaneous change of that magnitute has never happend, in the history of civilization. in 2026, your son will probably just buy a car that takes voice commands for GPS navigation, understands them really well, and then broadcasts a trip summary into his home computer (standard feature). |
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