SubJeff on 2/10/2010 at 10:16
Do you ever see any old sci-fi or better yet old news/tech shows that show what the world will be like in X number of years? For Brits there was Tomorrows World (what ever happen to Philipa Forrester) and now there is the BBC Click show.
What gets me everytime is no matter how seemingly advanced stuff is, and the same goes for things that we see on the internet - I read Gizmodo and Engadget and the like, it still seems in a hilarious infancy to me. Even the current round of smartphones (as much as I love my Nexus One) seem laughable compared to what I know the future will be.
Recent things that are more salient at the moment are 3D tech, obviously, and those power suits that the US Military and the Japanese are building. Oh, and the current set of "advanced" robots.
3D will of course become fairly ubiquitous and we'll eventually do away with glasses of any type and have some fancy solution to seeing 3D from any angle (as opposed to the focused space you must be in to see the Nintendo 3DS display in proper 3D). I also predict the rise of retinal projectors which will be in 3D and also entirely fill the visual field - the most realistic VR possible without bypassing the eye in the journey to the visual cortex.
In 50 years these power suits will be small enough to pack into a case and to wear in normal rooms and spaces. The current ones are pretty bulky. And yes there will be powered armour soldiers but I reckon eventually private individuals will be able to get hold of them and one day they'll be cheap enough for lots of people to have them. Yeah, Iron Man lite.
I don't think robots will get very smart though, for the same reason I don't think we're going to get that plug-into-brain VR tech. The brain is just too complex and creating an AI model that a humanoid robot can use to navigate and interact with the world is a mammoth task. ED209 falling down the stairs isn't far off the truth. This stuff will take 100s of years to get anywhere really interesting so I'm not bothered about it - it'll never be useful/fun in our lifetimes.
So why sad? Well I just imagine people in 50-100 years looking at the crap we have now, and the predictions we have now, and going "ha ha, look at those ludites!" just like we do when we look at the "amazing" tech of the 70s and 80s. And although the stuff that is around now is fairly sweet (fondling my Dual Shock right now iykwim) it'll be about 50 years before it starts to get really interesting.
I should have been born 50 years later. I don't want to miss it all.
addink on 2/10/2010 at 11:05
The thing about this wish is that you'll end up in a comparable situation.. The tech then will be nothing compared to the tech 50 years later.
Just be happy and exited about the developments we're making today. That feeling hasn't changed from 50 years back, to now, to 50 years in the future.
Personally I expect more surprises from biotech and nano tech than from mechanical developments.
Also retina projectors won't make a big impression, they all fail because of this retina projection tech already present in your eye: the lens. Because of this lens the only real possibility for full scope projections is fully cover the eye (probably with a semi-reflective mirror ie a small sheet of glass, so you can still see the real world) and use lenses to compensate/adjust the focus of the eye lens.
So in the end the 'projector' will be nothing more than a the equivalent of a lightweight tv screen, with lenses to accomodate for the screen's size and proximity. Not nearly as cool as lasers magically ignoring the refraction capabilities of the eye's lens, 'writing' on the retina.
Melan on 2/10/2010 at 11:29
With the Internet, e-mail, mobile phones, or hell, personal computers (that are capable of pretty sophisticated games plus allow you to reach an incredible amount of diverse content at a moment's notice), we are already living in the far future. People in the 1970s had none of what seems ho-hum today. Punch cards. That's what they had.
Kolya on 2/10/2010 at 12:06
Armored power-suits and 3D goggles, SE? No jetpacks?
We'll definitely see a fusion of the net and real world through augmented reality devices of some kind. Kids will shoot each other in VR games on the schoolyard. Vacations will mean you're allowed to log out of the corporate network. In fact that's what it largely means now. But sex will still be sex, beer will still be drunk and power suits will still be wet geek dreams of potency.
Brian The Dog on 2/10/2010 at 12:23
Part of the problem futurologists have is that they cannot cope with paradigm-shifting breakthroughs. Going back 70 years, it's fun to read Asimov's ideas about computers the size of factories that used valve technology - Shockley hadn't invented the transistor yet, and people couldn't imagine anything like the internet happening in their lifetimes. Personally I'd take a wild stab at the next breakthough being something to do wih the brain (e.g. interfacing computers and people's thoughts) - it's difficult stuff, but the advantages (and commercial opportunities) would be huge.
Muzman on 2/10/2010 at 12:29
Seeing space travel basically wither and die in my lifetime is really sucky. I don't really expect it to get going again properly for a looong time.
SubJeff on 2/10/2010 at 12:50
You mean space travel to other planets? The commercial space trip thing is another tech step that whilst necessary is also laughably small in the grand scheme of things. Resource gathering from our neighbouring planets will happen, but not for an age.
Koyla - augmented reality. Yes, I think it will be highly integrated into everyday life, so much so that one day the people with augmented reality goggles will experience a very different world from those who do not. Long term users will find taking them off as refreshing a change as city dwellers find breaks to the country.
Brian - yeah, one of the things that blinkers us is that we can't imagine things that are a shift from what we have now. 10 years ago I wouldn't have imagined smartphones and even basic augmented reality apps like Layar.
As far as medicine goes; I heard about a new crazy thing that is being developed in the USA. I'm an anaesthetist/anaesthsiologist and one of my areas of interest is regional anaesthesia. Nerve blocks, spinals, epidurals and so on. At present I inject local anaesthetics with or without opiates, depending on the case/area to be blocked, into spines and around the nerves of the arms and legs and stuff. There is the new antibody-to-pain-receptor thing on the horizon. The embryological origins of the upper and lower limbs (and other parts of the body) means that there are different receptor subtypes all over. This new idea is to inject targetted anti-bodies to the pain receptors in whichever part you want to anaesthetise and let it cook for a bit before surgery. The anti-bodies eventually wear off. It's mad, but it's brilliant, and if it works I'm going to look seriously oldskool even though now my methods are considered progressive!
Brian The Dog on 2/10/2010 at 13:23
Two things that may happen in my lifetime: a cure for cancer, and development of fusion reactors. The first has so much research being thrown at it that something will materialise in the next 70 years, with all the new medical discoveries happening. The second since ITER is expected to be a successful prototype and will be built in the next 10 years. Whether it's commercially viable to build others is another question.
demagogue on 2/10/2010 at 15:43
I think we're in a golden age right now, there's so much creation and development going on. 50-100 years from now they have it, but they won't be able to participate in the revolution it all sparks like we are right now. It's our job to make sense of everything going on, and they'll just take it for granted; so I feel like we have the higher calling. And since I do sort of buy into the singularity idea, not the wacky ideological parts, but at least the idea that we're reaching the physical limits of some things -- you can only discover the Theory of Everything once, or the physical theory of consciousness, human-like AI, the smallest & fastest practical processor, sustainable energy, the end of world poverty, custom organisms, etc -- that we have a privileged place being on the cusp of the final status quo, the first generation to know or see at least a few things in a final form where they physically can't go further. So future generations will polish them, but we were the first to understand ourselves and our universe at its limits.
But anyway, I was thinking about this kind of stuff recently because Back to the Future 2 was on a few nights ago, and holy shit I did not remember that the "far future" was 2015. First it made me feel old (although I'm not really old at all) because it's as far ahead of 1985 as 1955 was back, and 1955 feels like centuries ago. But just the idea that we'd have flying cars and household fusion power and all these things by 2015 is funny. But then again, actually watching it, it was also funny to see how far we *have* come since 1985. In the movie's "far future" nobody was carrying a cell phone, the "You're Fired" message came in on fax machines (?!), there's no concept of the Internet, we do have video phones and 1000 cable channels for tv...
