Group items tagged

it’s not immediately obvious that I can say anything useful about a civilization run by beings vastly more intelligent than us. I’d be like an australopithecine trying to visualize daytime cable TV.

The idea of an AI singularity

if you start trying to visualize a coherent future that includes aliens, telepathy, faster than light travel, or time machines, your futurology is going to rapidly run off the road and go crashing around in the blank bits of the map that say HERE BE DRAGONS.

at least one barkingly implausible innovation will come along between now and 2061 and turn everything we do upside down

My crystal ball is currently predicting that base load electricity will come from a mix of advanced nuclear fission reactor designs and predictable renewables such as tidal and hydroelectric power.

We are, I think, going to have molecular nanotechnology and atomic scale integrated circuitry.

engineered solutions that work a bit like biological systems

Mature nanotechnology is going to resemble organic life forms the way a Boeing 737 resembles thirty tons of seagull biomass.

without a technological civilization questions of network security take second place to where to get a new flint arrowhead.

if we’re still alive in the 26th century you’re welcome to remind me of what I got wrong in this talk.

we’re living through the early days of a revolution in genomics and biology

We haven’t yet managed to raise the upper limit on human life expectancy (it’s currently around 120 years), but an increasing number of us are going to get close to it.

another prediction: something outwardly resembling democracy everywhere.

Since 1911, democractic government by a republic has gone from being an eccentric minority practice to the default system of government world-wide

Democracy is a lousy form of government in some respects – it is particularly bad at long-term planning, for no event that lies beyond the electoral event horizon can compel a politician to pay attention to it

. In general, democratically elected politicians are forced to focus on short-term solutions to long-term problems because their performance is evaluated by elections held on a time scale of single-digit years

Democratic systems are prone to capture by special interest groups that exploit the information asymmetry that’s endemic in complex societies

Finally, representative democracy scales up badly

Nor are governments as important as they used to be.

the US government, the largest superpower on the block right now, is tightly constrained by the international trade system it promoted in the wake of the second world war.

we have democratic forms of government, without the transparency and accountability.

The good news is, we’re a lot richer than our ancestors. Relative decline is not tragic in a positive-sum world.

Assuming that they survive the obstacles on the road to development, this process is going to end fairly predictably: both India and China will eventually converge with a developed world standard of living, while undergoing the demographic transition to stable or slowly declining populations that appears to be an inevitable correlate of development.

a quiet economic revolution is sweeping Africa

In 2006, for the first time, more than half of the planet’s human population lived in cities. And by 2061 I expect more than half of the planet’s human population will live in conditions that correspond to the middle class citizens of developed nations.

by 2061 we or our children are going to be living on an urban middle-class planet, with a globalized economic and financial infrastructure recognizably descended from today’s system, and governments that at least try to pay lip service to democratic norms.

It’s a normative projection

I’m pretty certain that something utterly unexpected will come along and up-end all these projections – something as weird as the world wide web would have looked in 1961.

And while the outer forms of that comfortable, middle-class urban developed-world planetary experience might look familiar to us, the internal architecture will be unbelievably different.

a lot of the buildings are going to be familiar

Automobiles are automobiles, even if the ones he sees look kind of melted

Fashion? Hats are out, clothing has mutated in strange directions

He may be thrown by the number of pedestrians walking around with wires in their ears, or holding these cigarette-pack-sized boxes with glowing screens.

But there seem to be an awful lot of mad people walking around with bits of plastic clipped to their ears, talking to themselves

Our visitor from 1961 is familiar with cars and clothes and buildings

But he hasn’t heard of packet switched networks

Our time traveller from 1961 has a steep learning curve if he wants to understand the technology the folks with the cordless headsets are using.

The social consequences of a new technology are almost always impossible to guess in advance.

For example, we’re currently raising the first generation of kids who won’t know what it means to be lost – everywhere they go, they have GPS service and a moving map that will helpfully show them how to get wherever they want to go.

to our time traveller from 1961, it’s magic: you have a little glowing box, and if you tell it “I want to visit my cousin Bill, wherever he is,” a taxi will pull up and take you to Bill’s house

The whole question of whether a mature technosphere needs three or four billion full-time employees is an open one, as is the question of what we’re all going to do if it turns out that the future can’t deliver jobs.

We’re still in the first decade of mass mobile internet uptake, and we still haven’t seen what it really means when the internet becomes a pervasive part of our social environment, rather than something we have to specifically sit down and plug ourselves in to, usually at a desk.

the shape of the future depends on whether whoever provides the basic service of communication

funds their service by charging for bandwidth or charging for a fixed infrastructure cost.

These two models for pricing imply very different network topologies.

This leaves aside a third model, that of peer to peer mesh networks with no actual cellcos as such – just lots of folks with cheap routers. I’m going to provisionally assume that this one is hopelessly utopian

the security problems of a home-brew mesh network are enormous and gnarly; when any enterprising gang of scammers can set up a public router, who can you trust?

Let’s hypothesize a very high density, non-volatile serial storage medium that might be manufactured using molecular nanotechnology: I call it memory diamond.

wireless bandwidth appears to be constrained fundamentally by the transparency of air to electromagnetic radiation. I’ve seen some estimates that we may be able to punch as much as 2 tb/sec through air; then we run into problems.

One thing you can do trivially with that kind of capacity is full lifelogging for everyone. Lifelogging today is in its infancy, but it’s going to be a major disruptive technology within two decades.

the resulting search technology essentially gives you a prosthetic memory.

Lifelogging offers the promise of indexing and retrieving the unwritten and undocmented. And this is both a huge promise and an enormous threat.

Lifelogging raises huge privacy concerns, of course.

The security implications are monstrous: if you rely on lifelogging for your memory or your ability to do your job, then the importance of security is pushed down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

if done right, widespread lifelogging to cloud based storage would have immense advantages for combating crime and preventing identity theft.

whether lifelogging becomes a big social issue depends partly on the nature of our pricing model for bandwidth, and how we hammer out the security issues surrounding the idea of our sensory inputs being logged for posterity.

at least until the self-driving automobile matches and then exceeds human driver safety.

In particular, there’s a huge boom in new technologies for high speed gene sequencing.

full genome sequencing for individuals now available for around US $30,000, and expected to drop to around $1000–3000 within a couple of years.

Each of us is carrying around a cargo of 1–3 kilograms of bacteria and other unicellular organisms, which collectively outnumber the cells of our own bodies by a thousand to one.

Only the rapid development of DNA assays for SARS – it was sequenced within 48 hours of its identification as a new pathogenic virus – made it possible to build and enforce the strict quarantine regime that saved us from somewhere between two hundred million and a billion deaths.

we can expect eventually to see home genome monitoring – both looking for indicators of precancerous conditions or immune disorders within our bodies, and performing metagenomic analysis on our environment.

In each of these three examples of situations where personal privacy may be invaded, there exists a strong argument for doing so in the name of the common good – for prevention of epidemics, for prevention of crime, and for prevention of traffic accidents. They differ fundamentally from the currently familiar arguments for invasion of our data privacy by law enforcement – for example, to read our email or to look for evidence of copyright violation. Reading our email involves our public and private speech, and looking for warez involves our public and private assertion of intellectual property rights …. but eavesdropping on our metagenomic environment and our sensory environment impinges directly on the very core of our identities.

With lifelogging and other forms of ubiquitous computing mediated by wireless broadband, securing our personal data will become as important to individuals as securing our physical bodies.

the shifting sands of software obsolescence have for the most part buried our ancient learning mistakes.