C CJan 1, 2021 10:29 PM (This post was last modified: Jan 1, 2021 11:29 PM by C C.)
Concerning the work's own take on past, futurist predictions:
They weren’t entirely mistaken. As they guessed, the pace of technological change sped up, polio was conquered, and “calculating machines” were invented. But in detail and in broad conception they were almost comically off the mark.
Von Neumann foresaw a world in which “energy would be free—just like the unmetered air.” Sarnoff deemed it indisputable that ships, aircraft, locomotives, and even automobiles would be atomic-powered. Houses and industrial plants would run on small atomic generators, and so coal, oil, and gas would be displaced as fuel. We would all commute in personal helicopters. Guided missiles would deliver intercontinental mail. We would have the capacity not only to predict the weather far in advance but also to change weather and climate. Naturally, we could foresee the effects of any such intervention. Society would also improve. The work week would continue to shorten. Soon we would be worrying not about how to create jobs but about how to spend all our leisure time. The economy would no longer be subject to serious recessions. Scientific discoveries would strengthen our faith in the Creator. War would cease to be an instrument of national policy, and as communication (especially television) improved, nations and individual people would understand one another better and grow less hostile. We would have a world police force.
Almost as remarkable is what was not foreseen. No one, not even von Neumann, who did so much to lay the groundwork for it, anticipated the information revolution. Neither did anyone imagine the biological revolution or nanotechnology. The future of science seemed to lie in the study of atomic power. Islamism was not mentioned, and authors still assumed that time was on the side of the Soviet Union. Understandably enough, the writers tended to draw straight lines from the present. In their view, past predictions had proven wrong largely because they were insufficiently optimistic. When speaking of the future as surprising, they usually referred to the pace, not the nature, of change. The idea of radically contingent events altering the whole direction of change was underestimated. Progress, speed, continuation of present trends: these were the guiding assumptions.
As it happened, the volume was prophetic in another way. It exemplified a growing trend of failed predictions made with supreme confidence. To be sure, not all of these predictions were to be unreservedly optimistic. Perhaps the most widely read economist of his day, John Kenneth Galbraith predicted in 1967 that large corporations would be able to in-sulate themselves from competition and insure their dominance. These supposedly invincible corporations have mostly been replaced by others, which -- like Apple, Microsoft, and Walmart -- did not exist or had just been founded in 1967. Still more famously, Paul Ehrlich -- in his 1968 best seller "The Population Bomb", testimony before the U.S. Senate, commentary on television talk shows, and countless other appearances—predicted that overpopulation would cause a billion people to starve to death within a decade. He foresaw the rapid exhaustion of natural resources. Along with the Club of Rome, Zero Population Growth, and books such as "The Limits to Growth", he argued that humanity was exhausting limited resources and had already reached the point where catastrophe was unavoidable. The New Republic proclaimed that “world population has passed food supply. The famine has begun.”8In fact, the exact opposite was the case.
Actually, Feynman did propose or anticipate the equivalent of nanotechnology in his 1959 lecture "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom". Arthur C. Clarke prognosticated various items corresponding to the information age. And long prior to the 1960s, there were scattered works of science fiction that indulged in manipulation of biology themes. (late 1920s or 1930) CLICK TO ENLARGE:
C CJan 1, 2021 11:47 PM (This post was last modified: Jan 2, 2021 12:59 AM by C C.)
Miscellaneous excerpts from it (varying authors):
Sci-tech. Technology will continue, both unstopped and unstoppable. We will have universal connectivity among individuals worldwide, and we will have driverless cars. We may have fully renewable energy sources. We’ll have instant daily diagnosis of diseases, life expectancy will exceed one hundred years, and we will probably have many more artificial components to our bodies than we do now. But these engineering accomplishments, though they will certainly change our lives (and probably mostly for the better) are not disruptive at the level of the great inventions of the past. Those included tonal music, evolution, the classification of animals and plants, calculus, relativity, thermodynamics, evolution, flight, the printing press, radio, the steam engine, fire, splitting atoms, anesthesia, and quantum mechanics. But asking the right question is frequently the most important thing in science. New questions will be asked, and new conceptual breakthroughs—perhaps in a class with music, flight, and fire—will be born. The growth of science is remarkable. It is estimated that more than 50 percent of all the scientists who ever lived were born after 1900.
[...] “Synthetic biology” will be a daily commodity, and microorganisms (because of their adaptive abilities) will be used for many practical applications, from sanitation to coloring paint to soothing mosquito bites to creating food. Synthetic biology will have provided artificial cells, whose major applications in the areas of drug delivery and regenerative medicine will have (together with robotics and new materials) completely changed the face of surgery and many other parts of medicine.
[...] In 2040, the quest for more general organizing principles in the bio-logical sciences will have advanced substantially.
Society/Information. We may be drowning in spin, smoke screens, and lies, but people are longing to cut through to the truth. So how can the Internet and technology help us find our way? By continuing to give people a place they can turn to uncover the truth. The Internet has shown great promise in this regard. YouTube, Twitter, email, and turbocharged search engines have made it easier to expose the lies our leaders continue to tell. At the same time, this is a moment of economic anxiety. In times like these, people are more likely to be driven by their lizard brains and react in response to fear rather than facts, making it easier for demagogues to scapegoat and peddle conspiracy theories laced with violent undertones. In this kind of atmosphere, people sometimes refuse to believe their own eyes. And it becomes easier to perpetrate the latest big lie.
[...] The three techniques for fearmongering I have discussed -- repetition, the depiction of isolated incidents as trends, and misdirection -- continued to prove effective in the early twenty-first century, but with new targets and within a different story line. I anticipate the same will hold in 2040: the methods employed to exaggerate dangers and educe panic will remain reasonably constant, but the specific fears and the broader cultural narrative will change. Radical changes in narrative and in choices of bogeymen can occur almost overnight in response to weighty events.
Human rights. Students who identify as progressive tend to support and exploit these codes to protect an imagined civil right not to take offense, at the obvious expense of a right to give it. A “large bloc” of young people have internalized the notion that speech they deem “bullying,” insulting, or demeaning—including speech that insults or demeans on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, or vaguely defined personal and political characteristics, such as appearance, attire, and beliefs—is not speech but an actionable form of discrimination.
Colleges and universities are training generations of educated Americans (tomorrow’s leaders) to devalue our first, foundational freedom of speech, whether it protects insults, epithets, or unpopular religious ideals and political opinions. The belief that unwelcome speech is the equivalent of unwelcome action, properly subject to equivalent regulation, is entrenched on American campuses and will not soon be dislodged. From this perspective, the First Amendment is a civility code designed to discourage or punish harsh criticisms and strenuous arguments that offend or upset people with diminished power. From this perspective, free speech is nice or, at worst, indifferent speech that supports social norms and the status quo instead of challenging them.
This is a therapeutic approach to democracy that’s fundamentally hostile to civil liberty. It effectively condemns freedom, especially freedom of speech, as the victimization of presumptively vulnerable people and a bar to equality. An approach conceived by the left, decades ago, it’s now mirrored on the right by religious conservatives who condemn the freedom for minority beliefs secured by separation of church and state as the victimization of Christians—the annual casualties of an imaginary war on Christmas. Right and left, these therapeutic perspectives tend to confuse assertions of power with demands for freedom.
Pro-censorship progressives frame the power to suppress “verbal assaults” or harassment, vaguely defined, as the exercise of their right to be free from speech presumed to retard equality. Religious conservatives frame the power to impose officially sanctioned sectarian prayer on participants in public events or students in public schools as exercises of their own religious freedom. In this view, freedom is a zero-sum game in which my freedom to speak offensively violates your freedom not to be offended, and my freedom to abstain from prayer violates your freedom to engage in it.
Religion. For my money, the most penetrating insight into the future of religion in twenty-first-century America came from a Canadian scholar writing about South Asia in the 1940s. Wilfred Cantwell Smith was teaching at a Christian missionary college in Lahore (then a part of an undivided India under British rule, now located in Pakistan) and one day woke up to a realization both remarkable and obvious: most of his faculty colleagues were Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims, as were the majority of his students. For Cantwell Smith, both a committed Presbyterian and a budding scholar of comparative religions, it was an observation that set off a series of questions. How might frequent and intense interaction between people of various faiths impact everything from the religious identities of individuals to the theologies of religious traditions to the self-understanding and social cohesion of increasingly religiously diverse societies?
[...] If religion were a stock and you were the betting type in 1957, you would have probably bought. All signs pointed up. Ten years later, the last thing you would have wanted in your portfolio was religion. And so it goes in the volatile world of predicting religion. Sometimes the line goes straight and sometimes it zigzags. Before hazarding my guesses about the future, let me say that I’m a moderately progressive American Muslim who has a doctorate in the sociology of religion and runs an interfaith organization that works largely in higher education. I’m also an optimist. No doubt my predictions are colored by those various lenses. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, I think the most important theme in American religion is wider religious diversity and more frequent interaction between people who orient around religion differently, including the nones. That diversity can take four major forms: bubbles of isolation, barriers of division, bombs of destruction, or bridges of co-operation. I believe that in 2040 American religious diversity will be defined largely by bridges of cooperation. I also believe this will be fairly unique in the world.
[...] I believe that by 2040 the United States will proudly view itself as an interfaith country, much the way we take pride in our multiculturalism today. History is a useful guide here. A century ago, the United States was both profoundly antisemitic and anti-Catholic. Today, Catholics and Jews are among the most favorably viewed religious communities in the country.I think the same forces that propelled Catholics and Jews into the American mainstream are at work with newer religious minorities such as Muslims.
YazataJan 2, 2021 02:37 AM (This post was last modified: Jan 2, 2021 05:07 PM by Yazata.)
Cell phones! The artist certainly captured the way they monopolize people's attention and turn them into 'zombies', physically present but really not. The womens' short hair and clothing (is one wearing a hoodie?) isnt a bad prediction. (It's hard to predict fickle trends like fashion styles.) The hats, cigarette and the flying car aren't. Drinks are certainly still going strong.
As for my own technology predictions...
My guess is that physics will continue to stagnate. I don't expect any grand quantum or relativity style revolutions or anything like that in the next 20 years. (But those things are very hard to predict beforehand, aren't they?) Of course there will still be all kinds of new physical hypotheses and the layman's science magazines will continue to be full of 'everything you think you know is wrong' stories. But physics will drive less and less change in people's lives.
Engineering will likely stagnate as well. Just look at the technological changes 1880-1950 and compare them to the changes 1950-2020. Most of the last 70 years was basically just incremental improvements on what came before in the grand age of invention. In the 1880's, aircraft were the occasional balloon. In 1950's they were jet planes. Today they are more efficient jet planes. In the 1880's, ground transportation was horses. In 1950, it was automobiles. Today it's just more efficient automobiles.
I expect that rate of improvement to continue to slow as we wring all the efficiencies technically possible out of cars and jet planes. And not just cars and jet planes. I expect that we have already seen the maturing of the cell phone. Will cell phones in 2040 really be that different than the ones we have today? They can probably squeeze out new upgrades for some years yet, but they will be smaller and smaller changes as the phones asymptotically approach as good as they are going to get just like the passenger jets have. So in 2040 cell phones will just be commodities like tooth brushes or toasters.
One place where big changes might be possible is genetic engineering. Reengineering the genetic code to create designer organisms has the potential to be totally revolutionary. What's most likely to hold that back isn't so much the spectre of running up against the theoretical limits of the technology. It will be political opposition. There's already an activist movement growing to oppose it.
One wild-card is Elon Musk (our time-traveller from the future). If his Starships really work as he envisions, there will likely be human settlements on the Moon and Mars. (But probably nothing like a large self-sustaining Mars colony.) We may see the beginnings of Lunar mines and factories, and asteroid mining. So there may be the first stirrings of an off-world economy starting to appear, Expanse style. They may be looking at sending human expeditions to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn by 2040. Of course, if one man, one company and one country end up dominating human activity off-planet, the Chinese will be up there too and the US government may have shut SpaceX down or nationalized it.
But... Starship may not work. (And if it doesnt, I don't expect the Artemis return to the Moon to be much more than a one-off stunt, if it happens at all.) Or as I kind of suspect, Starship will be like the Space Shuttle, it will work but it won't be nearly as reusable as hoped. So the hoped for economies of rapid airliner-style reuse may never materialize. It's hard for me to predict the future of this one.
Virtual reality may become something big, but I kind of doubt it. Of course if Elon's brain interface experiments pan out, maybe they can directly stimulate the vision, hearing, touch and proprioceptive parts of the brain to create 'brain-in-a-vat' style experiences of actually being in virtual environments like video games, where people see, hear, touch and feel themselves moving. All without the limitations of a physical body or vulnerability to being killed.
The problem is that will require major brain implants. So I don't expect regular people to do it. The biggest market might be the military, to allow virtual telepresence inside battlefield robots. And there might inevitably be a rebel subculture of 20-something videogamers who get the implants to up things a notch (or ten), much like they get body modifications now.