Not sure if this has been posted/asked before. If so, all apologies.

What do you guys think the future has in store for us in terms of technological advances?

What do you think we will have at our disposal in the year 2050?

2100?

3000?

I am willing to bet money that, barring disaster, machines will pass the Turning test by 2050. Obviously this means we will have a lot of advances in AI up to this point, and after that, not even the sky is the limit as human level AI will be able to participate in research.

But what will technical advancment mean for people? Technology was astounding when it provided us with fresh healthy food, living space, electric lights, hot and cold running water, and so on. But once these needs were met, people became more ambivilant about technological progress. Now that our physical needs are mostly met in the developed world, what will futher technological improvments mean for people?

I think there are two areas that will undergo significant change. Technology will be used to meet psychological needs and to extend lifespans. Robotic or virtual companions will be used to fulfill people's social and sexual desires. If you don't believe this can happen, well today I felt a little sad when my completly artificial companion died in a computer game because of a mistake I made. Lives will be extended until a kind of immortality is reached. Whether this will be through reconditioning old bodies, engineering new ageless ones, or creating electronic copies of us, or something else, I can't say. If you are born (or decanted) after 2050 I'd say it is very likely you will have access to some form of immortality.

I think that technological improvement will result in world economic growth, again barring disaster, that averages over 3% a year through to 2050. This means that with population increases, the average person will be more than twice as rich as they are now. Perhaps a vast amount of this wealth will be spent on medical care, but the cost of each "unit" of medical care is likely to decrease as technology improves.

It is not a law of nature that we see more and more "advanced" technologies!
Perhaps 50 years form now new technology innovations will count less ("important innovations pr. year", however you count that) than it does now?
Reason:1:Some may reach a natural limit, either "absolute" or which can be only escaped by extreme costs.2:Other types may "cost" too much to exploit either ressources, or disturbing environment.3: As human needs are fullfilled, some types of "improvements" may be less necessary and attractive"(example:the travelling distance between most large centers ogf the world is already rather low, hours rather than days by plane. It may be possible to reduce it much further, but is this desirable?)

Do you count genetic manipulation as technologies? How about nanotech? Or are you limiting this thread to gadget-type machines only?

Ahh, the sweet delusion of progress....

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What brings us together is stronger than what pulls us apart

Anything in general.

I read an article a while back (can't find it again for the life of me! ) about how life might be in a few hundred years, and how simplified everything would be because of technology. So I'm curious to know what other people think will come.

It's something that still blows my mind - how could these atoms from the sun be arranged in such a way that they understand how to build machines (made from atoms, from the sun) that are capable of doing more and more things? Intelligence is beautiful, hopefully it wont be our downfall

OK, this is going to sound radical (to say the least).

I think that we are very close to the point where working to survive will be unnecessary! For all of history of life on this planet, animals have had to work to stay alive, whether it's herbivores having to graze every waking hour or carnivores having to chase down and kill prey, it's been "root, hog or die".

There has always been a leisure class that, for one reason or another, did not have to work.
Ever since the industrial revolution, innovation after innovation has brought us more and more labor saving devices - machines to do the work for us. With more and more machines doing the work, the price of products has going down in real terms.

The cost (in real dollars) of television sets has been going down (and the quality of the picture has been going up) since the invention of TV.

Same with audio. In the '70s, $500 would buy a real nice stereo. Of course, it wasn't "state of the art", but it was very good. Today $500 will buy a 5.1 surround sound system for your HDTV!
Every generation of computers brings more features and lower prices.

Every generation has had it's Luddites, complaining that "invention X" would put people out of work. We may be on the verge of their worst nightmare coming true.
Now, imagine (at least in the industrialized world) a majority "leisure class"!
Some of us may be alive to see an era when the only people who "work" are those who do it because they want to!

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

It sounded radical when Buckminster Fuller said it in the 1950s, too.

Eventually, I think it'll happen. But it'll take more than technology; the scary interim stages of transition will be the most difficult, as people getting "automated out of a job" rarely think it's a benefit to the human race. Probably most low-level jobs that exist now can be done more cheaply by machines-- I know that it was decades ago (late 1970s, I recall) that some engineering student designed a fully-automated fast food restaurant. It wasn't ever built because it would throw millions out of work. It will require radical changes to our entire economy to make full-automation a reality, even after the technologies are invented.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

What makes me wonder when I read those last posts is how you reconcile the vision of nobody working except for fun with the reality which is that average working hours have been rising instead of falling for the last couple of decades?

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

If you regularly give a bunch of monkeys heaps of fruit so there is plenty for all, they don't stop fighting each other and scrabbling for status.

Hard to say without sounding like a CT nut job!

I do remember Rowan & Martin's Laugh IN joking about the coming 30 hour work week and what would everybody do with all that free time. Up until that time (early 70s), One person, with one job could support a family and the average working hours were falling.

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

Is that so? Perhaps they don't know for sure that they'll get more later (e.g., same thing as with fish - they eat as much as possible because there is no guarantee there will be more later). Fighting even in abundance is likely as long as there is variability in quality (everyone wants the best) and the food can keep (so getting two pieces, even when you only need one, helps ensure you'll have something for later).

But I agree with the general sentiment that as things get easier and faster, people are simply expected to perform more. Perhaps this will change in the future, but I have yet to hear of a compelling reason why that would happen.

What do you think we will have at our disposal in the year 2050?

I don't think it's possible to predict anything remotely certain after this date, so that's as far as I'll go...

Well, my op is that the world--or rather, the U.S.--of 2050 will look more familiar to us than different; I don't expect a repeat of the tremendous advancement we saw between 1910 and 1950.

What I think we will have, know, or maintain:

--Pretty much all data and media storage will be solid state or P2P.
--The line between PDAs, PCs, and cell phones will blur until there's little more distinction than whether or not it can fit your pocket. As I've said before on other boards, I think the day is coming when you will literally be able to *live* out of your pocket with such devices.
--Space tourism from LEO to the Moon will be routine.
--We may finally have a GUT, with evidence to support it (I think we'll also know whether string theory works or doesn't, courtesy of new particle colliders coming on-line).
--We'll know plenty of Earth-like planets, probably down to temperature and atmospheric composition.
--Most cars will be hybrids, fuel cell, or electric.
--Military hardware will be mostly recognizable to us, save for the UCAVs I feel will ultimately relegate fighter and bomber pilots to close support roles. As is already apparent, there will be a shifting emphasis away from massive ground forces towards smaller units that can be rapidly deployed on an as-needed basis.
--Major airlines will slowly ditch their current models in favor of more fuel-efficient "flying wing" types.
--CATS, aside from space elevators.
--Routine stem cell research and treatments.

What I think we won't have, or what won't happen:

--True AI; to my eyes, this is starting to look like the "fusion is just around the corner" of computing. Ironically though, I do think we'll have realistic robots that can actually do useful work (courtesy of the Japanese ).
--In the same vein: fusion. Even if a power surplus is attained, I think it will remain too expensive to be worthwhile.
--Widespread supersonic transport (SST).
--Independent off-world colonies and manufacture.
--Immortality.
--A cure for cancer, or a pill that can prevent obesity.
--Cyborgs; by this, I mean people with either prosthetics so good that you couldn't tell at first blush, or artificial organs that function as well as the real thing (eyes, hearts, livers, etc.).
--Widespread human cloning.

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"Call me old-fashioned, but I think fire is magic. And it scares me a lot."

--The State

The last couple of decades*? Sure. Over the last couple of centuries? No way. And as machines become more able to do things you need people for today, the next couple of centuries will require less and less labor. A few decades is a blip on the chart, nothing more. Look at the big picture, not the fleeting pixels.


*In some countries, not all.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I think future is all artificial intelligence..Its all robotic. Robots will dominate the future...and may be we shall found better place to settle down elsewhere...

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LOST

I think that intelligence in computers will be achieved between 2050 and 2100. Of course we will need to get a sensible operating system for that to happen. After that, as computers will be able to truly intelligently design future computers, there will be an exponential growth rate in the growth rate of computer advances. That means that the future beyond 2100 is beyond our wildest imaginations. It also means that computers / robots will become the dominant life form and there will be a very wild ride for all other life forms, us included.

Don't look now...

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*

From the article: It can solve politics? It's got my vote!

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I'll point out that machines already have artificial intelligence. An artificial intelligence is one that perceives its environment and takes steps to maximise its chances of success. Everytime you use a search engine, reservation system or call a government department and talk to a voice recognition program you are using artifical intelligence. (Well, okay, in the case of the voice recognition system it's artifical stupidity.) AI is ubiquitous in our society, even if people don't realize that the nice young man behind the counter is merely serving as an interface between them and an AI. But being artificially intelligent is not the same as being equal to a human. When a computer passes a Turing test, that means its intelligence will be on par with a human. (Or smarter than a human. After all, if you met a parrot that could talk on the phone and convince people it was human, you'd might consider the parrot to be smarter than the average human.) There is no particular reason why we can't make extremely intelligent machines that aren't very self aware, we might consider than the equivlent of trained animals from an ethical viewpoint. But I'm sure the more interesting ones will be self aware, in a way similar to ourselves or to a greater extent. Just when a machine will pass a Turing test we can't say, but I think it will be before 2050, mainly because we're not quite as smart as we think we are. Or to put it in a nicer way, I don't think our intelligence is the result of anything other than computations in the organic computer in our skulls, and I think we will be able to more or less simulate that within about 40 years.

EDIT: Turing! Not Turning! Fixed it up.

That's Turing test!

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

Yeah, I had a feeling I was doing something wrong, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Anyway, to fake those sorts of mistakes, a computer might have to be smarter than a human to pass a Turing test.

I think we can be pretty certain that information technology and biotechnology, both of which, let's not forget, are very new fields of study historically speaking will continue to advance almost without limit well into the future. It seems like we will always find new ways to manipulate matter, as this is were science and art intersect. Millions of new chemical compounds are synthesized every year and the number of possible compounds and isomers is astronomical. With increasing technological prowess comes increasingly devestating consequences if the powerful new technologies are used for harm or they harm by accident. It is very hard to make precise predictions when it comes to dealing with human creativity--that's what makes something creative-- something that is radically new and elegant--something no one thought of before. For example, that handheld water purifier made by a Danish firm.

Does anyone remember reading in Carl Sagan's Cosmos in the section about an encyclopedia galactica about a hypothetical alien civilization's technology reaching an asymptotic limit?

I have little faith in the Turing test as an accurate gauge of a computer's consciousness, or self-awareness, or personhood, or whatever term you'd care to use. People are easy to fool, and we organic types come in so many individual variations of personality and communication skills that the margin of error for such a test is always going to be more than 100%, IMO.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I don't understand what you're saying. The whole point is the computer will be able to fake being as intelligent as a human as well as humans are able to fake being as intelligent as humans. The computer only needs to perform as well as humans do on the test to pass. It doesn't have to pass just once, it will have to perform many tests alongside many humans and do as well as they do on average. The computer only needs a success rate equal to humans to pass. After all, Turing tests have been done and some human beings who participated have failed them

The test is not a guage of consciousness, or self-awareness or personhood. We have no evidence that humans are consciouess or self-aware beyond self reports. It is a test of whether or not a machine can pass as human when people can't see that it's a machine.

Exactly the problem. It's an opinion poll, not a real scientific test. It tells you nothing of value about the computer itself except whether it would make a good phone receptionist.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

It tells you whether or not the machine can pass for a human in conversation. It is not limited to receptionist skills. And it is as real a scientific test as testing to see if a drug performs better than a placebo.

Let's say I told you that the head of a university philosophy department was actually a robot and, not believing me, you went and talked to her for an hour where you were free to discuss anything you wanted. If at the end of that hour you were convinced that she wasn't a robot and was human, would you then conclude that the professor was only fit for receptionist work? If so, that would seem to be an odd conclusion to arrive at. The professor's ability to have a discussion with you and convince you that she is human does not mean she is only fit to be a receptionist. The same applies if I told you that a plumber was a robot and you spent an hour talking to her. Again it would also be odd if you concluded that she was only fit for receptionist work. In fact you might conclude that the plumber (or the professor) might make a lousy receptionist, but that doesn't mean you'd think they were robots.

Or to look at it another way, if you talked to a brain damaged person and discovered that they couldn't have a normal conversation and that they couldn't respond in a way similar to most unbrain damaged people, would you conclude that you had learned nothing of interest about that person? Would you conclude that conversation provided no evidence on whether or not the brain damaged person could perform intellectually on the same level as an unbrain damaged person? I doubt you'd reach that conclusion.

Speaking as one who failed a Turing test, I'd say they have serious limitations.

Years ago, on a university computer "instant messaging" (though we didn't call it that) system, a friend had told another person that I was an AI and suggested they ask me questions on certain subjects I was expert on. He also had told them that if asked, I would insist I wasn't an AI. Of course, this was all meant as a big joke. Anyway, without knowing that I was being "tested" I was asked certain questions. And, like a lot of folks at BAUT, there are certain subjects I could discuss off the top of my head in painful detail. There were also other subjects (helpfully suggested by my friend) that "everybody knows," but I didn't know well at all (such as some then popular music). The combination led the "tester" to be convinced I was an AI. It was astonishingly frustrating. I wasn't able to convince the "tester" otherwise until I brought in outside information (what I heard on a radio station we could both tune to).

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Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

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That's an interesting story, but I don't really thinks it indicates the limitations of the Turing test. For a start, it wasn't double blind. It was in effect as if there was someone in a lab coat standing there and telling a subject in a drug trial that the placebo was an extremely effective drug and would really help their condition. Secondly, in drug tests we expect a lot of individuals to claim that the placebo helped their condition when it did no such thing. It is the statisical analysis that counts, not any one individual subject's response. Of course, in the case of the Turing test, rather than comparing a new drug to a placebo it is more comparing a new drug (artificial intelligence) to an old drug (human intelligence) to see if it is as effective.

To anyone who thinks the Turing test has severe limitations, I'll ask, do you have a more elegant way to determine when machines are able to effectively match human intelligence?

I do remember some interviews in regards to a more serious Turing test. In this case, experts had some rules on what they were allowed to discuss (not a completely freewheeling discussion) and a Shakespeare expert regularly was tagged as an AI for being, again, too good.

My point, though, is that it only takes a few exceptions from generally accepted social knowledge (whether you don't know the name of a popular song, or know some unusual subject in great detail) before your humanity can become suspect in a Turing type test. Now, if that's all it takes, imagine all the things that must be worked in for an AI to pass.


Tricky. I think I would be interested in what it could do. For example, could you give it vague requirements, and would it know how to proceed to ask the right questions to develop a good application. I wouldn't care if it could pass the Turing test, but I would be curious it it could think the task through, and develop it successfully.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

This is why a machine passing a Turing test is such a big deal. Some people look at the programing required and conclude it's impossible. But I don't think the machne that passes the Turing test will be programmed any more than we're programmed. It will be self learning.

It also shows how the Turing test is kind of unfair on the machine. Not only will it have to demonstrate that it is a thinking entity, it will have to do a fair job of imitating an ape as well. But I don't think that will be too much to ask of it.

I will mention that unless some organization sets good standards, a machine passing the Turing test won't be a sudden thing. There will be claims of success that will turn out to be overblown, tests that will have their methodology challenged and so on. Look how long it too to finally settle that a computer could be better than humans at chess.

AI is being improved in these areas all the time, so I'm confident we will see various results in our day to day lives in everything from cars that intelligently avoid collisions, translation programs that understand context and nuance, and a speak/write program that isn't a useless piece of crud.