[OT] Your visions of the future.

[Taera]

oh, another possibility - viral infections are getting out of control, things might go real bad very soon (read - accurate to the next millenium)

[Ward]

Dogscoff: You did some nice work here. I generally agree with you.

One more thought I didn't include in my post(Third reply on this topic - I donn't know how to make a direct connection to that post and it is too large to quote): Universal theory is very imortant. It doesn't include only physical laws like electomagnetism or gravitation. If we ever achieve something that we can call universal theory then it would change all aspects of life. Difference between organic and mechanic will become meaningless(human body IS a sophisticated machine). This will bring new views of the world. With them come changes in society.
I wanted to give this some "Time stamp". Then I thought about our world. Maybe we are slowly entering the era of Universalism.

[Aloofi]

Behold!
I've been shown the future, but I'm not gonna tell you......Muahahahaha.

I'm just gonna tell that WW3 started a year and a half ago. People just don't know it, yet.

[ March 27, 2003, 20:31: Message edited by: Aloofi ]

[Puke]

It was looking bad there for a while, when the Berlin Wall came down. the Soviet Union fell appart, and the Iron Curtain came down. It was looking like the end of the world I grew up in.

The "Green" party was gaining popularity, vegitarians were everywhere, pacifism was spreading. Old, petty, squabling, outdated, outmoded, backwards Europe consolidated into a single economic / political entity -- or at least was well on its way. Globalism, though it brought about evils of its own, was destroying borders.

But the old world wasnt gone, people had just stopped seeing it. My world was still there, you just had to look a bit below the surface. Multinational corporations still controlled the economies of smaller countries, and still ruled over them with an iron fist. Imperial France still lorded over Africa, and the United States continued to operate clandestinly around the globe to secure its economic interests. Free-industry zones in China brought about the kind of Cowboy Capitalism invisioned in the elegantly distopian views of Gibson and Stearling.

A dramatic change of tense drives my vision home. The streets of the collapsed Soviet Union are as close to a manifestation of the Cyberpunk genre as anything is likely to be. War is waged for oil, geopolitical influence, reconstruction dollars, and personal profit. International communities are robbed of any consequential significance on a whim, and decades of peace efforts in Asia are thrown out in sheer acts of arrogance. All the old demons are still dancing about the world, and the nature of mankind remains unchanged since the first bipedlas murdered each other with their bare hands.

Though the important figures will change, borders will shift, and empires will fall, the world will remain unchanged. Technology will advance, and possibly collapse, only to advance again. If exploitable resources are found in space, they will be exploited. If they are not fought over with weapons, they will be fought over with money and politics. There are only two possiblilites. Perhaps we are at the pinacle of history, looking down a dangerous precipice -- or perhaps we are poised to vault into a new era. There is one certainty, however: Though the scenery will change, the nature of man will not.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

[dogscoff]

ok, here's mine.

2003-2030:
-Manned mission to Mars planned and funded.
-Today's military neural tech (ie wearing a band around your head that reads brain waves trough your skull and controls a computer) makes its way into the commercial market. Particularly popular in mobile comms and gaming.
-People are wearing mobile computers/ comms devices in their clothes. Computers are now controlled extremely naturally with a mixture of voice, neural, motion and other input.
-Alzheimers, diabetes, strokes are all either curable or preventable.
-People are starting to talk pretentiously about "the end of geography", since with cheap, mobile teleconferencing abilities it barely matters if someone is in the same room as you or not. People are not only telecommuting in their work lives, but in their private lives as well. The hype says that people are now choosing their friends and contacts from everyone around the world based on interest and compatibility rather than the people you happen to live near, but in reality everyone is still hanging around with their families, colleagues and people they went to school with.
-Virtual Reality (ie 3D with direction-sensitive headsets) makes a comeback, especially in gaming and simulations.
-Hydrogen cars introduced, aren't particularly successful. People are bored with ecology and oil stays.
-The EU expands, suffering all kinds of problems as it absorbs new countries.
-First designer babies are born with certain "beauty" genes tweaked. Public outraged, practise is Banned almost everywhere.
-Several developping countries make sudden rushes to industrialisation, coming from out of nowhere right up to the top 10 or 20 richest countries in the world.
-In order to combat the age divide (ie too many pensioners, not enough workers) retirement age is pushed up in most industrialised countries, and they are all encouraging younger immigrants from the developping world to balance things out.
-Anti-immigration sentiment across the developped world triggers a new wave of nazism. The public is shocked into action and feelings swing back the other way.
-At least one disastrous accident involving a nuclear power station in a semi-industrialised nation.
-autopilots for cars are introduced and reduce accidents slightly.
-The EU legalises cannabis.

2030-2080
-First human-level AI created in some lab somewhere. It is extremely hard to communicate with, and doesn't seem particularly clever or useful.
-Plans drawn up for a permanently-manned base on the moon, just because we can. Mars mission finds extinct microscopic life, which drums up support and funding for surther space exploration, including detailed surveys of the more interesting jovian moons and asteroids.
-By putting chips inside the skull and body, blind people can be given sight, breaks in the spinal cord can be bridged and various other medical miracles are possible.
-AIDS, cancer and heart disease are now far better understood and far less deadly. New illnesses emerge to replace them.
-People are walking around with heads-up-display sunglasses or retinal projectors, so they are effectively permanently plugged into the comms network. You can have a conversation with a distant person's avatar which appears to be standing in front of you, apparently interacting with your environment.
-People are experimenting with new, more expressive forms of human language made possible by the new comms technology: spontaneously inserting visuals and sounds into conversation enhances the words. It's all considered a bit wanky by most people.
-Eventually there is a backlash against impersonal mobile comms technology. People start visiting one another in person again.
-Now that the EU is stabilising a little, other Groups of countries are clustering together under similar schemes.
-With more countries joining the list of industrialised nations and global energy requirements ramping up, there is a new energy crisis. After numerous accidents, nuclear power is unpopular and a new drive toward renewable energy is begun.
-Flying cars are introduced, and quickly outlawed when people decide they are a menace.
-Ground car autopilots are advanced further. Cars now communicate with the cars around them, relaying route and congestion information then collectively deciding how best to distribute traffic across the available routes. Fuel efficiency is increased, journey times halved and accidents almost completely eliminated. Some people still insist on driving manually, and have to lobby hard for their right to do so.
-As the technology becomes easier to replicate, a popular but illegal designer baby industry springs up.

2080-2150
-Moonbase successfully established at great expense. No-one quite knows what it is for, and it is declared a waste of money. There are a few more missions to Mars before the public decides it doesn't want to spend money on space for a while.
-AIs are becoming more advanced. They are replacing "dumb" computer systems in large corporate and governmental systems, conditioned to enjoy their jobs. Early mobile AIs are released as housekeepers, waiters etc. The public hates and fears them, and many are worried about losing their jobs to machines.
-The trens swings back toward mobile comms again, and medical brain implants are now being adapted to commercial purposes. Subdermal and subcranial implants are now all the rage, and the real world gradually becomes intertwined with a shared, superimposed, virtual world. By using interpretive avatars and new forms of language, a person can effectively be in several places at once, carrying out more than one conversation simultaneously.
-Gene-tweaked babies are still illegal but fashionable. The tweaks are now more than cosmetic, they are enhancing intelligence and physical prowess. People begin to panic that "normal" children will grow up into an underclass beneath the tweaked ones, and as a result gene-tweaking snowballs.
-The world is now politically divided into a dozen or so "clusters" of countries like the EU. The US and China are able to compete on that scale without forming alliances.
-People now consider themselves true "global villagers". When someone successfully applies for citizenship of a country they've never visited, the whole concept of national identity comes under threat.

2150+
-After a few conflicts, extensive arguments and lots of interbreeding, genetically-enhanced humans become more or less the norm.
-People of "pure" race are now in the global minority compared to people of mixed race.
-AIs are now very human like in appearance and capabilities. People begin to complain that AIs wholud have rights.
-The moonbase is abandoned and then renovated as a tourist resort. After a few hundred years it becomes a viable colony in its own right. Genetics are used to create a new breed of human more suited to the lunar environment.
-A permanent community is set up on Mars, with plans to terraform it over a period of several thousand years. Needless to say it doesn't go according to plan.
-The political maps change significantly numerous times as people try to draw boundaries around global communities rather than arbitrary geographical areas. People eventually just give up, deciding that it isn't really important anyway.
-The asteroids are eventually mined and settled, perhaps 200-300 years from now. The Jovian satellites are thoroughly explored, and plans drawn up for colonisation/ terraforming.
-Manned interstellar flight is achieved 400-500 years from now. It is at least another 500 years before anyone manages a return journey.

[Kamog]

Originally posted by Aloofi:
I'm just gonna tell that WW3 started a year and a half ago. People just don't know it, yet.

Let's hope it doesn't turn out that way...

[Aloofi]

Wow!
Puke, that was an inspired post.

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[Aloofi]

Originally posted by Kamog:
Let's hope it doesn't turn out that way...

On the contrary, let's hope it is that way.
Maybe we could have at Last a chance to create a society of free men where corporations and govertments no longer have our destinies in their hands, a free society that is not stolen from us by evil dictators or greedy businessmen.
Let's hope in war, because we have no hope in peace.
The corporations have created the current world order, and they will never let us create a society where the acumulation of wealth is not longer its engine.
Corporations and goverments will never allow themselves to become obsolete, we have to make them be!!!

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[Instar]

Information transmission will only increase with increasing computer speed, which is pretty easy prediction to make. The big issue is whether or not computer sentience will happen. I think that it can happen, it is just that people may decide against it. It also depends on how you define sentience.
Also, we humans must clean up our act environmentally. Colonizing other planets seems like a feasible way to relieve pressures here at home. (it beats the alternatives)
I really hope that the Internet matures... wait I mean the Users of the Internet... heh, we have too many CS playing "l337 h4x0rz"....
I hate to push any one product, but if the digital world of machines can consolidate with iniatives like .NET, the results should be short of astounding. For instance, you no longer have to agonize over differing data formats, or incompatible devices. It all works together. Data and meta-data flow like rivers..... ooooooooooooooooooh

[Fyron]

The corporations have created the current world order, and they will never let us create a society where the acumulation of wealth is not longer its engine.

The accumulation of wealth and or power has always been the engine of society. This will not change.