The Chicago Tribune toted up some of the predictions people made ten years ago for the world of 2010 — and unless something drastic happens in the next couple of weeks, they're looking a bit optimistic.

Forecaster Faith Popcorn said 90 percent of all consumer goods would be home-delivered. The World Future Society said you'd have a wristwatch-type device that monitored your blood chemistry, while an implanted microchip in your forearm adjusted the lights and heating systems of any building you walked into. Arthur C. Clarke predicted we'd have portable quantum generators that drew on the power of space to give us unlimited clean energy.

Also: Animal-to-human organ transplants would become common by now, school would be year-round and pre-school would be universal, everyone would have wearable computers and 7 percent of cars would be internet-enabled, and "Smellyvision" would allow you to smell cooking shows.

The funny part is, Tribune columnist Eric Zorn starts out by saying these predictions are all for "the next ten years" — without mentioning they were made ten years ago. So as you read the list of predictions, you're left wondering just how plausible these predictions are for the year 2020. And in many cases, they seem at least somewhat believable. Does that mean the predictions were possibly accurate, but just too optimistic time-wise? Or are we just incurably optimistic ourselves? [Chicago Tribune]

"At the Toronto [World Future Society] conference, veteran futurist Joseph Coates put it this way: "Being right or wrong isn't so much the point as being useful. The ultimate purpose is to change people's minds."

"Or as Kenneth Boulding, an influential 20th century futurist, once said: 'The future will always surprise us, but we must not let it dumbfound us.'" — Michael Rogers, writing in MSNBC

Sea City Of The Future, from Positive Negative

In a bizarre lawsuit filing, Global Findability says it's already patented something called "Integrated Information Processing System For Geospatial Media." And the lawsuit claims that Knowing includes (and therefore sells) "geospatial object entity code", or "geocode" for short. In other words — those GPS coordinates for future disasters, embedded in the 1950s scrap of paper? It's a real thing. Explains Global Findability:

Upon information and belief, defendants Summit and Escape, LLC, have made, used, offered to sell, and/or sold, and continues to make use, offer to sell, and/or sell, the Film, within this Judicial District, including, without limitation, the Geocode® product that infringes Global Findability's Patents.

Actually, judging from the patent itself, they've just patented a method of scheduling filming of particular events by location and time, and embedding location and time data in the recording afterwards. But it's kind of a confusing patent, to be honest.

Apparently Global Findability is not a totally fly-by-night operation, filing frivolous patents and lawsuits for fun. According to the Hollywood Reporter, its board includes tech mover-and-shaker Peter Morville, and it's represented by attorney Federick Samuels, who used to work for the Trademark And Patent Office.

So does this mean that Global Findability knows where the next deadly hurricane or plane crash will hit? And they're holding out on us? [Lawsuit Filing via THREsq]

Remember, this is a personal bot, so you couldn't have it do things like run the US economy or reorganize the military. What I thought was interesting was that the top two uses that people voted for - housework and sex work - are traditionally "feminine" forms of labor. We want our robots to replace housewives and hookers.

Of course, we don't know for sure if these results were skewed by the options on offer. For example, we don't see any poll options for stereotypically "masculine" jobs like "fix my computer," "do household repairs," or "work a job you hate all day to earn money." I mean, given the choice, would you rather have a personal robot who does your housework, or a personal robot who does your crappy day job so you can stay home and work on that artistic masterpiece or go surfing?

via IEET

People often lump Tierney together with George Will, as global-warming doubters at major newspapers who use somewhat specious arguments to downplay the scientific consensus that we're slow-cooking our planet. But Tierney's position as the Times' science columnist gives him more authority than Will's as a random TV pundit. But also, the thing I find fascinating about Tierney is that even as he goes to great lengths to paint the evidence about global warming as mere hype, he's also eager to buy into the hype whenever there's a claim that new technology will deliver us to a beautiful future, without having to make any hard choices. It's hard not to believe the two things are related.

Reading Tierney's columns and blog posts on global warming, a few things become clear. He's a global warming skeptic, rather than an out-and-out denier. (In one blog post, he says he believes there's "some risk" that global warming will be a danger.) But he's given tons of exposure and legitimacy to outright deniers, including some groups with ties to the oil industry. And he's done a lot to paint the scientific consensus on global warming as pure hype and conformism.

In Tierney's world, the reason the majority of scientists agree that global warming is a worsening crisis is dick-measuring. In a column on Obama's science advisor, John Holdren, Tierney spends most of the column quoting Roger Pielke, a climate researcher who's been one of the most vocal critics of the idea that the polar ice caps are melting. According to Pielke, scientists present conclusions about global warming as definitive not because the data supports them, but just to boost their own "authority in the political debate" and tarnish their opponents.

And Tierney implies that scientists sign on with the global-warming orthodoxy because that's where the money is. (One blog post is provocatively titled, "Global Warming Payola?".) And the idea that we're cooking the planet is sold to the public by taking advantage of natural disasters and tragic images of sad polar bears:

Two studies by NASA and university scientists last year concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little attention - and were certainly no match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.

Recently, Tierney has also been pounding on the common conservative meme that the same scientists who now warn about global warming were warning, in the 1970s, that we faced a new human-made ice age. Since they were so wrong back then, and have changed their tune so drastically, the implication is, why should we believe them now? (The meme is massively overplayed, but even if it were true, so what? Smart people adjust their views when they receive new information. And when the data becomes overwhelming, only idiots and tools stay agnostic.)

You should definitely read Andrew Leonard's takedown (at Salon.com) of one of Tierney's columns, in which he basically claims that the more energy we use, the faster we'll solve any environmental problems — because we'll all get richer, and rich people demand clean air. (Shorter version: CO2 is odorless and colorless, so relying on wealthy people's distaste for smog won't do much good.)

I'm not just picking on Tierney because he's the science columnist at one of our biggest newspapers — I'm fascinated with him because while he paints global-warming concerns as pure hype, he's also one of the biggest boosters of the hype around the Singularity, as simplified by Ray Kurzweil and others. Reading Tierney's writing makes me wonder if the two things (skepticism on pressing, real problems, and wide-eyed enthusiasm for fictional, easy solutions) go hand in hand.

In fact, Tierney has explicitly pushed the idea of a technological Singularity, happening by 2030, as the alternative to neo-Malthusian warnings that overpopulation will result in starvation and environmental disasters. In one blog post, "Malthus Vs. The Singularity," Tierney cites a paper by Robin Hanson in the IEEE Spectrum saying that the Singularity could speed up our economic growth so much, our economy would double within a month. (Or even a week.) Says Tierney, this provides an alternative to that downer Malthusian view:

Now, you could argue that his projections of artificial intelligence are as speculative and unprecedented as the Malthusian visions of resource depletion. But I'd bet on him over the Malthusians. Unlike Malthus, we can look around and see that we already have the energy and technology to feed a larger population than exists on Earth today. And we can look at Ray Kurzweil's graphs showing exponential growth in computing power for more than a century, with no apparent end in sight.

Here's a smaller version of the Ray Kurzweil graph he's talking about:

Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, was a frequent touchstone in Tierney's column and blog posts in the summer of 2008, although not so much since then. And the idea that you can extrapolate from existing trends in computing power into the next century is a cornerstone of Kurzweil's prediction that machines smarter than humans are coming in the next few decades. (Actually, the graph maps "calculations per second per $1,000," which seems a tad arbitrary — and how do you measure how many human brains $1,000 will buy you?)

Tierney eagerly seizes on Kurzweil's predictions that rapidly accelerating technological advances will solve all of our problems — he's devoted a column and at least one blog post to Kurzweil's Law Of Accelerating Returns, which says that progress has been speeding up since the beginning of life on Earth. (There are more charts, which show the timeline between multi-cellular organisms and the development of mammals, versus between the Industrial Revolution and the development of the personal computer. Guess which took longer?) According to Kurzweil, the time between Paradigm Shifts has been halving with each decade, and soon our paradigms will be shifting constantly.

Among other things, that means we'll have unlimited clean energy soon, life expectancy will start shooting up every year "faster than you're aging," and all of our problems will be solved. In another blog post, Tierney addresses his commenters who doubt Kurzweil's Law. (Don't they realize it's a Law?):

In response to my Findings column about [Kurzweil] and a post about his graphs, some readers were skeptical. Francis and others insisted it's naive to assume exponential progress can go on - that, just as bacteria proliferating in a petri dish will eventually exhaust the resources, we too will hit a limit.

I think these skeptics are missing the lessons of history, but before explaining why I like Mr. Kurzweil's theory more than theirs, let me grant them a couple of points. First, there is no guarantee that exponential increases in computer power will continue, or that the exponential growth in computer science will be matched in other fields. One of the most common mistakes of technoprophets is to assume that the the technology du jour will shape the future. When radio was invented, futurists envisioned locomotives powered by radio waves; when atomic power was discovered, there were predictions of nuclear-powered car in every garage.

Also, futurists tend to underestimate the social and political obstacles to progress, so they're often too optimistic about how soon people's lives will be transformed. Just because new tools exist doesn't mean they'll be used widely. Donald Norman, a technology expert profiled in my Findings column in December, says the chief problems to overcome in introducing new technologies involve people, not machines.

That said, after watching the impact of computers on so many fields, I share Mr. Kurzweil's belief that these tools are especially transformative and that change is just going to accelerate. Yes, there are physical limits to what can done with computer chips. But for a century now, each time computer engineers ran into previous physical limits - with the original electro-mechanical machines, with vacuum tubes, with transistors - they jumped to a new technology, and they're already working on successors to today's chips. It may seem naive to expect continuing leaps forward, but I think it's naive to ignore the trend of the past century - or the past 10,000 years.

The Cassandras have been warning of limits and resource depletion and population crashes for thousands of years, but as Julian Simon explained, we've kept exceeding limits and finding new resources and extending our life expectancy. The new problems lead to new solutions that leave us better off in the long run. Today's Cassandras are focused on climate change, which could bring real problems, but to think these problems are insurmountable seems to me as short-sighted as the prophecies of the 1960s ("overpopulation" leading to worldwide famines) and 1970s (the exhaustion of energy supplies).

If anything, climate change seems much more manageable than previous "crises" because the chief consequences are so far in the future. We have decades to figure out ways to deal with it: to find carbon-free sources of energy, to develop techniques for removing carbon from the atmosphere or geoengineering the climate, or simply to adapt. These are all formidable challenges, but our tools for dealing with them are going to be improving exponentially, as Mr. Kurzweil argues.

So once again, you see the connection — even as Tierney says that we have decades to figure out what to do about climate change, he's also tremendously excited about a Singularity in which all our troubles will melt away and magic robots will carry us into the cyber-heaven on their shoulders. Rather than viewing the Singularity as a huge disruption, one which we can't possibly understand in advance, as many science fiction writers have done, Tierney buys into the hype that the Singularity will give us unlimited rice pudding.

You'll notice the mention of "geoengineering" in that last paragraph — it's another one of Tierney's favorite pie-in-the-sky themes. If it really does turn out that CO2 in the atmosphere is causing some problems, there's a potential fix that doesn't involve making any sacrifices:

Originally called geoengineering, this approach used to be dismissed as science fiction fantasies: cooling the planet with sun-blocking particles or shades; tinkering with clouds to make them more reflective; removing vast quantities of carbon from the atmosphere.

Today this approach goes by the slightly less grandiose name of climate engineering, and it is looking more practical. Several recent reviews of these ideas conclude that cooling the planet would be technically feasible and economically affordable.

Possible ideas include lofting aerosol particles into the ionosphere to reflect shortwave radiation back into space, spraying seawater mist into low-lying clouds, to brighten them and reflect sunlight away from the Earth, and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Scientists have pooh-poohed the idea of geoengineering because — wait for it! — they don't want to lose the prestige and money they've gotten from warning about carbon emissions. But there are real reasons to think that geo-engineering without reduction in carbon emissions would be worse than doing nothing — and that's if it even succeeds. Futurist Jamais Cascio, author of Hacking The Earth, writes in the Wall Street Journal recently:

To be clear, geoengineering won't solve global warming. It's not a "techno-fix." It would be enormously risky and almost certainly lead to troubling unforeseen consequences. And without a doubt, the deployment of geoengineering would lead to international tension. Who decides what the ideal temperature would be? Russia? India? The U.S.? Who's to blame if Country A's geoengineering efforts cause a drought in Country B?

Also let's be clear about one other thing: We will still have to radically reduce carbon emissions, and do so quickly. We will still have to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, and adopt substantially more sustainable agricultural methods. We will still have to deal with the effects of ecosystems damaged by carbon overload...

[Geoengineering] would simply hold temperatures down temporarily, doing nothing about the causes of climate change, let alone ocean acidification and other symptoms of a carbon overdose. We can't let ourselves slip back into business-as-usual complacency, because we'd simply be setting ourselves up for a far greater disaster down the road.

Cascio explains further here:

I'm an optimistic person — but my optimism comes from a faith that we, as human beings, will figure out a way to change what we're doing before it's too late. I don't believe there are magical "get out of eco-hell free" cards lying around, or that the Singularity is going to solve all of our problems. The Singularity has given us some fantastic science-fiction novels by people like Vernor Vinge, Rudy Rucker and Charles Stross — but it's not going to come true, any more than the novels 1984 or 2001 were accurate descriptions of those years in real life. But even if computers did become smarter than humans in 100 years' time — for some values of "smarter" — I'm not sure that would save us from the results of our own fecklessness. For one thing, who's to say those super-smart computers would care whether the Earth was habitable for humans?

You can certainly look at our history, as a species, and see an unbroken line of progress. But you can also see many eras where we've driven ourselves into a technological hole (the Dark Ages come to mind) or engineered ourselves into mass starvation (China's Great Leap Forward was a purely human-made catastrophe.) There's certainly no guarantee that we get to have an unbroken upward progression going on for ever and ever.

We'll get a beautiful future — but only if we work for it. The idea that a wonderful, shining future will be handed to us, or that the awful dilemmas we're facing as a species will just go away, feels worse than foolish. It feels like sabotaging the future, for the sake of a bit more comfort and a false sense of security today.

If Tierney only used his bully pulpit at the Times to raise doubts about global warming, he'd just be one of many obstacles to saving our planet. But the fact that he's simultaneously guzzling the Kool Aid on things like Ray Kurzweil's Panglossian Law of Perfect Awesomeness and the mad-science easy fix for global warming makes him something much worse. His cheery outlook is actually helping to ruin our future.

Krugman came to Worldcon for two events: a conversation with his favorite living science-fiction author, Charles Stross (which we sadly missed because we were on an airplane) and a one-person talk about science fiction and economics. At the latter, he started out by saying Isaac Asimov's Foundation series inspired his decision to become an economist, since you couldn't actually study to become a psychohistorian. (He's said this many times before, and in fact, said it again in this past weekend's New York Times Book Review.)

But the most surprising part of Krugman's talk was his assertion that the world is actually changing less quickly than in the past. "The pace of change has actually, generation by generation, been slowing down," he claimed. "The world of today is not as different from the world of 1959 as the world of 1959 was from 1909."

So let's say that you travel 30 years into the future and find yourself in a shopping mall. You'll be astounded at the "great gizmos" that are for sale there, but you'll still be able to recognize it as a shopping mall, said Krugman. On the other hand, lots of trends are likely to come to a head over the next few decades, including climate change and peak oil, and they could result in a drastically different world.

Krugman just cleaned out his library and found he had four copies of tons of books published over the last couple decades, since he gets two advance review copies and two copies of the finished book. And he found himself tossing out duplicate copies of tons of futurist books that were depressingly off the mark about predicting the main concern of the 1990s or 2000s. (e.g. war with Japan.) So he's leery of trying to predict the future.

And of course, science fiction was ridiculously over-optimistic about the world of 2009, with talk of space colonization and undersea cities, and yet missed some huge changes which really have happened. "I remember reading something which had all these people flying around between planets, and using slide rules to calculate their next course," said Krugman.

We went to a Worldcon panel called "The Singularity: Are We Getting Any Closer?" featuring Farthing author Jo Walton and Julian Comstock/Spin author Robert Charles Wilson. They talked a lot about the pitfalls and plausibility of the Singularity, the idea that a drastic change in technology will result in a world we can barely visualize, full of sentient machines and vastly improved longevity, among other things.

Many people seem to think the Singularity is inevitable, noted Walton, but the panel was aimed at questioning whether we're any closer to it now than when Vernor Vinge pioneered it in his 1986 novel Marooned In Realtime.

For her part, Walton argues the Singularity is an interesting concept for science-fiction storytelling, but "it isn't going to happen. It's a completely mistaken concept [and] we've made no real progress towards it." The idea is based on a false extrapolation, similar to saying that since we could go 30 MPH 100 years ago, and 400 MPH 50 years ago, now we should be traveling at the speed of light.

And because people believe the Singularity is inevitable, some argue that you can't write about the future at all — since we can't imagine life after the Singularity, it's almost impossible to write about. Walton worries that this idea is the "turd in the punchbowl" of future-set science fiction.

Adds Walton: "To be fair, Vinge has written some excellent fiction within that constraint [of assuming the Singularity happens in 20 years], in the same way people write sonnets — but a sonnet is not the only poem you would want to write."

Wilson pointed out that if the Singularity really is coming, then it's inevitable — so there's no need for people to be cheerleaders for it. He compared it to "telepathy or dianetics," science-fictional ideas which some people adopted "with religious fervor." A core question in science fiction is "where is our technology going, and what can we do with it," noted Wilson. "The Singularity is just one answer."

Panelist Christopher Carson pointed out that the science fiction section in bookstores lately consists of nothing but "transhuman science fiction or urban fantasy." People tend to see the Singularity coming partly because devices are becoming more complicated — but that's often an example of "feature creep," like the fact that your cellphone now has a host of functions you don't understand and didn't ask for. That's not really a sign of progress, because those extra functions were designed by some marketing person somewhere, he pointed out.

The Singularity is notoriously hard to define, but people often say that you could bring Socrates forward in time and take him to Worldcon, and he would understand what it was about, more or less. But you couldn't take a goldfish to Worldcon and have it understand what was going on. A present-day human, visiting a post-Singularity world, would be more like that goldfish than Socrates.

But Walton says this is a loaded example, because Socrates is an extraordinary example. A "random Greek person" from Socrates' era might have a much harder time understanding Worldcon.

"The question I sometimes ask myself is, How would the Singularity work in Darfur?" says Wilson.

And there was lots of talk about the potential downsides of getting the Internet in your head, complete with phishing, spam, malware and bad memes. Says Walton, the first 100,000 people who get the Internet in their heads, without any terrible, life-ending mishaps, will have a really hard time upgrading later on. "Imagine an outdated computer in your head."

Slate talks to GBN, a corporate futurist organization, and despite being professional doomsayers, the GBN gang doesn't see the U.S.A. falling apart over 100 years as being that likely. But GBN does see a few crazy out there ideas for how the U.S. could end — including the rise of a new class of genetically modified super-humans, like Khan Noonien Singh, who take over the entire world and crush everybody else beneath their heels. But the four main scenarios GBN sees as being likely are:

• Collapse, due to massive, intractable corruption.
• Friendly breakup, because the U.S. is too big a country to govern properly.
• Global governance, in which U.N.-like institutions become much more powerful to grapple with global crises like climate change.
• Global conquest, in which a Hitler-esque dictator actually conquers the whole world.

It's probably true, though, that a country with oceans on two sides and relatively friendly neighbors, plus a fairly robust democracy, has a good chance of surviving over the next 100 years, as GBN says. On the other hand, predicting anything 100 years out (as the GBN people admit) is basically like throwing darts in the dark, drunk, using your feet. And I suspect that if fuel becomes much more expensive in the coming decades, the huge distances across the United States could become a lot more daunting and regional tensions could get a lot more pronounced. But there's a reason why medium-near-future science fiction is so hard to write.

Image by Something_Clever on Flickr. [Slate]

The Newsweek article is mostly pretty respectful and contains tons of information — I didn't know that Kurzweil had invented the flat-bed scanner and was friends with Stevie Wonder — but it does quote critic PZ Myers, who basically says Kurzweil is a bit of a kook. And then they go back and test the famously optimistic futurist's predictions against reality, and the results are not so good:

[W]hen you go back and check Kurzweil's previous books, you find that many of his predictions turned out to be wrong-not just a little bit wrong, but wildly, laughably wrong. During the height of the dotcom boom in 1998, Kurzweil predicted that the economy would keep on booming right through 2009 (and on to 2019, for that matter) and that one U.S. company (he didn't say which) would have a market capitalization of more than $1 trillion. Not even close. Kurzweil also predict-ed that by 2009 a top supercomputer would be capable of performing 20 quadrillion operations per second (20 petaflops in computer jargon), the same as the human brain. In fact, the top supercomputer just broke the one-petaflop mark-though Kurzweil says he considers all of Google to be a giant supercomputer and that it is, indeed, capable of performing 20 petaflops. Kurzweil also predicted that by now our cars would be able to drive themselves by communicating with intelligent sensors embedded in highways, and that speech recognition would be in widespread use. Neither has happened, but he insists they're both right around the corner. ("I was off by a few years," he says.)

And according to Newsweek, a New York screening of the Kurzweil documentary Transcendant Man turned a bit contentious:

As for fears that computers will kill us, or keep us as slaves, Kurzweil insists the computers will want us around.

Kurzweil took some serious heat on this last point during a panel discussion after the premiere of Transcendent Man at the Tribeca Film Festival last month. Some leading artificial-intelligence experts were in the audience, and they think we are racing toward a dystopian future. But Kurzweil is having none of that-he thinks the "man-machine civilization" is going to be wonderful. He doesn't argue. He just sits there, smiling. Ask him a pointed question and he just dodges it and launches into another monologue. He has no doubt. None.

I can't find it in the online version, but apparently the Newsweek article includes a sidebar listing all of Kurzweil's past predictions, including many that turned out to be wrong. It's this sidebar that he takes the most issue with, in his new open letter to Newsweek, which is probably too long for the magazine to print:

I appreciate your bringing my ideas to your readership. However, there are numerous inaccuracies and misrepresentations in Daniel Lyons' story. For example, of the many accurate predictions for the year 2009 that I wrote in my book The Age of Spiritual Machines, written in the late 1990s, only three are listed in the sidebar "Kurzweil's Crystal Ball" while a larger number are listed as "false." Of these "false" predictions, a number are in fact true, and others are only a few years away. For example, "Computers will be commonly embedded in clothing and jewelry" is listed as false. When I wrote this prediction, portable computers were large heavy devices carried under your arm. Today they are indeed embedded in shirt pockets, jacket pockets, and hung from belt loops. Colorful iPod nano models are worn on blouses as jewelry pins, health monitors are woven into undergarments, there are now computers in hearing aids, and there are many other examples.

"Most portable computers will not have keyboards" is listed as "False." When I wrote this, every portable computer had an (alphanumeric) keyboard. Today the majority of portable computers such as MP3 players, cameras, phones, game players and many other varieties do not have keyboards. The full quote of my prediction makes it clear that I am referring to computerized devices that "make phone calls, access the web, monitor body functions, provide directions, and provide a variety of other services."

One of Kurzweil's arguments in his defense: he predicted the Internet would "take off" in the late 1980s, when few people believed that. (Actually, a lot of college campuses and even some high schools were actively on the net in the late 1980s, and you already had networks of FTP sites and Gophers and so on.) On the other hand, computing has progressed much faster than a lot of people would have predicted a couple decades ago — so it's not a bad time to be an unalloyed optimist.

Better to keep things safely distant, like Starship Troopers did (set in the 23rd century), or ambiguous (Gattaca could be 10 years from now or 100). Still, specificity is hard to resist. Here's our timeline.

EXPIRED FUTURES

1973 - IT! The Terror from Beyond Space (made in 1958)
Astronauts complete not one but TWO missions to Mars. Too bad they're still using bolt-action rifles to fight the rubbery monster that snuck onboard.

1980 - Just Imagine (1930)
Everyone has serial numbers instead of names and pops pills instead of eating. Strangely, no one has heard of Michael Jackson.


1984 - "1984" (1948)
Mind-controlling propaganda infiltrates every aspect of daily life—but why is everyone so glum? MTV isn't that bad.

1993 - Robocop (1987)
Military robots, venal tech moguls and privatized police (not to mention insane TV hosts and ads in urinals)? They're crazy!... not to have set it in 2008 instead.

1995 - Quantum Leap (1989)
Time travel, courtesy of an A.I. named Ziggy and a dude with a hologram-projecting PDA. Sure beats Netscape and the Newton.


1997 - Escape from NY (1981), Predator 2 (1990), Terminator 2 (1991)
Convicts control Manhattan, a fishnet-wearing alien terrorizes LA, and Skynet nukes the whole world on "Judgment Day." We've had better years.

1999 - Strange Days (1995)
Black-market brainwave recordings let you see through someone else's eyes...and then hurl because of the shaky pics. (What, no built-in image stabilizer?)


2000 - Metropolis (1927)
Plutocrats control a shimmering cityscape, supported by a dronelike underclass. We didn't know they spoke German in Dubai!

2001 - 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Supercomputer HAL takes mankind "beyond the infinite." Meanwhile, Kozmo.com takes our deli order.

2005 - Bicentennial Man (1999)
An insipid robo-Mrs. Doubtfire in every home? We'll stick with our Roomba, thanks.

SOON TO EXPIRE

2009 - Freejack (1992)
Transhumanism meets time-travel: Old rich guys will pluck young replacement bodies from the past. Does Ray Kurzweil know about this?

2010 - District B13 (2004)
Sure, Sarkozy's got a temper — but we doubt he'll clean up Paris's slums with a neutron bomb.

2013 - A Scanner Darkly (2006)
A schizo-hallucinogenic drug war? Maybe. Robert Downey Jr. still nuttier than a Payday bar? Definitely.

2015 - Back to the Future II (1989)
Skip the self-lacing Nikes and focus on Mr. Fusion. The clock's ticking, science!


John Pavlus is a science writer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn.

Apart from the obvious question — what is cyberbreath, and don't they make a cyber-mouthwash for that? — I have to admit I'm a bit skeptical of Rothblatt's gung ho predictions. For one thing, she quotes Ray "Unlimited Rice Pudding" Kurzweil. For another, I'm not sure her understanding of Moore's law is quite rock solid. Here's how Intel describes Moore's Law:

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore is a visionary. In 1965, his prediction, popularly known as Moore's Law, states that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years. And Intel has kept that pace for nearly 40 years.

And here's how Moore himself expressed it, in a 1965 article in Electronics Magazine:

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year (see graph on next page). Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.

Here's how Martine Rothblatt interprets it:

For example, my one year-old computer has about 1/100,000th of the capability of a human mind (its processing speed is about that fraction of the number of human brain neural connections, although its software is in some areas pretty advanced). In other words, it has only .001% of the capability of a human mind. It's a rodent. I could go buy a new computer today that has 2/100,000th or .002% of the capability of a human mind. At this rate, with the way my linear mind works, I would expect to be able to buy a mindclone in 99,998 more years. What, me worry! Our linear minds take our most recent experience – such as going from a 1/100,000th of a human mind computer to a 2/100,000th of a human mind computer in one year – and extrapolate it forward such that we think it will take 998 more years to get 1% of a human mind, another 1000 years to get to 2% of a human mind, another 1000 years to get to 3% of a human mind, and so on.

In fact, though, information technology does not grow linearly, but exponentially. This means, according to "Moore's Law", information technology doubles each 1-2 years – something very different from growing linearly. Because computer capability doubles it means next year I will get not 3/100,000th of a human brain computer, but 4/100,000th of one. Exponential growth means the year after that I will get not 5/100,000th of a human brain computer, but 8/100,000th of one. With information technology, I can expect to reach mindclone computing as rapidly as this:

Years From Now Fraction of a Mindclone
Next Year 4/100,000th
Year After 8,100,000th
Third Year 16/100,000th
Fourth Year 32/100,000th
Fifth Year 64/100,000th
Sixth Year 128/100,000th
Seventh Year 256/100,000th
Eighth Year 512/100,000th
Ninth Year 1000/100,000th
Tenth Year 2000/100,000th
Eleventh Year 4000/100,000th
Twelfth Year 8000/100,000th
Thirteenth Year 16,000/100,000th
Fourteenth Year 32,000/100,000th
Fifteenth Year 64,000/100,000th
Sixteenth Year 128,000/100,000th = MINDCLONE

Three clarifying comments are in order. First, the rounding down from 1,024 to 1,000 in the ninth year is just to make the arithmetic easier to follow. Second, while Moore's Law says that the doubling occurs every 1-2 years, in the example given above I showed the doubling every year. The effect of making it every two years would simply be to postpone mindclones to 32 years from now instead of 16, or to 24 years from now if we use a doubling period of every 18 months. The important point is that mindclones are around the corner – not in some other millennium, or even in some other generation. This is about our lives.

I love the way her little explanation goes: "Year sixteen: MINDCLONE." So there you have it. We have exactly sixteen years before Skynet nukes us all into the stone age. [IEET]

Not according to Igor Panarin, a former KGB analyst and dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's diplomat school. Like Ernest Callenbach's seminal book Ecotopia, Panarin foresees the Western states splitting off to form their own independent Republic of California. But he sees them either becoming part of China, or under Chinese influence, not becoming an eco-friendly paradise. Meanwhile, the midwestern states will become part of Canada or under Canadian influence, the states around Texas will become part of Mexico or under Mexican influence, and the East Coast liberal elites will finally join Europe. (Oh, and Russia gets Alaska back, making Sarah Palin's boast that she can see Russia a reality at last.)

It's all pretty fanciful stuff, although I think the timetable is what makes it especially ludicrous. If he'd placed his predictions of fracturing in the 2020s or 2030s, it would be somewhat harder to dispute them. What makes Panarin's doomsaying somewhat more significant is that the Russian state-owned media has been pushing it hard, and he's been invited to lecture on it constantly. So the real news is that Russia is promoting these crackpotty views as quasi-official state futurism.

Panarin compares himself to the people who predicted the fall of the Soviet Union a decade or two before it happened — which may be the real reason his views are so popular in Russia now. It's our turn to feel the ground collapse out from under us. I'm just imagining the poor Europeans getting stuck with the hellhole of Conneticut, and having no idea what to do with it. [WSJ]

Writes Caden:

If environmental stewardship obligates us to be mindful of future generations in making our day-to-day decisions, what should we do? Should we be recycling paper and preventing people from building parking lots to save trees? Or should we acknowledge that the planet will be destroyed sooner or later and try to find ways to build something like Battlestar Galactica so the species will be preserved?

...

At first glance, the goal of recycling more and conserving more seems appropriate, even desirable. As Landsburg's example shows, however, advocates of conservation do not have the information they need to make the right decision if property rights aren't clearly defined. Further, as Block's example shows, if we really are to care about future generations and sacrifice on their behalf by not discounting the future, the inevitable destruction of the Earth when the sun dies out suggests a radically different approach. If we are really as concerned about our multi-great grandchildren who will presumably inhabit the earth in several billion years, we shouldn't be worried about recycling paper. We should be worried about building Battlestar Galactica.

You have to admit, he raises good points. Just ask, what would Adama do? BSG blueprints from Sexton Design. [Mises.org]

You shouldn't even bother trying to predict the future of technological progress, argues The Space Merchants author Frederick Pohl:

No sensible science-fiction writer tries to predict anything. Neither do the smartest futurologists. What those people do is try to imagine every important thing that may happen (so as to do in the present things which may encourage the good ones and forestall the bad) and that's what SF writers do in their daily toil.

Chiming in Nancy Kress (Dogs) says it's foolish to try to predict the course of technology more than about 15-20 years out.

Ringworld author Larry Niven is more sanguine, laying down a couple of iron-clad rules for writers seeking to predict a future technology:
1) Think about basic human goals that will never go away, like immortality or instant travel. Then think about how someone could make them happen.
2) You can't invent the car without also inventing traffic jams and gas shortages.

The whole article is worth checking out, if only to see Halting State author Charles Stross say, "Donald Rumsfeld was right." [CIO]

Crack the bubbly! Demand will continue to increase, and markets will become more and more sophisticated. Globalization will roar forwards. Says the executive summary:

Based on responses from over 150 manufacturing companies in eight countries, the study identifies a number of key findings about possible changes in the coming years:

— Manufacturing will become increasingly global by 2020, with around 80 % of manufacturers expected to have multi-country operations, compared with just over half today.

— Supply chains will also increase in complexity and consolidate. Half the companies surveyed said they will be using fewer suppliers by 2020, but 40 % said they will be using more distributors as increased competition drives them to reach new markets.

— Manufacturers appear uncertain what actions to take about green issues, but as political and social pressure increases around emissions reduction, urgent action will be required to reach 2020 targets.

— Differences between the manufacturing industries in developed and emerging markets will also continue to evolve.

I actually feel a bit sorry for these consultants, who probably did most of their survey before large chunks of the global economy started to hit the fan a few months ago. The lead time on a big doorstopper of a report like this is probably months and months. But it does show the ever-present danger of attempting to extrapolate from last year's trends into the future. (And, just maybe, why I was wise not to go into management consulting after all.)

Another thing occurs to me: Did none of the 150 companies surveyed for this report think transportation costs might have gone up by 2020? I mean, I know peak oil is still just a theory, but it doesn't seem entirely far-fetched to think that the cheap transportation that allows us to make a widget in Asia and ship it for assembly to South America, after which it gets sold in the U.S., will be a lot harder to manage by 2020.

Note: The image up top is from a different report, "The Future Of Manufacturing," from last February. [Consultant News]