Quote Originally Posted by boost
Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy
Also, robots. This shit is going to take off. Long before 2100 there will be sex-bots indistinguishable from the real thing.

The moral implications of technology are unreal. But I don't care, gimme a sex-bot IMO. I'll never leave the house, I don't give a fuck
you


are


awesome.
lol thx

Speaking of sex-bots, assuming they were close enough to the real thing, the sex/companionship would be WAY better than with humans. This is because we could program them to pretty much do our bidding. I mean you could program a sex-bot to love the way you smell, taste, sound, etc. They could be programmed to literally do and 'feel' however we wanted them. This is pretty sci-fi stuff, but it's also pretty legit. However, this is assuming it's possible to even create super advanced AI that doesn't become it's own egocentric entity, which I take contention with. I do, however, think that there will be a point before this egocentric entity AI where we could maintain robot intelligence while still being very human-like. Technological singularity and AI implications are pretty crazy though.

It also wouldn't be THAT hard to make them close enough to the real thing. This is due to human perception actually being pretty unrefined. We may think we're super perceptive, but really, our senses are pretty crap. They're fuzzy, they trick us all the time, and this has actually been a positive evolutionary trait allowing us to be less specialized, and thus more adaptable.

This partly explains why we like things like plastic surgery or photography or video games. They're not the real thing, but they're close enough that we can't tell enough of a difference to not elicit a biological reaction from them. AI is expected to pass the turing test by about 2020-2030, this means that in conversation it's indistinguishable from humans, and we've already got really human-like synthetic flesh. Really, the toughest part of robots is mechanics. We're making great progress, but still kinda lagging. I don't know much about it, but let's just say that machines have yet to be 'genuine' and 'asymmetrical' like biological organisms. The machines of today are way better than the ones of a decade ago, however.


edit(just an editing kinda day for me I guess): your predictions, in terms of the time lines youve laid out, seem really hopeful to me. However thats my super uneducated opinion. And then again in 19018 if someone predicted the present no one would have believed them.
The thing is that we understand science WAY more now than ever before. With each passing decade our understanding of scientific and technological principles improves dramatically. This is one thing the lay just don't realize about science: it's about deeper and deeper refinement, not blind guessing.

But it's even more than that. The travel of information, development and advancement of computers, and increase of wealth and education has made technology develop quicker now than ever before. The 2010s are going to see greater technological development than any other decade previously, and the 2020s will see more than the 2010s, and the increase in development will be an exponential one.

I linked a video a while back on the exponential function related to peak oil. It outlined the phenomenal and unfathomable impacts of exponential growth. Essentially, every doubling time sees growth greater than the entire previous growth. I don't know what our doubling time is (some say it's one decade), and it's a difficult thing to quantify practically, but the point is one of exponential growth and how crazy it is.

All the predictions I laid out are held by a chunk of scientists in the field. Science by nature is very conservative, while reality has shown that it is substantially more liberal than scientific conservative estimates, and those who get into the business of speculating do so from a very educated position. Not everybody's right, not everybody can be, but predictions are integral parts of science, so they do know how to do it. Most of it is simple mathematical calculations. Like we know how fast we can sequence DNA, we know how quickly our ability to sequence DNA is increasing, and we know how much DNA there is to sequence for certain issues. Back in the 90s we had the Human Genome Project. It took like 5 years to sequence the human genome. Today we're working on sequencing every known cancer genome. This is like a 300k times more genome to process than the human genome, but we estimate we'll be done is about 5 years (don't quote me on the exact numbers because I've forgotten them, but I'm close enough)

I could go on and on, but I really shouldn't provide so much text. Basically, computer advancement (which is going to continue for a looooooooong time) makes technological advancements INSANE. The year 2050 is going to OUT OF THIS WORLD. Did you know that the computers that landed Apollo 11 on the moon are as powerful as a modern hand held calculator? A CALCULATOR!!! Medicine is taking off due to finally integrating computers with biology; we haven't even seen the medical revolution yet, we've only just begun sequencing DNA and understanding genetics, but we're doing it at insane speeds due to computers.

And then there is going to be a MASSIVE revolution when we have a paradigm shift in computing technology. We are near to being able to stack computer chips in 3D. This will change everything, and make computer power/intelligence so much better. I can't find the article, but there's a company working on mapping the brain and sort of 'reverse engineering' a computer based on the brain. They think they will have it figured out before 2020. If they do then computing power will be on an entirely different level than current. Or there's the quantum computer. I don't know much about it, but this to would just destroy our current abilities, and scientists are optimistic about getting this perhaps in the next decade or so.

We're not even going to recognize the future, and this is due to the massive exponential growth of scientific progress to which we see no end in sight.

A rule of thumb could be as follows: when we discover something, it takes us 20-30 years to understand that something, then it takes us another 20-30 years to engineer that something.

I would also like to add that lay people like to say 'but hai we thought we'd be in flying cars by now omgwtfbbq happened thereeee??'. Well, reality is that we never thought that. Uneducated people thought that, not scientists. The public read those types of predictions in popular magazines, not scientific journals. If scientists predict something, you can rest assured that it's extremely likely. Having said that, not every scientist predicts what I've said, however, that's because most scientists don't predict anything. Like I said, science is really conservative, they like to stay out of the unknown. But the ones who do predict, at the very least say that shit is going to be WHACK in the future