I figured there would be near zero readership over the holidays, people have much better things to do. So, initially, I was going to skip today, but I guess I’ll just ramble a little bit about the future anyways.
We’re at a strange juxtaposition in our history, where our overall trajectory doesn’t look great, but there are still a few things “in the wind” that could be epic game changers.
The biggest is that fusion is looking promising again. Unlimited clean energy would massively disrupt our societies. Lots of science fiction books out there explain why, but the shortest answer is that shared, expensive, infrastructure forces us all together. Break that, and give everybody dependable robots, and we’ll disperse everywhere. Maybe not so great for the planet, but it would definitely make it harder for people to manipulate and exploit many of us.
Another great pending innovation is self-driving vehicles. Forget cars, we could build mobile houses, which would be amazing. It’s like Howl's Moving Castle, but better. Your whole house is a mobile set of rooms that reconnect at different times, in different places. You could share parts of your home with your family or friends. Everything would be constantly mobile, particularly if cheap energy wasn’t a constraint.
In general, robotics are radically improving. They are going to cause massive class upheavals in our societies. Machines caused some trouble long ago, making it harder in some parts of the world for people to find good jobs that provide lifetime stability. Robots will be far more transformative. If they wipe out every sort of blue-collar occupation, there will be a great swath of people who are left without any options. Enough people that it could be a real problem.
But robots also have the potential to do great things. I could see massive salvage yards where millions of robots, some huge, others tiny, take all of our trash and gradually recycle it back into its raw elements. Decreasing-sized robots that separate and chop up stuff, until it has become so small that it can provide near purity. Swarms of little nanorobots partition stuff into different particles. Trash farming. We can’t do this today, the electricity cost is massive, but if that suddenly fell …
Some of the growing ramifications of AI are looking interesting as well. While it still seems to be a little rigid right now, a bunch of these new technologies are also pretty darn amazing. I’m just hoping that they will help lift us up and not just enable the worst exploits. Too many people want to control others for the purpose of extracting wealth; it’s pointless, but they persist. We don’t need more billionaires, instead, we really need to come together to fix our mistakes. To accomplish this we need to be collectively smarter, so maybe AI will actually support that somehow.
As for software, it’s probably time to finally get really serious about it. AI may wipe out programming, but if it doesn’t we really need to do a much better job of engineering these massive systems that rule our lives. As well, we should be actively preventing unscrupulous people from using software for their own malicious purposes. We can’t just keep on quickly hacking out stuff and then walking away. It’s just contributing to the instability of the world.
I guess that’s it. The future world could be really comfortable, smart, and even luxurious, or it may be a horrific police state where everything you do is monitored. Either way, it is software and energy that helps enable these futures.
We’re at a strange juxtaposition in our history, where our overall trajectory doesn’t look great, but there are still a few things “in the wind” that could be epic game changers.
The biggest is that fusion is looking promising again. Unlimited clean energy would massively disrupt our societies. Lots of science fiction books out there explain why, but the shortest answer is that shared, expensive, infrastructure forces us all together. Break that, and give everybody dependable robots, and we’ll disperse everywhere. Maybe not so great for the planet, but it would definitely make it harder for people to manipulate and exploit many of us.
Another great pending innovation is self-driving vehicles. Forget cars, we could build mobile houses, which would be amazing. It’s like Howl's Moving Castle, but better. Your whole house is a mobile set of rooms that reconnect at different times, in different places. You could share parts of your home with your family or friends. Everything would be constantly mobile, particularly if cheap energy wasn’t a constraint.
In general, robotics are radically improving. They are going to cause massive class upheavals in our societies. Machines caused some trouble long ago, making it harder in some parts of the world for people to find good jobs that provide lifetime stability. Robots will be far more transformative. If they wipe out every sort of blue-collar occupation, there will be a great swath of people who are left without any options. Enough people that it could be a real problem.
But robots also have the potential to do great things. I could see massive salvage yards where millions of robots, some huge, others tiny, take all of our trash and gradually recycle it back into its raw elements. Decreasing-sized robots that separate and chop up stuff, until it has become so small that it can provide near purity. Swarms of little nanorobots partition stuff into different particles. Trash farming. We can’t do this today, the electricity cost is massive, but if that suddenly fell …
Some of the growing ramifications of AI are looking interesting as well. While it still seems to be a little rigid right now, a bunch of these new technologies are also pretty darn amazing. I’m just hoping that they will help lift us up and not just enable the worst exploits. Too many people want to control others for the purpose of extracting wealth; it’s pointless, but they persist. We don’t need more billionaires, instead, we really need to come together to fix our mistakes. To accomplish this we need to be collectively smarter, so maybe AI will actually support that somehow.
As for software, it’s probably time to finally get really serious about it. AI may wipe out programming, but if it doesn’t we really need to do a much better job of engineering these massive systems that rule our lives. As well, we should be actively preventing unscrupulous people from using software for their own malicious purposes. We can’t just keep on quickly hacking out stuff and then walking away. It’s just contributing to the instability of the world.
I guess that’s it. The future world could be really comfortable, smart, and even luxurious, or it may be a horrific police state where everything you do is monitored. Either way, it is software and energy that helps enable these futures.
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