
Reasons to expect the next 10 years to be more exciting than the last - revorad
http://www.hplusmagazine.com/editors-blog/top-10-reasons-expect-next-10-years-be-more-exciting-last
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DanielBMarkham
I can't wait for the next ten years -- it should be a blast.

Having said that, I don't think its going to be all roses. One commenter made
the analogy that the previous decade was like 1900-1910. I kind of get that
feeling as well -- rise of the mob, rise of anarchy, old structures not
working like they should, vast amounts of change and upheaval in the air.

Overall, I think it's going to be awesome. But I would just be cautious,
that's all. Not everything is going to be good, and there are going to be some
really gnarly and ugly things we're going to see in the next ten years along
with the great stuff.

I would note that the adjective "exciting" can be taken in many different
ways.

~~~
kiba
My guess:

Expect raw capitalism to re-invade the world. However, this is not going to
come in the way of political structure changing, but rather resistance to
political structure.

It's not going to be headed by One Megacorporation by any mean. They're just
along for the ride.

All the pieces are coming together. A radical ideology, a working knowledge of
economic, a technologically sophisticated community, and a new kind of
technology that the community can revolves around.

~~~
forkandwait
My counter guess: expect small and medium non-governmental _cooperative_
organizations to invade.

Currently the world is divided into those creatively make social structures
happen (gee Bob, let's start a company -- who should we hire? gee George and
Thomas, lets start our damn government on this side of the Atlantic -- how
does one train an army anyway?) and those who subconciously seek to occupy
them un-creatively (gee, should I become an Oracle dev or a Microsoft dev?
Gee, should I join the revolutionary army or the royalist army?)

But the technology (DIY manufacturing) and the communication (internet plus
math) and the culturation for everybody to become a little bit of the former
is starting to seep everywhere, and there are huge payoffs for taking it up
and organizing cooperatively(gee, why dont' we start GNU software and give it
away instead of try to sell it?)

Oh -- just want to mention that I _don't_ see this as being nation state
driven, and it is _not_ the big monolithic socialism of the past -- more a
"free market socialism"

~~~
forkandwait
... And in my more paranoid moments, I think that the reason public schools
suck is that otherwise we would flood the world with self-disciplined people
who can organize society for themselves and would grow very tired of working
for and buying from the current owners of our world...

(yes, you can call me damn hippy!)

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dstein
The most exciting thing is that because of the accelerating pace of
technological deflation, the cost of almost everything is asymptotically
approaching $0.

Access to all information, global communication, books, entertainment (movies,
tv shows, music etc), software, and even hardware are getting cheaper at an
alarming rate. The entire body of human knowledge (art, history, science etc)
is being interconnected into a global application that will be instantly
accessible and practically free (in inflation adjusted dollars).

It will be interesting what effects this will have on our socio-economic
system.

~~~
CWIZO
Umm, what exactly is approaching $0? Some examples please.

~~~
dstein
Let's see if I can explain it another way. The price of everything eventually
reaches $0.

There is only a certain period of time from which you can profit from any
particular good. If you make a hamburger, you have probably 2 hours to sell it
before it goes bad and is worthless.

And likewise, if you create a cell phone, you have maybe 2 years to sell it
before nobody will want it. And if you make a movie, you have a few months
where you can sell the movie (in a theater) and make money from it. Once the
movie hits the internet the ability to make money off it decreases (piracy
will happen more in the future, not less). Make a new app for the iPhone and
you have a few months where you can make money before a free alternative
arises.

This is technological deflation. And the pace is increasing. The time you're
able to make money is decreasing rapidly. Mathematically, as that time
approaches 0, the effective price of everything starts reaching $0. Why buy
anything today, when it'll be effectively free tomorrow?

~~~
lacker
This is bad economics. The price of everything does not trend towards $0.
Specifically, goods that require a high labor input do not get cheaper over
time unless they can be substituted with technology. Wages rise over time, so
anything requiring a certain amount of labor will get more expensive.

A good example is personal servants. In 1910 a middle class family in England
would be able to afford several full-time servants. Nowadays it's far more
expensive, because the ratio between middle-class wages and minimum wages is
much higher.

A similar modern example is education. The cost of education will rise over
time unless we can provide the same education with less labor investment. But
the cost of providing a given teacher-to-student ratio will go up over time.

~~~
dstein
* The price of everything does not trend towards $0.

I think you'd have to agree that any time you apply technology to a particular
"problem", the cost of solving that problem goes down. As technology
progresses, the problems become cheaper and easier to solve. And now I can go
to Walmart and buy a chair for $5 instead of fashioning one out of oak. Or I
can buy a $12 electric stand-up lamp, instead of burning whale-oil in a hand
lamp.

So, although oak and whale-oil is never going to be free, the cost of sitting
down and having light at nighttime, is essentially free at this point.

* A good example is personal servants.

This is not an example of technology. But alas, these days we do not require a
servant when I can pop a TV dinner in a microwave and eat a meal in 5 minutes.

* A similar modern example is education. The cost of education will rise over time unless we can provide the same education with less labor investment

Ever visit <http://www.khanacademy.org/> ?

~~~
cjy
You miss lacker's point, labor intensive goods actually become more expensive
as society becomes more productive. Check out Baumol's Theorem on wikipedia.

Basically, as technology makes us more productive in a lot of industries, the
opportunity cost of work that cannot be easily made more productive become
very high. So, we can expect the cost of things like nursing care to get more
expensive over time.

~~~
dstein
I don't really argue with that theorem at all. Perhaps manual labor and and
raw materials will always go up, while energy, information and technology will
always go down.

But if nurses cost too much, once we start applying technology to that
problem, we could probably find ways to dramatically reduce the cost of
nursing health care. Eg, robots, tele-doctors, cheap home healthcare etc.

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EGreg
I grew up in the 90s. The shows on TV rocked. They are what influenced me to
be who I am today.

I feel pity for the TV programming kids had to watch in the 2000s. What
happened to all the brilliant writing? Pinky & the brain? Gargoyles? Disney?
Animation with more than 2 frames per minute? We just got an avalanche of
inane dubbing of japanese anime. "Hey, Ash, let's go into the forest and
enslave little animal-looking things in balls and make them fight! I choose
you Pikachu! Yay!"

The best thing to come out of the 2000s decade of children's shows is YuGiOh
abridged :))

It can only get better from there.

Who's with me?

~~~
bryanlarsen
You're stuck in nostalgia-land -- TV has gotten a lot better over the last 20
years. And there's a simple reason for that. 20 years ago the only shows that
had a plot line longer than a single episode were the daytime soaps. Now, in
the age of >100 channels, DVRs and Hulu, plotlines are allowed to stretch over
an entire season, giving much more room for depth and development.

~~~
EGreg
I think you're not talking about kids shows. TV is definitely better in
general, but animated shows really, really sucked in the last decade. (I mean
shows for teens and children)

[http://blog.movies.yahoo.com/blog/177-disney-will-stop-
makin...](http://blog.movies.yahoo.com/blog/177-disney-will-stop-making-
princess-movies-because-boys-think-theyre-icky)

------
rwmj
I have a bad feeling about the next 10 years. 1900-1910 was a decade of
globalization and affluence for certain classes and a big split between rich
and poor, in fact rather like 2000-2010. 1910-1920 was not a happy period for
anyone.

~~~
VladRussian
yep, we're due for a small WWIII (there are set of global problems -
pollution, including green house gases, human rights, including ethnic
cleansing, currencies valuations, intellectual property rights, Internet
management - which can't be solved in the current framework of 180 states
getting individually to agree to a treaty and after that actually obeying the
treaty)

>10\. Political-Economic reorganization: [...] so I'm sure that people will
muddle through and figure out some way to distribute it equitably...

he forgot

11\. rapid increase of number of countries armed with nukes

~~~
Vivtek
Well, he did say "exciting!"

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Prisen
_By the end of the decade, expect voice and video quality as good as you might
expect from HDTV._

Bandwidth wise, this is (at least technically) possible today.

~~~
akgerber
You can download a full-length HD film to extant (but not-yet-sold) phones and
output it via an HDMI port. The only problem is that doing so will burn
probably $40 in bandwidth.

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delinquentme
Simply put: complexity increases over time ... this would infact lend itself
to more and increasingly "interesting" things :D

GO HUMANS!

------
pyrhho
The increasing power of motivated and intelligent individuals is a major
force, which I feel the author missed. In modern times (particularly in the
last 10 years) it has become easier and easier for the motivated and
intelligent individual to wield ever-increasing amounts of power. Today, and
even more-so in coming years, a few motivated people can wield power which
would rival the super-powers of a few decades ago. SpaceX for example with
their recent launch is on par with the early NASA progress.

I hate to reference wikileaks in yet another thread, but 20 years ago it would
have been unimaginable that a small group of people could set themselves to
rival[1] a super-power and be so effective at it. A similar argument could be
made about Al-Qaeda, Anonymous, and many other organizations.

Further Reading: Vernor Vinge touches briefly on this trend and some of its
implications in Rainbow's End.

Edit: [1] 'rival' may have been the wrong word. 'baffle'?

~~~
elai
9/11 could of happened as soon as airliners were invented and became a public
transit system...

~~~
pyrhho
True, it _could_ have. But it _didn't_ until the organizational and persuasive
ability of a small group of people could out-do the FBI, CIA, etc..

That being said, there is a lot more behind 9/11, and increasing power of
individuals relative to super-powers is just one factor.

------
Roboprog
Where is the evidence for better batteries (or capacitors)? Powering all the
portable junk seems to rest on this hand wave.

Then again, I'm too pessimistic to believe in all this singularity stuff.
Ironic that Vernor Vinge used the phrase "age of shattered dreams" in Deepness
in the Sky, considering he is also associated with the singularity thing.

~~~
jodrellblank
How is it ironic that a guy who wrote singularity fiction also wrote not-
singularity fiction?

> Then again, I'm too pessimistic to believe in all this singularity stuff.

Uh huh. <http://lesswrong.com/lw/ym/cynical_about_cynicism/>

> Where is the evidence for better batteries (or capacitors)?

There's Lithium-Air on the horizon with a suggested 10x storage over Lithium-
Ion, then there's the observation that large batteries once powered large
mobile phones for hours and now small batteries power small phones for days,
then there's fuel cell research, motion power (Seiko Kinetic watches, some
footwear) solar phones (Samsung Blue Earth), body heat hasn't really been
tried yet, etc.

~~~
gloob
As near as I can tell, the summary of your lesswrong link is something like:

"Some people disagree with me. But they're just playing games about social
status!"

Which, I mean, is cool and all, but it's perhaps possible that maybe some
people are just more cautious than others, for example. There have to be
better arguments than fabricating someone's motives out of thin air and
attacking those.

~~~
jodrellblank
A summary is "some people disagree with things, but can't give any specifics
of what things they think are mistaken and the evidence which makes them think
that. I [the author] have to assume that instead of looking at the evidence
and believing the most probable thing they can find, they are instead
disagreeing for other reasons which have nothing to do with truth or accuracy
or evidence based decision making".

 _but it's perhaps possible that maybe some people are just more cautious than
others, for example_

Cautious is saying "I wont invest in xyz singularity technology until I'm
convinced it works" or "I'm not planning my retirement fund based on living to
150 until I see people routinely living to 150 starting where I am now" or
"I've seen 80 claims of new technology fall through, so this has to have extra
strong evidence to convince me it's not in the same class".

Saying "I'm too pessimistic for this happy happy future world" isn't cautious,
it's something else.

(Also: perhaps, possible, maybe, just, for example? I can't say why but you
are strongly hammering into your post that you think someone is an idiot you
have to speak down to. Me, or the article author, or both. That's the kind of
social signalling you dismiss yet _you are doing it_ (and so am I. Everyone
does).

------
yxhuvud
Between increasingly repressive governments, a deep financial crisis that is
in it's third year and nowhere near being solved, peak oil and a southeast
asia that could turn _very_ ugly if the wrong events happen - I certainly
don't want an exciting decade. I want a really boring one where as little as
possible happens.

~~~
JonnieCache
The classic (apocryphal) chinese curse:

 _"May you live in interesting times"_

------
keiferski
Still waiting for my flying car...

~~~
younata
5 years until we get there. I'm kinda pissed about my lack of time-traveling
delorean. They said we were supposed to have these 25 years ago!

~~~
keiferski
Actually, it's been even longer than 25 years.

<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2550902895914120566#>

But I'll be patient.

------
JonnieCache
_"Did your friends really enjoy that party? Yes, but based on their
proximities to one another they split into 3 groups with little overlap. Maybe
try to have separate parties next time, or set up some icebreakers. The
following games and exercises have worked in similar occasions in the past.
Sally has done some of them before so maybe she can organize."_

Michael...... Vassar. Just making a note of that so I can be sure I _never_
end up at a party at this guys house.

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iaskwhy
Anyone notice how the author's picture is around 2.69 MB?

