
Predictions For the Next 110 Years - tokenadult
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/news/110-predictions-for-the-next-110-years
======
geuis
It's a disappointing list for such a grandiose title. Nearly every single
thing listed will be achievable in the next 20-30 years. It's reminiscent of
the French predictions of life 100 years later, 100 years ago.
[http://singularityhub.com/2012/10/15/19th-century-french-
art...](http://singularityhub.com/2012/10/15/19th-century-french-artists-
predicted-the-world-of-the-future-in-this-series-of-postcards/)

I would personally like to see some people come up with zany ideas. It's
really hard to try and think that far ahead, given how much has changed in the
last 100 years.

Computation should be everywhere, along with intelligent "software". Quotes
because those entities might not like the phrase "software". I wouldn't.

Beyond that, it's hard to guess. Most predictions don't take culture into
account. Technology and culture change and shape each other. Culture may be
radically different in 100 years. Kind of like Egyptian culture can be
demarcated before and after the rise of Islaam. Longer than 100 years, but
gets across the idea.

My gut predictions are about what _wont_ happen. Civilization won't collapse.
Global warming will have some change but won't kill all seaside cities. This
is because either through market forces (likely) or unified global political
action (unlikely), we fix it.

Wars: check. Pandemic plague: no. Space stuff: check.

I general, try not to say what won't happen. Be like Star Trek in the sixties.
Propose what seems futuristic to inspire people, and they'll figure out how to
do it.

~~~
stygianguest
Indeed a disappointing list.

A positive (logically, not ethically) prediction from my side:

In 100 years, the earth will have a smaller population than now (6 Billion),
concentrated in clusters of smallish cities (as opposed to mega-cities).
Nature will be reconquering much of the world that has been devastated by
climate change and the desperate attempts to grow food by starving
populations.

Society will be heavily stratified, with a perpetually unemployed lower class
living of the state with minimal rights and opportunities. Class distinctions
are amplified by biotechnological advances accessible only to those with money
and power. Surveillance will be ubiquitous and anonymity will be non-existant
for all but the most technologically savvy. Most countries will be governed by
some pseudo-democratic system.

Some descendant of humanity, be it genetically enhanced men or our electro-
mechanical children, will have colonized asteroids. Moreover, they will be
sending out extrasolar expeditions following the probes they have sent out 50
years earlier.

I must be in a bad mood today. Also, I didn't follow your advice.

~~~
sturadnidge
Negative predictions are quite interesting IMHO, shame we don't see more of
them in pop media. They could've at least mentioned 2038 in this one.

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ChuckMcM
These are always fun, and always wrong but of course we can only see what we
can see as my grandfather would say.

I suspect that once we can inject data directly into the brain's visual and
auditory systems things like telepresence will take on new life. I'd predict
that at some point in the future people get cochlear type implants rather than
headphones.

I also wonder about the increasing violence of the weather cycles and whether
or not that will result in new ways of building cities. Do we start building
towns in the midwest that just by staying indoors you can avoid any danger
from a tornado? Or housing systems that are immune to floods by either
floating up or simply being sealed and ready to be temporarily submerged.

Will communities build power banks? Giant power storage facilities to hold
excess renewable power that was generated? Or will that storage be distributed
amongst the buildings?

------
createmenot
"People will be fluent in every language."

Given the current state of language translating software, I think this is
highly unlikely in the next 10 years. Anyone who is bilingual and has used a
translation app knows how woefully inadequate it is for actual communication.
The nuances of language are far too complex, not to mention the importance of
non-verbal communication. How can software correctly translate the answer
"Well, I'm not sure..." (which could signify hesitation to accept, passive
disagreement, a pause for time to think, etc.) without understanding the
context of the answer, and the tone of voice and facial expression of the
speaker? Not in 10 years...

~~~
tokenadult
From the article: "People will be fluent in every language. With DARPA and
Google racing to perfect instant translation, it won't be long until your
cellphone speaks Swahili on your behalf." That was suggested as a plausible
prediction for 2022. The comment to which I reply says,

 _Given the current state of language translating software, I think this is
highly unlikely in the next 10 years. Anyone who is bilingual and has used a
translation app knows how woefully inadequate it is for actual communication._

The last time a video demonstration of software in development for language
translation was posted here on HN,

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4759620>

I commented,

 _To someone who spent years learning Chinese as a second language, and then
made my living for years as a Chinese-English interpreter, that was pretty
impressive._

 _The economics of the issue is that a machine interpreter just has to be as
good as a human interpreter at the same cost. That's a reachable target with
today's computer technology. EVERY time I've heard someone else interpreting
English or Chinese into the other language, I have heard mistakes, and I am
chagrined to remember mistakes that I made over the years. We can't count on
error-free machine interpretation between any pair of languages (human
language is too ambiguous in many daily life cases for that), but if companies
develop tested, validated software solutions for consecutive interpreting
(what I usually did, and what is shown in the video) or simultaneous
interpreting (the harder kind of interpreting in demand at the United Nations,
where even in the best case it is not always done well), then those companies
will be able to displace a lot of human professionals who rely on their
language ability to make a living._

And relating that comment to a timeline appropriate for today's thread, I
think ten years out is about right for a mobile app widely available at
reasonable cost that will displace human interpreters for most use cases that
now require human interpreters. As I further commented on the the earlier
thread 37 days ago,

 _Right now a lot of interpreters in the United States make a lot of part-time
income from gigs that involve suddenly getting telephone calls and joining in
to interpret a telephone conversation in two languages. This is often
necessary, for example, for physician interviews of patients in emergency
rooms or pharmacist consultations with patients buying prescribed drugs (where
I last saw a posted notice on how to access such an interpretation service).
The IBM Watson project is already targeted at becoming an expert system for
medical diagnosis, and patient care markets will surely provide a lot of
income for further development of software interpretation between human
languages._

 _It's still good for human beings to spend the time and effort to learn
another human language (as so many HN participants have by learning English as
a second language). That's a broadening experience and an intellectual
delight. But just as riding horses is more a form of recreation these days
than a basis for being employed, so too speaking another language will be a
declining factor in seeking employment in the next decade._

If there is economic demand for interpreting between a given language pair,
there will be great economic incentive to develop software-as-a-service to do
interpreting for that language pair. I would expect Japanese-English and
Spanish-English and Chinese-English interpreting all to decline as a human
paying occupation by ten years from now, even though international
communication will surely increase in the same time frame.

~~~
createmenot
I agree that software will soon be able to efficiently interpret between two
languages. I take issue with the article stating that "people will be fluent
in every language". Having access to an interpreter (software or human) does
not make one fluent in a language. Actually being fluent provides a much
greater depth of understanding than an interpreter can ever approach. An
English-speaking businessman who lives in Japan and relies on an interpreter
will not be as efficient at his job as one who becomes fluent in Japanese, due
to the enormous subtleties and cultural complexities of language.

------
subb
Hopefully, in the next 10-20 years, we will be able to heal spinal cord
injuries.

------
narrator
Nothing about genetic engineering of humans? I guess that's too unsettling? It
seems that there are certain futures that are possible and interesting but
people refuse to talk about because they bring up too many disturbing
implications.

~~~
meric
What about implanting a computer into your brain. An AI that's connected to
the `human internet` which record your senses and which you can interact with
your thoughts.

There's a trend in human history where as there are more and more of us, we
become closer to each other. Where in pre-historic times, different
populations only interact through migrations, in ancient times we begin to
have trade routes which allow populations to affect each other in terms of
years and decades rather than centuries. Development of oceanic travel reduced
this to months and years. The telegraph and railway further reduced this to
hours and days. Today with the mobile phone and internet, we can interact with
each other in terms of seconds and minutes. Will this trend continue into the
microseconds, so that in a thousand years time, humankind is a single hive
mind-like entity?

"Man considered with himself, for in a way, Man, mentally, was one. He
consisted of a trillion, trillion, trillion ageless bodies, each in its place,
each resting quiet and incorruptible, each cared for by perfect automatons,
equally incorruptible, while the minds of all the bodies freely melted one
into the other, indistinguishable."

<http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm>

------
cpeterso
I'm (sadly) pessimistic about advances in superlongevity. Even though modern
medicine has greatly increased average life expectancy and the number of
centenarians, maximum age has not increased. The number of centenarians over
110 has increased ~10x over the past 50 years, but the number older than 114
is pretty flat. There seems to be some biological "brick wall" around age 114.

The following site has some interesting charts about centenarians and
mortality: <http://www.grg.org/calment.html>

~~~
disgruntledphd2
I talked to a development economist once (well more than once, but the other
conversations are not germane) and he claimed that if you ignore infant
mortality decreases, populations in Africa (and other poor places) have
approximately the same average life expectancy as we do. Kinda summed up
modern medicine for me.

~~~
michaelochurch
The highly expensive care (that is only available in developed countries) only
adds a few months, in general. That's why the health cost graphs of most
people show a spike in the last year of life. That doesn't mean it shouldn't
be provided. That's a really tough call to make. I am saying that it won't
have a huge impact on life expectancy.

All that said, people in developing countries "just deal" with a lot of
seriously unpleasant (and economically costly) health problems that we'd fix
in the U.S. So there are quality-of-life benefits that don't show up in the
raw numbers.

Finally, a 50% reduction in across-the-board death rates only buys eight years
in life expectancy, because per-year death rates go up exponentially. Another
way to look at this is that "only" one year in life expectancy difference
actually represents being 9% better at keeping people alive.

For example, life expectancy of people who didn't die violently and survived
the first 2 years was about 50 in ancient times. (Including those factors, it
was 20-25.) Now it's about 80. That may not seem like a world-changing
increase compared to the other improvements, but it actually means that we're
12-16 times better at keeping people alive.

------
zalzane
God what a disappointing list. It's almost as awful as pretty much every other
set of future predictions that popmech makes.
[http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/futur...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/future-
that-never-was-next-gen-tech-concepts#slide-1)

I almost want to write my own list of predictions now.

------
sopooneo
One thing for sure: there will be at least one vast surprise that couldn't be
predicted. It will have a large effect on all future events.

------
michaelfeathers
As someone who grew up reading Popular Mechanics, I just want to say "Where's
my dirigible!"

------
mrlase
These seem very over optimistic.

