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Experts Fear Future Will be Like Sci-Fi Movies
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon Sep 25, 2006 06:10 AM
from the oh-no-robots dept.
from the oh-no-robots dept.
segphault writes "In the year 2020, Luddite terrorists attack technology infrastructure and artificial intelligences dominate earth! Or at least that's what 700 experts predict in the latest poll conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project (pdf). Is the future really going to be like a science fiction movie? Ars Technica provides a humorous overview of the survey results. From the article: 'Are these scenarios really indicative of future trends? Given the prevalence of many of these concepts in science fiction content, it is obvious that the ideas themselves are at least relevant enough to warrant consideration. That said, the nature of the survey and the way that the scenarios are presented makes the entire thing seem less plausible. In looking at classic science fiction films of the past, from Blade Runner to Soylent Green, one realizes that few of them really predict with any accuracy the world we live in today. Culture and technology can change in radically unpredictable ways, and today's experts may lack the foresight to perceive the future with the clarity of Hari Seldon.'"
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not a problem (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Alcohol, marijuana, caffine, sugar, nicotine, TV, MySpace, video games, soccer, golf, blackberries, pornography, religion, sudoku, gossip or pokemon.
We all have our vices.
Re:not a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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In 2020, statements lack internal consistency. (Score:4, Interesting)
Wait, which is it? The people left behind will self-segretate but not all of them do so my choice? My prediction is that in the year 2020, pulp [wikipedia.org] will be written by lousy artificial intelligence. What do you think, George [slashdot.org]?
Time Travel (Score:5, Funny)
messing with the spacetime continum .. (Score:5, Funny)
Well actually it happens all the time, but you don't notice. For instance in the future you invent a time machine and travel into the present. The world splits into two alternative futures and you always end up in the one in which you didn't invent a time machine. In fact you don't even need to invent a time traveling machine, just send messages back using tachions.
For instance 'Trice Upon a Time' by James P. Hogan gives a good illustration of communication with the past. Unfortunaly you won't be able to find this one on Amazon as he experimented with just such a device, the writer accidentally wiped himself from existance.
See also 'Timescape' by Gregory Benford where the exact opposite happens and someone turns up alive although one of the characters remembers her dying. Have you ever been suprised when some celebrity turms up on television movies and you go 'isn't he dead' or remember the plot of a movie that's different than when it turms up on tv. Well someone's just been messing with the spacetime continuum.
was Re:Time Travel
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Happens to me all the time. Leaves me feeling like Worf in that episode "Parallels" in Star Trek (hey, don't call me a geek, I'm on /. aren't I?).
Just the other day I stumbled across the Wikipedia bio for Andy Gibb (don't ask). It said he died in 1988 of heart disease. I distinctly remembered him dying from a drug overdose
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Re:Time Travel (Score:5, Funny)
Did you ever think about THAT?
Parent
Re:Time Travel (Score:5, Funny)
No, /. was outlawed in 2023. The last holdouts (all of whom had less than 4-digits in their IDs) were executed in the manner best befitting virgins. ...He's dead Jim. AHHHH! He's dead Jim. AHHHH! He's dead Jim. AHHHH!...
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Spandex (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Spandex (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Spandex (Score:4, Funny)
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Vision of the future (Score:4, Funny)
(10 points to the first person to name them all)
Re:Vision of the future (Score:5, Insightful)
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However, the movies made based on these events were never released from the studio archives, as they correctly guessed that once the novelty of watching a naked Arnold Schwarzenegger randomly spin in space and do nothing wore off, it wouldn't be a very compelling movie. You just can't carry a movie for an hour-and-a-half with that.
1984. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:1984. (Score:5, Insightful)
London has cameras everywhere.
NSA wiretaps?
Criticising Bush is "anti american".
We *ARE* in 1984 already.
Parent
Have you looked outside lately? (Score:4, Interesting)
I more fear that it will be like 1984. Cameras everywhere, mass surveillance, no criticism of the rulers allowed.
Aren't we pretty near the 1984 society already? This [progressive.org] would no longer be news today.
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Re:Have you looked outside lately? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:1984. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's funny, but I recently worked with a prison system where they had introduced a new program called "TruThought" [truthought.com] that was so Orwellian it was fucking creepy. The sad thing is that I was apparently the only one who noticed this. It was all I could do not to laugh (and, perhaps, cry) as the Truthought "trainers" rattled off points that could have been written by Orwell himself (it was literally "Newspeak" with a different name). Makes me wonder if the entire program didn't start off as a sick joke (some guy writing it as a riff on his boss, only to have it taken seriously).
-Eric
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Technological collapse due to fertility rates.... (Score:4, Insightful)
And, oh yeah, I predict lots of attendant unpleasantness - first-world cities emptied as birth-rates decline, then re-filled with unassimilated, superstitious immigrants (or, in the case of societies largely closed to immigration like Japan, just plain emptied). Noone to care for the elderly in once-wealthy societies. And lots, lots more fanatical religion and superstition. A new dark ages.
Fallen empires.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Apart from the 'caring for the elderly' bit (family structures were different back then) that sounds a bit like a descr
Re:Fallen empires.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The Wikipedia Article on the Roman Republic has a few statements that I find both amusing and frightening,
"This kind of violent and sensationalist politics only sought to inflame tensions within Roman society, namely the poor and the disenfranchised."
"Starting with the Punic Wars, the Roman economy began to change, concentrating wealth in the hands of a few powerful clans and causing political tension within Rome."
"Formerly middle-class soldiers would return from years of campaigning to find themselves landless, unable to support their families, and ironically, unemployable because the successes of the Legions made slaves a much cheaper source of labor."
Regarding your comparisons to the late Roman Empire, I agree that there are striking similarities in both Europe and the US; just replace "barbarian invasion" with "massive illegal immigration".
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is a good point, because the use of the term "selection" carries with it the implication that the trait is a result of one's genotype. For the most part, this is inappropriate when discussing the desire to reproduce. Using the term selection in this way is like suggesting that there is selection against hunger because hungry people die more
I forget whose quote this is... (Score:5, Funny)
Prediction (Score:3, Interesting)
Exponential trends; unknown endgame (Score:5, Interesting)
The closest real-world parallel to Hari Seldon's "Future History" would be Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns [kurzweilai.net] (a generalized "Moore's Law"), which makes the point that all evolutionary processes building on past progress accelerate exponentially, and it's only towards the knee-end of the curve -- like now -- that you notice the most change.
Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics/AI (GNR) will play a huge part in the coming decades; the only question is how well we'll be able to guide how it all unfolds. Take for example just one implication of advanced nanotech: The Molecular Manufacturing "replicator" in every home -- at the same time such a device creates vast "wealth without money" [bath.ac.uk] for the poorest of people, it also removes concentrated power from the former elite, which in of itself isn't a bad thing except that we're... only human, so the primitive-reaction could be bad.
It's my opinion that it's actually in our best interest to make sure that we either merge with AI, or that benevolent AI "take over" before our selfish monkey-brain fucks everything up with the increasingly powerful tech at our disposal.
Take a GOOD look at repondent stats... (Score:5, Insightful)
Assuming the questions were posed in a "Y/N" fashion, what this study tells anyone with a statistical background is that there is no fucking consensus whatsoever. These guys have no idea - pick any question about 2020 and pose it to one of these guys. They're almost exactly as likely to say "yes" as "no".
It's interesting that this study was done, and it makes an interesting read, but it produced almost exactly no significant results.
Nightmare world without expert predictions! (Score:5, Insightful)
According to expert futurologists, we face a nightmarish future -- a future without expert predictions of the future!
"People will get sick of it," said a spokesman for the Institute for Predictions. "They just won't want any more baseless predictions -- so people will stop making any."
Professor Isaac Sagan of the University of Pontification agrees. "In the future, people will almost certainly have gotten sick of hearing me talk about what will happen in the future. Very likely, I'll have to find another job -- such as fry cook, or hat salesman."
Although vapid, uninteresting predictions of the future are currently at a record high, even those who attempt to make actualy useful predictions foresee a downward trend.
"At some point, real problems are going to become impossible to ignore," pointed out Dr. Bob Gore of the Smartville College, Oxford. "With climate change already depopulating some areas, and the deepening split between the American, Muslim, and Chinese spheres of influence, it's only a matter of time until people just don't have the time to talk about whether, in future, they will have the time to make predictions about... hang on, I can't remember how I started this sentence."
Whoever you listen to, one theme is clear -- futurologists and the kind of 'experts' who appear in newspaper articles as 'experts predict' will one day die out, and that day may be sooner than we think. Which gives us all a ray of hope for the future.
If Future Will be Like Sci-Fi Movies... (Score:5, Funny)
Firefly - good call (Score:5, Funny)
Smart man that Joss is.
Forget 2020. 81 years later... (Score:4, Funny)
The question is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Coming true (Score:4, Insightful)
SciFi folks may do a better job of predicting than the average schmoe, but they don't do fantastically well. This is because technology changes and we're all living in bonazaland. (Marshall McLuhan's term for the fact that we're all living in the world of our youth, mentally, and the fact that it is impossible for us to see the world the way the kids do.) We don't see what's already happening.
Also, when we do make a look into the future, we cannot see far enough. When computers first appeared, the world expected them to be huge and brilliant. SciFi had them running planets. Meaning one big computer, running a planet. Who guessed that they'd still be stupid, 50 years later, but so small and so cheap that they run coke machines?
Further, when technology changes, it has a ripple effect. Things change all around it. That coke machine now has a computer in it. It knows what was bought at what time. Who thinks about the little things like that in toto? One or two may occur to a writer, or even fifty. But thousands of such small effects? And together, they change society.
But SciFi is right now and then, and we take those points out of context and those POINTS appear brilliant. HG Wells described the use of the atomic bomb. Never mind that he thought that, because of nuclear decay, it would keep exploding for years.
For SciFi that gets things right, the key is to look for SciFi without Sci. Orwell, for instance: 1984 is amazingly prescient. Look in various totalitarian countries (like or own, more and more) for bits and pieces which appear. Nothing on the whole, but lots of bits.
At the other end of the spectrum, John Varley looks horribly dated, these days, because he wrote about tech and sex. Well, sex hasn't changed, so he still describes a future, there (though it seems more like a wet dream than a possible future) but the tech in his books looks impossible or silly, now. This is a man who eschewed word processors while writing SciFi -- Talk about Bonazaland.
Philip K. Dick still seems current, since Phil didn't even know how light bulbs work. All his work is about society and ethics and the nature of reality. It ain't coming true, but it still grabs ya!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Isaac Asimov.
Yes, Asimov wrote about supercomputers, but he also had pocket calculators in the '50s.
The real place to look for small and cheap computers in science fiction of the fifties and sixties are Star Trek's automatic doors and everyone's autopiloted cars.
For SciFi that gets things right, the key is to look for SciFi without Sci. Orwell, for instance: 1984 is amazingly prescient.
Orwell was w
three DisneyWorld visions of future (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:F451 (Score:5, Insightful)
Golly gee, I hope that's not our future.
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I lost a parent to a car crash. (Score:3, Insightful)
poppycock (Score:5, Insightful)
But we don't have telescreens in every room that can listen and watch us. Yes, they listen to our phone calls without a warrant, but no, you don't have to guard your facial expression for fear of being tortured in Room 101. Saying that our situation is that bad trivializes the suffering and deaths of those whose situation is that bad.
I detest the rantings of O'Reilly and Coulter as much as the next thinking biped, but they do not consitute the Thought Police. Morons may impugn your patriotism for being skeptical of the President's policies, true, but no one, even Coulter, is saying you should be tortured for doing it.
There is no boot in the face, forever and ever. We are being pwned by bible-thumping do-gooders who are not burdened by the humility and self-doubt that plague those of us who can't think of ourselves as instruments of divine providence. They don't think of themselves as power-hungry. That is why our world is so alien to Orwell's fictional one. I'm about halfway done with Orwell's essays, and basically he thinks that people are good, except for those who are bad. But the world really isn't that way. The bad things are done not by inherently bad people, but by people who think they are doing good, but lack the capacity to doubt themselves, their convictions, and their methods. Mix in political conviction with religious faith, bind them together, and you get borderline megalomania, which I think characterizes Ashcroft, Perle, Cheney, and Bush pretty well. They aren't evil (well, maybe Cheney--he's scary), only immune from self-doubt, because they think that the ultimate arbiter of good, meaning God, is firmly on their side. If you are on God's side, then there is only one other side, really.
But this sort of megalomania is seductive even to non-religious people. I'd bet Pol Pot and most other Communist leaders just thought they were doing what was right, they lacked the capacity for self-doubt, and they were surrounded by those who told them what they wanted to hear. There aren't that many authentically bad people in the world. I think Orwell actually gave human beings too much credit, because being rational himself, he assumed that, a few stupid people aside, most people were rational. So even his "bad guys" are rational--they want power, and will use "the boot in the face" to get and keep it. But in reality we have clean-cut, Christian soldiers torturing people to death because they think they're fighting for freedom and democracy. People will do horrible things for noble words, and still sleep like babies at night. Evil is more complex and insidious than Orwell made it out to be.
Anyway, rambling aside, our world is not like the one Orwell created in his books. There are similarities, yes, but ours differs from his in nature and degree. If you use up all your superlatives now, if you shout "tyranny" now, what words will you use when it gets worse?
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Re:poppycock (Score:5, Interesting)
Revolution.
(I really liked your post btw)
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Re:poppycock (Score:5, Insightful)
Tell me you aren't naive enough to believe that our society's problems are solely of republican origin or that the democrats are the panacea, because they're not. In fact, it's clear you've fallen victim to the biggest lie of all: that elections are what decides the fate of our country.
I'm not necessarily referring to smoke-filled rooms when I say this either. Much of the problem is that there is momentum within our systems of power that prevents effective change from occurring (ex. term-limit legislation). In other cases, it is the system itself that causes the problem (ex. the elastic-clause of the Constitution). Again, like the GP said, we do ourselves a great disservice when we assume that someone behind the curtain is the single source of all our woes.
-Grym
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Re:Soylent Green is people (Score:4, Funny)
And I doubt that's enough for all of us!
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Not the movies, the books! (Score:3, Insightful)
IMHO, the great
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The Luddites were a group of people who destroyed machines in factories. They did this because the machines had put them out of work. Most weaving was done as a cottage industry, each craftsman having his own loom in his own house. The invention of the powered looms and subsequent rise of factories to house those looms meant that the cottage industry could not compete in terms of price and efficiency. So unless you were prepared to work for low wages in a factory (the powered looms were o