45 replies to this topic

[Christian U]

We've been talking about how much progress we have or haven't made over the last century, and I had to think of this when I sumbled upon this. This is a map created by the Institute for the Future after a conference in which a bunch of different scientists laid out what they thought was the cutting edge in their fields. It outlines the areas in which they think the next big science stories will play out. A lot of it sounds optimistic to say the least, considering that we're talking about just one decade here. But if nothing else, it should be an interesting discussion starter.

[Johnny Henning]

I'd like to see something similar from 1960 and compare it to what we actually have today.

[Mike]

I'd like to see something similar from 1960 and compare it to what we actually have today.

Thy wish is my command. Arthur C Clarke, 1964:



'The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic'

[Steve Sensible]

"Personal satellite" is an odd one. What would one do with a personal satellite exactly? Considering the staggering amount of space junk that already litters the heavens I think that one's highly unlikely.

[Ben the Obiwomble]

This was used as part of a training course I did a few months, had I known the contents I may not have picked it, as it was, I found it fascinating and was just about able to keep up:

http://www.ted.com/t...e_s_future.html

I'm guessing what he describes is possible with a lot of resources, which raises the question that the future of medicine may be more of what level of care to provide and when and to who than it is about the tech.

Edited by Ben the Obiwomble, 02 January 2012 - 04:43 PM.

[Christian U]

That prediction by Arthur C. Clarke was surprisingly accurate.

Edited by Christian U, 02 January 2012 - 04:43 PM.

[Mike]

That was surprisingly accurate.

Clarke? Yeah, he really did have a visionary intellect. He wrote a few books on pure science as well, and two of them (Profiles of the Future and Report From Planet Three) were essentially speculative essays on what the future would be like. I devoured them as a kid.

Medicine of the 2020s is going to be all about personal genomics.

[Ben the Obiwomble]

Personal genomics? So, tailoring/altering the human genome in specific ways?

[Mike]

More adapting medicines and therapies to what people's genome is, but altering the genome itself will come, as gene therapy comes into its own.

[Ben the Obiwomble]

Thanks, sounds quite fascinating. Hmm, maybe I ought to return to moral philosophy with medical ethics as the main research area.

[Johnny Henning]

Cool - I just saw PROPHETS OF SCIENCE FICTION which of course used Arthur C Clarke as its first subject and they used parts from those. He was pretty impressive. I think he even kept a checklist of predictions he'd made in his books and still bemoaned those that he didn't make.

However, even his reasonable predictions like "no one will travel for business anymore, they will only travel for pleasure" have been stymied by human habits and expectations.

As far as the new map, I think that we are actually a little behind what is possible as far as the study of human data. Or, actually, that the people who are on the cutting edge are putting their skills to more profitable use that academia and science.

I think neurology is pretty far advanced - however, I think the promise of studies of the brain, mind and consciousness are actually a little exaggerated in their findings. I remember the now famous report on the "God spot" - a supposed area in the temporal lobe that gave you religious experiments. In fact, it only gave a few people these experiences and most people felt a slight euphoria when they went through the stimulation. In many neurological studies of this sort where they are trying to find out things like what part of the brain controls some part of your life, they are making progress - and what they are finding seems to be both impressive and disturbing when it comes to ideas like free will and identity - but we still seem to be very far from anything definite. As someone once said, if the brain was so simple we could understand it, then we would be too simple-minded to understand it.

I think the seas hold out more possibility that space travel today. With dead zones and jellyfish oceans threatening, it's also more pressing. Mars is a dead planet, the oceans are alive and we need them to stay alive. However, there are technical elements - life support and lightweight but powerful construction materials, for example - that can be shared by space and sea exploration.

Space today is reaching a nadir of development with the basic end of manned space missions by NASA. At the same time, it was pretty much at a dead end anyway, so maybe there will be an opening somewhere else or internationally. I enjoy the Virgin Galactic idea that there will be paying space passengers within the next decade - I think that is possible - but really I think that should not be considered "space exploration" but the next step in aviation as extremely short 9but hopefully "affordable") international flights will be the eventual outcome of this. Orbital, self-sustaining stations (a bit too early to call them colonies) and moonbases are what I would consider significant steps in actual space exploration. However, we kinda need to get serious about dealing with the increasing amount of space junk because that is going to be a hazard to successfully exploiting near Earth space.

Controlled evolution can't move quickly simply because evolution is extremely slow and generational. Accelerating it 1000x would simply mean that we see a significant change in the species in a century instead of ten thousand years. Also, research in this area is showing that it is really hard to push the genome around without detrimental side effects. It's had 3 billion years to evolve resistance to manipulation, after all. Still, Mike's point about tailoring medicine to an individual genetic profile seems very reasonable to me. Personally, I think we will discover that there are standard relationships between genes which are more important that the actual function of the genes themselves, and these relationships will form the basis of the next stage of biological study - supergemonics, maybe.

Strange matter - again, we may discover a lot about the subatomic and quantum universe in the next decade. I'm hopeful that we will find the Higgs boson and I think we have already found a part of Dark Matter (WIMPs), but I think the advances will be mostly in the theoretical rather than applied side. We have to use matter and energy to manipulate matter and energy and there may be a limit to how much we can really dig into the subatomic scale. It may be as impossible for us to ever manipulate quarks as it is for us to pick up a single, specific carbon molecule with tweezers today.

[Christian U]

Clarke? Yeah, he really did have a visionary intellect. He wrote a few books on pure science as well, and two of them (Profiles of the Future and Report From Planet Three) were essentially speculative essays on what the future would be like. I devoured them as a kid.

Medicine of the 2020s is going to be all about personal genomics.

Mainly in predicting potential diseases?

[ditta]

Andy Diggle retweeted this. It sums up the awesomeness of the age that we live in-

http://twitter.com/#!/wjflowers/status/153544059544272896

[Steve Sensible]

I'd rather have a flying car.

[Johnny Henning]

I'd rather have a flying car.

No kidding, right?

[Mike]

Do you think we'll achieve meaningful AI before, say, 2025? If we do, do you think the Singularity concept is a likely one, or pure SF?

2025 still seems like the far future to my head, but it's only 13 years forward. 13 years back is 1999.

[Johnny Henning]

I think singularity is pure science fiction. I believe there will be a limit to how far we can actually manipulate matter and I believe it will end with something even less impressive than what nature has done to build vast number of species and an entire ecosystem out of DNA.

As far as artificial intelligence, I think we could have something about the level of a chimpanzee by 2025. However, I think that the goal of a human like intelligence is already outdated as far as the goal of artificial intelligence. By 2025, I think there will be computers capable of matching or exceeding human intelligence, but they will not be conscious or emotional in the way we see in science fiction movies. Self-awareness and emotions are not very useful in a tool and that is what profitable AI's will produce. You might say that understanding emotions may be important to interacting with the human users, but that may require what in the end is essentially non-productive development to achieve. Teaching an AI to understand anger, irritation, love and enthusiasm might help it develop a better working relationship with people, but at the same time, you open it up to the problems that arise from that, and the vast complexity of emotions might interfere with its primary goals and uses.

I think that will turn out to be the basic difference between artificial and human intelligence. Human intelligence basically arises from the complexity of emotional impulses. Possibly even consciousness arises from that. The emotions are the experience, and therefore to process it, we develop a personality, an "I" to experience the emotions even though, basically, the experience exists, but the "I" is an illusion.

However, in Artificial Intelligence, even the emotions would have to be developed as illusory experiences emerging from patterns designed to promote complex intelligence.

Still, even there, maybe artificial intelligence will require something like emotions to emerge. Already, scientists in this field have discovered that it is very hard to approach intelligence from top-down programming. Instead, you have to interlink basic program responses in such a way that their interrelationships form complex patterns. It may be that these "interrelationships" are exactly the same as emotions, and that they guide the development of intelligence, and, just like in Asimov, the artificial mind will need special psychologists to guide it to a healthy intelligent behavior.

In that case, android minds would take about as long as humans to develop since the psychological experiences would require the same amount of processing. So, even if we had the technological capacity to build a thinking computer mind in 2025, it might still take 10 years to actually develop it into a thinking being. Then perhaps we would basically clone that mind into new computer bodies so we could mass produce it. We'd have to use a different mind each generation however, since the original would always be developing. Or we could use that development indefinitely as we produce new versions.

Interesting idea for a story - following the development of the first artificial individual and his reaction to "his children" as he has millions of examples out there for how his life might've been different if he had made different choices or had different experiences.

Potentially, they could use an entire community of minds. - Another interesting idea, a man lives in a utopia until he discovers that he and everyone there are really artificial minds kept in this elevated state so their creators can produce perfectly well-adjusted androids in the "real world" who can last for years before breaking down from the clash between their own pristine moral state and the realities of human emotions and desires.

[Johnny Henning]

http://io9.com/58734...-light-and-time

Interesting take on invisibility - hiding in time?

New research published inNature reveals that scientists have successfully hidden an object in both space and time — even if for only for 40 picoseconds. Rather than bending light around the object, their technique creates a temporal hole in light beams where an event can be hidden...

The explanation doesn't make much sense, really:

...The technique relies on what's known as a split-time lens to create a temporal hole. A beam of light is pushed through the lens, which speeds up the travel of the fast moving blue light, and slows down the comparatively sluggish red, leaving a gap in the middle — a gap ripe for exploitation. The light is recombined on the other side, and for a window of trillionths of a second, whatever goes on in that gap is undetectable...

The problem is, of course, different wavelengths of light travel at the same velocity. Red light isn't any slower than blue light naturally, it just has a different, longer wavelength. So though blue oscillates more times each second than red and thus looks like it is moving faster, it is moving at the same speed per second. Blue carries more energy because energy is in the frequency, not velocity, of the lightwave.

I suppose what it is doing is refracting the blue light less than the red light so that blue travels less distance through the lens than red so that for a moment blue is ahead of red until the beam is recombined.

[Noel Luperon]

This was used as part of a training course I did a few months, had I known the contents I may not have picked it, as it was, I found it fascinating and was just about able to keep up:

http://www.ted.com/t...e_s_future.html

I'm guessing what he describes is possible with a lot of resources, which raises the question that the future of medicine may be more of what level of care to provide and when and to who than it is about the tech.

That was a great presentation, I hope half of those things come to be realized, it'll make for a great future, health-wise.

[Christian U]

http://io9.com/58734...-light-and-time

Interesting take on invisibility - hiding in time?




The explanation doesn't make much sense, really:



The problem is, of course, different wavelengths of light travel at the same velocity. Red light isn't any slower than blue light naturally, it just has a different, longer wavelength. So though blue oscillates more times each second than red and thus looks like it is moving faster, it is moving at the same speed per second. Blue carries more energy because energy is in the frequency, not velocity, of the lightwave.

I suppose what it is doing is refracting the blue light less than the red light so that blue travels less distance through the lens than red so that for a moment blue is ahead of red until the beam is recombined.

Huh. So that is what the "space-time cloaks" in the map of the future are.



Crazy stuff. Reads like sci-fi to me... Jonny, it does seem that time and wavelength are connected in this?

Bottom, the wavelength of the probe beam as a function of time from numerical simulations.