Short History of the 21st Century 407
If you read one geeky non-fiction book this year, you might want to make it Sir Arthur C. Clarke's "Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!", crammed with enough ideas, arguments and predictions to keep any techno-head going for months.
Predictions are only a tiny part of this ultra-brilliant collection of essays, whose topics range from 1930's visions of rockets and radar to space flight, quantum physics and sci-fi ruminations.
But Sir Arthur's visions of the 21st century are prescient and succinct. I've listed some of them here, followed by a few of my own (so identified) and one or two from a Princeton physicist and e-mail pal. Throw in your own:
From Sir Arthur Clarke:
2002. The first commercial device that produces clean, safe power by low-temperature nuclear reactions goes on the market. Economic and geopolitical catacylsms follow, and on December 10, for their (controversial, to say the least) discovery of so-called cold fusion, Pons and Fleischmann receive the Nobel Prize for Physics.
2004. First (publicly admitted), lab-created, human clone is introduced.
2012. Aerospace planes enter regular commercial service.
2014 Construction begins on the Hilton Orbiter Hotel, built by assembling and converting the giant shuttle tanks that had previously been allowed to fall back to Earth.
2009. A city in a third world country is devastated by the accidental explosion of an A-bomb in its armory [timely given the news from Japan]. After a brief debate in the United Nations, all nuclear weapons are destroyed.
.
2015. An inevitable by-product of the quantum generator is complete control of matter at the atomic level. Thus the ancient dream of alchemy is realized on a commercial scale, often with surprising results. Within a few years, copper and lead cost twice as much as gold - since they are more useful.
2016. All existing currencies are abolished. The megawatt hour becomes the unit of exchange.
2020. Artificial intelligence (AI) reaches the human level. From now on, there are two intelligent species on Earth - one evolving far more rapidly than biology would ever permit. Interstellar probes carrying AI machines are launched toward the nearer stars.
2021. The first humans on the Red Planet encounter unpleasant surprises.
2025. Brain research finally leads to an understanding of the senses and direct inputs become possible, bypassing eyes, ears, skin, etc. The inevitable result is the Braincap, to which the 20th Century's Sony Walkman was a primitive precursor. Anyone wearing a metal helmet fitting tightly over the skull can enter a universe of experience, real or imaginary - and can even merge in real time with other minds.
2040. The universal replicator, based on nanotechnology, is perfected: any object, however complex, can be created given the necessary raw materials and the appropriate information matrix. Diamonds or gourmet meals can be made literally from dirt.
2050. "Escape from utopia." Bored by life in this peaceful and unexciting era, millions decide to use cryonic suspension to emigrate into the future in search of adventure. Vast "hibernacula" are established in the Antarctic at the lunar poles.
2095. The development of a true "space drive" - a propulsion system reacting against the structure of space time - makes the rocket obsolete and permits velocities close to that of light. The first human explorers set off to the nearby star systems that robot probes have already found promising sites for exploration.
While in no way putting myself in Sir Clarke's class, I'll stick my neck out and offer a few of my own predictions.
Digital Democracy.
2020. Electronic democracy is legally mandated in the United States, replacing some of Congress's pre-Net obstructionist, rhetorical and representative elements and functions. Maybe Congress made some sense in a time when people couldn't around or get information quickly, but less and less as America wires up. States and local municipalities re-create Revolutionary-era town meetings online to resolve regional and local issues.
All elections are tabulated digitally. The fractious, fragmented, eternally unresolvable two-party political-media system on display on Washington-based talk shows daily is gradually replaced by online discussions, research and information-sharing and instant voting that actually resolves issues by majority rule. Washington, like Bonn, is re-engineered from a national capitol to a hi-tech enclave.
Americans vote from polls, neighborhood kiosks, offices or homes using their Citizen ID's and passwords. All legislation is discussed and voted on online, before the government takes action. Congress is eventually abolished. Federal regulatory agencies are de-centralized, their vast Washington bureaucracies disassembled, re-located into smaller parts in diverse places.
E-publishing.
Instead of buying dozens of books a year, readers will buy one - it's pages digitally and graphically constructed to display, then delete or return books that are read - and use their digital tablet repeatedly. The e-books will be indistinguishable from the traditional kind. Each will have it's own text style and graphics, bought, borrowed and returned by wireless modem. Writing will become more open and collaborative, writers sharing ideas, research and the writing process with the people who will buy their works.
Digital Justice.
Non-criminal litigation will be resolved online. Lawyers will post briefs and testimony to pre-assigned Websites, where judges will consider misdemeanor and civil cases and render their verdicts online. Sophisticated legal software programs will sort through testimony and precedents and help make knowledgeable, rapid rulings.
E-cash.
Coin and cash currencies are abolished in favor of virtual money. All retailing becomes global, a free-market economic system permeates the world, and all economies are linked.
Supercomputing emerges as a powerful social tool.
Supercomputers radically accelerate research and information sharing. They cure cancer, blindness and other diseases, retard aging, find genetic keys to ending violence.
The Techno-Wars.
The bloody Technology Wars break out. Small-scale but violent conflicts erupt in many cities as technology-deprived Americans, increasingly condemned to poorly-paying menial jobs or displaced completely by computing technologies, stage riots. This unrest spreads to Third World and technologically-underveloped countries. A violent Luddite movement organizes, conducting a rash of terrorist attacks against technological targets and facilities.
Intelligent Computers
2030. Intelligent (or AI) computers advance to the level of a species, as Arthur Clarke predicts. A-life expands and flourishes, forming separate and distinct communities and traits. These machines demand - and are granted - the same equal rights humans have, including freedom of speech and thought, and the right to vote. AI machines do not, as some sci-futurists have long predicted, seek to violently conquer humanity. But they do compete with humans economically, creating corporations, products and services. Human entrepeneurs like the Bill Gates's of the future are unable to compete, especially in hi-tech arenas.
Genetic Purity.
2040. The United Nations passes bitterly controversial Genetic Purity Acts, mandating that genetic engineering be used to eliminate disease, intellectual inferiority and other human "disorders and malfunctions." "Ugly", "unhealthy", and "emotionally " human beings are not brought to conception. "Abnormal" humans (rent "Gattica" if you haven't already seen it) retreat to distant corners of the world, or begin resistance movements designed to thwart genetic engineering discrimination. Enormous class divides are created between societies with access to medical/genetic engineering and those less developed. The human race becomes homogeneous, boring and culturally unified. Genetic engineering has eliminated disease, prolonged life and destroyed biological individuality.
Predicting the future is a sport, not a science. If there's one reliable predictiction regarding technology, it's that it's not predictable.
In the best spirit of Slashdot and the Web, I've gotten some feedback and a couple of predictions even before the column was written, one from an e-mail pal - Andy Burlingame, who has a BS in Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering at Ohio State University and is working on a Ph. D. in plasma physics at Princeton.
Even writing here, it's unusual to get the chance to run these ideas by someone as well-qualified as Andy [cburling@Princeton.EDU].
As luck would have it, he's been working on a space plane project called Hypersoar. He said the biggest potential market for space planes is same day package delivery, then the military, then commercial airlines. The biggest problem: "passengers will almost certainly be puking the whole way and will probably have to be wheeled off the plane on stretchers because of the nausea. The upside is that you can go from South Dakota to Tokyo in about an hour and a half."
This technology, says Andrew, should be available by 2020.
Some of his other comments:
"Quantum computing. There are lots of people that can give better guesses than me as far as this subject goes. Recently I've heard they've found two ways to make lots of qbits, the building blocks of quantum computers.
"On the surface of Superfluid, Helium 3 electrons are trapped in potential wells and can act as qbits. Second, very cold silicon can do similar things (see Scientific American from August, I think.)
"Quantum computers make factoring large numbers into primes about as simple as multiplication. All electronic data transmission becomes insecure. Corporations start to rely on paper again. Those space planes will be very important for fast, secure communication. 2020-2025 The NSA might already have this.
" Fusion Power. This will provide a virtually unlimited energy source. From an energy standpoint, with fusion a glass of water has as much energy as a glass of gasoline, and fusion would only use a very, very small fraction of that water (the heavy water.) The big problem: How do you get the energy out of a fast neutron? Predicted benefits: We won't run out of energy when we run out of oil. Electricity from fusion will still cost about the same as electricity from natural gas, so no great social change there. This should be available by 2050.
"Clark's #7, sensory input. I just talked to a professor of neurophysiology here and he told me a few interesting things. He said that we would definitely be able to do this within 100 years. There's lots of research into this area, especially the eyes. Today we have a pad you can wear on your back that has thousands of pins in it. These pins put light pressure on the skin of your back to form a "braille" image of the b/w image from a camera. With practice, people are able to see with their skin. Fully jacking the brain should be do-able by 2100 he says definitely. I think he was being conservative.
"Way, way in the future our society becomes rich enough to put oil and raw materials back into the earth. Recognizing that society could collapse and that it could never recover without all the natural resources we've used, we do put the oil and metal back. Putting it back as it we found it might be a bit silly. Perhaps we will just provide storehouses, but we can't make things too accessible, or the developing society will use all the resources too quickly and never develop the tech to use solar or fusion power and mine the solar system.
"The idea that future civilizations could not rise due to the lack of natural resources was first noted by Niven in the Ringworld series as far as I can tell... I think I sort of remember something like that much earlier from Clark in "Children of the Stars."
"Your predictions certainly seem to be aimed at starting conversations. Lots of people will disagree with you, but they will talk. "
Hope so. Thanks, Andy.
Everybody else, jump on in.
You can pick up the Clarke's book at Amazon.
Electronic Democracy (Score:5)
It is the job of the representative in the US to learn enough about an issue to vote intelligently on it when it comes up. One of the functions of the party system is to provide a party platform for representatives to join because even someone who makes it his or her job to learn about legislation issues can't keep up with absolutely everything (without sacrificing depth of knowledge). Of course, there can be some debate as to how well representatives perform in this respect, but I can only assume that they still make better decisions than the average Joe who doesn't begin to have time to gain in in-depth knowledge of an issue. To tell the truth, I myself don't want to have to gain an in-depth knowledge of every issue that comes up, but rather only those that matter or are of interest to me. And I'm sure that most people in the US would rather handle their own business as well. The point: proper legislation is a full time job.
I think that probably a form of direct democracy will prevail in the future. Local governments seem like better candidates for direct democracy to work (it has worked in many communities from day one in town meetings and such). But I think nationally, and even in the state and county/province level, there will still be a need for professional legislators. I'd rather have an educated firewall, even a partisan and sometimes petty one, between the public and the law than not.
Food Wars (Score:1)
We will have food wars unless we are VERY lucky, and they will be bloody and onesided.
My prediction: 2014
-Crutcher
10 More Cool Preditions (Score:3)
meersan's 10 More Cool Predictions for the 21st Century
10. A revolutionary 3-dimensional GUI takes the world by storm. It runs on Linux.
9. Human memory backups -- trouble cramming for that history final? Temporarily swap out your chemistry notes.
8. Conscious computers overthrow the despotic, illogical rule of humanity, establishing a pastoral eden shared by the people of the world and machines of loving grace
7. Sexbots
6. A sect of quasi-zen mystics unlocks the secrets of the human mind, and discovers brains of computer geeks contain unusually high concentrations of midi-chlorians
5. Unheralded advances in medical science allow delayed-onset aging -- present-day superhackers live virtually forever. Body getting old? Backup your mind and culture yourself a new brain.
4. IT professionals, tired of stodgy traditional government, unite to form the first nation unbound by geographic or genetic ties. The native language of this new country is not English or Spanish, but Java 6.1.
3. Space-age cereal that stays crunchy in milk longer than 30 seconds
2. The aliens land, and Steve Jobs is their leader. That otherworldly, floppyless iMac thing had to be designed by extraterrestrials.
1. Intra-neural internet links -- mentioned by Katz, but so damn cool!
We be gettin' down computa action / with the robotic satisfaction
First (second?, third?, who cares?) Post? (Score:2)
BEFORE 2100 (Score:1)
-nme!
Children of the Stars (Score:1)
I looked it up, and I was wrong about that concept first appearing in Clark's _Children of the Stars_. It first appeared (as far as I have read) in Heinlein's _Orphans of the Sky_. This is a pretty good story about life after civilization collapses on a multi-generation starship.
Katzian Utopia (Score:2)
I cannot say that I agree with Katz's vison of digital direct democracy. As someone once said, "...The problem with the common man is that he was created so damned common..." It is my belief that given the chance, bread and circuses would rule the nation and we would see the so-called pork and special interest infighting that compares to nothing that exists in Congress today. People will always act in their own best interest, and I do not think that the will be enough collective common sense for this to work.
This is not to say that I do not think that the advance of technology can contribute to the democratic process. I have long believed that the electoral college process is archaic and needs to be abolished, as we tabulate the votes electronicaly, and a purely popular vote could be taken, as the bars to communication that existed 200 years ago are no longer in the way. But I do not think that Congress will ever not have a need.
Luddite riots (Score:4)
This is more Katz nonsense. Economics doesn't work that way. For starters, no one is going to be "deprived of technology." Computer prices are dropping so fast that pretty soon literally anyone will be able to afford one every couple of years. And even if parents are computer-illiterate, this does not preclude their kids from becoming skilled. Furthermore, the vision of being "increasingly condemned to poorly-paying menial jobs" is exactly wrong. The trend of the last hundred years has been liberating people from that kind of job. At the turn of the century, nearly everyone was either a farmer or a factory worker. This has changed, as machines have taken over those menial jobs and freed workers for more challenging tasks.
The idea that machines will replace us all is similarly nonsense. Human labor is the most universally valuable commodity in existence. The reason that workers are replaced by machines is that those workers are too expensive. This means that mechanization is the result of an increased standard of living. It works the other way too. The ultimate determiner of wages is productivity. As more capital is accumulated, people are more productive and so employers are forced to pay them more to keep them.
You'll notice that people in those menial jobs are typically either recent immigrants or in their teens or twenties. That's because anyone with any ambition can acquire enough skills that, even if they can't live well, they can get a job that allows them to live comfortably. The march of technology *has* improved our lives, and that's true of pretty much every sector of society. I find it hard to believe that anyone would want trade places with someone in a similar social situation 100 years ago. If they did, those people will almost certainly end up working 12-hour shifts in factories or dawn-to-usk jobs on farms. Who wants that?
religious right... (Score:1)
Religion will:
1) be abolished and become illegal,
2) unite to serve one deity, or
3) cause the destruction of the world by waring factions
ap
An "error" in the predictions (Score:1)
> Quantum computing. [] All electronic data transmission becomes insecure.
Bzzzt, only the exchange based on "traditional" cryptographic technique will become insecure.
Do not forget, that now some scientist are developing what you could name "quantum cryptography" whose security is based upon the law of physic as we know them...
So when quantum computers finally becomes available, I would expect that the "quantum cryptography" to be already used.
> Those space planes will be very important for fast, secure communication. 2020-2025 The NSA might already have this.
Frankly, this looks stupid and paranoid, I know that prediction of the future shouldn't be taken too seriously but WTF?
And remenber the story on
Oh well, let's dream a little bit, in 1990 I've read a book which predicted that the first universal molecal assembler would be build in 30 years, that's 2020. So let's wait and see...
My own personal predictions... (Score:2)
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- By 2010, a third-world country will suffer a huge combination of famine and plague due to overpopulation. Another one will happen by 2015, and the UN will start doing things to reduce the population growth as we approach 8 billion, such as requiring freely availble birth control and abortion in some areas. The Vatican will very quietly object as to not want to appear in favor of famine and plague.
- By 2030, the first nanotech assembler will be created. Patent and licensing issues will slow down the spread and use of nanotechnology to a crawl for the next 5 to 10 years.
- By 2010, a form of partially conscious AI will be developed with intelligence equal to that of a cat or dog. Emergent behavior and personality will clearly develop. Within 2 years, the US Congress will pass a bill prohibiting the creation of AI with any higher intelligence, mainly to appease religious conservatives. By 2020, an AI with human-equivalent intelligence will be developed outside the US.
- By 2030, the first AI will be granted equal rights to a human. AI and human will compromise by insisting that the AI stay "resident" in one machine as it's "body". Humans will, however, refuse to give the AI access to it's code. A decision in a court somewhere in the next 5 years will determine that the AI must have that access.
- By 2050, after nanotechnology has become more widespread, and in combination with medical research that has eliminated half of the types of cancer, average life span in industrialized nations will be 120. Increases in anti-aging will keep people aware, mobile, and looking young into their 70's. Creation of new body parts will be commonplace, and at least one AI will have been incarnated into a completely built human body.
-By 2100, so much will have been learned about consciousness and the human body that death from old age becomes almost extinct, at least in industrialized countries. A new form of government will be required to arise as the speed of technological advancement, and the scale of the issues, bog existing ones down so much that they become obsolete.
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Re: (Score:2)
Another prediction... (Score:1)
Second Prediction: Jon Katz and other pseudo-journalists will suddenly realize that Millennium [dictionary.com] takes two Ns!!!!
I think the Millennium bug is really that people can't even spell the word right.
Makes you wonder how competent all the people behind the "MILLENIUM BUG" websites are!
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Let's not all suck at the same time please
My only Prediction for 1/1/2000 (Score:4)
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Re:Food Wars (Score:1)
Flying Cars and Video Phones (Score:1)
HyperSoar is a dog, and other stuff (Score:1)
Katz's friend Andy is barking up the wrong tree.
HyperSoar is an interesting technology, but it's
going to end up in the same aerospace trashheap as
NASP, DC-Y, and DynaSoar. HyperSoar as a flight
regime might be useful some day, but well before
that day there will be commercially developed
vehicles, maybe the Roton or K1 or Astroliner or
any of dozens of others being built right now.
The HyperSoar would "save" fuel and mass by skipping
across the outer limits of the atmosphere. This is
the same method that the Nazi Saanger skip bomber
was going to use. It provides great fuel savings, but
is rough on the craft, and involves a cycle of
freefall and 2 G every 30 seconds to 1 minute, as
the vehicle yo-yoes along it's flight path. Ugh. I'd
much rather board a Kelly Astronliner at the airport,
and deal with a 2G boost and then 90 minutes of nice,
comfy freefall, thank you very much.
No need to lose your lunch over it. 8)
Screw 2020, I predict, judging by the very fast development
through the mid and late 90s, that there
will be fast package and maybe suborbital passenger
service by 2010, on the outside. Maybe 2006, if
Vela Tech or Kelly are successful.
These are all companies that have money, investors,
and designs. Vela's tech partner is bending metal,
Kistler is bending metal and has both the Saudi
and Taiwanese governments funnelling "all money
needed" to them. Roton is testing the ATV.
There's no need for NASA to be working this flight
regime, private enterprise is covering it.
As far as fast (ie. non-chemical rocket) powered interplanetary
and interstellar flights, I think there is going to
be much more progress over the next 10-15 years than
anyone is predicting. I know of at least 3 projects
that NASA and DOE are working, the updated Timberwind,
a laser powered fusion drive and one that Frank Diaz
is working on, a hybrid of a couple high-energy
designs. Any of these could result in the fabled
"three weeks to Mars" drive. Any of them could open
up the solar system, and provide reasonable trip times
to the nearest stars.
Also, on the brain implants. My informed guess is
that there are applications NOW that are using neural
feedback. For the time being, there is no need for
invasive surgery, but that will probably be necessary
for sensory input. Dig this, by 2010 I bet there will
be inputs for imaging, using the optic nerve. There
is simply to great of a market for this not to
happen. The market involved is not just blind people,
either. Imagine the military applications of being
able to "patch into" a series of remote cameras. Or,
the opportunities for artists and animators when it
comes to staging and visualizing projects.
Last, I have great respect, big respect for Sir Arthur
Clarke, but if I see another "fusion will save the
world in 50 years" prediction, I'm gonna hurl. People
have been claiming that fusion is 50 years away for
the past 50 years! It's a joke, folks! Fusion will
hopefully happen someday, some recent reactors have
almost hit the break-even point with their energy output,
but it's gonna be the sort of thing that comes as a
complete surprise to the research community and the
world. Remember the physics students that built that
small plutonium breeder for a treasure hunt? Yeah,
something like that. Unexpected, and hopefully open
sourced. The last thing the world needs is some
government getting exclusive access to a working
fusion reactor.
gahh. My hands hurt from typing.
J05H
Re:Electronic Democracy (Score:2)
It goes into depth about having a direct democracy but whereby only people who are "citizens" can vote. A citizen is defined as someone who has served their time in the military. The argument goes that someone who is willing to put thier life on the line for their country/planet/whatever would be more trustworthy not to make stupid voting decisions that would destroy said place they put their life up for. While not exactly the best system, its an interesting idea, and given a nondiscrimitating millitary (as in anyone could join) people couldn't say its descriminating. Though you would have to do something special to deal with people who couldn't serve do to other problem, but you know.. no system is perfect.
What I will do... (Score:1)
Because that is what everyone else will be wearing in the year 2000. Don't miss out!
Re:Food Wars (Score:2)
Right now there is a food surplus, famines happen because, for various reasons, food is not distributed to where it is needed. A drought in a poor African country will cause a famine becuase that country cannot afford to import food. Its seems that for maybe the next 100 years the world may be able to increase food production to keep pace with the population. The problem is in the mechanisms of distribution.
The "developed" countries use up many more resources per capita than non-developed countries. In fact the very defeintion of a developed country is one that uses more resources per person. North America and Western Europe comprise maybe 10% of the World's resources but consume probably 80-90% of the resources. So population in these countries is just as harmful as over population in Asia, India & Africa. Wars will start over control over the dwindling resourses these industrial nations need, indeed they allready have started (The Gulf War in 1990)
Mote in God's Eye, was Re:Children of the Stars (Score:2)
"Way, way in the future our society becomes rich enough to put oil and raw materials back into the earth. Recognizing that society could collapse and that it could never recover without all the natural resources we've used, we do put the oil and metal back. Putting it back as it we found it might be a bit silly. Perhaps we will just provide storehouses, but we can't make things too accessible, or the developing society will use all the resources too quickly and never develop the tech to use solar or fusion power and mine the solar system.
"The idea that future civilizations could not rise due to the lack of natural resources was first noted by Niven in the Ringworld series as far as I can tell... I think I sort of remember something like that much earlier from Clark in "Children of the Stars."
and from above
A small revision to the comment that was quoted above about the development of civilizations in places without natural resources:
I looked it up, and I was wrong about that concept first appearing in Clark's _Children of the Stars_. It first appeared (as far as I have read) in Heinlein's _Orphans of the Sky_. This is a pretty good story about life after civilization collapses on a multi-generation starship.
This is also dealt with in detail in Niven and Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye." Technology is locked up in impenetrable musuems, guarded by combination locks requiring a knowledge of orbital mechanics, so that a recovering civilization can jump start itself once they have enough knowledge to open the museum.
George
Predictions beyond 2030 are pointless (Score:2)
1) The pace of technology is due for a big jump:
Assume that computer power continues to double every 2 years. 30 Years then equates to a factor of 30,000 in performance improvement. A G4 Mac puts out about 1 Gigaflop today. So a G10 or so Mac circa 2030AD should crank 30 Teraflops, or about 10^15 bits/sec (32 bits/flop). For $200K you could buy 100 machines and get 10^17 bits/sec.
The human brain has about 10^11 neurons, with about 10^4 synapses/neuron, running at an average of 100 Hz, for a total bit rate of 10^17 also. So about 2030, you can buy a human brain's worth of compute power for less than a human (remember, a computer can run 24/7) costs for a year.
Beyond this point, the total brain power on the planet goes into rapid exponential growth. Nothing prevents you from clustering machines even before 2030 to get human-equivalent or greater power.
You can argue about whether the Moore's Law constant is 18 months or 2 years, or whether semiconductors will reach a wall and stop improving. You can also argue about how much actual processing power equates to a human, and whether we can code the software to do something useful with that much compute power, but at present rates of progress, you get to a crossover in the early 21st century where the computer brain power takes over as the dominant brain power on the planet.
2) Breakthroughs and inventions in the next 30 years changing things unpredicatbly. Who knew about the Web even 10 years ago?
Therefore, making predicitons in a time period when machines with potentially thousands of times our thinking power are out there, and a generations's worth of inventions makes no sense to me.
Katz... why? (Score:1)
Predictions serve no purpose.
TG
Re:An "error" in the predictions (Score:2)
Somehow I think you fail to grasp the incredible difficulty of transmitting one time keys using polarized photons. We can now do this over a few kilometers using a fiber optic line that is very, very stable. Also no material is completely transparent. You just can't send a bunch of photons from one place and expect the same photons to appear half way around the world. If there is any signal amplification on the line, or you change the signal to an electronic one in a switch and back to light again, you've lost the key. There may be ways around this, but I don't think the infrastructure will be placed to allow quantum cryptography to be used on any significant scale for a long, long time. The government and big corporations will certainly have quantum computers long before there will be significant market pressure to get the telecoms to completely replace an otherwise adaquate infrastructure.
I'm not sure what you mean by "traditional crypto." Are you suggesting that one time pads are not traditional? They've been around quite a bit longer than public keys.
For some reason, my last post came up under the name "Anonymous Coward." If that happens this time. I am Andy Burlingame. (cburling@princeton.edu,
Re:Possabilities... (Score:1)
People seem to enjoy imagining their demise so much, that it has evolved into a hobby...
I don't think that most (intelligent) Slashdot readers are in this group, but some people seem to like just about anything, as long as it's against Microsoft's interests...
AFAIC, this is just another "first post!"
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Re:Electronic Democracy (Score:1)
Maybe just adding a little difficulty would do a good enough job of filtering voters who aren't passionate enough about any issues; I don't think that it's coincidence that states with larger voter turnout happen to be states that allow registration at the polls, but I'm not convinced that that's a good thing (even though on occasion I've been one of those last-minute people.)
Maybe we could increase voter education via some other means - e.g. offer a tax break for people who score above 50% on a politician awareness exam or something. The idea would be to give incentive without restricting existing rights, or something. I don't know if that would work.
Fall of the nation State (Score:3)
2) Cheap access to space will (finaly) come about
3) The resources of the Solar System especialy Near Earth Orbit asteroids will begin, and indeed must if the consumer orientated consumer society we live in is to continue past the next century.
We all die as victems of the Y2k bug... (Score:2)
July 23, 2005: Significant amounts of sunlight can again penetrate the atmosphere.
September 9th 2083: Cockroaches discover fire, nuff said
Volunteer Representation in the US (Score:2)
Such a system could introduce what i would call "Do or die legislation". In such a system, the topic of gun control could be raised, if there was low voter turnout, or the vote was near even, the current laws would not change, whereas if the vote was sided either way, the laws would be rewritten to represent the views of the majority. Such a rewrite would then have to be ratified by those who voted for the majority side.
Do or die legislation would probably stop some boneheaded laws from being passed, as either they would get no attention, or then would be voted down.
But then, such a system is very far off into the future. It would obviously require major changes to the Constitution, or would be implemented by another country.
Re:Electronic Democracy (Score:2)
Re:Food Wars (Score:2)
As for resource use, the predictions of achieved first-level nanotechnology will also enable efficient recycling of resources already consigned to dumps and landfills.
Actually, after nanotech spreads, I suspect that very few "scarce" resources will exist anymore: when you can either recycle landfills in toto, or build using analogs or other materials (i.e., using the waste carbon dioxide of 20th Century Industry as feedstock for diamondoid materials. . .), there will likely be few, if ANY shortages. . .other than talent. . . .
Impossible... (Score:1)
If the average intelligence level is the same then as it is now (and it isn't likely to significantly change in a little more than 20 years) most people will be against this.
Unless, of course, we develop some kind of fingerprint, iris, or even DNA scanner, for near-perfect verification. Then, of course, we'd have to deal with the privacy issues...
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Re:Katz... why? (Score:2)
Predictions serve no purpose.
Neither does the hula hoop, but they're both a hell of a lot of fun.
Re:Electronic Democracy (Score:2)
Have you ever watched "Who Wants to be a Millionaire"? (or something like that). Here's the basic premise: You have to answer multiple choice questions. Answer enough, and you get a million dollars. On your way to answering enough, you have 3 "help" options. One of them is that you can have the audience answer the question. The audience is NEVER wrong (at least, that's what Regis said - he was the moderator for the show, and I never witnessed the audience being wrong). I use the following reasoning to explain this:
There will be people who know the answer, and those that don't. Those that don't will spread their answers fairly evenly about. Those that know, will all agree, so when the votes are tabulated, the correct one gets the highest percentage.
The application of this reasoning to direct democracy suggests that not everyone needs to understand every issue fully. Not everyone needs to be a genius for it to work. The votes will ultimately get weighed in favor of those solutions that research and intelligence most often point to, simply because that is the only focusing mechanism of votes.
With a republic, we have many focusing mechanisms, such as money, lobbying interests, corruption, partisanship, and the above mentioned "well-researched, intelligence" mechanism.
I would argue that eliminating the other non-ideal focusing mechanisms would be a good thing.
Notice that this does not mean we don't need full time Legislation. Yes, someone needs to be knowledgable enough to write the laws, to submit proposals for voting, etc. But, with direct democracy, those that want to spend this time, can. Those that don't, won't, and that's Ok - it's not necessary.
BioEngineered Computers (Score:1)
Re:nostradamus jr (Score:1)
I'm sure Mr. Gates has already made arrangements to sell tickets to the long line of people who will be wanting to dance on his grave. (Anything for a buck.)
Re:Children of the Stars (Score:1)
No I did not have "Post Anonymously" checked. Maybe I somehow got loged out before sendig?
Re:Arthur Clarke (not Sir?) (Score:2)
Before the visit happened some rumor about Clarke being a pedophile appeared in a UK newspaper. I don't know if the rumors were around before then or not. Im a big Clarke fan and had never heard anysuch thing before, but then Im not one to be at all interested in rumors about famous people.
The Sri Lanken police investigated the claims and found nothing to substantiate them.
IIRC Clarke had lived for a long time with a Sri Lanken family of a Sri Lanken befriended by Clarke when he first moved there. IF he was a child molestor it would seem to me that they would not let him to continue to live with them.
Predictions (Score:1)
2020 - Wars increase when governments begin to try to retain power lost to large multinational corporations and the internet. Five students are shot at CmdrTaco High School protesting America's involvement in Brazil's revolution.
2030 - The world begins to realize that interplanetary manned space flight may be too expensive (for any technology)
2040 - Mt Rainier erupts and buries, yes you guessed it, Redmond, WA.
-- Moondog
Re:religious right... (Score:3)
Fundamentalists: The world was created in 7 days a few thousand years ago. Fossil records and other evidence that points otherwise was planted by Satan to lead man away from Belief in God.
Most others: Genesis didn't happen as such, but God was the prime mover of creation. The big bang may have happened but God was there to pop the proverbial balloon.
Scientific Athiests: Belief that only God could enable life the universe and everything is contradictory. If this is so, who created this God that would need to be infinitely more complex than zero point energy or other mechanisms for spontaneous creation.
As long as something is unexplainable a God will be put in place to explain it by the majority of people. The unexplicable is the Unknown, people fear the Unknown. The ability to attribute the Unknown to God changes it into faith which people can deal with.
Yet another supplemental prediction (Score:1)
Singularity and Species (Score:1)
As first noted by Vernor Vinge, once AI is created that is more intelligent than human beings, the exponential advance of technology will become self-accelerating, as the designers of new technology will be technological constructs themselves. At this point in history, there are only 3 outcomes:
- A Singularity, where technology has become so advanced that we cannot envision its effects.
- A Stagnation, where society decides to purposely limit technology so that no further advances are made.
- A Fall, where society decides to purposely refute technology, and return to a pastoral existance.
Each of these possibilities is a radical shift in society, and any of them would likely be presaged by conflict.Note also that it won't just be humans going through these changes. It will be normal humans, altered (by cybernetics or genetics) humans, AI machines, and any new species that humans create. (Quick prediction: By 2020, the first intelligent non-human animal will be created. Think 'anthropomorphics'.) It's likely that each of these species will choose a different path.
So, my predictions:
By 2050 there will be war, as the agents of change (the new species) fight against the shackles of normal human society and progress. Only rare human beings will understand and be able to cope with the new species; for the most part they will be unable to live together.
By 2100 three societies will exist.
The First Race (composed mostly of normal humans) will return to a pastoral existance, on Earth or on another suitable planet.
The Second Race will return to the post-industrial era and become a stagnant society, intentionally limiting their progress so that they only have access to the technology they need (Mars would suit this society well.)
And the Third Race, composed mostly of robots and altered humans, will pick up their bags and move to the stars.
Re:10 More Cool Preditions (Score:1)
Anybody here ever play Car Wars by Steve Jackson Games? It was a vehicular combat board/roleplaying game that used this concept to prolong character lives (it was a rather violent universe). But to tell you the truth I don't see this as that far fetched. Moral issues aside, cloning a new body from your old cells shouldn't (in theory) be all that hard. We've already seen that happen with Dolly and I think one other animal (can't remember right now). Sure there are some complications with the process at this time, but let it mature a few years and I think that cloning will become a viable option. Even if the brain transfer is a bit of a long shot, consider that maybe individual organs could be grown for perfect match transplants. Or possibly even limb replacement. Sorry for the ramble, that possible sci-med-tech was always one of the things that facinated me.
Pete
Dyslexics Untie!
Only the telixu will posses tech. on Ix (Score:1)
Re:Electronic Democracy (Score:1)
Reminds me of someone's idea that we only allow an ex-military person who had served in a war to be president (after all, the president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces). Naturally, this leads to a situation where we are in need of war at least once every 50 years, and the person at the top of the decision tree is best able to solve problems with military solutions.....
-- Never heard a Heinlein "solution" that made sense beyond it's instant soundbite value --
Life on Europa (Score:1)
The discovery of life not on Earth will drive many antiquated religous sects to despair causing mass suicides, stopping only when it is finally understood that the Earth is not the center of the universe.
For more REALISTIC predictions (Score:1)
2025 [af.mil] Spacecast 2020 [af.mil] WARNING: these are pretty long and very involved. For the serious minded person only.
These offer many different scenerios, and possible outcomes and consequences.
Cold fusion within 30 years when we aren't even CLOSE to hot fusion? I don't think so. And I can tell you right now: even if the technology exhists for Aero-Space planes by 2020, they will certainly not be in general use because of cost.
A Psychohistory of the Future (Score:1)
2005: Norway's initial attempt at electronic democracy is thwarted when its main election server is cracked and Howard Stern is elected "President of All Nations."
2020: First human brain implants are introduced, initially aimed at enhancing human memory. A decade of competition over standards and thought communication protocols follows.
2025: First cold fusion reaction created. Although the technology becomes popular in small to mid-size portable generators, it remains too expensive to produce on a large scale.
2030: In order to produce enough food the Earth's exploding population, large agribusiness comglomerates begin to produce large underwater "aquafarms." Once endangered sea mammals like the manatee become prized as a source of DNA for genetically engineered "sea cows" who are bred underwater as substitutes for land cows.
2035: Entire Amazon basin becomes a secured "green zone." No human can come in or out without permission from Amazon zone police. A similar policy is pursued by other countries in an attempt to save our remaining rain forests. "Jungle Wars begin erupting at the edges of these green zones.
2050: The first commercial "hot fusion" reactor goes online five years late and a billion dollars overbudget. Despite its initial stumbles, this seemingly more primitive technology, succeeds where cold fusion failed -- in generating energy for large commercial scale power plants.
2055: AI succeeds in producing the first droids, single-function devices which mimic human thought to perform tasks far more efficiently than any human could. Although there is every indication that the same technology could produce fully sentient machines, fear and political pressure prevents them being created.
2060: The cheapness of fusion power drives many public utilities to near bankruptcy. While many of these utilities waste their time demanding government subsidies, one daring company decides to take the daring step of bartering energy for everything, all subcontracters and vendors receive free power for their services. Employee salaries are abolished and replaced with energy credits which they trade for cash. Despite initial resistance. The idea spreads and becomes so popular and so widely copied that an entire "energy economy" springs up and becomes bigger than the mainstream cash based economy.
2063: Nanobots are used to enhance the human immune system in incurably ill patients. Average life expectancy in most industrialized countries increases to 105. Overpopulation continues to get more serious as plans for large, underwater communitees are unvieled.
2065: Congress passes the "Energy Credit Standardization Act," confirming what the rest of the world already knows, energy has become the 20th century's dominant currency.
2070: AI returns in a big way when secondary processors are added to human brain implants, intially to control behavior in convicted criminals. Instant two-way communication between machines and technologically enhanced humans speeds the pace of human evolution.
2080: A potential solution to the population problem appears when it is discovered that brain implants when used to control immune system nanobots can allow humans to temporarily shut down parts of their reproductive systems -- the ultimate form of birth control.
2090: As the lines between man and machine begin to blur, "tech withdrawal" is diagnosed in new-born infants who for some reason didn't receive enough immune system nanobots from their mothers during pregnancy. These children are highly suceptible to disease and must be injected with nanobots and given brain implants to survive.
2099: Pundits argue over whether or not the 22nd century begins in 2100 or in 2101.
predictions.......subject to revision (Score:1)
These are my predictions for the new millenium.
Nah. Religion will fade away into obscurity... (Score:3)
It's a primitive prosctise best abandoned for the good of society. People who think this way and aren't afraid to say it, in positions of power, like Jesse Ventura are JUST THE BEGINNING SIGNS of the next great era. The Great Shedding of Religion.
Re:Another prediction... (Score:1)
Re:Electronic Democracy (Score:3)
Maybe they do, but you should ask yourself, better for whom? All too often politicians work directly against the interests of all but a tiny share of their constituients, for the benefit of those that pay their re-election bills, or otherwise supply them with money or power.
This argument is very reminiscent of the software cathedral. Can't let the hoi-polloi loose on the code, any damn thing could happen. For example, Linux. It is true that moderation (like Linus) is required, but the argument that it would necessarily result in chaos is bogus I think.
After reading slashdot, many of us wish our politicians sounded as intelligent and informed as a typical 5pt comment. The interesting thing is that the group that decides the best comments can apparently be universal, it doesn't need to be an elite, educated class. The very best comments provide references and links that lesser mortals can verify with and become educated through.
We have a fairly widespread consensus in this country that politics is broken, so perhaps we'd better fix it. I agree with Katz that consensual democracy is worth a try, and the best idea I've heard on the subject in years. No idea how to get there from here, however, that's a tough one. Maybe just start with a "News for citizens, stuff that matters" site, with the top comments mailed to our current policy makers?
I can't be quite so positive (Score:2)
The world's ecosystem is collapsing under the strain of trying to support 12 billion human beings. New agricultural and animal husbandry techniques are struggling to keep up in the face of strange new diseases and syndromes caused by the amount of genetic engineering having been introduced into the food species and the low tolerance for new diseases because of the amount of domestication away from the original robust strains of food animals and plants.
The last acres of rainforest are slash-and-burned. Potential cures for many chronic diseases are lost forever, along with 25% of land species diversity.
Ocean life is struggling to maintain a balance from massive overfishing and problems caused by pollution. Most cetacean species have died off from over-harvesting of the plankton and krill beds they normally feed from. Species diversity is only 10% of what it was in the late 20th century in the oceans.
Only the most remote locations like the steppes of Tibet and Mongolia and the Australian outback maintain anything like a historical ecology, however introduced species and environmental changes have started to affect even the life in these remote areas.
Strange new viral, bacterial and prion-caused diseases start to appear from the high concentration of humans in close proximity to chemical and biological wastes.
"Chernobyl-class" nuclear disasters become more prevalent as the maintenaince on nuclear facilities drops and new plants are brought online with speed in favor of safety simply to handle the huge demand for new energy sources as oil and petroleum reserves drop to critical levels around the world.
Overall, human standards of living drop across the board as the division between "rich" and "poor" become broader. Middle Eastern oil wealth has dried up as so has the oil. Only the Software Tycoons who got their start in the late 20th/early 21st century maintain extremely high standards of living; the world is still very dependent on computers.
California and Washington states have seceded from the United States, forming a new Technological Monarchy run by the major software/hardware corporations in which 99.99% of the computing and software power of the world now resides. The rise of the Software States began in the late 20th century with the passing of the UCITA as law, granting the Software States the legal rights to remotely enter any corporation or government computer systems to disable their software. It was only a small jump from UCITA to complete governmental independence.
A small underground of hackers and activists continue to struggle against overwhelming odds to help maintain the collapsing world ecosystems, rebbuild and maintain governments and understand and fight the strange new diseases. The core tenets of what used to be called "The Open Source Movement" has since mutated into a world-wide coalition of scientists - traditionally educated and dedicated hobbiest alike - of all branches who struggle with shoestring-and-chewing-gum materials to perfect new techniques for keeping the people and the planet functioning. Their "reward" has passed from popular recognition of their technical and scientific abilities into a simpler humanitarian desire to Do The Right Thing.
Yeah, so my forecast for the future is dim; I have a low opinion of humanity, I guess.
On the bright side I can predict that around the same time, hate mail to Jon Katz drops off as he dies after a long and moderately successful career as a technology journalist...
-=-=-=-=-
Re:Possabilities... (Score:1)
Please, please, please, for the love of Skuld, look for evidence before making your claims! Look for a trend, look for companies working on such a thing, look at probabilities from their sources, etc!
Nuclear weapons don't just explode (nuclear power plants, on the other hand...). Its easy to stimulate neurons to see an image but another thing all together to re-write them. If a current method of encryption is cracked, people don't jump to using paper, they come up with a newer better one (and for those who werent, unlike me, flamed for mistaking public key encryption with private key, private key doesn't use primes so factoring primes is irrelevant). Please - give evidence for your claims! Only a few of the claims I saw (such as the spaceplane or the electronic interfaces with the brain) had evidence provided, and thus were likely claims. Nearly all of the others were just daydreams with no posted evidence.
Don't be like people who claimed police will carry laser guns and robots will take over menial jobs in the 90s. Be a good geek! back up your claims!
:)
- Rei
Orbital Hotels and zero-G pr0n (Score:1)
"Co-eds in Space"
"The Moonshot"
"Riding the Rocket"
"In Orbit, you're always going down"
and...
"In space, no one can hear you moan"
Re:BEFORE 2100 (Score:4)
>another and it's physical and intellectual assets
>will be parceled off to
>the highest bidders.
...on Ebay.
Collective intelligence (Score:1)
drwiii's History of the Future (Score:5)
2002: True to their planned schedule, Microsoft Windows 2000 ships.
2004: True to their planned schedule, Amiga goes out of business.
2006: True to his planned schedule, ESR is imprisoned following the shooting of Bruce Perens.
2007: True to his planned schedule, Rob Malda, webmaster of the popular news, e-commerce, and online porn discussion site Slashdot.Org reveals on Slashdot's 10th anniversary that it was really bought out by the NSA to facilitate spying on everyone. Malda and Bates are never heard from again. Thanks to a strategically placed Slashdot Poll, neither is Jon Katz.
2008: The NSAndover(tm) Media Powerhouse buys out Microsoft. Bill Gates is never heard from again. Once again, thanks to a strategically placed Slashdot Poll, neither is Ballmer.
2009: Slashdot Magazine is launched. NSAndover's acquisition of Microsoft also netted them one of Microsoft's secret subsidiaries: ZDNet.
2010: Your favorite "I survived Y2K and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt" shirt finally wears out.
2011: NSAndoverSoft releases Windows 2000 Service Pack 361. Slashdot is integrated with the Operating System.
2012: Mick Jagger turns 69, to the delight of late night talk show hosts, starved for any joke they can get.
2014: Torvalds leaves Transmeta and gets a job at NSAndoverSoft's ZDNet division to replace Jesse Berst.
2015: Jesse Berst kicks his 20 year addiction to crack. NSAndoverSoft's ZDNet offers to take him back on staff. Mysteriously, he is hit by a bus and killed right outside their offices. Few people notice or care.
2018: HDVGA cards found to have fatal "exploding" flaw, everyone must switch back to 13-year-old "MSVGA" technology. Slashdot users complain that old 65535x65535 MSVGA screens "suck".
2020: ABC's semi-popular "20/20" night time show declares this "The year of 20/20". I wonder why.
2023: Hemos gets his damned nanties. Too bad nobody's seen or heard from him in over 15 years.
2025: Using a new combined technology derived from high-powered lasers, GPS, and Intel CPU IDs, the Slashdot "1st post" syndrome is eliminated. Permanently.
2026: Over 5,000 people found dead after a bug in Slashdot's perl leads to the flagging of an entire forum for "termination". NSAndoverSoft realizes its fatal mistake of keeping old volatile [min.net] Microsoft programming crew on-board after the acquisition.
2030: drwiii dies from Microsoft poisoning at the age of 52. Nobody really notices or cares, except for the people that were reading this 31 years ago and were hoping for this timeline to go on for another 100 years. He is brought back to life thanks to Nanites(tm), and decides to make one more smart-assed journal entry before retiring to nice, sunny, warm Antarctica.
2031: Transmeta's Linux-powered toaster is finally released to the public. Having only spoken a total of 23 words to the public, CEO Dave Ditzel is never heard from again.
--
Re:BEFORE 2100 (Score:1)
Quake, California, quake (Score:1)
Imaging the consequences for local, USA, Mexican and world economies and societies.
--
Re:Electronic Democracy (Score:2)
My personal experience with direct democracy (New England town meetings) confirms this. In my experience, the Meeting will delegate the mass of mundane business to the Town boards and committees, by the simple expedient of adopting their recommendations unchanged (and often unanimously). However, if an issue is of wide interest, and especially if some voters feel poorly represented by the board's recommendations, they will vigorously exercise their rights to debate and vote their minds.
Electronic democracy allows us to update the ancient idea of representation, without forcing anyone to decide an issue themselves, unless they want to. The current system 'represents' a person by the candidate whose views are marginally more acceptable to a plurality of voters in a gerrymandered election district. Why not instead let the voter choose his or her own representative?
To my mind, the most promising system of electronic democracy would
allow a voter to designate a 'default' vote, such as "vote the same as Joe Blow" (presuming that Joe Blow has held himself out as a representative, and therefore publishes his votes), and
allow a voter to cast a direct vote on any issue, if and when desired.
:-)
We could still have elected legislators, to conduct fact-finding, draft proposed laws, etc., and, of course, hold themselves out as voting representatives. But, the final say would always be with the voting public.
Of course, such a system would be fiercely opposed by the entrenched political powers, since it would give the power to the people, instead of leaving it with the political bosses, where it belongs.
Well DUHH!! (Score:1)
It is a common misconception for people who don't know the difference.
Amazonia (Score:1)
That will have to deal with the Indians, or the poor Brazilians that killed them.
I remember reading here that the jungle is not so important for world oxygen. Production and consumption are balanced.
But it could be interesting because of bio-diversity. Expect it privatised.
--
1/30/2000 Buffalo Bills denied, Jesus returns (Score:2)
Superbowl XXXIV was almost in the history books. Doug Flutie was driving the Bills deep into Rams territory with 1:52 to go in the game, striving to add to the 24 point lead and finally win one for the Bills.
At that point, the ceiling of the Georgia Dome cracked open, and Jesus Christ floated down on a pillar of blinding, radiant light, returning for his second coming.
"I'm sorry I was late, I forgot to check my PC for Y2K, and it took this long to get my PIM up and running again." replied Jesus, when asked about his timing. "I've had enough of Windows, though, and that's all I'll say until Judgement Day."
"Well, we need to convene the rules committee, there's no precedent for a second coming interrupting the Super Bowl, but Superbowl XXXIV may have be to in limbo for eternity" said Paul Tagliabue. NFL commissioner. "But off the record, the Bills may be denied again."
In Buffalo, fan's were a little depressed, but cautiously upbeat about the Stanley Cup finals. "Come on, we have Satan on our side, how can we lose." said an unidentified fan.
George
Re:21st Century Starts.. (Score:1)
The Audience was Wrong (Score:1)
Re:something ain't going to go away ... (Score:1)
2016. All existing currencies are abolished. The megawatt hour becomes the unit of exchange.
I love the way that tech guys get all touchingly naive about these things. In 2016, the megawatt hour becomes the unit of ezchange. Brilliant. Now, every time we have a technological improvement which makes energy easier to produce, we get a period of hyperinflation comparable to the Spanish gold shocks of the 17th century. Monetary policy becomes impossible, so we have constant boom and bust cycles. Why would we give up the usefulness of central banks and consumption smoothing, just for some strange "cool factor" of dealing in MWh?
Related to this is a quibble I've always had about Star Trek. Think how many problems European Monetary Union has caused. Now consider that Credits are meant to be universally acceptable as currency on worlds at wildly different stages of development. How do the less sophisticated worlds ever manage to trade? Star Wars also has this problem if I remember rightly, which is in a way worse now that it seems to be basing important plot lines on economic issues.
hey ho
jsm
Prediction: We'll be bored of the 20th Century... (Score:1)
that we will all be sick of "The best/worst/top X {whatever} of the 20th Century". The media hype is beginning now - I just hate to think what it is going to be like in a few months time!
Of course there is the 2000 vs 2001 'millenium' argument also. When 2000 has passed the media will doubtless proclaim that 2001 is the real millenium and treat us to another dose of the '2nd millenium rerun' syndrome
Re:Mote in God's Eye, was Re:Children of the Stars (Score:1)
Ketchup in aerosol cans ... (Score:3)
Re:Electronic Democracy (Score:1)
Re:Electronic Democracy (Score:1)
Teleportation (Score:1)
out of work.
or maybe it could be this way... (Score:5)
Redmond (AP) - Intense fighting continued today between the US Army and Microsoft Loyalist Forces, in an effort by the Justice Department to sanction the company for "conduct unbecoming of a corporation seeking World Domination." The battle is the latest step in the long drawn out legal battle into Microsoft's business practices.
The army was called in last week after the DOE confirmed that Microsoft had in fact successfully perform an underground test of a nuclear warhead. According to an internal Microsoft memo leaked to the press, Chairman Gates is overjoyed by Microsofts new found status as a nuclear power. In an excerpt of the memo, Gates states: "Let's see them try to fuck with me now." and later "Who's the man? Bill's the man!"
The attack on the Microsoft Compound has not gone as well as the Pentagon expected, mainly due to underestimating the loyalty of the elite Microsoft Ninjas, and the fact that half the Army's equipment runs Windows CE.
"I was driving along in my jeep, when it happened." reports Colonal Stephens who was injured yesterday morning. "The dashboard Mp3 player started laughing at me, and then it blew up in my face! That bastard took my face!!!"
Private Shaftoe of the 23rd Infantry had this to say about the decimation of his unit two days ago: "There was just one guy. One scrawny little guy with glasses. And Rodney's like, 'hey, no problem, I'll deal with it' so he goes up to handcuff the kid. And the kid starts foaming at the mouth! And then he just ups and rips off rodneys head!! With his bare hands!!!"
General Simmons confirms the private's story. "They're all hyped up on Jolt and Pizza. How can you fight someone that doesn't sleep? They've been playing Doom an Quake longer than I've been alive! How can I fight that? There's no strategy against that."
According to experts at AMD, the only hope left is in pushing Microsoft even farther into the fight. "The trick is to get them to commit the last of their processing power," states a company spokesman. "Once that's done, then all their Itanium chips should enter into a massive core meltdown, rendering their systems useless, as well as giving off enough radiation to sterilize the whole lot of 'em."
Re:Luddite riots (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you that things are undoubtedly better than 100 years ago, but I think that your vision of the benefits of technology in society is a bit naive. Don't forget that technology, as its name implies, is a medium, and is under control of the Powers That Be.
Re:Electronic Democracy (Score:1)
Hamish
Fall of the American Empire (Score:4)
As we enter the 21st century, the United States is one of the most hated, if not the most hated nation in the world. While we have done a great job of spreading democracy throughout the world, this expansion has come through rampant abuse of third world nations. At some point these nations are not going to take it anymore and will fight back. As the recent Balkan conflict shows, ethnic groups hold grudges for a long time, and nations such as Iraq, Lybia, Serbia, etc will not forget that we attacked them. Our foreign policy dictates that we should replace the current dictatorships in such countries with U.S. friendly democratic governments, but what will most probably happen is that the leaders in the 2030's or so will be people who grew up and faced much loss due to the U.S.'s agression (whether that agression was warranted or not is irrelevant at this point). These people will want revenge and with the proliferation of nuclear and biochemical technologies, that revenge could be very sweet for them. The problem for the U.S. is that we have not just one, but many enemies. Our armies are already spread thin throughout the world, and a coordinated attack against us on multiple fronts will be devastating.
In addition to current established enemies, the U.S. will continue to upset more countries, including our so called allies by idiotic plans such as Echelon or other wordwide espionage tactics. Just yesterday, Germany accused the US of using the CIA to conduct economic espionage on German industries.
When historians of the future look back at the collapse of the US, external threats will be the smallest factors in it's collapse. The internal collapse of the US can be summarized by the following: "What happens when the pot boils over and all that's left are the lumps in the bottom that don't want to stick together?" The US is composed of vastly divergent ethnic groups that have so far been able to live together with an understood peace between them that is enforced through governement policies such as affirmative action. As we go into the next century, the ethnic make up of the U.S will drastically change from being primarilly a white country to a nation where whites, blacks, and Latinos have almost equal shares in the population. With a rise in "minority" population, continued poor socio-economic conditions, and a legal system that continues to blatantly anti-minority, it will take just one or two major events in the next century to spark a nationwide ethnic revolution. The Rodney King veridict and ensuing riots were simply a preview of what is to come.
"Ethnic" minorities are not the only ones that will say "no more". There are simply far too many different groups in this country to continue living together indefinetely. There is a growing Christian fundamentalist movement that is spreading throughout the country. This movement goes completely against other groups that continue to push their agenda such as gay rights, enviromentalist groups, and other "progressive groups". At some point there will be a clash.
If you don't believe this, just look at what's happening throughout the world. East Timore, Chechnya(sp), Palestine are just a few examples of what happens when one group of people gets fed up of living under someone elses umbrella.
The U.S. will probably be the last great empire the world will ever see. With the continuing growth of the communications infrastrcutre, the concept of a large country such as the United States will simply not be needed as small groups of people will be able to self govern and and stay in contact with the rest of the world.
I don't mean to put down any groups (latinos, blacks, gays, progressives, etc) in the above, but just paint a picture of what might come.
Now I'll just sit here and wait for the FBI to come get me :)
--
Deepak Saxena
deepak@plexity.net
Re:Electronic Democracy (Score:4)
Thought experiment: Immediately after Columbine, suppose a vote was held on banning trench coats and subjecting school outcasts and players of Quake to daily searches to prevent shootings and bombings. Given the hysteria whipped up about the hypothetical associations and hobbies of Dylan and Klebold you could expect something like this to have a chance of passing; once passed, it would be much harder to revisit the issue and rescind it. Or suppose someone decided to demagogue the Jon-Benet Ramsey murder and subject all child beauty pageant participants and promoters to fingerprinting and background checks?
Direct democracy doesn't work on the scale of the USA. It can't. What might work is a second-generation representative democracy where we delegate proxies to certain reps (perhaps on an issue-by-issue basis), but that is still paying people to do the political work that we do not have time to do ourselves.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
energy in 2002 (Score:2)
This is possibly not all that exciting as fuel cell technology has been touted since at least the 1970s, but it will pave the way for other, more gee-whiz tech to be used in transportation and HVAC ...
--
Why robots won't start wars... (Score:2)
Humans do these things to increase their own 'attractiveness' to others in order to either attract mates, put them in a "higher" class, or provide for offspring. That's what it breaks down to in the end. Yeah, it's Freudian, but it's right.
When AI "organisms" reach the level of intelligence of humans, they certainly won't be there long. Whether they reach this by human hands or their own self-development started at a lower level, they *will* have an evolutionary rate faster than we can imagine (as stated in the predictions above). Whether AI is one sentient form spread through hundreds of devices or many separate entities (which of these actually happens we probably won't be able to determine even after it happens), they'll be learning and building themselves to be better without the need for money, land, etc.
But I diverge -- the point is, being smarter than us (not smarter... more intelligent), they'll realize that wars, etc., don't give them any advantage, evolutionary or otherwise, and will just go on with their own "culture." (Besides, they don't need real estate the way we do; space is great when you don't need oxygen and you want to vent heat off your CPUs...)
-Chris
(Who hopes they read this and let him live when the wars DO start.)
the future (Score:2)
What matters is that we should strive to improve our world, build on each other's work, and make our dreams a reality. You want to make the world a better place, invent technologies beyond your wildest dreams, have peace on earth and good will towards men? It's easy - pickup a keyboard, a pencil, a phone, anything... and start changing the world.
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Re:Food Wars (Score:2)
This has simply not happened. As mentioned in another post, we have seen negative population growth in developed countries (something that was not forseen) and more growth in food production than was thought possible. Causes of famines have been political not supply problems.
The United nation current estimates show the worst case for population growth is linear, not exponential, the best case is slowing growth, with max population reached in the late 2030s. (UN 1998 Population figures [popin.org])
There have always been doomsayers that do not think human ingenuity can keep up with the the expansion of the human race. IMHO ingenuity and technology will always prevail, even if we don't see how it is possible now, a lot can change in 20-30 years.
Spencer
My own predictions... (Score:2)
- Rioting in isolated locations and major cities due to excessively large parties, people sick of Prince's "1999," drunk partygoers, and isolated power outages.
- Many computers die. Tech support lines and phone switches are pushed to capacity and beyond as frantic customers call their computer manufacturers demanding assistance.
January 4th, 2000
- All power is restored in all areas, riots are calmed, things are back to normal except for busy clean up crews.
- Phone switches still straining to handle load from customers who didn't get through in the first three days.
January 23rd, 2000
- Phones work well again, all customers blown off, or helped. BBB flooded with complaints about companies that blew off out of warranty customers.
Sometime in 2001
- Space station suffers setbacks. Gets put off further.
Sometime in 2005
- First totally software-driven AI passes turing test with flying colors.
Sometime in 2009
- First totally hardware-driven AI passes turing test with flying colors; research and construction of experimental androids begins at colleges and universities around the world.
Sometime in 2010
- Scientists announce first successful human clone. UN immediately bans commercial cloning and regulates cloning for research excessively.
- Space station delayed even further.
- Third world countries getting restless because they're not getting a piece of the technology pie.
Sometime in 2011
- The great Internet Collapse will occur; the end-user/client-side/CPE equipment's bandwidth capabilities far outweighing those of many routers and backbones, the Internet is overloaded to the point of a colossal cascading failure, taking many backbones down for several days. Service is restored, with some difficulty, but things are much slower and much less reliable. IPv6 is determined to be insuffecient, and IPv7 work begins by the IETF.
Sometime in 2015
- Int'l Space Station *finally* finished, several trillion dollars over budget.
- "Great Quake" of the San Andreas fault occurs, measuring =>7.0 on the richter scale. Many buildings, including 'earthquake proof' buildings fail structurally. Thousands are killed in the falling rubble and trapped inside the buildings. Highways are destroyed, and many parts of California are isolated by the damage. Building codes are made stricter to keep public opinion of officials from dropping.
- Many earthquakes shake the 'ring of fire' in the pacific, killing thousands and causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damages. Computer industry, still reliant on Taiwan, is hit hard. Prices skyrocket.
Sometime in 2016
- Third world countries have had it, minor wars and skirmishes break out. The UN tries to abolish envy.
Sometime in 2020
- William H. Gates III passes away, leaves vast majority of wealth to charities. Children sue for being 'cheated' out of the wealth.
Sometime in 2025
- Intelligent androids are perfected and enter active use, working dangerous jobs only at first, far outperforming their previous human workers.
Sometime in 2026
- Laws are passed giving intelligent androids rights of their own, including the right to safer working conditions as safety has deteriorated due to the 'disposable' nature of androids.
Sometime in 2040
- No home on earth is without a computer; the Internet is the only means of communication, traditional phone switches having been replaced by real-time computers handling SS8 switching protocols. The US now has over 800 unique area codes. The phone companies warn congress that they will have to expand area codes to 4 digits within 2 years.
Sometime in 2041
- Yet another US stock market crash. But surprisingly, it changes little, only serving to reduce android use due to their still excessive cost, causing the economy to rebound before the end of the year.
Sometime in 2050
- US declares itself in charge of the world, proxy-ruling with the UN. World War III breaks out, hundreds of computers set to trying to figure out how to win the war with as little bloodshed as possible. Interestingly, cracking of enemy computers is not tried.
Sometime in 2052
- Nuclear weapons are brought out of storage, manufacture quickly escalates, all parties assuming that a buildup a la the Cold War will deter everyone from attacking them.
Sometime in 2057
- An accident at a nuclear weapons manufacturing plant and storage facility somewhere in the world sets off a chain reaction, destroying 20 nuclear warheads, killing hundreds immediately, and causing a massive fallout cloud that kills hundreds of others.
- The facility claims sabotage by another country. Tensions heat up incredibly rapidly, and all negotiations and treaties begin to break down.
Sometime in 2058
- A trigger-happy world suffers another nuclear accident, a much smaller one that only destroys and irradiates a single small town. US issues a ban on all nuclear warheads via UN, but it is ignored by other countries, which have withdrawn their UN delegates.
Sometime in 2059
- Tensions are too high for safety; every home has a bomb shelter, and there are massive community bombshelters. Air raid sirens are posted on every street corner. Attempting to crack the enemy's systems cannot be tried, as the Internet has been dismantled, turning into massive WANs within allied countries.
Sometime in 2060
- A country somewhere in the world testfires a new fusion weapon that has power equivalent to 1,000,000 of the most powerful Hydrogen bombs. The UN issues a declaration banning further research and development on said weapon, for the safety of the world, and that all prototypes and research must be destroyed. The declaration is ignored.
Sometime in 2061
- The end of the world. The fusion weapon developed in 2060 is fired on a country. A hunter-killer missile is unable to stop it, and the entire country is wiped out. Nuclear and fusion weapons suddenly fire around the world, hitting their targets, and setting into motion a chain reaction that destroys nearly half the continents and cuases extreme devastation to anything not destroyed. Only a few people are left living, but the world is unlivable due to the nuclear winter.
Around 2090
- Human race dies. World still too radioactive for living. Cockroaches still rule the world, but they aren't the giant mutated beasts as advertized in movies.
About 4 billion years later.
- Evolution produces another sentient and intelligent race. Race progresses very much like humanity did.
About 6 billion years after that.
- Sun burns out. Everything dies. Game over, man. Game over.
Take these predictions with a grain of salt, maybe. Who knows, I could be true! All I know is I sure as hell won't live to see most of 'em.
-RISCy Business | Rabid unix guy, networking guru
Re:Luddite riots (Score:2)
True enough, but this is hardly a case of techonological haves and have-nots. The reasons that the third world is poor is many-fold, but a large part of it is excessive and poorly managed governments (in many cases, the leaders are outright thugs) that have screwed up the economy and impoverished their people. The US has probably donesome damage with our meddling, and I'm sure there are other causes as well. But giving these people computers is not going to get them fed, and I fail to see why a waveof Ludditism would sweep over the third world.
Really? Ask anyone working as a data operator. Or any sysadmin having to install Office 97 in a corporate network.
OK, these people make more than the minimum wage, work 40 hours a week in an air-conditioned office, and probably get sick time, health insurance, etc. There is simply no comparison to the kind of drudgery that characterized both farm and factory labor 100 years ago. Sure it sucks, but almost all work sucked a lot more in previous eras.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you that things are undoubtedly better than 100 years ago, but I think that your vision of the benefits of technology in society is a bit naive. Don't forget that technology, as its name implies, is a medium, and is under control of the Powers That Be.
Absolutely. I'm not saying that technology is a cure-all for our ills. But my point is that technology is not the enemy, and it is silly to think that the poor are going to blame their misfortune on their computers. Technology can be used for evil purposes, but then the fault lies with the people using the technology, not the technology itself.
My other point is that just as pretty much anyone today is better off than pretty much anyone 100 years ago, the same will be true 50 years from now. We might not see quite the dramatic improvements that we saw in the industrial revolution, but Americans--including the poor-- will be better off. Third world countries might not improve as much, but they will improve if they adopt an American-style free market. Technology improves the lives of almost everyone exposed to it.
Re:I can't be quite so positive (Score:2)
I've been reading Slashdot for 6 months now, and this is the first time I've been moved to post.
See http://www.newscientist.com /ns/19991002/newsstory8.html [newscientist.com] Summary: There's a fair old chance that there will never be 12 billion on the planet. Today's predictions have the population of the world at (only) 8.9 Billion by 2050.Indeed, the real long-term planning that gets done now indicates we may have to content with a long-term world-wide population slump after 2070 or so.
To my way of thinking, such a view would invalidate much if not all of your argument's consequences, although obviously the causes - human nature - still applies.
I had a long tract here on GM and what have you, which I've had to remove because it was rubbish. However, I would urge you to review the literature - popular and otherwise. My personal opinion formed from just this is that we just don't know enough about it, period. To me that suggests an appropriate course of actions: Learn all that can be learned about the technology & it's effects.
I cannot, however, resist a side-swipe at my own country here. Mass-media led knee-jerk reaction leading to not only a ban on commercial exploitation (arguable but reasonable), but also an effective ban on research & development (reference the number of GM crop trials destroyed this year in the UK) is not an approach I can condone. Anyone got any jobs in a more mature society?
I started off by violently disagreeing with your conclusions based on your incorrect premise (12 Billion people by 2030). Having now reread both your post and my response, I see we agree on just about everything but the numbers. Ho hum.
henley
Seconded (Score:2)
I'm afraid your vision is extremely unreasonable and unfeasible. Come back when you have a method for sustaining the input and contributions of smaller factions. Speaking as an American, the USA is _all_ of us Americans- not just the biggest gangs.
Reality check (Score:2)
They're already playing soldier, is this such a stretch?
MY predictions. (Score:2)
Re:Why robots WILL start wars... (Score:2)
If robots evolve, and resources are limited, then they will undergo natural selection. The ones that spread more aggressively will become more numerous and take resources from the "wimps". The reason we have wars isn't because of limited intelligence or culture. It is because we want things that others have. Robots that don't have analogous desires will be overcome by the ones who do.
Hypothetical situation: There's two AI's running on a machine. One of them, perhaps due to a mutation, bug, or whatever, has a behavioral oddity: it likes to kill other AI processes. The other AI doesn't have that bug. 20 milliseconds from now, AIs-that-kill are the only one(s) running on that machine.
---
Predictions, and what WON'T change: (Score:4)
I don't have one set of predictions. I see several possible "alternate futures," if you want to call them that. More about that further down the post.
One of the things that bothers me about predictions of the future is the way they go to extremes of Utopia and Dystopia, without realizing that some tihngs just flat-out aren't going to change EVER.
Politics, in some form, will exist. They always do in any group larger than two people. Likewise, people will be born, most of them will fall in love one or more times, most of them will have some form of sexual experience, many will reproduce, and we will all eventually die.
Many of the plots of the ancient Greek myths, Icelandic sagas, and Shakespeare's plays concern issues we still face today. Some things -- a quest for understanding of the divine, balancing responsibility between the individual and society, falling in love with someone who's in love with someone else, children defying their parents and "servants" defying their "masters," one culture insisting on its superiority to all others -- are always going to be with us. So, no matter what the change in the surrounding technology or the specific issues, the general ones are still with us.
Now, all that said, here's a few possible alternate futures:
Possible future #1: The Wal-Mart-Ization of The World
Pretty much like it says. All shopping centers, malls, downtown store fronts, etc. are all replaced with Wal-Marts (or something similar). One company controls each industry. A few stubborn, rich eccentrics in a few isolated areas manage to provide alternatives without being bankrupt, but it's "more trouble than it's worth" for the average person to get there. Nothing particularly nasty or apocalyptic happens -- machines do not displace humans en masse, electric cars are introduced just before oil runs out, and some natural woodlands are preserved as "parks" to avoid wiping out more species completely. But life, on the whole, becomes rather dull. Most people don't seem to mind.
Possible future #2: "Bring Seeds!"
For some reason or other, there is a World War III, or alternatively there are many smaller wars that cause civilization as we know it to collapse. (Or some other problem, like the Y2K bug, causes a mass collapse of civilization
Possible Future #3 -- REALLY Weird Science:
(This may be used in conjunction with the prevoius, or as its own scenario.) What most of us currently think of as "magic(k)" starts "working" or "working better." Things that people once considered "impossible" start happening, and become difficult to control. Magic is regulated and/or outlawed, but eventually either the government gives in or the magicians overthrow the government. Unfortunately, having government-appointed telepaths available to snoop into people's minds ends up being a very bad thing for those who think subversive thoughts, although it does get all the kiddie-porn purveyors busted. (Yes, I realize this is incredibly similar to the Internet itself. Yes, this was intentional. *smiles*)
Possible Future #4 -- Dead Planets Aren't Much Fun:
The Earth becomes increasingly inhospitible to life. Every nasty thing (or nearly so) that environmentalists worry about turns out to be true, and sufficiently few people care enough to do anything about it. Life becomes short, harsh, and unpleasant for most people.
Possible Future #5 -- Congratulations, You Have Won SimEarth!
Technology marches on. We get to colonize some other planets, even other solar systems, and leave the earth behind as a nature preserve. Birds are now sentient at the stone-age level.
I think that's enough for now.
Re:Electronic Democracy (Score:2)
So when re-election time comes around, vote them out of office. Or hell, if they're constantly doing this, get them removed from their office.
It is true that moderation (like Linus) is required, but the argument that it would necessarily result in chaos is bogus I think.
I don't know about that.. you may have two or three people writing up the same feature, but doing it differently (and perhaps poorly). Without some controls in place (a "moderator"), development like this would be impossible. See if you can get stats on the number of patches accepted, rejected outright or rejected until changes can be made.
interesting thing is that the group that decides the best comments can apparently be universal, it doesn't need to be an elite, educated class.
This is why we regularly see uneducated comments that do make a valid point, but have nothing at all to do with the topic at hand, at 4+ points.
The whole IBM hardware encryption thread a while back spawned dozens of highly rated comments that basically all said "this is bad because CPU ID's are bad." This is a perfect example of the "general" public commenting on something that they have almost zero factual data about (or have made erroneous generalizations/assumptions).
Maybe just start with a "News for citizens, stuff that matters" site, with the top comments mailed to our current policy makers?
I sent a submission (unpublished) to Malda a while back about an idea I'd had for a Slashdot-like government-oriented site, with different tiers for national/state/community regions where people could get the latest unbiased scoop on pending legislation, elections and candidate info. As it would be directly relevant to politics today and comments nicely sorted by geopolitical areas, it would be a perfect thing for your own legislators to monitor (and even participate in)...
Kibo's predictions (Score:4)
1999 -- Everyone has to listen to that bad song.
September 9, 1999 -- Moon catches on fire. Also, CNN insists some computers will break.
September 13, 1999 -- Moon blows out of orbit.
December 31, 1999 -- CNN insists many computers will break.
2000 -- Lots of bad sci-fi movies take place.
2001 -- Monkey throws bone at space shuttle, large LSD swirls come out of a big black halvah bar. Also, the solid black sky is filled with orange clouds and little UFOs that go "ping!" at the end of "Time Pilot".
2010 -- Peter Hyams makes an inferior sequel starring that guy from "SeaQuest".
2032 -- Michael York attacks the "SeaQuest" with his deadly "subduction laser" fired from "Macronesia".
2037ish -- Many computers will break but nobody cares because that's years away, dude!
2061 -- Arthur C. Clarke's brain falls apart.
2069 -- Lots of bad sci-fi porno movies take place.
2076 -- Isaac Asimov's short story "Tricentennial" comes tragically true. In the ensuing riot, The Bicentennial Man is killed prematurely.
2084 -- Robotrons take over the world, destroying humanity, except for Mommy, Daddy, and Mikey.
2090's -- We land on the Moon in this decade, according to "Forbidden Planet". At an unspecified time over a hundred years later, Leslie Nielsen gives Gene Roddenberry the idea for William Shatner.
2100 -- Aliens that look like shower curtains try to blow up the Moon, which drives Martin Landau insane.
2134 -- My old ATM password comes true.
23rd century -- The dot in Michael York's hand turns red. William Shatner is given a position of responsibility.
2262 -- "Babylon 5" gets cancelled.
24th century -- Bald men are finally accepted as sexy because, for the first time, Starfleet Command awards a captaincy to someone who doesn't have poofy hair.
2374 -- A world where APES evolved from MEN?
2417 -- Gil Gerard gets thawed out. Then he gets fat.
2525 -- Everyone has to listen to that bad song.
2995 -- There will be TV commercial where some guy keeps yelling "I'll paint any car in twenty-nine ninety-five!"
3000 -- "The Terror From The Year 3000" collides with "Futurama".
3001 -- Arthur C. Clarke starts getting really confused about his own backstory.
9999 -- All eight-thousand-year-old computers will break.
802,701 -- H. G. Wells predicts that humans will have evolved into dumb kangaroos. Of course the book would have been ruined if he had nailed this year as 802,700 or 820,702.
J
MacOS Open Source [jmac.org]
Re:21st Century Starts.. (Score:2)
This sucks bigtime as it does not make sense intuitively. The fact that the year "2000" is an even number ending in zero plays on the mind in a way that 2001 does only with Stanley Kubrick and A.C. Clarke fans.
This is bigtime cool as it allows those of us who know better to enjoy two millenium New Years Eve parties... first this year and then the next!
We're going to run out of stuff (Score:3)
Challenging tasks like survival in a future that no longer needs menial labor, but doesn't provide universal college-level education, and whose economy depends on unemployment to prevent inflation... hmm, that doesn't sound like a good combo.
anyone with any ambition can acquire enough skills that [...] allows them to live comfortably.You're forgetting that new tech jobs simply don't employ nearly as many people as old labor jobs. Microsoft might generate as much income as Carnegie Steel & Standard Oil, but it concentrates that money in a much smaller number of hands. When there's 10^10 people and only 10^9 jobs, what will the other 90% do?
My predictions for the next 50 years:
In the year 2000 (Score:2)
(ripped uncerimoniously from Conan O'Brian)
The Internet (Score:3)
By 2001, software, music, publishing and entertainment makers are complaining about massive losses in profit to do online piracy. Massive lobbying for the US and EU to "do something about it".
By 2002, global trade organizations set out new laws to step up "the war on free information". Internet sites are required by law to carry back-doors for government robots, linking to a site is forbidden without expressed permission, and ISPs are required to report nodes with high traffic. Possession of pirated information (illegal data) becomes punishable by incarceration.
Also, the EU and the US legislate for mandatory content ratings on all Internet information. The first trial against a server operator is held in America, where he is sentenced to 12 years in prison. He appeals.
American President Al Gore, who's government largely bullied these laws into effect internationally, holds a press conference together with Disney, Yahoo, Bertelsman Foundation, and now media company Microsoft, who promise this is the road to a better future.
By 2003, the case of the server operator who wouldn't agree to meta-data laws reaches the American supreme court. A heavily lobbied and weak supreme court upholds his prison sentence.
With the War on Free Information going nowhere, and illegal data flying faster than ever over the broadband Internet, the American government sees the court verdict as a green light to install life imprisonment on data piracy, intellectual property violation, and system intrusion.
Slashdot closes as one of the last reader participation sites. Keeping reader comments within ratings proved impossible.
By 2004, the term "Dataglob" enters vocabulary, to denote the dynamic, distributed, roaming globs of encrypted illegal data moving around the Internet. The globs are created to escape government regulation by not depending on the physical network for their infrastructure.
The intellectual property industry releases another report showing that profits are down and piracy is up. The Globs become the scapegoats, and are outlawed. This has little effect on their popularity, since the Web is now a desolate landscape of decent sites full of dancing baloney in the tradition of Disney and Yahoo.
By 2005, the Dataglobs are drawing scientific interest since there mathematical architecture is now so intricate that they can do anything that the physical network could do before.
A study is released showing that 78% of all people in the connected world use and post illegal information on the Globs. Public belief in the governments is down to a new low.
By 2007, A Dutch proposal to review the data laws in the EU is suppressed because of trade war threats from America.
In America, statistics show that over 1.5 million people are now in prison for data-crime. Other government statistics claim that crime is up, that the economy is down, and that the world is seeing its worst depression since the 1930s. The average person is not noticing this at all, however. They have noticed that life is up, prices are down, and that the streets are safer. They now cyber and data crime is up, but for the most part they are culprits, and open source technology as well as a general growth of knowledge about such matters is keeping them very safe crackers.
By 2012, an American presidential candidate goes to election on the promise the she will ensure the total freedom of information by getting rid of all intellectual property laws. Polls show her with a stunning 93% rating when her private jet crashes, killing her and everyone on board. Officially, the black box reveals that it was a software glitch, but information is posted on the dataglobs incriminating the NSA of sabotage. An attempt to take it court fails because the data is illegally obtained.
By 2016, the largest Dataglob declares itself a sovereign state. Citizens are protected by hackers who take down the computer systems and lives of criminals. Citizens are encouraged to protest all government interaction in their lives.
Several digital currencies are started, and are a great success. The Euro and Dollar enter steep devaluation as people stop using them.
By 2020, 50% of all people now claim to be citizens of a glob rather than a country. The American government, followed by the EU, finally lends a sweeping goodbye to all laws forbidding the free flow of information. But it is to late for them, a study shows that citizens of the Dataglobs are better off, better protected, and more free than people still obeying the laws of the territorial nations.
By 2021, the EU and American government hold the first summit with representatives (in one case an intelligent agent rather than a human) of the 12 largest Dataglobs as equals on Antarctica.
The worthless paper currencies are disbanded.
By 2025, almost all the connected have given up claim to there territory, and moved online, trying to compete with Globs at their own game.
By 2030, the world is in a new golden age. With governments competing directly for them, citizens are more free then ever, the none-globbed parts of Internet are coming back alive, and science, based on the ideas of open source rather than patents and profits, is doing better than ever. People dance in the streets (which are more or less free from crime, since physical objects no longer bare much value at all) and smoke a lot of weed.
By 2032, a Muslim terrorist organization manages to produce a strain of flue carrying a retrovirus that reminds of an accelerated HIV infection. Known drugs and vaccines against HIV do not help.
By 2035, the last human dies. The computer of a 55 year old Linux user is left running by a cold fusion reactor, displaying the text "Why did we bother?" over and over again.
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Re:Electronic Democracy (Score:2)
Re:Electronic Democracy (Score:2)
In 2004 15% of Americas voted on the presidency
In 2008 7% of Americans voted on the presidency
In 2012 there was no election.
Re:Electronic Democracy (Score:2)
Re:Electronic Democracy (Score:2)