The future is now. 
I remember reading an old article by Larry Niven — one of the fist so-called "hard-science" and also few professional SF writers — about predicting the future.
He started off with a few badly wrong instances from the early 20C, where eminent people (they might be called "futurologists" now) tried to predict what the world would be like in the 20s, the 50s, the 70s or the very dim 90s.
The predictions were all hilariously wrong. A couple of them were badly wrong even about lifting the veil even 5-10 years ahead. No-one saw the WW's coming or the huge impact on technology they would make, or the huge re-arrangement of world power that would result. Or even the end of the Brit Empire.
If you get to see the old B&W film called "The Tunnel", I recommend. It posits a future world where the Brits and the US link up via an under-Atlantic tunnel. Of course, everything is still run by huge mysterious machines with gears, and the tunnel digging is all done by hand by people wearing headlamps. But at least they had a nice 6-person rail-car to get between the action end of the tunnel and the office.
As an instance of how unpredictable the world is (and why AI is so hard Niven gave his example of the automobile. Experts MAY have predicted that cities might spread out, and air pollution might be a problem, but they would not have predicted the changes to mating habits and the invention of burnouts (hmmmm…. doh-nuts!) and whatever that noise is kids make with the fancy automatic transmissions.
While I've only recently been bitten by the robot-building bug, I have been interested for quite a few years. Back in the 60s I used to read books showing lots of B&W photos of giant metallic humanoid bots lifting pretty girls on their arms, and stuff like that. They talked of mechanical turtles that could re-charge themselves from a wall socket (they sell these now in $30 kits , and chess-playing computers that would soon be able to beat any human player.
There was a lot of speculation how robots would be hoovering our homes and doing all the industrial drudge work. Some of Azimov's work (dating from the 20s?) gave another perspective — with a personal robot and access to raw materials, we'd all become industrialists and multimillionaires. There was even a bit of concern what that might do to the world economy. I exaggerate, but that was one of the early undercurrents.
And then, of course, there are all the essentially psychological problems of the "Three Laws". In fact the brittleness of *any* set of rules is a well-known result from mathematical logic (also coming from the 20s or there-abouts, and much disputed for many decades). You only have to look at how well the legal system — which handles things no normal computer language can even come close to — works to realise no amount of tinkering will get away from the underlying "Red Queen" problem.
Niven ended his article by claiming (with some evidence) that ordinary "civilians" see the future as pretty-much the same as now. I.e. a flat line. Scientists or specialists, Niven claimed, saw the future as steady progress — a straight line angled upward a little. Sci Fi writers saw the future as a slightly more steep line. But the future was actually an exponential.
So while predicting what the future may look like in a certain area may be lots of fun and good exercise for the "little green cells" (called "little grey cells" on this planet, apparently), it's a bit of a diversion.
What you do now (and maybe in the next few minutes shapes as much of the future as humans can typically anticipate or deal with.
There are all sorts of possibilities, but — practically by definition of what is "interesting" — all the interesting possibilities will come out of far left field and take everyone — especially the experts — utterly by surprise.
Search 
The Forums
No Status Selected
Print this Post 
