Predicting the future of technology

Discussion in 'General Science & Technology' started by khan, Jun 18, 2012.

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  1. khan

    khan Registered Senior Member

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    Can anyone offer some suggestions for predicting the future of technology?

    I found these general rules of thumb in my search ...so far

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    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws

    Shermer's last law

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shermer's_last_law


    How to Predict the Future of Technology

    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-future-is-for-fools

    This article says it is easier to predict things that can happen rather than predicting what cannot happen... :shrug:
     
    khan, Jun 18, 2012
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  3. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Sure. Just look at the past, and you'll see that it's almost impossible.

    Even within any single era, when human culture has more-or-less adapted and normalized to the most recent Paradigm Shift (1. Agriculture, 2. City-building, 3. Bronze, 4. Iron, 5. Industry, 6. Electronics), we have a dismal record of predicting the future of technologies that we've already discovered!

    In the Iron Age (roughly 1200BCE-1700CE), even once the printing press was invented, no one foresaw how rapid, large-scale reproduction of written language would transform civilization. Abundant, affordable books made public education possible, and the new writing-intensive businesses made it necessary. Newspapers made the public more informed, which helped turn government into a more responsive and democratic institution. That one technology, printing, transformed a population in which only priests and aristocrats could read and write, into one in which literacy is virtually universal in the most advanced nations.

    In the Industrial Era (roughly 1700-1950CE, and BTW no two scholars will ever agree on the starting and ending dates of any era

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    ), wars were fought over different visions of the future of industrial technology. The American North foresaw human energy highly leveraged by the conversion of the chemical energy in fossil fuel into kinetic energy (the defining technology of industry IMHO). But the South believed that the old manorial economy would endure, with a small aristocracy getting rich from the labor of a large population of serfs, with the only change being the replacement of serfs with slaves, since free men wanted to move north and work for wages in factories and offices. Some historians insist that if the South had won the Civil War and was still a separate nation, it would still have slavery. But most look at the history of the rest of the hemisphere and note that everywhere else but Haiti slavery died out peacefully, by attrition, as modern industrial methods out-produced slave labor at a lower cost.

    No one foresaw the ultimate result of the unimaginable productivity increase that industry brought: that the economy of the USA (and ultimately the world, although there are still a few places where it hasn't happened yet) would toggle from scarcity-driven to surplus-driven. Virtually everyone has the necessities of life (which now include things our ancestors couldn't imagine such as toilets, refrigerators, telephones, TVs and cars or magnificent public transit systems) and entire new industries have arisen to help us spend our surplus money, including advertising, a business that our ancestors could certainly not have fathomed.

    But now that we're in the Electronic Age (which began in the 1830s with the first commercial telegraph, arguably became dominant after WWII with the rise of television, and with the proliferation of computer and communication technology is now clearly a new kind of world) we still haven't gotten any better at predicting the future of our dominant technology.

    As I've noted before, Tom Watson, president of IBM in the 1950s, predicted that the total world market for computers would be less than 100. The Selectric (speed-ball) typewriter was their masterpiece!

    Oh yeah, and they promised that they would never build a portable typewriter. "The name of our company is International Business Machines, and a portable typewriter is simply not a business machine." (Not a direct quote, but that's basically what their salesmen said when we asked them when we'd have portable Selectrics in our dorm rooms in college. Now you kids have tiny computers that fit in your pockets.)
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Jun 20, 2012
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  5. Snocrash

    Snocrash Registered Member

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    That Scientific American article you linked to had some advise:


    Here's a good article from Wired, they have 7 tips for spotting future trends:

    Looks like I can't post links yet... but just search for the 4/24/12 How to Spot the Future article in Wired.
     
    Snocrash, Jun 20, 2012
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  7. leopold

    leopold Valued Senior Member

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    i would add the following laws:
    4. anything and everything is possible, until proven impossible.
    5. practically all "new inventions" makes use of previous inventions or discoveries.
     
    leopold, Jun 20, 2012
    #4
  8. spidergoat

    spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    I say we will hit peak science within the next 50-100 years. The decline of research will coincide with the decline of cheap energy and it's subsequent effects on civilization.
     
    spidergoat, Jun 20, 2012
    #5
  9. mathman

    mathman Valued Senior Member

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    I am a little more optimistic. Alternate sources of energy - solar, wind, biomass, fusion(?) will keep us supplied for a much longer time.
     
    mathman, Jun 20, 2012
    #6
  10. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    But technology is the key to reducing energy usage.
    • One-fourth of America's petroleum consumption goes directly to commuting: auto or public transit. If you add in energy-intensive fast food for people who don't get home early enough to cook, nannies commuting to care for children whose parents never see them awake, gardeners and handymen driving around to do easy jobs that homeowners don't have time to do themselves, etc., that figure probably rises to one-third. As a new generation of managers takes over who have spent their whole lives living virtually, telecommuting will allow most workers to restrict travel primarily to socializing and recreation. And don't forget that the vehicles still on the road are considerably more energy-efficient than their predecessors.
    • How much energy does the publishing industry use? Including home delivery of newspapers and magazines, not to mention the beloved phenomenon of junk mail? I get my periodicals on the internet now, and unfortunately my junk mail has followed. Publishing is just one obvious example. Other industries are also becoming more energy-efficient due to information and process-control technology.
    • Other major energy-consuming processes have become enormously more efficient, from the humble incandescent lightbulb to the cathode-ray TV set.
    • And don't forget that the steady average global rise in living standards, largely the result of technology, is one of the major causes for the astounding decrease in the birth rate: prosperity has proven to be the most effective contraceptive. The global population is universally predicted to peak by the end of this century and then start decreasing for the first time in tens of thousands of years. We have enough energy to make it to that point and beyond. From then on, fewer people mean less of a drain on resources. Couple that with continuing predictable, unremarkable shifts in energy use and production. New, unforeseen technologies will take care of the rest.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Jun 21, 2012
    #7
  11. Cyperium

    Cyperium I'm always me Valued Senior Member

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    I predict that cloud technology will advance to the stage where we never need to run any program from our own computers (except the program handling the cloud software). As long as you can sufficiently run the cloud software then you can run any program and there will be no more "system requirements". All programs will be run from super-computers, the speed of the internet will allow you to interact with the programs in real-time just as you would within your own computer.

    We can see some effects of this already, Youtube does a lot of processing when you upload a video and this is done on their computers, there are also many other web-services that does processing for you.
     
    Cyperium, Jun 21, 2012
    #8
  12. quadraphonics

    quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    Sounds great and all, but ignores the point that the correlation between technological development and energy usage is strongly positive.

    For example, consider the well known paradox that the introduction of devices with improved efficiency then causes greater proliferation and usage of said devices, to the point where the total resource consumption goes up. This paradox has been observed since early in the Industrial Revolution, and even has a specific name:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
     
    quadraphonics, Jun 21, 2012
    #9
  13. Epictetus

    Epictetus here & now Registered Senior Member

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    Predicting the future of technology!? Well what about the singularity? :fright: All bets are off if that happens!
     
    Epictetus, Jun 22, 2012
    #10
  14. data2.0

    data2.0 Registered Senior Member

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    Oh my a most curious topic. I have often considered this and the number one thing I believe is possible but people call impossible is to travel faster than the speed of light. I bet even naturally occurring things travel faster than the speed of light. In the next twenty years I expect cheap, infinite energy. Also cool hats.
     
    data2.0, Jun 22, 2012
    #11
  15. Epictetus

    Epictetus here & now Registered Senior Member

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    Epictetus, Jun 22, 2012
    #12
  16. keith1

    keith1 Guest

    We are obligated to build upon the past, as it would be wasteful, if not foolish, not to accept the synergy at hand. There is much comfort, memory, and generational sharing found in nostalgic rehashing of the eras.

    Likewise, a shallow artistic newness can be conjured temporarily from the bending and shaping of what was taboo only yesterday. But this is not the significant newness required for, in shaking off the past entirely.

    Technology has been this needed complete reforming escarpment. I do not believe it will cease in doing so.

    Oil production started from that same shift in lighting, lubricating the new machinery--the change from moving 30 miles a day, to 300 miles...

    We will no doubt cross other milestones of progressive surge on our course--
    We have yet to tap the magnetosphere and solar fields surrounding us...

    Necessity is the mother of invention. Complacency in wealth and the will of the "embedded contented near-do-wells" is fleeting.
     
    keith1, Jun 22, 2012
    #13
  17. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    But this line of reasoning ignores Paradigm Shifts. Obviously, all past Paradigm Shifts have indeed resulted in quantum increases in energy use. The Agricultural Revolution allowed us to harness the muscular energy of large herbivores, augmenting human energy by a factor I can't find quickly, but probably no more than ten. The Bronze Age required a massive increase in the conversion of the chemical energy in wood and other organic materials into heat for smelting and alloying. The Iron Age increased that even more, because smelting iron requires much hotter fires, and because people found many more uses for iron artifacts than for bronze ones.

    Obviously, as I have pontificated before, the foundational technology of the Industrial Revolution was the conversion of the chemical energy in fossil material (coal, petroleum and natural gas) into kinetic energy. This powers all of our factories, vehicles, agricultural equipment, toys and other machinery. This increased our use of energy dramatically. So did the harnessing of electricity toward the end of the Industrial Era. Not only did this give us more ways of using energy, but the multiple-conversion processes result in less efficient usage (coal to heat, heat to kinetic energy, kinetic energy to electricity in the powerplant, then electricity back into kinetic energy, or perhaps into light at the user's end).

    But the Electronic Revolution is a new kind of Paradigm Shift. Its foundational technology, the condensing of information into groups of subatomic particles and the deployment of that information to massively increase the efficiency of pre-electronic processes, works in exactly the opposite direction of previous Paradigm Shifts. We no longer keep coming up with ways to use more energy. Instead we keep coming up with ways to use less.
    • I can't stress telecommuting enough: All by itself that will reduce America's petroleum consumption by approximately one-third.
    • There is nothing on the horizon that will significantly reverse that trend, because everything else that the Electronic Revolution delivers to us consistenly results in less energy consumption.
    • Look at your home.
    • Your workplace, which may now, thanks to electronics, be your home.
    • The places where you shop--Amazon.com reduces the number of miles a product has to travel before it ends up in your house.
    • The ways in which you play--Angry Birds uses a lot less energy than the maintenance of a golf course.
    • The way your children learn--Wikipedia is closer than the library.
    • Even the way you socialize--we still like to get together in person from time to time, but let's face it, telephone and e-mail give us more communication bandwidth and "virtual togetherness" for less gasoline.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Jun 22, 2012
    #14
  18. quadraphonics

    quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    I don't see how. Especially considering your own admission immediately afterwords:

    You say that but - again - per-capita energy usage has clearly increased throughout most of that shift (I'm counting the invention of the telegraph as the starting of that shift). Per-capita energy usage in the USA did indeed level off starting in exactly 1973, but I'm say that is clearly attributable to the oil shocks of the time. Saudi Arabia, by contrast, has continued to increase per-capita energy usage every year since.

    It also won't ever happen on any major scale. It doesn't work well for most jobs, most of the time. I'd bank on changes in urban/suburban planning, location of work sites, etc. as bigger drivers of reduced commuting.

    Telecommuting is one of those things that sounds amazing on paper, and is really great for certain niches, but turns out to have a lot of prosaic hidden costs for most applications that handicap its widespread proliferation. Not least amongst the hidden cost is the basic fact that most people actually prefer for there to be some physical separation between their work and living spaces. But there are lots of other, more prosaic ones like the added costs of data security, maintenance of computers/software in far-flung locations, reduced efficiency of meetings and the workplace social network in general, etc. The technology for this has been out there for quite a while now, so if it were enough to trigger a major shift in work habits such would already be readily apparent. Instead, it's being used to tie together far-flung (traditional, commuter) offices in a game of international labor cost arbitrage - thereby boosting the fortunes (and so, workforces) at each of the component offices, which thereby increases commuting (not counting the periodic international flights that managers take to keep track of the various locations).

    Did you read the page on Jevon's Paradox? It applies explicitly to inventions that increase energy efficiency. You make a more efficient lightbulb, and the result is that people will want to light a lot of areas that previously cost too much to light, and so energy consumption goes up. You invent a more efficient computer, and suddenly there's a computer in every phone, printer, radio, etc. in the country - and energy consumed by computers goes up. You invent a more efficient car, and suddenly everyone can afford to drive that much more and energy consumption goes up.

    Again, the Electronics Revolution has been going on for generations now, with zero decrease in per-capita energy consumption (instead, we've had a massive increase).

    My home is littered with energy-consuming electronic appliances. Even as any particular one has gotten more efficient, the total number of them a given person owns has grown at least as fast. Where we used to have one TV, one computer, and one telephone per household, we now have the same number per person, along with a pile of wireless routers, cable modems, video game consoles, wireless stereo systems, etc.

    See above.

    And thereby allows people to buy lots more products than they would have, driving up the total number of miles travelled by products on their way to consumers' houses.

    False dichotomy. There's been no decline in golf course maintenance. Angry Birds has, instead, resulted in people spending a lot of time playing (energy-consuming) games during times when they previously would not have been using a computer at all.

    And the result is that we can spend a ton more time on Wikipedia than we used to in the library, thereby consuming even more energy than before.

    That's also a false dichotomy. Those technologies aren't coming out of traditional in-person socialization - they're coming out of what used to be "alone time" or "work time," and if anything driving even more in-person socialization by making it easier to plan and track such events.

    Basically, your reasoning there assumes that people will respond to improvements in efficiency by continuing to do the same things they used to do, and simply pocketing the energy savings. They do not. Instead, they respond by increasing their usage and so consuming as much, if not more, energy. The incentives driving that are pretty obvious if you think about it, and the absence of any visible decline in per-capita energy consumption during the period you invoke is fairly unequivocable evidence of that.
     
    Last edited: Jun 22, 2012
    quadraphonics, Jun 22, 2012
    #15
  19. superstring01

    superstring01 Moderator

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    I think any predictions of the future fail on the fact that beyond a certain horizon of increase and distance, it becomes utterly impossible.

    Silly predictions (Sorry, Spider) that we'll somehow reverse, completely ignores the exponential increase in computing technology and the advent of designer-life.

    So, the question is this, by the time oil runs out in a century -- and even if we are still depended on it -- how far will our bio-technology have taken us. Consider now we've completely mapped the entire human genome. Working out what it all means, but with the doubling of computer power every few years, by 2030 there won't me much left to work out.

    Consider the need to do what Brazil has already done: Ethanol. Two advancing (as in, we're spending billions on it right now) that will change this for the world: algae which is "programmed" to eat our garbage and give off methane (good) and a bio-engineered plant that produces more sugar than sugar cane but will grow in the great plains.

    It also ignores that massive amount of unused fossil fuels in the USA that we're hoarding or just not using (the USA is the Saudi Arabia of coal, and we certainly aren't tapping all of our oil reserves), how long--when presented with economic collapse--do you think the USA will hold off for "ecological reasons" using those resources? Not long. Stomachs always win over hearts.

    This says nothing about the encroaching of engineering and human life or where nano-engineering will take us. We may (or may not) see universal assemblers in the next century, but if Moore's law continues unabated (and we can already predict with absolute certainty the technology basement), then by 2040 a standard laptop will have more computing power than all human brains on earth.

    Think we'll have trouble inventing a solution? No problem. Put the technology to work doing it for us. This is why such a point is called the "technology singularity", we have no idea what the solutions we will conceive by that point in time, but any notion--beyond a global war--that predicts a reverse of technology for the planet is just wishful thinking from minds that have some vague romantic attraction to an agrarian lifestyle.

    ~String
     
    superstring01, Jun 23, 2012
    #16
  20. Epictetus

    Epictetus here & now Registered Senior Member

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    Well Friend Fraggle, you do go on... but to put it more succinctly, look at it this way: the three revolutions (agricultural, industrial and informational) affected the stomach, the hands and the mind respectively. The revolutionary tools were (symbolically if not in actuality) the plow, the steam engine and the microchip.

    I agree about telecommuting, but that's nothing new. I've been reading in science magazines since 1972 about the 'home office'. The word 'virtual' always puts me in line of a Billy Joel lyric:

    It's just a fantasy
    It's not the real thing
    But sometimes a fantasy
    Is all you need​


    Was it Asimov's Caves of Steel wherein everyone (on an underpopulated, resource-rich planet albeit) lives in a private villa, and no one ever sees anyone else, they just send their holograms. Marriage is an exception, naturally, but it is taboo in this society to refer to someone's family. Asking if one has children is the equivalent of calling them a bastard in our society. So maybe it'll come to that.

    As for Wiki being closer to than the library... yes, I remember as a younger man how I used to walk (look it up,if you don't know what it means) half an hour to the public library, where I was quite proud of my card catalog use abilities. I used to say that I could not play a musical instrument, but the card catalog was like a synthesizer in my hands. Hah! Yes, Barney Rubble and I used to have fine times at the public library.

    Life without the Internet! Great Caesar's Ghost! What were we thinking!?
     
    Last edited: Jun 23, 2012
    Epictetus, Jun 23, 2012
    #17
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