What do you think the world will be like in 100 years?

[Cevain]

Something like Ghost In The Shell except we'll be spending more time in virtual environments than "reality" which will become pretty much become an entirely meaningless pursuit once we figure out it's possible to have the same experiences virtually thanks to the major advances in biotech and computing tech.

Right now there are teams making all kinds of breakthroughs in connecting digital information with human brains. So far it's just about better robotic arms but very soon we will have the technology to put a chip in our head that connects to our brain as a calculator and we will get it to stay competitive with all the people who get it right away and we will become used to spending time in virtual environments. These things are completely certain, the uncertainty lies in just how digital we become and whether or not we will see a point in holding onto our corporeal forms.

IMHO trying to frame life in a hundred years in a human context is futile because we will be beyond that. In the past we have been chained to natural evolution so change was so gradual it was imperceptible. We are now forging our own evolutionary pathways and it may lead us down more than one path and split us into different "species", so to speak, but it will be something beyond what we can even imagine. That's especially true if the chip-in-our-heads deal comes within the next 20 years, if you pay attention to tech news at all that seems to be a stretch it's likely to happen even sooner.

Don't you ever feel like the information available to us now is overwhelming? Well then, you will be one of the first to get a chip in your skull that can process information to the tune of billions of floating point operations per second. That's like a billion people on a billion calculators doing a billion unique calculations at once. That's insane. That's inconceivable. That's already in the pipeline. Just imagine how fast progress will accelerate once we have that capability. Or at least, sleep on it for now and try to imagine it after you get chipped. It'll be a lot easier to do then.

Nice post . It's amazing when you think about what kind of technological steps we have taken the past 30 years. If we are going to take the same kind of steps in the next 100 years, or even bigger steps, this chip-in-the-head doesn't even sound that strange.

Makes you wonder what could be possible when we start to tune people into super evolved Einsteins and what a team of those people could come up with. This might turn out great, but it might also turn out quite nasty in the wrong hands I can imagine. This is an interesting time indeed when you look at it from a technological viewpoint.

 

[-=SS=-]

Nice post . It's amazing when you think about what kind of technological steps we have taken the past 30 years. If we are going to take the same kind of steps in the next 100 years, or even bigger steps, this chip-in-the-head doesn't even sound that strange.

Chips/Electronics connected to the body or brain.. FUCK THAT. You would have to be a complete and utter retard to EVER allow that to be done to you. Seriously, I don't know how anyone could think that is a good idea! Look how insidious facebook is and that isn't even connected to your body.. imagine being hooked into a system directly, mankind would be absolutely and utterly helpless!

 

[panic in paradise]

^haahaa good point

___
do you think the internet will be shut down within 100 years?

id assume yes, but up again soon after that.

Don't you ever feel like the information available to us now is overwhelming?

yes i feel that this sort of practice could be, or is done to keep intelligence levels at a par, regionally, by constantly leaving nothing to the imagination.

 

[psychodead]

im hoping that they will get this nuclear fusion thing off the ground and our energy problems will be solved.

 

[panic in paradise]

Something tells me drugs and tobacco will be much much less popular.

I can see a trend starting already with the younger teens these days, it is too easy to reference all the avoidable misery those choices entail.

 

[L2R]

Chips/Electronics connected to the body or brain.. FUCK THAT. You would have to be a complete and utter retard to EVER allow that to be done to you. Seriously, I don't know how anyone could think that is a good idea! Look how insidious facebook is and that isn't even connected to your body.. imagine being hooked into a system directly, mankind would be absolutely and utterly helpless!

privacy, sanity and the high chance of epilepsy are a small price to pay for automatic door opening. :D nobs are for nobs!

 

[-=SS=-]

privacy, sanity and the high chance of epilepsy are a small price to pay for automatic door opening. :d nobs are for nobs!

lol! :D

 

[thujone]

Nice post . It's amazing when you think about what kind of technological steps we have taken the past 30 years. If we are going to take the same kind of steps in the next 100 years, or even bigger steps, this chip-in-the-head doesn't even sound that strange.

Thanks Yea, framing it all in the context of what has been accomplished in the past hundred years and what is being accomplished right now without us even realizing it, the future just looks insane (as the present might seem to someone in the past).

Chips/Electronics connected to the body or brain.. FUCK THAT. You would have to be a complete and utter retard to EVER allow that to be done to you. Seriously, I don't know how anyone could think that is a good idea! Look how insidious facebook is and that isn't even connected to your body.. imagine being hooked into a system directly, mankind would be absolutely and utterly helpless!

Well, you live in London so I'll assume you own a GSM cell phone which you presumably carry with you most places and is packed with technology that can be used to track your location either through the built-in GPS device or through the radiolocation. What is the difference between being connected to the world from a device in your pocket versus a device in your head? Obviously, the chip-in-head would not become acceptable without safeguards to ensure that it can't take over your mind should you pick up a virus from somewhere.

My question is what will you do when you wake up one day to realize that everyone around you is electronically augmented? How will you be able to keep up with a society in which the rate of information being exchanged and processed is accelerated far beyond what is possible for someone who is 100% human? I think it's wrong to look at technology and focus on how it could be used for evil. Although such a cautious view speaks to real worries about abuse that will need to be addressed, it also shows a lot of ignorance about how modern communication systems work and our role in their functionality.

Technology is nothing more than a collection of tools, and while it could be used for malicious purposes it has far, far greater potential for good. Let's return to that point about cell phones: people could monitor your every move and know the nature of your text messages and phone calls. That's pretty scary, but at the same time we need cell phones to be connected with one another so we use them anyway.

Ok, time for a thought experiment: consider how much of the world's population owns a cell phone. Now consider how many people in first-world countries have graduated to 3G/4G internet-enabled smartphones. Now consider the rising popularity of tablets which are based on the same OS as smartphones, the main difference is that they offer you enough screen space to actually get something done and view/post to a website without having to squint or use your thumbs to type as on an iPhone. Given these developments in recent years, does is still sound far-fetched that we are yearning to graduate to chips in our heads that can allow us to do away entirely with the constraints of physical interfaces (i.e. screen size) and simply make webpages appear in full resolution in front of our eyes that we can post to just by thinking of the words we want to input?

 

[modern buddha]

nobs are for nobs!

Purposeful double spelling error?

 

[L2R]

yeah totally that was like fully intentional, and shit. my puns are like onions.

 

[Thou]

Hopefully it will be devoid of the sapien variable, whatever shape it evolves into.

 

[illmantos]

I think..
- the average life expectancy will be over 100
- nudity and sex will be commonplace on TV - life full on porn-scenes will be in primetime tv shows (it's already getting there)
- everything will probably be purchased on credit cards - cash probably won't exist (?, maybe)
- the internet will probably be censored, somehow
- we'll be over-populated

Or
- we'll all be dead from global warming.

Major technology advance, Cannabis being legal economy rising from taxation , Liberals will change drug laws cigarettes will be illegal, More neurological advancement research, Crime rate goes down from the cannabis, We realize we are from primate ancestry , We will no longer be the Apex predator, No such thing as religion, realizing god is non existant and infact was just a genius scientist, and we will all be one race so racism is none existant. Technology will be used to control us like in the Deus Ex games with the kill switches.

 

[Thou]

Humans won't be around jack, if the gods have any mercy.

 

[xxsicknessxx]

one word CHINA

 

[L2R]

^so, everything will be very pretty and extremely fragile?

 

[thujone]

The problem with threads that start with "what do you think" is people read that as "post your knee-jerk reactions!"

 

[rangrz]

Major technology advance

Probably.

Cannabis being legal economy rising from taxation

What do you mean? Cannabis legal and part of the economy. Realistic in some cultures, not in others. Do you mean Cannabis will replace things like energy? HAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh please, you're killing me, that's some high hopes for a mild euphoriant.

Liberals will change drug laws cigarettes will be illegal

Why Liberals? Liberals in what meaning? American use? Australian? Russian? They are all different. Why would they ban cigs but legalize cannabis?.

More neurological advancement research

That sentence is hard to understand, but physiology research on neurons, brains and nerves, like other physiology research seems likely to continue, I'd agree

We realize we are from primate ancestry

That which happened 153 years ago can hardly be called "the future"

We will no longer be the Apex predator

What do you foresee evolving in the next 100 years to the extent of being a major threat to humans from a predatory stand point? Evolution does not happen that fast. Also won't the tech advances allow us to merc the shit out of it anyways?

No such thing as religion, realizing god is non existant and infact was just a genius scientist

So you think that in less the two expected life-spans of humans, all religious people will have died, none will adopt new religion and also abiogenesis was the result an alien molecular biologist? How about religious people who are alive now and will be like 110 in 100 years? Where'd they go?

and we will all be one race so racism is none existant.

What do you mean? The social construct of race of well be gone? Again, it seems unlikely, people are quick to categorize people into groups and the young racists of today, some will still be alive in 100 years. People will be homogenized such that no outward sign exists? lolwut...again some people will still be alive from now and they will be the same "race" as they are now, not to mention, 2-3-maybe 4 generations is not enough, and that means EVERYONE has to reproduce with a different "race" for it to work. But the idea of race has no biological merit as it is and can be seen as never having existed in a meaningful sense anyways, rather being the imagination of people.

 

[missmegandelaney]

I think in 100 years... well.
The idiots will die, and the smart ones will survive.

 

[nickels]

5-d

 

[qwe]

i want 6D vision. i don't think 100 years is too short.