Posted on 05/26/2006 8:08:09 AM PDT by Neville72
The rate of technological progress is about to shift into high gear, some futurists say. Are you ready to take advantage of the business opportunities?
If Ray Kurzweil is right, the business landscape - indeed, the entire human race - is about to be transformed beyond all recognition.
Kurzweil is a renowned computer scientist and inventor (he built the first flatbed scanner). And no less a figure than Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has called Kurzweil the greatest thinker on artificial intelligence alive today. So when he talks, it's worth paying attention.
Here's the question Kurzweil is asking these days: What if the exponential growth shown in Moore's Law applies not just to etching transistors in silicon chips, but to all of human progress and innovation?
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
Sometimes they are called businessmen.
Not like that was terribly difficult to see coming. The core of the internet already existed for use by the military and acedemia, and there were already some of the early stages of dial-up private network (CompuPay dates waaaay back and was really starting to get big after the H&R Block buy out in '77). It was an emerging market that was growing, the only question was who was going to win and how.
Uh, that would be me. Exactly.
PS. My previous comments are probably more hostile sounding than I intended. It just irks me a bit when people are dismissive of technological advance. Things are actually moving along quite nicely in my opinion, and will basically continue to do so, at least on the tech front. In other spheres, who knows..
Great. Better let more illegals in to do the work to take care of all the old boomers, because they selfishly didn't have enough kids to do the job themselves.
. We can now model and engineer the abstract.
Like global warming/cooling?
Communist is a species of Socialist. A communist follows Marx, and the dialectic theory of human history. A Socialist need not agree with Marx, but can still believe that the best society is one where the government owns all the property, and is in charge of distributing all benefits.
There was an article in the now defunct "OMNI" magazine which had predictions from some think tank.
They predicted the fall of the soviet union, the unification of europe, and I am just watching the rest unfold. The dates were a bit off but the results are there.
Does anyone have a copy of those dates and predictions? (or remember what month the magazine was?)
It was somebody in the 1950s, back in the early days of futurists when they mostly got employed by the World's Fair, before it was a license to print money.
Futurists can be Malthusians, it all depends on what's selling at the time.
Yes average life-expectancy is expanding, didn't say it wasn't. But it's not expanding at anywhere near the rate many futurists have predicted. According to some in the 1960s we should be expecting to live to 120 now. It's not my fantasy world, it's the futurists fantasy world. You have to devide up the predictions from doctors and the predictions from futurists, one of the halmarks of futurists is they don't actually know all that much about the field they are making predictions for.
Umm.. Why would they need to be illegals? We can always raise the quota of legal immigrants as needed, and it's not as if there'd be any problem meeting it.
On another note, however, I'd imagine that within the next 200 years (and probably much sooner) our medical technology will advance to the point where old geezers can be rejuvenated. The real question is how much it'll cost and what kind of social disruptions will result depending on how widespread it ends up being.
If things go as Kurzweil expects, there won't be an "old" boomers, just young boomers that have been around a long time..
I'm not dismissing technological advances at all. I think amazing things have happened in my lifetime and see nothing but more amazing things on the horizon. What I'm dismissing are futurists, who by and large just make crap up hoping to be the next Toffler or Ehrlich or any of the others who made a pile of money being wrong.
OK, that's a very good point. I agree with you that there were more optimistic predictions made about life expectancy, but that they did not derive from the medical profession itself.
Futurists can be Malthusians...
I guess, but I don't consider the Paul Ehrlich types to be futurists, but enviro-whacko Malthusian Luddites.
Think tankers aren't futurists. There's a difference between people who study the facts and try to spot trends and the guys who slap together some big headline to push a best seller and get on the talk show circuit. There are people who can predict the future very well, because they're smart, unfortunately they tend to not be the people making all the money at it. Whenever I see a prediction that includes something along the lines of "no aging" my futurist-BS-meter pegs, it's one of the big halmarks of people making money at it.
My dad was watching a show on the discover channel back in 1998 about nanotech. It said that if you were to project a 1998 man 25 years into the future, he would think that future world ran on magic.
I believe the world is already reaching the point where it is changing faster than human beings can psycologically cope with it. We are in for interesting times.
No that's the great part about futurists, their predictions don't need to extrapolate on ANYTHING other than what people want to hear.
Ah, the fearful Luddite emerges from his cave to scream, Hogwash! As always.
Consider the following statements that were all valid not long ago:
Only a human can drive a car.
Only a human can master the game of chess.
Only humans can recognize an individual face.
Only humans can understand continuous speech.
Only a human musician can compose music in the style of Bach.
Only a human can improvise jazz.
Only a human can pilot an airplane.
Those were all true 15 years ago. They're all false now.
We went from having the "holy grail" of robotics being the ability to walk upright on their own just ten years ago, to having such robots not only walking, but jumping, dancing, balancing on one foot... and doing that while talking, following spoken commands, recognizing faces, able to get back up if you trip them, and run simple office errands--such robots were on sale at the end of last year.
That's the power of exponential growth, and that's what's at the core of Kurzweil's analysis. These exponential growth curves in computing technology, artificial intelligence software, nanotechnology, and biotechnology are going to completely change what it means to be human in a very short time period.
Kurzweil himself anticipated and predicted the exponential growth of the Arpanet evolving into the Internet as early as the late 70s/early 80s. Was he wrong?
Kurzweil predicted in the 80s that a computer would take the world chess championship by 1998. He was off by a year.
You really should avail yourself of the facts before posting such moronic generalities.
I consider Ehrlich to be the shining example of why you should get a whole bunch of salt before even considering the predictions of any futurist. What I like best about Ehrlich is that he still manages to get books published long after he predicted we would unavoidably be reduced to mass cannibalism, he's a shining example of the complete unaccountability of futurists, he should be working the comedy circuit not the lecture circuit.
In his book, Your Next 50 Years, written in 1979, Dr. Robert Prehoda predicted cell phones, the breakup of the soviet union, a small nuclear war between Pakistan and India and a few other interesting things. The cell phones and breakup of the soviets happened around the time frame he predicted.
One thing that has been predicted for some time - and let's be frank, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see we are on the cusp of this one - virtual worlds so real that it competes directly with the real world.
Look at where gaming is going. Naturally, most of those who predicted it talked about it as having the same devastating results on people and our culture as drugs.
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