Editor's Blog
1. DNA sequencing: Over the next decade gene sequencing prices are expected to continue to decline by over 50% per year. That means that by the end of the decade we should probably know the genomes of a large fraction of the developed world population; of all important species of animals, plants and fungi; and of the microbial ecosystems in all sorts of natural environments. This should enable everything from GATTACA style genetic analysis of adults and embryos to improved flavors of cheese via better bacterial fermentation, as well as very advanced personalized medicine. The biggest questions relate to privacy and consent issues. Will knowledge of one’s own genome be tightly regulated? Will drugs ever be FDA approved for a market of one, and if not, how will personalized medicine work? Stay tuned to find out.
2. Regenerative Medicine: Already people are growing fingers from their own stem cells and growth factor infused protein scaffolds. Soon decellularized organs and directed stem-cell differentiation should enable the replacement of most major organs. Beyond that, such technologies could eventually lead to the creation of whole new synthetic organisms, though not, presumably, in the next decade. Still, by 2020, while we may not yet be able to build werewolves, healthy people who receive rapid emergency responses should be almost as durable. Shame to give up those dreams of bionic arms, but I’m pretty sure most people want flesh instead. Eventually any desired enhancement gadgetry can be built into the protein scaffold, but the killer app — replacement — will be taken.
3. Wireless broadband: Don’t you wish your cell phone sounded more like, you know, a phone? Reallocation of wireless spectrum and continued expansion of cellular infrastructures should make this possible, via the allocation of more bandwidth to each phone call, The continued replacement of voice by text, better technologies for compression and decompression and the like will accelerate the trend. By the end of the decade, expect voice and video quality as good as you might expect from HDTV.
4. Better energy storage: Tired of running out of battery power? Of batteries becoming worthless after too many discharges? Of your skateboard not having a kilowatt motor to keep up with traffic? In a decade these problems will be things of the past. Work on nanostructured batteries, ultracapacitors and fuel cells looks ready to enable high power machinery to operate everywhere and low power machinery to be ready for more after a few seconds of recharge time.
5. Robotics comes of age: The US military has funded robotics research extremely aggressively, and that research seems to be paying off. While today’s drones are mostly for recon, plans already exist for adding firepower. The civilian implications are tremendous. Facial recognition software will go from airports to eyewear while continuing to accelerate in the progress curve for its development. A bit further out, think widespread useful household robots, aerostats, and ultimately, the commercial robotic car.
6. Ubiquitous sensing and data: Science used to largely consist of meticulously gathering data and then using it to test hypotheses. By 2020, not so much. As HD cameras migrate from cell phones to always on line-of-site video (due to better energy tech and signal processing software as much as cheaper CCDs and better lenses) and radio tags shift from cars to inventories, the data to evaluate almost any macroscale hypothesis will already be available and recorded. Asking the right questions and translating them into statistical algorithms won’t necessarily be easy, but it sounds a lot more fun than lab work.
7. Cloud computing: Want a wearable supercomputer but don’t know what to do with the megawatt of waste heat? No problem, just borrow one for a second when you need it. Throw in some human intelligence while your at it. By 2020, Jeopardy playing AI won’t be a cool marketing gimmick, it will be a readily available servant you can talk to through your headset. No need to spend a fortune on the hardware, just ask it your questions when you feel curious.
8. The real social network: See that cute girl or boy sitting over there? Imagine seeing what you have in common at a glance. Social connections, common interests, whatever’s public. Want to try a new candy bar? People who like the things you like say you probably won’t enjoy it. Want a loan? Someone you know wants a 6% return, and based on your friends (evaluated by frequency of email exchange, not ‘friending’), they consider you trustworthy. Want to go skiing? It’s been one year since Jake, Ann and Alex last did so. They all like to go at least twice a year most years and they all have open calendars today. Did your friends really enjoy that party? Yes, but based on their proximities to one another they split into 3 groups with little overlap. Maybe try to have separate parties next time, or set up some icebreakers. The following games and exercises have worked in similar occasions in the past. Sally has done some of them before so maybe she can organize.
9. Augmented Reality: The killer app for most of the above. Want to talk with someone? Their Aura tells you how busy they probably feel as assessed by skin conductance, sleep history, and inbox content. Where did you put your necklace? Seems you last saw it on the kitchen counter. Feel like playing Pac-Man in Central Park with CGI ghosts? Totally doable. You can even dial in detailed rendering for more elaborate VR by renting out some computing clusters in Iceland.
10. Political-Economic reorganization: The good news is, as far as I can tell, none of these technologies is going to cost much. The bad news is that this means that they aren’t going to bring back much in the way of jobs, or even profits. I don’t really know what that’s going to mean, but the word Cyberpunk comes to mind. Importing oil may get quite a bit more difficult, but computer assisted ride sharing, VR, and to a lesser extent new energy and efficiency technologies should help. There’s plenty of food, cheap Chinese manufactured goods too cheap to meter via Ebay and Walmart and plenty of housing, so I’m sure that people will muddle through and figure out some way to distribute it equitably… that or elect jackbooted thugs to figure it out for them. A lot really depends on what the American middle class decides to believe once its totally clear that they aren’t going to be able to retire the way they expected, afford ever more expensive health-care, etc. The recent story with Bernie Madoff gives me some hope. No pograms. That’s progress!
Michael Vassar is the president of the Singularity Institute and is on the board of Humanity Plus. He has been writing and presenting futurist material with organizations such as Humanity Plus, Futurist.com and the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology and IEET since 2003.
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28 Comments
In the next ten years you will become an even bigger loser than you already are. You will have even fewer friends. And when you get sick and are supposed to die like nature intends, they’ll instead prolong you’re miserable wretched existence by injecting you with a bunch of stem cells. congratulations, enjoy the ride.
I believe that the premise of the article is right on. the last couple years haven’t produced as many breakthroughs, but it does seem that, at least with stem cell/iPS cell technology, the advances are starting to appear. Esp. with the first couple clinical trials underway. Important to consider how these therapies jive with our goal of Affordable Health Insurance .
I really enjoyed reading this article. Some of the things you listed, however, do concern me a little. I think that something technology can go a little too far. I did really like your comment that no new program is real progress.
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It’s a good list, though the civilian robotics category really received short shrift (really just a single sentence). Robots will perform all sorts of menial labor (cleaning, construction, maintenance), increasing living standards everywhere.
And Michael, did you really write “while your at it”? Egads.
I have strong doubts about 3. Air as a transmission media has many sufficient limitations, from unpredictable and fundamentally inevitable natural noise that forces to apply sofisticated detection and multiplexing techniques, to scantiness of accessible radio frequencies regulated by state bodies. Of course, some progress will be made anyway, but its potential is much more restricted than, say, of CPUs efficiency or computer memory capacity.
I think we must start to set good bases of the social organization of the future society. One of the big porblems will be, for example, how is people going to obtain an earning if most of their jobs will be replaced by computers/robots? And if there is no people with money to spend who’s gonna buy all the products that the new robotic factories are going to produce?
>how is people going to obtain an earning if most of their jobs will be replaced by computers/robots?<
As more and more jobs are ‘lost’ to automation, I think that we must eventually adopt a guaranteed income. Every person would receive a fixed salery, regardless of financial or employment status. We might start off with a pretty basic weekly stipend, enough to get by on but hardly a luxury. This might encourage people to try and find remaining jobs, perhaps so they can afford the new products you mentioned. You would not loose your guaranteed income if you had a job, so you could top up your weekly stipend. As more and more of the economy became automated, we might then raise the weekly stipend or the price of products might fall until the majority of consumer goods are freely available, or if not quite free then extremely cheap. The human race would retire from wage-slavery, supported by the robots.
What a load of bollocks. Technocracy Inc. said the same thing. In 1920ies. Almost a century passed, nothing happened. Market simply don’t work that way.
Present- Robots are taking our jobs, we wont have anyone to work for!
150 years ago- Those steam engines are taking our jobs!
8000 years ago- Those horses are taking our jobs!
As you can see, we still have jobs after all these centuries, and our quality of life is unimaginably better. Further automation does decrease the availability of work, but it also inherently decreases scarcity. So as scarcity decreases, prices decrease. A specific job will start to pay less, but the items that were new when that job was new will cost less, still being just as affordable. However if you want to be able to afford the new technology, then you’ll have to get a new job. This is nothing new, its just more rapid now that it’s following the singularity.
The people who make major decisions for the rest of us have often enjoyed guaranteed incomes for generations. For example, the Bushes and the Kennedys have lived off of inherited fortunes created a century ago. And newcomers to the ruling class find ways to make sure their children get into this system as well. Does anyone seriously believe that President Bush’s daughters, or Chelsea Mezvinsky née Chelsea Clinton, will ever have to hold down real jobs or otherwise have to worry about money?
Yet these same people propagandize us that guaranteed incomes destroy character and initiative and will damage the economy, so they do us a favor by not offering us one as a matter of national policy. Go figure.
Just print lots of green paper and dump it onto the mob from airplanes and helicopters.
The coming age is the one where socialism will actually have a chance to prosper.
two words: SOCIAL COLLAPSE
While I agree that automation will drastically reduce the cost of goods and services, and increase our standard of living, I disagree that the disruption will be analogous to ones caused by labor-saving devices of the past. It’s quite true that, whenever a new technology arrived on the scene, it created new forms of employment as well as rendered others obsolete. However, the advent of intelligent machines will be a new type of revolution, that differs from historical disruptions in kind as well as degree.
Consider that AGI, by definition, will be equivalent to (or surpass) human intelligence in every facet — creativity, language, spatial reasoning etc. Couple this with vast physical advantages that machines already enjoy. The result is that they will be more effective than humans at *every* single job. Ponder that for a moment — there is no role a human could assume that won’t be better performed by a machine. Nothing. In contrast, the steam engine supplanted certain menial jobs, but created new posts that people (and only people) could occupy. You may start to see why this upcoming disruption will be unlike anything yet encountered by the human race.
You should also appreciate why a guaranteed minimum income, as suggested by the previous post, starts to make sense. In this scheme, robots perform most or all of the duties, and corporations that employ them are taxed accordingly. This wealth is then distributed to all citizens. People would be free to earn extra income through investments and corporate ownership, but unemployment would effectively be 100%. This should not cause any problems, however, since the cost of living will be ridiculously low, and the standard of living absurdly high. Society would resemble a huge vacation resort for 10 billion fabulously wealthy folks.
I’ve also noticed that our rulers propagandize us about the evils of socialized health care, then help themselves to heaping portions of it when they get sick, like Dick Cheney and former president Bill Clinton. Arizona’s own Senator John McCain has received nothing but socialized health care since his birth in a U.S. Navy hospital in the Canal Zone; he even received socialized health care from Soviet physicians during his imprisonment in North Vietnam.
And I notice that Ron Paul stays strangely silent about the socialized health care he provided as an Air Force flight surgeon in the 1960′s. Did he practice medicine incompetently during that stage of his life because of his socialized working conditions, as libertarian propaganda claims? Or did he instead act professionally and benefit from the training and experience he carried over into his later private practice?
Daryl, there are two important aspects that you might want to get into consideration.
1. When AGI become smarter and smarter, we (our bodies, including brains) might change dramatically as well by merging with the technology we create. This would mean that when AGIs start performing tasks that we perform right now, we (at that time) will be able to do new things that we are currently not capable of.
2. The money is the way of paying for scarce resources (natural resources, someones time, etc.). With advent of AGI many resources might no longer be at scarce and become abundant, e.g. food, housing, heating, fresh water, clothing, etc. Even your own “body upgrades” might get abundant at some point. If it will be abundant you might not need money to pay for that, like you don’t pay for your email account right now.
“Regenerative Medicine”
This includes hair, right? Forget heart replacements, I dont want to end up looking like my dad.
Aleksander, I believe you are exactly right. Just a couple comments:
1. We’ll definitely incorporate the new techs in our bodies and brains. But will that keep us one step ahead of AGI’s? Or will their substrate-independent freedom allow them to zoom past us? Either way, no person will be required to perform any low-level tasks (meaning almost any job that currently exists).
2. Indeed, many things will eventually be so inexpensive that they will be too cheap to meter, much like email accounts today. However, we need to transition from our scarcity-based employment economy of today into the abundance-based retirement economy of tomorrow. A monetary system will still be necessary as the revolution unfolds.
And even once there is a glut of every conceivable resource available to all, what will we do about certain commodities that may still be in limited supply, such as beachfront estates in California?
The point you are overlooking is that prior to the rise of an Economy of Abundance (which is inevitable) the Economy of Scarcity WILL COLLAPSE.
In fact, it’s in the process of doing so right now. If we are lucky, then the collapse will be slow enough that the rise of the EoA over the next few decades will take up the slack, meaning that as material goods lose all value due to the eradication of “scarcity” the costs of “living” will continue to drop at the same rate that “real wages” drop.
However, if that collapse DOES NOT happen slowly, then the “guaranteed income” model may become necessary for the short term, otherwise, massive economic inequality will lead to violence, and probable revolution to redress the “wealth gap”
So, which is better? A minimal amount of socialism, or blood running in the streets in a second “French revolution”
Myself, I’d prefer the path of least violence.
once we’ve learned to turn stem cells into any type of cell in the human body, I do suspect that follicles will be high on the list of “regenerative” therapies that will be researched.
The CloudPhone will displace the SmartPhone once low power displays arrive, opening the way to very long battery life if the phone uses fixed function compression/encryption/graphics logic and moves most general processing to the Cloud. The smart cell service provider will allow use of personal cloud servers “for privacy” – but most people will just use Cloud services.
Robotics will certainly ramp up but only in restricted domains – UAVs for FedEx enhanced service, self-driving delivery vans in independent-living retirement communities, elder-assistance robots smart enough to move around and charge themselves, but otherwise relying on remote control. Sufficient trust in robotics for flying passenger airliners and cars will probably have to wait a decade after they’re technically feasible.
Actually, more and more people are living longer, healthier, richer and more fulfilling lives than at ANY TIME in human history. Literally millions of people in Europe and the US are living without working (think: pensions). Sure, the pension system needs some work but its problems will be overcome and progress will continue unabated.
How many percent of the population of Europe and the US can live today without even working? Just off investments, pensions etc… Probably 5%. In the old days, only the top 0.1% could do that. As wealth and technology work together you will see that 10% then 20% of the population will have sufficient funds to live without working as costs for life’s essentials fall and wealth accumulates. Eventually large swaths of the world’s population will be free from the necessity of working for a living.
This has never happened before for human beings and is something I find very exciting and should give us all hope.
The adoption/advancement of new technologies, systems and ideas can threaten the existing power structure’s control, ability to financially benefit. The market is not really a level playing field. How will a mulit-national pharmaceutical company respond and exert their political influence towards new technologies that affect their bottom line? We are in the “corporation vs the human being” age. Hopefully the types of and speed of advancements/innovation will require a radical evolution of new political, social and economic systems as well. Most importantly, much meaning in life comes from the quality of our relationships, specifically our self and others. Having more relationships, and more information readily available about those we relate with does not mean we will have more meaningful relationships. Much advancement/adoptions in communication style, like Marshall Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communincation, needs to happen to have better quality of relationships.
Great analysis. I strongly agree.
I thought he wrote “pogram” but meant “pogrom,” because in earlier times a Madoff-scale scam would have led to a pogrom.
Hopefully the types of and speed of advancements/innovation will require a radical evolution of new political, social and economic systems as well.
I assume you are referring to biohacking and the DIY biology movement 3-D fabber technology also seems to point in the direction of the DIY society.
May I recommend you read Macrowikinomics.
An Excerpt:
…These industrial age institutions brought us mass production of goods, mass media like newspapers, radio, and television, mass education and learning for everyone, mass marketing and mass democracy and government in which elected officials produced and distributed laws and services.
As a mode of production the industrial economy was infinitely superior to what came before it (the agrarian craft society), dramatically advancing wealth, prosperity, and the standard of living for many.
But this was a centralized, one-way, one-size-fits-all mass model controlled by the powerful owners of production and society.
Now because of the new Web the old industrial models are all being turned on their heads. There is now a new engine of innovation and wealth creation and a powerful new force that radically drops collaboration costs and as such enables communities to collaborate on shared concerns, endeavors, and challenges. Greater openness in innovation and science, for example, is creating more economic opportunity for citizens and businesses that learn how to tap into global innovation webs.
In the fight against climate change, ordinary people are forging a mass movement to bring greater consumer awareness and a sense of community to making ordinary household and business decisions that can reduce our carbon footprints. In education, leading universities are breaking down their ivory towers and building a global network for higher learning—a rich tapestry of world-class educational resources that every aspiring student on the planet can use and return to throughout his or her lifetime.
Innovators across the public sector are harnessing the Web to generate more productive and equitable services, bolster public trust and legitimacy, and unlock new possibilities to co-innovate solutions to local, national, and global challenges. Put it all together and it becomes increasingly clear that we can rethink and rebuild many industries and sectors of society on a profoundly new, open, networked model. Indeed, for the first time in history, people everywhere can participate fully in achieving this new future.
In our previous book, Wikinomics (Portfolio 2006), we called this new force “mass collaboration” and argued that it was reaching a tipping point where social networking was becoming a new mode of social production that would forever change the way products and services are designed, manufactured, and marketed on a global basis. But, in the four years since penning the idea, it’s clear that wikinomics has gone beyond a business or a technology trend to become a more encompassing societal shift. It’s a bit like going from micro- to macroeconomics. In which case, wikinomics, defined as the art and science of mass collaboration in business, becomes macrowikinomics:the application of wikinomics and its core principles to society and all of it institutions. Just as millions have contributed to Wikipedia—and thousands still make ongoing contributions to large-scale collaborations like Linux and the human genome project—there is now a historic opportunity to marshal human skill, ingenuity, and intelligence on a mass scale to reevaluate and reposition many of our institutions for the coming decades and for future generations. After all, the potential for new models of collaboration does not end with the production of software, media, entertainment, and culture. Why not open-source government, education, science, the production of energy, and even health care? As we will discover in later chapters, these are not idle fantasies, but real opportunities that the new world of macrowikinomics makes possible.
…[M]any of our institutions are stalled, lacking vitality, leadership, and dynamism. It’s like every last ounce of oxygen has been squeezed out, leaving a mess of deflated expectations and chronically underutilized resources. This apparent paralysis, in turn, begs some pretty fundamental questions: if the knowledge, leadership, and capability required to solve the really tough problems can’t be found in the corporate headquarters and national capitals around the globe, will it be found at all? And if so, where will the new insights and leadership come from? Indeed, if our problems are not solvable by fine-tuning existing institutions, what new models and structures should replace them? Are you, wearing your various hats as an employee, manager, learner, teacher, entrepreneur, voter, consumer, community member, or citizen of the world, prepared to take on a larger role in reinventing our beleaguered institutions? What must be done to reboot business and the world and how can you participate?
These are just some of the tough questions we tackle in this book…. As citizens, and as leaders within our organizations, we need to look beyond the borders of nations and think about society in broad, global terms. If our problems are global in scale, then we need to come together as global citizens to solve them. A system erected around the primacy of national and corporate self-interests just isn’t going to cut it for this century.
The good news is that while many institutions are in various stages of decline, for each we can now see the clear contours of fresh thinking, new approaches, and rebirth. To be sure, collaborative innovation can have downsides—including tough adjustments for industries whose business models were based on scarcities that no longer exist.…
The growing prominence of collaborative endeavors also raises a number of tough questions about the roles and responsibilities of different actors in society. Can we really rely on the self-organized masses to deliver criticalvservices such as compiling life-and-death information in a crisis? What happens if the funding dries up or people lose interest and move on to something else? Who will take responsibility if something goes wrong, or claim success when things go right? And who’s ultimately accountable when everyone is on everyone else’s turf?
In the old paradigm, there were clear roles and responsibilities. In the new world of wikinomics, the lines between sectors and institutions are blurring. Nonprofits increasingly act like entrepreneurial start-ups. Businesses are taking on some of the functions of government. Governments are caught in a network of powers and counterinfluences of which they are just a part. And though most people recognize that problems get solved more quickly when governments, businesses, nonprofits, and citizens work together, there is still a dearth of understanding about how to make partnerships across sectors work at the pace of wikinomics.
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I’m not the only one who sees that our current crisis is one of obsolete industries attempting to prevent their obsolescence by preventing progress, and attempting to use governmental force to try and maintain outdated business models. The Weavers Guild did it centuries ago too at the end of the middle ages.
The Behemoths are dying, and all the small, fast, adaptable companies will feast on them in the decade to come.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/12/cure-for-baldness-could-be-available-in.html
Scientists in Germany have grown hair follicles from stem cells. Professor Roland Lauster at Berlin’s Technical University believes his work could be a step towards providing treatment for the 80 per cent of people who suffer from hair loss worldwide. Lauster claims the treatment – which would probably require the hair follicles to be implanted on to the head – could be available in five years.