Our future, some thoughts.

John Baker

John Baker

Final Approach
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John Baker
We all know that technological advancements have been taking place, compared to human history, at astounding rates since the advent of computers. Every year that rate almost seems to be doubling in most categories.

We are not all that far away from computers that can write their own programs, even decide their own missions, advanced robotics will undoubtably weasel themselves into the mix at the same time.
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We like to think, and even can make sound arguments against the idea of pilotless commercial aircraft, but we all know it is in our future at some point.

What about robotics or robots becoming self aware? It makes us think of the Terminator movies, how evil and nasty robots would be towards humans, but would they?

Think of this, it is we who designed and built computers, we are doing the same with robots. How far along do you think will we be in one hundred years or even just fifty years? Look at where we were technologically in 1915 and where we are today.

We are also messing about with biological electronics and a host of other amazing things that belong more in a science fiction story than reality.

Soon our robots will be designing and building themselves, even to the point of mining, manufacturing, and shipping the raw materials to their robot built factories.

It is conceivable that within a hundred or so years that one will be hard pressed to distinguish a human from a robot. This of course leads me to my debunking of the Terminator concept.

As things stand, there is no such thing as the perfect man or woman (disregarding pilots of course) We all find fault with each other on a daily basis. Then when we consider the container loads of assorted sex toys that reach our ports almost daily, it is not hard to imagine our decendents receiving very large, plain wrapped packages at their homes.

I mean if you could simply purchase the perfect mate and companion, why would you settle for an undoubtably flawed human? Robots will look, feel, walk, and talk just like a human, but in order to reproduce, they must be engineered and manufactured.(I think)

Our species will not be murdered by our robots, we will eliminate ourselves happily coupling with machines, which more than a few of us are already doing.

We soon will be replacing ourselves with a species of our own creation unless of course we annihilate ourselves with some of our other creations first.

Such robots will of course not be cheap, so it will be our wealthy that disappear first, or at least their genes.

Robots will, at the same time, continue improving on themselves. They will be making astounding advances in all of our sciences while we humans work on degenerating our species to the level of idiots.

I hope y'all have some fun with this.

-John
 
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So when I get older and my skills start to deteriorate,I can purchase a robot to help with the flying. The robot will just be a more advanced auto pilot. After the flight I can have my google driverless car take me home.
 
Sad that the integration of robot and human still isn't there.

I want:

Electrodes the size of a grain of rice that can be popped into muscle groups using a syringe that are connected to a CPU to control a new prosthetic hand.


Right now, the most useful and second most durable is still this:





Which is 10x better than any of the prosthetic hands I've used including those that make different gestures and grip patterns.
 
I think we have now reached the point of there being no such thing as an original thought, there's just too many of us now. I assumed my thought had already been addressed by at least a few hundred or thousand people, but now it's even in cartoons...how about a hundred million people. Oh well, it is still something worth batting around....I guess.

-John
 
John Baker said:
.......while we humans work on degenerating our species to the level of idiots.
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Sadly, this part of the process seems to be accelerating exponentially.

Are those your original thoughts in the OP, John? Very astute!

Jim
 
Jim Rosenow said:
Sadly, this part of the process seems to be accelerating exponentially.

Are those your original thoughts in the OP, John? Very astute!

Jim
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To me they were, however I had assumed others had addressed them before, just not on such a grand scale....one of the drawback of being an uneducated lout.

Someone posted a cartoon on this thread then I guess they deleted it. I think it should be reposted, it hit the nail on the head.

-John
 
Some technologies advance at breathtaking speed, others not so much. I'm still flying a 50 year old airplane. The only thing I KNOW about the future is it won't be what I expect.
 
Anyone seen Sarah Conner recently?
 
John Baker said:
To me they were, however I had assumed others had addressed them before, just not on such a grand scale....one of the drawback of being an uneducated lout.

Someone posted a cartoon on this thread then I guess they deleted it. I think it should be reposted, it hit the nail on the head.

-John
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H.G. Wells had similar thoughts....replace eloi with 'robot' in The Time Machine?

Jim
 
John Baker said:
I think we have now reached the point of there being no such thing as an original thought, there's just too many of us now. I assumed my thought had already been addressed by at least a few hundred or thousand people, but now it's even in cartoons...how about a hundred million people. Oh well, it is still something worth batting around....I guess.

-John
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What's the old phrase? Perspiration vs Inspiration? Having an idea is the easy part. Implementing it (well) is the hard part.

And of course figuring out how to convince other people to buy it...
 
steingar said:
Some technologies advance at breathtaking speed, others not so much. I'm still flying a 50 year old airplane. The only thing I KNOW about the future is it won't be what I expect.
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That's not technology, that's politics.
 
Suppose we were able to transfer our conscious minds into robot bodies as we aged and therefore had a(theoretically) unlimited lifespan as we could just swap bodies when the old one failed.

We wouldn't need anywhere near as many people reproducing. Let the population drop to about 1/10 what it is now and maintain at replacement level.
 
cowman said:
Suppose we were able to transfer our conscious minds into robot bodies as we aged and therefore had a(theoretically) unlimited lifespan as we could just swap bodies when the old one failed.

We wouldn't need anywhere near as many people reproducing. Let the population drop to about 1/10 what it is now and maintain at replacement level.
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Ok now you just attempting to play God.
 
I hate to say this.....

There are a fair number of 60 year old Sci Fi novels on the topic. Start with "I, Robot."

People don't even know what consciousness or self awareness really are, so talking about building machines that exhibit those behaviors is extremely premature and will remain so for many decades at least.
 
If you want to drill down into this a little deeper read up on some of Dr. Ray Kurzweil's predictions.

We are approaching what he calls 'singularity' where computers and robotics pretty much start writing history from the point of self awareness on.

Humans will have to meld with technology or become sub-standard. Think of the Borg on Star Trek. Class bias will inevitably come into play whereas the rich class will be able to afford 'enhancements' leaving the poor class even further behind. Immortality comes into play. People will want and kill for the tech. Many exciting and scary things.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uIzS1uCOcE
 
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No one drawing breath today will see self-aware, self directing, and autonomous machines. All software sucks, varying only by degree; need some real significant breakthroughs to build the tools we'd need to build the tools we'll need. Same-same with the computing/ thinking platform. Gonna take more than a large scale adding machine and pre-built "guess-ware".

We (humans) will get taller, prettier, dumber, and sicker/less healthy, as natural selection is thwarted to a degree. Or, perhaos more correctly, as we naturally select ourselves in that direction.

Just my opinion. I could be wrong. . .
 
Sundancer said:
No one drawing breath today will see self-aware, self directing, and autonomous machines. All software sucks, varying only by degree; need some real significant breakthroughs to build the tools we'd need to build the tools we'll need. Same-same with the computing/ thinking platform. Gonna take more than a large scale adding machine and pre-built "guess-ware".

We (humans) will get taller, prettier, dumber, and sicker/less healthy, as natural selection is thwarted to a degree. Or, perhaos more correctly, as we naturally select ourselves in that direction.

Just my opinion. I could be wrong. . .
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Read up on Moore's law. It might change your mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law

Self awareness has been predicted to happen as early as 2020. Kurzweil put's it closer to 2029 thinking legislation will be enacted to slow it down. But it's inevitable if the law of semi-conductors continues.
 
I'm up on it, been in the biz a long time. Faster adding machines are still just faster adding machines, I think. . .the smarts just aren't there, and I don't they will be unless/until we get the big change or breakthrough in both the physical platform and the software/thinkware to drive it. . .

What we got (and will get) on the current adding machines/guessware boxes will do a lot of good stuff for us, and there is plenty good applied science problem solving gonna come down the road.

I just don't think intuitive cognition, sef-awareness, and general purpose, absract thought is on the hirizon, not on the current computing track. . .
 
txflyer said:
Read up on Moore's law. It might change your mind.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law



Self awareness has been predicted to happen as early as 2020. Kurzweil put's it closer to 2029 thinking legislation will be enacted to slow it down. But it's inevitable if the law of semi-conductors continues.
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And Intel and others have admitted that Moore's "law" (of which even Moore himself never intended it to be considered a "law") hasn't been being met in the last few years.

Not with traditional silicon based semiconductor tech anyway.

They've been doing the multiple core thing, instead. The cores themselves aren't getting that much faster anymore. Parallelism has replaced Moore's prediction and raw speed gains have "hockey sticked". Cores hang out at around 3-4 GHz speeds these days and don't go much faster. The investment in making the distance between things on the dies at the fab to jump another magnitude, is too expensive right now.

Which drives costs down via virtualization. Not speed. Ironically or not, we're basically cranking back up the old mainframe model but with far more centralized and virtualized hardware. The web browser is the modern dumb terminal.

Meanwhile, faster (or even more parallel) computing doesn't add intelligence nor self-awareness to machines. Plenty of really good research written about that, also. But massive parallelism does help crack traditional encryption which relies on the fact that it's difficult to do mathematical division in hardware.
 
You going to trust a pilotless airplane? Guess you're new to computers.

Gives a whole new meaning to "system crash"
 
Neuroscience hasn't come up with a provable reason why we are self-aware, so it's not reasonable to think we are capable of designing a computer which is. At least not until we discover the mechanism.
 
James331 said:
You going to trust a pilotless airplane? Guess you're new to computers.



Gives a whole new meaning to "system crash"
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I've always said I'd hop aboard one, once I see the entire engineering team take it to
go somewhere, while not under duress/on the clock for the marketing department.
 
Sundancer said:
I'm up on it, been in the biz a long time. Faster adding machines are still just faster adding machines, I think. . .the smarts just aren't there, and I don't they will be unless/until we get the big change or breakthrough in both the physical platform and the software/thinkware to drive it. . .

What we got (and will get) on the current adding machines/guessware boxes will do a lot of good stuff for us, and there is plenty good applied science problem solving gonna come down the road.

I just don't think intuitive cognition, sef-awareness, and general purpose, absract thought is on the hirizon, not on the current computing track. . .
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I'm wondering if a like group of people back in 1915 who were having a similar conversation about computers or say telephones you could carry around with you that you not only could communicate with but you could also solve problems, watch movies, even know exactly where you are on the planet, what would that discussion be like?
　
What about others listening in? Not many pilots in those days so it is unlikely they would be able to chalk it off to that. They probably would just think the conversationists were crazy and call the authorities....if they had access to a telephone that is....

-John
 
Maybe, they might have; but I mentioned a breakthrough in the platform, right? That happened with the development of solid state components (transistor, etc.), so the hybrid radio/computer in your pocket became possible. . .

Faster than sound is a lot easier than faster than light, and my intuition is that real machine intelligence is a bigger lift than making a miniature radio. I mean, radio was around in 1915, and had been for a while. Your cell phone is a derivative of that; I think machine intelligence is a lot tougher than just making a faster adding machine, which is where computer tech is right now.

I've seen a lot of major advances in applied computing in my career (the Internet, cell phones, higher speed networking, ubiquitous software in most tech), but no real breakthrough in fundamentals. Virtualization? Been around since the sixties. Cloud? Mainframe service providors were doing it decades ago. Machine learning? 30 years back, just used a diffrent name.

We're doing good applying what we already built, using the parts in new ways, solving probkems better, fir sure. But we ain't gonna create an intelligence based on the hardware and software pkatforms we have now.

Or, I could be wrong. . .
 
"Who knows what evil is lurking in the depths of man's mind?"
　
That's the opening announcement of a 1940s radio show, "The Shadow."

Where I lived as a chid we had no televison. After dinner my family sat around either a plastic radio in the kitchen, or the big wooden one in the living room, and listened to the radio shows, Amos & Andy, The Whistler, The Shadow and a few more I can no longer recall.
　
Most all families had one telephone, a big black ugly thing with a dial instead of buttons hanging on the wall in the kitchen. We also had a party line. We kids could listen in on other people's conversations, however, getting caught indulging in such a gross insult to the social niceties would always mean a good whipping. There were no time outs or withholding of a favorite toy in those days.
　
In just my lifetime the technological changes have been mind boggling...Underestimating the future rarely works.

-John
 
evapilotaz said:
Ok now you just attempting to play God.
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Well, my intention is to live forever or as long as practically possible while I'm still able to enjoy it. If my body is failing 50 years in the future and they can transplant my mind into a robot body I'm all for it.

As far as the population thing goes.... you can't realistically have people living forever or even twice as long without cutting the birth rate back OR sending people out to live in space. There just isn't enough room and board for us all on Earth.
 
I think we'd make room here. . .per Malthus and munitions. .
 
Evolution to my way of thinking is inevitable. It cannot be stopped. Be it human, animal, plant, robotic, or anything. Everything evolves or goes extinct.

There doesn't appear to be much grey area in this regard on this particular rock we live on.
 
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