Futurist Magazine's Top 10 Predictions for 2008 and Beyond

[Silent A]

Could you please give examples of "political decisions" that might be made by AI (or whatever)?

Maybe I have a tighter definition of "political" than you, but I can't see AI making decisions about that are currently made by voters or legislative bodies. At least not in the foreseeable future.

[vhawk01]

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I definitely see #9 coming true. It's one of the few places on Earth that has not really been tampered with. Eventually we'll have to eat, cure diseases and enjoy life. It's what we do.

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[tame_deuces]

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Could you please give examples of "political decisions" that might be made by AI (or whatever)?

Maybe I have a tighter definition of "political" than you, but I can't see AI making decisions about that are currently made by voters or legislative bodies. At least not in the foreseeable future.

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At the very least you will most likely see increasingly complex simulations run on computers to aid in political decisions.

[tolbiny]

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4. Counterfeiting of currency will proliferate, driving the move toward a cashless society. Sophisticated new optical scanning technologies could, in the next five years, be a boon for currency counterfeiters, so societies are increasingly putting aside their privacy fears about going cashless. Meanwhile, cashless technologies are improving, making them far easier and safer to use. --Allen H. Kupetz, "Our Cashless Future," May-June 2007, p. 37

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This doesn't make any sense, if you are afraid of counter fitting you don't go AWAY from solid, physical objects. Gold, silver and other physical items are the hardest thing to counter fit, while one hardcore hacker could theoretically destroy an entire e-currency.

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6. Water will be in the twenty-first century what oil was in the twentieth century. Global fresh water shortages and drought conditions are spreading in both the developed and developing world. In response, the dry state of California is building 13 desalination plants that could provide 10%-20% of the state's water in the next two decades. Desalination will become more mainstream by 2020. --William E. Halal, "Technology's Promise: Highlights from the TechCast Project," Nov-Dec, p. 44

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Fossil fuels are extremely valuable AND decreasing in abundance. Water is abundant and potential INCREASES are huge.

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10. More decisions will be made by nonhuman entities. Electronically enabled teams in networks, robots with artificial intelligence, and other noncarbon life-forms will make financial, health, educational, and even political decisions for us. Reason: Technologies are increasing the complexity of our lives and human workers' competency is not keeping pace well enough to avoid disasters due to human error. --Arnold Brown, "'Not with a Bang': Civilization's Accelerating Challenge," Sep-Oct 2007, p. 38

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This stuff always scares me- the solution to human error is to have humans build stuff that is error proof!

[ZeeJustin]

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Maybe I have a tighter definition of "political" than you, but I can't see AI making decisions about that are currently made by voters or legislative bodies. At least not in the foreseeable future.

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I'm sure AI could be used to redraw district lines in an unbias manner, provide great help in making military strategies, help determine optimal budgeting plans, or even set up a system to run background checks at airport security,

[NNNNOOOOONAN]

kind of ironic that humans are living longer, healthier lives at the same they are heading toward extinction. preservation of life seems to be quite the catch-22 eh?

also, does anyone else get scared to death when they read stuff like this?
i don't feel like being around when humans go extinct. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

[JMAnon]

My thoughts:

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1. The world will have a billion millionaires by 2025.


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Maybe true, but there won't be nearly that many if you adjust for inflation back to 1970. "Millionaire" is no longer a term that should connote extreme wealth (or even being upper class). Millions of millionaires will still be required to work to enjoy a good standard of living.

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2. Fashion will go wired as technologies and tastes converge to revolutionize the textile industry.


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Probably true.

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3. The threat of another cold war with China, Russia, or both could replace terrorism as the chief foreign-policy concern of the United States.


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Historically, the most powerful empires have always jockied for position and vied for influence. No reason to think that will change.

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4. Counterfeiting of currency will proliferate, driving the move toward a cashless society.


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Convenience and efficiency will drive the move to a cashless society much more than counterfeiting. Anti-counterfeiting technology is keeping pace with counterfeiters quite easily.

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5. The earth is on the verge of a significant extinction event.


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This one is too vague to qualify as much of a prediction.

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6. Water will be in the twenty-first century what oil was in the twentieth century.


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Desalinization and distillation/purification are too easy for this to be true. Improvements in desalinization technology and economies of scale are bound to follow increased demand for and decreased supply of fresh water. I agree with the text that says desalinization will become increasingly important, but I don't think fresh water will approximate the price of oil in constant dollars this century.

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7. World population by 2050 may grow larger than previously expected, due in part to healthier, longer-living people


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If the people doing the "expecting" haven't already accounted for increasing life expectancy, they aren't doing their jobs very well. It certainly is possible that advances in technology will increase life expectancy faster than most experts would currently predict, but predicting such a change is pretty much wild-ass guessing.

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8. The number of Africans imperiled by floods will grow 70-fold by 2080.


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Maybe. We have not seriously begun to consider methods of blocking the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth to control global warming. If we don't get started too late, we will probably be able to avert the massive flooding of Africa. Of course, who knows what we will screw up once we start monkeying with global climate control.

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9. Rising prices for natural resources could lead to a full-scale rush to develop the Arctic.


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This is very likely.

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10. More decisions will be made by nonhuman entities.


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This is also very likely.

[Silent A]

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Maybe I have a tighter definition of "political" than you, but I can't see AI making decisions about that are currently made by voters or legislative bodies. At least not in the foreseeable future.

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I'm sure AI could be used to redraw district lines in an unbias manner, provide great help in making military strategies, help determine optimal budgeting plans, or even set up a system to run background checks at airport security,

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Meh. I don't consider any of these to be significant political decisions (with the possible exception of military strategies, but I suspect the level of AI influence will be low). In fact, I wouldn't classify the last one as political at all. And the first one is more of a problem solving issue. You don't need AI to do that, just a well programmed algorithm.

I can see AI as becoming a tool which people will use to make decisions. In fact, I'd say it's inevitable (if not already here if your definition of AI is loose). But actually letting AI make the final decision? That's a long way off, and may well never come.

[Silent A]

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Fossil fuels are extremely valuable AND decreasing in abundance. Water is abundant and potential INCREASES are huge.

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Desalinization and distillation/purification are too easy for this to be true. Improvements in desalinization technology and economies of scale are bound to follow increased demand for and decreased supply of fresh water. I agree with the text that says desalinization will become increasingly important, but I don't think fresh water will approximate the price of oil in constant dollars this century.

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First, fresh water is not abundant at all, at least not with respect to the volumes required. Second, desalinization is not easy by any stretch of the imagination, especially if you consider the rapid increases in energy costs we can expect to see over the next 100 years.

Also, the price of water vs. oil is not the key issue. To start with, the average person needs far more water everyday than oil so you have to take that into account. More important however is the the fact that water serves a fundamentally different function in society than oil does.

Access to oil effects a society's ability to produce wealth but access to fresh water effects a society's ability to survive. These effects might look similar from a GDP perspective, but they will manifest themselves in different ways inside a given society.

Also, a society that lacks sufficient fresh water does not have as many options as the society that lacks oil because you just can't buy your way out of the problem (like Japan and the US does with oil right now). The volumes involved are so large that transportation costs are usually prohibitive.

[JMAnon]

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Second, desalinization is not easy by any stretch of the imagination, especially if you consider the rapid increases in energy costs we can expect to see over the next 100 years.


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Given that desalinization is already comercially viable at a time when fresh water is incredibly cheap, I think you are wrong.

Energy costs probably will increase, but the rising costs will increase the price of commodities roughly in proportion to how energy-intensive the production process is. Desalinization is not an enormously energy-intensive process relative to other things we produce, so increased energy costs may actually make desalinization cheaper relative to other ventures as energy prices climb. It would be quite a time-consuming undertaking to predict exactly what effect rising energy costs will have on the relative price of desalinated water.

As an aside, we also may find alternative means of power production (like wind, tidal, and wave power) that will be only marginally more expensive than fossil fuels are now. I suspect that the predictions of massive increases in energy costs are overblown. I am optimistic that, as fossil fuels become scarcer, we will expend a lot of brain power figuring out how to harness alternative energy sources more efficiently.

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Also, the price of water vs. oil is not the key issue.


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I think it is exactly the issue. The prediction was "water will be the oil of this century." In what sense other than "valuable" do you think the author intended the comparison?