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I've been spending much of my free time over the past two months doing a rather tedious task - collecting data to compile a history of inventions, to fit each one to a standard product life cycle model (with 10 stages from emergence to extinction) and try to identify the relation between past and current technologies and the points where new ones take off - and truly novel breakthroughs happen.
What I came up with fit at least recent centuries rather well, and provided a built-in leveling-off mechanism that made it progressively slower work to build, say, Better Mousetrap 2, 3, 4 and 5, respectively.
The hard part was figuring out what might drive true breakthroughs - things that had no precedent like, say, lasers. But, I figured something that works for that, too - a look-back of emerging technologies for the prior x number of years(two years worlds OK for the latter half of the 20th century), and brainstorming about syntheses of these notions.
So now comes the fun part - seeing where the future takes us!
Stage 1: The 2010s. The Age of Telepresence
In the 2010s, the Phone is God. 3G telecommunications is the mainstream, 4G is rolling. Not just multipurpose but multidimensional. People have specialty devices they like for, say, reading (ebooks) but their phones are calculators, spreadsheets, credit cards, GPS, internet browsers, music players, video viewers, word processors, personal organizers, digital cameras and - oh yes - they're phones, too. This is part of a trend in portable computing that began with the pocket calculator, the programmable calculator, the briefcase portable, the laptop, the notebook and now the iphone/smartphone/droid world.
The Internet continues to evolve; the big change in the past five years is of course social media - which is itself the latest exercise in iterative game theory and uplift modeling. In other words, data miners and pattern recognizers, munching through terabytes of meta data looking to make sense of you as a consumer, as an investor, as someone with voting behavior. Yep, you can draw an arc from DART (compliments of DARPA) through to Facebook. If you wonder why your privacy is so dicey on the big F.B., well, don't worry. Those occasional oopses aren't flaws they're features as far as the paying clientele is concerned.
And web media is on a tear. Same as with your phones (heh, even on your phones!) you can watch movies, TV shows, video clips, audio clips, download songs, upload them both and share all with your friends.
Space exploration is big stuff too! You can't see it but a lot of research in new propulsion systems (ion propulsion, for example) is happening in the background. The Cassini probe around Saturn is still generating great front-line research. A wave of Jupiter orbiter missions is penciled in for the next decade - and suddenly the long-snubbed Moon is looking like an interesting place to visit now that it might have water - and a very interesting high-energy substance called Helium-3. Of course, private spaceflight is all the rage, from Virgin Galaxy's tourist spaceflights, coming soon to a galaxy near you to SpaceX Dragon capsule program, just in time relieve the Tandy computer-era Space Shuttle. The International Space Station is up and running, a platform ready to get both basic and applied microgravity research going - manufacturing, space medicine, physics, you name it, it's going to get tested.
Genetically modified organisms are not just well underway but well embedded in the human food chain, plants and animals alike. Looking past critters, there are now tests being running on eventually offering in vitro food - test tube food! Meat from a faucet! Woo!
There are of course opportunities in hydroponics, aeroponics (did I spell that correctly?) and considerable interest in vertical farming, as a means to take advantage of the huge amount of solar energy over every square meter of the Earth's surface that goes wasted.
Then there is biocomputing - building computational devices around the DNA double helix. This isn't just a sideshow - these puppies could be very very fast someday. Just consider the speed of complex biochemical reactions. A lot of information is being gathered and interpreted, then converted into assembly instructions, with monitoring systems keeping an eye on the whole show (and via interpersonal behavior, on other "shows" as well). Borrowing a line from the pitcher's mound scene in the movie "Bull Durham" - our bodies are dealing with a lot of stuff here! We might have something to learn.
A very interesting kind of tech, past the conceptual stage and in limited use already, is the 3D printer. Yes, you read that right - three dimensional printing. OK, so what the heck is that? At the moment, it's a workstation that enables, for example, designers to take computer schematics and make physical prototypes out of special molding materials. The molds themselves are programmable, a feature built into the substances themselves. This is sometimes called 'claytronics'. (All of these interesting words are available on wikipedia but I could literally spend three days linking these for you so please.. I beg you.. just go to wikipedia and look 'em up!)
Welcome to personalized medicine! A thriving bioinformatics industry and close mating of diagnostics and therapy have given rise to a new discipline, conceived in the 2000s, called theranostics. If you have had a physical exam recently you may well already have direct experience with a kind of medicine where everything down to your vitamin levels is interesting to your physician, and rated as a contribution or a detriment to your overall morbidity and prospective mortality.
Also in medicine has been a proliferation of artificial body parts - much more effective mechanical hearts, vision replacement systems (and by implication mind-machine interfacing). On the cutting edge are prosthetic limbs with far more functionality than the arms and legs of old - and resemblance to living limbs. And, given the improvements in M-M interfaces, prospects for full functionality are literally in sight ...and replacing sight, in increasingly sophisticated fashion, is becoming possible as well.
The wonks in the gallery are drumming their fingers, wondering about quantum computing. Well, the first generation of applied cryptography is out there already - though there's a lot of ground to cover before anyone feels their information is safe from piracy or tampering. The holy grail of quantum entanglement continues to be sought after.
Cloud Processing and File Sharing - Storing information using a rotation of servers around the world was the rage in 2010 and enthusiasm for utilization of home servers' down time for backups, bulk data and night audits - or peak-time usages by companies on the far side of the planet where it was daylight - went from a neat idea to the global IT standard. There are of course may security and control qualms - on the other hand business continuity is more certain. Companies in the early 2010s were mulling through the changes. Big IT brands such as Microsoft attempted the leap into cloud and net-based activity. Not all made it, but that's private enterprise for you.
Socially, even more than Social Media,various forms of telepresence, from Skype video to flatscreen Virtual Reality simulators, gave people who were geographically dispersed a multi-sensory connection - sight, sound, body language - in an immediate setting. While the web conference model has a 20 year pedigree, and teleconferencing was twice as old as a practice, it really was not until around 2010 that usage of telepresence started to take off. Phones took over many of the computing, entertainment and communications functions - the apps - that characterized physical life. Telepresence - which required as-yet-immobile hardware - took interactions that required higher volume and complexity of data to an entirely new level.
All of these aspects of Stage One were the foundation for all the changes to come.
Stage 2 (2020s): The Virtual Revolution
Theranostics really takes off, as does the emancipation of medicine for many - Do It Yourself Care (not the heavy lifting such as heart surgery, obviously, but to a much higher degree than commonplace in 2010) in concert with theranostics subscriptions are commonplace. There are plenty of physicians - more, even - and it pays to listen to your MD - in the form of discounts if need major care, and in premiums on insurance. There is actually a move to bundle treatment and insurance, a revisiting of the HMO structure, though one where doctors have much more control of the situation. The doctors like it.
There is a profound transformation in the level of lay medical knowledge required to function in daily life. While use of drug therapies helps simplify the situation, the heavier dependence on pharmaceuticals has greatly increased the need to track likelihood of adverse reactions, allergies and dangerous combinations, down to the specific genetic grouping. For this reason, a huge growth area in medicine is pharmacogenetics - the science of understanding genetics-driven variations in responsiveness to pharmaceuticals.
Regenerative medicine is the big breakthrough - the ability to stimulate regrowth of any living tissue. At the cutting edge are experiments begun in the 2000s, now in clinical trials, to take cell cultures from a different kind of tissue in the patient, revert it to stem cells, then reconfigure into replacements. This is simple for some organs and tissues (skin and hair for example, the latter of course being a big money-maker already) but more involved in instances where, say, regrowing heterogeneous tissue in, say, an entire limb - nerve, muscle, and all - remains a complex proposition. Thus, the is still a market for the now highly-advanced 'android' limbs. In one respect a long-awaited miracle has been attained at last - regrowth of spinal nerve tissue is now commonplace... but there is still no cure for backaches.
Space travel is starting to leave the bottle rockets behind - a variety of non-rocket launch systems, from magnetic loops and arcs to pinwheel sky hooks capable of plucking freight pods out of the air at hypersonic speeds - are being developed. The first planned location is the Moon itself, due to the absence of air and low gravity. Given the abundance of energy, water, metals (in the outer moons) and frozen gases, the Jupiter system is being given thorough looking-over by the various national space agencies - particularly the moon of Europa.
There is even talk of visiting Jupiter with a manned mission ahead of Mars, the view being that Mars, shy of having a serious terraformation mission profile, just doesn't offer anything that can't be acquired from the Moon for much cheaper and much closer to home.
Perhaps some of the most interesting developments are the mating of social media with working models of emotional states to produce convincing emulations of emotions by computers. The field of affective computing is big business, and contemporary higher education makes understanding of 'emotive models' and 'theories of mind' a priority for future leaders. It would not do for an underling with a good app to run circles around the management team. That would be bad for productivity.
A new discipline - holographic psychography - emerges. It's partly IT, partly psychiatry and all about constructing working models of human emotion and cognition - specific to the individual person and hypothetical variations of same. And you thought you were well-watched now.
Also, the virtual worlds of the 2020s are full-immersion - not in a Tron sense (yes, the movie is on my mind and it's coming out this weekend) but the experience, especially with the high power of affective computing, is very engaging. Haptics (technologies around the creation of touch sensations and responses of systems to touch commands) is a cutting edge aspect of Stage Two VR, with all the opportunities and complexities that implies. Mind out of the gutter, please - I am referring to the ability to create worlds where you can feel sunlight on your face, the wind at your back, the crunch of snow under your boots - and the sense of gettin' some serious fat air over a mogul on a fast run down the ski slope.
Yet there is a political consequence of such powerful sensoria. Imagine the ability to self-organize into online communities around desirable attributes and skills, shared attitudes and values with the ability to provide, better-than-real accommodations to interact - independent of geography. What you have in effect is not just a New World - but a New Universe of Virtual Worlds to colonize. And this begins - first as extensions of existing countries, political units and parties and factions of same, then it goes exponential as a tendency. People start to identify more with their VL (virtual life) 'nationality' than their RL (or real life). In the past it was freaky. In the 2010-present, it's quirky. In the present of the 2020s, it's trendy, on its way to usual.
The means to support multi-channel consciousness is on the cutting edge. Imagine being truly capable of multi-tasking, to simultaneously maintain physical and virtual reality existences, to spin of subset of your awareness to diligently attend to tasks (what a writer named Walter Jon Williams once called 'daemons') while your primary self does its thing. This is coming - I suppose you could call it tech-assisted multiple personality reordering.
And that's just 20 years forward into the Singularity - and we're not even going very quickly.
Stage 3 (2030s): Programmable Metabolisms and Planet-Hopping by Proxy
Advances in the quality and reliability of 3D printing create a boom in customized pay-and-make retail manufacturing. Fabrication of spare parts and small-scale electronics is possible off of home printers. Feedstock infrastructure is in high demand as a public utility.
Regenerative medicine is now moving into very exciting territory with proteomics (programmable protein synthesis). No longer is it necessary to tailor-create a GMO to, say, secrete a specific pharmaceutical. Standard "pharmacows" can produce, say, insulin, in the morning and re-geared for statin production in the afternoon. Higher-end, smaller-dosage specialty drugs can be produced in batches using faster-metabolism GMOs. It's even possible for human beings to loan their physical bodies for protein manufacturing; it's a living and aside from diet and behavioral restrictions you got plenty of time to devote to VL.
As well as 'daemons' or 'partial personalities' (a la Greg Bear's "Eon"), fully artificial answer engine remotes, or virtual agents, are in widespread use. These interact with daemons and one another at very high transmission rates. This is becoming THE way commerce and cultural exchanges happen.
The Solar System is getting thoroughly - I mean THOROUGHLY - explored - fast very lightweight remotes can support vast teams of experts via daemons and virtual agents. Oh - and physicals are touching down on all the major worlds too. Yeah, yeah. Mars landing, big whoop.
While 3D printers are nice, heavy industry is the near-complete preserve of industrial robots.
Cloud Computing is it; there are no PCs or laptops, they have gone the way of the 8 track and vinyl. People have telepads - or they have implants in their ear canals, or both.
Proteomics has opened the door to another transformation in people's lives: tunable metabolisms. This is serious "edge" stuff - first developed a a protocol to slow down aggressive cancers, but quickly realized as a means to speed up healing, regeneration, stress/recovery in athletic or military training - and of course to boost physical performance in same. Think - Captain America.
Also on the fringe, given the advancing state of the art in mind-machine interfaces, are physical avatars - the ability to project out of VL into 3D-printed specialty androids with haptic sensors. It's not cheap - and it's not quite teleporting - but it has created a viable way for people to visit other planets.
From here we have to cut it short for tonight... but I will outline the rest of the steps (then I have to rotate over to doing the actual comments):
2040s - Instantly Reconfigurable Machines
1 Do it yourself regeneration
2 Laser Propulsion spacecraft
3 Permanent VL (virtual life)
4 3D Printer 4 (home printers standard0
5 Artificial Organs 7 (universal donor/recipient protocols)
6 Androids 2 (in general use, especially as 'remotes' for avatars)
7 Cutting Edge: Virtual Machines 1 (concepts on how to shape plasma windows into machine parts to do work of one kind, say, a water pump, them move the projection frame to another place to be, ay, a power generator. Et cetera.
2050s - Mnemonics Revolution
1 Mnemonics - Emotional and thought recording, copying and transfer
2 Physical basis is photonic Computing and metamaterials (Mnemoware)
3 Virtual Circuitry (per Virtual Machines above) is key as well
4 Advent of shared-mind gestalts 1 and cloud personas (pej., Borgs)
5 GATTACA-style datasets/testing, biopunk hacking/sharewaring
6 Piezoprinter; it is now possible to print charged batteries.
7 Faber 1 (Universal Toolkit)
8 Clear photosynthetic skin
9 Ability to convert biomass into 'computronium' on a cloud computing model
10 Thermosynthetic engine
11 Rejuvenation Vaccine
12 Subrail (Underground vaccuum maglev tunnels, egregiously overdue)
2060s - The Inflection - It All Starts To Change
1 Interstellar Nanoprobes
2 Syngenic Nanotechnology (blending of nanotech, mnemonic and proteomics
3 Multi-mode Avatars (Virtual machines go from 'physical' to 'virtual' states; why not have virtual androids?)
4 Terraformation 2 - "paraforming" of portions of planets - and parts of Earth that aren't too nicely kept
5 Expectation is that Virtual Printers will eventually lead to printerless realization of objects as humans/androids/AIs/Vpersons internalize printing capabilities - think 4G phones from earlier
6 CloudRealities - serverless virtual worlds, self-projecting and maintaining their own infrastructure
7 True Regeneration (Fast Healing Protocols), one step more and it's shapechanging
8 Metaceuticals - dosage chemicals developed from entirely artificial forms of matter.
9 Genomic Encryption - a useful thing to do in a world where your own biomass is data storage.
10 Self-Organizing Infrastructure (related to CloudRealities above)
11 Sentient Animals (some are more sentient than unaugmented humans in this era)
2070s - Silicon and Carbon are One
1 Synths - Synthetic Personas (capable of incarnation, teleportation, shapechanging). People start upgrading, and happily so.
2 Ecological Specialization of Humanity (undersea, extreme climates, offworld) - being a synth makes it easy to do, and change back, or to something new
3 Convergence of cybernetics and genetics - terms no longer exist apart
4 Printers are now metamaterial- and nanofabrication-capable
2080s - The Inner and Outer Migrations
1 Antimemetics
2 Conscious Proteomic Control
3 Interplanetary Industry, Energy Production
4 Human-range AI - took this long bc human capabilities accelerated greatly) - the two advanced in parallel now.
5 Emotional file sharing
6 VRmigration (blurring between not just origination of minds but their state of existence)
7 Subnuclear Transmutation
8 VRCasting
9 SynGenetic Optimization Therapy
10 Bioprinter (life machine)
11 Synemories
12 Conscience Apps
2090s - Mastery of Space and Time (Sort of)
1 Transhuman-level AI emergence (again, by now humans are too)
2 Quantum Nanotechnology
3 Macro-level Quantum Teleportation - possible to trasmit nanotech
4 Faber 2, mass scale printer for industrial assembly
5 Ethereal Habitats (Sky Cities)
6 Tau Sphere (Spacetime metric manipulation - experimental)
7 Full sensation VR
8 Very High temperature Superconductors 3 (Spun Superwire)
2100s - Godlike Powers? Sure.. After I Get Tired of Farmville
1 Organs with synthetic purposes
2 Artificial Photosynthesis fully adopted as replacement for eating
3 Antimatter (for midnight snacks)
4 Ultracapacitor (makes it possible to store immense energies in body)
5 Complete plasticity of biomass possible
6 All of a physical person's mass supports computation
7 EntangleNet (no lightspeed lag, wherever net is assembled)
8 Ability to print exotic states of matter, tailored to specs
9 Nanolevitation / Nanogravity simulation
10 Mnemotech II (ability to upgrade to transcendent minds that do not need instrumentation to do Really Cool Stuff)
Well maybe it will not happen THAT fast but I am pretty good at this sort of thing. This is why I say, from time to time, that every important quarrel you might have these days could be obsolete within 10 years.. and definitely will be within 100.
ON TO THE COMMENTS!!!
Well good for me I had a LOT to write...
I can haz one (1) comment submission!
FROM EDDIE C
Wiscmass added That may be the essential point to GoldnI's rescued yesterday and recommended today Ten Years Later: The Legacy of Bush v. Gore.
NOW FOR MY PIX
Let us sit, and share stories...of the world when it was newer
In the midst of another most excellentOjibwa diary, I came across the start of this thread about the Cahokia Mounds in Missouri. Too often, we think of pre-Columbian American history as something that happened south of the Rio Grande. It is easy to overlook that the first human footprints in the Western Hemisphere were in North America - and a lot of civilization and pre-civilization happened here.
My pix - All of these.
Perhaps long, long before anywhere else in the New World. And we know from archaeological evidence that settlements have been here for at least as long as people were putting up mud huts in the Fertile Crescent on the far side of the planet.
A little something to get your awe on.
The future that could be is as nothing compared to the vast wonder of what may have been.
They are both important components of the long view.
Something the First People grokked, and quite well.
Let us remember and mourn, and wish godspeed....
for tears are proper; one of our own has lost one of their own
I don't think there's much to add past that.
When we remember we are more alive when together than apart...
we become human to each other
and that's a beautiful thing.
AND NOW FOR THE TOP MOJO!!!!
Top 30 Comments excluding tip jars, first comments and stuff:
1) Very Sorry to Hear About This, Kristina by JekyllnHyde — 200
2) I've been on the road for four years by Rich N Mdriems — 105
3) She's great by leftyboy666 — 102
4) Thank you for working to undermine by slinkerwink — 98
5) I think business should stop bashing, by Colorado is the Shiznit — 98
6) You hang in there Sweetheart. by Fishgrease — 96
7) This was always headed by devtob — 89
8) Maybe but this is a dumb idea. It assumes by Something the Dog Said — 85
9) Climate change legislation & treaties by FishOutofWater — 80
10) Whatever Makes the Insurance Industry Squirm by JekyllnHyde — 78
11) I Suspect This Story by JekyllnHyde — 74
12) We are moving to Guam. by Jane Lew — 74
13) Same old bullshit. by TomP — 73
14) Unless you're Jewish. Or Irish. Or Italian. by bigtimecynic — 71
15) Fishgrease! by Kristina40 — 68
16) When I gave hundreds of dollars to Obama by fizziks — 68
17) Don't let Bush win again by david mizner — 68
18) A good start would be the defeat... by JeffW — 67
19) Could be because 261 in Congress are millionaires by kurious — 66
20) I Think Big Business Has More Help Than by Aspe4 — 64
21) The bill is full of poisoin pills by bear83 — 63
22) He "wins", America loses by RaulVB — 61
23) My brother left Florida for a job in Missouri by SocioSam — 60
24) Actually if more of us here would acknowledge by Sophie Amrain — 58
25) This is all about preventing by slinkerwink — 57
26) I suppose this is surprising news by Pager — 56
27) When doctors and lawyers are hurting by leftangler — 55
28) Five times by joanneleon — 55
29) I meant to include a by david mizner — 55
30) Argument by diploma?? by fizziks — 54
31) Jeff Merkley, Sherrod Brown, and by TomP — 54
Top 30 Comments with no exclusions, aka the Tip Jar & Pooties list :-):
1) Tip Jar by RogerShuler — 362
2) Tip Jar by kyeo — 256
3) Tip Jar by nyceve — 238
4) Tip Jar by TomP — 232
5) Very Sorry to Hear About This, Kristina by JekyllnHyde — 200
6) Tip Jar by Johnnythebandit — 191
7) Tip Jar by joanneleon — 183
8) Tip Jar by slinkerwink — 180
9) Tip Jar by Clarknt67 — 149
10) Tips? Flames? by Something the Dog Said — 147
11) Tip Jar by DrSteveB — 136
12) Tip Jar by Badabing — 118
13) Scritchie Jar by triciawyse — 114
14) Tip Jar by Ojibwa — 113
15) Tip Jar by Jay Inslee — 109
16) Tip Jar by brooklynbadboy — 106
17) I've been on the road for four years by Rich N Mdriems — 105
18) She's great by leftyboy666 — 102
19) Thank you for working to undermine by slinkerwink — 98
20) I think business should stop bashing, by Colorado is the Shiznit — 98
21) You hang in there Sweetheart. by Fishgrease — 96
22) This was always headed by devtob — 89
23) Maybe but this is a dumb idea. It assumes by Something the Dog Said — 85
24) Tip jar and offbeat news item by ScottyUrb — 82
25) Climate change legislation & treaties by FishOutofWater — 80
26) Whatever Makes the Insurance Industry Squirm by JekyllnHyde — 78
27) I Suspect This Story by JekyllnHyde — 74
28) We are moving to Guam. by Jane Lew — 74
29) Same old bullshit. by TomP — 73
30) Unless you're Jewish. Or Irish. Or Italian. by bigtimecynic — 71
31) Tip Jar by chichagof — 71