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I just wish the human race would stop pretending to know what the future may or may not hold. You would think that with our recorded history, people would be s

I just wish the human race would stop pretending to know what the future may or may not hold. You would think that with our recorded history, people would be smart enough to shut up about the "limitations of the future". There is not a single person alive today who knows what technology will look like in 10 years, let alone 100 or 1000+. All it takes is a single new discovery from a single person to completely change our understanding of what is possible with technology - or any other aspect of our lives. The blatant arrogance with which people pretend to know what the future holds is infuriating. Why do so many find it so difficult to admit that we know an infinitesimal portion of total knowledge of the universe? We only recently discovered electricity. Computing is still in its infancy. A computer from the future - if they are even called that anymore - may be directly comparable to what we have today. Or the technology may change so much that the two devices are not even recognizable as being related. People need to stop telling me that it's impossible for technology to scale as much in the next 30 years as it has in the past 30. What looks like a technological ceiling today could evaporate at any time. Why does the human race insist on believing that the knowledge we have gained so far is "all there is to know", until proven otherwise? It strikes me that one has to be quite literally an imbecile to not understand that the future will unfurl much that we cannot even fathom today. This insistence that the world of computing 50 years from now must somehow be built on the shoulders of existing technology... it's absurd to be that closed-minded.

wolfgke 11y ago
There a physical barriers, say, conservation of energy (or for mechanical systems conservation of linear and angular momentum), non-decreasing entropy etc. If I were a physicist I could tell you a lot more of these invariants (say from quantum physics). We surely don't know what technology the future will have, but I would bet that at least for the next 50 years there will be no fundamental breakthrough that both changes our understanding of such laws of nature and is already at this timeframe available to be implemented in technology (the last time that such a breakthrough occured was theory/ies of relativity and quantum physics - both at the beginning of the 20th century). So I might not know what the future is like, but we can surely make lots of scenarios highly unlikely.
EdiX 11y ago
> There is not a single person alive today who knows what technology will look like in 10 years Agreed, nobody knows what's going to happen in the future, however... >Computing is still in its infancy. A computer from the future - if they are even called that anymore - may be directly comparable to what we have today. Or the technology may change so much that the two devices are not even recognizable as being related. ... you should remember that 'nobody' also includes you. For computers to keep getting faster we'd need something faster than a MOSFET to build our computers on. The fact that it hasn't been discovered in 90 years doesn't mean it's not going to be discovered ever, but it also doesn't mean it's bound to be discovered soon because of the unstoppable kurtzweilian march of progress. Since we can't predict future discoveries because of the law of total expectations the best we can do is try to describe what the future looks like from here.

wolfgke 11y ago

There a physical barriers, say, conservation of energy (or for mechanical systems conservation of linear and angular momentum), non-decreasing entropy etc. If I were a physicist I could tell you a lot more of these invariants (say from quantum physics). We surely don't know what technology the future will have, but I would bet that at least for the next 50 years there will be no fundamental breakthrough that both changes our understanding of such laws of nature and is already at this timeframe available to be implemented in technology (the last time that such a breakthrough occured was theory/ies of relativity and quantum physics - both at the beginning of the 20th century). So I might not know what the future is like, but we can surely make lots of scenarios highly unlikely.

EdiX 11y ago

> There is not a single person alive today who knows what technology will look like in 10 years Agreed, nobody knows what's going to happen in the future, however... >Computing is still in its infancy. A computer from the future - if they are even called that anymore - may be directly comparable to what we have today. Or the technology may change so much that the two devices are not even recognizable as being related. ... you should remember that 'nobody' also includes you. For computers to keep getting faster we'd need something faster than a MOSFET to build our computers on. The fact that it hasn't been discovered in 90 years doesn't mean it's not going to be discovered ever, but it also doesn't mean it's bound to be discovered soon because of the unstoppable kurtzweilian march of progress. Since we can't predict future discoveries because of the law of total expectations the best we can do is try to describe what the future looks like from here.