9 ms·

A world where everyone has a robot: why 2040 could blow your mind

34 points by peter123 11y ago

Retric 11y ago
It's odd, but I keep feeling like the pace of progress is slowing down. When was the last time you used a product and said “this is vastly better?” A PS 4 feels somewhat better than a PS3 which was release 10 years ago. Cellphones seem stuck on the black rectangle design. Cars are getting ever so slightly better cruise control every year vs. becoming self-driving. We almost have a cure for AIDS except not quite. Or is that just me?
- ameister14 11y ago
  Usually things come in waves, in a couple of different fields: communication, transportation, or manufacturing/agriculture. We've just gone through a communication revolution and are about to enter a transportation revolution, where people stop actively driving cars, and a manufacturing progression where manufacturing is more distributed and automated. It's not all consumer products and making them better. It's the process they get to you.
- pault 11y ago
  ...says Retric, typing on a cheap, portable super computer which is connected to a globe-spanning network that pipes all the world's information directly into one's eyeballs, on-demand, at the speed of light...
  - Retric 11y ago
    Fiber optics and the internet are both older than I am. The internet is 45 years old. Companies started laying huge fiber optic networks in the 70's.
    - grey-area 11y ago
      You skipped over cheap portable supercomputer...all the worlds information The internet may be a few decades old but we're just getting started using it, and portable computing using the Internet has accelerated rapidly in the last decade along with virtual assistants, AI, bioinformatics, autonomous cars, robotics, drones etc etc. Lots of things are changing very rapidly right now.
    - euyyn 11y ago
      The world-wide web of the mid-to-late 90s is a qualitative improvement over the internet of 45 years ago. Heck, when I was a kid, ubiquitous videoconference (on non-mobile terminals!) was Science Fiction. Today, when someone sees me VC'ing with my mom at the other side of the planet, using a thin screen I can hold in my hand, it's just a dull urban thing.
- jbattle 11y ago
  one random example - i'm shocked at how good cheap RC drones are (compared to what was available just a few years ago)
- JeffL 11y ago
  My iPhone and iPad. It's not that many years that I've had them and they are nothing like anything I ever used before. My dad's electric RAV4 made with Tesla components. That thing is so quiet and smooth and can accelerate like crazy. My quadcoptor with HD camera is pretty awesome, and unlike anything available before. Uber feels vastly superior to me than taxis or even renting a car in some cases. This one might be weird, but I play a lot of games, and I feel like Heroes of the Storm which came out last year is vastly better than any other game I've ever played in my life. Maybe that's just me? :) Reading HN and Reddit is a vastly superior experience to reading newspapers and magazines. I feel very excited to be alive with all the innovation going on.
  - jonsen 11y ago
    You are describing state of the art, not addressing the speed of progres.
    - JeffL 11y ago
      I was just responding to the question: When was the last time you used a product and said “this is vastly better?”
- bhauer 11y ago
  For what it's worth, I don't think it's just you. Innovation is a diffuse thing, though, and I often find that when I perceive innovation as stalled, the truth is that innovation is simply happening in places I don't care about. A few weeks back, a Youtube video [1] was shared here that asked if computers are still getting faster. The video argues that they are. I don't dispute that. However, I think it's widely acknowledged that the pace of real-world performance increases—especially in CPUs—has been slow of late. The largest performance boon in the past 5 years has been the widespread use of SSDs as main storage. I just built a powerhouse workstation for my office that replaced a 2008-era first-generation i7. While this new workstation has gobs of cores, each individual core is only modestly faster than the individual cores from 2008. To me, computing speed is one of my paramount technology desires. The ideal is for all of my computing interactions to occur in 0 milliseconds. I want all my computing devices, and especially my workstation—the device I spend 8 hours at each day—to provide the pinnacle of performance. So it is acutely disappointing to me that the computing horsepower I have available to me is broadening but not becoming faster. Innovation is happening in the low-power space, not the workstation space. Obviously, there are incremental advances, and service to enthusiasts, but I think any honest observer would realize that the market is smaller so the drive to invest R&D in high-power processor performance is diminished. I feel the same way concerning the enormous amount of R&D investment going into centralized cloud platforms versus decentralized private/federated networks. I contend that had private networks seen as much raw brainpower invested in the past 10 years, managing a secure private network would have been made easier for laypeople, and ultimately we would have retained greater privacy and self-ownership of data. I also feel that computing devices working together over a secure private network in a peer-to-peer model would be vastly preferable to using a vendor-provided centralized cloud to provide device interop. I would prefer my phone and workstation work together directly, on the same private network, rather than using a cloud server as an intermediary. But as I said at the beginning, it's a matter of opinion and perspective. Broadly speaking—across the whole universe of technology—innovation is happening. But often I find it's happening in areas of little appeal to me. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuLxX07isNg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuLxX07isNg
- at-fates-hands 11y ago
  I've been using old smartphones for a while now and even phones that were released in 2014 are dirt cheap since for me, there is no discernible differences between models. Can I: 1 - Take a picture and post it somewhere 2 - Surf the internet and use apps for consuming content 3 - Take some video and upload it to youtube 4 - use it to text message friends and family 5 - make and receive phone calls These 5 basic functions are available on EVERY smartphone manufactured today. The differences? Minute. My LG G2 vs. the LG G3? The LG G3 has a Mildly better screen, 1 more GB of RAM and few other minor improvements. You're absolutely correct progress is slowing down in tech. The biggest move forwards I thought was when Microsoft completely redesigned the interface of their Windows phones. It was totally original and I thought much better than how Android copied Apple's design. Other than that? Not sure there have really been HUGE tech advancements in the smartphone arena. Same goes for PC's and Cars. Unless you're a HUGE hardware guy, I don't see big improvements or revolutions in these areas of tech.
- johngalt 11y ago
  Generic IT guy here. No matter how good the new machine is people always assume it's the same or worse than the old one. I'm not sure what drives this general feeling, but it has been a consistent theme. Despite every metric improving, people feel as if progress is stagnant. > When was the last time you used a product and said “this is vastly better?” Mid 2011 when I put a high dollar SSD in my laptop for the first time.
- RikNieu 11y ago
  I suspect the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive will be spurring on novelties and developments.
ape4 11y ago
A world where everyone has a smartphone ... just imagine!
kristopolous 11y ago
am I crazy to think the cultural shift in the rich world will actually be to more local communities, a return to rewarding physical labor such as gardening and craftsmanship to form a low ecological impact society of selected technology? I don't see the upcoming generation as being dazzled by accumulation and owning stuff. Nor do I see them wanting to ride on the hands of leisure. I see a culture of rejection of the codependence of infrastructure. When looking at 2040 you have to look at teenagers right now and understand what kind of society they'll be building. And personally I don't see one with a bunch of robotic assistants. Sure they have lots of screentime but that's for communication far more than labor reduction. These teens aren't tabulating Excel columns for hours on end. We are amidst a revolution of distributive communication that's being manifested by a revitalization of community. The barriers to engagement will eventually be expunged, not fortified.
- whatnotests 11y ago
  Expand on this - you've got a great blog article right there.
  - kristopolous 11y ago
    If you want to read about this approach I'll recommend http://www.culturechange.org/auto_free_times.html http://www.culturechange.org/auto_free_times.html and http://www.bioneers.org/ http://www.bioneers.org/ . Note that the first one ended publication over 13 years ago. You may read it in the context of green radicalism of 1997 and realize that it's becoming the dominant culture of 2016. For innovations you can look towards organizations like http://dignityvillage.org/ http://dignityvillage.org/ ... Literally, a legally recognized homeless community. If you are expecting to find future cultural innovation coming from elite organizations, you're looking in the wrong place. The disenfranchised through radical organization is where that occurs. As it happens it deradicalizes. Things such as not smoking, abstaining from red meat, not attending religious services weekly or not getting married were once radical positions. But as the cultural barriers imposed by radical animosity fell, personal reservations against these habits fell with them and they gave rise to cultural change. That's why you can't simply elongate the status quo by 20 years in a linear trajectory and get "The Future!"
cynical_sheet 11y ago
Why is enslavement of members of homo sapiens species illegal and wrong, but enslavement of AI robots legal and acceptable?
- jonsen 11y ago
  Because legislation is mostly reactive.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
marcosdumay 11y ago
The only commentary I can have about that infographic with trends is... It's so mundane. Even boring. There's no surprise. Everything just goes up at the previous exponential. No big hit, no saturation. Nothing ever changes. Ok, there's another commentary, in that something that boring is almost certainly wrong on several counts.
coldcode 11y ago
By 2100 maybe we are robots. Or back to the stone age.

34 points by peter123 11y ago

It's odd, but I keep feeling like the pace of progress is slowing down. When was the last time you used a product and said “this is vastly better?” A PS 4 feels somewhat better than a PS3 which was release 10 years ago. Cellphones seem stuck on the black rectangle design. Cars are getting ever so slightly better cruise control every year vs. becoming self-driving. We almost have a cure for AIDS except not quite. Or is that just me?

ameister14 11y ago
Usually things come in waves, in a couple of different fields: communication, transportation, or manufacturing/agriculture. We've just gone through a communication revolution and are about to enter a transportation revolution, where people stop actively driving cars, and a manufacturing progression where manufacturing is more distributed and automated. It's not all consumer products and making them better. It's the process they get to you.
pault 11y ago
...says Retric, typing on a cheap, portable super computer which is connected to a globe-spanning network that pipes all the world's information directly into one's eyeballs, on-demand, at the speed of light...
- Retric 11y ago
  Fiber optics and the internet are both older than I am. The internet is 45 years old. Companies started laying huge fiber optic networks in the 70's.
  - grey-area 11y ago
    You skipped over cheap portable supercomputer...all the worlds information The internet may be a few decades old but we're just getting started using it, and portable computing using the Internet has accelerated rapidly in the last decade along with virtual assistants, AI, bioinformatics, autonomous cars, robotics, drones etc etc. Lots of things are changing very rapidly right now.
  - euyyn 11y ago
    The world-wide web of the mid-to-late 90s is a qualitative improvement over the internet of 45 years ago. Heck, when I was a kid, ubiquitous videoconference (on non-mobile terminals!) was Science Fiction. Today, when someone sees me VC'ing with my mom at the other side of the planet, using a thin screen I can hold in my hand, it's just a dull urban thing.
jbattle 11y ago
one random example - i'm shocked at how good cheap RC drones are (compared to what was available just a few years ago)
JeffL 11y ago
My iPhone and iPad. It's not that many years that I've had them and they are nothing like anything I ever used before. My dad's electric RAV4 made with Tesla components. That thing is so quiet and smooth and can accelerate like crazy. My quadcoptor with HD camera is pretty awesome, and unlike anything available before. Uber feels vastly superior to me than taxis or even renting a car in some cases. This one might be weird, but I play a lot of games, and I feel like Heroes of the Storm which came out last year is vastly better than any other game I've ever played in my life. Maybe that's just me? :) Reading HN and Reddit is a vastly superior experience to reading newspapers and magazines. I feel very excited to be alive with all the innovation going on.
- jonsen 11y ago
  You are describing state of the art, not addressing the speed of progres.
  - JeffL 11y ago
    I was just responding to the question: When was the last time you used a product and said “this is vastly better?”
bhauer 11y ago
For what it's worth, I don't think it's just you. Innovation is a diffuse thing, though, and I often find that when I perceive innovation as stalled, the truth is that innovation is simply happening in places I don't care about. A few weeks back, a Youtube video [1] was shared here that asked if computers are still getting faster. The video argues that they are. I don't dispute that. However, I think it's widely acknowledged that the pace of real-world performance increases—especially in CPUs—has been slow of late. The largest performance boon in the past 5 years has been the widespread use of SSDs as main storage. I just built a powerhouse workstation for my office that replaced a 2008-era first-generation i7. While this new workstation has gobs of cores, each individual core is only modestly faster than the individual cores from 2008. To me, computing speed is one of my paramount technology desires. The ideal is for all of my computing interactions to occur in 0 milliseconds. I want all my computing devices, and especially my workstation—the device I spend 8 hours at each day—to provide the pinnacle of performance. So it is acutely disappointing to me that the computing horsepower I have available to me is broadening but not becoming faster. Innovation is happening in the low-power space, not the workstation space. Obviously, there are incremental advances, and service to enthusiasts, but I think any honest observer would realize that the market is smaller so the drive to invest R&D in high-power processor performance is diminished. I feel the same way concerning the enormous amount of R&D investment going into centralized cloud platforms versus decentralized private/federated networks. I contend that had private networks seen as much raw brainpower invested in the past 10 years, managing a secure private network would have been made easier for laypeople, and ultimately we would have retained greater privacy and self-ownership of data. I also feel that computing devices working together over a secure private network in a peer-to-peer model would be vastly preferable to using a vendor-provided centralized cloud to provide device interop. I would prefer my phone and workstation work together directly, on the same private network, rather than using a cloud server as an intermediary. But as I said at the beginning, it's a matter of opinion and perspective. Broadly speaking—across the whole universe of technology—innovation is happening. But often I find it's happening in areas of little appeal to me. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuLxX07isNg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuLxX07isNg
at-fates-hands 11y ago
I've been using old smartphones for a while now and even phones that were released in 2014 are dirt cheap since for me, there is no discernible differences between models. Can I: 1 - Take a picture and post it somewhere 2 - Surf the internet and use apps for consuming content 3 - Take some video and upload it to youtube 4 - use it to text message friends and family 5 - make and receive phone calls These 5 basic functions are available on EVERY smartphone manufactured today. The differences? Minute. My LG G2 vs. the LG G3? The LG G3 has a Mildly better screen, 1 more GB of RAM and few other minor improvements. You're absolutely correct progress is slowing down in tech. The biggest move forwards I thought was when Microsoft completely redesigned the interface of their Windows phones. It was totally original and I thought much better than how Android copied Apple's design. Other than that? Not sure there have really been HUGE tech advancements in the smartphone arena. Same goes for PC's and Cars. Unless you're a HUGE hardware guy, I don't see big improvements or revolutions in these areas of tech.
johngalt 11y ago
Generic IT guy here. No matter how good the new machine is people always assume it's the same or worse than the old one. I'm not sure what drives this general feeling, but it has been a consistent theme. Despite every metric improving, people feel as if progress is stagnant. > When was the last time you used a product and said “this is vastly better?” Mid 2011 when I put a high dollar SSD in my laptop for the first time.
RikNieu 11y ago
I suspect the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive will be spurring on novelties and developments.

ape4 11y ago

A world where everyone has a smartphone ... just imagine!

kristopolous 11y ago

am I crazy to think the cultural shift in the rich world will actually be to more local communities, a return to rewarding physical labor such as gardening and craftsmanship to form a low ecological impact society of selected technology? I don't see the upcoming generation as being dazzled by accumulation and owning stuff. Nor do I see them wanting to ride on the hands of leisure. I see a culture of rejection of the codependence of infrastructure. When looking at 2040 you have to look at teenagers right now and understand what kind of society they'll be building. And personally I don't see one with a bunch of robotic assistants. Sure they have lots of screentime but that's for communication far more than labor reduction. These teens aren't tabulating Excel columns for hours on end. We are amidst a revolution of distributive communication that's being manifested by a revitalization of community. The barriers to engagement will eventually be expunged, not fortified.

whatnotests 11y ago
Expand on this - you've got a great blog article right there.
- kristopolous 11y ago
  If you want to read about this approach I'll recommend http://www.culturechange.org/auto_free_times.html http://www.culturechange.org/auto_free_times.html and http://www.bioneers.org/ http://www.bioneers.org/ . Note that the first one ended publication over 13 years ago. You may read it in the context of green radicalism of 1997 and realize that it's becoming the dominant culture of 2016. For innovations you can look towards organizations like http://dignityvillage.org/ http://dignityvillage.org/ ... Literally, a legally recognized homeless community. If you are expecting to find future cultural innovation coming from elite organizations, you're looking in the wrong place. The disenfranchised through radical organization is where that occurs. As it happens it deradicalizes. Things such as not smoking, abstaining from red meat, not attending religious services weekly or not getting married were once radical positions. But as the cultural barriers imposed by radical animosity fell, personal reservations against these habits fell with them and they gave rise to cultural change. That's why you can't simply elongate the status quo by 20 years in a linear trajectory and get "The Future!"

cynical_sheet 11y ago

Why is enslavement of members of homo sapiens species illegal and wrong, but enslavement of AI robots legal and acceptable?

jonsen 11y ago
Because legislation is mostly reactive.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

marcosdumay 11y ago

The only commentary I can have about that infographic with trends is... It's so mundane. Even boring. There's no surprise. Everything just goes up at the previous exponential. No big hit, no saturation. Nothing ever changes. Ok, there's another commentary, in that something that boring is almost certainly wrong on several counts.

coldcode 11y ago

By 2100 maybe we are robots. Or back to the stone age.