6 ms·

Reasons to expect the next 10 years to be more exciting than the last

42 points by revorad 16y ago

rwmj 16y ago
I have a bad feeling about the next 10 years. 1900-1910 was a decade of globalization and affluence for certain classes and a big split between rich and poor, in fact rather like 2000-2010. 1910-1920 was not a happy period for anyone.
- VladRussian 16y ago
  yep, we're due for a small WWIII (there are set of global problems - pollution, including green house gases, human rights, including ethnic cleansing, currencies valuations, intellectual property rights, Internet management - which can't be solved in the current framework of 180 states getting individually to agree to a treaty and after that actually obeying the treaty) >10. Political-Economic reorganization: [...] so I'm sure that people will muddle through and figure out some way to distribute it equitably... he forgot 11. rapid increase of number of countries armed with nukes
  - Vivtek 16y ago
    Well, he did say "exciting!"
- Estragon 16y ago
  I agree, it's likely to be a time of great disorder and suffering. God forbid there should be another World War, but many of the reasons for international amicability are now breaking down, like easy trade and a relatively simple geopolitical structure.
keiferski 16y ago
Still waiting for my flying car...
- younata 16y ago
  5 years until we get there. I'm kinda pissed about my lack of time-traveling delorean. They said we were supposed to have these 25 years ago!
  - keiferski 16y ago
    Actually, it's been even longer than 25 years. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2550902895914120566# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2550902895914120566# But I'll be patient.
- Devilboy 16y ago
  You can buy them already. You just can't use them anywhere useful.
delinquentme 16y ago
Simply put: complexity increases over time ... this would infact lend itself to more and increasingly "interesting" things :D GO HUMANS!
Prisen 16y ago
By the end of the decade, expect voice and video quality as good as you might expect from HDTV. Bandwidth wise, this is (at least technically) possible today.
- akgerber 16y ago
  You can download a full-length HD film to extant (but not-yet-sold) phones and output it via an HDMI port. The only problem is that doing so will burn probably $40 in bandwidth.
EGreg 16y ago
I grew up in the 90s. The shows on TV rocked. They are what influenced me to be who I am today. I feel pity for the TV programming kids had to watch in the 2000s. What happened to all the brilliant writing? Pinky & the brain? Gargoyles? Disney? Animation with more than 2 frames per minute? We just got an avalanche of inane dubbing of japanese anime. "Hey, Ash, let's go into the forest and enslave little animal-looking things in balls and make them fight! I choose you Pikachu! Yay!" The best thing to come out of the 2000s decade of children's shows is YuGiOh abridged :)) It can only get better from there. Who's with me?
- bryanlarsen 16y ago
  You're stuck in nostalgia-land -- TV has gotten a lot better over the last 20 years. And there's a simple reason for that. 20 years ago the only shows that had a plot line longer than a single episode were the daytime soaps. Now, in the age of >100 channels, DVRs and Hulu, plotlines are allowed to stretch over an entire season, giving much more room for depth and development.
  - EGreg 16y ago
    I think you're not talking about kids shows. TV is definitely better in general, but animated shows really, really sucked in the last decade. (I mean shows for teens and children) http://blog.movies.yahoo.com/blog/177-disney-will-stop-making-princess-movies-because-boys-think-theyre-icky http://blog.movies.yahoo.com/blog/177-disney-will-stop-makin...
- neild 16y ago
  The best Western children's TV show in the 2000s that I can think of is Avatar: The Last Airbender. Which isn't just a great TV show for kids, but a great TV show in general.
  - Vivtek 16y ago
    Yeah, my kids and I doted on Avatar. I just rewatched the whole series straight through on Netflix a couple of weeks ago. Definitely thumbs up. Johnny Test ain't half bad, either, in terms of shorter stuff, and there are plenty of others. It's not all Pikachu. GP, you're not watching the right channels.
dstein 16y ago
The most exciting thing is that because of the accelerating pace of technological deflation, the cost of almost everything is asymptotically approaching $0. Access to all information, global communication, books, entertainment (movies, tv shows, music etc), software, and even hardware are getting cheaper at an alarming rate. The entire body of human knowledge (art, history, science etc) is being interconnected into a global application that will be instantly accessible and practically free (in inflation adjusted dollars). It will be interesting what effects this will have on our socio-economic system.
- CWIZO 16y ago
  Umm, what exactly is approaching $0? Some examples please.
  - gwern 16y ago
    > Access to all information, global communication, books, entertainment (movies, tv shows, music etc), software, and even hardware are getting cheaper at an alarming rate >> Some examples please.
    - CWIZO 16y ago
      Yeah those aren't really examples. Books, tv, movies, music: you have to pay to get it (unless you are a pirate). Some software is free, but you have to pay for the, well, paid one. You have to pay for your global communication (internet). And you most certainly have to pay for your hardware. So which of those things is rapidly approaching 0$ (except maybe some apps on appstore)?
      - woodall 16y ago
        Not at your local library.
      - farnsworth 16y ago
        Watch a tv show in 2000: Buy a TV, pay for cable, watch TV with many commercials. Watch a tv show in 2010: Go to your library's computer (or the computer you probably already have), access hulu.com, watch for free with minimal commercials. Buy a song in 2000: Drive to a store, buy the CD for $15 and cd player Buy a song in 2010: iTunes or Amazon for $.99. The point is not that nothing is free, or that it may never be free, but that it's very cheap and very accessible with less effort and fewer different orthogonal pieces of specialized hardware.
Roboprog 16y ago
Where is the evidence for better batteries (or capacitors)? Powering all the portable junk seems to rest on this hand wave. Then again, I'm too pessimistic to believe in all this singularity stuff. Ironic that Vernor Vinge used the phrase "age of shattered dreams" in Deepness in the Sky, considering he is also associated with the singularity thing.
- jodrellblank 16y ago
  How is it ironic that a guy who wrote singularity fiction also wrote not-singularity fiction? > Then again, I'm too pessimistic to believe in all this singularity stuff. Uh huh. http://lesswrong.com/lw/ym/cynical_about_cynicism/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/ym/cynical_about_cynicism/ > Where is the evidence for better batteries (or capacitors)? There's Lithium-Air on the horizon with a suggested 10x storage over Lithium-Ion, then there's the observation that large batteries once powered large mobile phones for hours and now small batteries power small phones for days, then there's fuel cell research, motion power (Seiko Kinetic watches, some footwear) solar phones (Samsung Blue Earth), body heat hasn't really been tried yet, etc.
  - gloob 16y ago
    As near as I can tell, the summary of your lesswrong link is something like: "Some people disagree with me. But they're just playing games about social status!" Which, I mean, is cool and all, but it's perhaps possible that maybe some people are just more cautious than others, for example. There have to be better arguments than fabricating someone's motives out of thin air and attacking those.
    - jodrellblank 16y ago
      A summary is "some people disagree with things, but can't give any specifics of what things they think are mistaken and the evidence which makes them think that. I [the author] have to assume that instead of looking at the evidence and believing the most probable thing they can find, they are instead disagreeing for other reasons which have nothing to do with truth or accuracy or evidence based decision making". but it's perhaps possible that maybe some people are just more cautious than others, for example Cautious is saying "I wont invest in xyz singularity technology until I'm convinced it works" or "I'm not planning my retirement fund based on living to 150 until I see people routinely living to 150 starting where I am now" or "I've seen 80 claims of new technology fall through, so this has to have extra strong evidence to convince me it's not in the same class". Saying "I'm too pessimistic for this happy happy future world" isn't cautious, it's something else. (Also: perhaps, possible, maybe, just, for example? I can't say why but you are strongly hammering into your post that you think someone is an idiot you have to speak down to. Me, or the article author, or both. That's the kind of social signalling you dismiss yet you are doing it (and so am I. Everyone does).
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
I can't wait for the next ten years -- it should be a blast. Having said that, I don't think its going to be all roses. One commenter made the analogy that the previous decade was like 1900-1910. I kind of get that feeling as well -- rise of the mob, rise of anarchy, old structures not working like they should, vast amounts of change and upheaval in the air. Overall, I think it's going to be awesome. But I would just be cautious, that's all. Not everything is going to be good, and there are going to be some really gnarly and ugly things we're going to see in the next ten years along with the great stuff. I would note that the adjective "exciting" can be taken in many different ways.
- kiba 16y ago
  My guess: Expect raw capitalism to re-invade the world. However, this is not going to come in the way of political structure changing, but rather resistance to political structure. It's not going to be headed by One Megacorporation by any mean. They're just along for the ride. All the pieces are coming together. A radical ideology, a working knowledge of economic, a technologically sophisticated community, and a new kind of technology that the community can revolves around.
  - forkandwait 16y ago
    My counter guess: expect small and medium non-governmental cooperative organizations to invade. Currently the world is divided into those creatively make social structures happen (gee Bob, let's start a company -- who should we hire? gee George and Thomas, lets start our damn government on this side of the Atlantic -- how does one train an army anyway?) and those who subconciously seek to occupy them un-creatively (gee, should I become an Oracle dev or a Microsoft dev? Gee, should I join the revolutionary army or the royalist army?) But the technology (DIY manufacturing) and the communication (internet plus math) and the culturation for everybody to become a little bit of the former is starting to seep everywhere, and there are huge payoffs for taking it up and organizing cooperatively(gee, why dont' we start GNU software and give it away instead of try to sell it?) Oh -- just want to mention that I don't see this as being nation state driven, and it is not the big monolithic socialism of the past -- more a "free market socialism"
iaskwhy 16y ago
Anyone notice how the author's picture is around 2.69 MB?
yxhuvud 16y ago
Between increasingly repressive governments, a deep financial crisis that is in it's third year and nowhere near being solved, peak oil and a southeast asia that could turn very ugly if the wrong events happen - I certainly don't want an exciting decade. I want a really boring one where as little as possible happens.
- JonnieCache 16y ago
  The classic (apocryphal) chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times"
JonnieCache 16y ago
"Did your friends really enjoy that party? Yes, but based on their proximities to one another they split into 3 groups with little overlap. Maybe try to have separate parties next time, or set up some icebreakers. The following games and exercises have worked in similar occasions in the past. Sally has done some of them before so maybe she can organize." Michael...... Vassar. Just making a note of that so I can be sure I never end up at a party at this guys house.
pyrhho 16y ago
The increasing power of motivated and intelligent individuals is a major force, which I feel the author missed. In modern times (particularly in the last 10 years) it has become easier and easier for the motivated and intelligent individual to wield ever-increasing amounts of power. Today, and even more-so in coming years, a few motivated people can wield power which would rival the super-powers of a few decades ago. SpaceX for example with their recent launch is on par with the early NASA progress. I hate to reference wikileaks in yet another thread, but 20 years ago it would have been unimaginable that a small group of people could set themselves to rival[1] a super-power and be so effective at it. A similar argument could be made about Al-Qaeda, Anonymous, and many other organizations. Further Reading: Vernor Vinge touches briefly on this trend and some of its implications in Rainbow's End. Edit: [1] 'rival' may have been the wrong word. 'baffle'?
- elai 16y ago
  9/11 could of happened as soon as airliners were invented and became a public transit system...
  - pyrhho 16y ago
    True, it could have. But it didn't until the organizational and persuasive ability of a small group of people could out-do the FBI, CIA, etc.. That being said, there is a lot more behind 9/11, and increasing power of individuals relative to super-powers is just one factor.
- ebaysucks 16y ago
  Agreed. As "combat methods" require more intelligence, it will become harder for governments to control the population. Convincing an army of hackers to follow a military order without questioning it is much harder than convincing some kids it's cool and patriotic to run towards a front line with a gun in their hands. Flags and national anthems will lose much of their political importance.

42 points by revorad 16y ago

rwmj 16y ago

I have a bad feeling about the next 10 years. 1900-1910 was a decade of globalization and affluence for certain classes and a big split between rich and poor, in fact rather like 2000-2010. 1910-1920 was not a happy period for anyone.

VladRussian 16y ago
yep, we're due for a small WWIII (there are set of global problems - pollution, including green house gases, human rights, including ethnic cleansing, currencies valuations, intellectual property rights, Internet management - which can't be solved in the current framework of 180 states getting individually to agree to a treaty and after that actually obeying the treaty) >10. Political-Economic reorganization: [...] so I'm sure that people will muddle through and figure out some way to distribute it equitably... he forgot 11. rapid increase of number of countries armed with nukes
- Vivtek 16y ago
  Well, he did say "exciting!"
Estragon 16y ago
I agree, it's likely to be a time of great disorder and suffering. God forbid there should be another World War, but many of the reasons for international amicability are now breaking down, like easy trade and a relatively simple geopolitical structure.

keiferski 16y ago

Still waiting for my flying car...

younata 16y ago
5 years until we get there. I'm kinda pissed about my lack of time-traveling delorean. They said we were supposed to have these 25 years ago!
- keiferski 16y ago
  Actually, it's been even longer than 25 years. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2550902895914120566# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2550902895914120566# But I'll be patient.
Devilboy 16y ago
You can buy them already. You just can't use them anywhere useful.

delinquentme 16y ago

Simply put: complexity increases over time ... this would infact lend itself to more and increasingly "interesting" things :D GO HUMANS!

Prisen 16y ago

By the end of the decade, expect voice and video quality as good as you might expect from HDTV. Bandwidth wise, this is (at least technically) possible today.

akgerber 16y ago
You can download a full-length HD film to extant (but not-yet-sold) phones and output it via an HDMI port. The only problem is that doing so will burn probably $40 in bandwidth.

EGreg 16y ago

I grew up in the 90s. The shows on TV rocked. They are what influenced me to be who I am today. I feel pity for the TV programming kids had to watch in the 2000s. What happened to all the brilliant writing? Pinky & the brain? Gargoyles? Disney? Animation with more than 2 frames per minute? We just got an avalanche of inane dubbing of japanese anime. "Hey, Ash, let's go into the forest and enslave little animal-looking things in balls and make them fight! I choose you Pikachu! Yay!" The best thing to come out of the 2000s decade of children's shows is YuGiOh abridged :)) It can only get better from there. Who's with me?

bryanlarsen 16y ago
You're stuck in nostalgia-land -- TV has gotten a lot better over the last 20 years. And there's a simple reason for that. 20 years ago the only shows that had a plot line longer than a single episode were the daytime soaps. Now, in the age of >100 channels, DVRs and Hulu, plotlines are allowed to stretch over an entire season, giving much more room for depth and development.
- EGreg 16y ago
  I think you're not talking about kids shows. TV is definitely better in general, but animated shows really, really sucked in the last decade. (I mean shows for teens and children) http://blog.movies.yahoo.com/blog/177-disney-will-stop-making-princess-movies-because-boys-think-theyre-icky http://blog.movies.yahoo.com/blog/177-disney-will-stop-makin...
neild 16y ago
The best Western children's TV show in the 2000s that I can think of is Avatar: The Last Airbender. Which isn't just a great TV show for kids, but a great TV show in general.
- Vivtek 16y ago
  Yeah, my kids and I doted on Avatar. I just rewatched the whole series straight through on Netflix a couple of weeks ago. Definitely thumbs up. Johnny Test ain't half bad, either, in terms of shorter stuff, and there are plenty of others. It's not all Pikachu. GP, you're not watching the right channels.

dstein 16y ago

The most exciting thing is that because of the accelerating pace of technological deflation, the cost of almost everything is asymptotically approaching $0. Access to all information, global communication, books, entertainment (movies, tv shows, music etc), software, and even hardware are getting cheaper at an alarming rate. The entire body of human knowledge (art, history, science etc) is being interconnected into a global application that will be instantly accessible and practically free (in inflation adjusted dollars). It will be interesting what effects this will have on our socio-economic system.

CWIZO 16y ago
Umm, what exactly is approaching $0? Some examples please.
- gwern 16y ago
  > Access to all information, global communication, books, entertainment (movies, tv shows, music etc), software, and even hardware are getting cheaper at an alarming rate >> Some examples please.
  - CWIZO 16y ago
    Yeah those aren't really examples. Books, tv, movies, music: you have to pay to get it (unless you are a pirate). Some software is free, but you have to pay for the, well, paid one. You have to pay for your global communication (internet). And you most certainly have to pay for your hardware. So which of those things is rapidly approaching 0$ (except maybe some apps on appstore)?
    - woodall 16y ago
      Not at your local library.
    - farnsworth 16y ago
      Watch a tv show in 2000: Buy a TV, pay for cable, watch TV with many commercials. Watch a tv show in 2010: Go to your library's computer (or the computer you probably already have), access hulu.com, watch for free with minimal commercials. Buy a song in 2000: Drive to a store, buy the CD for $15 and cd player Buy a song in 2010: iTunes or Amazon for $.99. The point is not that nothing is free, or that it may never be free, but that it's very cheap and very accessible with less effort and fewer different orthogonal pieces of specialized hardware.

Roboprog 16y ago

Where is the evidence for better batteries (or capacitors)? Powering all the portable junk seems to rest on this hand wave. Then again, I'm too pessimistic to believe in all this singularity stuff. Ironic that Vernor Vinge used the phrase "age of shattered dreams" in Deepness in the Sky, considering he is also associated with the singularity thing.

jodrellblank 16y ago
How is it ironic that a guy who wrote singularity fiction also wrote not-singularity fiction? > Then again, I'm too pessimistic to believe in all this singularity stuff. Uh huh. http://lesswrong.com/lw/ym/cynical_about_cynicism/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/ym/cynical_about_cynicism/ > Where is the evidence for better batteries (or capacitors)? There's Lithium-Air on the horizon with a suggested 10x storage over Lithium-Ion, then there's the observation that large batteries once powered large mobile phones for hours and now small batteries power small phones for days, then there's fuel cell research, motion power (Seiko Kinetic watches, some footwear) solar phones (Samsung Blue Earth), body heat hasn't really been tried yet, etc.
- gloob 16y ago
  As near as I can tell, the summary of your lesswrong link is something like: "Some people disagree with me. But they're just playing games about social status!" Which, I mean, is cool and all, but it's perhaps possible that maybe some people are just more cautious than others, for example. There have to be better arguments than fabricating someone's motives out of thin air and attacking those.
  - jodrellblank 16y ago
    A summary is "some people disagree with things, but can't give any specifics of what things they think are mistaken and the evidence which makes them think that. I [the author] have to assume that instead of looking at the evidence and believing the most probable thing they can find, they are instead disagreeing for other reasons which have nothing to do with truth or accuracy or evidence based decision making". but it's perhaps possible that maybe some people are just more cautious than others, for example Cautious is saying "I wont invest in xyz singularity technology until I'm convinced it works" or "I'm not planning my retirement fund based on living to 150 until I see people routinely living to 150 starting where I am now" or "I've seen 80 claims of new technology fall through, so this has to have extra strong evidence to convince me it's not in the same class". Saying "I'm too pessimistic for this happy happy future world" isn't cautious, it's something else. (Also: perhaps, possible, maybe, just, for example? I can't say why but you are strongly hammering into your post that you think someone is an idiot you have to speak down to. Me, or the article author, or both. That's the kind of social signalling you dismiss yet you are doing it (and so am I. Everyone does).

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

I can't wait for the next ten years -- it should be a blast. Having said that, I don't think its going to be all roses. One commenter made the analogy that the previous decade was like 1900-1910. I kind of get that feeling as well -- rise of the mob, rise of anarchy, old structures not working like they should, vast amounts of change and upheaval in the air. Overall, I think it's going to be awesome. But I would just be cautious, that's all. Not everything is going to be good, and there are going to be some really gnarly and ugly things we're going to see in the next ten years along with the great stuff. I would note that the adjective "exciting" can be taken in many different ways.

kiba 16y ago
My guess: Expect raw capitalism to re-invade the world. However, this is not going to come in the way of political structure changing, but rather resistance to political structure. It's not going to be headed by One Megacorporation by any mean. They're just along for the ride. All the pieces are coming together. A radical ideology, a working knowledge of economic, a technologically sophisticated community, and a new kind of technology that the community can revolves around.
- forkandwait 16y ago
  My counter guess: expect small and medium non-governmental cooperative organizations to invade. Currently the world is divided into those creatively make social structures happen (gee Bob, let's start a company -- who should we hire? gee George and Thomas, lets start our damn government on this side of the Atlantic -- how does one train an army anyway?) and those who subconciously seek to occupy them un-creatively (gee, should I become an Oracle dev or a Microsoft dev? Gee, should I join the revolutionary army or the royalist army?) But the technology (DIY manufacturing) and the communication (internet plus math) and the culturation for everybody to become a little bit of the former is starting to seep everywhere, and there are huge payoffs for taking it up and organizing cooperatively(gee, why dont' we start GNU software and give it away instead of try to sell it?) Oh -- just want to mention that I don't see this as being nation state driven, and it is not the big monolithic socialism of the past -- more a "free market socialism"

iaskwhy 16y ago

Anyone notice how the author's picture is around 2.69 MB?

yxhuvud 16y ago

Between increasingly repressive governments, a deep financial crisis that is in it's third year and nowhere near being solved, peak oil and a southeast asia that could turn very ugly if the wrong events happen - I certainly don't want an exciting decade. I want a really boring one where as little as possible happens.

JonnieCache 16y ago
The classic (apocryphal) chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times"

JonnieCache 16y ago

"Did your friends really enjoy that party? Yes, but based on their proximities to one another they split into 3 groups with little overlap. Maybe try to have separate parties next time, or set up some icebreakers. The following games and exercises have worked in similar occasions in the past. Sally has done some of them before so maybe she can organize." Michael...... Vassar. Just making a note of that so I can be sure I never end up at a party at this guys house.

pyrhho 16y ago

The increasing power of motivated and intelligent individuals is a major force, which I feel the author missed. In modern times (particularly in the last 10 years) it has become easier and easier for the motivated and intelligent individual to wield ever-increasing amounts of power. Today, and even more-so in coming years, a few motivated people can wield power which would rival the super-powers of a few decades ago. SpaceX for example with their recent launch is on par with the early NASA progress. I hate to reference wikileaks in yet another thread, but 20 years ago it would have been unimaginable that a small group of people could set themselves to rival[1] a super-power and be so effective at it. A similar argument could be made about Al-Qaeda, Anonymous, and many other organizations. Further Reading: Vernor Vinge touches briefly on this trend and some of its implications in Rainbow's End. Edit: [1] 'rival' may have been the wrong word. 'baffle'?

elai 16y ago
9/11 could of happened as soon as airliners were invented and became a public transit system...
- pyrhho 16y ago
  True, it could have. But it didn't until the organizational and persuasive ability of a small group of people could out-do the FBI, CIA, etc.. That being said, there is a lot more behind 9/11, and increasing power of individuals relative to super-powers is just one factor.
ebaysucks 16y ago
Agreed. As "combat methods" require more intelligence, it will become harder for governments to control the population. Convincing an army of hackers to follow a military order without questioning it is much harder than convincing some kids it's cool and patriotic to run towards a front line with a gun in their hands. Flags and national anthems will lose much of their political importance.