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My thoughts: 1. IMHO learning a second language will largely be no longer necessary because English will increasingly be the lingua franca. That being said, on

by cletus 16y ago

My thoughts: 1. IMHO learning a second language will largely be no longer necessary because English will increasingly be the lingua franca. That being said, on the fly translation will clearly continue to get better. 2. 150 year life expectancy? This one I don't buy. Medicine here has to be differentiated in two areas: curing and preventing the causes of "premature" death (eg disease) that stop us reaching a "natural" age when we die. That lone won't get us to 150 years. We're probably not far off that limit now. To get to 150 we need to extend the age to which humans can live, which is getting into some fairly serious genetics. I can see such technology coming about but IMHO will be the province of the wealthy for some time and will probably take longer than expected (again IMHO). 3. I disagree with this. Despite all the efforts to stop poverty, even in developed nations, there is a segment of the population who remain poor. It might be controversial but a certain segment (IMHO) are poor and remain poor because they make poor choices. Also, the definition of "poor" constantly changes. Poverty in the developing world is lack of access to basic health care, food and clean drinking water. In the developed world, poverty seems to mean your iPhone is two generations old. And yes I realize there is true poverty in the developed world. There are people who are homeless but the scope of "poverty" in such discussions extends way beyond those when we're discussing social policy. 4. Possible. Food production will need to change. 5. Agreed. I think future generations will look back on this age of manually driven cars as being somewhat barbaric, especially considering the number of people who die on the roads. 6. I also agree that the world's will become increasingly urbanized and you will see "mega-cities" as a result. There are efficiency advantages in concentrating populations in such cities. 7. I was just having a conversation with a colleague at work on Friday about flying cars. My position was (and is) that personal flying vehicles won't happen before driverless cars. Humans won't simply be able to reliably fly such vehicles. Also, the energy costs I believe will possibly scupper such plans so we need to find a far cheaper source of energy for this to happen, especially considering we've probably passed peak oil production. 8. This too is dependent on finding a new, cheaper energy source. Without that space travel will (IMHO) still be too expensive. 9. I think this will be partially true but human labour is extraordinarily cheap and will be incredibly hard to completely displace. It's the same reason we still have humans doing incredibly menial work even when such work could be done by robots, that are comparatively much more expensive. 10. Probably true. Predicting the future is hard. 1900 to 2000 had a massive amount of change, unparalleled in human history. Think about it: we went from the birth of the automobile to handheld computers, putting a man on the Moon, the global Internet and cheap, almost ubiquitous air travel. How much of that could've been predicted? What's more, how much of that is on the back of cheap non-renewable energy that is ultimately unsustainable? Not just energy, but other resources like metals. The rate at which the world population is growing and using resources is unsustainable so something has to change: whether it be new energy sources are found or the population problem corrects itself. I seriously urge you to watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY if you haven't already. If you think of sci-fi as a predictor of the future (which it has been in many ways), we've vastly exceeded predictions in some fields (eg computers) and vastly underperformed in others (eg space travel). I heard Jerry Pournelle talking abot this with the predictions from the Mote in God's Eye. The handheld computers exist now, being smartphones, less than 40 years after the book was published. But in space travel terms, we're, if anything, behind what we were in the 20th century. To me the predictable aspects of the future are: 1. Urbanization; 2. Ubiquity of computing and networking; 3. Genetic engineering. Other things depend on the big question mark that is cheap and abundant energy. We may not find anything, in which case the future will be bleak. If we find something however the world will change beyond recognition.

bergie 16y ago
It will be interesting to see if urbanization of the third world will have positive impact on the environment. Better efficiency and less human intrusion on natural habitats
manifold 16y ago
I agree that a 150 year life expectancy is very unlikely in the next 20 years, but the possibility of people who are alive in 2030 reaching 150 seems plausible. I think that's the argument de Grey was making, and their source article had confused the two issues.
acangiano 16y ago
I believe most of these points will become reality, but some of them by 2120 not by 2020.
Symmetry 16y ago
2. Why do you think that only the wealthy will have access to these treatments? Its quite likely that some number of people won't have access, but most new medical technologies are available to most people because the largest cost of any new medical technology is its development. For some disease that everyone suffers from I wouldn't expect the treatment to end up costing more than, say, your typical run of chemotherapy. Something expensive, but that should be covered by most health insurance. 3. He gave an objective definition of "poor" he was using in his prediction, and while I agree that completely eliminating poverty might be impossible getting it down to 1 in 50 seems doable. EDIT: Edited for clarity.
- derleth 16y ago
  > Why do you think that only the wealthy will have access to these treatments? To begin with, the companies providing them will have to reach break-even and, in a field like biotech with huge up-front costs, that means making a lot of money from the first clients. Rich people have a lot of money. > Something expensive, but that should be covered by most health insurance. Then we're talking about different things. How often does health insurance pay for treatments that are still somewhat unproven in the real world? > He gave an objective definition of "poor" he was using in his prediction Right, and everyone seems to ignore the fact that, as measured on an objective scale, how a culture defines 'poverty' creeps up that absolute wealth scale as the culture's wealth grows. For example, at one time kings and rich industrialists could die of appendicitis; now, only the most desperately poor are so deprived of healthcare that having an inflamed appendix is a death sentence.

by cletus 16y ago

bergie 16y ago

It will be interesting to see if urbanization of the third world will have positive impact on the environment. Better efficiency and less human intrusion on natural habitats

manifold 16y ago

I agree that a 150 year life expectancy is very unlikely in the next 20 years, but the possibility of people who are alive in 2030 reaching 150 seems plausible. I think that's the argument de Grey was making, and their source article had confused the two issues.

acangiano 16y ago

I believe most of these points will become reality, but some of them by 2120 not by 2020.

Symmetry 16y ago

2. Why do you think that only the wealthy will have access to these treatments? Its quite likely that some number of people won't have access, but most new medical technologies are available to most people because the largest cost of any new medical technology is its development. For some disease that everyone suffers from I wouldn't expect the treatment to end up costing more than, say, your typical run of chemotherapy. Something expensive, but that should be covered by most health insurance. 3. He gave an objective definition of "poor" he was using in his prediction, and while I agree that completely eliminating poverty might be impossible getting it down to 1 in 50 seems doable. EDIT: Edited for clarity.

derleth 16y ago
> Why do you think that only the wealthy will have access to these treatments? To begin with, the companies providing them will have to reach break-even and, in a field like biotech with huge up-front costs, that means making a lot of money from the first clients. Rich people have a lot of money. > Something expensive, but that should be covered by most health insurance. Then we're talking about different things. How often does health insurance pay for treatments that are still somewhat unproven in the real world? > He gave an objective definition of "poor" he was using in his prediction Right, and everyone seems to ignore the fact that, as measured on an objective scale, how a culture defines 'poverty' creeps up that absolute wealth scale as the culture's wealth grows. For example, at one time kings and rich industrialists could die of appendicitis; now, only the most desperately poor are so deprived of healthcare that having an inflamed appendix is a death sentence.