8 ms·

Futurists have their heads in the clouds

34 points by spekcular 5y ago

tuatoru 5y ago
I don't really care where futurists keep their heads, but they, including Hoel, use them intermittently, superficially and in a slipshod manner. They don't do their homework. I very much doubt that Hoel has properly thought through in detail what it would take to operate a permanent colony on Mars and what would have to happen to set one up. If he has, he has not troubled to write down his thoughts. As an example of what I'm talking about, Brian Potter, on his blog "Construction Physics", has delved into the detail and explained some of the mass of physical, economic, informational, institutional, organisational, and cultural factors that result in the building construction industry and construction costs being what they are.[1] I have never seen its like from any futurist. 1. https://constructionphysics.substack.com/ https://constructionphysics.substack.com/
basedgod 5y ago
I really doubt there will be a rise of the throuple in any meaningful sense. The entire point of the authors essay is how unchanging society is, but suddenly it's going to become not uncommon for inherently complicated (more dynamics than dyads) relationships to exist? It hasn't been the case at any point in human history (other than extremely small minorities). This is not going to change now. Humans don't work that way on a mass scale. The same with education. Education does not exist to educate, it exists to babysit children (parents have to go to work! look at the last election in Virginia), and be a hoop to jump through for accreditation. Online learning will be hugely inconvenient for these purposes, and traditional in person education will remain the most common form well into the end of the 21st century Nothing ever changes
- pempem 5y ago
  I'm here for the cynicism but here's the thing: we went from no weekends to weekends; we went from random schools to mandatory school; we went from child labor to almost no child labor with noted exceptions things do change. we can change them more. i agree that throuple is an unlikely emergence from those efforts :D
adamcstephens 5y ago
Some self-reflection seems like it would be valuable here.
dmitrybrant 5y ago
Wait, a colony on Mars by 2050 that doesn't need to be resupplied from Earth? ...lol no. Strong, strong disagree that there will be any kind of "colony" on Mars by 2050, and my prediction is that we won't even have our first manned mission to Mars this century. We haven't been back to the Moon in 50 years. We haven't left LEO in 50 years. Surely we would need to build a colony on the Moon first, as a trial for building a colony somewhere that's three orders of magnitude farther away. We are nowhere close to doing this.
- ravi-delia 5y ago
  I absolutely agree that we won't have a colony on Mars by 2050, but I think you vastly overestimate the difficulty of just traveling to Mars if you're judging based on the Moon. Political will? Perhaps, but I think the best way to think of it is that it was possible to go to the Moon on technology from 50 years ago. Modern rockets are far, far better.
- abruzzi 5y ago
  Yeah, this one was hard to buy, unless there are a lot of billionaires that want to live in houses the size of a college dorm room. The cost to get to mars, and to live on Mars seems to me to be absolutely prohibitive at this point. A number of the other observations also seemed to be a stretch. I'm not sure AI will have the level of impact he expects in less than 30 years. the death of the local store and getting any product delivered in an hour or less seems way too optimistic when you consider all the small rural towns in the US that can't even get decent broadband today.
  - DennisP 5y ago
    "At this point" sure, but it's not happening at all unless SpaceX succeeds with Starship at scale, which means fully, rapidly reusable and building at least a hundred of them per year, which gets launch costs to LEO down to about $50/kg. Starting with that, SpaceX would send at least a hundred Starships to Mars with every launch window, each able to carry over a hundred tons of cargo. Price per passenger depends on how many you can safely pack in and maybe Musk is being overoptimistic on that, but he's shooting for half a million dollars.
petermcneeley 5y ago
#8 and #18 conflict unless the author is not "rich"
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
huitzitziltzin 5y ago
After arguing (correctly, IMO) that futurists make ridiculous predictions, he predicts a colony on Mars? Why? To what end? What would it do and who would care? Who would want to travel months through space one way just to do… what will anyone be able to do on Mars anyway? I can see some tourism of a particularly extreme sort but the idea of a Mars colony strikes me as totally insane. Also predicting that most education will be online after everyone spent a year and a half discovering how terrible both Zoom school and Zoom university are is a bold (and likely wrong) prediction. I buy that the future is female given current trends, but basically the whole list of predictions in the second half of the article is exactly the mistake he explains futurists make in the first half!
- mhio 5y ago
  There's a large, very well funded company building the path for Mars (and back). So there's 5000 or so SpaceX candidates already who have bought into the idea. I'd guess NASA would have a few people willing as well. To be honest I think it will likely happen before 2050, but it also might also come and go before then as well. Getting to self sufficiency is a very, very long shot, and up until then something has to foot the bill which is where the endeavour is most likely to fall over. In any case, we get to watch some cool looking hardware go up in the mean time - https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=54984.msg2309043#msg2309043 https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=54984.msg2...
- tkgally 5y ago
  > predicting that most education will be online after everyone spent a year and a half discovering how terrible both Zoom school and Zoom university are is a bold (and likely wrong) prediction. You’re probably right about Zoom school—it has sounded pretty terrible to me, too, especially for younger children—but I think the jury is still out on Zoom university. I teach at a university in Japan where most of the teaching has been conducted online since April of last year, and we’re now debating what to do next year if infections stay low. (After a frightening spike in August, they are very low in Japan now.) When faculty in my department were asked their teaching preference for the next academic year, about a third said they want to return to in-person only, a third want to teach a combination of in-person and online, and a third—including me—want to keep teaching online only. When I’ve discussed the issue with undergraduates in my classes this year, about half have said they prefer to stay online for many or most of their classes. However, they do strongly prefer to socialize with other students in person. The reasons many teachers and students prefer online classes range from the mundane—such as avoiding long commutes on crowded trains—to the perception that, for some types of classes, online learning can actually be more effective than classroom teaching. For me, the game-changer for online classes has been the ability of students to take part in classes regardless of where they are. Most international students have been unable to enter Japan since April 2020, but, at my university at least, they have been able to continue their studies online. After I taught a graduate seminar last year in which more than half the students were in other countries—Indonesia, Thailand, China—and all were able to participate in the discussions on an equal basis, I came to think that it will be hard for in-person-only universities to remain competitive in the future.
mempko 5y ago
Not a single mention about the climate crisis and sixth mass extinction. Simply pure utopian thought.
djit 5y ago
Thank you for the laughs. The way some people make a living out of utter BS never fails to amaze me.
- pphysch 5y ago
  Indeed. What a ridiculous article written by someone who hasn't intellectually stepped out of their SV comfort zone.
GDC7 5y ago
I think they know too. But techno-utopianism is a form of art in Silicon Valley. Your average SV techbro feels superior to regular people who enjoy other forms of art such as music or sports or poetry or even film making. Label those activities as a "waste of time" but they end up completely falling for the BS performance art that scum like Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes put up. And they elevate them too! Where normal people see art in an Hendrix solo or an Eminem verse they see it in the obnoxious self-promoting BS spewed by such characters. Of course the window dressing for all the above is nonesense marketing terms such as : "showing passion" or "produce a strong narrative" or even "tell your story to the world"
herlitzj 5y ago
Is it just me or does the future he paints sound absolutely abysmal? It's effectively a dictorship where your entire life is bouncing from one tulip mania to another holed up in your apartment talking to an AI and lost in a world of garbage content from Neflix 2.0 while you await your burrito delivery and dream of hitting it big on <insert_name> Coin so you can move to Mars and watch the dust blow around. Kill me now :(
- akiselev 5y ago
  > Is it just me or does the future he paints sound absolutely abysmal? That's how I know it's an realistic and mostly unbiased prediction that's relatively accurate: it looks kinda like today, except more of it. Barring a black swan event that drastically changes our system of values and incentives, that's probably how it's going to play out. We just had a black swan play out and... it's all the same, just six feet more of it. Most social revolutions either up reshuffling the deck or in disaster. The low hanging fruit in most technological fields has been picked and "priced in" during decades past. Hope for the best, expect the worst.
  - jdkee 5y ago
    If you are referring to the pandemic, that is by definition not a black swan event as it was expected to occur at some point.
    - snidane 5y ago
      The disease is not a black swan. The global reaction to it certainly is.
cl42 5y ago
I really dislike forecasting with vague statements that are almost certainly going to be correct. Case in point: "Anti-aging technology will extend the health-spans of the rich." There are myriad ways in which this statement will be true and yet it's completely useless today. As long as there is any tech (biotech, medicine, plastic surgery, etc.) that extends people's lives by even a little bit, or improves their QOL into a slightly older age, then this is true. It's unactionable, unclear, etc. I'm constantly looking for good, verifiable, and actionable forecasts for this stuff, if anyone has them. And if you are interested in doing such a thing, please reach out. :)
typest 5y ago
> 2050, that super futuristic year, is only 29 years out, so it is exactly the same as predicting what the world would look like today back in 1992 The problem with this analysis is that the rate of change of the world is accelerating; the world is changing faster now than it was in 1992. Fundamentally, this is driven by the fact that all the changes from the past cause further changes, in an exponential process. Thus a straightforward linear estimate of the future will underestimate how much things will change in the future.
- CuriouslyC 5y ago
  Things have been accelerating in a sigmoidal manner, which looks exponential in the early curve, but then plateaus as it approaches a limit. It's hard to say how far along we in the curve now, but given that we're bumping up against the limits of silicon semiconductors now, I'd say perhaps farther than you might expect.
- kibwen 5y ago
  > The problem with this analysis is that the rate of change of the world is accelerating; the world is changing faster now than it was in 1992. Fundamentally, this is driven by the fact that all the changes from the past cause further changes, in an exponential process Any accelerating trend can't be sustained indefinitely. We know that the accelerating rate of progress is because of computers (which reduce the feedback loops on various processes which then help make better computers, and so on). When we reach a point where computers stop getting better, the rate of progress will stabilize. We've already observed stagnant clock speeds for over a decade. There are still worthy investments to be made, like in miniaturization, affordability, and heterogeneity, but without a breakthrough as monumental as the transistor we have no reason to assume that acceleration will continue.
typest 5y ago
The author dismisses futurists’ predictions as ludicrous, without providing any evidence to the contrary. Robin Hanson has some crazy claims, but he thinks things through and is extremely willing to bet on what he believes in. Just because something seems crazy, does not mean it is wrong.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
> If you want to predict the future accurately, you should be an incrementalist and accept that human nature doesn’t change along most axes. Meaning that the future will look a lot like the past. If Cicero were transported from ancient Rome to our time he would easily understand most things about our society. This is, I think the heart of the issue. Human nature is pretty constant. We can change our environment or trade offs (for example at one time if you wanted to avoid pregnancy, the trade off was don’t have sex, now it is take a pill, hence the leveling out of our population).
flerovium 5y ago
> 2050, that super futuristic year, is only 29 years out, so it is exactly the same as predicting what the world would look like today back in 1992 What about the 29 years between 1912 and 1941? The pace of recent history is not a good indicator of future change.
- Alan_Dillman 5y ago
  Or just between 1992 and 1963. Heck, I only know the 70s onward, and remember the mid 70s only in child's eye, me centric ways. I remember my aunts being upset about Elvis Presley dying, but I wasn't quite sure what the fuss was, and that was 77; I was 5. Someone died, but how did they fit into my world? Oh, that guy that sings? But we can still listen to him? Then what is the big deal? My wonderful Usbourne Books of the Future were still promising me personal spacecraft and tours of Saturn's rings as late as 1980. The robots would take care of the garden back home. On the space station. A whole way of looking at the future came unravelled in just the 12 years between then and our prognosticator's birth. By 1992, everyone was dreaming of cyberpunk, of uploading our minds, and fiction had the rich living in LEO. The stars had stretched out of reach. Our cynical futurist, age 33, has not meaningfully experienced social change with an adult perspective over 29 years. Every 30 year period ever has been a mad scramble of change. I am sure that was true between 1000 and 1030 even. Big shit was happening. Like my 1972-1980 world view, his 1992-2000 world was likely pretty personal, and coloured by a narrow range of life experiences. So I am skeptical he has the breadth of experience needed to extend 29 into the future.
cuzBchain 5y ago
Writers write to captivate an indifferent audience not educate one, film at 11. Maybe some of the ideas would come to fruition faster if spinning in semantic circles for coin were set aside for the engineering work necessary.
jcoq 5y ago
It's difficult for me to see how AI will replace massive numbers of programmers, rather than expand their productivity and/or change the nature of their work. Business logic is about getting very tiny details and edge cases correct: "if a, b and c but not d and e, unless of course f and g"... I don't see how that code can be created by an AI in a way that doesn't create even more work for someone fixing bugs. We have barely scratched the surface of what tech can offer in most brick and mortar industries because this business logic is so incredibly difficult to automate. It seems unfeasible that a magic AI will come along and do what humans cannot do alone. I think we'll see programming evolve and software engineers will probably be among the first workers who learn to work in truly collaborative ways with AI.
klyrs 5y ago
I predict that futurists will have their heads in the clouds in 2121. What's new?
stubish 5y ago
I can't see AI putting artists out of business. Artists are and will remain much more cost effective than the expense of training machines, because most of them work for peanuts or free. The most we will see is artists using AI as a medium ('Show me a dog with an apple on its head. Now make it greener with more neanderthal.').

34 points by spekcular 5y ago

I don't really care where futurists keep their heads, but they, including Hoel, use them intermittently, superficially and in a slipshod manner. They don't do their homework. I very much doubt that Hoel has properly thought through in detail what it would take to operate a permanent colony on Mars and what would have to happen to set one up. If he has, he has not troubled to write down his thoughts. As an example of what I'm talking about, Brian Potter, on his blog "Construction Physics", has delved into the detail and explained some of the mass of physical, economic, informational, institutional, organisational, and cultural factors that result in the building construction industry and construction costs being what they are.[1] I have never seen its like from any futurist. 1. https://constructionphysics.substack.com/ https://constructionphysics.substack.com/

basedgod 5y ago

I really doubt there will be a rise of the throuple in any meaningful sense. The entire point of the authors essay is how unchanging society is, but suddenly it's going to become not uncommon for inherently complicated (more dynamics than dyads) relationships to exist? It hasn't been the case at any point in human history (other than extremely small minorities). This is not going to change now. Humans don't work that way on a mass scale. The same with education. Education does not exist to educate, it exists to babysit children (parents have to go to work! look at the last election in Virginia), and be a hoop to jump through for accreditation. Online learning will be hugely inconvenient for these purposes, and traditional in person education will remain the most common form well into the end of the 21st century Nothing ever changes

pempem 5y ago
I'm here for the cynicism but here's the thing: we went from no weekends to weekends; we went from random schools to mandatory school; we went from child labor to almost no child labor with noted exceptions things do change. we can change them more. i agree that throuple is an unlikely emergence from those efforts :D

adamcstephens 5y ago

Some self-reflection seems like it would be valuable here.

dmitrybrant 5y ago

Wait, a colony on Mars by 2050 that doesn't need to be resupplied from Earth? ...lol no. Strong, strong disagree that there will be any kind of "colony" on Mars by 2050, and my prediction is that we won't even have our first manned mission to Mars this century. We haven't been back to the Moon in 50 years. We haven't left LEO in 50 years. Surely we would need to build a colony on the Moon first, as a trial for building a colony somewhere that's three orders of magnitude farther away. We are nowhere close to doing this.

ravi-delia 5y ago
I absolutely agree that we won't have a colony on Mars by 2050, but I think you vastly overestimate the difficulty of just traveling to Mars if you're judging based on the Moon. Political will? Perhaps, but I think the best way to think of it is that it was possible to go to the Moon on technology from 50 years ago. Modern rockets are far, far better.
abruzzi 5y ago
Yeah, this one was hard to buy, unless there are a lot of billionaires that want to live in houses the size of a college dorm room. The cost to get to mars, and to live on Mars seems to me to be absolutely prohibitive at this point. A number of the other observations also seemed to be a stretch. I'm not sure AI will have the level of impact he expects in less than 30 years. the death of the local store and getting any product delivered in an hour or less seems way too optimistic when you consider all the small rural towns in the US that can't even get decent broadband today.
- DennisP 5y ago
  "At this point" sure, but it's not happening at all unless SpaceX succeeds with Starship at scale, which means fully, rapidly reusable and building at least a hundred of them per year, which gets launch costs to LEO down to about $50/kg. Starting with that, SpaceX would send at least a hundred Starships to Mars with every launch window, each able to carry over a hundred tons of cargo. Price per passenger depends on how many you can safely pack in and maybe Musk is being overoptimistic on that, but he's shooting for half a million dollars.

petermcneeley 5y ago

#8 and #18 conflict unless the author is not "rich"

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

huitzitziltzin 5y ago

After arguing (correctly, IMO) that futurists make ridiculous predictions, he predicts a colony on Mars? Why? To what end? What would it do and who would care? Who would want to travel months through space one way just to do… what will anyone be able to do on Mars anyway? I can see some tourism of a particularly extreme sort but the idea of a Mars colony strikes me as totally insane. Also predicting that most education will be online after everyone spent a year and a half discovering how terrible both Zoom school and Zoom university are is a bold (and likely wrong) prediction. I buy that the future is female given current trends, but basically the whole list of predictions in the second half of the article is exactly the mistake he explains futurists make in the first half!

mhio 5y ago
There's a large, very well funded company building the path for Mars (and back). So there's 5000 or so SpaceX candidates already who have bought into the idea. I'd guess NASA would have a few people willing as well. To be honest I think it will likely happen before 2050, but it also might also come and go before then as well. Getting to self sufficiency is a very, very long shot, and up until then something has to foot the bill which is where the endeavour is most likely to fall over. In any case, we get to watch some cool looking hardware go up in the mean time - https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=54984.msg2309043#msg2309043 https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=54984.msg2...
tkgally 5y ago
> predicting that most education will be online after everyone spent a year and a half discovering how terrible both Zoom school and Zoom university are is a bold (and likely wrong) prediction. You’re probably right about Zoom school—it has sounded pretty terrible to me, too, especially for younger children—but I think the jury is still out on Zoom university. I teach at a university in Japan where most of the teaching has been conducted online since April of last year, and we’re now debating what to do next year if infections stay low. (After a frightening spike in August, they are very low in Japan now.) When faculty in my department were asked their teaching preference for the next academic year, about a third said they want to return to in-person only, a third want to teach a combination of in-person and online, and a third—including me—want to keep teaching online only. When I’ve discussed the issue with undergraduates in my classes this year, about half have said they prefer to stay online for many or most of their classes. However, they do strongly prefer to socialize with other students in person. The reasons many teachers and students prefer online classes range from the mundane—such as avoiding long commutes on crowded trains—to the perception that, for some types of classes, online learning can actually be more effective than classroom teaching. For me, the game-changer for online classes has been the ability of students to take part in classes regardless of where they are. Most international students have been unable to enter Japan since April 2020, but, at my university at least, they have been able to continue their studies online. After I taught a graduate seminar last year in which more than half the students were in other countries—Indonesia, Thailand, China—and all were able to participate in the discussions on an equal basis, I came to think that it will be hard for in-person-only universities to remain competitive in the future.

mempko 5y ago

Not a single mention about the climate crisis and sixth mass extinction. Simply pure utopian thought.

djit 5y ago

Thank you for the laughs. The way some people make a living out of utter BS never fails to amaze me.

pphysch 5y ago
Indeed. What a ridiculous article written by someone who hasn't intellectually stepped out of their SV comfort zone.

GDC7 5y ago

I think they know too. But techno-utopianism is a form of art in Silicon Valley. Your average SV techbro feels superior to regular people who enjoy other forms of art such as music or sports or poetry or even film making. Label those activities as a "waste of time" but they end up completely falling for the BS performance art that scum like Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes put up. And they elevate them too! Where normal people see art in an Hendrix solo or an Eminem verse they see it in the obnoxious self-promoting BS spewed by such characters. Of course the window dressing for all the above is nonesense marketing terms such as : "showing passion" or "produce a strong narrative" or even "tell your story to the world"

herlitzj 5y ago

Is it just me or does the future he paints sound absolutely abysmal? It's effectively a dictorship where your entire life is bouncing from one tulip mania to another holed up in your apartment talking to an AI and lost in a world of garbage content from Neflix 2.0 while you await your burrito delivery and dream of hitting it big on <insert_name> Coin so you can move to Mars and watch the dust blow around. Kill me now :(

akiselev 5y ago
> Is it just me or does the future he paints sound absolutely abysmal? That's how I know it's an realistic and mostly unbiased prediction that's relatively accurate: it looks kinda like today, except more of it. Barring a black swan event that drastically changes our system of values and incentives, that's probably how it's going to play out. We just had a black swan play out and... it's all the same, just six feet more of it. Most social revolutions either up reshuffling the deck or in disaster. The low hanging fruit in most technological fields has been picked and "priced in" during decades past. Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- jdkee 5y ago
  If you are referring to the pandemic, that is by definition not a black swan event as it was expected to occur at some point.
  - snidane 5y ago
    The disease is not a black swan. The global reaction to it certainly is.

cl42 5y ago

I really dislike forecasting with vague statements that are almost certainly going to be correct. Case in point: "Anti-aging technology will extend the health-spans of the rich." There are myriad ways in which this statement will be true and yet it's completely useless today. As long as there is any tech (biotech, medicine, plastic surgery, etc.) that extends people's lives by even a little bit, or improves their QOL into a slightly older age, then this is true. It's unactionable, unclear, etc. I'm constantly looking for good, verifiable, and actionable forecasts for this stuff, if anyone has them. And if you are interested in doing such a thing, please reach out. :)

typest 5y ago

> 2050, that super futuristic year, is only 29 years out, so it is exactly the same as predicting what the world would look like today back in 1992 The problem with this analysis is that the rate of change of the world is accelerating; the world is changing faster now than it was in 1992. Fundamentally, this is driven by the fact that all the changes from the past cause further changes, in an exponential process. Thus a straightforward linear estimate of the future will underestimate how much things will change in the future.

CuriouslyC 5y ago
Things have been accelerating in a sigmoidal manner, which looks exponential in the early curve, but then plateaus as it approaches a limit. It's hard to say how far along we in the curve now, but given that we're bumping up against the limits of silicon semiconductors now, I'd say perhaps farther than you might expect.
kibwen 5y ago
> The problem with this analysis is that the rate of change of the world is accelerating; the world is changing faster now than it was in 1992. Fundamentally, this is driven by the fact that all the changes from the past cause further changes, in an exponential process Any accelerating trend can't be sustained indefinitely. We know that the accelerating rate of progress is because of computers (which reduce the feedback loops on various processes which then help make better computers, and so on). When we reach a point where computers stop getting better, the rate of progress will stabilize. We've already observed stagnant clock speeds for over a decade. There are still worthy investments to be made, like in miniaturization, affordability, and heterogeneity, but without a breakthrough as monumental as the transistor we have no reason to assume that acceleration will continue.

typest 5y ago

The author dismisses futurists’ predictions as ludicrous, without providing any evidence to the contrary. Robin Hanson has some crazy claims, but he thinks things through and is extremely willing to bet on what he believes in. Just because something seems crazy, does not mean it is wrong.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

> If you want to predict the future accurately, you should be an incrementalist and accept that human nature doesn’t change along most axes. Meaning that the future will look a lot like the past. If Cicero were transported from ancient Rome to our time he would easily understand most things about our society. This is, I think the heart of the issue. Human nature is pretty constant. We can change our environment or trade offs (for example at one time if you wanted to avoid pregnancy, the trade off was don’t have sex, now it is take a pill, hence the leveling out of our population).

flerovium 5y ago

> 2050, that super futuristic year, is only 29 years out, so it is exactly the same as predicting what the world would look like today back in 1992 What about the 29 years between 1912 and 1941? The pace of recent history is not a good indicator of future change.

Alan_Dillman 5y ago
Or just between 1992 and 1963. Heck, I only know the 70s onward, and remember the mid 70s only in child's eye, me centric ways. I remember my aunts being upset about Elvis Presley dying, but I wasn't quite sure what the fuss was, and that was 77; I was 5. Someone died, but how did they fit into my world? Oh, that guy that sings? But we can still listen to him? Then what is the big deal? My wonderful Usbourne Books of the Future were still promising me personal spacecraft and tours of Saturn's rings as late as 1980. The robots would take care of the garden back home. On the space station. A whole way of looking at the future came unravelled in just the 12 years between then and our prognosticator's birth. By 1992, everyone was dreaming of cyberpunk, of uploading our minds, and fiction had the rich living in LEO. The stars had stretched out of reach. Our cynical futurist, age 33, has not meaningfully experienced social change with an adult perspective over 29 years. Every 30 year period ever has been a mad scramble of change. I am sure that was true between 1000 and 1030 even. Big shit was happening. Like my 1972-1980 world view, his 1992-2000 world was likely pretty personal, and coloured by a narrow range of life experiences. So I am skeptical he has the breadth of experience needed to extend 29 into the future.

cuzBchain 5y ago

Writers write to captivate an indifferent audience not educate one, film at 11. Maybe some of the ideas would come to fruition faster if spinning in semantic circles for coin were set aside for the engineering work necessary.

jcoq 5y ago

It's difficult for me to see how AI will replace massive numbers of programmers, rather than expand their productivity and/or change the nature of their work. Business logic is about getting very tiny details and edge cases correct: "if a, b and c but not d and e, unless of course f and g"... I don't see how that code can be created by an AI in a way that doesn't create even more work for someone fixing bugs. We have barely scratched the surface of what tech can offer in most brick and mortar industries because this business logic is so incredibly difficult to automate. It seems unfeasible that a magic AI will come along and do what humans cannot do alone. I think we'll see programming evolve and software engineers will probably be among the first workers who learn to work in truly collaborative ways with AI.

klyrs 5y ago

I predict that futurists will have their heads in the clouds in 2121. What's new?

stubish 5y ago

I can't see AI putting artists out of business. Artists are and will remain much more cost effective than the expense of training machines, because most of them work for peanuts or free. The most we will see is artists using AI as a medium ('Show me a dog with an apple on its head. Now make it greener with more neanderthal.').