4 ms·
These trends, projected far into the future, evoke points of conversation along the lines of "The Singularity" which as been a recent hot topic here on HN. You
by Femur 18y ago
These trends, projected far into the future, evoke points of conversation along the lines of "The Singularity" which as been a recent hot topic here on HN.
You touch on a great notion that for some trends, projection makes relative sense (especially in IT). Trends like population seem a little less sound to me; these could be easily interrupted by so many destructive factors (disease, politics, genocides...) that it seems somewhat senseless to plot.
I could be wrong though, and the population trends could be more stable than anything.
- russell 18y agoPredictions of population growth have confounded nearly everyone back to Malthus. The interesting trend is that the middle class seem to reproduce at a rate too low to sustain the population. Japan and Italy below the rate to sustain their populations. By 2100 the global population will probably be heading downward from a peak a few decades earlier. No one really wants to throw a global cataclysm into the stew: nuclear war, pandemic, Yellowstone eruption, asteroid strike. I remember reading predictions from a hundred years ago. (No, I'm not that old.) It missed all the mini-singularities, even the ones that had been already invented, like the automobile and the telephone.