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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fuindordm" data-source="post: 6642036" data-attributes="member: 5435">I think the future will arrive much more slowly than Yaarel predicts, for several reasons:1. We're reaching the limits of material science to supply infrastructure for supercomputers. R&D is underway of course, and so far Moore's Law has been upheld, but I think we will soon reach the point where the next generation of CPUs cannot be build with the current generation of factories; we will need an entirely new supply chain and manufacturing sector.2. The difficulty of scientific problems grows exponentially along with the power of computing resources.  Bioinformatics is making great strides, but after 20 years it is still very very far from being able to determine the effect of a single gene change on an organism, let alone draw a one-to-one, deterministic relationship between a given genome and the macro-organism.  Long gone are the days when a brilliant physicist could change our paradigm from a patent office; now we need consortiums of hundreds or thousands of physicists to make progress. 3. People have been predicting that strong AI is just around the corner for the past 40 years, and we're no closer than we were before. Learning and perception are major factors, not just Moore's Law, and it's easy to imagine that there are other hard limits on intelligence that we haven't discovered yet.4. Even if we do have a strong AI in 2030, with access to all public data, that doesn't mean it can design an even stronger AI. The progress of research is still limited by our ability to experiment in the physical world (see point 1 above) and strong AIs are equally bound by those limits.So I think we have at least a full century ahead of us where computers, physics, and biology remain comprehensible to the people of today. In that time frame I can see:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">bioinformatics reaching the point where we can "tune" human beings for certain traits, but not design a macro-organism from scratch; </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">regenerative medicine and fully personalized medicine (where we can choose a drug based on your particular genome that will have the best effect with the least important side effect)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">pseudo-AIs that are essentially very powerful expert systems that pass the Turing test within their area of expertise, but need intensive training and tuning in controlled environments to reach that point (e.g. the emergency medical hologram from Voyager)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">new technologies that solve the clean energy problem on Earth and solve the fuel problem for interplanetary space travel.</li> </ul>To take a few examples; each of these is easily another 20-30 years away, if not more.  Cybernetics, eugenics, regeneration, clean energy, interplanetary travel (in weeks to months), and pseudo-AI are all within reach this century. Designer organisms, free energy, immortality, interstellar travel, and strong AI are not, in my opinion, and even if we get strong AI it won't lower the material barriers to progress.So the idea of aliens bringing the tech for space travel is a very good one to keep the future recognizable but still exciting.And our internet world is perfectly comprehensible to a person from even the early 1900's -- "In the future, electric technology will allow every person to carry the knowledge of a public library with them, anywhere they go!"  They might not understand how that tech could work, but they could grasp the social consequences of what that tech can do.</blockquote>

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