2020 will have more social media experts on hacker news to down vote me.
Ray Kurzweil predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020
21–30 of 44 posts
Re: Ray Kurzweil predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020
#22I'd really hate to belong to last mortal human generation.
Re: Ray Kurzweil predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020
#23I'd really hate to belong to last mortal human generation.
At least your children would remember you...
Re: Ray Kurzweil predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
2000 like 2010? You don’t really believe that, right?
Well, what's the difference between the average human lifespan in 2000 and the average human lifespan in 2010? The Internet is very different than it was (though more in form than in function), various industries have risen or fallen, and so on, and - probably what the parent post was talking about - that all fits very tidily into the normal pattern of human history. No-one can meaningfully predict what technologies…
The average human lifespan in the United States has been increasing linearly by about 2 months per year since 1980. In 1990 average life expectancy was 75.5 in 2000 it was 77 and 2010 will be 78.5 http://www94.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+unite...
Re: Ray Kurzweil predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020
#25Predictions of the future are always,necessarily, extrapolations of the present. Back in the 1930's, when airplanes and cars were the hot techonology of the day, it was obvious to imagine a future with flying cars. Now, we're still going through the information revolution (at least in some countries) and it's easy to imagine a future with more pervasive computational technologies. But I wonder what the next paradigm…
We could have had that energy revolution decades ago, but we threw it away. :) Hopefully there will be no such mistake made with solar, et al.
Are you referring to nuclear power? We didn't throw it away. Indeed, the very question of waste which can't be simply thrown away has hampered widespread nuclear plant deployment.
Nuclear is off the table until we figure out what to do with the waste.
Re: Ray Kurzweil predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
2000 like 2010? You don’t really believe that, right?
And what's significantly different? We are still stuck with the x86 architecture. All operating systems are just new versions of the same products. Sure, the web got rounded corners, dial-up is completely gone, and the dot-com bubble burst, but computing has not changed a whole lot. The changes of the last decade have been mostly bug fixes. Not that this is a bad thing.
Not decided on whether change is accelerating, but a very significant improvement in my own life is the market availability of an automatic vacuum cleaner (i.e. Roomba). Much like the automatic dishwashers and clothes washers of yore, this is a huge time-saver. God, I hate vacuuming...
Re: Ray Kurzweil predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia. The best compendium of knowledge in the history of mankind. Google. From a lab project to revolutionize finding information. Youtube. It's now possible to share video with everyone around the world lacking information. iPhone. Real, useful smartphones are finally here. And that's just what I thought of off the top of my head, in a minute, from the field I work in. There are thousands of examples everywhere…
Incidentally: * Wikipedia: founded in 2000 using wiki technology developed in the mid-1990s. * Google: founded in 1996, domain registered in 1997, incorporated in 1998.
I think this is a little disingenuous. If 2020 comes and we're all using high-resolution immersion goggles to do computing, will you point at the Virtual Boy and say it's not new because they did it in the '90s?
Google and Wikipedia circa 1998 is a lot different than Google and Wikipedia circa 2010. Think high-resolution searchable 3D maps of more or less the whole world, single point of reference for the majority of human knowledge you would ever think to look up different.
Re: Ray Kurzweil predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020
#28I'd really hate to belong to last mortal human generation.
Depends what happens after death.
Re: Ray Kurzweil predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
People get used to things extremely rapidly. A lot of the stuff we use daily would seem almost magical to some people living today, not to mention 2-3 generations back. You can search billions and billions of documents for free in less than a second, and my parents had to buy non-scientific calculators for insane prices. Supercomputers from not so long ago probably couldn't play 1080p video decently. Cellphones went…
What you mention doesn't apply to 10 years ago. Maybe 20-50 years ago.
10 years ago there was no iPod. Even mp3 was not that popular. It was when Napster started.
10 years ago there was NO way you could have video on the internet. Real streaming was a joke.
10 years ago, people were still using Altavista and getting internet access through AOL CDs.
10 years ago, Yahoo! Mail offered 2MB of space.
10 years ago, there was no genome sequencing complete.
10 years ago, cell phones were small, but they couldn't do much besides talking and texting. Remember how they looked like? Motorola's Startac was pretty modern, and it didn't have a LCD screen. Color displays were a dream.
Re: Ray Kurzweil predicts how technology will change humanity by 2020
#30The 1990->2000 change seemed more impressive than 2000->2010 because we'd come to expect rapid change after the '90s. So nothing that has happened in the past 10 years was especially surprising in the way the Internet would be from a 1986 perspective. (When I first learned about the internet, as a 6-year-old in '89, I never thought I'd actually be able to use it until college, which seemed ridiculously far away.)
I think we're accelerating on a linear graph, but decelerating on a log graph, due to a lack of investment in science and technology compared to previous eras, and also due to the social and economic catastrophes that were seeded in the '80s and came to roost in this decade.
The 2000s was a "weak" decade, but still not a bad one, all considered. This is similar the 1930s were better than most of the 19th century, but seem awful by comparison to now (or even the '50s). Technological progress has finally reached a point where even society's "bad" decades (e.g. 2000s) are good.