The Future Is Pretty Cool

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Mon Apr 21, 2014 8:58 pm

I've been toying around with near-future fiction lately, and I wanted to hear what the Den thinks about the future. Note: Although fiction is what led to my writing up this thread, the idea is to talk about actual future technologies or social trends that you expect will really happen somewhere in the time between now and 2050 or so. Of course, since at the far end of that range our predictions are entering into the "wild guess" territory, it's basically the same as pure science fiction in a lot of ways.

Here's a couple of things I've come across that seem cool:

-Cyborg prosthetics. We already have a cyborg arm that's approaching human utility. It seems reasonable to me that within even just ten years we might get superstrength robo arms, although I doubt they'll actually become a thing that people just have for a decade or two after that.

-3D printing. A recent-ish convention has informed that 3D printers capable of making models, figurines, etc. etc. are already a thing that exists. The cheapest (and least reliable) of them already cost under a thousand dollars. I'm curious if anyone can ballpark estimate when 3D printing 3D printers will be a thing.

-Household drone swarms. This is another case where we already have the first glimpse of this: Roombas are a thing. Most estimates agree that by 2035 we'll have lots of tiny robots tidying up after us, cooking our meals, and basically being a robot butler, except there'll be like twenty specialized bots instead of a single humanoid one. On the same subject: 2035 is also when the DoD expects the first fully autonomous robot soldiers to be deployed.

-Artificial Intelligence is similar. The Massachusettes Institute of Technology taught a computer how to read Civilization manuals. A lot of people have set 2050 as the date when AIs on par with human intelligence will emerge.

-Wearable technology. Most specifically, things like Google Glass. I actually don't know if this one even counts as future tech. Is there any major hurdle between Google Glass and the sci-fi idea of a HUD that you can wear? I think the only thing missing here might be for the price to come down.

-We don't seem to be doing much with space these days, but Kerbal Space Program makes me hope we'll look into setting up moon bases. I'm not sure what we'd do with them, but man, wouldn't it be cool?

...You Lost Me · Post by **...You Lost Me** » Mon Apr 21, 2014 9:21 pm

The 3D printer RepRap is (almost) capable of building another 3D printer, since basically every part is made from plastic. Problem is you can't 3D-print the computer chip, and I think that's a long ways off.

Also:

Microfluidic devices (basically customized one-shot tests for the biomedical field) will be on the rise with more cost-efficient 3D printing. In the far future, you should be able to go to your doctor's office and have them 3D-print a device to test for your cancer/flu/allergies/etc.
Computers that act human (androids!). They're still bad, but I heard an NPR talk that showcased an awesome puppet.

K · Post by K » Tue Apr 22, 2014 6:41 am

3-D printed human organs are a thing that we have now. Sure, we just have the easy ones, but I expect great things by 2035. The future of human longevity is looking pretty bright.

According to Krugman, in 2030 all of the wealthy will be those who inherited wealth. Definitely a distopia worthy of sci-fi.

Since we can currently pull shitty images out of people's heads with giant brainscan machines, I really want to see what we can do with a few decades of work. The idea that we'll probably end up doing Shadowrun's Matrix without computers in our head is pretty exciting.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Tue Apr 22, 2014 7:01 am

Polymers are nuts. My sister's in grad school for polymer science, and as an undergrad she was helping do stuff like "make heat-blocking camouflage facepaint so soldiers won't get facial burns from the heatwash of IEDs and explosions in general." There's polymers that behave like floppy rubber or glass, depending on the temperature they're cooked and cooled at. And then you get into the stuff you could embed in them to help fiddle with the properties, or two different polymers together, and it gets really crazy.

Last April, President Obama started a brainmap project--like the human genome project--with the idea of actually trying to precisely understand how the brain does what it does and how those parts interact. Considering the Human Genome Project has earned back like $100 for every $1 spent on it thanks to the possibilities it opened up, this sort of investment in research is going to make a mark on the future.

Drolyt · Post by **Drolyt** » Tue Apr 22, 2014 9:53 pm

Chamomile wrote: I'm curious if anyone can ballpark estimate when 3D printing 3D printers will be a thing.

They are working on it. Not sure how close they are, but it can already make some of its own components.

A lot of people have set 2050 as the date when AIs on par with human intelligence will emerge.

Take anything like that with a grain of salt, people were saying things like that in the 70s and it basically turned out like flying cars. Honestly it isn't clear that we are even that much closer, huge advances in fields such as machine learning have awesome real world application but haven't proven useful for creating general intelligence, at least not yet. It's certainly possible we'll have this by 2050, perhaps much sooner, but my point is that any prediction about it comes directly out of someone's ass rather than from any understanding of computer science.

Anyways here's some cool technology I've read about:
-Graphene nanofiltration. Basically a really really thin water filter, this will allow filtering water at a much lower price (don't need such an expensive pump), potentially bringing clean water to billions of people. Maybe not as cool as some other things, but arguably much more important.
-Programmable tattoo. I believe this started as an April Fools joke, but I actually want one. The idea is you have some sort of implant in your skin and then you can change your tattoo at will.
-Holodeck. We've already got some cool VR tech (omindirectional treadmills, 3d googles + surround sound headset, various wiimote-like devices) and I'm really excited to see where it goes in the next few years.

rampaging-poet · Post by **rampaging-poet** » Wed Apr 23, 2014 12:12 am

I often read PhysNews, which is like big RSS feed for several sources of physics-related news. Potentially awesome things are announced basically very day. These are just a few things I remember from the site.

Researchers have created transparent solar panels that can be used in place of glass windows. They're optimized to produce electricity from a narrow wavelength band and let everything else through.

Femtosecond X-ray pulses were used to measure the structure of a material as it transitioned from normal conductivity to superconductivity. The findings provide useful information about what doesn't break superconductivity at high temperature. This will hopefully make it easier to understand superconductivity in general and engineer high-temperature superconductors.

Metamaterial lenses are neat. By fine-tuning the surface of a transparent material, it's possible to get optical effects completely different from what you'd expect from the len's shape alone. One group claims to have created a broad-spectrum version that could be used for things like stealth aircraft - a camera could focus light without a spherical lens distorting the surface of its container.

Molybdenum Dioxide might replace silicon in low-energy computing. It's apparently possible to make thinner transistors out of it than out of silicon, reducing the power requirements. It's also amenable to traditional techniques for manufacturing computer chips, so if it continues to perform well in the lab it's only a matter of time before real commercial products are made from it.

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Wed Apr 23, 2014 6:11 am

I don't really think the fact that a 3D printer that can print itself is that interesting. Great, you made an academic point about bootstrapping, big fucking deal. Not really worth the sacrifices you needed to make for it.

I've been hearing about microfluidics ever since I entered graduate school five years ago. I've since left, and they're still vaporware.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Wed Apr 23, 2014 6:45 am

Surgo wrote:I don't really think the fact that a 3D printer that can print itself is that interesting. Great, you made an academic point about bootstrapping, big fucking deal. Not really worth the sacrifices you needed to make for it.

This. Unless the Printer is also capable of hunting down and refilling it's own supplies, all you have done is push the required outside intervention step one step backward. You are still infinitely far away from nanobots that grey goo the world.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Wed Apr 23, 2014 8:28 am

The raw materials for a 3D printer are more fungible than the 3D printer itself. Of course you should care about whether or not you have to go out and buy an appliance or that appliance's weight in materials. That makes a world of difference to both consumers and manufacturers, for obvious reason.

momothefiddler · Post by **momothefiddler** » Wed Apr 23, 2014 8:36 am

Kaelik wrote:You are still infinitely far away from nanobots that grey goo the world.

You say this like it's a bad thing.

I think the intended result of a printer that can print itself as well as other things is a decentralization of manufacturing, which supposedly is supposed to launch us into a star-trek-replicator-style post-scarcity era. Which sounds nice, and there was that one dude who apparently designed and printed a prosthetic for his kid with a level functionality that he wouldn't have been able to afford otherwise, but it's still not all that exciting.

The other claim that I've seen is that if you have your own manufacturing facility in your home, all you need is raw materials and information, which allows you to ignore those pesky patents and monopolies and just open-source your hardware and down with the man, man.
Which would intrigue me if it weren't for the fact that information is already plenty controlled, and we have clear legal ideas of ownership thereof and you're just gonna have to buy a license to print a certain number of certain types of legos and then your blueprint will delete itself, just like buying a subscription to Adobe... anything, I think, by now.

When it runs on solar power and constructs edible food from arbitrary organic materials, then I'll be excited.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Wed Apr 23, 2014 9:40 am

momothefiddler wrote:Which would intrigue me if it weren't for the fact that information is already plenty controlled, and we have clear legal ideas of ownership thereof and you're just gonna have to buy a license to print a certain number of certain types of legos and then your blueprint will delete itself, just like buying a subscription to Adobe... anything, I think, by now.

I do vaguely recall the battle against internet piracy going something like that. </sarcasm>

Effective, efficient, and affordable 3D printers (three big if's) really would kick manufacturing in the balls in the same way piracy has kicked entertainment in the balls. That has upsides and downsides, but it does put a cap on how much you can abuse IP laws before people ignore them and steal your shit. Which is inarguably good when that cap is above the cost of production but below what prices would be with the IP laws in full practical effect.

Unfortunately, kicking manufacturing (especially the sorts of manufacturing that 3D printers could feasibly do) in the balls probably wouldn't amount to much - the monopoly privilege of owning an appliance patent just isn't as impressive as the monopoly privilege of owning a pop star's soul. And I guess it is is always possible the entertainment industry will succeed in killing the internet through pseudo-scarcity (data limits) or turning it into cable (subscriptions to specific content providers), in which case open source everything gets killed dead.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Wed Apr 23, 2014 10:01 am

2050: I'll be 75, if I make it. I don't really expect whatever's left of government to be able to manage a pension, and nor does anyone in our current government. No one really expects the current monetary system to survive that long either, though no one knows what the fuck that means. Anyway.

PEAK FUCKING OIL
I know regular oil peaked already and they just went to shale oil, and there's also some other really dirty shit to come, but they're all long gone by 2050. Your vehicles will be crazy-expensive short-range electric pedal-cars or they will run on coal gasification (a carbon-monoxide burning engine, popular in the WWII years here).

Coal gasification in modern cities is a pollution nightmare. And it's your future, for any city without total access to electrified public transit.

And you should know it's not going to be nice. The prices will spike and crash and spike and then the tankers will simply stop turning up. And then you learn just how incredibly heavily the world relies on not just cheap oil, but oil at any price. There's also peak uranium and peak all sorts of rare earth metals coming up. Peak phosphorus will be interesting for farm outputs. Speaking of which.

FUCKING CLIMATE CHANGE
Look, I know people are sort of super-busy not giving a shit, but there's going to be over eight billion people to feed by 2050 and we're going to be producing perhaps 5% less food than we can today, erratically because of increased droughts and floods in the breadbaskets of the world.

You know how long governments last when the shops run out of bread? Three days is conventional wisdom. It's cute that the 3D printers will be mass-producing heavy machine-guns in people's garages by then, not to mention internet polymer recipes that produce semtex from household cleaners and a microwave. Good luck with the TPMs.

The "hundred year floods" should be pushing toward every ten years by then. I mean, unless people actually fucking do something. Which history shows they will not do. Fucking history. Ironically, while the english speaking world has it's head firmly up it's ass (because we own the oil supply, so digdigdigdig) China is building a pretty incredible number of solar power plants well away from any risks to socialise the cost, and the wealthy northern european nations are going all "passivhaus" and won't actually need external power for the most part, at least for the rich.

THE RISE OF EXTREMISM
Our governments are losing respect. The internet is part of that, the old lies aren't working as well, it's sort of the movable-type printing press all over again. Low voter turnouts except for the crazy people are actually a super-bad thing which should worry more people than it does. Anyhoo, what people pick when they lose respect for democracy and a free press and shit is always some totalitarian fuck that blames minorities and small foreign nations with limited military budgets for everything that is wrong, and many things that aren't even true. And people just go along with that every single time, in part because the people who don't just get fucking shot.

Like, the French Revolution gave us the principles of the modern western world, liberty and equality and property. But it also gave us Napoleon Bonaparte. The end of the German, Russian, and Chinese empires gave us Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. It's a thing. Change is surprisingly harsh. And now we all have nuclear weapons.

NUCLEAR FUCKING WEAPONS
That's a line from a Dennis Leary song. Where he pithily notes the typical US citizen's response to foreign issues appearing on the news is to threaten global annihilation. Y'all weren't that far off having Sarah Palin as president. In charge of those. At will. There's less than there used to be, but it's still enough to kill all life on earth several times over, just sitting there, waiting for a couple guys to have a bad day and turn a couple keys.

But hey, enjoy your iPad7S nano when the time comes. It will be incrementally better than the iPad7 nano, and you will send ludicrous amounts of capital to China for it. Where they are building a future which can actually exist in the future.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Wed Apr 23, 2014 1:18 pm

China is actually also going strong in research towards Thorium Reactors specifically because of peak uranium.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Wed Apr 23, 2014 2:56 pm

DSMatticus wrote:
momothefiddler wrote:Which would intrigue me if it weren't for the fact that information is already plenty controlled, and we have clear legal ideas of ownership thereof and you're just gonna have to buy a license to print a certain number of certain types of legos and then your blueprint will delete itself, just like buying a subscription to Adobe... anything, I think, by now.
I do vaguely recall the battle against internet piracy going something like that. </sarcasm>

Effective, efficient, and affordable 3D printers (three big if's) really would kick manufacturing in the balls in the same way piracy has kicked entertainment in the balls. That has upsides and downsides, but it does put a cap on how much you can abuse IP laws before people ignore them and steal your shit. Which is inarguably good when that cap is above the cost of production but below what prices would be with the IP laws in full practical effect.

Unfortunately, kicking manufacturing (especially the sorts of manufacturing that 3D printers could feasibly do) in the balls probably wouldn't amount to much - the monopoly privilege of owning an appliance patent just isn't as impressive as the monopoly privilege of owning a pop star's soul. And I guess it is is always possible the entertainment industry will succeed in killing the internet through pseudo-scarcity (data limits) or turning it into cable (subscriptions to specific content providers), in which case open source everything gets killed dead.

It's going to be a long goddamn time, if ever, before 3D printing has a lower unit cost than mass manufacturing techniques. I'm also rather dubious home ones are ever going to be truly self-replicating even when fed with materials. Microchips are tiny and complicated and not made of plastic. Being able to replicate the mechanical bits is cute and all, but it's not really going to be more than a party trick.

What it's really going to do, and has been doing already, is making it easier to make and get things which don't have enough demand to justify the initial cost of setting up an assembly line.

As for climate and such, that actually seems to be looking up. Electric cars are improving, natural gas fracking turns out to be pretty environmentally sound, solar panel prices are falling.

momothefiddler · Post by **momothefiddler** » Wed Apr 23, 2014 5:41 pm

DSMatticus wrote:I do vaguely recall the battle against internet piracy going something like that. </sarcasm>

Yeah, I may have exaggerated. But it's not like they never make any advances at all. Basically I'm expecting

DSMatticus wrote:And I guess it is is always possible the entertainment industry will succeed in killing the internet through pseudo-scarcity (data limits) or turning it into cable (subscriptions to specific content providers), in which case open source everything gets killed dead.

...especially once the people who produce physical objects (of whom there are many) add their force to that of the people who produce electronic information. And once someone gets it in their head that anything that could print a burger could print (horrors) weed, well....

...You Lost Me · Post by **...You Lost Me** » Wed Apr 23, 2014 5:42 pm

Surgo wrote:I've been hearing about microfluidics ever since I entered graduate school five years ago. I've since left, and they're still vaporware.

That's wrong. Microfluidics has actually done things in the last five years. Nothing news-worthy, but plenty of cool and useful stuff. And considering the average major university has just one microfluidics lab, slow progress isn't exactly abnormal.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Wed Apr 23, 2014 7:32 pm

Electric Cars are actually pretty bad for the environment.
The energy needed to build one electric car with still empty battery is roughly equal to building a Hummer H1 and giving it enough fuel to drive once across america or something like that i think if i remember correctly.

And that is just the production.
Then we get to the fact that they still need energy.
Yes, wind, water, solar is there, but the main source of power is still fossil fuel and nuclear power, so indirectly they are still not good for the environment. And actually turning fossil fuel into electricity to power cars with is less efficient and thus more wastefull and as such worse for the environment than using it straight up as fuel for a normal car.

The only thing the electric cars do better than normal ones is emitting less carbon dioxides and the such into the environment themselves. Still the production and support infrastructure doing that though.

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Wed Apr 23, 2014 7:49 pm

It does depend on where you live. In California, they reach 80 MPG equivalent, while in Colorado they only reach mid 30s.

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Thu Apr 24, 2014 1:22 am

...You Lost Me wrote:
Surgo wrote:I've been hearing about microfluidics ever since I entered graduate school five years ago. I've since left, and they're still vaporware.
That's wrong. Microfluidics has actually done things in the last five years. Nothing news-worthy, but plenty of cool and useful stuff. And considering the average major university has just one microfluidics lab, slow progress isn't exactly abnormal.

I suppose I was a little harsh with the vaporware designation. What I meant to say was that this hype train needs to remain in the station for a while.

Stahlseele wrote:And actually turning fossil fuel into electricity to power cars with is less efficient and thus more wastefull and as such worse for the environment than using it straight up as fuel for a normal car.

This is only true for coal, and only then if you get low MPG in your electric car. (edit: MPG equivalent, duh.)

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Thu Apr 24, 2014 4:52 am

Stahlseele wrote:Electric Cars are actually pretty bad for the environment.
The energy needed to build one electric car with still empty battery is roughly equal to building a Hummer H1 and giving it enough fuel to drive once across america or something like that i think if i remember correctly.

You've read that somewhere, and it's just wrong, and you're stupid to believe it. Real costs are strongly linked to energy inputs in materials production and final manufacture. The electrics use as much power to design, gather materials, and make into a manufacturing plant and series of cars as it costs you to buy them. They are cheaper than most Hummers.

Further, while the embedded energy in motor cars is indeed very large, it's still massively smaller than the energy in their lifetime use of fuel. Roughly 8% of a typical car's lifetime CO2 production comes from it's raw materials (6%) and assembly costs (2%). 92% is fuel and it's production.

And that is just the production.

Making the steel, mostly, and as nothing else is cheaper, nothing else uses less net energy.

Then we get to the fact that they still need energy.
Yes, wind, water, solar is there, but the main source of power is still fossil fuel and nuclear power, so indirectly they are still not good for the environment. And actually turning fossil fuel into electricity to power cars with is less efficient and thus more wastefull and as such worse for the environment than using it straight up as fuel for a normal car.

No it fucking isn't. Again, you've been reading shit and are stupid to believe it. Does anyone plug a fucking petrol motor into a generator and make electricity that way? No? Really? Never? Well, actually, they do, with really big diesels in isolated places and during peak loads in certain under supplied regions, and it's fucking horribly expensive. Because it wastes much more energy.

Modern high efficiency diesel engines are still at best 40% efficient. Petrol lucky to make 30%. Electric generation at coal plants is over 60% efficient, and gas plants all well over 80% now. Line loss and conversion drops that by anything up to 40% in the most remote of places (.6 * .6 = .36) to still around 40% efficient, even on 100% coal electric in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere. Wost case.

But then they have regenerative brakes, and on standard city runs they reuse that same power three times. 3 * 0.4 = 1.2 which means in classical measures of total power output over fuel use they are 120% efficient. Vs 30% for most cars, or 20% if you're lucky for the fucking piece of shit cock microscope known as the Hummer. So no. You're wrong.

The only thing the electric cars do better than normal ones is emitting less carbon dioxides and the such into the environment themselves. Still the production and support infrastructure doing that though.

No, you are just fucking retarded from listening to denialist propaganda. What petrol cars are is many thousands of dollars cheaper on day one with much longer range and much faster refuelling: those are real and unsolvable issues. That will always be true. Over their life electrics are massively cheaper and use around 30% of the lifetime CO2 outputs (even considering battery replacement) in the worst possible case.

Where I live, electricity is 100% renewable. There is only hydro and wind here, and we spill a bunch of it because there's not enough demand. The CO2 costs of it is not exactly zero, but it is 0.000 so who gives a fuck. Electric cars built and run here would have 6% of the lifetime CO2 output of typical modern sedans.

And they're still useless compared to electric trains. OMG, electric trains. Or a boat. Mmm, shipping, beats even electric trains, that good. But you're much better to drive even your Hummer across the country than fly, even though flying is cheaper considering the time involved and associated opportunity costs.

Ideally the roads would get an electrified rail. Then your electric cars just ID themselves to the smart grid and you don't even need the big battery banks or recharge or anything. 2050? Why not. Enough battery to get you to the road, and boom, as many megawatts as you can suck down. Emergency ground vehicles running with biodiesel backup engines. A few crooks with ethanol-powered strait-4's hidden under the rear seats. Lifting-body airships return to replace aeroplanes, reaching 200kph. The future, baby.

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The Future Is Pretty Cool

The Future Is Pretty Cool

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