This dude will own the world.
What will the world be like in 2020?
- Thread starter Combine
- Start date
locknroll said:
books will never go away.
Combine said:
Its possible today. Several games can handle more then 5000 people on a server-cluster. For example Eve-Online (www.eve-online.com) has had 12000 people on a single server-cluster. VR would not increase the stain on a server (the server would still be making the salme calcuations as before), it would be a enduser hardware requirement. And 3D VR is also around today, even if its somewhat expensive for the general public.
Combine said:
Personal Aircraft are affordable for professinals today, around 100k-150k USD. But I do not see cars being replaced for quite a while. I think most people would be afraid of of switching, so it's not happening anytime soon.
N
Nuttyfish
Guest
The internet will be available in book form
ajanta
Registered Senior Member
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Yazata
Valued Senior Member
This thread started in 2004, 16 years away from 2020. Now it's 2016, just 4 years away. So we can start to test the predictions.
Not even close. The United States no longer has a manned space program to speak of. China has developed a capacity to put people into orbit with Russian assistance, but only simple 60's-style capsules. Humans are probably farther away from going to Mars or even returning to the Moon than we were in 2004.
Virtual reality is coming real soon, just around the corner, just like it was in 2004. No dramatic developments in that regard.
The Middle East is still in an uproar. Nothing much has changed in that regard.
Nothing like that.
Every teen has got a cell-phone, which is all that matters to them. I guess that omnipresent I-phones are supposed to make up for the fact that in just about every other way, the future never happened. I think that it's kind of sad, actually.
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Edont Knoff
Registered Senior Member
Even tighter coupling humans to virtual reality, further loss of interest in real reality.
StrangerDanger
Registered Member
well dude, I have some bad news for you
A lot more significant changes between 1926 and 1976 than between the latter and 2026. So yeah, largely the existing machines only grew smarter or more complicated over 16 years. Even the USB flash drive existed in 2004. There were American drone strikes in Pakistan in 2004.
Popular Mechanics article in 1950 describing how the world would be 50 years later:
"[In 2000] nobody has yet circumnavigated the moon in a rocket spaceship, but the idea is not laughed down."
_
Well, there's air, just not the type we prefer.
Ken Fabian
Registered Senior Member
Some seem less like predictions than what people were wishing for. Global warming keeps getting worse and efforts to prevent strong action are still fiercely opposed. What decarbonising that is happening seems more side effect of RE getting cheap than deep commitment - although the alarmist economic fears of committing to decarbonising are much diminished.
Trump or like someone like Trump - a shift towards corrupt totalitarianism and the loss of global respect for the US - was a long running prediction by some outside this venue but still came as a WTF surprise.
The more exciting and self indulgent scifi dreams haven't done so well - living in space and flying cars - but computer technology has advanced a lot; the CGI versions at least are better than ever.
Much as they get decried for the attention sucking endless scroll and algorithmically targeted messaging the smartphone does so many things we did by other means that the beneficial impacts are hard to fully appreciate. If I am reading a book on my phone on a bus or train am I that different to reading a real book or paper, like people used to do?
The rise and rise of the gambling app for sucking money out of people with poor bookkeeping skills and lack of understanding of probability is dismaying.
3D TV got made but never really gained the mass appeal, a bit like videophones didn't. The reality just hasn't turned out being as attractive as it sounded.
I didn't see AI in the predictions, the good or the bad; it probably isn't turning out much like the dreamers imagined.
We haven't cured all cancer but some kinds we can deal with very effectively now and we are a lot better at treating most of them. America's healthcare system still looks like one of the worst - those advances don't flow through to everyone.
Nano-tech hasn't developed or delivered in the ways imagined.
I didn't notice flying drones in the predictions.
I think the biggest misses were renewable energy, batteries, EV's. From empty gestures at decarbonising, even something of a joke, they have become the least cost and most built electricity options around the world and we are adding more of new supply at rates exceeding anything that has come before - the factories for hundreds of nuclear power plants worth a year are in place and still growing fast.
Batteries went from a token big battery that provoked they have to be joking if that will make any difference reactions to megafactories delivering hundreds and edging into thousands of them a year within a decade. Batteries aren't yet managing long range electric trucks and ships and planes but are already doing the shorter range sorts and R&D is still delivering big leaps. I don't think China becoming an R&D powerhouse was in many predictions. China defies all the stereotypes for communist/totalitarian regimes.
Trump or like someone like Trump - a shift towards corrupt totalitarianism and the loss of global respect for the US - was a long running prediction by some outside this venue but still came as a WTF surprise.
The more exciting and self indulgent scifi dreams haven't done so well - living in space and flying cars - but computer technology has advanced a lot; the CGI versions at least are better than ever.
Much as they get decried for the attention sucking endless scroll and algorithmically targeted messaging the smartphone does so many things we did by other means that the beneficial impacts are hard to fully appreciate. If I am reading a book on my phone on a bus or train am I that different to reading a real book or paper, like people used to do?
The rise and rise of the gambling app for sucking money out of people with poor bookkeeping skills and lack of understanding of probability is dismaying.
3D TV got made but never really gained the mass appeal, a bit like videophones didn't. The reality just hasn't turned out being as attractive as it sounded.
I didn't see AI in the predictions, the good or the bad; it probably isn't turning out much like the dreamers imagined.
We haven't cured all cancer but some kinds we can deal with very effectively now and we are a lot better at treating most of them. America's healthcare system still looks like one of the worst - those advances don't flow through to everyone.
Nano-tech hasn't developed or delivered in the ways imagined.
I didn't notice flying drones in the predictions.
I think the biggest misses were renewable energy, batteries, EV's. From empty gestures at decarbonising, even something of a joke, they have become the least cost and most built electricity options around the world and we are adding more of new supply at rates exceeding anything that has come before - the factories for hundreds of nuclear power plants worth a year are in place and still growing fast.
Batteries went from a token big battery that provoked they have to be joking if that will make any difference reactions to megafactories delivering hundreds and edging into thousands of them a year within a decade. Batteries aren't yet managing long range electric trucks and ships and planes but are already doing the shorter range sorts and R&D is still delivering big leaps. I don't think China becoming an R&D powerhouse was in many predictions. China defies all the stereotypes for communist/totalitarian regimes.
I always thought that that factor (cheaper renewables) was an essential component of any decarbonization attempt. That's why I thought that all the incentive programs made sense even though PV was initially expensive - incentive programs would drive demand and demand would drive economies of scale. When I first got involved with solar in 1985 PV was $10 a watt. Now it's $0.25 a watt.
I was surprised quadrotors didn't come sooner, once I understood how they worked in 1990. The only thing holding them back at that point were control systems and in 1990 they were almost there; the only thing missing was a really cheap gyro.
I drove my first real EV in 1992 and the first time I drove it I knew they were the future. I thought battery issues would take five years or so to work out - but it took closer to 15. But again battery costs are coming down VERY fast. LFP's are under $100 a kilowatt-hour now.
I wasn't too surprised by China, because I met a lot of Chinese kids at college who were just brilliant, and were going back to China to work in industry there. I was surprised that more of them didn't stay here.
The biggest miss in my predictions is that, when I first saw the rise of the Internet in 1983 (TCP/IP) and 1989 (first browser) and then smartphones (1995 or so) I thought that the ability to access most of the information in the world with a handheld device would increase overall intelligence, as people used it for easy access to accurate information. And of course it has had the opposite effect.
Pinball1970
Valued Senior Member
No you were correct. Scientists, researchers, Physicians, lecturers, good students, interested laymen with half decent critical skills use the internet and Ai to get to information quickly, use it for quick searches, cross reference to text books, newspapers, journals, transcripts, published papers and on line interviews to name a few.
It would have been optimistic to assume the bar would rise for everyone.
Having said that stupid people also get information faster, it is just that important filters do not work very well.
Ken Fabian
Registered Senior Member
billvon, I had the impression that funding RE was more empty gesturing - appeasing the loudest voices on the climate problem, that tended to be 'green' (and reinforcing perceptions the climate issue was about appeasing unreasonable 'green' demands) - than any genuine, deep commitment to decarbonising. But I admit to being cynical.
Perhaps not a surprise that RE could be made to work at low cost to those involved in trying - scientists, engineers - or even that for a lot of people it looked more genuine than it did to me, much as I wanted it to work, but to those funding it, who almost certainly had energy industry experts telling them such options wouldn't work it must have been unexpected that RE would become the most built kind of energy by the early 2020's.
Perhaps not a surprise that RE could be made to work at low cost to those involved in trying - scientists, engineers - or even that for a lot of people it looked more genuine than it did to me, much as I wanted it to work, but to those funding it, who almost certainly had energy industry experts telling them such options wouldn't work it must have been unexpected that RE would become the most built kind of energy by the early 2020's.
Looking at media like Facebook, Twitter and Tiktok it sure seems like - on average - the Internet is making people dumber. But of course heeding those media sources may be self-selecting for the dumbest content out there.