FUTURELAND

Here are some ideas on how I see the next hundred years.

THE END OF GAS

There will be no more gasoline internal combustion engines. A simple and wasteless fuel will take over. Powerlines will not be necessary anymore. You will have your own power station at home. Cars won't need refueling. The price of traveling and transport  will decrease dramatically so people will mix a lot with diseases spreading worlwide and goods being produced anywhere on earth.

AUTOMATION AND THE EXPIRATION OF DEMOCRACY

Automation and robotics are a current revolution. The world will be very different in some 30 years due to the economic shift of a majority of people not working but plenty of goods being produced by machines. Maybe there will be less democracy because governments will rule the economy in order to distribute the welfare generated by self-driven machines. This automated society will behave very differently than we currently do. Maybe poor countries will stop working at all and accommodate to receive full help from the robotised rich world; therefore the gap between developed countries and the third world is going to magnify.

PLENTY OF WATER AND FOOD

I guess there will be an important discovery on how to process salt water from the sea into drinking liquid on a very cheap way. Biotechnology will increase productivity at the top and instead of farms, food will be harvested in many floors(*) buildings inside cities (levitating towns).
Link (Dec-27-2012):
Water purifying technique.

THE OPEN SOURCE PARADISE

At some point, when abundance in rich countries assures all life conditions for everybody, technology and science will be released by companies and governments or at least there will be a great share of knowlegde-exchange because current rules of competition are not going to be a need to survive. There will be no more struggle to overcome the other one, so knowlegde-secrets will not be an advantage anymore. As a result from this, human evolution is going to accelerate and more advancements and discoveries will take place. Link: Open Source Initiative.

ON FILMS

I think movies are going to be developed entirely by software, even from the script. So very few people will be in charge barely on the most refined work or minor shifts. But since nobody wants imaginary artists -people want real blood- there will be true people holographed in files that will be used for making films. These persons are going to true-film the dangerous scenes, or at least pretend they are. They will be forced to lead lives that resemble their movie characters and maybe even participate in dangerous situations in real life, or fake them. Maybe some of this is already happening, I am not too much a movies man.

FLIGHT AND LEVITATION

My last guessed revolution has to do with flight or levitation. I think there will be a major breakthrough on how to keep things floating in the air or escaping the gravity attraction. So flying will not require wings and maybe there will be floating cities. Perhaps space flight will be easy and humanity will settle on the moon, mars and other worlds, creating new countries and political problems.

Biotechnology, genetical engineering, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence will complete this new world that comes.

WORKERS OF THE FUTURE

I think there will always be jobs for the less educated but very little. Most of the workers in this new world will be scientists, philosophers, inventors, entrepreneurs, artists, entertainers, judges, managers, social carers, teachers, motivational trainers, law enforcement, planners, politicians,  religious leaders and everything related to automation that cannot be performed by machines.

(*) I had used the word "stories" but I think it is wrong. My Englis is not really good.

SOME IDEAS ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

I did not make any web search around intelligence. I chose to go the naive way and then maybe discover the theory. Perhaps what I am writing is outdated or discarded but I am having fun with this. My point of view is that intelligence is not an abstract skill based only upon logic, math or some other human theoretical creation. Logic (maybe algorithms) seem necessary for any thought or emotional process but maybe conventional logic is not enough to grasp the whole mind's dynamics.

THE GUESSING PROCESS OF THOUGHT

Uncertainty is at the core of any thinking process. We will never be able to know everything, so we guess. Religion is a very useful tool to give meaning to the unknown; but science or philosophy give more accurate explanations. Science is an excellent tool yet there is always a limit to it. There are some questions that science does not approach; philosophy fills that space and then religion or even fantasy. Us humans organize things according to categories, similarities or convenience. Then we assign names to those categories and things. We link a thing to a category and both get a new meaning. Emotions are present at any thought process of course. So there's an emotional side for any connection or idea.

WANDERING ME

To my knowledge artificial intelligence aims to emulate the human conscious mind or solve problems based on rigid logic. Human brain runs on unexpected paths even when fully aware. You can amaze yourself playing an automatic video of stabbing some coworker on the back just because they raised the voice at you; then you come back to reality and try figure out why they did so. Psychology has determined that we have a parallel mind labeled as unconscious self that flows chaotically and apparently not following any ethical rule. This unconscious mind devises strange worlds in which the known rules of reality are barely followed and events do not happen in a linear-time way. This strange form of thinking affects our decisions however it seems artificial intelligence theorists and developers do not consider it at all.

CURIOSITY

Artificial intelligence can be whatever we humans decide it should be. We are its creator so we define how it functions. Until now, AI serves the purpose of helping us do tasks that are impossible for our natural brains. But we want artificial brains to behave as our minds work. It seems technology is not currently capable of this kind of feat. I think for a machine to cogitate like humans do, it takes perceiving reality same way as we do. This means eyes, skin, a sense of smell, ears and instinctive reactions such as our own. A full nervous system that current electronics cannot achieve. Maybe nanotechnology will solve it. Animals focus on things that start moving before them. This is an instinct for self defense and maybe for hunting. A little child is fascinated with the light of a candle, he tries to grab it and then he feels the hurt that warns him of the danger and quickly retreats. So there is a process of watching, guessing, comparing with other already known things, and when realising it is something new, beginning to explore. We learn from others too. This little kid might be warned of not touching the flame. Maybe he will obey.

PENDING: INSTINCT, EMOTIONS, TACT, MEMORIES...

Originally wrote phylosophy but there was a bell ringing until I checked the spelling.

THE PERFECT BLOG

I have been thinking of what an electronic text should look like. 

The core strategy is readability, which means:

• Simple and easy to understand fonts
• A single basic font and color
• Not huddled letters
• A pale background either yellow, brown or mustard
• Reduced width (some five inches)
• Some space between lines

Then it comes the content itself. It should be:

• Grammarly correct
• Easy-to-understand sentences
• Original
• Interesting
• Short
• Moving to reflection or action

HAPPINESS, A QUICK REFERENCE

Some hints to live an easier life

• People who perceive the divine as something we flow in, tend to be happier than those who see God as a distant and hard to access judge. I guess it is due to guilt and the fear on the outcome of death
• Accept yourself as you are
• Taking good health care
• Feeling or being loved by your surrounding people (relatives, neighbors, etc.)
• Not tormenting yourself with the past. There is no way to change it after all
• Not keeping grudges
• Being thankful for the learned lesson from who harmed you
• Have a lifeproject and keep on pursuing it
• Enjoying the present moment such as is
• Not distressing with a never coming future
• Experiencing the flow, which means getting lost in some activity one enjoys
• Not burdening the soul with guilt
• Not causing harm to others
• Seeing the funny side on everything
• Telling your problems to someone (you trust) so you can release pressure
• Having a secure financial life. Money isn't happiness but an uncertain future or present leads to worry, which leads to unhappiness
• Not worrying too much on what others think about you
• Help somebody solve their problems (and expect backfire not gratitude)
• Don't deny your negative emotions, just try to understand where they come from
• Never mask your problems but face them constructively
• Getting off the routine from time to time
• Avoid self-defeating inner talk (e.g. thinking how stupid I am)
• Take a risk, try new things
• Share the joy of your relatives or friends success
   

 Links:

Happiness I

Happiness II

Tricks
Eudaimonic happiness

UBERWEB

Current access to the Internet poses a series of problems to individual rights such as privacy issues, intelectual property threats coming from the terms of use (the contract). It seems the internet has evolved into a national security tool for the United States. Yet the whole world makes use of it. For US people some irruption into their cyberlives might be acceptable as long as it ensures their security and freedom. To the rest of us there is no benefit. I do not know if in the United States there are means to prevent other people from breaking into one's web connections. I guess there are, since it looks like they trust the internet for business. In my case that is not possible. I am outside the United States and I have never felt secure on the internet. Attacks to any of my web accounts have been common. Breaking passwords appears to be really easy. So it is hard for me to pass a credit card into any web service. One last and devastating issue on internet terms of use is that providers determine what you can upload or not. They define political correctness rules for anything you upload, even if it is a simple letter to a close friend. So the internet has become some kind of big brother that molds even your thoughts.

I think there is a lot of room for a new and very different electronic network. One that guarantees privacy, security, freedom, property and which should be world-wide dispersed so it does not become a national security instrument for a particular country. If it can happen it will come true. American corporations are surely going to refuse it. Are american individuals going to take it?

Links

The web 2.0

The web 3.0

THE JUDGMENT DAY

Terminator film throws a warning on robots taking over and wiping all of us out. It is not a new idea. It appears to be running around since XIX century. It brings some worry on the future. But there are many other concerns that can lead human race to self destruction much sooner than this robotic-artificial-intelligence-doom. Genetical engineering can lead to out of control mutations or diseases. Automation seems to be driving developed countries into a collapse. Even current nuclear weapons might kill most human population. People live huddled in cities. This exacts a sea of oil flowing to multimillion humans towns. If this black blood begins running short, the whole civilisation of cities would quickly die.

For machines to take over it is required two curious abilities that humans do not master yet: Self replication and self repairing. No device can rule humans if not carrying these skills. No single robot will decide our destiny if it is not self-aware and capable of desire. The only out-of-control-technology threat to mankind might be the grey goo. It is a nanotech hell of tiny machines replicating uncontrollably until they destroy all life on earth. When nuclear weapons were only a project it was suspected that a single detonation was going to spread through the whole universe and bring it all to an end. It did not happen. So even the grey goo is perhaps just too much fear. And same as nuclear bombs no grey goo or tech-doom will prevent people from trying new things.

DIE HARD2 AGAINST REALITY...

One of these weekends I found this movie on a public tv station. I usually do not invest time in action movies. But it caught my eye when reviewing the technological evolution. There were no cellphones. Wireless communication was a novelty. Scenes are slower than nowadays. So I found it less violent than I remember. The script is absolutely unreal. After all it is a movie to hypnotise the audiencie through violence. The story is about some guys who devise a bloody plot just to free a single man. But it takes seizing a whole airport in Washington. And as a warning bad guys crash a huge airplane full of passengers. Killing lots of people is a mass-crime thousands of times more relevant than simply attempting to save a man from justice. It is an absurdity only conceived to make possible a film of explosions. Could it happen in the real world? What if this movie was inspiring for the terrorist attacks of september 11th of 2001? Reality proved to be more fantastic than an action movie.