The world is hitting its stride in technological advances and futurists have been making wild-sounding bets on what we’ll accomplish in the not-so-distant future.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil, for example, believes that by 2040 artificial intelligence will be so good, humans will be fully-immersed in virtual reality and that something called The Singularity, when technology becomes so advanced that it actually changes the human race irreversibly, will occur.
Kevin Kelly, who helped launched Wired in 1993, sat down for an hour-long video interview with John Brockman at The Edge. Kelly believes that the next 20 years in technology will be radical. So much so, that he believes our technological advances will make the previous 20 years “pale” in comparison.
“If we were sent back with a time machine, even 20 years, and reported to people what we have right now and describe what we were going to get in this device in our pocket—we’d have this free encyclopedia, and we’d have street maps to most of the cities of the world, and we’d have box scores in real time and stock quotes and weather reports, PDFs for every manual in the world…You would simply be declared insane,” Kelly said.
“But the next twenty years are going to make this last twenty years just pale,” he continued. “We’re just at the beginning of the beginning of all these kind of changes. There’s a sense that all the big things have happened, but relatively speaking, nothing big has happened yet. In 20 years from now we’ll look back and say, ‘Well, nothing really happened in the last 20 years.'”
In 20 years from now we’ll look back and say, ‘Well, nothing really happened in the last 20 years.'”
What will these mind-blowing changes look like? He mentioned a few thoughts during the interview with Brockman.
Robots are going to make lots of things
“Certainly most of the things that are going to be produced are going to be made by robots and automation, but [humans] can modify them and we can change them, and we can be involved in the co-production of them to a degree that we couldn’t in the industrial age,” Kelly says.
“That’s sort of the promise of 3D printing and robotics and all these other high-tech material sciences is that it’s going to become as malleable.”
Tracking and surveillance are only going to get more prevalent, — For more information read the original article here.
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