The United Kingdom’s Leading Futurist discussed his astonishing forecast of what life will have to offer in the next forty five years.
Among his predictions for the near future he speaks of airplanes that will be too frightened to crash, your morning yogurt offering a good morning greeting before you eat it and how our human consciousness will be able to be warehoused on high tech computers. This brings a type of immortality to everyone, the catch being that personal wealth would be quite helpful to take full advantage of the new world offerings.
These future declarations did not come from a science fiction scribe or some sleazy sideshow psychic. They are the quite serious forecasts of one Ian Pearson, Chief of the Futurology department at BT.
He says that when studying the timelines, by the year 2050, it would be reasonable to expect that we could download our minds to a hard drive, no longer concerned about losing a life’s work to mortality. If you are wealthy enough that is by the year 2050, this could be entirely realistic. If you lack the available funds, you might be required to wait another twenty or thirty years as the procedure becomes more readily available. Science is quite serious about this and the technology is advancing rapidly – forty five years is an incredibly long time in the field of Information Technology.
The forty four year old Pearson began to formulate his grand future vision upon graduation in applied mathematics and theoretical physics. He put in four years as a missile designer and worked the past twenty years laboring in optical networking, broadband capabilities and cybernetics within the labs of BT. He understands that his prophetic quatrains’ can be at once very exciting as well as quite frightening.
Pearson feels strongly that infants born today may not ever need to die, stressing progress made in computer power demonstrated recently by Sony and its release of PlayStation 3. This machine is thirty five times more commanding than their prior gaming machines. The latest PlayStation 3 is one percent as powerful as the human brain, claims Pearson. This is coming close to super computer positioning and PlayStation 5 will quite likely be as resourceful as a human brain.
The quickest computer in the world, IBM’s BlueGene, can process 70.72 trillion calculations each second [teraflops] and is getting faster on a continual basis. However, if someone has strong beliefs in the individuality of awareness or differing souls might find what Pearson has to say next a bit disconcerting. Already research is being conducted on how it may be possible to configure a computer that might indeed display a conscious. Many scientists now think this could be completely possible.
Currently they have no idea how to make this happen but the process has begun to move in that direction, looking at the basis of consciousness and the processing of data from the outside world. Data is also retrieved from other portions of the brain as well and each every component processes the data from an internal sensing foundation.
Consciousness is simply one more sense and the plan is to engineer this into a computer. There is some resistance but Pearson thinks it will be possible to construct a conscious computer with phenomenal human intellect before the year 2020.
He says this super computer will have emotions; this would be a driving force behind its development. If you were flying on an airplane, you would certainly want the onboard computer to be more frightened of crashing than any of its human cargo. Therefore, with that said, it does what is entirely necessary in order to stay aloft until it is supposed to land safely.
Far more jobs will be automated than now. Telephone call centers will no longer be portals of frustration but rather individualized answering “personalities. This will allow for a better caller experience with less frustration. Call centers would have, as many staff as required and waiting in a queue for the next available operator will be a thing of the past.
Pearson is from Whitehaven in Cumbria, works in partnership on tech matters with a number of developers, and observes the advances of technologies from around the globe. He agrees that he gets caught up in debate regarding the repercussions of such progression. He believes you need to have the debate, and a worldly one at that. The largest debate is whether or not we should be constructing machines as intelligent or more than we humans are. Should we be allowed to alter bacteria to pull together electronic circuitry so they can become intelligent is a debate in progress and is in the midst of research.
It is currently possible to utilize DNA, for instance, to construct electronic circuits, having intelligent yogurt for breakfast at some point is not that big a leap from that. Perhaps sometime in the next ten or fifteen years, smart yogurt will have a raft of electronics in every singular bacterium. Imagine having a chat with your peach yogurt before you eat it!
In the lesser term, he believes the next stage of advancement will be in “ambient intelligence”: processors with everything. An example of this would be having a pollen sensor counter in your car relaying to you the antihistamine threat to you before leaving the car. Chips will be tiny enough that you can begin to implant them in the skin. This could be for a video tattoo comprising ultra thin layers of polymer that would be applied to the skin, keeping them in place for a few days. You could maybe incorporate a cell phone, linking it to the network and utilize it as a videophone to download media clips or scour emails.
The major electronics company, Philips, is coming out with the planet’s first roll out display that is only one millimeter thick with a 12.5 centimeter screen that can be wrapped about the arm. It sees production commencing in roughly two years.
The next stage will be a phase of “simplicity” by about 2013 to 2015. A this point, information technology will have reached a point where it will be well enough advanced that people will be able to use it without the required training tutorials and – or courses they require today.
You will no longer need a single processor in your computer that will need to do everything. There will be stacks of tiny self systemizing chips within a box that will be able to hook up and do things themselves. It will remain virus free due to the majority of the system being stored inside of hardware that hackers cannot source. If the computer begins to sense trouble, you would simply need to push a reset button and the operating system would default back to the factory setting.
The next stage Pearson envisions is the “virtual worlds” in around 2020. Much of our time will be spent in the realm of the virtual world. It will be 3D, we will be fully immersed into computer generated environments in which we can socialize as well as do business in these virtual settings. It is not hard to imagine technology handing you a full-scale, 3D representation that would link up with your nervous system allowing you to shake a customer’s hand. It would be like being inside a person’s office and it is next to impossible to think that this will not be our normal method for communication.
Thu, Feb 11, 2010
Immortality, Lifestyle, Nanotechnology