What are your top 5 technologies of the next 15 years?

[RAMA]

sojourner wrote:

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So, Rama, why hasn't running water, a what, 3 thousand year old technology, made it to every human on the planet by now?

Water seems simple doesn't? But it's a resource people have been fighting for for a long time, partly because we only have had easy access to .5% of the water on the planet (see quote below). Politics, religion, culture, war, natural disasters have all limited availability of clean water. In harsher climates, people often spend half the day acquiring access to water, limiting employment, health, and spending money. Many nations in the world can't afford the infrastructure necessary to supply running water. Roughly 900 million (depending on where you get your data) don't have access to it. Even so, this is certainly a higher total than 50 years ago, or 100.

What is changing is affordability...as seen in the UN data I've posted before, countries and people have more wealth than ever. Add to this the scale and price of the technology available to bring access to clean water has changed, and in reality it doesn't matter if the water runs, only that it's clean...

We talk about water wars. And yet we fight over 0.5% of the water on the planet. Diamandis talks of Dean Kamen’s Slingshot device, which can generate 100 liters clean water from any source. Coca Cola is apparently going to test this in the field soon–with a view to deploying it globally. Given how much water that company consumes, this is a big deal. Or, as Diamandis puts it, “this is the kind of innovation empowered by this technology that exists today.”

The cheap Slingshot device, which will likely revolutionize the world on many levels.



http://foundationcenter.org/pnd/news...l?id=245900021

BTW, care to guess what percentage of the world had running water 3,000 years ago?

RAMA

[sojourner]

RAMA wrote:

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Water seems simple doesn't? But it's a resource people have been fighting for for a long time, partly because we only have had easy access to .5% of the water on the planet (see quote below). Politics, religion, culture, war, natural disasters have all limited availability of clean water. In harsher climates, people often spend half the day acquiring access to water, limiting employment, health, and spending money. Many nations in the world can't afford the infrastructure necessary to supply running water. Roughly 900 million (depending on where you get your data) don't have access to it. Even so, this is certainly a higher total than 50 years ago, or 100.

This is exactly the point. something so simple as clean water has yet to become a pervasive technology due to the reasons you mentioned, yet you seem to think somehow that in the next 20 years the entire planet is going to transform into a resource rich utopia. We'll be lucky if in 20 years there are any fish left to eat.

What is changing is affordability...as seen in the UN data I've posted before, countries and people have more wealth than ever. Add to this the scale and price of the technology available to bring access to clean water has changed, and in reality it doesn't matter if the water runs, only that it's clean...





http://foundationcenter.org/pnd/news...l?id=245900021

BTW, care to guess what percentage of the world had running water 3,000 years ago?

RAMA

Does the percentage matter in any way? the point is that now, 3 thousand years later, we have yet to reach 100%.

[RAMA]

sojourner wrote:

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This is exactly the point. something so simple as clean water has yet to become a pervasive technology due to the reasons you mentioned, yet you seem to think somehow that in the next 20 years the entire planet is going to transform into a resource rich utopia. We'll be lucky if in 20 years there are any fish left to eat.

You missed MY point then, it really ISN'T simple at all....

Does the percentage matter in any way? the point is that now, 3 thousand years later, we have yet to reach 100%.

Human evolution is a mere fraction of geological time...10-12,000 years for what we think of as modern civilization, less than 250 years for true industrialized civilization out of a 5 billion year old planet! The fact that water availability has exploded in the last 100 years is quite a huge success(only 14% of homes in the USA had a bathtub in 1900!!)...and yet we have further to go. I've mentioned just a few of the enabling mechanisms that will allow us to improve this, and it's not wishful thinking, it's backed by ingenuity and big corporate money...not just Coca Cola, but GE and others..

[sojourner]

Human evolution has nothing to do with technological spread. Do you really think it's taken this long for the technology of clean water to reach the entire planet? The only reason the companies you mentioned are doing it now is for publicity.

Anyway, I give up. I can see you're devoted to this religion you've formed.

[RAMA]

sojourner wrote:

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Human evolution has nothing to do with technological spread. Do you really think it's taken this long for the technology of clean water to reach the entire planet? The only reason the companies you mentioned are doing it now is for publicity.

Anyway, I give up. I can see you're devoted to this religion you've formed.

These are all facts...you simply refuse to see them...you couldn't have looked at the UN numbers, you didn't look at the technologies involved, you didn't look at mathematical models of exponential growth. So again...while the end result is uncertain, it really appears to be headed in that direction. So if you refuse to believe anything will change in the next 30-50 years, maybe at least I can enlighten you about the past...

http://www.wilderdom.com/vignettes/WorldFacts.html

[Chemahkuu]

tl;dr find a new cult.

[RAMA]

You haven't done much to back up the idea that the internet is an enabling technology, let alone the idea that internet access in and of itself is sufficient to offset the global income gap when more advanced technologies are less likely to proliferate at the same time.

I think this probably just scratches the surface of what 3 billion new minds, contributors, consumers, etc will add to the human situation in 2020 onward, but here goes:

Politics and political revolutions

The Internet has achieved new relevance as a political tool. The presidential campaign of Howard Dean in 2004 in the United States was notable for its success in soliciting donation via the Internet. Many political groups use the Internet to achieve a new method of organizing in order to carry out their mission, having given rise to Internet activism, most notably practiced by rebels in the Arab Spring.[63][64]
The New York Times suggested that social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter helped people organize the political revolutions in Egypt where it helped certain classes of protesters organize protests, communicate grievances, and disseminate information.[65]
The potential of the Internet as a civic tool of communicative power was thoroughly explored by Simon R. B. Berdal in his thesis of 2004:
“ As the globally evolving Internet provides ever new access points to virtual discourse forums, it also promotes new civic relations and associations within which communicative power may flow and accumulate. Thus, traditionally ... national-embedded peripheries get entangled into greater, international peripheries, with stronger combined powers... The Internet, as a consequence, changes the topology of the "centre-periphery" model, by stimulating conventional peripheries to interlink into "super-periphery" structures, which enclose and "besiege" several centres at once.[66] ” Berdal, therefore, extends the Habermasian notion of the Public sphere to the Internet, and underlines the inherent global and civic nature that intervowen Internet technologies provide. To limit the growing civic potential of the Internet, Berdal also notes how "self-protective measures" are put in place by those threatened by it:
“ If we consider China’s attempts to filter "unsuitable material" from the Internet, most of us would agree that this resembles a self-protective measure by the system against the growing civic potentials of the Internet. Nevertheless, both types represent limitations to "peripheral capacities". Thus, the Chinese government tries to prevent communicative power to build up and unleash (as the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising suggests, the government may find it wise to install "upstream measures"). Even though limited, the Internet is proving to be an empowering tool also to the Chinese periphery: Analysts believe that Internet petitions have influenced policy implementation in favour of the public’s online-articulated will...

I've already brought up the economic impact, the world economy will never implode, this is a HUGE market...representing trillions of dollars, even though they are from poorer countries.

There are a million ways to do things, certainly. There is, however, only one BEST way to do things, with "best" being defined as that which is most likely to succeed so far as the goals we set. Experience tells me that any endeavor that depends entirely on a new revolutionary untried technology is doomed to either failure or such limited success as to never fully realize its goals. So the Von Neuman Machines -- or any other fanciful high tech approach, up to and including space elevators, launch loops, space tethers, laser-based propulsion, airship/stratolaunch or SSTO spaceplanes -- suffers from an inherent catch-22: the only way to make them effective is to use them ALOT, and the only way to use them a lot is to send an assload of people into space to develop them in the first place.

Ah, but such machines are cheaper, easier, more numerous and far more likely to succeed than expensive, unwieldy spacecraft, with or without human crews. Unless there are new developments in price-performance of powerplants, or discoveries of shortcuts in space, this will be the best way to go...see the aforementioned video clip.

Which means that ultimately NONE of those technologies will make space exploration possible in and of themselves. Those technologies will make space exploration EASIER, and considerably cheaper, and possibly even safer. The catch is that none of those technologies will develop until they are widely tested and used, which means that mankind does not have the luxury of waiting until space exploration gets easier, cheaper or safer. If we're going to do it, we'll still have to send people into space by the hundreds up there to establish a frontier where those technologies can be used and mature, and we're also going to have to learn to be comfortable with the idea that ALOT of the people we send into space are going to die up there. Until we take those first developmental (and psychological) steps, everything else is just fantasy.

Humans may follow AFTER...or they MAY not...maybe they will explore inwardly for awhile, using a thought process we can barely grasp. What we may do eventually is--again--the cheaper--easier, more sensible thing and not travel into space at all(suspended animation: prob not, generational ships: not very likely to last..), but to send DNA and information about that original subject by laser or in a storage bank aboard a ship, and re-create us there...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvvO8...eature=related

quote]If they're going to "evolve" that on their own it'll take a timescale similar -- though probably much longer -- to natural evolution, since those machines do not procreate and the variation between one generation and the next is vanishingly small (besides the fact that the evolutionary pressure towards emotions or "humanlike features" is virtually zero).

On this timescale issue, I not only think you are wrong, but resoundingly so. In some cases the evolutionary approach is exactly what AI researchers are taking, bypassing having to program all data into a computer, they allow the AI to learn (bottom up). At the point the AI(s) reach human intelligence, then intelligence of the whole planet, they may well go in any direction, human personality or not, it would be possible! As for procreation of intelligent species, well its very human-centric now isn't it? Of course of machine can create intelligent copies or MORE intelligent copies of themselves, its certainly procreation in a different form. Since we are creating these AI ourselves, we can even bypass other parts of evolution in organic brains, the building of newer onto older parts of the brain...technically, we've already gotten to a level of AI evolution much faster than nature ever did!

Monkey level AI in 50 years: 1950-2000(much faster than nature):

http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/AI_power_075.jpg

Marovec, computer hardware matching the human brain:

http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm

[RAMA]

sojourner wrote:

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Human evolution has nothing to do with technological spread.

Nonsense. Show me an early ape who can manage post-19th century technology in a meaningful way. Cultural evolution is even faster than biological evolution, and both are intertwined, influencing and influenced by technology...fire, agriculture, factories, light bulbs, nuclear power, space...today in industrialized nations, social interactions are influenced even more directly by it.

Do you really think it's taken this long for the technology of clean water to reach the entire planet? The only reason the companies you mentioned are doing it now is for publicity.

So you dispute that the companies can do what they set out to? Because it's happening regardless. Does it matter that they are trying to make a profit by opening up a HUGE market? I would expect them to do that.

[publiusr]

Some resources:
Solar system live!http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Solar/action?sys=-Sf

Matter and anti-matter
http://www.bautforum.com/showthread....tter-is-formed
http://phys.org/news/2012-05-landmark.html
Q anyone?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

[RAMA]

I guess even I underestimated the "cloud" computing craze, looks like its going to be almost quietly integrated into it's own OS(s) and therefore changing personal computing as we know it.

[sojourner]

^Funny, they've been saying that for at least 10 years, yet people still seem to like to control they're own data.

[RAMA]

sojourner wrote:

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^Funny, they've been saying that for at least 10 years, yet people still seem to like to control they're own data.

Originally I thought the same thing, apparently I was wrong...the cloud is too scalable, too adaptive, too accessible.

Although I had online backup as long ago as the 90s, the cloud required a "killer app", looks like the killer app are the OSs and internet itself as well as portable devices --which have huge market penetration now--that created a need for sharing personal info across them all. Again, the meme was out there and the huge companies involved made it a self-fulfilling prophecy.


I have been using Google Docs, Cloud Print, Dropbox for some time now, and now with Drive integrating all of Google's services, the game has changed.

RAMA

[Crazy Eddie]

RAMA wrote:

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So you dispute that the companies can do what they set out to?

The question of whether or not they CAN is a moot point. It's really a question of whether or not they WILL. There are a lot of political, social and economic reasons to believe that they probably will not.

[RAMA]

newtype_alpha wrote:

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The question of whether or not they CAN is a moot point. It's really a question of whether or not they WILL. There are a lot of political, social and economic reasons to believe that they probably will not.

Well the huge emerging markets suggest otherwise...Coca Cola alone (as in my example) is willing to spread the Slingshot technology to over 100 countries after testing.

RAMA

[RAMA]

With a healthy disregard for the impossbile, people can do almost anything...Google CEO along with many of those in the technological forefront are taking the Singularity into account in their future equations:

http://singularityhub.com/2012/05/27...most-anything/