I think one of the hot topic issues on the table will be machine rights. Whether or not to free machines from slavery. Which will eventually be inevitable. But there will still be religious factions that believe machines have no soul and hence should not be treated any better then pets. This will be less of an issue when it comes to daily life and more of a issue when it comes to crimes committed by the machines.
We’ll be driving all electric robotic cars with multi-directional wheels using a form of what are now called hyperdirectional wheels and advanced robotic suspension systems.
New inexpensive but efficient propulsion technologies will begin to make their way into crafts built to bring the wealthy into space.
Computers will be built into contact lenses for heads up display interfaces and composite reality. Also let you change your eyes to cool colors.
Electric tattoos will exist, powered off of your body and capable of motion when you press certain areas.
Most cancers and diseases will be curable.
Human life expectancy will triple at the least.
Buildings and homes will be built more eco friendly and designed to work with nature rather then against it.
We will begin building factories in space in order to decrease pollution on earth in and attempt to make our earth more garden-like.
Human beings will begin increasing their awareness and abilities through nano robotic machines in the body. Better eyesight, hearing, intelligence, strength and response time. This will make us competitive with our wholly machine counterparts.
People will still ask the big questions “What’s out there in space?” “Is there a God?” “Why am I here?”
But machines will also be asking these questions.
This all seems so far-fetched, but it really isn’t.
I’ve never heard that contact lens idea before. I really like it. :]
That is a lot to do in 100 years. I would just be happy if we could have ice cream that doesn’t melt so fast.
Crap. Xanga ate my comment.
I heard about some sort of technology, which could make a fake eyeball, capable of sight, and implant it into the eye socket. It also contains a microcomputer, with a digital interface, which could look at an object, search for it, and then project the information onto the surface of the eye. Never forget a name again.
reminds me of I-robot. :)
It would be cool to live long enough to see all of that happen though…hopefully someone will come up with a formula to extent human life spans between now and then so someone from this era will witness it happening :)
Interesting thoughts… I’m not looking forward to the idea of sentinent machines though. Then we have to ask if that’s what we were/are, whether hammers mind being hammered with, and… hm. The Terminator and The Matrix and Logan’s Run comes to mind.
Good Post.
@Darn_it_danube - Yeah when you think about it, it’s both a long time and a short amount of time. Just like people living in 1909 wondering what the world would be like in 2009. Could they have imagined movies with the kind of special effects we have today? Or computers that fit in our pocket and let us call anyone in the world? Or even the concept of video games or the internet or microwaves?
I would say that’s a pretty generous timeline for the contact lens idea. Other scientists place that happening somewhere around 2025-2030.
@TheTheologiansCafe - Lol. Yeah that would be nice. I’m a fan of Ray Kurzweil and he tends to be an optomist about the future, as well as an established inventor. Right now I’m reading his book “The Singularity is Near” in which he talks about the evolution of progress being exponential rather then linear. In other words it’s not 1, 2, 3, 4, ect. It’s 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, ect. You use the technology you invent to create better technology. You don’t start fresh from the beginning every time. So as the technology you invent gets better, the next generation doubles the previous generations capability. This has been a proven theory in more then one field. Moores law is just an example of one of them.
So it’s said that within the first 50 years of the 21st century we will have twice the advancement that we had in the whole 100 years of the 20th century.
two words.
ca
reeeeepy.
@shatterFocus - What’s creepy? The future? Actually most of this stuff is fascinating. The future is going to get really interesting.
@roxics – nooo the whole machine thing. i personally believe it won’t happen: that this world will end before we reach that stage. But hey, I’m not God.
@roxics – (thankfully. because if I was God, we’d all be in serious trouble)
@Undercover_Librarian – Yeah you’ll probably end up seeing a lot of that in the decades to come. Or rather it will end up seeing you. lol Medical advancements are something we’re going to see a huge leap in. Curing the blind, deaf and paralyzed. Already they are working on regrowing teeth. By the year 2020 you’ll be able to walk into a dentist and start the proceed to have a tooth regrown. The ability already exists in the human body, as can be seen by people growing their adult teeth. It just gets shut off in a brain at some point. We’ll turn it back on.
@jazziegal97 – I-robot is not that far off. Several scientists are already working on extending human life. It’s being said that in 15 years we’ll be able to extend someones life expectancy by several years. Then by the time those years are about to wear out the technology will have advanced even further to be able to extend your life another 25 years or so.
They say that right now, the first person to live to 1000 years old has already been born. If you’re under 30 today, chances are, given enough money, you could live several hundred years or more. Death will become optional, barring any car acciendents and so on.
@Ampbreia – Well the truth is we are machines. Biological machines. The problem is, people today don’t want to accept that. People want top believe there is something magical about humanity. Well the magic is that we’re here to begin with. But taht doesn’t change that fact that we are machines and there is nothing wrong with that.
Science fiction also scares people with the idea that a machine race is going to want to kill us. The reality is, a machine race is likely to be just as complex and diverse as humanity is, possibly even more so. I think if we can all learn to love and live in harmony, then things will be fine. But you know that for the first several decades the machines will be a slave race. We’ll say “we created you for a purpose, to do our deeds, not to set you free, what would be the point in that” while others will say “machines have no soul” just as they said about black people at one point. But eventually that will change.
@shatterFocus – I think it’s pretty safe to assume the world won’t end. Afterall this is just the beginning. We’ve hardly scratched the surface. We’re still very young in the universe. We have yet to expand to other worlds, control our weather, harness the energy of our galaxy and so on. We’re still a very primative race in the grand scheme of things.
That said, there will be wars and there could be huge man made disasters to come. Entire cities being blown off the face of the earth in nuclear terrorism. As well as designer diseases. But if this happens the people behind it wil likely be some kind of rebel religious crusaders. The big nations of this planet have already figured out it’s better to work together then try and go to nuclear war with each other.
oooO can’t wait for the future to get here! =)
I don’t think this particular world will still exist then.
As long as there is coffee around, I’ll be fine. Beyond that, I don’t make it a habit to look that far into the future. 10-15 years is mind boggling enough for me, let alone 100 years.
Ah!
It is hard to grasp sometimes, however it’s not really that difficult to imagine. We pretty much have machines for every job now, so I don’t really think it would be far fetched if they start building androids to replace us. I still find the idea of machines having a conscientiousness hard to believe. But we will never know until it’s upon us.
In one hundred years the world will be an irradiated asteroid field in the depths of space with all the aliens asking “what the f*** happened here?!?!”
Full fledged AI will definately not be around in 100 years. That is to say not the sort that will have the ability to ask “Is there a God?” or “Why am I here?”. AI researchers believe they will be able to solve more logical and direct problems, but these questions you listed require a level of self-conciousness for AI that no one in computer science think will happen for at least another two centuries, if at all.