Year: 2015

Saving the Past for the Future

Posted By: adminfuturePosted On:

They say that history always repeats itself. But, what if we are losing our history? How can that be with all the data floating around. Some people commemorate loved ones, both relatives and pets with photos and paintings. Dottie Dowling (see Facebook page) does wonderful photos, especially of animals and Carol McClees, carolsfineart.com,  is frequently commissioned to paint people’s pets so they have a memory of them.

Preserving Books

We are generating more data than at any time in history, but much of it is so ephemeral. Many older books are much more durable than modern books. That is because early books were written on parchment or printed on linen paper or things like that which were very stable. Then they found that you could make paper from wood pulp which was much cheaper. However, it naturally has acid in it unless it is specially treated to be neutral. This causes the paper to degrade over time. So libraries are actually having more trouble preserving some of the early books printed on wood pulp based paper whereas they are having minimal trouble preserving the earlier books printed on other materials.

Preserving Newspapers

Then there are the newspapers. They are printed on a cheap grade of paper, (with the catchy name of newsprint) that are not intended to last since it is expected that they will be read and discarded in a day or two. Libraries and museums that have newspaper collections are having even more trouble preserving these. Many are save by microfilming or now digitizing.

Preserving Film

The earliest films were made with a nitrate base which is very flamable and not very stable. So there is a race on to copy these old films onto or into other media, whether that be newer stable film or digitized. It would be a shame to lose these old films because they give us a visual glimpse into another time.

Preserving Correspondence

Before there were telephones and email and twitter, people wrote letters to each other. These letters give us great insight in historical figures and also into what was happening during different historical periods. Today it is rare for people to write letters. Historians are losing this valuable tool to be able to look back in time. The late 1900s and on into the 2000s, there will be much less that people leave behind. Even if emails are saved, the same care and thought does not go into them.

Preserving Computer Files

We may be compounding the problem by putting so much information online. As file formats change, it is already difficult to go back and read some old file formats, or old floppy disks. And that is only 10 or 20 years ago, not 100 or 200 years ago. What happens if this data is corrupted or there is an electromagnetic pulse that fries the computers the data is on? Will it be properly backed up? It will be interesting in the future to look back and see if this era with so much data floating around is surprisingly bereft of information about it.

0

Bad Future Predictions

Posted By: adminfuturePosted On:

The Huffington Post had a funny article about predictions of the future that didn’t quite work out.

1859 – People that Edwin Drake knew thought he was bonkers for trying to drill in the Earth to find oil. Whales were plentiful and would do just fine.

1873 – The Queen’s surgeon said that it would be crazy to do surgery on chest, abdomen and brain and that no one would ever do such an inhumane thing.

1878 – An Oxford professor thought the electric light was a gimmick for the grand Paris Exhibition and that it would fade away and never be heard of again.

1883 – Of all people, someone as intelligent and learned as Lord Kelvin thought that x-rays were a hoax.

1888 – Possibly his proof was that no one had so far been successful but a professor Joseph Le Conte felt that this proved that a self propelled flying machine was impossible.  Good think most inventors don’t listen to this kind of logic.

1903 – A bank president told Henry Ford’s attorney not to invest in Ford Motor Company because cars were a fad and we would always use horses.

1912 – The Syracuse Herald was a bit too fast with their reporting on the Titanic. They claimed that all passengers had been saved and the ship was damaged but making its way to Halifax. Wrong!

1919 – Hall of fame baseball player, Tris Speaker, said it was a supremely dumb idea to convert Babe Ruth from the best left handed pitcher in all of baseball to a right fielder. However, the Babe went on to hold the record for the most home runs in one year for 34 years and the most career home runs record for 39 years.

1920 – The New York Times decided that a rocket would never be able to get out of Earth’s atmosphere. Maybe their descendants were the ones who said the moon walk was a hoax staged on a Hollywood set.

1944 – A modeling agency told Marilyn Monroe that she should get a secretarial job or get married.

1948 – A radio pioneer declared that TV was just a “flash in the pan”

1955 – Variety magazine proclaimed that Rock n Roll would disappear by June of that year.

2005 – And of course since this was in the Huffington Post, the last is that the LA Weekly said when the Huffington Post was launched that it would not survive.

 

0

History of Predicting the Future

Posted By: adminfuturePosted On:

Many people have tried to predict the future. It seems deeply embedded in various religions. Jesus was part of a group predicting the apocalypse. However the meaning of the word has changed. It originally meant a revelation of God’s will rather than the end of the world as it has come to mean now.

Jewish Predictions

Jewish belief in the apocalypse is that the current world is ruled by evil and that a Messiah will come and deliver believers to a new era that will by ruled by God. Predictions of when the Messiah would come were discouraged so that people wouldn’t lose their belief if the prediction was wrong. We have been waiting 2,000 years.

There have been many false predictions over the years. You would think that people would look at the track record and avoid making predictions of the end of the world. Here are some of the ones.

The final battle was going to be fought in the year 66-70 as the Jews battled the Romans. Then Hilary Poitiers said it would end in 365 and Martin of Tours said it would happen before the year 400.

Christian predictions

Then the year 500, 793 and 800 and a waffle by Gregory of Tours saying 799-806. Have you noticed that a lot of the predictions are for turn of the century and turn of the millennium. They probably didn’t stop to think that telling time in this way was a human construct and there was nothing special about these dates.

Then there was 848, 992-5 by an assortment of Christians, January 1, 1000 and 1033. We skip the 1100s and the end of the world predictions start up again in the 1200s. and 1300s, skip the 1400s and then more in the 1500s. (There might have been some in the 1100s and 1400s but they weren’t mentioned in the article we read.

The Demise Gets More Frequent

There were many predictions of the end of the world in the 1500, 1600s, 1700s and 1800s. Some reworked their calculations when the world didn’t end after the first date they predicted. Cotton Mather tried 3 times. It is not clear if the increase was because with a greater population and therefore more people who might make predictions or that historical recordation improved and we just will never know the true extend of predictions in earlier times.

Aliens enter the picture

In the 1900s the bad predictions did not let up. Jeane Dixon got this one wrong. Unfortunately for Jim Jones’ followers in Guyana, Jim Jones decided not to wait for the apocalypse and created his own. Then Charles Manson murdered people to start a race war that would create an apocalypse. The Heaven’s Gate Cult believed an alien spacecraft was in the shadow of Halley’s comet and we were supposed to die as it came by so that our souls could get to the spacecraft. Thirty nine of them committed suicide so they could get to the spaceship.

And the hits just keep on coming. It seems like they are getting more frequent. When will people learn?

 

0

More on Cars

Posted By: adminfuturePosted On:

Are we in for a future of the Jetsons with flying cars? Or as mentioned in a prior post, most people not owning cars, but instead, doing taxis, limo rental, uber type services and the like. Will the cars drive themselves or will we still be at the wheel?

Flying Cars Planned

Well, there are actually some cars that can fly. The problem is the cost. They will probably never be a main stream item. However, one company Terrafugia is designing a flying car they call the TF-X. It uses technology that is already available and would fly at 200 mph and hold 4 people. No pilot’s license would be needed because it would fly itself. Terrafugia says it will probably be ready in 10 years. They have a model that will need a pilot’s license and is close to passing FAA approval and could be ready for sale in one to two years.

There is also a prototype called the AeroMobile. They are on version 3.0 and it is almost ready to be sold as well. It uses regular gasoline so it can be driven into any gas station to refuel.

Is it a Car or a Technology Product?

USA Today had an article where they felt self driving cars are in the future and the near future will be more tech upgrades to cars. At first the article made it sound like automated cars might not happen but later in the article it intimated it might happen in 10 years or so. That seems pretty close. They point out how much technology is going into cars these days and how a lot of tech companies have increasing automotive sales.

They feel like it will take a while because to have self driving cars, it is not like it is on a test track. They have to interact with self driving cars from other manufacturers. Then there is the question of how much will insurance be and also getting the legislation passed to allow it. Not things that will happen overnight.

Another reason it will take a while is that the car industry operates on a different schedule. The tech industry often works on a 6 month time frame, but new car models typically take 5 years to roll out.

Who Makes the Money?

The article says that people like to drive, but we think that those people will be a minority. We do agree though that the car companies may have to worry more about the tech companies like Google. They may come up with their own cars, but they also may change the power structure and where most of the profits go. It may be that the tech companies walk away with most of the profits from cars and the car companies don’t make that much because their part is more commodotized.

0

The Future is More of the Past

Posted By: adminfuturePosted On:

I just had my eyes opened. I just found some articles that my father had sent me in  1987. I had never gotten around to reading them at the time and felt guilty about throwing them away without looking at them.

Finally, in 2015 I unburied them and looked through them. It was very interesting and made me question even more whether I wanted to trust what advice people had to give about the stock market and the economy.

Crash of 1987

The articles talk about the stock market crash of 1987 and what were the causes and what should people do. A number of people were comparing the downturn to 1929 which in retrospect is a severely overblown reaction.

Some people felt that modern safeguards would prevent a meltdown to the 1929 levels. Between Social Security, unemployment insurance and an active Federal Reserve, many felt that they would prevent a complete 1929 style meltdown. At the time they were written, the downturn seemed to be only in the stock market and not in the general economy.

Worse than 1929?

One analyst felt that these only treated the symptoms and not the underlying causes. He felt that 1987 might be even worse than 1929. He said in both cases that excessive world wide debt and a contracting economy had been the cause of the crash.

He also said that legislators had gone overboard after the 1929 crash and there was too much New Deal social legislation and also business regulation. He felt that this was having a major drag on the economy. Sounds like the Republicans of 2015. Not much has changed.

Back to the Future

Another article said that people got too caught up in the euphoria of the stock market rise and that they didn’t pay attention to the warning signs. That sounds like what happens at any market peak to me. They said that people didn’t pay attention to low earning yields and dividends on stocks and figured that corporate earnings would increase and yields along with it.

Other problems were inflationary expectations which were much higher back then than they are now. Also there was a stalemate between Congress and the President. Perhaps not the inflation (although people keep beating that drum) it sounds a lot like today doesn’t it?

At least I didn’t read anything about people jumping out of windows in 1987 the way some did in 1929. There were a number of comments about people who had bought on margin and were facing margin calls. This was much worse in 1929 because there were fewer safeguards to keep people out of trouble back then. In 1929, everyone from tycoons to blue collar workers was buying on margin since it seemed like the joy ride would never end.

 

 

 

0

The Future is Global Cooling

Posted By: adminfuturePosted On:

An Ice Age is coming! Crazy? If you were alive in the 1970s you might remember that people were worried about global cooling and a new Ice Age in the future. What happened and where did they go wrong?

Well, part of it was that there was some cooling between 1940 and 1970 which was part of normal long term temperature fluctuations. You actually need to look a longer term trends to see more accurately what is going on. Plus, there was another group of scientists who were working on global warming theories who eventually won out.

Part of the problem was the media, which is often the case with science stories. They ran stories about ice ages etc. but they didn’t run any corrections or opposing views of the global warming scientists. Ninety percent of scientists in the 1970s felt that there would be global warming and 10% thought there would be global cooling.

Why was there a cooling period from 1940 to 1970? There were two reasons put forward and one of them is now considered to be the main reason. This was the effect of aerosols. These are particulates that are put in the air by power plants and other sources. Whereas greenhouse gases trap the heat, the aerosols / particulates reflect sunlight so less of it reaches the earth.

The other was called orbital forcing. Orbital forcing are the changes in climate changed by slight changes in the earth’s tilt and orbit. Apparently, this is the main cause of the ice ages and has a cycle of 20,000 years or so. Since geologists frequently deal in millions of years, 20,000 years is soon. But when the media heard soon, they took it to mean right around the corner.

More recently, a professor by the name of Don Easterbrook has claimed that we were about to have global cooling. He claims the data support this and uses in part the 1940-1970 cooling. But he also says more recent data shows cooling. Most scientists don’t understand how he is intrepeting the data since they feel that the data strongly shows a warming trend. There are others besides Easterbrook, but they are in the distinct minority.

 

 

-2

Future of Cars

Posted By: adminfuturePosted On:

At an automotive conference people were talking about how cars were changing. Then someone brought up the elephant in the room. It is likely that people won’t buy cars in the future, just rent them when they need them and they will be self driving. It will be almost like having a limousine at your beck and call. I wonder what that will do to car prices and limo prices?

Dramatic Changes Ahead

The auto industry is going to change dramatically over the next 10 to 20 years. More than at any time except perhaps the very beginning. This change might rival that. Cars will become self driving. You will be able to read a book, get work done, relax.

Presumably the car will be interconnected so it will know when there is traffic or road closures ahead and take a different route. GPS units are already basically doing this today.

But the biggest change will be ownership. Most of the car companies are assuming that at some point in the not too distant future, most people won’t own cars. Whenever they need one, they will just use their cell phone to call one to pick them up, somewhat the way Uber and other services work today. A driverless car would arrive and text or call your cell phone to let you know that it is there.

Will Professional Drivers Be Needed?

There are still plenty of places a human capacity for problem solving may be necessary to get through narrow spaces, especially for trucks dealing with tight places to turn around and deal with loading docks, etc.

How will this affect taxi cabs and limousine services? There is a good chance that taxi drivers will be out of a job. It is possible the Uber or possibly even the car companies will have a fleet of driverless vehicles. Cab companies could do the same thing. It will probably only work with consolidation though. It will be the end of small independent cab companies.

Limo companies are likely a different story. Part of the experience is having the chauffeur there, opening doors and helping people. The car may drive itself, but there will still probably be a need for chauffeurs. Will the pay go down? Will you need a drivers permit to be able to use a car the drives itself? If so, you could hire anyone to be a chauffeur.

Who will dominate the market and how?

So, the big question who will own and service these fleets of cars? Will it be GM and Ford and the others? Or one of the leasing companies? Or Tesla? Or Google? Or some new company? There are so many possibilities. It will be interesting to see who dives and and takes control of the market.

0

Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity

Posted By: adminfuturePosted On:

Who is Ray Kurzweil? While everyone has heard of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, many people have never heard of Ray Kurzweil. Despite that, Forbes magazine has called him the ultimate thinking machine and Inc. magazine called him the rightful heir to Thomas Edison. He was the main inventor of many technologies / devices including the first generalized optical character reader, the first CCD flat bed scanner, the first machine to synthesize speech from text, the first reading machine to translate text to speech, the first large vocabulary speech recognition to be commercially marketed, the first music synthesizer to be able to capture the sound of a grand piano and other orchestra instruments.

Singularity is Near

In 2005, Kurzweil wrote a book called The Singularity is Near. What is the Singularity? Many people have forecast it, not just Kurzweil. The first was probably the computer scientist John von Neumann in the 1950s. The idea is that as artificial intelligence and robots get smarter, they will reach a point where they could do something like thinking. They could design improvements for themselves.

Periods of Intellectual Evolution

Kurszweil breaks our evolution down into six epochs. At first we focussed on learning physics and chemistry. Then came biology and DNA, next the brain, followed by technology. He feels the next step will be a merging of human technology and human intelligence.

As I said in another post, we have been experiencing exponential growth in technology and learning. Kurzweil feels that it is in a way double exponential because there is incentive to put more money and resources into things that are growing rapidly and making money. Therefore they have more resources and discoveries which accelerates the pace even faster.

Increasing Paradigm Shifts

But, Kurzweil has a slight twist on this. He says that the growth may look smooth but is actually made up of different spurts. When there is a paradigm shift, it taks of slowly at first and then rapidly accelerates. But then it doesn’t keep accelerating, it maxes out and slows down. Kurzweil’s point is that when things start to slow down, people look for solutions and ways around the issue. A new paradigm shift is discovered and the process starts over, but they all blend together to make the process look smooth. He feels that paradigm shifts are becoming ever more common and the rate of change is accelerating.

He feels that Moore’s law will max out around 2020. He says that it is only the latest paradigm shift in computing. It started with electromechanical. If you saw the recent movie, The Imitation Game, that is what electromechanical computers were. Next was relay, followed by vacuum tubes and then transistors. He feels that something will replace integrated circuits, possibly carbon nanotubes and the acceleration will continue.

Understanding the Brain

He feels that to get to the singularity we need to understand the brain better. We could reverse engineer it, but he also suggests the possibility of uploading a brain so to speak. Copy every aspect of it digitally. But we don’t have the capability to do this now and Kurzweil doesn’t think we will have it until around 2040.

He also feels that with increasing knowledge of biology, medicine and genetics that we will basically be able to live forever. However, this increased knowledge will increase the ability of people to do bad things, such as destructive nanobots which could do more damage than suicide bombers.

Humans become Robots?

He feels that past the singularity we may no longer need our bodies and even though there may only be machines, that they will be essentially human because they will be imbued with our characteristics. But at the same time he says that it will allow our bodies to remain physically fit and healthy and that nanobots or some other technologies will allow us to change our bodies almost at will. But that makes no sense unless it is a step on the way to being completely machine based. Guess I need to read the book.

Also makes me wonder about battery technology. That is kind of a sticking point in all of this. Battery technology has definitely not been on an exponential curve.

Populating the Universe

He predicts that is only a short time after the Singularity that we begin to spread out and begin saturating the universe with intelligence. Since we have seen no evidence of any other intelligence out there, he feels that we are the first and it is our duty to expand through the universe. I am not sure I understand this, but it seems he feels that as we move past the singularity we will take on more and more of the attributes of a god or gods. I might be misrepresenting that one. My apologies if so.

Counter Views

Critiques of the book say Kurzweil has misunderstood some things. David Linden, a neuroscientist, says that although data collection is increasing exponentially, insight is increasing linearly.  He says that while the price and speed of sequencing genes is changing rapidly, our understanding of them is increasing much more slowly.

Theodore Modis doesn’t believe that anything increases exponentially forever. He feels that something called a logistics function is a better comparison or example. It eventually tops out and flattens.

However, Kurzweil has plenty of supporters as well. I guess we will see in the not too distant future, who is right!

 

0

What the Next 10 Years Will Look Like

Posted By: adminfuturePosted On:

An article in the Huffington Post interviews 7 futurists about what to expect in the next 10 years. So, what is a futurist? Pretty much what it sounds like. It is a person who spends his or her time thinking about the future, what the likely changes are based on current trends and making predictions.

Should we believe them? Well, the track record the past of the predictions coming true haven’t been great and of course it gets worse the further out in time you go. One of the key problems is that you can trend things out but you can’t predict paradigm shifts where something is invented or discovered that rapidly speeds up or changes development in one area or another. One minor example that didn’t even need a discovery or invention is gay marriage. Acceptance seemed to reach a tipping point in society and the change in society’s viewpoint on the subject changed far faster than anyone predicted. It also happened faster than most if not all social changes had in the past.

The first person mentioned in the article is Dr. Michio Kaku. You have probably seen him on TV on various science shows. He is a professor of theoretical physics. He thinks that in only 10 years we will have at least the beginnings of a Brainnet. Apparently scientists are already connecting the brain to computers and decoding some of our thoughts and memories. Dr. Kaku thinks that we will be able to transmit thoughts, memories, feelings and emotions aroung the world. Historians will be able to record a much broader history based on this and he predicted that just as teenagers now post selfies from their prom, that they will be posting memories and feelings from the prom in the future.

Next up is Dr. Ray Kurzweil. He was key in inventing scanners and reading machines for the blind and many other inventions. He is now working at Google. Part of his prediction focuses on 3D printing. He thinks it will have advanced so far that we will print out our clothing and will download the latest clothing designs from top designers and print them out. More amazingly he predicts that we will be able to print out organs or print out repairs to organs. I know people are hard at work on this but thought it was further away than 10 years. He also forecasts that we will spend more time in virtual realities reacting with avatars. Some of these avatars might even be our deceased relatives. They will be recreated through emails, letters etc. He feels that they will be realistic enough but not quite right to be kind of creepy. He feels that by 2030, with the ability to record more aspects of the brain as Dr. Kaku was talking about above, that the avatars will feel realistic.

Dr. Anne Lise-Kjaer founded a forecasting agency in London. She says that the World Health Organization believes the 75% of all deaths in 2020 will be from chronic diseases like diabetes and heart problems. She sees medical technology being able to track people better on a day to day basis and keep them healthier and also diagnose problems sooner so corrective action can be taken before it has progressed very far. She is particularly heartened by apps that can help with mental diseases, not just physical diseases.

Dr. James Canton, head of Institute for Global Futures thinks that the internet of things will continue to expand and by 2025 most of the world will be amazingly connected. No big surprise there. But he also predicts that artificial intelligence will become as smart or smarter than humans. He says humans and robots will merge to treat patients around the world. My question is, why just in medicine? Wouldn’t this happen in all occupations? He also sees dramatic advances in personalized medicine and personal genetic medicine. Finally he sees a next generation Bitcoin that will replace paper money and coins.

Jason Silva – You know him as the host of National Geographic’s Brain Games. He feels that the on-demand model used in manufacturing will move into many or all aspects of life. There will be self driving cars so most people won’t own cars, they will just summon one with their smart phone when they need one.

Dr. Amy Zalman, head of the World Future Society, is intrigued by the possibilities from what we are learning about the brain and how people function. One example is that a study recently found that heads of companies had less stress than people working in the company. An Israeli study found that judges gave out heavier sentences before lunch when they were hungry. She hopes that as we discover things like this that we can make the world a fairer place and that we can have business and government function more effectively and fairly.

Mark Stevenson is the author of An Optimist’s Tour of the Future. He has a different take in that he likes the technologies but feels that our present institutions are holding back change. He feels we need to figure out new ways to organize ourselves. So he is looking at things like the movement in India for open source drug discovery.

0

Will We Recognize the Future?

Posted By: adminfuturePosted On:

If aliens make contact with us, will we even recognize it or them? Presumably, as in movies such as Contact, a simple form of math will be the key to unlocking the communication if it is possible.

But the problem is, if they have figured out a way to visit us, they are far more sophisticated and advanced than we are now. And if we receive a communication, how long has it taken to get here and how long will it take to send a message back. Will their civilization even still exist when we send a return message?

Think about our history. We began the stone age about 2.5 million years ago. It took until 5,500 years ago to begin to move to the bronze age. Then the iron age about 3,000 years ago. Then the first steam  engine was invented about 300 years ago. The first electric motor was created about 150 years ago.

The first train and the first car were just after 1800. The first plane flew in 1903. We landed on the moon in 1969. So it only took 66 years from the first time we were able to figure out how to have powered flight to landing on the moon. One lifetime!

The first general purpose computer was built in 1945 (ENIAC) and the first integrated circuit was in 1958.

The speed of knowledge accumulation seemed for the longest time like it was on a straight line. But the last several hundred years have shown that it was just the beginning of an exponential curve. Could people from 200 years ago understand today’s technology? It would be difficult. A lot of people living today don’t understand today’s technology.

In another 200 years at the present rate of increase, where will we be? Most of this change has happened over 5,000 years and the bulk of the change has happened over the last 200 years. When compared to geological times scales, this is less than a blink of an eye. So if another civilization on another planet in another solar system got started 10,000 years before us, which is essentially at exactly the same time in geological terms when you look at the age of the universe, galaxy and solar system, there is little chance we would understand anything that was 10,000 years more advanced than where we are now.

Is it more likely that as knowledge accumulates that it will be an S curve and start slowing down with time? Or is it likely to keep rapidly expanding. If it is an S curve, we have a chance of catching up enough to understand. If not, which is more likely, they might consider us as pets the way we treat dogs and cats. Or at least as curiosities. Any real communication might be difficult or impossible. Do we really want to have contact with aliens considering the likely technological differences?

0