http://singularityhub.com/2015/05/11/the-world-in-2025-8-predictions-for-the-next-10-years/
Go check it out, it's a great read and a valuable resource.
However, some of the claims, like an exact speed threshold from which could decide to call something "A $1,000 Human Brain" got me going. I could not let that pass.
So here, for what's it's worth, are my own comments, confirmations and counter-claims for the Year 2025 (original text in blue highlights):
1. A $1,000 Human brain
In 2025, $1,000 should buy you a computer able to calculate at 10^16 cycles per second (10,000 trillion cycles per second), the equivalent processing speed of the human brain.
Speed is no indication of performance. The architectures of the human brain and a computer are so different that reaching this threshold of speed in no way makes it a "human" brain.
We may well end up with programs or parallel-processing machines which emulate the architecture of the human brain more accurately than today's computers, but this is not the metric to look at.
2. A Trillion-Sensor Economy
The Internet of Everything describes the networked connections between devices, people, processes and data. By 2025, the IoE will exceed 100 billion connected devices, each with a dozen or more sensors collecting data. This will lead to a trillion-sensor economy driving a data revolution beyond our imagination. Cisco's recent report estimates the IoE will generate $19 trillion of newly created value.
This is happening. To what extend all this new data amounts to "newly created value" depends entirely on what we do with this information. Information does not usually deliver value until it can be turned into knowledge.
3. Perfect Knowledge
We're heading towards a world of perfect knowledge. With a trillion sensors gathering data everywhere (autonomous cars, satellite systems, drones, wearables, cameras), you'll be able to know anything you want, anytime, anywhere, and query that data for answers and insights.
With perfect knowledge comes perfect falsehood. Just having lots and lots of information does not mean we know more.
However, the examples given mainly relate to information derived at first hand, so in general the quality of knowledge will go up. I wonder if we will see a move towards creating deliberate falsehoods on some of these channels? Vested interests suggest we will - along with increasing moves by industry and by states that are beholden to industry, to limit the reach of free-flying and wearable sensors, and legal challenges to the use of information people don't like.
4. 8 Billion Hyper-Connected People
Facebook (Internet.org), SpaceX, Google (Project Loon), Qualcomm and Virgin (OneWeb) are planning to provide global connectivity to every human on Earth at speeds exceeding one megabit per second.
We will grow from three to eight billion connected humans, adding five billion new consumers into the global economy. They represent tens of trillions of new dollars flowing into the global economy. And they are not coming online like we did 20 years ago with a 9600 modem on AOL. They're coming online with a 1 Mbps connection and access to the world's information on Google, cloud 3D printing, Amazon Web Services, artificial intelligence with Watson, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, and more.
Most likely. And the new arrivals will be a lot less tolerant of the level of geekhood that most of us have taken for granted. The first wave of people connected to the Internet were native geeks (and a few hangers-on like me); the second wave have been turned into geeks by Facebook and conditioned (by the purveyors of hand held devices) to put up with a shocking loss of control of their information and apps.
In East Africa people already use the Internet and mobile connectivity for payments and so on, at greater sophistication than most Western folk. The winner in this next part of the race will be those who can make internet applications interface sensibly to normal people without requiring them to think like geeks. This third wave will demand it.
5. Disruption of Healthcare
Existing healthcare institutions will be crushed as new business models with better and more efficient care emerge. Thousands of startups, as well as today's data giants (Google, Apple, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, etc.) will all enter this lucrative $3.8 trillion healthcare industry with new business models that dematerialize, demonetize and democratize today's bureaucratic and inefficient system.
Biometric sensing (wearables) and AI will make each of us the CEOs of our own health. Large-scale genomic sequencing and machine learning will allow us to understand the root cause of cancer, heart disease and neurodegenerative disease and what to do about it. Robotic surgeons can carry out an autonomous surgical procedure perfectly (every time) for pennies on the dollar. Each of us will be able to regrow a heart, liver, lung or kidney when we need it, instead of waiting for the donor to die.
There was an article in the US about 100 years ago predicting things we would see in the next 100 years. Nearly all of them were substantively right, apart from the one predicting universal free health care for all Americans.
All these technical innovations are happening, but the question of who gets them is one of politics (cost etc.) not technology. Unless there is the political will to address free healthcare across the board, these innovations will mean that people with high incomes will be healthier and live longer than those without.
6. Augmented and Virtual Reality
Billions of dollars invested by Facebook (Oculus), Google (Magic Leap), Microsoft (Hololens), Sony, Qualcomm, HTC and others will lead to a new generation of displays and user interfaces.
The screen as we know it — on your phone, your computer and your TV — will disappear and be replaced by eyewear. Not the geeky Google Glass, but stylish equivalents to what the well-dressed fashionistas are wearing today. The result will be a massive disruption in a number of industries ranging from consumer retail, to real estate, education, travel, entertainment, and the fundamental ways we operate as humans.
This is coming, but I think the statement about the way it will pan out, is a mistake.
The things that could be enabled by the use of VR goggles and the like, could have been enabled any time since the mid 90s by a simple shift in the way that people are expected to interact with information. William Gibson set out the vision in 1985 (Neuromancer, describing cyberspace).
But the experience of immersion can be replicated on a flat screen, albeit less dramatically. A true cyberspace implementation would be usable both on flat screen / tablet and with immersive goggles, and would be independent of the medium.
If people didn't have the imagination to see this before, there is nothing to make me optimistic of them achieving it now just because there are goggles. There needs to be a disruption to the operation system itself, not just the user interface. See also (4) above.
Meanwhile, expect to see a big increase in geo-located head-up displays, with people running to get to a restaurant before their battery goes flat.
7. Early Days of JARVIS
Artificial intelligence research will make strides in the next decade. If you think Siri is useful now, the next decade's generation of Siri will be much more like JARVIS from Iron Man, with expanded capabilities to understand and answer. Companies like IBM Watson, DeepMind and Vicarious continue to hunker down and develop next-generation AI systems. In a decade, it will be normal for you to give your AI access to listen to all of your conversations, read your emails and scan your biometric data because the upside and convenience will be so immense.
Watson still uses brute statistical force over any real understanding of meaning, according to most insider accounts (there is some mention of ontology). Artificial intelligence took a wrong turn in the 1980s and, at least in the kinds of apps that are being cited as game-changers, shows no sign of returning. Brute force statistics usually gives the right answers and requires no-one to understand how meaning works. Last time I checked into a hotel in Shanghai and passed the receipt through Google Translate, it got every word right except the name of the hotel, which it replaced with the statistically more probable Hyatt. That's not so useful when the reason I wanted the thing translated was so as to be able to find the hotel.
So we can expect to see a linear progression in the results achievable by brute force statistics. Things won't progress to a different kind of intelligence as long as this route remains commercially viable.
8. Blockchain
If you haven't heard of the blockchain, I highly recommend you read up on it. You might have heard of bitcoin, which is the decentralized (global), democratized, highly secure cryptocurrency based on the blockchain. But the real innovation is the blockchain itself, a protocol that allows for secure, direct (without a middleman), digital transfers of value and assets (think money, contracts, stocks, IP). Investors like Marc Andreesen have poured tens of millions into the development and believe this is as important of an opportunity as the creation of the Internet itself.
Definitely one to watch. Again, from what we have seen in East AFrica, it will be the newer wave of Internet adopters who really drive this forward, especially in rural and informal economies, and in cultures like Africa where economic activity tends to work from the bottom up.
Bottom Line: We Live in the Most Exciting Time Ever
We always have. Except maybe in the 14th century
Postscript
As a useful illustration to my comments on (7), when I posted my comments to the article on Facebook, that system decided that the word "brain" in line 1 should be replaced by the name of an account I know of that begins with the word "brain". I had to go back in and edit that out. Expect to see a lot more of that sort of annoyance as a result of more badly thought out intelligence trying to help us with brute force statistics.
Any thoughts or comments?
