Within the next thirty to forty years, advancements made in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics will completely reshape human existence.

Aging will be reversible, production of anything will be as cheap as the base materials (plentiful carbon atoms), and we'll be supplementing our biological intelligence with computers.

The last is the most important, because the resulting "intelligence explosion," with each hyper-intelligent generation designing the next, is so far outside the realm of what is currently possible that we can't predict what will happen. The biological portion of our intelligence will be obsolete within my lifetime.

So my question is as follows:

I am twenty-four years old. That puts me at an interesting spot chronologically...I will very likely be alive to take advantage of these advances, expanding my lifespan and intelligence as far as I want. However, the bulk of my "productive years," in the traditional sense, will take place in the current paradigm.

Aside from taking the necessary precautions to assure that I don't die prematurely, do I otherwise continue as normal? How do I reconcile my current career (managing a group of bar/grills) with the knowledge that 20/30 years out, people won't "need" to eat?

Should I focus on amassing enough personal wealth to make sure I don't die a few years before the technology gets affordable?

Should I apply my considerable intelligence towards these fields and help usher in the revolution?

Or should I just relax, take peace in the knowledge that all of our "long term problems" (global warming, social security, nuclear waste, etc...)are going to be non-issues, let others do the work in this inevitable process, and wait for it become ubiquitous?

It's an odd question...how do you plan for a future that's totally unrecognizable?

One really can't plan for an unimaginable future. I think you are making assumptions based on "best-case" scenarios and that the kind of intelligence you expect may not occur when you expect, and possibly not at all.

My advice is to guard your health, try to make a living and continue as if most human attributes are not going to be radically altered en masse in the next few decades.

I would advise you to worry about the issues you say are going to be non-issues, such as global warming, nuclear WAR and so on, since those problems really do need to be worked on if humans want to continue to have a habitable biosphere at all.

Computational power has been doubling every 1 to 2 years, without fail, since computing was invented. That's exponential growth.

Furthermore, the rate of the doubling is, itself, increasing, as more and more research $$$ are put into it.

In the same way that your Iphone is millions of times more capable than computers 40 years ago, computers 40 year from now will be TRILLIONS of times more powerful than computers are today. There have already been successful experiments conducted in which DNA molecules or even single atoms have performed computations. With molecular or quantum computing on the horizon, it's hard to see computing hitting a wall.

Nuclear war is of course an issue to be worried about, since it's an immediate threat. Nuclear waste, not so much...it may take 10,000 years to dispose of today, but we'll soon have the methods to render it harmless.

Global warming is caused by too much CO2 in the atmosphere. The nanotechnology revolution will require mass amounts of carbon to construct all the stuff we'll want to use. It'll be an obvious win/win to snatch the carbon right from the air and use it to build lawnchairs. Just careful that we don't take so much as to cause global cooling!

As you pointed out computors are developing and will keep developing far beyond our imagination today. In the end we will barely be needed at all, but for keeping the machines trimmed. Most of us will not work at all. So how will we survive?
My vision is a society where there is no money anymore, food housing and other essentials needed for a decent life is produced by machines and shared by all, produced as smartly as possible with a minimum of waste. We have gotten rid of the capitalistic system as ever increased consumption of limited resources will be impossible.
Instead of money we will use fame, titles, honor, etc, as a way to motivate people. I even belive those are better motivators than money.
Utopia? Today maybe, but within the next century? The alternative is ofcourse another world war or some other cataclysmic ordeal rooting out most of the population ..

Last Edited : Thursday, 6 October 2011 - 08:45

Most people will supplement their biological intelligence with non-biological intelligence. Non-enhanced humans, if any choose to remain that way, will enjoy a comfortable lifestyle in the way our pets do...they won't be in control of their own destiny.

The enhanced humans will still keep everything we define as "human" today...artistic ability, physical sensation, emotional intelligence. The idea that we'll fall into discreet categories of "human" and "machine" is understandable, given the cold, calculating nature of machines today...but once computers pass the Turing test (become indistinguishable from human intelligence), who's to say what's "human" and what's not?

The voice controlled iphone is already here. You no longer need to learn anything really. All answers are availble instantly via the internet. This will make people (in general) even more stupid and lazy than they already are

Even if you can afford it, do you think they'll have the tech to deal with Yellowstone within the next few hundred years?

rex

I wasn't aware there was a crisis at Yellowstone, let alone one more formidable than changing the nature of humanity. Share?

When that one blows life as we know it will be over..

Yellowstone is a supervolcano which has been claimed to be ~40K years overdue ...
admittedly Wiki has toned down recent worry concerning the rising dome within the caldera which they claim has subsided in the past few years;

but according to this video, an eruption is inevitable:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Vn6kxfD3Ek

This is something new to me also, very informative video, ive spent the last short while watching many videos on the supervolcanos of the world, hopefully none of us are around when they start to go

Reasons not to be concerned about a catastrophic volcano eruption in Yellowstone:

(1. The consensus among professional geologists (you know, those guys who aren't googling "yellowstone volcano" like I just did) don't think it's going to happen anytime soon.

(2. The idea that we're "overdue" is a faulty one. The volcano has only erupted three times: 2.1 MYA, 1.3 MYA, and 650,000 years ago. That's not enough data to draw a scientific conclusion...and even if we were going to, you'd see that the volcano erupts, on average, every 725,000 years. That means we've still got 75,000 years before we're "due."

(3. By the end of the century, we'll all be hyper-intelligent robots, will have figured out the intricacies of plate tectonics, and will have solved the problem one way or another. There really is no limit on what you can accomplish with unlimited resources and umlimited intelligence.

Well in my original post, I did ask if you think they'll have the tech to deal with Yellowstone some day and I do hope you're right that we won't have to worry about it for another 75K years;
but in the past decade they were worried about the dome of earth above the caldera rising:

"en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_Caldera
"The upward movement of the Yellowstone caldera floor—almost 3 inches (7.6 cm) each year between 2004 and 2008—was more than three times greater than ever observed since such measurements began in 1923.[22] From mid-Summer 2004 through mid-Summer 2008, the land surface within the caldera moved upwards, as much as 8 inches (20 cm) at the White Lake GPS station.[23][24] By the end of 2009, the uplift had slowed significantly and appeared to have stopped.[25] In January 2010, the USGS stated "that uplift of the Yellowstone Caldera has slowed significantly" [26] and uplift continues but at a slower pace.[27] The U.S. Geological Survey, University of Utah and National Park Service scientists with the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory maintain that they "see no evidence that another such cataclysmic eruption will occur at Yellowstone in the foreseeable future.""

As already mentioned though, the Wiki does say that the rising has significantly slowed to the extent that they are apparently not worried about it now.

Anyway, I've had the thought that they could somehow relieve the pressure, but I've read that they're actually concerned about setting off the eruption by messing with it ... the thought also crossed my mind:
no wonder they taught us about 'Old Faithful' when we were kids.

rex

Last Edited : Friday, 7 October 2011 - 18:05

ROBOT PANTS ARE A REALITY: TODAY!

a5.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/312133_10100366746578944_23316459_50029777_1711177431_n.jpg

Here's something that impressed me:
www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-05-06-double-hand-transplant_N.htm

In the original article I read though, I thought he got both hands and feet transplanted, but anyway, my question is:
are they able to connect nerve endings now?

They didn't used to be able to do that ...
I mean are this guys hands just for show or do they actually work?

Admittedly I didn't read the whole article.

rex

Nerve endings connected...he'll be able to use them like normal hands!

10 to 15 years from now, we shouldn't even need a donor. It should be easy enough to clone new body parts from your own DNA!

Example: Recently, Dr. Stephen Badylak from the McGowan Institute of Regenerative Medicine helped a patient with esophageal cancer regrow the lining of their esophagus! After removing the damaged tissue, he prompted the patient's own stem cells to repair the damage. This allowed to patient to avoid having their esophagus removed!

Also, check out the precursor to nanobot technology: MICROBOTS. They're the size of a pinhead and levitate using magnets.

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=sri-magnetic-microbot-construction

They can construct objects on such a tiny level of detail that microbots will be what we end up using to build even smaller (nano) robots!

Last Edited : Monday, 24 October 2011 - 03:55

Ever see the old sci/fi "The Incredible Shrinking Man"?
That movie fascinated me years later with the idea that if man were only 6" tall, our problems on Earth would be over ...
Earth could probably support 12 times our present population with no problem if man could be genetically down-sized over the next thousand years or so.

Actually, I believe even now that we're lagging in terraform technology and that the Earth could really support 10xs our present population if for example the Sahara were terraformed along with the deserts of Australia and of the rest of the world.

rex

Last Edited : Monday, 24 October 2011 - 08:46

If man were 6" tall, cats and dogs would have eaten us all long ago

Last Edited : Monday, 24 October 2011 - 08:53

Not with laser armed 1/8" robots to scare them off.

I find people who think the earth could support a lot more humans to be naive or worse. We have come up to the edge of many different resources, perhaps the most important being water supplies. The environment has been degraded in all respects, depleted energy supplies, fishing out the oceans, tearing down forests, nuclear waste and nuclear pollution spreading over the earth, etc. Not to mention climate change and the attendant problems from that.

In any case, the idea that the earth could hold even the amount of people we have now with minimum living standards had been shown to be untenable. We need far less, not tons more humans on earth in order to think about sustaining our species indefinitely. I have seen estimates that put the largest population that allows sustainability at about a billion, and even then, only if we lived very cleanly and with low-impact.

As for Sage's desires, they are for elitists only, I think. I imagine we need to be less industrially based rather than more in order to bequeath a reasonable earth to future generations. I can hear them cursing us as I write. More farms, less roads. More vegetables, less meat and fish.

Minus Population Growth!