Lets talk about the future.

[Johnny5]

This conversation is absolutely fascinating, when I initially proposed the topic I hadn’t imagined it would head in this direction. While I understand some are weary of a future where we allow greed, hate and indulgence to destroy us I believe we will innovate beyond that. When automation is ubiquitous and humans are allowed more and more time to contemplate our own existence.

My hope is for a future where the “human cost” of everything is so low we can provide the 5 basic necessities to everyone on the planet there will be less need for war. Yes it will start with the developed world, if you look around the only places really destabilizing on the globe now are doing so because of religion. Most of that destabilization is done because of lack of information, education and the few holding all the cards. When the internet is provided free of charge, and even the richest most powerful warlords and dictators cannot stop people from seeing just how small the world is we may see a shift of power from the few to the many.

We will reach a time where everything is so cheap we won’t need to fight over power, water, and information. There will come a time where your consciousness can be uploaded to a cloud in some sort of life extension program and I believe it will be at this point where we have been able to innovate beyond religion. When second life is real who needs the promise of heaven?

We may choose to share “stupid” things on Facebook but at no time ever have humans had the means to be connected to each other in such a way. I think Reddit is a better example of crowd sourced human connection. In this example the cream is allowed to filter to the top and even something on a very obscure sub reddit can make it to the front at times.

Some one talked about the printing press being a waste of time and unnecessary earlier. There was a time when the world functioned a little bit like a giant computer. Information was exchanged at a shower pace using ships instead of transistors. In order to assure everyone was on the same page the British standardized education (reading, writing and arithmetic) obviously this was post printing press but pre computer. They needed to ensure that when a letter was written in India or Australia it could be read with ease in Britain. Every one needed to be able to do the same math and know the same basic things. Now we have innovated beyond the need for this type of education. We have moved beyond the need to remember much of anything besides whatever it takes to effectively google it (in this case I use google as a verb meaning “to search” not necessarily with the Google search engine).

There are many problems facing us in the future though. I touched on this in the Uber thread but I am deeply worried about an automated future making most of humanity as we know it unemployable. We only have room for so many highly skilled jobs. I do believe (perhaps in vain) that a StarTrek-esk future is on the horizon.

I talked before about the 5 necessities for human life

• Food and fresh water
• Clothing
• Housing
• Healthcare
• Education

The 6th is purpose, without it humans tend to waver and float through life aimlessly. Some are happy playing Xbox all day long and there will be those that do. But when we are able to provide these 5 things to everyone on the planet free of charge it will open up so much more time to innovate and create things we have never imagines before.

I hope by this time @897934-884 will be tired of rubbing two sticks together and invent a fucking hover board already.

Sorry if this reply seems a bit disjointed I just woke up.

[Rick in China]

@Johnny5

I don’t really think those 5 are necessities for life, necessities for quality life perhaps, but I think you’re missing a super-important-necessity for life: sex. Technology is helping with that one, too, of course!

[Maz]

The future is behind us. We missed it! Now we’re heading for some other shit, some people’s wild and wet dreams.

The future has decided long ago that it doesn’t need us.

[Charlie]

Johnny5 wrote:

I touched on this in the Uber thread but I am deeply worried about an automated future making most of humanity as we know it unemployable. We only have room for so many highly skilled jobs. I do believe (perhaps in vain) that a StarTrek-esk future is on the horizon.

This point alone is really interesting and we are coming right up this problem right now, in the coming years. One major way that is happening is related to Uber, and involves automated cars. At this point there’s really no doubt that cars will be automated in the near future, but no one knows what the effects of this will be. I read this article recently which I found riveting: How Uber’s Autonomous Cars Will Destroy 10 Million Jobs and Reshape the Economy by 2025

The tl;dr version is: Truck, bus, delivery and taxi drivers make up 6 million people in the United States alone. Automated cars will eliminate all of these jobs and many more, but no one knows what effect this will have on society and the economy.

This is technology making millions of people’s jobs obsolete virtually overnight. We’ve seen variations of the same theme; previously human jobs becoming automated:

• Farming & agriculture
• Clerks at checkout counters
• Manufacturing

Robots are coming for your job. That article does a great job summing it up. Who would you rather have prepare a hamburger for you: a machine which can do it perfectly every time or someone working for minimum wage who probably isn’t motivated to do more than the bare minimum?

Over the last 10-15 years I have seen automation change a lot of the industries that I’ve worked in:

DJ’ing: it used to take a lot of time and effort to learn how to DJ. You had to invest a lot in equipment, physically go to record stores to buy records and learn to mix them, etc. Now I could teach a monkey how to DJ with software that does all of the hard work for you. You can see this in the insane proliferation of DJs, even in Chengdu. The vast majority of them cannot beat match, which 10-15 years ago was considered the first skill that every DJ must learn. You can still DJ the old way, but most people don’t because it’s much easier to just take the shortcut and most people won’t notice anyway.

Web development: it used to demand coding, now there’s a virtually limitless selection of pre-built websites that you can customize or tools that write all of the code for you. You can still make websites the old way, but most people don’t because it’s much easier to just take the shortcut and most people won’t notice anyway.

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