What Will Sex Be Like In The Future?
The concepts in this article are based on the works of researchers including Ray Kurzweil, Daniel Burrus, Steven Hawking, and several others. If you disagree with anything in this article, go argue with them, not me.
Recently I had an interesting experience. I was working away in my home office, being productive as usual, and suddenly a tear in the space-time continuum appeared in the air, hovering over my desk(!). As I backed away in shock, a voice came from the small wormhole. In seconds, I realized it was my voice.
Having a brief conversation with the voice, I realized that it was the future version of myself, talking to me from the year 2045. At first I thought it was all bullshit, but I asked future-me about some very personal, private information Iâve never told anyone and never written down. Sure enough, he knew it all, convincing me that it was indeed me.
We talked at length about the future, regarding my own life, my family, political shifts in the world, future economic events, things like that. Soon the conversation switched to sex, and I made sure to audio record that part so I could transcribe it and make a blog post here for you guys. What follows is that conversation.
Me: So do I get laid a lot in 2045?
Future Me: Oh yeah. Almost every day in the virtual world, a few times a week in the real world.
Me: Really? Uh, Iâm 73 years old in 2045. Iâm having sex every day at that age? I have sex only three days a week now at age 43!
Future Me: Well, youâre 73 years in numerical age now, but that doesnât really mean anything anymore. With genome therapy during the late 2020s and nanotech enhancements in the 2030s, your biological age right now is about 28, although you look about age 37, since you prefer to look like youâre in your late 30s.
Me: Actually yeah, I consider age 37 to be the ideal age for a man in terms of physical appearance.
Future Me: Yup, thatâs exactly how old I look, because that’s the age I chose to look. Though internally Iâm equal to about age 28, maybe 26. The nanobots within me clean out all impurities, replace damaged cells, repair DNA, and a whole host of other things. âAging,â as you understand it, no longer exists in the civilized world.
Me: I suppose you guys already cured cancer, so I never got it.
Future Me: Well, âcureâ isnât quite the right word, but essentially yes. We prevented most cancer with genome therapy by the late 2020s. There are a few stubborn types of cancer we were never able to prevent, so these days the nanobots in our bloodstream automatically prevent any cancer cells from replicating, so itâs pretty much the same thing.
Me: Then I assume youâre having sex with younger women and older women? Like I do now?
Future Me: Well, again, the concept of age these days doesnât really apply. I have sex with women who are way younger and way older in numerical age, but in biological terms theyâre usually much different than their numerical age. Theyâre all pretty hot, because they choose to look that way, regardless of numerical age. I have sex with AIs too, where age isnât a relevant concept at all.
Me: Whoa, wait a minute. Iâm going to have sex with computers? You mean sex robots?
Future Me: Haha. No. Like I said, much of the sex I have is in the virtual world. I spend a lot of time there. In there, Iâm having sex with women who are also visiting. But Iâm not literally having sex with them, rather their virtual selves, what you used to call âavatars.â But since computers surpassed human intelligence several years ago, I also have sex with what you used to call AIs. These are computer people in the virtual world indistinguishable from real human beings.
Me: So you mean you plug into the Matrix like Keanu Reeves with an access port in your head?
Future Me: Ha! No, no! Nothing so primitive. I have several billion nanobots in my brain resting on almost every neuron. All I have to do is âthinkâ myself in the virtual world and Iâm there. The nanobots transmit the signals to my brain as if theyâre real, like Iâm really experiencing them. I canât tell the difference. There are lots of virtual worlds, hundreds of thousands in fact, just like web sites in your time. Remember when you were a kid, and you wished you could really enter a world like Lord of the Rings or Dungeons and Dragons?
Me: Yeah!
Future Me: Well, thatâs often where I hang out in my free time. Sometimes I even work there. I like the fantasy worlds, though some of the sci-fi worlds are fun too. There are many virtual worlds based on Tolkienâs Middle Earth. I just had sex with Lady Galadriel last month. In a tree.
Me: Whoa!!! Thatâs crazy. And awesome.
Future Me: I thought youâd think so. But in the virtual world, youâre not limited by your appearance and neither is anyone else. You can look like anything you want, and have sex with people who look like anything they want. You can even switch genders, so you can feel what itâs like to be a woman getting pounded by a man. You can even swap identities with your lover, so you can feel what itâs like to be a woman getting pounded by you.
Me: Jesus. Gross. Donât tell me youâve actually done that…
Future Me: No, Iâm old-fashioned about that stuff. Itâs just too weird for me, being raised way back in the 1980s. But your grandkids have. They love doing it. I think your kids might have too. Stuff like that is a normal thing now for the newer generations. Since the left-wingers took over most governments several decades ago, itâs pretty much anything goes in the virtual world in terms of sex, and to a large degree the real world too.
Me: Oh yeah. Forgot about that. The liberals. No libertarians in 2045, is there?
Future Me: In the real world they donât have much power, but there are huge libertarian virtual worlds and right-wing virtual worlds too. The virtual world is heavily decentralized like your internet, so it’s not really something governments can regulate. I spend a lot of time in two of my favorite libertarian worlds, and even make a lot of real-life money from businesses Iâve started in there. I donât visit the left-wing worlds for obvious reasons…too socialist, very little financial freedom, and WAY too much political correctness. I stay out of the right-wing worlds too…they do monogamy there, and have their cerebral nanobots configured so that life-long Disney monogamy actually works now.
Me: Lifetime monogamy, even in a virtual world, sounds pretty boring to me.
Future Me: It is. But the right-wingers like it. So do the religious types. It works for them.
Me: Okay, thatâs fine for the virtual stuff, but what about sex in real life?
Future Me: Itâs like I said. Everyone here looks decently young. Aging no longer exists the way you think of it. And we can eat whatever we want and not gain any weight, since the nanobots in our GI tract burn up any bad stuff before it gets absorbed by the body. Frankly, we really donât even need to eat any more; it’s become a thing we do for novelty or pleasure. The only âoldâ or âfatâ people in this time are those who choose to look that way because they like it, or those in the third world who have rejected the technology, or those who are just farting around. Most people look decently young and decently attractive, regardless of numerical age.
Me: So itâs like that stupid Justin Timberlake movie, In Time, where everyone stops aging at 25? So everyone looks the same age?
Future Me: Not exactly, since lots of people like to look much older than 25, including yourself. Lots of guys are sporting the old-but-hot Sean Connery-type look. It really depends. But yeah, most of the women like to look young, so itâs similar to that movie but not the same. There are various biological ages, and that includes the AIs.
Me: Wait a minute. AIs? There are AIs in the real world too?
Future Me: Of course. One of my current MLTRs is an AI. Sheâs super hot. Kind of a smartass too.
Me: Ah ha! So there ARE sex robots! I was right about that prediction!
Future Me: Well, actually no. At least, not the way you think of as a ârobot.â Sheâs not some metal or plastic thing. Sheâs a nanotech AI, fully nanotech from the ground up, with a brain designed just like our own enhanced human brains, and with real flesh. Sheâs also just as smart as a human. Actually more so, since she can think much faster and efficiently than you or I can. You really canât tell the difference. Biological and non-biological really arenât two different things any more. Weâre actually experimenting now with biological humans assuming fully nanotech bodies, so that we can get on-par with the non-biologicals.
Me: What? How does that work?
Future Me: Remember the movie Virtuosity, where Russell Crowe was from a virtual computer world and made from nanotech in the real world?
Me: Yeah.
Future Me: Itâs sort of like that. The AIs with nanotech bodies can instantly repair themselves, and even change shape into something completely different. We biologicals will be like that soon, in another ten years or less.
Me: Wow. You know, this is all so radically different from anything we know of today. Iâm pretty sure that if I told other people this, theyâd say, âWell yeah, this will happen someday, but not for another 100 years. Itâs not going to happen by the 2040s.â
Future Me: Yeah, you guys back then kept making that mistake.
Me: What mistake?
Future Me: Assuming that the rate of technological growth was linear instead of exponential. Guys who think this stuff wonât happen for another 100 years think that it wonât happen for another 100 years at the current 2015 rate of technological growth. The problem is the rate of growth isnât going to stay at 2015 levels forever. Your society, even in 2015, has already stumbled into an exponential technological growth curve. This means the rate of technological growth shoots up like a hockey stick on a graph, instead of remaining a constant, straight, rising line, which is what most people assume. So saying âit wonât happen for 100 more yearsâ is technically right, but the human race will experience 100 years of technological growth in the next 20-25, because the rate of growth is accelerating at an increasingly exponential rate.
Me: Hm. That actually makes sense.
Future Me: Yeah. Itâs just that most folks arenât ready to hear this stuff yet. But you know all about that already, donât you? Back in 2015, people were still trying to make lifetime monogamy work, right?
Me: Oh yeah. Tell me about it. Theyâre still trying and failing. And getting pissed off when you try to provide them with another way.
Future Me: Heh. Yeah. Well, donât worry. That problem will fix itself soon, relatively speaking. These days, âmonogamyâ isnât even a concern or discussion. Different groups of people just do what they want, either in reality or virtually. If they canât, they set their nanobots so they can. Problem solved.
Me: Sounds nice.
Future Me: It is. Things arenât perfect of course, and we have our problems, but youâre having a great time here.
Me: Good. Thatâs all I wanted to hear.
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Interesting post. Wonder if it will actually happen in my lifetime. Although the “switching genders” thing I would rather not think about!
Timberlake’s movie “In Time” could of been a great movie. Interesting to think about; pre-programmed with the amount of time we have and using time as a currency. They took that great premise and turned it into an “us versus the evil rich guys” plot though. Bleh.
Why was the main rich evil bad guy just sitting on a million years in the bank? How come he hadn’t invested any of that? Why not keep 100k years and invest the rest? And why was everyone split into separate time areas? Who is going to clean the rich guys mansion? Who does all the work in the rich time area? Why would the rich voluntarily create a system that forced them to display their worth (time) on their person? (of course, off person storage is one work around)
Were the writers so ignorant of how currency works that the only way the rich got ahead in this fantasy world was to raise interest rates on time loans and cause inflation on everything else?
If you get divorced in that world, does the judge take half of your time and give it to your ex-wife?
Think you wasted time being married?? Wait until you have to give literally half your life to her!!
I firmly believe there will be a huge fight against any kid of lifelike sex-bots from the fems. It’s along the lines of male birth control pills which would put more power in our hands for reproduction. If this comes to pass, it will diminish their sway over men, especially betas who struggle to get laid and can catch oneitis very easily. Sex-bots will alleviate their need and give them the release they need without submitting to a dominant female. Those who have power always fear to lose it.
On a sidenote, I did battle with a friend’s GF this weekend over my non-monogomous ways. A couple of your recent posts came into play. I was able to recognize her as a Dominant type(my friend I’d call a more confident beta, but beta none the less) and see through her disdain. I’m a threat and she doesn’t know how to handle a guy that won’t submit to her monogomy demands. She said there are 3 guys-nice(beta), honest(alpha 2.0) and assholes(alpha 1.0). She said I’m honest but not nice since I won’t date 1 woman at a time. It’s so much more fun to have these debates now seeing thing through the “red pill” lens if you will.
I recently saw the movie Self/Less and had the same thoughts. Great concept, but Hollywood simply isn’t equipped to handle these kinds of deep issues. They appeal to too broad a market.
Agree. Women will NOT like it at all.
I’ve said this before: Once we have viable, realistic sex robots that are under $1000 (which will happen WAY before 2045), it will be the greatest shift in sexual power from one gender to another since the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Greater even.
And yeah, women are going to have a very big problem with it.
Haha! Honest-but-not-nice is how I’ve described myself too.
“I’ll never lie to you, never bitch at you, and never tell you what to do…but you still won’t like what I do.”
Thanks for the entertainment BD. Reading the dialog, I kept waiting for ‘you’ to ask your future self “WHY did you come back to 2015 to tell me anything?” Your future scenario reminded me of the Michael Crichton novel Westworld. Never read it or saw the movie versions, but I know the basic plot. [I guess the recent Bruce Willis movie ‘Vice’ uses that story(?).]
Some of us might want to read an article ‘The Dawn of the Sexbots’ by George Gurley in the May 2015 issue of Vanity Fair (with Sofia Vergara on the cover). I have not yet read it myself, but when I glanced at it, it looked interesting.
So many people profit so much by the current status quo of dealing with cancer, I’m afraid they will prevent the eradication of cancer, or at least postpone it decades past when it could have been achieved. For example, I would’ve thought the first gas/oil ‘crisis’ in 1974 was enough of a wake up call for the USA to develop technology to make us independent of oil ASAP. Can we agree that the reason why it didn’t happen was because so many people were thriving directly from the 1974 status quo (re our dependency on oil)? Politicians get bought off by corporations thriving in the current conditions, then our gov’t stops progress in that area. Progress gets postponed decades when the prospect of it threatens enough peoples’ livelihood (or source of social status).
Comments about why feminists and other women will hate the sexbots etc and fight it fiercely remind me of the topic of why prostitution remains illegal in almost all of the US.
I love the stuff you’re reading now, BD. It’s stuff that hit me a couple of years ago and I’ve been chewing it up ever since.
If it’s not in your queue to be read, I would highly recommend “Rise of the Robots” by Martin Ford. It takes a deep look at machine learning and automation and how it will impact the economy.
We have never met but I feel I know you somewhat.
I don’t say this to everyone but it is very good that you decided to never drink or do drugs even though pot is legal now in Washington.
I would especially warn you not to do any of the stronger psychedelics like acid or psysiliciban. While they are safe for most people I don’t think you would ever return to “normal” and they would be wasted on you anyway because when other people get high they think like this post.
Sex robots will be as illegal as child porn, they will be grounds for divorce, taking your kids away from you and firing you from your job and you will have to pay fines that go to rehabilitating and retraining women. You think men run our government, right? That is why porn is illegal and Harlequin romances are sold at the grocery store check out….
Only the ultra rich like kings, dictators, Arab oil sheiks and maybe presidents will ever see any of this stuff.
Medical greed is out of control and nothing will be done to help anyone who is not very rich in fact things will start to go backward.
Our antibiotics are becoming ineffective and no new antibiotics are being developed because there is not enough profit in it so thousands of people die from common infections each year.
I think we are witnessing the peak of our medical abilities and that progress will slow and then stop.
Look at all the “wonder drugs” we have now, take a look at the side effects? Is it mathematically possible that every drug that is good for anything has deadly side effects that can only be cured by more expensive drugs? Let’s see, who decides which drugs to develop?
Oh sh*t!
OK, just one more. We have all these wonderful anti psychotics, Cymbalta is one of them. Some people that get in trouble with the judicial system are even required by law to take these drugs.
The major side effect? Suicide…
But hey they get paid for the drugs right? Then everything is OK….
OK, I just can’t stop. A wonderful new cure for Hepatitis C has been developed, yaaa! It is only $84,000 Booooooo!
There is a huge difference between what could be possible and what will happen.
We landed on the moon in 1969 it is possible that we could have traveled to other planets by now. Instead the USA buys seats on Russian space ships to get to the space station. Would anybody have believed this in 1970? Even the Russians?
The virtual world.
I walk into my friends house, I get a glance and a hi. Cartoons are playing on the TV but nobody is watching. Grandma and three young kids are all looking at their smart phones playing games, nobody talks….or looks up, not even at the TV!
Can a smart phone do wonderful things? Yes it can, is that what is going to happen with it? Probably not….But at least they are only $500.00…
***nanotech AI, fully nanotech from the ground up, with a brain designed just like our own enhanced human brains, and with real flesh.***
If you have been following the news you have heard about the Planed Parenthood kerfluffle. Medical researchers want fetal tissue for research and the troglodytes had a bird…
What planet are they going to build these nanotech AIs on with real flesh? To satisfy mens lust…
Completely agree. Moneyed interests and Big Government will fight a lot of this stuff.
It will still eventually happen. “Delayed” does not mean “never.”
Example: Regardless of the oil interests, we will have 100% viable electric (or even solar) cars at some point. It can’t not happen.
No. It won’t go that far. They will try, but it won’t go that far.
Now THAT will probably be true, but you already know my answer to that. Never get married, never get monogamous, have your own business, don’t have any employees, etc. An Alpha 2.0 will be immune from all that crap, just like he is now.
If you’re dumb enough to get legally married, you’re asking for all kinds of problems.
Porn isn’t illegal. Do you live on another planet?
Jesus dude. Completely wrong. What an attitude.
True, but now you have a computer in your pocket that you can ask any question in existence and it instantly gives you the answer. Tech moves slowly in some areas, lightning fast in others. Also, space tech is HEAVILY regulated by Big Government, which of course slows everything way down.
This planet. In a few years (or decades) meat will be grown instead of killed. They’ll “grow” fully real chicken breasts that you can eat instead of killing real-life chickens. Human flesh will be grown the same way. It can also be built by nanobots using carbon molecules (but don’t ask me now; I’m not a scientist).
We already have viable electric cars, unless being able to drive several hundred miles with only 5 minute stops is required to be viable.
However, solar cars will never happen (i.e. cars that are nearly 100% powered by solar panels on the car). Current electric cars take about 0.3 kWh to go one mile, while in Los Angeles you only get 5.4 kWh per m^2 per day. If a car’s surface area is about 10 m^2, that’s 54 kwh, or 180 miles a day. In reality most cities don’t get that much sunlight, solar panels can’t cover 100% of the car (unless you can drive without looking out the window)the solar panels aren’t 100% efficient, and are heavier than paint (hurting your mileage). No matter how good technology gets, you’re better off just putting solar panels on your house and using that to charge your car.
What’s more likely to happen is “smart” roads, roads that are able to charge your car as you drive on it. I would expect this to be a reality in my lifetime, possibly before I get old like you :p
I’ve heard it said that part of the joy of sex for men (and some women) is the thrill of the chase and anticipation etc. This is missing in sex with my FBs, but present with my main girl. And yes, she needs careful handling but I enjoy that bit too. She remains a challenge which spices things up a bit. It exercises my brain as well as my groin.
So I wonder, no matter how good sex may be with a sex robot of the future, what do we miss out on when we just get her out of the cupboard?
However, if the future sex robots ensure that women have to get their act together to have a chance with a man, that’s all to the good! đ
What about male sex robots for women?
Hey you didn’t respond to the guy above so I thought I’d reaak.
“Why do you come from the future to talk to your past self”?
It’s just the mechanism for the story.
True. What I meant to say is electric cars “100% comparable to gas cars.” We’re not quite there yet. Most electric cars are smaller, weaker, slower, and have less power than gas-powered cars. The ones that aren’t (like the Teslas) are $100,000+. Again, not quite comparable.
But we’re very close, yes.
That’s only for Thrill of the Hunt men. I’m a Pleasure of Sex man so I don’t give a shit. The chase for me is a pain in my ass and a waste of my time that takes time away from my Mission, not a pleasure. I describe both types of men here.
There will be robots (or later, AIs) who will play “hard to get” who will appeal to those kinds of people. Just like now there are simple, shoot-em-up video games and very difficult, thought-provoking, complex, time-consuming video games.
There will be something for everyone, trust me.
We will absolutely have those too. They just won’t be game-changers like the sexbots for men will be.
Future-me, having a sizable portion of his brain as non-biological and computerized, recalled with pinpoint accuracy that 30 years ago (his time), on August 24, 2015, he needed an interesting blog post for the Blackdragon blog and was experiencing an acute case of writer’s block. Thus he time traveled to the past to ensure his past self could write a cool blog post, thereby closing the temporal causality loop.
Of course, time travel technology doesn’t exist in 2045. Future-me was assisted by future-future-me from the year 2674, who traveled back in time to 2045 to lend future-me just enough tech to open a time-wormhole sufficient for communication only. Doing this was against the laws of his time, but future-future-me is a really nice guy. Future-future-me reminded future-me to thank me for all the vitamins I was taking and the regular exercise I was doing, ensuring my future survival and happiness. He was just doing me a solid and repaying the favor.
Sadly, once his job was completed, he returned to 2674 and was promptly arrested by an officer of the Temporal Enforcement Agency who looked just like Jean Claude Van Damme. But hey, us Blackdragons look out for each other.
By 2045 America and Western Europe will be on their way to becoming 3rd world sh*tholes with a largely brown population. If there is to be a gateway to futurism it will come from the Asian world. But you will also have 4 billion African blacks by the end of this century. They will seek to emigrate to other countries. The Asians will of course be smart and not let them in. Europeans being suicidal will.
The 21 century will see the rise of Islam in Europe and the European reaction to it, it will see the swamping of the world with African blacks and the problems that will unleash on the world and it will see the rise of the North Asians as world hegemons. The future could be utterly dismal for non-elite whites.
There will be no world full on nanobots, sexbots, virtual worlds and the all you can eat sex buffet that you envision. You’ll probably be dead by 2045 of a degenerative disease or sexually incapacitated as is usual for a lifelong fat person. And the scholars you cited are all smart but delusional; and of course utopian.
We’re centuries away from that type of world, if ever.
Wait, where did you hear about AIs like you described above? Which sci fi writer wrote about this? I want to know more. I would do anything for nanobots that can make anything I want when I want it. Then I can quit my job and do whatever…
Check out http://www.reddit.com/r/futurology or read the books that BD is talking about.
I don’t get all the “nay sayers” denying that technology is changing everything for everyone on a lightning fast pace!
Man, it was only the 90s when you had to plug your PC on your phone line and wait for a noisy big annoying machine to connect you to internet. Today you don’t even need phones to talk to people across the world using Full-HD cameras that fit the tip of your fingers!!!
Things are moving ahead really fast! It’s really easy to picture artificial limbs, nanotech and all kinds of technological enhancements being applied to human beings.
The anime movie Ghost in The Shell raised interesting points regarding the subject. Although it was released on 1995 and considered groundbreaking at the time, these days it looks really obsolete (most of it’s futuristic concepts are already applied on a simple smartphone). Damn, Matrix is from 1999 and Minority Report from 2002 and they’re already looking old!
Things are so advanced that my 83 year old dad had a knee replacement surgery and was walking in less than a week after the procedure!
Can’t wait to see whats coming next!
BD sometimes this blog is so entertaining — like your explanation of why your future self visited you now, etc. — or the idea of a man programming his sex robot to ‘play hard to get’ — ha ha ha. Thanks for some good laughs.
@Netbug, yes, but I would like to know the specific book that has the said described AIs. I love technology, but I have not done much reading sci-fi books.
Also, thank you for the link, I will look at it.
@ysg Sorry, I was confusing one of his earlier posts. I know that he recently read “The Singularity is Near” by Ray Kurzweil which deals with many of these topics (though it is 10 years old now). I’d recommend Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford if you want to read a more recent work on AI and emergence through algorithms (deals primarily with technological unemployment).
Hopefully BD can cite more of his recent readings for us both.
That’s likely correct, as I’ve been saying for years. The Western world will fail.
But that doesn’t mean the entire human race will fail. The US and America doesn’t represent the entire planet Earth. Per my point:
Bingo. That’s where this stuff will likely come from. (Why do you think I’m planning on moving to Asia?) Most of the Western world will likely be too busy collapsing under politically correct socialism.
You negative guys are really funny. You remind me of the weirdos in the early 1900s who said human flight was impossible, and “everything that has been invented already has been.”
Yeah, in a world where computation power doubles in speed and halves in price every 18 months, we are right now at the pinnacle of human advancement and everything from here on out is downhill. Uh huh.
You guys are hilarious. At least you make me smile.
Like I said in the post, most people aren’t ready to hear this stuff yet. Like with many of the topics I discuss here, much of society is going to look at the facts staring them in the face and then deny them because they don’t like them.
Yeah, start with The Singularity Is Near by Kurzweil. That covers the basics for most of this stuff.
Other good books on this: Flash Foresight by Daniel Burrus and Abundance by Diamandis and Kotler
I also subscribe to all of these guys’ email newsletters. Really great info there.
What did your future self say about there being aliens? And having sex with the hot ones.
BD you are mistaking technological progress/innovation with refinement. The concept of the computer (machine) and networks were created decades ago they have just been refined. He Mobile phone of today is just s miniature version of the big room filling terminals of the 60s. The wireless networks of today are just expanded versions of the copper and coax networks of the 70s. Same with the discovery of DNA and genetica manipulation. Innovation comes in generational waves by the geniuses of our time and society refines them. There is no current innovation or sets of innovations that would give rise to the world you described.
There is a difference between growing living tissue from smaller stem cells or DNA cultures and creating an autonomous biological being.
I was half expecting your future self to say he had met a hot wood elf named Bast ?
I didn’t get around to asking him about aliens, nor did he bring it up, which means we haven’t met any by 2045. I know me, and if we had met aliens by then that would have been the first thing out of his mouth.
(On an off-topic note, my opinion about intelligent life on other worlds has done a complete 180Â over the last few years as I’ve read more information on this topic.)
No I’m not. I’m not making these predictions. Re-read the first two sentences of the article.
I know you are exercising your artistic license here, so I will direct my arguments at Kurzwell/Hawkings et al. Â I have to agree with what Themaster said. Â Technological change tends to occur in quantum leaps, followed by periods of refinement of existing technologies. Â Even if you look back on the past 50Â years, filmmakers were projecting that we would have manned exploration of the outer solar system as early as 2001, based on the predictions of Arthur Clarke, who also argued that progress happens exponentially. Â Kurzwell strikes me as another one of these celebrity quasi scientists who make bold predictions and underestimate the logistical obstacles of what they’re predicting. Â History is also replete with examples where technological progress has halted and reversed during the collapse of civilizations and the dark ages that follow.
Even though I think some challenges will be too difficult to overcome, it is amazing what can be achieved when enough resources and willpower are directed towards a goal.
Yeah, that’s an interesting one. Arthur C. Clarke made his predictions based on political conditions rather than technological ones. He had no idea the cold war would suddenly end in 1989. Actually, no one predicted that.
When the cold war ended, the space race ended, and the superpowers suddenly lost interest in space. That’s why we’re not walking around on Mars today. If the cold war was still in full force today, we very likely would be. (And perhaps normal people would not have smartphones.)
Yet Kurzweil has been correct on the majority of his predictions. He’s often been *off* on his predictions, but few of his predictions were *completely wrong*. I always make the distinction between off by a 10-20 years or completely wrong (though I realize many people consider those the same thing).
Very true, but barring a world-wide nuclear war or world-wide pandemic, this will not happen any time soon. Prior epochs were conducive to these kinds of dark ages. Today is not. Notice that even with mass proliferation of nuclear weapons for decades at the hands of sociopathic assholes like Nixon, Bush, Obama, and Putin, we’re still all here doing just fine. How many people during the height of the cold war scare of the 1960s would have predicted that by the year 2015 (55 friggin years into the future), no one would have used even one nuke yet?
I am no futurist, but my overall assessment is that predictions made based on long-standing technological (not political, not historical, but technological) trends, might be off by 10, 20, maybe even 30 years, but they won’t be hundreds of years off, or “completely wrong.”
The above stuff I described may not happen in the 2040s. We may have to wait until the 2060s or 2070s. But based on the very clear data it makes no sense whatsoever to assume we’ll have to wait hundreds of years (again, barring some kind of unpredictable world-wide catastrophe).
Then again, I could be wrong. đ
Clarke’s predictions wouldn’t have come true regardless of whether the Cold war was still going on or not.  Long before the Cold war ended, NASA funding peaked during the Apollo program and never recovered.  Manned space exploration is extremely expensive and difficult to justify.  When I interned at NASA, my mentors remarked that the Space Station was just now being constructed, as they recalled helping design it when they were interns, a full generation earlier.  The undertaking to get to the moon was remarkable, but getting to Mars would be orders of magnitude more difficult.  Dr. Zubrin wrote books arguing for the colonization of Mars for decades, and when NASA got around to reviewing his plans, they concluded that many of his assumptions grossly optimistic.
You’re mostly right about Kurzwell, though. Â Considering he graduated from MIT with a background in Computer Science, he had the right experience to project upon the technologies that existed when he wrote his first book. Â Conveniently though, most of his more bold predictions are set to occur long after he’s dead. Â To be fair, the further into the future we go the harder it is to make accurate predictions. Â Personally, I suspect that there may be biological or quantum obstacles to achieving AI or reversing aging, though I’d prefer to be wrong. Â Even really smart, really driven people fail in their bold visions. Â I expect that Tesla Motors will eventually fail despite all of the technology they’ve developed and funds that they’ve raised. Â That perspective may seem extremely cynical to you, but working in applied research has humbled me over the years.
Considering the last generation to experience a full blown world war is almost completely dead, my worry is that the current world leaders won’t face as much political blowback by instigating one.  But after considering your point on the Cold war, I’m probably just being paranoid here.  More likely, I think we’ll experience decades of global debt deflation and currency crises.  It will be painful, but in the end what will follow is an era of growth and innovation.
The future is now my friends.
http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/campaign-launched-against-harmful-sex-robots-n427751?cid=par-time-article_20150915
Wow! đ Methinks “those in charge” are already panicking at the thought of some real independence for men! (And women too judging by the article.) I know that humans are social animals but the world order does seem to rely heavily on co-dependence to prop the system up.
Will be interesting to see how this develops. No doubt the church will get on board soon, trying to preserve the sanctity of marriage bla bla bla. đ
It has begun…
It is predictable the problem will be over population.
This will destroy everything and probably in our lifetime, well maybe not mine.
Our population is growing at a geometric rate, time to double is going down. There is a limit to how many people can live on planet earth and we are going to find out how many. Even at the end there will still be people against birth control and abortion humans are not really that intelligent.
Moving to Asia will not help you long term they are way overpopulated already, why do you think Chinese fly to the USA to birth their anchor babies?
Except for Antarctica and Iceland maybe Canada this will be the last place people will still have a little room to move without tripping over someone else.
I don’t believe in human caused climate change yet at 8 billion people but at 16 to 32 billion people it will probably happen so that is about 40 years.
So the 64 billion dollar question is
is there anyway to stop our population growth or even slow it down a little bit?
The only other way out is someplace else to put a lot of people and our space travel is not even close to that capability and as we get more and more overpopulated you hear the cries of why waste money on space when we have poor starving people here?
Without an answer to this you have a very predictable end.
When you look at the very flawed computer models from the warmist alarmists the last habitable area on earth runs from Minnesota to Washington..so I will let you know…..if you are still there…
Hopefully I live long enough to experience completed/perfected virtual reality,and all those other goodies that advanced technology brings (I’m 21 years old,so perhaps there’s hope for me yet,haha :P)
Still,for those who don’t want to wait for the tech to exist(or most importantly,those who are too old and are unlikely to reach that time),there is a way to experience virtual reality today; Lucid dreaming.
Although it does require practice/patience and a little dedication (in my personal experience,lucid dreaming really isn’t that hard to learn if you have the right info. many other skills are actually much harder to learn),the payoff is certainly worth it. I still hope to experience sword-art-online/nerve gear level virtual reality,but since that is not available yet,lucid dreaming makes a really good alternative as of now.
I know (trust me, I do know) what you are going to think of it, but it is a dream of mine that we can finally quit tormenting/slaying millions of other living beings of weaker species (that’s the only difference between them and we humans: intelligence and the power that comes from intelligence).
Humans won’t stop tormenting each other, though.
If what you hope for will realize, they’ll be beings with a limited mind and unlimited powers. Gods with a human mind. The human mind hasn’t evolved to bear that kind of power.
What weapons will be developed?
Some as unthinkable now as the H bomb was before it was invented.
My bet is, we annihilate our species, or the majority of it.
Moreover, a good deal of pleasantness comes from having to struggle to get things.
In the world of the abundance of everything, our pleasure centres would get desensitized.
No way it’ll be as easy as you say.
@5t: having godlike power includes being able to reprogram your own nature so as to suppress the bad parts, and make the problem of boredom and overabundance irrelevant. You could even live in a VR world where you do suffer and meet tough challenges. And if that seems too far fetched, then it contradicts the premise of godlike power.
Besides, I suspect that once we’ve really expanded our minds, we’re going to discover sensations and ideas so alien and complex that petty human things will become pretty irrelevant. A mathematician once talked about how figuring out certain math problems felt like a multi-hour orgasm. If we ever hit Kurzweil-esque level of technology, human “problems” as we know them are gonna be a distant memory.
I think the breaking point will be when a really good AI gets invented. Then it could be used to optimize all the other technologies, such as batteries. Like blackdragon said here , the technology that is holding back humanity the most is batteries. It could also be used as a management system in companies. Something like Manna but less mean.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex-recession/573949/
This has a lot to do with what you predicted!