In the last post I discussed a few people's predictions for 2024 and some retrospectives of people's predictions they'd made for 2023 and how that worked out for them. One prediction video started my thinking going along the usual scary paths it takes. I followed Joe Scott's thoughts of what life might be like in 2100, and using the broad categories in that video, took a look at what I saw. I said in that last post, and will reiterate it here again:
I really like Joe's videos and invariably find them thought-provoking and a launchpad for further thoughts and investigations. This video was right up my alley to spark some thoughts. I've held some of them for decades but never really taken them further, it's taken this particular chain of thoughts to get me to revisit them. Still others have been on my mind for only around as long as I've been blogging, but they too deserve to be roused from their slumber and re-examined now.
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So - what if we got a few things not quite right? What if there are other solutions out there to some of the issues we're facing, the issues that'll partially shape the year 2100? Here's my views, my "twist" on things.
Now Here's My Twist
In my 20s (late 1970s) I came across a mind-blowing concept. Suppose, I thought, just suppose, that you had to argue that gravity wasn't a force of attraction between two masses. And you had to do it in such a way that it would fit entirely into our understanding and be easy enough to grasp. How could you argue that gravity wasn't a force at all?
So.
Are you ready for it?
Take a moment and think of a solution.
Now are you ready?
Okay.
My friends and I had these sorts of mental exercises all the time, look at things differently, take a diametric view, and have at it. And so was born . . . Quodge.
Quodge is a force that exists everywhere but is indetectable. It does however project a repulsion field equally in every direction around it. The repulsion field only interacts with the "mass" component of particles, it presses against them. One particle with mass therefore experiences no movement in any direction. It absorbs part of the Quodge force from every direction, which creates its actual mass.
As soon as there are two particles with "mass," each occludes part of the Quodge forces it's subject to. This means that if you were the second particle with mass, youl'd experience an equal push from Quodge forces, except in one direction where The Other had occluded a tiny portion of the Quodge. If the particles are far apart, this effect would be almost indetectable among all the other Quodge in between, but if the two particles are closer, a small but detectable effect would occur, becoming geometrically stronger as the two particles approached each other, until the two particles were pressed together.
This actually makes more sense than the textbook description, sort of like our understanding of fire went from something gods sent as punishment, to the knowledge we currently hold (still poorly understood but definitely better) that sees fire as atomic/particle phenomenon.
Fire Time:
Fire: we are thought to have been using fire for 800,000 to 1m years ago, possibly longer
Steam: It took almost all of that time to get to steam engines. A jet reaction engine machine appeared around 2100 years ago and the first steam engines capable of driving generators appeared 500 years ago and the first generators about 400 years ago
Nuclear power (both fission and fusion) were worked on for only about as long as I've been alive, some 70 - 50 years. Fusion is still not a working generating system. Interestingly, both of these systems still include steam turbines as part of their designs.
Now we're looking at nuclear fusion, and along that way we may yet discover some Quodge-like effect. Or develop time-energy conversion. Or ... Well, sky's the limit. Look how quickly computers developed - I have my most recent article about it online for just a few weeks but it highlights our geometric or even logarithmic rates of progress once we get going on something. And it brings me to AI:
AI:
Let's suppose that only solar, wind, and a small contingent of nuclear energy power stations exist in the very near future. The overall effect will be that we can have a LOT of energy. And just that alone will accelerate new technology. But along with that comes all the new imaginative ways to use steadily-improving AI to solve real-world problems. People are afraid of AI because there's a bit of a fever-pitch of interest in the technology right now.
But it's not aware yet, and it can only wield tools WE give it. Let's make that a leitmotif in the way we develop and use AI. It can design ways to draw CO2 out of the air, recover and recycle waste materials, develop better ways to use the foods we produce for healthier populations, improved vaccines and medicines, transport systems, and more.
For all the doomsayers: Why? Why do you think AI will subjugate or destroy us? It's far more likely that corporations, in their quest to own everything, will use AI as a tool to subjugate us.
Don't fight the weapon, fight those wielding it. AI is only ever going to be a tool, used as a weapon. Don't let the current bullshit snow jobs distract you from that. Insist that it be used as a tool for progress, not as a weapon to conquer and fuck up the planet.
Communications
In that video in the preceding article of this pair, the Internet was mentioned. And the question of "How did people live with - just not knowing things - before the Internet?" came up. In the last article in this series of two I mentioned this and also mentioned how the ever-accelerating advances led from cave paintings to the Encyclopedia Brittanica and now beyond. Currently, the Internet has servers and browsers, but by 2100 I think all that data will be spread out all over, and managed between, nodes.
We currently use electromagnetic waves (radio, light) to communicate over the air and over wires and fibre optic cables. We will probably still be using those but of course, some wildcard like CRISPR-built Quodge quantum comunications could come along - and with it, every technology we use could also change. So in 2100 we may well receive our "knowing things" through a specialised implantable or wearable organ or DNA-grown device "node" as I mentioned above, matched to our DNA.
Such a node could become as natural to us as our speech and auditory centres are currently, and this could be the first use of AI to design such a thing. Don't say that 75 years is too short as timeline for us to adopt that technology.
Transistors were only beginning to be widely used in the 1960s. By the 1970s, integrated circuits with several thousand transistors were in common used in communications equipment and computers. By the early 1980s mobile phones were an expensive rarity. By the 1990s they were commonplace, by the 2000s they were ubiquitous and probably contained more transistors in the integrated circuits of one device than all mobile phones in the first half of the 1980s contained. Today, that's old hat.
Suppose there's a CRISPR breakthrough in the next six years (which is not beyond the capabilities of the technology) and it made possible over the next ten years, a new style of communications device is developed that can be safely implanted, and later, just added to your DNA profile.
Given how mobile phones went from arcane technology to almost universal adoption in basically juist twenty years, and given that there'd be sixty years between when the technology was introduced and the year 2100, it's a cinch that by then everyone would be part of a realtime, live, computing / communications cloud.
Space
Our conquest of space was mentioned. I mentioned the fact that humans are not evolved to live anywhere but on this planet. Space and other planets would be so hostile to us that I think by 2100 there would be abandoned ruins on the moon and Mars with large tallies of colonist graves, when we realised that we just can't survive anywhere else.
And that right there is another use for AI and the breakthrough in CRISPR / DNA - design a new human genotype that's suited for life in space, on other planets, and moons. It will mean the first self-directed evolution from homo erectus to homo astriensis, and only when that new species is born will moon bases and Mars colonies and seedships make sense. I don't think we'll see such genetic variations by 2100 but that includes a big disclaimer... Maybe we will.
In regard to transport, I've posited that our technology isn't the only kind there is. Our technology is still very "object-centric," i.e. it's centred in things. You have a mobile phone for a raft of functions, a toaster to make toast. A car to drive for almost 5% of your time or less, that then occupies your driveway or parking spot for the other 95% of the time and does absolutely nothing at all except depreciate in value and slowly degenerate until you have to buy another one. You see where this is going, for both tech and transport, perhaps?
Our technology is ostentatious. It's in your face. It's there being TECHNOLOGY!!!!! LOOK!!!!! and that's sort of like a kid with their first bike - initially they keep it washed and clean and parade it around for everyone to see. (That's the stage "our" technology - and us - are at in case you hadn't guessed.) Eventually, the bike becomes just a way to get around, and eventually there's the buses and Ubers, more convenient and no need to maintain them.
In a few articles I've mentioned "ubiquitous tech" which just gets out of sight, out of the way, and does its job. In fact, the best kind of tech, I reckon, is completely invisible. You have your node, but it's just like another sense and pretty much invisible too. You want to go somewhere, the invisible tech around you makes it happen. At first, it'll be a driverless vehicle that comes from - somewhere - and takes you to your destination, then goes - somewhere - again.
So - I want to go from "home" to a "grocery shop." Home is a structure, perhaps a tiny house made from recycled materials, perhaps an apartment in a large building, maybe a place on a floating platform island at sea. I'll be in an apartment complex, on the 6th floor.
I stop and think "I need to go to the grocery store" using my node voice, and a reply comes back "proceed to the transport spot now" and so I walk to a balcony at the end of my hallway, where a transport has landed and is waiting for me. I hop in, nodevoice my name, and the transport takes off, deposits me on the platform of the grocer's. I can select the produce I want, and nodevoice my desire to go get a coffee. Procedure repeats. When I get home, the produce I chose is in the fridge, having been delivered. I cook my own meals, I'm an anachronism like that.
That's a very probable 2100. Also, the ability to just teleview the grocery and not even need to use transport, that's on the cards. Which bring us to -
Food
And lastly, by 2100 eating naturally-growning living things may be a thing only anachronisms still do. If we've used AI to analyse our foods to the tiniest trace elements and organic compound, every flavouring compound, and be able to grow analogs of the living things and assemble them. Yes, to you and me that would be an onerous lifelong task but to AI it's just a fairly quick process, analysing everything, synthesising, and then making on demand.
The planet will be able to recover ecologically and synthesising natural-identical food from common materials and energy (you can do almost anything if you have enough energy to throw at the task) takes our incessant demand on the ecosystem away. Using solar and wind energy removes another demand on natural systems.
Finally, we'll realise that the entire planet is our space-going habitat, a huge space ark, and will start building life support systems that don't require irreplaceable resources to be extracted and converted into toxic and/or planet-harming dangerous forms. Because at the moment, believe me, we're destroying our life support system faster than it can repair itself.
Sometime even later, ubiquitous tech will just make whatever you need on the spot, and unmake it when you no longer need it. Almost limitless energy, remember? Energy can do anything. With enough AI type software directing it.
Crowdsourcing
I recall just two decades and a bit ago (2002) that Berkely University released a parallel computing platform, which was later renamed to BOINC. It was initially made to decode extraterrestrial signals buried in radiotelescope data but one of the first things that gave me cause to really respect the infrastructure that powered SETI@home (the forerunner of BOINC) was when thousands of PCs running a variant of it decoded the entire human genome in under a year. For perspective, scientists with the latest computers at their disposal expected to be decoding that genome for at least ten years.
In more recent years, sites like reddit have solved mysteries that have been unsolved for centuries in some cases. We have places like github and bitbucket where people can collaborate on software and hardware, on small projects like homebrewed weather stations to more complex things like agricultural robots and all the way to entire software systems that power businesses and online collaboration platforms and beyond. Add in AI and you can see how much such a network will achieve.
And of course, all those platforms ARE adding AI components. This is why I am so sure the new software and hardware that'll be coming out of these setups will be orders of magnitude better, and keep the pace of technology exceeding Moore's Law.
"I'll give you another example: when I was ten, I had a transistor radio. When I was seventeen, I built a tiny, very low-powered, computer. It was made with individual logic integrated circuits wired together painstakingly by hand. The CPU at the heart of it was dumber than the computer that guided the Apollo mission. When I was twenty-two, I bought a small - a tiny - little computer that outperformed the Apollo mission computer by a few orders of magnitude. Before I was thirty, I owned two computers that were basically the beginnings of the home computing revolution, the Amstrad CPC464 and a VIC-20. Five years later I bought a PC-AT in parts and assembled it, then a series of progressively more powerful machines up to the present, where my best computer is now more than ten years old and still more powerful than all my computers leading up to it combined."
That's a period from around the mid 1960s to now, with progress markedly accelerating from the 1990s to the present. I now have several postage-stamp-sized computer boards that are each more powerful than my first five computers put together. The kicker? That postage-stamp-sized computer board was developed about three years ago and is now surpassed by the latest generations of processor boards by a similar margin. And of course they're not a patch on processors developed for the competitive mobile phone market.
Forty years ago no-one could have predicted that a device half the size of a Mills & Boon romance pulp paperback would help us manage our finances, allow others to call us wherever we were and us to call them wherever they were, read our daily news, watch movies and documentaries, control the lights and other devices in our home, and play games that were impossible on a PC ten years ago unless you'd forked out an exorbitant sum for a high-powered gaming rig.
And right now, no-one would believe that the next advance in technology is already on the drawing board somewhere, being simulated by an AI and tested. But it is. And when it's made and released, it'll change the scene as much as computers did, only in the space of one tenth, one twentieth, of the time.
Show Me The Money
I'm not sure how much longer the fiction of currency can be pulled off. With energy becoming so plentiful, and so much waste material around to salvage, it won't take people long to put them together. And that in turn will allow the creating of better machines for salvaging and recycling stuff. And then we have materials, manufacturing processes, and a whole slew of future tech that - gets out of the way when you don't need it. But more importantly - technology that doesn't cost anything.
Finally we get to 3D printing. We started our printing revolution as it were, when key patents expired, in 2000 and 2010. In this history, "reprap" was the hobbyist machine that could in theory reproduce itself, but hobby 3D printers only became a commercial reality after those patented technologies became available. But by the mid 2010s you could print parts in metal. At a price, and not as strong as forged or machined parts, but metal.
Around this time some companies began seriously working on printers that could print rocket engines and rocket bodies. Overnight, rocket engines went from painstakingly designed, hand machined and assembled, expensive items that might take years to make actual, to something you could design, print in a few days and have ready for testing in a few weeks, then redesign and iterate again in just a few weeks.
I bought a 3D printer in 2021 that needed a little know-how and maintenance, but is able to print in some reasonably tough engineering plastics. It's now 2024 and in 2023 only a years and a bit after I got my hobbyist "learn as you go" printer, you could buy printers that came completely assembled and ready to just - print. You can get metal parts machined by sending your files and a sum of money, and getting a parcel sent back a week or two later.
In another few years the idea of one of "those quaint 3D printers" will be just that - a quaint memory. And the machine that sits in the cabinet will be able to print any damn thing you want, take back the thing when you've finished with it and recycle it ready for the next thing you want to have.
This is already (sort of) happening as more of those "point'n'print" machines are making it into people's hands - when a device they own fails, they print a replacement part for it. If they have a problem, they print a tool to take care of it. It's a fairly small contingent as of the moment, but with online repositories of the model files ready to just load up and print, you'll see a lot more of this in 2024, and by 2100 the sky's the limit I guess.
The obvious endpoint of that kind of technology is the ubiqiuitech I'm always rabbiting on about - no need to own even a printer when your node can get anything you need assembled out of whatever's plentiful and available.
I'm of course also noting how the original 3D printing tech was around for thirty years before patents ran out, and then suddenly there was an explosion of machines and ideas and model files and so forth, and you can even build a machine from stock materials that you can easily purchase and a few circuit boards and specialty components. You won't even need that in 2100.
So the idea of currency kinda loses its reason for existing...
My "Predictions"
We won't need individual vehicles by 2100. We may not even really need vehicles. Any that we do use will not use fossil fuels.
We'll either have completely destroyed the planet by then, rendering everything I'm saying here invalid, or else we'll have come to a deep and detailed understanding of how the connected ecosystems of the planet work, and have instituted repairs and ongoing rectifications to re-balance it. Some of these efforts will be planned on the millennium scale. I kinda hope that latter is what happens, but we need to start acting to make it happen NOW.
We may have already created genetically modified new humans to enable them to live in space and on planets other than Earth.
We'll definitely have created food that wasn't made at the expense of the normal ecosystem and that takes no nutrition or energy out of the planet's natural ecosystem.
We'll probably have a genetically engineered "node" implanted (or added to our genome) to keep connected to all other people and feel that it's just an extension of our senses. These nodes will also manage all the information between them.
Energy may come from solar or other renewable-based technology or (more likely) from a currently unknown technology. It, like all other technologies of the 2100th, will be invisible and unremarkable, being just a part of life that no-one really notices.
That technology will enable what you want/need to be relayed by your node to other ubiquitous tech and generated for you on the spot, then recycled when you no longer need it.
The idea of a "fiat currency" won't exist any more, there may be some form of points system but probably not. Existing will no longer be costly, so why track costs?
Large scale "crowdsourcing" in combination with AI will become a knowledge and learning system so powerful that I can't even imagine it other than to say that it will be beyond what anyone can imagine today.
And at least one new basic force will be discovered, maybe a few. These will change everything, including my predictions...
Okay, we're "down here." What's going on? We're facing a medical crisis. I can't spend as much time as I'd like to on these articles and the projects I'd planned. I may be able to get back to them, or not.
That does mean fewer posts, which means fewer announcements on social media, fewer people's eyes being directed to the blogs. You can help me out though - share this article, follow the (newspaper icon) link to the News Stand - and share that on your social media too. This should bring my posts to the attention of a few more readers, and maybe even a snowball effect.
