The Future Freaks Me Out

The Future Freaks Me Out

Over the next 20 years, a lot is set to change in the world of technology. Electric cars will drive themselves, robots will interact with us better than humans do, and augmented reality (the interaction between computer-generated sensory input and our visible reality) will become commonplace. Chief News Reporter Zane Pocock takes a look at some of the cool shit that could appear in the near future, assuming we get through 2013, the Zombie Apocalypse, and a few Raptures.

3D Printing

As the DVD piracy ads go, “You wouldn’t steal a car”… but you probably would if you could download one. And soon you may very well be able to do so. 3D printing, as the name suggests, is a technology that can manufacture three-dimensional physical objects in plastic and metal right from your desktop, through the printing of material layers. The well-known illegal download haven The Pirate Bay already has a section entitled “Physibles”, which hosts a whole heap of pirated 3D files you can use to print off patented “things”. If you ever played Warhammer or bought Barbies as a kid, you can see that the business models of plastic toy manufacturers are essentially fucked. It’s safe to assume that the moment good-quality 3D printers are cheap enough, every family will have one. If you buy one for your children one Christmas, you’d never buy toys again. As such, it will be important going forward that product manufacturers learn from the mistakes of the music industry and work out a commercial model based on advertising and subscriptions as early in this development as possible, so that skilled creators are still creating the very items you want to print.

On a more practical and economically positive note, we can look to the world’s production centres. America, for example, has long received internal criticism for losing all its manufacturing industry to China – just look at the “designed in California, made in China” labels on Apple products. But if these companies could manufacture goods without much expenditure on human labour (except for some human “machine managers”), the attraction of manufacturing on-site would be huge. The jobs this has the potential to create could very well put the world on the path to fixing struggling economies. On top of this, the carbon cost of freighting goods to end consumers would also be drastically reduced by the technology. With other positives in the pipeline including printing your own drugs, printing live organs to be transplanted, or printing off the sexy parts of your celebrity crush, this is one of the most deservedly hyped-up potential technologies of the near future.

The Autonomous Mechanical World

Another emergent technology creating a lot of noise in the mechanical world is Artificial Intelligence, which is a branch of computer science aiming to make machines humanly intelligent. This includes everything from computer programs capable of conversing with you to completely autonomous warrior robots that could wage their own little war without external input.

I can hear the doubt in your thoughts. I can hear you saying, “Zane, this is space-age bullshitting speculation. Grow up and evangelise something else.” But you’re tragically wrong. Not only are there already hundreds of self-driving cars shooting around California in a phenomenal Google experiment (laws have even been passed to allow such driverless cars), but thus far they have a lower crash rate than human drivers, and you can even take a free online course, taught by Google’s project coordinator Sebastian Thrun, which teaches you how to program your own one. More on that point next.

As awesome as this all seems, it’s scary to think that the combination of AI and 3D printing could very well result in a self-replicating and autonomous population of robots. Think about that for a while. We will probably be able to produce something capable of this in less than ten years. Where technology was once about command and control, it is fast becoming much more about relationships. But this isn’t all that terrible. Google, for example, is now an extension of our minds, freeing them up for more important things. Who’s to say that intelligent robots won’t simply stick to their assigned tasks and free up our time for endless drinking and debauchery? Surely, surely they’ll always have a big red “kill” button, right? Supposedly we can also look forward to the advent of “mind-uploading” – where our minds control and exist in a robot body – but I have doubts. And on a related note for the philosophers amongst us: we could quite feasibly be “living” inside a complex, realistic computer simulation right now that some God-like figure developed. Fuck me…

Cloud Learning

The future of education is undergoing drastic technological change, too. As society heads ever further towards qualifications-for-qualifications’-sake, frustrations have been mounting over the supposed unimportance of learning. In fact, we are possibly the last generation to attend a physical university with the sole purpose of gaining a degree. Campuses will still likely survive for the purposes of students wanting to live just as the students of our generation did, and for research purposes, but will be very different places due to the already-exponential rise of online education. A lot of us have probably heard of Khan Academy, which started off teaching high school-level classes in short YouTube videos. Heck, we’re the right generation to have been potentially been assigned one of these videos to go over for Year 10 Maths homework. But why does this incredibly practical, learn-at-your-own-pace educational structure disappear once we get to University? Health Scis taking CELS191 would’ve got their hopes up that the University would make use of the technology already available to them by podcasting lectures and producing guided learning modules, only to be brought back down to earth by the realisation that, for now, tertiary education institutions wallow in a pool of stone-age incompetence and exclusivity. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Last year Stanford University staged a huge educational experiment. For free, it allowed hundreds of thousands of international students to view the exact same classes and complete the exact same assignments as the fortune-paying physical students in three of its most popular courses. Your humble reporter completed and passed them all, and it’s utterly unbelievable that these courses, which were challenging but presented in an easier-to-use format, were free, while our university courses cost hundreds a pop for inferior content. Understandably, following this experiment, which was going full-throttle exactly a year ago, competitors (if they can be called that) have been popping up left, right and centre. Udacity, an offshoot of these original classes, offers papers predominantly in Computer Science. Their leading competitor, Coursera, offers courses in everything from Biology & Life Sciences to Economics & Finance and the usual array of Humanities, from various different universities. MIT has even jumped on the bandwagon with the much-anticipated “MITx”, and if you want a walk-through way of learning to code, then Code Academy is brilliant and free. What’s more, most of these open-content institutions are even looking at offering a full and legitimate degree for the small fee of a few hundred dollars. The courses themselves will remain free – you will only need to purchase this “proof” of study if you feel it’s as important as the act of learning.

#ThirdWorldProblems

I admit you can apply the #firstworldproblems tag to any of the issues I’ve mentioned so far. And sure, it’s totally relevant. But let’s not forget how applicable future technologies will be to the developing world, too. Free online courses and the decreasing cost of digital technology could very well educate the developing world. 3D printed drugs are destined to fight illnesses that are identified with “lab on a chip” technology running through an iPhone app, applied by do-gooders who need not even be qualified. And what’s brilliant is that a number of NGOs have already started doing these things, which certainly reinstates a bit of faith in the first world.

On the negative side, the advance of robotics makes war easier, like when autonomous drones are able to wipe out villages. And perhaps the most important area to focus our attention on is global warming. As promising as various policies are, we’re not making too much headway. The effects of global warming will wipe out crops in the third world and “sink” small islands, posing the single biggest threat to the world in the coming decades. Going forward, it will be important that the futurist world has its finger on the pulse of balance at all times.

Remarkable as it may seem, almost all of the most important technologies will feel vital when we get them. Look at the iPhone. Just over five years ago, nothing like it had ever existed. It was seriously fucking futuristic. Touch screens had only just arrived, and the definition of a smartphone was a Blackberry – “smart” because it was capable of email. Nowadays, it feels like I’m in the Stone Age because I don’t have one. I even compensate by having an iPod Touch for the vital apps. So get excited, pay attention to the promises of the future, and make the most of them. Keep them in mind when choosing your career (journalism isn’t looking too brilliant for me), and maybe even put some of your student loan into shares (check out Apple). Cool shit will happen.
This article first appeared in Issue 27, 2012.
Posted 5:59pm Sunday 7th October 2012 by Zane Pocock.