A few disturbing future predictions

I like to think big. It's entertaining for me to speculate about paradigm shifts and unexpected advancements. Here are a few of mine for the middle of the century, assuming that exponential tech growth continues. I've written them in the present tense, as if someone from the future is speaking about everyday life:

• Biological machines exist in various forms, grown in labs. Some are pets or humanoid companions. Some exist for labor purposes. Still others are used on the black market for slavery, prostitution or criminal enterprises.
• The Internet is a dynamic, constantly changing, branching tree of information, presented in a highly elaborate three dimensional environment. Web pages are not set in stone but rather alter themselves to accommodate your interests. The narrowing of information to what is relevant to you has been perfected.
• Physical cash and change are replaced by purely virtual representations of wealth. As you perform work (whether efficiently or poorly), it will be added or subtracted to your account in real-time. Two parties can agree that a particular task counts as work, adding to your account. If you begin breaking the law, you will see your account rapidly deplete until you resume a law abiding disposition.
• The average work week in most countries is much shorter than it is today due to automation. Very few menial jobs exist for humans. Most blue collar jobs require specialized training, which is facilitated by learning devices that can feed instructional information directly into the brain.
• Video games are highly immersive experiences that feel, on all sensory levels (including taste and smell) like separate realities. These experiences can range from physically demanding to completely within the mind. There are no control pads, consoles or TV sets. Gameplay is either mentally achieved, or exist as elaborate, solid (in appearance) holograms that interact with reality.
• Space tourism is not common, but several critical hubs have been constructed that serve as hangars, refueling stations, expensive tourist traps and launch pads for space travel. Only a few exist and they utilize graphene elevators that reach to ground level.
• Several small scale colonies have been established off-world. Earth's moon is used for resource extraction, with workers living in lunar colonies for weeks or months at a time.
• Cars are not only automated, but are self repairing/self cleaning. They are constructed of materials (graphene being one) that greatly cushion collisions. Your main responsibility is to purchase more nanobot fluid, which the car will store internally until repairs are needed.
• Medical nanobots aide in bodily repair as well as slow down the aging process (if not halt it).
• Small scale drones patrol cities, scanning for criminal activity. At their disposal are facial recognition systems, cameras that send three dimensional data back to authorities, pattern identifiers that know people's habits and what they may do next, even the ability to "smell" for chemicals (such as cocaine or weed) that may be in the area.
• Your portable computing device is a digestible fluid that connects to your neural network, allowing you to compute within your mind. You have the option to turn the interface/augmentation on and off, but are susceptible to viruses, including your actions being controlled by an external authority.
• Prisons are less crowded due to injections of substances that can instantly turn on or off switches in the brain. Thus, even a cold hearted murderer becomes a kind, functional, generous member of society, due to the extreme precision of the chemical change.
• YouTube has turned into a massive archive of human experiences, as subjects are able to upload not only volumetric audio and video, but also emotional information.

That is very disturbing indeed, i hope all that you mentioned doesn't happen because i can't imagine living in such world like that.

I want to believe that those things regarding human brain (extension, manipulation, importing information) will never happen. Brain is the residence of human's self-aware consciousness ("soul") and it'd be too dangerous to even try to mess with it, anyhow, even when we find ways to make it technically possible. It MUST remain strictly banned.

All the automation / freedom restricting predictions are pretty disturbing too.

The question is, who will such a future be for? For the current 99% or, if you want to go lower than that, for the billions of third world citizens?

Your prediction has a lot of technical focus on stuff that might well be possible one day, assuming that some major discoveries will be made (people wouldn't believe you if you told them that one day man would fly, harness the power of lightning, and use "electronic brains" and devices that let him hear and see miles away).

However there's nothing about the social changes. What kind of a world will these technical advances appear, and for whom will they be meant? For everyone, in an idealized version of today's "best of possible worlds" society? Just for a restricted elite, in a dystopian future? Something else? What will war be like in a world where there are such technologies available, at least to the world's superpowers? How many will there be, by the way?

Maes said:

The question is, who will such a future be for? For the current 99% or, if you want to go lower than that, for the billions of third world citizens?

The current 99% will be middle-aged or older by the middle of the century, and will have had decades to slowly adapt to radically new tech changes. The younger generation of that time will have grown up so immersed in the omnipresence of computers, they will be fully prepared for what lies ahead.

Maes said:Your prediction has a lot of technical focus on stuff that might well be possible one day, assuming that some major discoveries will be made...[/B]

The reason my speculations are so radical is because of the prominence of exponential tech growth. Being that 30 linear steps equals 30 and 30 exponential steps equals approximately a billion, then three decades from now, we should see computational power that is a billion-fold stronger, not 30-fold. Physical space does become a problem, as only so many transistors can fit within a given volume, but much as transistors replaced vacuum tubes, something more efficient will replace transistors. Quantum computing, which is slowly taking off, will prove to be a huge player in exponentially growing computing power.

Maes said:However there's nothing about the social changes. What kind of a world will these technical advances appear, and for whom will they be meant? For everyone, in an idealized version of today's "best of possible worlds" society? Just for a restricted elite, in a dystopian future? Something else? What will war be like in a world where there are such technologies available, at least to the world's superpowers? How many will there be, by the way? [/B]

The third world won't suffer as much as you might think. What we're seeing is a rapid development of materials and devices that are cheaper, smaller and more efficient than its predecessors, meaning that even the poorest communities will have access to them, even if they are of an inferior nature. The elitism only exists at first, until the product inevitably becomes cheap enough for the average consumer.

These advances in technology, I imagine, would be for everyone, and whether this is good or bad is not clear. Everyone being augmented and connected in a global network full of information that bleeds into the real world seems to be a goal of many different areas of technology.

War will be terrifying. Here are a few predictions, again in the present tense:
• Weapons auto-aim, not dissimilar to video games. Average shooters have pinpoint accuracy.
• Rail guns have been reduced to a portable size. They are at least as small as the ones that appear in Quake 2.
• Laser based weapons are common. Various wavelengths of light can be concentrated, producing devastating results.
• Uniforms with an invisibility mode are standard issue. Larger scale structures such as tanks also have invisibility modes.
• Armor is self-repairing. If enough damage is taken, it will fall apart, but smaller impacts are unable to destroy it.
• Internal computing (wetware) allows for military strategists to monitor the health, armor, ammunition, position and dialogue of friendlies, while spy drones can hack into enemy wetware and retrieve their information.
• Military strategists can also run simulations of battles before the fact, using a high definition, three dimensional representation of reality, with soldiers represented by sophisticated AIs.
• Mechs have shown up as a new form of military defense. Having evolved from exoskeletal suit, they completely shell the pilot. They can be used to fire at enemies, lift heavy equipment, reach otherwise inaccessible areas (due to a propulsion system), destroy barricades and rescue civilians.
• Autonomous mechs and other machines are also common in war. They are able to survive by solar power as well as consuming materials that can be used as battery power. They are a mixture of biological and cybernetic engineering, able to self-heal but also armed with the latest in military weaponry.
• Soldiers are trained "Matrix"-style, through hyperrealistic VR simulations and intensive training courses that send information--even muscle memory--directly into the brain. The most elite soldiers are cloned repeatedly.
• There has been at least one war off-world. Problems with the resource mining facilities on Lunar. Terraforming facilities exist on Mars but are still in early production; no wars have been fought on Martian soil.

I think you may be assuming too much. Of course some of the things you mentioned, like pet robots, weapon auto-aiming, monitoring the sodlier's health "live", not only can and will happen, they already exist and it's just a matter of time to perfect them. But then there are some things like "brain computers" and such that I just don't see happening before the half of this century. Which brings me to this:

scifista42 said:

I want to believe that those things regarding human brain (extension, manipulation, importing information) will never happen. Brain is the residence of human's self-aware consciousness ("soul") and it'd be too dangerous to even try to mess with it, anyhow, even when we find ways to make it technically possible. It MUST remain strictly banned.

That kind of things already happen, we are used to mess with our brains with all kind of stuff, from therapy to drugs (legal and illegal). Now, for a part I agree that it will be possible to interfere more directly with our "internal wiring" in the near future, with all the consequences that we can expect, but it's unlikely that will stop because we are naturally curious, so if we think we can do something, we'll try it, and chances are we'll be succesfull at least to a degree; that's what science is about, at least in part.

Maes said:

However there's nothing about the social changes. What kind of a world will these technical advances appear, and for whom will they be meant? For everyone, in an idealized version of today's "best of possible worlds" society? Just for a restricted elite, in a dystopian future? Something else? What will war be like in a world where there are such technologies available, at least to the world's superpowers? How many will there be, by the way?

A good question is what happens in a future world where enough industries have been completely automated that there is a significant portion of the population who do not have any kind of useful skills that can be used to find work.

Here's a list of jobs currently in decline due to automation. It's not hard to see how certain jobs will be completely eliminated: for example, in 20 years from now I don't expect "taxi driver" to be a job that anyone is still getting paid for.

In the long term, the development of increasingly advanced technology and automation means a shrinking pool of jobs available for real people. What happens when half the population can't find work? The ability to work is the ability to earn money and provide for yourself. If you don't have marketable skills that anyone wants to pay you for any more, what do you do? Revolt?

Clearly in a world like this there would need to be large-scale social changes. But in a world where the population is under complete surveillance and the police and army have been replaced by perfectly loyal, emotionless drones, revolution might not even be possible either.

People have a utopian vision of what technology will bring us in the future, and some of those things might come true. But realistically, it's going to cause massive social upheaval and the result might actually be very unpleasant.

I disagree with every prediction in the original post.

fraggle said:

Clearly in a world like this there would need to be large-scale social changes. But in a world where the population is under complete surveillance and the police and army have been replaced by perfectly loyal, emotionless drones, revolution might not even be possible either.

Come think of it, it will be almost pointless to have a population, at that point. As only few individuals will possess any skills useful to such a society, this can only be a society where everybody is a "master" of sorts, holding some super specialization, very specialized knowledge or freak talent (or simply being born into the ruling elite). Lacking everything else, being a sexual object for some higher-status citizen.

Everybody else would be superfluous: menial work could be done by robots, and there wouldn't be much need for a large "proletarian" working-class population to surveil, police tax and rule in the first place.

The world population would surely be a lot smaler than today, or the concept of "ciizenship" or "person: will be rather restrictive. There will be large numbers of people cut out of all this, living in a nearly primitive state.

Unless George Orwell was right, and man will always need the psychological "rush" of inflicting pain, suffering and exercising dominance over his weakest kin. Can society really evolve to the point where every problem will be solved, everybody is perfectly rational and so the need for central governance/policing would be superfluous? A kind of utopian anarchy? If not, then probably an underclass will be allowed to exist, for the sole purpose of gratifying their leaders' need to rule over someone inferior.

GoatLord said:

• YouTube has turned into a massive archive of human experiences, as subjects are able to upload not only volumetric audio and video, but also emotional information.

Social media somewhat does this already. I've often thought about how weird it will be in 30 or 40 years from now to view a Youtube video and think "Uploaded in 2008? Oh yeah, they're long dead by now. That kid? Probably like 40 something. Oh, here's a comment that's 25 years old..."

Provided I'm even still alive. I hope I don't see the day any of that above nonsense happens. At what point will we be human anymore?

The fuck is this graphene shit you speak of? All the future needs is electric sheep, third-world countries being used as test subject for warheads, and HAL9000 killing astronauts for shits and giggles.

AndrewB said:

I disagree with every prediction in the original post.

Why is that? Every single prediction was based on pre-existing technology.

Clonehunter said:

The fuck is this graphene shit you speak of?

It's very thin layers of graphite



By the middle of this century, if humanity hasn't been subjugated by its own technology - we'll be worshiping the technocrats as gods.

GreyGhost said:

we'll be worshiping the technocrats as gods.

Poor choice of words -we're already worshipping a certain other kind of "technocrats" in the EU.

I'm reminded of a certain quote from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor - at least no one worth speaking of."

Pretty much sums up all predictions of the future, in my opinion.

Maes said:

Poor choice of words -we're already worshipping a certain other kind of "technocrats" in the EU.

Good point. Maybe I should have said "technomages" or "transhumans".

The way things're going here in the UK...
Riots like the ones in 2011 WILL happen again.
A protest march that turns into a riot will be the start of a storming of rhe houses of Parliament and the way the shitbags there keep making cuts the politicians won't have much military or police protection and the polticians will be lynched.

I think in the future, there will eventually be a genetic schism created between the wealthy and the poor. The rich will be the only ones that could afford to take advantage of advances in genetics, eventually becoming a super race. Moreover, the rich would be the only ones that could afford to live on newly terra-formed planets. Thus in the future, the wealthy will create new worlds inhabited by super-humans. While the earth, will be left to the poor.

This might be controversial and insulting ;
As long as humanity keeps thinking the way they do now, there is no future to look forward to.
Nobody has any awareness about anything they are doing for even the smallest second. Al humanity
is doing is reproducing like a fungus on a feeding ground and once the feeding ground has been
depleted death is Imminent. The planet is already at the limits of keeping up with the human
population.

The only thing genetic engineering would lead to with current-day politicians and ways of thinking
are ants. An ant working for a queen with almost no health problems, minimal sleep, and eventually
the ant dies in the factory.

FireFish pretty much sums up my thoughts exactly. I've also thought of what Kontra Kommando said about the rich being the only ones able to take advatnage of genetics development, though I never considered the terraforming aspect. I think the poor will have died off by the time we get that far..

This kinda reminds me of two songs I like. "3rd Stone From the Sun" by Jimi Hendrix and "Destructos VS The Earth" by Morbid Angel. The Hendrix song is about an alien species visiting Earth - Finding the trees and lanscrapes to be beautiful, but is confused by the ways of Humans, and puts and end to them all. The Morbid Angel track is about human intelligence being a failed 10,000 year experiment, they conclude we are a cancer that grows more violent each passing year with no concern for the planet we inhabit, so the alien overlords which gave us this knowledge decide to kill us all!

Two of my favorite songs, both awesome in their own ways.

FireFish said:

As long as humanity keeps thinking the way they do now, there is no future to look forward to.
Nobody has any awareness about anything they are doing for even the smallest second. Al humanity
is doing is reproducing like a fungus on a feeding ground and once the feeding ground has been
depleted death is Imminent.

Wow, don't you underestimate the power of intelect too much? I believe it matters that humans are capable of rational thinking on a high level. Each individual human has the ability. Many have already used it in a history-changing way (inventors, politicians, military leaders). I'm sure that we - as the humankind - can prevent an undesired bad future which would (perhaps) naturally come. Nobody can be sure if we really will, though.

Ya, well Big Brother is still 30 years late.

This is gonna be fun.

GoatLord said:

• Biological machines exist in various forms, grown in labs. Some are pets or humanoid companions. Some exist for labor purposes. Still others are used on the black market for slavery, prostitution or criminal enterprises.

I have no idea what you mean by 'biological machine,' you could mean it's self-replicating or healing or made of organic molecules or just very complex. So F- for clarity. And btw we already have very well-purposed machines to do labor for us or entertain the kids or be sex toys.

• The Internet is a dynamic, constantly changing, branching tree of information, presented in a highly elaborate three dimensional environment. Web pages are not set in stone but rather alter themselves to accommodate your interests. The narrowing of information to what is relevant to you has been perfected.

3-D? What is this, some pointless sci-fi gimmick?

• Physical cash and change are replaced by purely virtual representations of wealth. As you perform work (whether efficiently or poorly), it will be added or subtracted to your account in real-time. Two parties can agree that a particular task counts as work, adding to your account. If you begin breaking the law, you will see your account rapidly deplete until you resume a law abiding disposition.

Are we adopting the cred system in the future? Gee, the American economy must be pretty fucked to just up and adopt a new currency without any gold to back it. And since when has anyone been paid for the labor they do and not their job by the hour? How is efficiency going to be determined? How are the corporate fat cats going to get away with sitting on their asses all day under this new system? Without their approval it's a no-go. And two parties needing to agree to add money to someone's account? Too slow. Too complicated. How is the money-vacuum justice system that you describe going to punish vagrants with no creds to their name? Do they get time in the iso-cubes? Sounds like justice inequality based on income to me. Very unconstitutional.

• The average work week in most countries is much shorter than it is today due to automation. Very few menial jobs exist for humans. Most blue collar jobs require specialized training, which is facilitated by learning devices that can feed instructional information directly into the brain.

Is this a nod toward Battlefield Earth? Ballsy but no.

• Video games are highly immersive experiences that feel, on all sensory levels (including taste and smell) like separate realities. These experiences can range from physically demanding to completely within the mind. There are no control pads, consoles or TV sets. Gameplay is either mentally achieved, or exist as elaborate, solid (in appearance) holograms that interact with reality.

Saying video games will be more immersive is a pretty tame prediction but I see you spiced it up with the holograms again. F- for originality.

• Space tourism is not common, but several critical hubs have been constructed that serve as hangars, refueling stations, expensive tourist traps and launch pads for space travel. Only a few exist and they utilize graphene elevators that reach to ground level.

For what? What are we doing in space? Is it because we're in the future so naturally SPACE? Is everything chrome plated in the future as well and do we all get jumpsuits and visors?

• Several small scale colonies have been established off-world. Earth's moon is used for resource extraction, with workers living in lunar colonies for weeks or months at a time.

There ain't no resources on that gray rock. Helium-3? Not enough. Impractical.

• Cars are not only automated, but are self repairing/self cleaning. They are constructed of materials (graphene being one) that greatly cushion collisions. Your main responsibility is to purchase more nanobot fluid, which the car will store internally until repairs are needed.

Here with the graphene again. What's with you and graphene? Nanobot fluid? "Hey Tom, I'm running low on nanobots for my flying car. You got that chrome-plating future nanofluid?"
"Yeah, aisle 5 next to the robot sex slaves."
"Boy, this is some fucked up future Goatlord dreamt up for us, I tell ya."
"You said it. That'll be 15 space creds."
I'll take duct tape over gray goo, thank you.

• Medical nanobots aide in bodily repair as well as slow down the aging process (if not halt it).

Now they're inside me? Hell to the no. Also, overpopulation ring any bells?

• Small scale drones patrol cities, scanning for criminal activity. At their disposal are facial recognition systems, cameras that send three dimensional data back to authorities, pattern identifiers that know people's habits and what they may do next, even the ability to "smell" for chemicals (such as cocaine or weed) that may be in the area.

Boring. We already have this crap, just not the legislation Big Brother needs to cram it down our throats.

• Your portable computing device is a digestible fluid that connects to your neural network, allowing you to compute within your mind. You have the option to turn the interface/augmentation on and off, but are susceptible to viruses, including your actions being controlled by an external authority.

Dude. What. The. Fuck.

• Prisons are less crowded due to injections of substances that can instantly turn on or off switches in the brain. Thus, even a cold hearted murderer becomes a kind, functional, generous member of society, due to the extreme precision of the chemical change.

Sounds like 50's pseudo-medicine garbage to me.


• YouTube has turned into a massive archive of human experiences, as subjects are able to upload not only volumetric audio and video, but also emotional information.

Do they also upload their consciousness so Youtube becomes the Tree of Souls? Then a corporation has absolute control over me, but it's okay because at least I can talk to my ancestors through the great 3-D chrome-plated interface of Youtube.

Wow. That was exhausing. I see you made some more predictions. I might get to those later, if anyone wants.

I strongly suspect the future will bring about a similar utopian/dystopian dynamic like the one we live in today. I roll my eyes at all the purely dystopian talk because I see it as a reflection of overly cynical, desolate films/novels/games that focus on dramatic post-apocalyptic or 1984-ish scenarios. I'll now present a hypothetical list of pros and cons of future tech innovations in order to explain why I think we're heading toward a mix of good and bad:

PRO:
Medical advances will lead to quicker detection of tumors, cancer and other diseases; less invasive surgery; shorter recoveries; decreased pain/suffering and longer life spans.
CON:
Such advances will be available primarily to the rich, until incremental improvements make it cheaper and better for the lower class.

PRO:
Advancements in artificial intelligence will result in highly personalized, intuitive computers; amplification of human intelligence; shorter work weeks; highly efficient information access; highly accelerated tech growth; competent medical, psychological and societal advice; living spaces that respond to the preferences of individuals; entirely new forms of companionship; highly efficient recording and organizing of events.
CON: Greater-than-human AI networks may result in the development of unexpected agendas that are in conflict or are incompatible with human agendas; over reliance on AI assistance may weaken human intuition and social skills; military application could prove horrifying; with more free time, humans may suffer increased depression and suicide.

PRO: Radical forms of renewable energy will help create a more pollution-free and energy efficient environment.
CON: Corporations will hold on to fossil fuels as long as it's financially feasible; its replacement will quickly be monopolized; new energy sources will become stupid buzzwords that people will resonate with, even if another source is far more efficient.

PRO: Space exploration will lead to tourism, colonization, terra formation and resource mining.
CON: This could lead to worlds being depleted of their resources, off-world wars and planetary classism.

scifista42 said:

Wow, don't you underestimate the power of intelect too much? I believe it matters that humans are capable of rational thinking on a high level. Each individual human has the ability. Many have already used it in a history-changing way (inventors, politicians, military leaders). I'm sure that we - as the humankind - can prevent an undesired bad future which would (perhaps) naturally come. Nobody can be sure if we really will, though.

Well, my hope is that we'll all end up like Star Trek: The Next Generation depicts, but I don't necessarily think it'll turn out that way. The hunger for power/control has a way of destroying rather than building, generally speaking. I would love to know that we move past that in the future, but these are all just predictions after all.

Maybe the way things have been going in the US has brought on my assumptions of doom and gloom in the future. Every day I'm hearing more about police brutality and shit - Cops are literally allowed to steal whatever they want from you and keep it for themselves. Legally. (The process is called 'Civil Forfeiture'...) America is falling and falling hard, it's a sad sight to watch and fills quite a few people with fear and overall negativity. I guess that's why I associate my homeland's downfall with negative predictions for the world as a whole.

I want to make it crystal clear that I hope I'm wrong!

Krispy said:

This is gonna be fun.

Krispy, I was a little peeved at you at first, but your responses were so funny I couldn't help but smile. I do have some rebuttals, though:

"Biological machines..."

Krispy said:
I have no idea what you mean by 'biological machine,' you could mean it's self-replicating or healing or made of organic molecules or just very complex. So F- for clarity.

A biological machine would, yes, be composed of self-replicating molecules. It would have tissue, muscles, bones, cells etc. Some would be based on human blueprints while others would use biological elements from various aspects of life. Biological/hybrid machines will be more efficient than ones that are purely electronic.

"The Internet..."

Krispy said:
3-D? What is this, some pointless sci-fi gimmick?

The sheer amount of information that will exist, the way you receive it an the way it's presented will not work with our current foundation (2D windows). Something more dynamic will ultimately take its place.

"Physical cash and change..."

Krispy said:
Are we adopting the cred system in the future? Gee, the American economy must be pretty fucked to just up and adopt a new currency without any gold to back it. And since when has anyone been paid for the labor they do and not their job by the hour? How is efficiency going to be determined? How are the corporate fat cats going to get away with sitting on their asses all day under this new system? Without their approval it's a no-go. And two parties needing to agree to add money to someone's account? Too slow. Too complicated. How is the money-vacuum justice system that you describe going to punish vagrants with no creds to their name? Do they get time in the iso-cubes? Sounds like justice inequality based on income to me. Very unconstitutional.

With our entire lives being monitored and everything being monitored and networked, it wold be easy to implement a system that determine's a person's wealth by their actions. CEOs and such would end up taking massive pay cuts, which won't matter because their monetary goals of ownership and control won't cost much in a society that can produce everything cheaply.

"The average work week..."

Krispy said:
Is this a nod toward Battlefield Earth? Ballsy but no.

This is a reflection of increased automation and increased AI functionality.

"Video games..."

Krispy said:
Saying video games will be more immersive is a pretty tame prediction but I see you spiced it up with the holograms again. F- for originality.

Hollywood style holographic interaction hasn't become feasible yet due to problems with the propagation of and projection of, light. Nanoscale light emitting diodes programmed with a coordinate system, combined with the recent discovery of solidified light, should allow for highly believable, intelligent interactions with holograms, or technology similar to holography.

"Space tourism..."

Krispy said:
For what? What are we doing in space? Is it because we're in the future so naturally SPACE? Is everything chrome plated in the future as well and do we all get jumpsuits and visors?

Resource mining, terra formation, colonization, scientific curiosity and the establishment of a galactic society are all reasons for advocating space travel.

"Several small scale colonies have been established off-world..."

Krispy said:
There ain't no resources on that gray rock. Helium-3? Not enough. Impractical.

Water has been found on the moon.

"Cars are not only automated..."

Krispy said:
What's with you and graphene? Nanobot fluid? "Hey Tom, I'm running low on nanobots for my flying car. You got that chrome-plating future nanofluid?"

Graphene is 200x stronger than steel and can be contorted like rubber. Highly efficient material. Liquid would be a practical phase state for self repairing nanobots. It would be easy for then to cooperate and travel through the guts of the vehicle, searching for issues to fix. Fluid based computation is no more strange than spore or pill-based computing.

"Medical nanobots aide in bodily repair..."

Krispy said:
Now they're inside me? Hell to the no. Also, overpopulation ring any bells?

There are a lot of misconceptions about overpopulation. Organized distribution of the population would leave room for billions more; floating cities (ocean based) and off-world colonies will help. People who live for centuries will opt to end their lives when they're ready. Increased control over whether one wants to become pregnant will assist further.

"Small scale drones patrol cities..."

Krispy said:
Boring. We already have this crap, just not the legislation Big Brother needs to cram it down our throats.

Smell sensors are only now bring developed by IBM. I also envision these drones being nearly invisible.

"Your portable computing device..."

Krispy said:
Dude. What. The. Fuck.

Each generation of computing brings devices closer to our bodies, so an internal, biologically driven system would be highly efficient. You could piss or shit out the computer after a specific interval of time, making the idea less invasive.

"Prisons are less crowded..."

Krispy said:
Sounds like 50's pseudo-medicine garbage to me. [/B]

It was demonstrated decades ago that stimulating different parts of the brain dramatically altered behavior.

"YouTube..."

Krispy said:
Do they also upload their consciousness so Youtube becomes the Tree of Souls? Then a corporation has absolute control over me, but it's okay because at least I can talk to my ancestors through the great 3-D chrome-plated interface of Youtube.

Consciousness uploading wouldn't mean that your "soul" would now exist only computationally; rather, it would mean that aspects of your consciousness would be represented digitally.

scifista42 said:

Wow, don't you underestimate the power of intelect too much? I believe it matters that humans are capable of rational thinking on a high level. Each individual human has the ability. Many have already used it in a history-changing way (inventors, politicians, military leaders). I'm sure that we - as the humankind - can prevent an undesired bad future which would (perhaps) naturally come. Nobody can be sure if we really will, though.

Never underestimate the power of inertia. By and large, people don't like change when it means being nudged out of their comfort zone, even if it's for their own good. So I agree with FireFish, but would have gone with the boiling frog metaphor.

Krispy said:

I have no idea what you mean by 'biological machine,' you could mean it's self-replicating or healing or made of organic molecules or just very complex. So F- for clarity. And btw we already have very well-purposed machines to do labor for us or entertain the kids or be sex toys.

I was thinking along lines of clones that have been bio-engineered for specific tasks, but if 90% or more of the population are sitting idle it would be so much simpler to re-introduce slavery.

A frog dumped into boiling water will fucking die. A frog dumped into water slowly heated to a boil will jump out once the temperature goes too far north.

Jaxxoon R said:

A frog dumped into boiling water will fucking die. A frog dumped into water slowly heated to a boil will jump out once the temperature goes too far north.

Do not look at it in such a literal way ;
Once you are doused in comfort you have less chance to respond to impending danger.

We all think ; "If i kill this one ugly plant in my garden, it will not make a difference."
If a million people think that way, a million plants will be killed.

humanity is well beyond natural selection and all this 'survival of the fittest' has long been disabled
by our human mind. Anybody should be able to realize by now that when all other life on the planet takes a dive,
humanity is next in line. Or what else would people expect to happen if we keep pouring concrete and keep building
to house the endless stream of newborn humans. A species with no real natural enemy, so it keeps expanding with
no limits.

And since when has anyone been paid for the labor they do and not their job by the hour?

I hope you sneaked that in just to see if anyone was reading everything. ;)