Surveying the future

By Wiebke Brauer

How precise can predictions be for the world of tomorrow? Two approaches are conceivable to come up with an answer: The first one looks back – on the forecasts for our current present that were ventured around the year 2000. It shows how close or not former ideas of the future came to reality. The second approach looks ahead – to scenarios that a researcher today is mapping out for the year 2050.

#AI #Everyday Life

“Predictions aren’t easy especially when it comes to the future,” according to a Danish joke from the 1950s that hasn’t lost any of its relevance if we’re honest. Even so, that has never kept people from trying to make them anyway. Someone who was a particularly good clairvoyant was science fiction author Jules Verne who in his 1863 novel “Paris in the Twentieth Century” described glazed skyscrapers, air conditioning systems, television sets, or fax machines. By the way, Jules Vernes’ publisher found the book to be so bad back then that he didn’t want to publish it. In addition, in a letter to the novelist he wrote, “People will never believe in your predictions.”

Wrong. But let’s see what predictions were made for today around the turn of the millennium.

Nanotechnology: K. Eric Drexler was once dubbed the “first full-time prophet of nanotechnology.” In the 1990s, the American engineer and pioneer predicted that one day there would be “assemblers,” tiny robots that could cure diseases, rid the environment of pollutants, produce completely new materials, and even other nanobots. That seems far-fetched – and Drexler later slowed down his mind games himself. Even so, today, nanotechnology using machines that are a hundred times smaller than the thickness of a hair, is no longer a lunatic vision of the future but routine business in the world’s development labs. Researchers at the Technical University Munich, for instance, managed to stimulate stem cells with the help of nano robots with such precision that they systematically and reliably change into bone cells. Those robots were driven and guided by laser light. At ETH Zurich, a whole course of study is engaged in the further development of such microscopically sized small machines and their uses. In that light, Drexler with his “assemblers,” wasn’t overshooting the mark by a great deal. © iLexx/iStock
Smartphones: No, not everyone predicted the smartphone that we’re constantly staring at. Nicholas Negroponte, one of the masterminds of the digital revolution, of all people, in a 2010 interview with “SZ” said, “A cellphone is great for use as a telephone and for sending text messages – but not for a lot more. It’s a question of size. There’s a good reason why the size of atlases is larger than the one of train schedules. If someone says that a cellphone could replace a laptop that’s nonsense.” Well, there were other voices as well. Even 20 years earlier, Nathan Myhrvold, former Chief Technical Officer at Microsoft, formulated a “truly personal computer” he called “Wallet PC” that you could carry with you all the time, that communicates as a wireless device combining functions such as telephony, email, notes, and media in one device. © Kar-Tr/iStock
Robotics: If there’s anyone who always firmly believed in robots it’s Hans Moravec, who devoted his life to the development of smart machines. In the 1990s, the Austrian-Canadian scientist described that by 2010 robots would at first have a reptile-like intelligence and the “personality of a washing machine” and perform easy, mechanical jobs on factory floors or warehouse halls – the vision of humanoid robots. By 2030, Moravec said at the time, robots with rudimentary abilities to think that could condition themselves would be developed. Rudimentary abilities to think? That’s a rather defensive prediction for the emerging skills of AI-supported humanoids. Today we can say that Moravec‘s assumptions were more on the mark than many of his critics thought were possible. We can stay tuned to see if his proposition that machines will have overtaken humans both physically and mentally by 2050 will be right as well. © demaerre/iStock
Genetic engineering: On June 26, 2000, American President Bill Clinton said, “Today, we are learning the language in which God created life.” He said this on the occasion of the Human Genome Project that was initiated in the United States at the end of the 1980s to decode the entire genetic blueprint of human beings – and by 2000 that had almost been achieved. Interestingly, the data at that time were deliberately made freely accessible and accelerated the development of new research fields leading to genetic tests, personalized medicine, and new therapies such as those in cancer treatments. Whether humans learned God’s language, as Clinton predicted, is neither here nor there. © lexRaths/iStock
Autonomous driving: As correct as many predictions may have been around the turn of the millennium, as premature were those concerning autonomous driving. In his 1999 book “The Age of Spiritual Machines,” the famous futurist Ray Kurzweil noted that autonomous driving would expand from controlled environments such as freeways to the more complex urban traffic. In his book “Visions of the Future,” Michio Kaku also outlined scenarios in which cars with the help of sensors and computer control could independently navigate and evade obstacles. With that, both of them, like in many other aspects, would be right, albeit we’re not seeing masses of self-driving cars zipping through our big cities yet. Apparently, we still need to have a little more patience in that respect. © metamorworks/iStock
Artificial intelligence: William Gibson, American science fiction novelist (*1948)
When it comes to AI we really must say that everyone was predicting that. In 1997, the highly acclaimed physicist Michio Kaku wrote “We are going to have smart homes, cars, TV sets, jewelry, and wallets, and be talking to our household devices – and they are going to answer.” Interestingly, Kaku also predicted connected computers with reasoning power, speech recognition, and even common sense. In addition, he wrote about how devices might be getting on our nerves with their well-meant advice and designed a scenario for watching the movie “Casablanca” – albeit not starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergmann but featuring the viewers’ faces. Today, that’s called deepfake. © Sansert Sangsakawrat/iStock
Online elections: In Europe, around the turn of the millennium, the idea of shifting elections to the internet was being contemplated and the EU launched the “CyberVote” research project that tried to find out how internet elections could be implemented technically. The idea, among other things, was that people would be more inclined to vote if they could just do it online. However, that model hardly gained traction in practice. The reasons were security risks, technical uncertainties, and lack of confidence. One of the few exceptions is Estonia that introduced internet elections in 2005. © ojogabonitoo /iStock
Knowledge economy: Around the turn of the millennium, the central premonition that knowledge, information, and innovation will turn into decisive drivers of economic growth became increasingly relevant. The OECD in a 1996 report said that knowledge-intensive activities and technological development would become increasingly important. The idea is anything but new. As early as in 1980 American futurist Alvin Toffler described this change, warning of a “Future Shock” at the time – which meant that too much change in too short of a time span would overtask people. Things didn’t get quite as bad as that but the truth is that lifelong learning will be one of the key core competences of the future. © designer491/iStock
Cyborgs: No, the human-machine fusion has not really worked out so far. Ray Kurzweil visioned that computer technology would be integrated into the human body. Hans Moravec predicted that human consciousness could be transferred to machines in the long run, and that biological bodies would become less important. However, in practice, the so-called transhumanism has only become evident in its infancy: like in implants or interfaces between the brain and computers such as cochlea implants that transmit auditory signals directly to the auditory nerve. © gremlin/iStock
Work: In 1997, in her book “Death of Distance,” the British economist and journalist Frances Cairncross described a world in which, thanks to modern communication technologies, spatial distance increasingly loses importance. Her proposition was that when information is transmitted via digital networks in real time work is no longer necessarily tied to a fixed location. That’s true because today remote work has become a firm component of our working culture and teams work together across long distances. © martin-dm/iStock

How researchers imagine the year of 2050

Sven Gábor Jánszky is a futurist and CEO of 2b Ahead ThinkTank in Leipzig. “tomorrow” asked him how people are going to live in 2050.

Mr. Jánszky, what will a day in 2050 be like?
One thing for starters: Working at our institute are PHD futurists that use scientific methods. With them, it’s possible to predict about ten years, that’s all. Anything beyond that is speculation. If I had to speculate, I’d say that I don’t believe that the course of a day would change fundamentally. Clearly, we’re going to live in times where technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics will have reached a level of intelligence that’s clearly above human intelligence. AI and robots will be taking over most processes of what we call working life today and replace many of today’s jobs.

So, what are we going to do all day?
People will be getting up and spending the morning with social work, for instance by helping in schools or passing on knowledge, albeit not completely unconditionally but as a contribution to society. After that work on one’s personal self-actualization begins, encompassing sports and health as well as purpose and spirituality.

Surveying the future — Futurist Sven Gábor Jánszky

“Everyone is going to have their own AI. People will be talking to their own digital double.“

How are we going to live with AI in everyday life?
Everyone is going to have their own AI. It will be dedicated agents, in other words personal assistants, maybe three to five, that communicate among each other and know their human in great detail. We could say: people will be talking to their own digital double. The person will have an agent as a contact and personal digital companion.

Will smartphones in their current form continue to exist?
No, they’re going to disappear. The visual function will migrate to headsets. The auditive function is already shifting to small, inconspicuous devices. This is heading in the direction of integrated systems that we know from science fiction.

And how are we going to live?
There will hardly be any change in that respect. However, the biggest change within residential settings will be humanoid robots, in other words robots that look like humans and can do various jobs like cleaning, cooking, providing security, playing with kids or pets, taking over nursing jobs, or serving as conversation partners. I call them the “new cohabitants.”

You just mentioned nursing care, now we are getting older and older.
Yes, there’s a steep rise in the percentage of older people. We’re assuming that many people will live to be around the age of 120 while remaining mobile and capable for longer periods of time. Aging will slow down. There are approaches already to influence the biological age. In terms of society, that primarily changes the structure: birth rates decline while the total population tends not to continue to grow. And the end-of-life shifts more into the realm of personal choices. Moreover, people are going to stay active longer.

A final question: Personally, to what are you looking forward the most when looking into the future?
To a world with adequate energy. Having more energy than we need changes everything. In fact, that scenario was described only once in “Star Trek,” as a world in which anything can be produced at any time and money no longer matters. That’s not a prediction but I do find the idea of perhaps being able to experience something like that very fascinating.

Author Wiebke Brauer

Wiebke Brauer, who serves as the senior text editor of cult car magazine “Ramp,” among other things, has always been interested in the major questions concerning the future. For this text, the native of Hamburg compared past predictions with future scenarios – and learned that the future cannot be calculated but with the right paradigm shift can be surveyed with amazing accuracy.