Reasons to expect the next 10 years to be more exciting than the last

http://www.hplusmagazine.com/editors-blog/top-10-reasons-expect-next-10-years-be-more-exciting-last

by revorad • 16 years ago

42 61 16 years ago

rwmj• 16 years ago

I have a bad feeling about the next 10 years. 1900-1910 was a decade of globalization and affluence for certain classes and a big split between rich and poor, in fact rather like 2000-2010. 1910-1920 was not a happy period for anyone.

VladRussian• 16 years ago

yep, we're due for a small WWIII (there are set of global problems - pollution, including green house gases, human rights, including ethnic cleansing, currencies valuations, intellectual property rights, Internet management - which can't be solved in the current framework of 180 states getting individually to agree to a treaty and after that actually obeying the treaty)

>10. Political-Economic reorganization: [...] so I'm sure that people will muddle through and figure out some way to distribute it equitably...

he forgot

11. rapid increase of number of countries armed with nukes

Vivtek2• 16 years ago

Well, he did say "exciting!"

Estragon• 16 years ago

I agree, it's likely to be a time of great disorder and suffering. God forbid there should be another World War, but many of the reasons for international amicability are now breaking down, like easy trade and a relatively simple geopolitical structure.

keiferski2• 16 years ago

Still waiting for my flying car...

younata• 16 years ago

5 years until we get there. I'm kinda pissed about my lack of time-traveling delorean. They said we were supposed to have these 25 years ago!

keiferski2• 16 years ago

Actually, it's been even longer than 25 years.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2550902895914120566#

But I'll be patient.

Devilboy2• 16 years ago

You can buy them already. You just can't use them anywhere useful.

delinquentme• 16 years ago

Simply put: complexity increases over time ... this would infact lend itself to more and increasingly "interesting" things :D

GO HUMANS!

Prisen• 16 years ago

By the end of the decade, expect voice and video quality as good as you might expect from HDTV.

Bandwidth wise, this is (at least technically) possible today.

akgerber• 16 years ago

You can download a full-length HD film to extant (but not-yet-sold) phones and output it via an HDMI port. The only problem is that doing so will burn probably $40 in bandwidth.

EGreg2• 16 years ago

I grew up in the 90s. The shows on TV rocked. They are what influenced me to be who I am today.

I feel pity for the TV programming kids had to watch in the 2000s. What happened to all the brilliant writing? Pinky & the brain? Gargoyles? Disney? Animation with more than 2 frames per minute? We just got an avalanche of inane dubbing of japanese anime. "Hey, Ash, let's go into the forest and enslave little animal-looking things in balls and make them fight! I choose you Pikachu! Yay!"

The best thing to come out of the 2000s decade of children's shows is YuGiOh abridged :))

It can only get better from there.

Who's with me?

bryanlarsen3• 16 years ago

You're stuck in nostalgia-land -- TV has gotten a lot better over the last 20 years. And there's a simple reason for that. 20 years ago the only shows that had a plot line longer than a single episode were the daytime soaps. Now, in the age of >100 channels, DVRs and Hulu, plotlines are allowed to stretch over an entire season, giving much more room for depth and development.

EGreg2• 16 years ago

I think you're not talking about kids shows. TV is definitely better in general, but animated shows really, really sucked in the last decade. (I mean shows for teens and children)

http://blog.movies.yahoo.com/blog/177-disney-will-stop-makin...

neild• 16 years ago

The best Western children's TV show in the 2000s that I can think of is Avatar: The Last Airbender. Which isn't just a great TV show for kids, but a great TV show in general.

Vivtek2• 16 years ago

Yeah, my kids and I doted on Avatar. I just rewatched the whole series straight through on Netflix a couple of weeks ago. Definitely thumbs up.

Johnny Test ain't half bad, either, in terms of shorter stuff, and there are plenty of others. It's not all Pikachu. GP, you're not watching the right channels.

elai3• 16 years ago

Not really, the writing is about the same. YuGiOh, Bakugon, and other anime series made after the games they promote are actually a cheaply made long drawn out commercials, as originally designed. Chaotica, Pokemon and Digimon are a bit better, but not by much. Fairly Odd Parents, Spongebob, Ben 10, Avatar, An Air Pirates show and something with a boy with scientist twin sisters and others are on par or better with 90s shows.

Devilboy2• 16 years ago

I was a 90s kid too. Do yourself a favor and NEVER watch any of those old cartoons again on Youtube. I have and it shattered my childhood memories.

dstein5• 16 years ago

The most exciting thing is that because of the accelerating pace of technological deflation, the cost of almost everything is asymptotically approaching $0.

Access to all information, global communication, books, entertainment (movies, tv shows, music etc), software, and even hardware are getting cheaper at an alarming rate. The entire body of human knowledge (art, history, science etc) is being interconnected into a global application that will be instantly accessible and practically free (in inflation adjusted dollars).

It will be interesting what effects this will have on our socio-economic system.

CWIZO3• 16 years ago

Umm, what exactly is approaching $0? Some examples please.

gwern• 16 years ago

> Access to all information, global communication, books, entertainment (movies, tv shows, music etc), software, and even hardware are getting cheaper at an alarming rate

>> Some examples please.

bryanlarsen3• 16 years ago

"asymptotically" means that it never actually reaches $0.

dstein5• 16 years ago

Let's see if I can explain it another way. The price of everything eventually reaches $0.

There is only a certain period of time from which you can profit from any particular good. If you make a hamburger, you have probably 2 hours to sell it before it goes bad and is worthless.

And likewise, if you create a cell phone, you have maybe 2 years to sell it before nobody will want it. And if you make a movie, you have a few months where you can sell the movie (in a theater) and make money from it. Once the movie hits the internet the ability to make money off it decreases (piracy will happen more in the future, not less). Make a new app for the iPhone and you have a few months where you can make money before a free alternative arises.

This is technological deflation. And the pace is increasing. The time you're able to make money is decreasing rapidly. Mathematically, as that time approaches 0, the effective price of everything starts reaching $0. Why buy anything today, when it'll be effectively free tomorrow?

jodrellblank4• 16 years ago

The cost of 1MB of memory, 1 FLOPS of processing power, 1MB of long term storage, 1Kbps of bandwidth wired or wireless, 1 email sent to a person, and correspondingly the cost of storing one book or film or picture also falls.

You don't actually get a 1Gb hard disk made and on your doorstep for $0, but you do get much more space for the same money than you did three years ago so cost per Gb falls and falls towards zero.

(Though I don't follow how this counts as the "cost of almost everything" unless you say something like, a new car costs the same as one ten years ago but now comes with more features, so each feature cost less than it used to" perhaps?).

erikstarck• 16 years ago

Everything that can be automated will be automated.

The price of something that has been automated is zero.

joe_the_user• 16 years ago

Current counter-examples would be health care, energy, food, raw materials and land.

Food might start to go down at some point but I don't see land and raw materials declining for a little while, though if telecommuting from Utah or outer-Mongolia becomes easy, land might well get cheaper.

Health care's an odd thing. Maybe enough biology research will bring the price down but so-far it's increased the price. A lot of this comes because of a market that's happy to absorb a higher priced replacement for a given item if the replacement can claim superiority in other ways. This sound OK but it's had truly poisonous results. Open source biology could eventually have an impact here.

Energy is a long story in itself...

Still, it's interesting to think about these tendencies.

elai3• 16 years ago

I think a large part of health care price inflation comes from extreme distortions that governments and case law bring to that industry.

Roboprog• 16 years ago

Where is the evidence for better batteries (or capacitors)? Powering all the portable junk seems to rest on this hand wave.

Then again, I'm too pessimistic to believe in all this singularity stuff. Ironic that Vernor Vinge used the phrase "age of shattered dreams" in Deepness in the Sky, considering he is also associated with the singularity thing.

jodrellblank4• 16 years ago

How is it ironic that a guy who wrote singularity fiction also wrote not-singularity fiction?

> Then again, I'm too pessimistic to believe in all this singularity stuff.

Uh huh. http://lesswrong.com/lw/ym/cynical_about_cynicism/

> Where is the evidence for better batteries (or capacitors)?

There's Lithium-Air on the horizon with a suggested 10x storage over Lithium-Ion, then there's the observation that large batteries once powered large mobile phones for hours and now small batteries power small phones for days, then there's fuel cell research, motion power (Seiko Kinetic watches, some footwear) solar phones (Samsung Blue Earth), body heat hasn't really been tried yet, etc.

gloob• 16 years ago

As near as I can tell, the summary of your lesswrong link is something like:

"Some people disagree with me. But they're just playing games about social status!"

Which, I mean, is cool and all, but it's perhaps possible that maybe some people are just more cautious than others, for example. There have to be better arguments than fabricating someone's motives out of thin air and attacking those.

DanielBMarkham• 16 years ago

I can't wait for the next ten years -- it should be a blast.

Having said that, I don't think its going to be all roses. One commenter made the analogy that the previous decade was like 1900-1910. I kind of get that feeling as well -- rise of the mob, rise of anarchy, old structures not working like they should, vast amounts of change and upheaval in the air.

Overall, I think it's going to be awesome. But I would just be cautious, that's all. Not everything is going to be good, and there are going to be some really gnarly and ugly things we're going to see in the next ten years along with the great stuff.

I would note that the adjective "exciting" can be taken in many different ways.

kiba3• 16 years ago

My guess:

Expect raw capitalism to re-invade the world. However, this is not going to come in the way of political structure changing, but rather resistance to political structure.

It's not going to be headed by One Megacorporation by any mean. They're just along for the ride.

All the pieces are coming together. A radical ideology, a working knowledge of economic, a technologically sophisticated community, and a new kind of technology that the community can revolves around.

forkandwait2• 16 years ago

My counter guess: expect small and medium non-governmental cooperative organizations to invade.

Currently the world is divided into those creatively make social structures happen (gee Bob, let's start a company -- who should we hire? gee George and Thomas, lets start our damn government on this side of the Atlantic -- how does one train an army anyway?) and those who subconciously seek to occupy them un-creatively (gee, should I become an Oracle dev or a Microsoft dev? Gee, should I join the revolutionary army or the royalist army?)

But the technology (DIY manufacturing) and the communication (internet plus math) and the culturation for everybody to become a little bit of the former is starting to seep everywhere, and there are huge payoffs for taking it up and organizing cooperatively(gee, why dont' we start GNU software and give it away instead of try to sell it?)

Oh -- just want to mention that I don't see this as being nation state driven, and it is not the big monolithic socialism of the past -- more a "free market socialism"

jamesbritt4• 16 years ago

"Expect raw capitalism to re-invade the world. "

Can you define "raw capitalism"?

iaskwhy• 16 years ago

Anyone notice how the author's picture is around 2.69 MB?

yxhuvud• 16 years ago

Between increasingly repressive governments, a deep financial crisis that is in it's third year and nowhere near being solved, peak oil and a southeast asia that could turn very ugly if the wrong events happen - I certainly don't want an exciting decade. I want a really boring one where as little as possible happens.

JonnieCache2• 16 years ago

The classic (apocryphal) chinese curse:

"May you live in interesting times"

JonnieCache2• 16 years ago

"Did your friends really enjoy that party? Yes, but based on their proximities to one another they split into 3 groups with little overlap. Maybe try to have separate parties next time, or set up some icebreakers. The following games and exercises have worked in similar occasions in the past. Sally has done some of them before so maybe she can organize."

Michael...... Vassar. Just making a note of that so I can be sure I never end up at a party at this guys house.

pyrhho2• 16 years ago

The increasing power of motivated and intelligent individuals is a major force, which I feel the author missed. In modern times (particularly in the last 10 years) it has become easier and easier for the motivated and intelligent individual to wield ever-increasing amounts of power. Today, and even more-so in coming years, a few motivated people can wield power which would rival the super-powers of a few decades ago. SpaceX for example with their recent launch is on par with the early NASA progress.

I hate to reference wikileaks in yet another thread, but 20 years ago it would have been unimaginable that a small group of people could set themselves to rival[1] a super-power and be so effective at it. A similar argument could be made about Al-Qaeda, Anonymous, and many other organizations.

Further Reading: Vernor Vinge touches briefly on this trend and some of its implications in Rainbow's End.

Edit: [1] 'rival' may have been the wrong word. 'baffle'?

elai3• 16 years ago

9/11 could of happened as soon as airliners were invented and became a public transit system...

pyrhho2• 16 years ago

True, it could have. But it didn't until the organizational and persuasive ability of a small group of people could out-do the FBI, CIA, etc..

That being said, there is a lot more behind 9/11, and increasing power of individuals relative to super-powers is just one factor.

ebaysucks• 16 years ago

Agreed.

As "combat methods" require more intelligence, it will become harder for governments to control the population.

Convincing an army of hackers to follow a military order without questioning it is much harder than convincing some kids it's cool and patriotic to run towards a front line with a gun in their hands.

Flags and national anthems will lose much of their political importance.

Reasons to expect the next 10 years to be more exciting than the last

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