Foundations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution

[Nero]

A word on the Metaverse, it is unlikely to exist in one uniform way like the Internet exists today, instead there may well be many metaverses that are built and enabled by the people running them to allow them to do pretty much whatever they like in VR.

Thoughts Yuli?

[Vakanai]

I suppose I was a bit lucky not to have been in the futurist community back then, reading the last several posts. Sure like a lot of you I was kind of gypped that we hadn't arrived in the era of space colonies and flying or at least hovering cars promised to us in the Jetsons or Blade Runner. I was very aware when 2015 came and went and was nothing like the 2015 of Back to the Future Part II. But I wasn't as "in the know" back then as I was now - I had googled "transhumanist forum" years earlier, couldn't find anything worthwhile, so was mostly a lone transhumanist and futurist as it were. Being somewhat less informed, I wasn't as aware of how slow the pace of progress was. What I knew and saw, not particularly searching for it, was the usual thing which was actually quite extraordinary for the time: the smartphone took my old desktop, photo camera, video camera, photo display, and video display and crammed it all into something people could hold in their hand. And it came with a voice assistant, a little AI you could talk to. Sure it wasn't particularly smart, but it existed and spoke and that's not nothing. And then voice assistants stopped living in just phones and were given their own little home speakers, and suddenly your whole home could be connected, and everything began to become "smarter" - smart bulbs and plugs were kind of the earliest, but then there was a smart thermostat, and then a video doorbell, then smart locks, and the home of the Jetsons at least sort of began to take shape, albeit in a dumbed down way and without the awesome sassy robot maid. And sure, it didn't quite matter which "smart" assistant was living in your phone and speakers because truth is they were and are still all about equally as dumb - but then there was Watson! The Jeopardy winning robot that people where speculating might replace doctors one day in diagnosing illnesses. And you know eventually that some day these voice assistants will get upgraded to something a little less dumb. Or at least you hope. So in around a decade of time we got supercomputer "does everything" devices in our hands, dumb little AI voices everywhere, about everything you could really want to control with a voice command was made to respond to a voice command, and we kept seeing promising snippets of AI that might actually know stuff well enough that we might want its voice everywhere someday (maybe).

At the same time smart phones and smart homes were beginning to take off we suddenly got so much disruption in tech it seemed - particularly in transportation and delivery. Suddenly cab hailing became an app, which drove ride sharing, which is now driving autonomous vehicle research. Basically road worthy robots on wheels. Sure, they're not road legal yet, but they're getting so close that it feels near future. And then people started talking about drone delivery, which again hasn't really happened yet, but the tech seems to be there - like, we can all feel that we should be getting packages delivered by drone, but governments and bureaucracies are just too slow to change air traffic laws to make it happen. Still, the promise is there.

I mean, it's not exactly The Future™ as we'd like to think about it - smartphones, voice assistants, smarthome gadgets, game winning AIs, and the very near future of driverless taxis and drone deliveries feel more like minor conveniences that aren't world changing, are mildly frustrating (least whenever Syri/Alexa/Google isn't hearing you right), and mildly worrying in the erosion of privacy department or how this might all lead to a future that's even more of a corporate dystopia than the present we're already living in (lets not kid ourselves, Amazon Apple and Google aren't making the world a better place, they're just trying to make money in a capitalist society run a bit too amok). But, it's promising to an extent. The rise of the smartphone has brought about the rise of voice assistants, which in turn has brought about heavier focus on AI, which has lead to a lot of the AI stuff (at least to some extent - there's a lot of things bringing focus to developing more capable AI). Voice assistant has brought about the smart home, which has brought about oodles of gadgets and connected devices and more emphasis on rolling out internet coverage worldwide. The phone also brought about ride sharing and ordering things online, which is pushing driverless cars and drone development. And drones have actually pushed forward the "air taxi" idea (let's be honest, most flying car/taxi designs today look more than a little drone-like). Which will merge into driverless flying taxis one day...

Heck, the BCIs that'll help people get around will be using a lot of smartphone tech if not just controlling smartphones outright. VR/AR/MR/the "metaverse" is inspiring BCI research so we can control those interfaces more naturally.

I mean, I hate to say it, and it's way too corporate and consumer focused, and none of us should trust these companies, and a lot of this just kind of highlights how capitalism, and American capitalism in particular, has become too corrupt I think, but ever since Apple released the iPhone, the late 00s through the 10s from a layperson's (aka me) futurist perspective has been anything but some dry spell in news. Yeah sure, until Boston Dynamics started showcasing their robots in dance videos the more visually cool robot/cyborg/android bit of the puzzle looked missing, but the intense focus on AI and steady progress in that field has been on point, more of the tech-environment we build for ourselves is under our (voice) commands, we have more computing power in our hands than ever before, and we can actually see the flying-car future slowly being developed right now. I mean, we didn't get the space colonies, we still are aging in real time, we don't have a robot butler more advanced than a Roomba, like we aren't really living in the best or coolest sci-fi future right now. But when I get bored and really look into things, I find some new bit of AI news, or some cool tech gadget, or some BCI breakthrough, or some video of a driverless car, or dancing robots, that my mind never has to go too long before I start trying to add this latest thing into my idea of what the Future™ looks like (and I had to copy/paste the ™ by the way, I've no clue how to get my keyboard to do that) and start trying to spin it off into what this or that could possibly lead too.

I don't know, it's just the last 15 years of my life feel so much more chock full of progress, ever since the late 00s, compared to my first 20 years (and yes, that means I'm 35). And since I've only been a transhumanist since my early teens, that means most of the time I've been futurist oriented has been fairly filled with stuff going on. Even if for most of that time it didn't really affect me personally very much.

(Hopefully the next 15 years will see more progress in the medical/anti-aging fields along with more and better prosthetics that eventually are downright better than their biological equivalents - I want to be an immortal cyborg, have ever since I learned what a respirocyte is.)

[Tadasuke]

The way I personally see important progress since the early 18th century (in the so called "developed countries", like France, Germany or Belgium) is written below. I don't count any military or warfare technologies, as they don't improve peoples living standards or increase life satisfaction or lifespans.

1700 - 1749 : some key innovations are discovered (e.g. better cheaper glass making or the flying shuttle)
1750 - 1799 : wide-scale implementations of them
1800 - 1849 : some key innovations are discovered (e.g. steamboats, railways, telegraph, cast-iron cooking range)
1850 - 1899 : wide-scale implementations of them
1900 - 1949 : some key innovations are discovered (e.g. assembly line for mass production, washing machine, fridge, flushable valves with water tanks resting on the bowl, toilet paper rolls, home radio and television, plastics, transistors, antibiotics)
1950 - 1999 : wide-scale implementations of them
possibly a similar situation in the 21st century

A Regular Folks Supper 200 years Ago – March 1820:

[firestar464]

Yeah we have more and more while living less and less

[raklian]

Yeah we have more and more while living less and less

And then, we'll have nothing but living MUCH more.