Putting the life back in science fiction

I started writing this in response to the somewhat-different entry about the future that you pulled just before this one went up, so it’s structured oddly…

Thoughts on the future:

The Singularity: keeping computing power on an exponential curve past 2020 will require something other than the silicon transistors we’ve been shrinking for the last 40 years. The rate of improvement could slow dramatically until the next paradigm picks up steam. But even if something’s ready to sustain the curve past 2020, I don’t expect the Singularity. AI is already here, and it can kick human ass at a variety of difficult intellectual problems. But AI shares nothing with human culture or evolutionary history. AI isn’t going to be Machine People. Expecting faster computers to become Machine People who will save or enslave humans is like expecting a toaster to gain telekinesis and an evil brain because it was struck by lightning. I am not dismissing Machine People in principle, but I think brain emulation is the only plausible way there and I have doubts that it will be realized, much less realized before 2050.

I think the future is still full of robots. But I think they’ll be purpose-built machines that are little like the robots of fiction. They may cook your food, drive your car, and eliminate your job, but they won’t pass a Turing test or plot an uprising.

The Environment: I expect extinctions to continue accelerating for some time. I expect the large cats and African megafauna to disappear from the wild in my lifetime. I don’t expect atmospheric CO2 to decline or even stabilize in my lifetime. I expect AGW denial to collapse at some point in the future when 1) the effects are really obvious and 2) it’s already too far gone to return to the 20th century norm, even with the most aggressive globally coordinated effort. I expect continued degradation of ecosystems over large portions of the Earth’s surface, plus exhaustion of fossil water and wild fish stocks. Unlike many environmentalists raising the alarm, I think this will make many humans miserable but not lead to death on a population-curbing scale. It turns out that people can live long enough to birth the next generation even when they’re already living 5 to a room and defecating right into the water that washes their pots. Many other species cannot tolerate so much crowding and filth; they, rather than we, will diminish in number. The future is bright for rats, dogs, and pigeons.

America and China: I wish the American empire had already ended. Why does the USA have a global network of military bases 20 years after the Communists gave up? I fear it’s going to drag out for decades to come, pissing away money when there’s not war and money plus lives when there is. A lot of American “thinkers” seem to expect China to play the USSR in an updated production of Cold War, but they’re aiming to win at global capitalism, regardless of internal political organization or rhetoric.

10 years ago I thought America had a large enough head start to remain competitive but China’s been building productivity and winning market segments while we’ve been incinerating mountains of money in the name of security. The good news is that American prosperity can fall a long way and Americans will still be wealthy by global standards. The bad news is that the decline isn’t going to be smooth and predictable. The ugly news is that the movers and shakers are happy to sacrifice a billion dollars of general prosperity if they can personally skim another 10 million.

The story is even bigger than America and China: whither capitalism in the 21st century? I have heard (mostly from Marxists) that capitalism cannot function without growing markets. If that is true, this is its last century, though it’s anyone’s guess if the successor will be better. Every nation but North Korea is already participating in the global capitalist economy. Global population is expected to peak mid-century. Then what, when there are no more markets to open or expand?

Expect the unexpected: it looks like quantum mechanics and relativity have the entirety of physics tidied up, except for a few cosmological mysteries and niggling problems of reconciling gravity with QM. On the other hand, physics in the late 19th century appeared to have almost everything tidied up except a few niggling mysteries of electromagnetism… Global nuclear war looks a lot less likely today than 50 years ago, but even a regional nuclear war could upend all sorts of projections. If nano-factories or even clunky von Neumann machines lead to completely automated manufacturing, the impact would be so great that I don’t want to even try to extrapolate.