Wait, a colony on Mars by 2050 that doesn't need to be resupplied from Earth? ...lol no.
Strong, strong disagree that there will be any kind of "colony" on Mars by 2050, and my prediction is that we won't even have our first manned mission to Mars this century.
We haven't been back to the Moon in 50 years. We haven't left LEO in 50 years. Surely we would need to build a colony on the Moon first, as a trial for building a colony somewhere that's three orders of magnitude farther away. We are nowhere close to doing this.
...because until basically now, the tech for doing so was an immensely expensive, one shot, disposable rocket, which could only carry a return vehicle, one lander and a small crew. As a result, the only use for moon missions was (1) to do trivial kinds of science such as could be done with the very limited kinds of instruments that could be carried, and (2) for national bragging rights.
With the science done, with the missions becoming routine and boring, the only entity that could afford to go stopped spending its money.
Yeah, this one was hard to buy, unless there are a lot of billionaires that want to live in houses the size of a college dorm room. The cost to get to mars, and to live on Mars seems to me to be absolutely prohibitive at this point.
A number of the other observations also seemed to be a stretch. I'm not sure AI will have the level of impact he expects in less than 30 years. the death of the local store and getting any product delivered in an hour or less seems way too optimistic when you consider all the small rural towns in the US that can't even get decent broadband today.
These things don't happen naturally, they don't progress at some rate. They happen because people decide to do them, and then do them.
Humans haven't been to the moon in 50 years because nobody has decided to go in 50 years. Right now there's a man with more resources than almost any man on earth and he has dedicated his life to ensuring that people go to mars and live there. He is so to used on it that he has focused on creating novel technology just for the purpose, and demonstrated that technology. It is going to happen.
In space, distance doesn't really matter, gravity wells matter. Going to mars is not much different than going to the moon. You don't really need a trial, the people are stuck there no matter how far away it is.
Autarky on Mars, sure now. But now, the richest man in the world is existentially dedicated to building 1,000 Starships to build a city on Mars and I'm pretty sure he's going to pull it off.
> my prediction is that we won't even have our first manned mission to Mars this century.
Well that's a wacky prediction. What makes you think that?
We haven't been back to the Moon in 50 years, sure, but we've barely been trying until recently. We're very close to having vehicles that can get to the Moon and Mars.
I absolutely agree that we won't have a colony on Mars by 2050, but I think you vastly overestimate the difficulty of just traveling to Mars if you're judging based on the Moon. Political will? Perhaps, but I think the best way to think of it is that it was possible to go to the Moon on technology from 50 years ago. Modern rockets are far, far better.
not that I really disagree with your point, but orders of magnitude of distance are a poor measure of the kind of effort it takes to get places in space.
Almost all of the energy and effort is spent on getting things off of the earth to begin with, everything after that point is comparatively easy, especially if you are willing to take a long time doing it.
The major problem with a Mars mission is that the constraints of getting things into orbit are so oppressive, its hard to send enough supplies and equipment to orbit, due to the exponential explosion of the rocket equation.
The author never specified that the colony would be self-sufficient by 2050.
Elon Musk is planning on sending a Starship along with 100 tons of cargo to Mars in September 2022. He'll probably miss that window and send it October 2024 instead.
Musk also plans on building 50 Starships per year.
After arguing (correctly, IMO) that futurists make ridiculous predictions, he predicts a colony on Mars? Why? To what end? What would it do and who would care? Who would want to travel months through space one way just to do… what will anyone be able to do on Mars anyway? I can see some tourism of a particularly extreme sort but the idea of a Mars colony strikes me as totally insane.
Also predicting that most education will be online after everyone spent a year and a half discovering how terrible both Zoom school and Zoom university are is a bold (and likely wrong) prediction.
I buy that the future is female given current trends, but basically the whole list of predictions in the second half of the article is exactly the mistake he explains futurists make in the first half!
> predicting that most education will be online after everyone spent a year and a half discovering how terrible both Zoom school and Zoom university are is a bold (and likely wrong) prediction.
You’re probably right about Zoom school—it has sounded pretty terrible to me, too, especially for younger children—but I think the jury is still out on Zoom university.
I teach at a university in Japan where most of the teaching has been conducted online since April of last year, and we’re now debating what to do next year if infections stay low. (After a frightening spike in August, they are very low in Japan now.) When faculty in my department were asked their teaching preference for the next academic year, about a third said they want to return to in-person only, a third want to teach a combination of in-person and online, and a third—including me—want to keep teaching online only.
When I’ve discussed the issue with undergraduates in my classes this year, about half have said they prefer to stay online for many or most of their classes. However, they do strongly prefer to socialize with other students in person.
The reasons many teachers and students prefer online classes range from the mundane—such as avoiding long commutes on crowded trains—to the perception that, for some types of classes, online learning can actually be more effective than classroom teaching.
For me, the game-changer for online classes has been the ability of students to take part in classes regardless of where they are. Most international students have been unable to enter Japan since April 2020, but, at my university at least, they have been able to continue their studies online. After I taught a graduate seminar last year in which more than half the students were in other countries—Indonesia, Thailand, China—and all were able to participate in the discussions on an equal basis, I came to think that it will be hard for in-person-only universities to remain competitive in the future.
There's a large, very well funded company building the path for Mars (and back). So there's 5000 or so SpaceX candidates already who have bought into the idea. I'd guess NASA would have a few people willing as well.
To be honest I think it will likely happen before 2050, but it also might also come and go before then as well. Getting to self sufficiency is a very, very long shot, and up until then something has to foot the bill which is where the endeavour is most likely to fall over.
Is it just me or does the future he paints sound absolutely abysmal? It's effectively a dictorship where your entire life is bouncing from one tulip mania to another holed up in your apartment talking to an AI and lost in a world of garbage content from Neflix 2.0 while you await your burrito delivery and dream of hitting it big on <insert_name> Coin so you can move to Mars and watch the dust blow around.
> Is it just me or does the future he paints sound absolutely abysmal?
That's how I know it's an realistic and mostly unbiased prediction that's relatively accurate: it looks kinda like today, except more of it. Barring a black swan event that drastically changes our system of values and incentives, that's probably how it's going to play out. We just had a black swan play out and... it's all the same, just six feet more of it.
Most social revolutions either up reshuffling the deck or in disaster. The low hanging fruit in most technological fields has been picked and "priced in" during decades past.
I don't really care where futurists keep their heads, but they, including Hoel, use them intermittently, superficially and in a slipshod manner. They don't do their homework.
I very much doubt that Hoel has properly thought through in detail what it would take to operate a permanent colony on Mars and what would have to happen to set one up. If he has, he has not troubled to write down his thoughts.
As an example of what I'm talking about, Brian Potter, on his blog "Construction Physics", has delved into the detail and explained some of the mass of physical, economic, informational, institutional, organisational, and cultural factors that result in the building construction industry and construction costs being what they are.[1]
I really doubt there will be a rise of the throuple in any meaningful sense. The entire point of the authors essay is how unchanging society is, but suddenly it's going to become not uncommon for inherently complicated (more dynamics than dyads) relationships to exist?
It hasn't been the case at any point in human history (other than extremely small minorities). This is not going to change now. Humans don't work that way on a mass scale.
The same with education. Education does not exist to educate, it exists to babysit children (parents have to go to work! look at the last election in Virginia), and be a hoop to jump through for accreditation. Online learning will be hugely inconvenient for these purposes, and traditional in person education will remain the most common form well into the end of the 21st century
I'm here for the cynicism but here's the thing: we went from no weekends to weekends; we went from random schools to mandatory school; we went from child labor to almost no child labor with noted exceptions
things do change. we can change them more.
i agree that throuple is an unlikely emergence from those efforts :D
I really dislike forecasting with vague statements that are almost certainly going to be correct.
Case in point: "Anti-aging technology will extend the health-spans of the rich."
There are myriad ways in which this statement will be true and yet it's completely useless today. As long as there is any tech (biotech, medicine, plastic surgery, etc.) that extends people's lives by even a little bit, or improves their QOL into a slightly older age, then this is true.
It's unactionable, unclear, etc.
I'm constantly looking for good, verifiable, and actionable forecasts for this stuff, if anyone has them. And if you are interested in doing such a thing, please reach out. :)
It's difficult for me to see how AI will replace massive numbers of programmers, rather than expand their productivity and/or change the nature of their work.
Business logic is about getting very tiny details and edge cases correct: "if a, b and c but not d and e, unless of course f and g"... I don't see how that code can be created by an AI in a way that doesn't create even more work for someone fixing bugs.
We have barely scratched the surface of what tech can offer in most brick and mortar industries because this business logic is so incredibly difficult to automate. It seems unfeasible that a magic AI will come along and do what humans cannot do alone.
I think we'll see programming evolve and software engineers will probably be among the first workers who learn to work in truly collaborative ways with AI.
Heck, I only know the 70s onward, and remember the mid 70s only in child's eye, me centric ways. I remember my aunts being upset about Elvis Presley dying, but I wasn't quite sure what the fuss was, and that was 77; I was 5. Someone died, but how did they fit into my world? Oh, that guy that sings? But we can still listen to him? Then what is the big deal?
My wonderful Usbourne Books of the Future were still promising me personal spacecraft and tours of Saturn's rings as late as 1980. The robots would take care of the garden back home. On the space station.
A whole way of looking at the future came unravelled in just the 12 years between then and our prognosticator's birth. By 1992, everyone was dreaming of cyberpunk, of uploading our minds, and fiction had the rich living in LEO. The stars had stretched out of reach.
Our cynical futurist, age 33, has not meaningfully experienced social change with an adult perspective over 29 years. Every 30 year period ever has been a mad scramble of change. I am sure that was true between 1000 and 1030 even. Big shit was happening.
Like my 1972-1980 world view, his 1992-2000 world was likely pretty personal, and coloured by a narrow range of life experiences. So I am skeptical he has the breadth of experience needed to extend 29 into the future.
> If you want to predict the future accurately, you should be an incrementalist and accept that human nature doesn’t change along most axes. Meaning that the future will look a lot like the past. If Cicero were transported from ancient Rome to our time he would easily understand most things about our society.
This is, I think the heart of the issue. Human nature is pretty constant. We can change our environment or trade offs (for example at one time if you wanted to avoid pregnancy, the trade off was don’t have sex, now it is take a pill, hence the leveling out of our population).
> 2050, that super futuristic year, is only 29 years out, so it is exactly the same as predicting what the world would look like today back in 1992
The problem with this analysis is that the rate of change of the world is accelerating; the world is changing faster now than it was in 1992. Fundamentally, this is driven by the fact that all the changes from the past cause further changes, in an exponential process. Thus a straightforward linear estimate of the future will underestimate how much things will change in the future.
Things have been accelerating in a sigmoidal manner, which looks exponential in the early curve, but then plateaus as it approaches a limit. It's hard to say how far along we in the curve now, but given that we're bumping up against the limits of silicon semiconductors now, I'd say perhaps farther than you might expect.
> The problem with this analysis is that the rate of change of the world is accelerating; the world is changing faster now than it was in 1992. Fundamentally, this is driven by the fact that all the changes from the past cause further changes, in an exponential process
Any accelerating trend can't be sustained indefinitely. We know that the accelerating rate of progress is because of computers (which reduce the feedback loops on various processes which then help make better computers, and so on). When we reach a point where computers stop getting better, the rate of progress will stabilize. We've already observed stagnant clock speeds for over a decade. There are still worthy investments to be made, like in miniaturization, affordability, and heterogeneity, but without a breakthrough as monumental as the transistor we have no reason to assume that acceleration will continue.
I can't see AI putting artists out of business. Artists are and will remain much more cost effective than the expense of training machines, because most of them work for peanuts or free. The most we will see is artists using AI as a medium ('Show me a dog with an apple on its head. Now make it greener with more neanderthal.').
The author dismisses futurists’ predictions as ludicrous, without providing any evidence to the contrary. Robin Hanson has some crazy claims, but he thinks things through and is extremely willing to bet on what he believes in.
Just because something seems crazy, does not mean it is wrong.
But techno-utopianism is a form of art in Silicon Valley.
Your average SV techbro feels superior to regular people who enjoy other forms of art such as music or sports or poetry or even film making.
Label those activities as a "waste of time" but they end up completely falling for the BS performance art that scum like Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes put up.
And they elevate them too! Where normal people see art in an Hendrix solo or an Eminem verse they see it in the obnoxious self-promoting BS spewed by such characters.
Of course the window dressing for all the above is nonesense marketing terms such as : "showing passion" or "produce a strong narrative" or even "tell your story to the world"
[+] [-] dmitrybrant|4 years ago|reply
Strong, strong disagree that there will be any kind of "colony" on Mars by 2050, and my prediction is that we won't even have our first manned mission to Mars this century.
We haven't been back to the Moon in 50 years. We haven't left LEO in 50 years. Surely we would need to build a colony on the Moon first, as a trial for building a colony somewhere that's three orders of magnitude farther away. We are nowhere close to doing this.
[+] [-] JulianMorrison|4 years ago|reply
...because until basically now, the tech for doing so was an immensely expensive, one shot, disposable rocket, which could only carry a return vehicle, one lander and a small crew. As a result, the only use for moon missions was (1) to do trivial kinds of science such as could be done with the very limited kinds of instruments that could be carried, and (2) for national bragging rights.
With the science done, with the missions becoming routine and boring, the only entity that could afford to go stopped spending its money.
This is all right on the cusp of changing.
[+] [-] abruzzi|4 years ago|reply
A number of the other observations also seemed to be a stretch. I'm not sure AI will have the level of impact he expects in less than 30 years. the death of the local store and getting any product delivered in an hour or less seems way too optimistic when you consider all the small rural towns in the US that can't even get decent broadband today.
[+] [-] betwixthewires|4 years ago|reply
Humans haven't been to the moon in 50 years because nobody has decided to go in 50 years. Right now there's a man with more resources than almost any man on earth and he has dedicated his life to ensuring that people go to mars and live there. He is so to used on it that he has focused on creating novel technology just for the purpose, and demonstrated that technology. It is going to happen.
In space, distance doesn't really matter, gravity wells matter. Going to mars is not much different than going to the moon. You don't really need a trial, the people are stuck there no matter how far away it is.
[+] [-] unchocked|4 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1461235511511633922
... the second richest man in the world is existentially dedicated to building the a city in Earth orbit.
[+] [-] yupper32|4 years ago|reply
Well that's a wacky prediction. What makes you think that?
We haven't been back to the Moon in 50 years, sure, but we've barely been trying until recently. We're very close to having vehicles that can get to the Moon and Mars.
[+] [-] ravi-delia|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway2048|4 years ago|reply
Almost all of the energy and effort is spent on getting things off of the earth to begin with, everything after that point is comparatively easy, especially if you are willing to take a long time doing it.
The major problem with a Mars mission is that the constraints of getting things into orbit are so oppressive, its hard to send enough supplies and equipment to orbit, due to the exponential explosion of the rocket equation.
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|4 years ago|reply
Elon Musk is planning on sending a Starship along with 100 tons of cargo to Mars in September 2022. He'll probably miss that window and send it October 2024 instead.
Musk also plans on building 50 Starships per year.
[+] [-] huitzitziltzin|4 years ago|reply
Also predicting that most education will be online after everyone spent a year and a half discovering how terrible both Zoom school and Zoom university are is a bold (and likely wrong) prediction.
I buy that the future is female given current trends, but basically the whole list of predictions in the second half of the article is exactly the mistake he explains futurists make in the first half!
[+] [-] tkgally|4 years ago|reply
You’re probably right about Zoom school—it has sounded pretty terrible to me, too, especially for younger children—but I think the jury is still out on Zoom university.
I teach at a university in Japan where most of the teaching has been conducted online since April of last year, and we’re now debating what to do next year if infections stay low. (After a frightening spike in August, they are very low in Japan now.) When faculty in my department were asked their teaching preference for the next academic year, about a third said they want to return to in-person only, a third want to teach a combination of in-person and online, and a third—including me—want to keep teaching online only.
When I’ve discussed the issue with undergraduates in my classes this year, about half have said they prefer to stay online for many or most of their classes. However, they do strongly prefer to socialize with other students in person.
The reasons many teachers and students prefer online classes range from the mundane—such as avoiding long commutes on crowded trains—to the perception that, for some types of classes, online learning can actually be more effective than classroom teaching.
For me, the game-changer for online classes has been the ability of students to take part in classes regardless of where they are. Most international students have been unable to enter Japan since April 2020, but, at my university at least, they have been able to continue their studies online. After I taught a graduate seminar last year in which more than half the students were in other countries—Indonesia, Thailand, China—and all were able to participate in the discussions on an equal basis, I came to think that it will be hard for in-person-only universities to remain competitive in the future.
[+] [-] mhio|4 years ago|reply
To be honest I think it will likely happen before 2050, but it also might also come and go before then as well. Getting to self sufficiency is a very, very long shot, and up until then something has to foot the bill which is where the endeavour is most likely to fall over.
In any case, we get to watch some cool looking hardware go up in the mean time - https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=54984.msg2...
[+] [-] herlitzj|4 years ago|reply
Kill me now :(
[+] [-] akiselev|4 years ago|reply
That's how I know it's an realistic and mostly unbiased prediction that's relatively accurate: it looks kinda like today, except more of it. Barring a black swan event that drastically changes our system of values and incentives, that's probably how it's going to play out. We just had a black swan play out and... it's all the same, just six feet more of it.
Most social revolutions either up reshuffling the deck or in disaster. The low hanging fruit in most technological fields has been picked and "priced in" during decades past.
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
[+] [-] tuatoru|4 years ago|reply
I very much doubt that Hoel has properly thought through in detail what it would take to operate a permanent colony on Mars and what would have to happen to set one up. If he has, he has not troubled to write down his thoughts.
As an example of what I'm talking about, Brian Potter, on his blog "Construction Physics", has delved into the detail and explained some of the mass of physical, economic, informational, institutional, organisational, and cultural factors that result in the building construction industry and construction costs being what they are.[1]
I have never seen its like from any futurist.
1. https://constructionphysics.substack.com/
[+] [-] basedgod|4 years ago|reply
It hasn't been the case at any point in human history (other than extremely small minorities). This is not going to change now. Humans don't work that way on a mass scale.
The same with education. Education does not exist to educate, it exists to babysit children (parents have to go to work! look at the last election in Virginia), and be a hoop to jump through for accreditation. Online learning will be hugely inconvenient for these purposes, and traditional in person education will remain the most common form well into the end of the 21st century
Nothing ever changes
[+] [-] pempem|4 years ago|reply
things do change. we can change them more.
i agree that throuple is an unlikely emergence from those efforts :D
[+] [-] cl42|4 years ago|reply
Case in point: "Anti-aging technology will extend the health-spans of the rich."
There are myriad ways in which this statement will be true and yet it's completely useless today. As long as there is any tech (biotech, medicine, plastic surgery, etc.) that extends people's lives by even a little bit, or improves their QOL into a slightly older age, then this is true.
It's unactionable, unclear, etc.
I'm constantly looking for good, verifiable, and actionable forecasts for this stuff, if anyone has them. And if you are interested in doing such a thing, please reach out. :)
[+] [-] jcoq|4 years ago|reply
Business logic is about getting very tiny details and edge cases correct: "if a, b and c but not d and e, unless of course f and g"... I don't see how that code can be created by an AI in a way that doesn't create even more work for someone fixing bugs.
We have barely scratched the surface of what tech can offer in most brick and mortar industries because this business logic is so incredibly difficult to automate. It seems unfeasible that a magic AI will come along and do what humans cannot do alone.
I think we'll see programming evolve and software engineers will probably be among the first workers who learn to work in truly collaborative ways with AI.
[+] [-] flerovium|4 years ago|reply
What about the 29 years between 1912 and 1941?
The pace of recent history is not a good indicator of future change.
[+] [-] Alan_Dillman|4 years ago|reply
Heck, I only know the 70s onward, and remember the mid 70s only in child's eye, me centric ways. I remember my aunts being upset about Elvis Presley dying, but I wasn't quite sure what the fuss was, and that was 77; I was 5. Someone died, but how did they fit into my world? Oh, that guy that sings? But we can still listen to him? Then what is the big deal?
My wonderful Usbourne Books of the Future were still promising me personal spacecraft and tours of Saturn's rings as late as 1980. The robots would take care of the garden back home. On the space station.
A whole way of looking at the future came unravelled in just the 12 years between then and our prognosticator's birth. By 1992, everyone was dreaming of cyberpunk, of uploading our minds, and fiction had the rich living in LEO. The stars had stretched out of reach.
Our cynical futurist, age 33, has not meaningfully experienced social change with an adult perspective over 29 years. Every 30 year period ever has been a mad scramble of change. I am sure that was true between 1000 and 1030 even. Big shit was happening.
Like my 1972-1980 world view, his 1992-2000 world was likely pretty personal, and coloured by a narrow range of life experiences. So I am skeptical he has the breadth of experience needed to extend 29 into the future.
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|4 years ago|reply
This is, I think the heart of the issue. Human nature is pretty constant. We can change our environment or trade offs (for example at one time if you wanted to avoid pregnancy, the trade off was don’t have sex, now it is take a pill, hence the leveling out of our population).
[+] [-] mempko|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamcstephens|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pphysch|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] typest|4 years ago|reply
The problem with this analysis is that the rate of change of the world is accelerating; the world is changing faster now than it was in 1992. Fundamentally, this is driven by the fact that all the changes from the past cause further changes, in an exponential process. Thus a straightforward linear estimate of the future will underestimate how much things will change in the future.
[+] [-] CuriouslyC|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kibwen|4 years ago|reply
Any accelerating trend can't be sustained indefinitely. We know that the accelerating rate of progress is because of computers (which reduce the feedback loops on various processes which then help make better computers, and so on). When we reach a point where computers stop getting better, the rate of progress will stabilize. We've already observed stagnant clock speeds for over a decade. There are still worthy investments to be made, like in miniaturization, affordability, and heterogeneity, but without a breakthrough as monumental as the transistor we have no reason to assume that acceleration will continue.
[+] [-] petermcneeley|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stubish|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] typest|4 years ago|reply
Just because something seems crazy, does not mean it is wrong.
[+] [-] klyrs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] cuzBchain|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] GDC7|4 years ago|reply
But techno-utopianism is a form of art in Silicon Valley.
Your average SV techbro feels superior to regular people who enjoy other forms of art such as music or sports or poetry or even film making.
Label those activities as a "waste of time" but they end up completely falling for the BS performance art that scum like Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes put up.
And they elevate them too! Where normal people see art in an Hendrix solo or an Eminem verse they see it in the obnoxious self-promoting BS spewed by such characters.
Of course the window dressing for all the above is nonesense marketing terms such as : "showing passion" or "produce a strong narrative" or even "tell your story to the world"