AI writing code and discover millions of new breakthroughs every day for the good of mankind. While people living in alternate reality satisfying all there pleasures.
I beg to differ but slightly : humanity will probably still exist in 100 years but probably less numerous and less technological than now.
At one point natural resources depletion and the effect of climate change will reduce human population to a fraction of what it is now. The remaining ones will have to make do with less technology and more manual work.
I'd encourage every HN reader to read the Archdruid Report, eye opening.
Human beings always overvalue their importance. Every generation thinks of the previous as a bad one, of itself as the last one. Truth is, we are not at the tip of any curve, no unique snowflakes, we are each just one of billions that already were and billions that are to be.
Honestly, this isn't that far out to guess, and it probably won't be nearly as futuristic as we might imagine.
For example, in 1967 Dennis Ritchie began work on the c programming language, still highly used today only almost 50 years later. In 1962 the Chinook helicopter when into service. Almost 35 years ago the US Space Shuttle went into service, and we still haven't seen a huge amount of new innovation there. Though maybe it will come.
Anyway, the point is, 100 years brings amazing innovations (before 1967 there was no c, after all! So it was amazing). But, progress happens a lot more slowly than I think most realize in our science fiction laden society. We probably won't have any strong AI Robot Overloads in 100 years. Most likely we'll still be writing software to solve our day to day challenges while sitting around and complaining about how poorly other software engineers write their code.
At some point in less than 100 years, the contemporary equivalent of today's software will then be a type of telekinetic programmable matter. But you don't really program it. Its more like a number of beings work closely together via wirelessly connected direct neural interfaces to imagine what might be possible, while AGIs work behind the scenes to implement and integrate these fantasies. These are then realized by some type of physical particle arrangement at some resolution.
With enough engineering we could accomplish a crude approximation of this magic today. To really guess about 100 years from now is impossible. Chimps couldn't predict the evolution of computers and we can't predict ASI technologies.
Moore's law continued, all of Earth 2015's data could fit on the head of a pin. However, operating systems continued to get "smarter" with built-in features and AI that always require more storage and processing power than is available, causing everything to be slow and buggy, and everything gets more buggy the longer you use it.
No software is allowed release on the mass market unless it fits Apple's TOS (Apple is now the world government as well). All apps will be politically correct and use no porn, swear words, violence, or mention anything hinting at a competitor to Apple.
AI that can fix bugs and manage its own size will be a mere 10 years away.
> AI would rather use Android phones and takes over the world.
Seriously though, I'd rather speculate on the risk of the super AI a company has developed until then turning against the company itself. Not from a 'destroy the world' type of scenario but from a 'marketing desaster' scenario.
I don't think it'll look that different as far as technologists are concerned. There'll be software engineers who write code that interfaces with hardware and other software APIs. The languages will change, the ideas might change, but the jobs will still exist.
What will really change is the sophistication of people who interact with software - the end user. They'll start writing code (within the confines of an application suite) in a big way. At the moment I imagine only a single digit percentage of users can write a macro or use a scripting language in an application, but that will change immensely. Everyone will use 'code' to manipulate data in their job. There will be a fundamental shift towards understanding things on an abstract 'everything is just data' level. The real question is whether that's 100 years away or 20 years away. I suspect it's going to be much closer to 20.
Humans try hard to be smarter than their "software" counterparts. Start-ups emerge with a problem to solve "How to make a normal human smarter than any machines". Economics would be decentralized, and ultimately survival of the fittest. If only I could live to see all this.
I think that won't exist "coders" or "programmers" or "developers" anymore. From the core, machine will be programmable by natural language.
The basic rules for "talking to machines" will be teach in schools as a subset of the regular language learning.
As today there are no more monastic scribes, there won't be coders anymore. "Writing code", ie, talking to machines will be easy enough for universal reach.
The commonplace luxuries of tomorrow will be the rich persons luxuries today. Personalized service will become mainstream. We will have fashion designers, interior decorators, mentors, tutors, financial advisers, constantly at our disposal. Cars will do the driving. Nearly the entire world will become bi(tri)lingual, with deep contextual and instantaneous translation (and history) for all travel and business dealings.
I liked Vernor Vinge's idea that a programmer will be called "software archielogist" and his main job is unearthing existing pieces of code created over the past hundred years and putting them together. Sometimes it feels like we're already at that point.
But you'd think with 130 years of software behind us we'd have code for everything.
Mathematics has evolved since Pythagoras, but still remains the same foundation.
Language hasn't changed much since Gutenberg invented the printing press.
Programming hasn't changed that much in 50 years since Lisp, Fortran, Pascal. We have more libraries, frameworks, tools, but it's still the same loops, conditions, functions.
I predict with total confidence things will be the same.
IMHO to get our rising unbounded complexity under control, Turing completeness will come to be seen as a curse to be avoided. Untyped Lisp will be seen as a lowest common denominator "failure mode" (ala Greenspun's tenth rule), not as a language to deliberately program in.
Adopting this philosophy means that it will be a language designer's responsibility to incorporate as many compatible features as possible (not as macros!) to avoid the temptation of layering a lisp.
(That is if languages continue to develop, rather than the slop-on-slop mentality fully taking over).
> Long after everything else you know has gone to dust, Vim will be there. Some version of Vim will be running on whatever computer triggers armageddon.
Neoglyphs, a new meta-symbology unifying mathematics, statistics and a broad swathe of human language semantics will emerge, drawing heavily from Chinese and early 21st century international signage: Japanese の will win out on Chinese 的 (for indicating possession). Grammar will be absent to simplistic, with a Chinese/Tai-Kadai/Austronesian rather than Indo-Aryan structure (ie. use of amorphous noun/verb concept ideograms and adjunct tense-particles where necessary rather than tedious verb conjugation). This new symbology (glyph library) will be the standard pedagogical language across the world, and the normal interface language for all software. It will quickly begin to effect semantics in the few major remnant human languages, the vast majority of which died out between the early 20th and mid 21st century. Long-form reading will become even rarer. The lyrics and snapshot-imagerie of the rock and instagram generations will give way to a resurgence in poetry, lauded for its vaguearies, which will be widely appreciated in a mix of classical Chinese and the neoglyphs. This will be automatically set to music by algorithms, in personal stylistic preference. Interface code itself (windows, scrollers, presentation systems, graph generators, etc.) will no longer be programmed by humans, instead they will be generated automatically against semantic and contextual preferences linked to the user, much as some advanced unix users enjoy customizing their shell. The challenges of code reuse (portability, parallelism, etc.) will be solved automatically in almost every case. Most software will derive from expert systems which translate human wants in to functional software using simplistic visual metaphor and iterative design in the lounge-room. Increased availability of pure and micro-dosed drugs of all current and yet to be discovered genres will play a big part the more creative outputs from these sessions, which will essentially complete the union of human/biological abstract thinking and the speed and technical prowess of the machines. In the 20th century, Frank Zappa said "You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer." At the dawn of the 22nd century, countries will have essentially become dormant anachronisms, but good drugs and revolutionary thinkers (no longer titled programmers) will by definition possess their own widely recognized neoglyphs. Many of the thinkers will be those previously considered disabled or challenged by society at large; the autistic, the handicapped, the psychonauts, the other-large-mammals - whose capacity for modes of reasoning apart from the mainstream will finally become valued. Finally, 0xDEADBEEF will disappear as a meme, since beef in real life will no longer exist except for the ultra-rich.
[+] [-] am185|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clamprecht|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Varkiil|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmnicolas|11 years ago|reply
At one point natural resources depletion and the effect of climate change will reduce human population to a fraction of what it is now. The remaining ones will have to make do with less technology and more manual work.
I'd encourage every HN reader to read the Archdruid Report, eye opening.
[+] [-] allendoerfer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] desdiv|11 years ago|reply
[0] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/11/nuclear-winter-and-hum...
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] trcollinson|11 years ago|reply
For example, in 1967 Dennis Ritchie began work on the c programming language, still highly used today only almost 50 years later. In 1962 the Chinook helicopter when into service. Almost 35 years ago the US Space Shuttle went into service, and we still haven't seen a huge amount of new innovation there. Though maybe it will come.
Anyway, the point is, 100 years brings amazing innovations (before 1967 there was no c, after all! So it was amazing). But, progress happens a lot more slowly than I think most realize in our science fiction laden society. We probably won't have any strong AI Robot Overloads in 100 years. Most likely we'll still be writing software to solve our day to day challenges while sitting around and complaining about how poorly other software engineers write their code.
[+] [-] ilaksh|11 years ago|reply
With enough engineering we could accomplish a crude approximation of this magic today. To really guess about 100 years from now is impossible. Chimps couldn't predict the evolution of computers and we can't predict ASI technologies.
[+] [-] ccvannorman|11 years ago|reply
No software is allowed release on the mass market unless it fits Apple's TOS (Apple is now the world government as well). All apps will be politically correct and use no porn, swear words, violence, or mention anything hinting at a competitor to Apple.
AI that can fix bugs and manage its own size will be a mere 10 years away.
[+] [-] cybrox|11 years ago|reply
Seriously though, I'd rather speculate on the risk of the super AI a company has developed until then turning against the company itself. Not from a 'destroy the world' type of scenario but from a 'marketing desaster' scenario.
[+] [-] onion2k|11 years ago|reply
What will really change is the sophistication of people who interact with software - the end user. They'll start writing code (within the confines of an application suite) in a big way. At the moment I imagine only a single digit percentage of users can write a macro or use a scripting language in an application, but that will change immensely. Everyone will use 'code' to manipulate data in their job. There will be a fundamental shift towards understanding things on an abstract 'everything is just data' level. The real question is whether that's 100 years away or 20 years away. I suspect it's going to be much closer to 20.
[+] [-] styts|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nitinics|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lancey|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bpg_92|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soneca|11 years ago|reply
As today there are no more monastic scribes, there won't be coders anymore. "Writing code", ie, talking to machines will be easy enough for universal reach.
[+] [-] tcbawo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrfusion|11 years ago|reply
But you'd think with 130 years of software behind us we'd have code for everything.
[+] [-] Thiz|11 years ago|reply
Language hasn't changed much since Gutenberg invented the printing press.
Programming hasn't changed that much in 50 years since Lisp, Fortran, Pascal. We have more libraries, frameworks, tools, but it's still the same loops, conditions, functions.
I predict with total confidence things will be the same.
[+] [-] mindslight|11 years ago|reply
Adopting this philosophy means that it will be a language designer's responsibility to incorporate as many compatible features as possible (not as macros!) to avoid the temptation of layering a lisp.
(That is if languages continue to develop, rather than the slop-on-slop mentality fully taking over).
[+] [-] fractalb|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tobylane|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shiggerino|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Artemis2|11 years ago|reply
> Long after everything else you know has gone to dust, Vim will be there. Some version of Vim will be running on whatever computer triggers armageddon.
[+] [-] ptype|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thegreatpeter|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panglott|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contingencies|11 years ago|reply