Quote of the Week.
"Imagine that you could travel back in time to the year 1900.
Imagine that you stand on a soap box on a city street corner in 1900
and you say to the gathering crowd, "By 1955, people will be flying
at supersonic speeds in sleek aircraft and traveling coast to coast
in just a few hours."
In 1900, it would have been insane to suggest that. In 1900,
airplanes did not even exist. Orville and Wilbur did not make the
first flight until 1903. The Model T Ford did not appear until 1909.
Yet, by 1947, Chuck Yeager flew the X1 at supersonic speeds. In
1954, the B-52 bomber made its maiden flight. It took only 51 years
to go from a rickety wooden airplane flying at 10 MPH, to a gigantic
aluminum jet-powered Stratofortress carrying 70,000 pounds of bombs
halfway around the world at 550 MPH. In 1958, Pan Am started
non-stop jet flights between New York and Paris in the Boeing 707.
In 1969, Americans set foot on the moon. It is unbelievable what
engineers and corporations can accomplish in 50 or 60 short years.
There were millions of people in 1900 who believed that humans would
never fly. They were completely wrong. However, I don't think anyone
in 1900 could imagine the B-52 happening in 54 years."
From "Robotic Nation"
by Marshall Brain
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
Brought to our attention by reader David Schachter.
This quote is from an interesting paper that depicts a 'present and future history' within which, by 2050, autonomous humanoid robots have taken over most of the entry-level jobs of today. But far from the Jetsons' vision of a utopia full of enthusiastic perennial vacationers, the robots have usurped most of the jobs, such as maids and other cleaning personnel, fast food cooks and clerks, and the many other jobs that don't require the spark of human creativity. One result is that 50% of the U.S. workforce is then unemployed.
Marshall makes the economic necessity for businesses of that time to follow this trend quite clear, similar to how businesses once all gave up messengers for the telephone, horse-drawn delivery wagons for trucks, and typewriters for computers -- competitive necessity. At which point he uses the quote above to help us understand why this possibility is FAR from "absurd," even if it seems so from our viewpoint today, "50 years in the past."
Moore Perspective.
Along the way, Marshall also illuminates some of the results of Moore's Law, such as through these excerpts:
"A processor in 2002 is 10,000 times faster than a processor in 1982 was. This trend has been in place for decades, and there is nothing to indicate that it will slow down any time soon. Scientists and engineers always get around the limitations that threaten Moore's law by developing new technologies."
"A 10 MEGAbyte hard disk cost about $1,000 in 1982. Today you can buy a 250 GIGAbyte drive that is twice as fast for $350. Today's drive is 25,000 times bigger and costs one-third the price of the 1982 model..."
"In the same time period -- 1982 to 2002 -- standard RAM (Random Access Memory) available in a home machine has gone from 64 KILObytes to 128 MEGAbytes -- it improved by of factor of 2,000."
"What if we simply extrapolate out, taking the idea that every 20 years things improve by a factor of 1,000 or 10,000? What we get is a machine in 2020 that has a processor running at something like 10 trillion operations per second. It has a TERAbyte of RAM and one or two PETAbytes of storage space (a petabyte is one quadrillion bytes)."
"What if we extrapolate ANOTHER 20 years after that, to 2040? A typical home machine at that point will be 1,000 times faster than the 2020 machine. Human brains are thought to be able to process at a rate of approximately one quadrillion operations per second. A CPU in the 2040 time frame could have the processing power of a human brain, and it will cost $1,000. It will have a PETAbyte (one quadrillion bytes) of RAM. It will have one EXAbyte of storage space. An exabyte is 1,000 quadrillion bytes."
Although none of us have a clear picture of what 2050 will look like, Marshall's reasoning (he presents additional supporting data in his must-read article -
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm), is very hard to argue with -- consider the well-established history of many technologies' double-exponential growth, and the just-now-beginning NBIC Convergence (the coming together, and therefore synergistic growth, of the previously separate fields of Nanotechnology, Biology & medicine, Information sciences, and Cognitive sciences)!
(If the POTENTIAL for such changes seems like so much poppycock -- please re-read the first three quoted paragraphs at the beginning of this article.)
The question, of course, if things develop as Marshall foretells, is how our society might plan to effectively deal with another 50 years of such exponential changes. Especially considering that the dramatically-high unemployment would be only the very tip of this particular iceberg...
Don't Blink!
