Just to counter that point, go find the short story called "The Roads Must Roll." It is an awful, awful, poorly thought out attempt to figure out how transportation works after fossil fuels.

Some famous author* said something like, scifi used to be about predicting the far far future, but as time wore on, scifi began predicting less-far into the future, until scifi nowadays is barely 5-10 years ahead. Something about optimism in the future or something. Can't find the quote anywhere with Google for the life of me...

*I thought I remembered the quote being Gibson's, and when I was lucky enough to meet him at a book signing and asked him about the quote he a) didn't really recognize it, and b) didn't seem happy to have the quote misattributed to him...doh (IMG:style_emoticons/default/frown.gif)

I think its because we're approaching the technological singularity. It's becoming harder and harder to predict the advances in science decades out (beyond the usual teleporters, flying cars, and widespread space travel) because the other side of the singularity is as inconceivable to us as computers are to a man from the 1800s, or the steam engine to a man from the 1100s.

Every single technological advancement that has had world-reaching effects cannot be conceived by someone who does not know what the technology is. And right now science is advancing at a pace where within the next 10 years or so we'll be revolutionizing computing power in a way that we, right now, cannot even begin to think of the ramifications.

To quote Vernor Vinge:
"We will soon create intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time and the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding. This singularity, I believe, already haunts a number of science-fiction writers. It makes realistic extrapolation to an interstellar future impossible. To write a story set more than a century hence, one needs a nuclear war in between ... so that the world remains intelligible."

I saw an interesting video that was anti-singularity the other day...

ah, here it is: Anti-Singularity

Not sure if it's right or not or whatever, but hopefully an interesting counter-piece.

What that guy is doing is bashing Ray Kurzweil's notion of the singularity, which is good.

Because Ray Kurzweil is...wrong in so many ways. He (Ray) has this idea that we can solve all of the world's problems by 2050 through technology and never once takes into account human nature.

So yes, Ray Kurzweil's definition of the singularity is that we create god with artificial intelligence, which isn't what I'm talking about. I was pretty sure I conveyed that by calling the Steam Engine a technological singularity of the 1600s/1700s/1800s* or the integrated circuit was in the 1960s.

Prior to the steam engine mass transit was impossible and inconceivable. Prior to the integrated circuit everything we have today was impossible and inconceivable (no one in 1950 was capable of predicting the modern cell phone--hand-held communication device? Sure, we had radios, making that smaller was easily fanciful, but not cell phones and their widespread use). "No one will ever need more than 640 kilobytes of RAM."

*Depending on how you decide when the "steam engine" was invented and finally perfected to being useful.

Well, you don't really need more than 640 kilobytes of RAM, it's just very nice and desirable. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

As for cellphones, I'm fairly sure various sci-fi things had those back in the 50s. Sure, they were 'communicators' or something similar, but they were basically cellphones. And as I recall, didn't Startrek come out with their communicators before cellphones? Sure they were hands free and voice activated, but they were still cellphones.

Star Trek started in 1966. And my point was cell phones, not "a hand held communcations device."

Cell phones are far more advanced (even in their 2 pound brik-phone form) than Star Trek communicators. Communicators are the equivalent of walkie-talkies.

We still had phone operators who connected non-mobile phones in 1975. So a mobile device that could call anyone anywhere would have been damn fanciful in 1950. Possible to imagine such a device? Yes. Possible to imagine that every 14 year old in the united states would own one? No.

How so? What could original cellphones do that a Star Trek communicator couldn't?

I might not be up on my star trek, I never watched it, but I was under the assumption that it didn't allow the user to call any single other user in perfect privacy.

Judging by the fact that the call went: 'tap communictor to activate it, call a specific name, other person got a ring, then they tapped the communicator to talk' it seems very much like a personal 1 to 1 phone call. Now, it was also possible to use it for conference calls or to send out ship-wide messages and stuff, but I've never seen anything (not that I've watched many episodes) that showed the 1 on 1 calls to be any less private than a cellphone call.

Then I was wrong.

Oh well.

It's still 15 years (original star trek) after the year I indicated and I might still be wrong. It was an example. I could have said that cell phones were inconceivable to an ancient Egyptian, to which the answer would be "no shit" and just as useless.

Here's the best way to prove my point:

Name one technology yet to be invented which will have widespread use in the teen through senior population of a society of at least 200 million people 15 years from now.

No offense but...duh?

This seemed to me like something they were cognizant of when 4E/4A was written.

A commlink is essentially just a souped up cell phone.

Also, I was wrong. Cell phones existed (military use) in the 1950s. The first publically available mobile car system was available in the 1960s (hence star trek communicators).

So drop my "1950" date back about 20 years.

Ok, that was weird. Moving on...

Since when are cellphones perfectly private? Your still punching RF signal through the air, open to god and the world if they're unencrypted/unprotected. No different than a radio, actually. Suspectible to interception, triangulation, real time monitoring, and anything else you can do to a radio. More so, actually, because courtesy of your phone needing to be a designated number (so that the infrastructure knows which pairs to open the radio channel between) you are instantly identifiable.

With a pair of WWII radios you could create an equally "private" channel. Cellphones have merely provided the infrastructure to make this easy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udlxr8t1nZM

Unfortunately in german, but there are english subs. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Bye
Thanee

Dang, everything I want to say is at least in its infancy already, including cybereyes (IMG:style_emoticons/default/frown.gif)

Portable solar panels, cybernetics, commlinks, all have already been invented. I could point out that 'cellphone' would have been an answer from Star Trek, though they may not have thought it was 15 years away.

Lets see.... laser weaponry is likely to be too inefficient compared to guns for personal use, but it is a possibility.

Okay:
Electronic paper. Yet to be invented to my knowledge, and would be excellent for taking notes for students. Heck, schools wouldn't have to worry about printer costs any more, as teachers could pass out handouts, quizes, and even test through the paper.

I don't know that seniors would be using that, but asking for that wide a range is even more difficult. I doubt that many seniors had cellphones right when they came out either.

It would really suck to turn on the stove function by mistake while it is in your pocket.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper

Haven't seen a Kindle yet?

Yes, you can't write on ePaper yet, but that's just a combination of drawing tablets and the ePaper screen and probably not too far off (I would be surprised to hear that no one's working on this already).

I've seen a couple of kids with laptops that have tablet screens. It's pretty much what you're talking about. They scribble on the PDFs we get for reading.

You said it had to not exist yet. Electronic paper as I defined it doesn't exist yet. There are technologies that have similar capacities. Kind of like radios have similar capacities to cellphones. No technology is created in a void. There has never been a technology that simply jumped out of nowhere. The fact is that it is impossible to come up with a technology that doesn't exist yet (at all) but will be widespread in 15 years, because no technology will be invented and become widespread in the next 15 years that doesn't at least have components of it around today.

Yes, a tablet laptop has been around for "about a decade" (my friend and current GM has one that's about 8 years old). Replacing the LCD screen with ePaper is "trivial" (I mean that in the sense that you'd be replacing the display part and ensuring that the remaining functionality was still working).

Well, I'll deny everything you put forth as being a singularity then. Cellphones are just a trivial adaptation of radios. Computers are just a trivial adaptation of earlier computers, which are just a trivial adaptation of whatever was before them (Adding machines, like those old fashioned tills?) which was just a trivial adaptation of an abacus. Steam engines are just trivial adaptations of waterwheels and other similar technologies.

Internal combustion engines were just trivial adaptations of steam engines, etc.

A singularity on the far side of it (eg. us to the steam engine) never appears as a singularity, we can see the cause-effect relationship involved, but from the other side, it's very difficult to conceive of those technologies and their impact on society.

Even as computers were being made and popularized, few people thought that they'd achieve the widespread use that they have today (my mother worked with someone who said that there'd never be a market for more than 7 computers in the whole world).

My point that it is impossible for us to conceive of the next singularity is entirely true:
We cannot guess what gadget will next arise and dominate the market with the ferocity that it does. We can only put forth the ideas we have and see what happens.

For instance, take quantum computers. Assuming we can utilize quantum processing in a manner that competes with current digital technology, how will society change as a result?

I bet you can't answer that.

(One thing we're only just learning out the impact of the internet is that it's causing us to evolve towards a more fragmented and easily interrupted thinking patterns, unlike what books did centuries ago, forcing our brains--which were easily interrupted and have been for millenia because humans evolved from a prey animal--to focus on one thing at a time and to do so for long periods of time)

Hence the widespread occurrence of ADHD in modern times (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

But, if you're asking for technologies that will change the world, there I have responses.

New engines are being developed for vehicles that will be roughly 3-4 times as efficient as current ICE technology.
New wind turbines are being developed for high altitude wind harvesting that will be able to operate 24/7 and are more efficient in wind -> energy conversion than current mills. (Don't know the exact improvement, but it is significant).
Solar panels with around 50% efficiency currently exist, and around 20% can be made very cheaply.
Nanotube (Not the right name, forgot what it was called.. microflow?) technology is being developed which allows for genetic sequencing on something the size of a credit card.
I won't even go into all the things that are being worked on for production of various oil replacements.
Catoms are being developed. Catoms are programmable matter.

So, what does all this mean for the future of the world? I means that the US and other countries won't be nearly as concerned with the middle east because all those methods of gathering energy and lower energy requirements for vehicles will decrease and eventually eliminate the need for oil for energy (And maybe for things like plastic, but I don't know about that as well).

The pocket genetic lab might see either a decrease in crime rate, or an increase in capture as testing genetic evidence becomes cheap, quick, and easy.

Quantum computers? That's a bit harder to see, as it mainly means an increase in processing power. I suppose increases in processing power would lead to smarter computers, and likely to eventual AI, especially as quantum mechanics could allow an AI to simulate 'random thought'. I'm sure that it will bring about interesting revolutions in computer defense, as the first quantum computers could likely break through modern encryption and similar things with comparatively little difficulty.