Predicting the future is hard. Knowing what technological miracles await us in the next few years is almost impossible; what to say then about the next eighty? And yet, Gizmodo decided to put together a list of ten cool, advanced and amazing technologies that should be around 2100. Some of these technologies are already "almost here", but the same can be said about the thermonuclear fusion promised to us many years ago. And as incredible as the things described below may seem to you, most - if not all - should just appear at the turn of the 22nd century. The reason for this lies in an innovation not on this list: artificial superintelligence. As computer scientist EJ Goode aptly put it in the 1960s, "The first superintelligent machine will be the last invention to be made by man."
Once a machine has an intelligence that surpasses human intelligence - and this may already happen in the 2050s - the words "technically possible" will no longer make sense. Intelligent machines will replace humans as designers and engineers, create technologies from any of our fairy tales and fantasies, and even more. Here are ten such technologies that could change almost everything.
Brain-connected virtual reality
Wearable VR devices like the Oculus Rift are all cool and good, but no matter how sophisticated such devices are, the “true” sense of being in parallel reality will always remain out of reach. You need something more … implementing. By 2100, we will definitely find a way to make the experience of virtual reality indistinguishable from this very reality. Remarkably, this experience will be directly fed to our brains, bypassing the usual senses and making everything that happens incredibly reliable.
To get a material sense of what is happening, we need to get to the source of all experience: the human brain. Essentially, the brain (and whatever else) is a sense-processing device. Everything that we feel from day to day, whether it is the smell of old socks or the alluring glow of a monitor, everything passes through the brain. But what is real? When we talk about what we feel, what we hear, what we see and taste, only the electrical signals read by the brain are “real”.
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Futurist Ray Kurzweil explained how this might have happened in his book The Singularity Is Near.
He believes that everything will start with nanorobots in our bodies and brains. Nanorobots will keep us healthy, provide full immersion in virtual reality right from within our nervous system, provide direct communication between the brain and the brain via the Internet and significantly expand human mental capabilities. But do not forget that non-biological intelligence "grows smarter" twice a year, and biological intelligence essentially stands still. By the 2030s, the non-biological part of our intelligence will replace the biological one.
Kurzweil's time frame is, of course, a little optimistic, but his words are not devoid of meaning; we will find new ways to disrupt the blood-brain barrier and create microscopic machines that can travel throughout the body. And we're also working on a detailed brain map that includes areas that process incoming sensory information.
After implantation in the brain, Kurzweil nanorobots could detect various sensory inputs in the brain and close them (that is, prevent the passage of electrical signals from the retina of the eye, ear, etc.), making a person completely cut off from the real environment. This would be the perfect sensory deprivation camera. Instead of these signals, nanorobots receiving wireless signals would send theirs to the brain and feed it with artificial senses. A person will feel as if he is in another world.
Utilitarian fog
Nanotechnology innovator J. Storrs Hall imagines utility fog (or service nanosmog) as a swarm of nanorobots, or "foglets", which can take the shape of almost any object and change its shape on the fly. Storrs came up with this idea when he tried to imagine the seat belt of the future. Instead of static belts and airbags, Hall introduced a smart cloud of connected snowflake flolets that can move in accordance with any object nearby, including passengers in the car.
The utilitarian fog challenges the imagination in terms of technological complexity. Each foglet will be only 10 microns across (the size of a human cell), equipped with a tiny, rudimentary on-board computer that will control its actions (and externally supported by an artificial intelligence system) and a dozen telescopic limbs that will extend outward in the shape of a dodecahedron. By communicating, the two foglets will form a circuit that allows the transmission of energy and communication over the network. These voglets will not be able to float, but will rather form a lattice structure that stretches in all 12 directions.
Utilitarian fog will work like programmable matter, be able to move, envelop and even transport an object or person. Perhaps such a fog could even be used to create a virtual world around a person.
Space solar energy
As our civilization tries to mitigate the effects of climate change and move towards a more sustainable energy economy, it seems that we can never meet our insatiable energy needs. Space energy - an idea that was proposed back in the 1960s - could solve this problem once and for all.
About 60 years ago, Peter Glaser introduced solar satellites capable of transmitting captured solar energy to the Earth's surface via microwaves. Since then, various schemes have been proposed for using this idea, and Japan even has a real plan. The SBSP system is a Japanese orbital farm that will maintain a stationary orbit 36,000 kilometers above the equator and transmit energy to Earth via laser beams. Each satellite will target a 3-kilometer-wide receiving station that will generate a gigawatt of electricity. This is enough to power half a million homes. For safety reasons, the receiving stations will be located far from human habitat, in the desert or on an island.
Loading consciousness
At the turn of the 22nd century, many people would prefer a purely digital existence, free from all biological constraints. Loading consciousness or emulating a whole brain will allow an exact copy of an existing biological brain. The scans will capture every detail down to the molecular level and include memories, associations, and even personal quirks.
Futurists do not yet know exactly when mind upload will become available, but an important step will be to make sure that all critical parts of the brain are copied, especially those that are tied to the human sense of identity (namely, the parahippocampus and retrosplenial cortex). You will also have to resort to "destructive" copying, where the existing brain is sliced or even removed in order to record the state and memories of a person. Alternatively, a sufficiently powerful brain scanner could be used to take brain casts and then "insert" them into a computer capable of transmitting this information to a functioning consciousness. For a busy person to function normally, he will also need a virtual body and environment.
An important scientific and philosophical question that needs to be asked is whether this process will be a true "transfer" of consciousness, and not a copy of the human brain. Moreover, it is not entirely clear whether it is possible to recreate self-awareness on a digital substrate. The scary thing is that each download can produce some kind of zombie that will behave like a human in the past, but in fact act in a script like a program.
Weather control
It is highly unlikely that our species will be able to fully control the weather by the end of this century, but it can seriously influence it. We are already seeding clouds with particles to stimulate precipitation; California has been doing this for 50 years. During the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, the Chinese authorities fired 1,100 rockets into the clouds to provoke rainstorms before the storms reached the capital. Sometimes, even into thunderclouds, laser pulses are launched in the hope of causing lightning.
In the future, weather engineers will be able to build massive wall-like structures that will prevent devastating tornadoes from forming, or they will build massive - very massive - turbines in the sea that will suck energy from hurricanes. A 2014 study found that a wind farm made up of tens of thousands of individual wind turbines could reduce wind speeds by 148 km / h and reduce storm surges by 79%. Basically, it means nullifying the hurricane.
More interestingly, we could end up building a weather machine to create programmable weather. A particularly curious global blueprint calls for a thin cloud of small transparent globes that rise into the atmosphere and can reflect incoming sunlight. Inside each ball will be a mirror and a GPS module, an orientation control mechanism and a small computer. The "programmable greenhouse gas" lifted by hydrogen will be 30 kilometers above the Earth's surface. When millions of mirrors look away from Earth, they will be able to reflect sunlight back into space. This artificial intelligence-driven system will be able to change weather conditions around the world and transform less-habitable places in temperate areas.
Nanoassemblers
Think 3D printers are cool? Then wait for the appearance of molecular assemblers (nanoassemblers), hypothetical machines described by one of the fathers of nanotechnology, Eric Drexler. Drexler described the nanoassembler as a device capable of manipulating individual atoms to create the desired product.
Drexler emphasized that biological assemblers already exist and produce complex and wondrous structures like bacteria, trees, me and you. Using the same logic, he believes that we will eventually be able to harness the mechanical properties of ultra-small objects and use similar principles to create objects of any shape or consistency.
Nano-assemblers can lead the world to an era of "cardinal abundance", allowing us to produce objects and materials that would otherwise be impossible to build, literally from scratch (or, more precisely, from molecules). Such devices could even cook our food. To make a steak, the nanoassembler needs carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, from which it will add amino acids and proteins, and then assemble in the form of a steak.
Geoengineering
The effects of climate change are likely to be irreversible. Regardless of what we do from now until 2100, the level of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere will continue to warm the planet.
To prevent many of the environmental disasters that will follow climate change - from sea-level rise and superdroughts to superstorms and mass extinctions - we must reluctantly start changing the planet through geoengineering.
Some notable geohacking proposals include seeding cirrus clouds to reduce reflectivity, injection of stratospheric particles to control solar radiation, injection of sulfur aerosols to cause global blackout, and simple solutions like rainforest reforestation to restore carbon balance. Other ideas include a giant space reflector (although this may be beyond our technological capabilities by 2100), fertilizing the oceans to grow carbon-absorbing algae, and increasing the alkalinity of the ocean to make them less acidic. Obviously there is no shortage of ideas.
The problem with geoengineering, of course, is that we can confidently destroy the planet if something goes wrong and become addicted to it. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and we will rely on sophisticated climate models and supercomputers.
Communication of minds
Advances in communication technology and neuroscience will literally transform humanity into a telepathic species.
The emergence of a direct mind-to-mind connection will further bind us as individuals and, presumably, lead to "swarm consciousness" - a vast network of interconnected minds working together via the Internet. In such a future, we will observe the dissolution of the personality and the rise of the collective mass consciousness.
Remarkably, such a future may be closer than we think. Back in 2014, an international team of researchers was the first to demonstrate a direct and completely non-invasive brain-to-brain communication system. During the experiments, the participants were able to exchange mentally projected words, although they were separated by hundreds of kilometers. A year later, another team of scientists transmitted brain signals over the Internet, controlling the movements of another person's hand. These systems, which are now only in their infancy, hint at a future in which we can use the power of thought to communicate with each other and telekinetic control of smart devices in our environment.
The power of fusion
Earlier this year, physicists in Germany used a 2-megawatt microwave pulse to heat a low-density hydrogen plasma to 80 million degrees. This experiment produced no energy and only lasted a quarter of a second, but was an important step forward in efforts to launch nuclear fusion, an extremely promising form of energy production.
Unlike nuclear fission, during which the nuclei of an atom are divided into smaller pieces, nuclear fusion creates a single heavy nucleus from two lungs. As a result, the change in mass generates a huge amount of energy, which, according to scientists, can be used as a working source of clean energy. Thermonuclear fusion could replace the burning of fossil fuels and traditional nuclear reactors.
But for that, scientists need to figure out how to reliably and safely manage the conditions that commonly occur in the sun. The problem is that fusion plasma is very difficult to confine; free flowing fluxes of protons and electrons are extinguished. Our sun holds the plasma with powerful gravity, but on Earth you have to rely on magnets and lasers to repeat this feat. As soon as a tiny piece of plasma escapes, it can ruin the wall of the machine, so the fusion reactor shuts down.
Artificial life forms
Not wanting to dwell on genetic engineering, scientists of the future will surely want to create new organisms from scratch - from microscopic synthetic bacteria to new humans. This burgeoning discipline of artificial life began with an attempt to recreate a purely biological phenomenon, and in this it is helped by computers and other synthetic environments.
The drive to create synthetic life forms is already well under way. Earlier this year, scientists at the Institute of Synthetic Genomics successfully created an artificial bacterial genome that possessed a meager set of 473 genes - fewer than any organism found in nature. Further breakthroughs in this area will help biologists study the basic functions of life and classify the most important genes in cells. Scientists can use the building blocks of cells to create organisms with abilities not found in nature, such as bacteria that can consume plastic and toxic waste, and microorganisms that can act as medicines for our bodies.
Any of the technologies listed above can change our civilization. What's less clear is how these miracles will work among themselves; the cross-effects of technologies are often difficult to predict. For example, the connection of virtual reality connected to the brain, loading consciousness and artificial intelligence can lead to the creation of a computer civilization consisting of real people and artificial intelligences. Geoengineering systems of the future may include a weather management system. Etc.
The more predictions we make about future technologies, the more difficult it becomes to understand what the future might actually look like.
ILYA KHEL