The Future IS coming even if it seems to take for ever
Where are our flying cars!?!?
Ok flying cars don't seem to be coming any time soon, but what about the rest. Like many of you I grew up hearing about all these cool futuristic technologies and then was disappointed 3 months later when we didn't have them everywhere. For me I grew up in Ireland in the 80's and 90's and a popular science program was Beyond 2000, an australian show about future technologies. Here's an episode i found on youtube (about being able to transfer money online easily, imagine that)
Anyway I'd see all these cool things and then a year later go 'what a minute, where the hell is my robot butler'. Well it turns out futuristic advances take time, so I'd like to catalog some of the stuff childhood me was excited by and is currently beginning to go mainstream.
Drone Deliveries
I find this one of the cooler and more futuristic technologies coming soon, and one that despite being talked about for years I never really thought would happen, but not only will it happen it is happening right now. From the well known examples of Amazon Prime Air and Alphabet's Project Wing to this recent article about 7-Eleven's drone program all of which are up and running in trial deliveriers.
Self Driving Cars
A lot of modern cars have the ability to brake, park and even change lanes for you, most famously the Tesla model S. Here is a video from yesterday of a Tesla beginning to stop before anyone notices there will be an accident.
Likely before we get self driving cars we will be sharing our roads with self driving trucks, road tests in the US, Europe and Australia have already begun. In 2014 there were 3,413 deaths in America involving large trucks, it is hoped that as well as the economical advantages of driverless trucks, they could save a large number of these lives.
Solar and Wind power
It is probable that most of us live within a short distance to a view of wind turbines, and one or more of our neighbours have solar panels on their roof. And if all the wind farms planned can get planning permission on top of companies like Solarcity/Telsa plans for solar panels on roofs this trend will only accelerate. Here's a link to Elon Musk's presentation of their solar tiles.
Currently the EU with a population of >700mil generates over 15% of it's energy from these sources, with targets (which it is expected it hit) of >20% by 2020, oh side note it will be 2020 in 3 years, WTF!?!?
Cryptocurrency
We are living and using cryptocurrency as we speak but I feel we are comparable to solar power in the 90's, it existed, it was being used but to the mainstream it is only something people seen on popular science programs. I don't know about anyone else but this thought makes me excited about Steemit and being in the crypto space in general.
Anyone got any other examples? What had you amazed as a kid and is now here or just over the horizon?
My thing that I have been following for some years now is the development of Robots. Robots are coming. Algorithmic robots in cyberspace as well as 3 dimensional ones in the work place and the home. I recently saw a wonderful documentary about a recent experiment using the NAO Robot in hospitals to talk with elderly patients who basically feel lonely as they have are left alone to recover after an operation. Nurses have no time to chat with them and so the patients became depressed. Amazingly they found it astonishingly easy to relate to the NAO robot seeing as a kind if intelligent child. Doctors were amazed to see their spirits lifted so quickly after just 10 minutes of them talking with the Robot. It was quite heart warming to watch. So yeah watch out for the robots. Interesting post.
So I shouldn't give up on my robot butler just yet.
'Algorithmic robots in cyberspace' is this A.I or is there a difference
Hi yes A.I are algorithms of course but Artificial Intelligence is more more of course as I was also referring to Ai that could one day beat the Turing test. Some say that some Ai have apparently already passed this test but I am skeptical about this. For Ai/robotics, like on the film Ai, to have real consciousness as human-beings have I think is a long long way off just yet. Just to prove this, if we take the sense of "smell". Smell does not just enable is to detect food or detect if it is stale or possibly poison, it also has important memory connotations with our past and present. Think about when you smell your grandmother´s apple pie and how that makes you feel. take away the sense of smell and you dramatically reduce our sense of reality. Robots can see very well these days and even have touch sensors. But touch to an android that does not to to procreate as humans do, would have vastly different meaning than it does for us. And smell, why would they that when they do not need to eat. Well perhaps for illegal drug detection at airports. Thus it is not only intelligence level and communications skills that give us consciousness it is also the emotion meaning that we attach to our five senses. Just some thoughts that came to me as I was writing. Good luck with the Ai butler.
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