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As long as there have been Popular Mechanics Magazines there have been predictions of personal carplanes. Ain’t gonna happen.
Forests have been sacrificed for their paper and Arabian kingdoms deflated for their oil to provide scribes and pundits with the materials and energy necessary to propagate predictions. This is wrong on many levels, but to name two: news was better when it consisted of reporting what happened, rather than spinning predictions of what might happen; and secondly, nobody ever predicts what’s not going to happen. Fake news not only fails to tell us what is happening, it never tells us what is not going to happen. Let us begin to correct that situation here and now.
Five Things That Ain’t Never Gonna Happen:
1. There is never going to be a driverless car.
There’s no such thing now, anywhere in the world — all the driverless cars have drivers. In all the tests you’ve read about of “self-driving cars,” the cars were not, in fact, driving themselves but were under close, intense human supervision. The hype was not about what had been achieved, but what might be achieved sometime maybe, and was aimed at investors and lenders. Uber didn’t create a self-driving car division because autonomous care were ready to go, but because it was the quickest way to raise a few billion dollars, and Uber is burning cash at the rate now of about a billion dollars a quarter.
2. There is never going to be a “new industrial revolution” based on 5G cellular networks.
There is a very simple and self-evident reason for this assertion: 5G networks require transmitters (cellular towers) to be spaced about every thousand feet. The cell phone business is desperate to come up with a reason to keep you and me buying new and improved cell phones every two years, but they aren’t and they can’t. Hence the Hail-Mary hype about clunky, 5G-capable phones (with battery life measured in minutes) even though there are in this world only a few blocks of 5G networks working sporadically.
3. America is never going to be energy independent.
We burn twice as much energy as we find — energy companies like to say they “produce” it, but what they do is find it — we have for about a half century and we will until the end. All the easy oil and coal and gas has been burned, and what remains is ever more difficult and expensive to extract. It takes more energy every year to get energy out of the ground, and there is simply no way it is going to stop getting worse.
4. Robots are never going to replace humans in the workplace.
Robots can and do perform individual tasks — making welds on cars on the assembly line, for instance, but humans are not often hired to do single, simple tasks. When they tried to put a robot in a fast food restaurant they found it could, indeed, flip the burgers. But humans had to prepare the raw burgers, put them in in place, take the cooked burgers away, assemble and serve the meals, and deal with the robot when it broke or went crazy.
5. Artificial intelligence is never going to be anything other than artificial.
YouTube used artificial intelligence in a bot designed to flag and counter fake news. No more unreliable, biased human interpretations, this was going to finally meet Sergeant Joe Friday’s goal — “Just the facts, ma’am.” It hadn’t been deployed long when it flagged video of Notre Dame Cathedral burning and relabeled it as the Twin Towers burning on 9/11. Repeat after me: artificial intelligence is artificial.
All these glittering dreams — of life going on as it has, only better — are part of a vicious con being executed on all of us by the world’s industrial oligarchs, who just want to keep making more money. They have learned that if their business plan includes words like driverless cars, artificial intelligence or genetic engineering, they can sell stock and borrow money without having a product, without making any profits and with neither collateral nor demonstrated ability to pay it back.
The whole world has turned into a giant Ponzi Scheme, which requires new suckers to be bedazzled out of their money faster than the old suckers go broke or drop out. Ponzi schemes always fail, of course, but in the meantime laissez les bons temps rouler.
Regarding point 5: It’s true enuf, but then, if you extrapolate Derek Bickerton’s theory of ‘language creating intelligence rather than intelligence creating language’* you might deduce that human intelligence is, in itself, nothing more than an elaborate artifice.
Check out the movies ‘Her’,’2001′ or ‘Forbidden Planet'(to name a few). I listen to my daughter talking to Siri on her cell and I wonder.
*I’m taking some liberty here with Bickerton. In fact, I’m not aware of his stance on AI.
All the things you talk about in the post are mass ego-fantasies, and the other thing besides printed money that gives BAU a lease on life of a few more years, is pure ego-fantasy. Indeed, I don’t really bother talking to people very much anymore, because it’s painfully clear that very few people see anything other than exactly what they want to see.
Cheap fusion energy can be added to the list. Also add self sustaining human colony on Mars. I just reread Asimov & Heinlein for the glorious optimism.
Oh, and a wall along the Mexican border. Not going to happen.
I like the saying that “energy production through nuclear fusion is about twenty years in the future… and always will be.” As to colonies on Mars: we can’t even pull that off in Antarctica where there is ample water and oxygen, and the average temperature is warmer.
The ITER project in France just made an exception to this. They just said that fusion technology will be viable in 2045. That’s 26 years into the future.
Glad you are well, hope you are rested. Good to hear your voice again.
We are in agreement on #5. I fear that organic intelligence will follow in the foot steps of AI.
No curiosity, no intelligence and no future. The TV can tell everyone what they deserve guess the truth ain’t part of that.
Hell of a good point. Maybe AI will triumph because OI rots. Imagine that happening in the Information Age?
I’ve just read that the Anunnaki, a race of super-beings possessing scientific knowledge way more advanced than anything we humans have ever come up with, are due to come to our world again after their last visit several thousand years ago, to lift us collectively out of the mire of our folly and ignorance. Rejoice, my friends, a new dawn is at hand!
P.S. If it turns out this is all BS, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. (Yes, I’ve lost my mind.) :P
P.P.S. Welcome back, Tom.
Thanks. Good to hear from you, too.
I would add one more to the list;
Were never going to colonize Mars, the costs are to high and by the time we develop the tech we wont have enough surplus energy to support a colony on another planet.
Dear Mr. Lewis – Driverless cars are all well and good, but I’m holding out for the model that flies! :-). Lew
Tom – I never did want any of that stuff anyway. Missed you bigly. Russ Day
The Green New Deal won’t get done due to the rapid uptick of Deaths of Dispair.
Yes to all of the above. I am constantly amazed at what calls itself journalism these days, print, radio or TV where what passes for a story is just endless speculative opinion and opinionised bullshit. No consideration of actually what might have happened or simply the unvarnished facts, no, we get uncorroborated analysis free opinion about what might have happened and therefore what will happen. I am constantly gobsmacked when some so called show anchor or journalist listens to this bullshit and then merely asks questions about the bullshit, you think, do these people not read anything or actually think about anything and you realise they are educated illiterates and hucksters nothing more. When all else fails throw in a chart of some sort that’ll do it.
Just on the issue of AI, this is never going to happen and that is not merely an opinion but a mathematical fact. I think there must be 100 people on the planet who ever bothered to read the book by Roger Penrose former Prof of Mathematics at Oxford University called ‘The Emperors New Mind’. It is a succinct but very dense examination of the issue of AI based on the mathematics of cognitive pattern recognition to simplify it but Penrose provides the mathematical proofs as to why it cannot be done and hence AI is a myth, something to do with Eulers theorem. I smile every time I hear some poor ignorant fool crap on about AI, there is no such thing anywhere. Clever alogrithmic programs yes. Ditto for why driverless cars can never be, no AI no driverless cars. And so it goes on.
I’ve been accused of being a luddite, but some of you guys take the cake!* As the prophet Daniel observed, “see the writing on the wall.” There is no reason to assume that intelligence would be reserved for only one biocreature – the human. Nor is there cause to believe that intelligence can’t be replicated in a non-biological form…It’s happening even as we brood and bicker!
I don’t even own a smart phone…so there!
Humans are never going to be literally imortal (Im not including religious beliefs here, I’m talking about medical advances). Just not going to happen.
Also, the human population is not going to keep rising indefinitely. Not enough spaces and resources, especially food, for that.
Everyone on earth will never be able to enjoy a traditionally middle class lifestyle as seen in the USA during the latter half of the 20th century. Not enough resources.
Yes, yes, and yes.
If you want to read a silly book and maybe laugh a little, I recommend Michio Kaku’s “The Future of Humanity.”