Best to be highly skeptical about the following set of scenarios; it is a safe bet that things will not turn out as the article foresees. However, suppose that just 2 or 3 predictions do work out as predicted. Or even just one prediction out of the list. To think about Billy ======================= Sci-Fi, Religion, And Silicon Valley’s Quest For Higher Learning At Singularity University Inside the $12,000 weeklong program teaching rising entrepreneurs that the secret to success is as simple as being able to tell the future.
posted on October 4, 2013 at 1:25am EDT (http://www.buzzfeed.com/elbenson) _Eric Benson _ (http://www.buzzfeed.com/elbenson) It was the final night of classes at _Singularity University_ (http://singularityu.org/) ’s March 2013 Executive Program, and we, the students, had been given a valedictory assignment: Predict the future. For the past six days, the 63 of us had been immersed in lectures on the nearly limitless potential of artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, and bioinformatics, and now the moment had arrived for us to figure out what we really believed and ponder the big questions. Was a transhuman future — the Singularity — really only three decades away, as SU’s chancellor and co-founder Ray Kurzweil had prophesied? Were we really on the brink of a cure for all viruses and an era of radical energy abundance? Would we soon be able to choose to live forever? How many glasses of wine would it take until our group of entrepreneurs, executives, and hippie mystics got impatient and just resolved to build a time machine? Inside Singularity University’s airy classroom on the campus of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, the SU staff distributed about 50 sheets of paper, many bearing newspaper headlines from this radical but not-too-distant future. (A future that, shockingly, still included a print newspaper industry.) We were instructed to break up into small groups to decide when in the next 20 years these world-changing milestones would come to pass. “LIFE EXPECTANCY REACHES 150 IN AMERICA” blared the first headline. I stared at it incredulously. Life expectancy in the United States was currently 79. For the life expectancy to hit 150, that would mean… I started to do some back-of-the-napkin calculations. One of my fellow classmates, the 66-year-old chairman of an international law firm, was quicker to formulate his answer. “According to a gerontologist in England, the first person to live to 1,000 has already been born,” he told us. “I’m not sure I believe that, but everyone thinks that the first person to live to 150 has already been born. I’d even say the first person to live to 200 has been born.” The other five of us nodded our heads. We collectively decided that U.S. life expectancy would reach 150 within the next 10 to 15 years. The next headline declared: “ROBOT LEAVES EARTH, MINES OTHER PLANET AND BRINGS MATERIAL BACK TO EARTH.” A number of us exchanged sidelong glances. Progress in space had slowed dramatically in the post-Apollo era. A group of planetary exploration enthusiasts — among them the film director James Cameron and SU co-founder Peter Diamandis — had recently backed a company seeking to mine asteroids, but it was hard to imagine those missions were imminent. Then Diane Murphy, Singularity’s PR executive, sidled up to our table. “ Elon Musk already announced a plan to create an 80,000-person colony on Mars starting in 15 years,” she said. Gently admonished, we decided that planet-mining robots would be operational in the next decade. After half an hour, the entire class reconvened in SU’s main lecture hall to compile our predictions into a master chronology. This is the future we foresaw: Five years from now, a majority of medical doctors will consult with artificial intelligence before making a diagnosis; a genetic-engineering service for fetuses will be an increasingly popular resource for expectant parents; and a synthetically manufactured virus will be found spreading in the wild. Five years after that, 100 million people will have watched the World Cup via virtual reality glasses, and laptops, tablets, and mobile devices will have been abandoned in favor of more immersive computer systems. Jump another half-decade ahead, an AI will be given lead authorship of a scientific paper and a zoo will open that houses 10 species that went extinct more than 15,000 years ago. By 2033, our collective vision became murky: One small group predicted that synthetic grass would have cleaned up 100% of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, arresting the progress of global warming and beginning to reverse its pernicious effects. Another group decided to write their own headline: “WORLD ENDS.” “So how many people here had arguments about something they barely knew existed six days ago?” asked Kathryn Myronuk, SU’s director of research. Hearty laughter broke out across the room. The evening was now a haze, with most of us buzzed on Merlot. It was 10 p.m. The lights dimmed in the conference room. Music came crashing over the speakers, and a few students launched into a sweaty dance. In an adjoining room where a late-night bull session on the nature of consciousness had transpired earlier in the week, more bottles of wine were emptied, with a pride of leonine European venture capitalists leading the bacchanal. The party carried on into the wee hours. The future looked bright. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
