Skeptics Guide to the Future

Steven (&Bob&Jay) Novella 2022 - Bvtn Lib 500 NOV

In a nutshell, the BIG FUTURE did not arrive. The microchip did, and continues to arrive. Scaling smaller reduces capacitance, increases performance, and increases both cost and power density per square millimeter. We now use 3 KeV extreme UV for imaging, using photolithography tools the size of a small house (and the cost of a large office building), rather than the desktop mask aligners of my youth. Steven is an clinical neurologist and an enthusiastic de-bunker of herbal nostrums, and uses that lens in this book ... with variable focus.

I haven't learned much about brothers Bob and Jay. Lack of T.V., I suppose.

My take on futurism: media pundits also don't live in the future.

And now the book:

• 008 Futurism Fallacy #1 - Overestimating short-term progress while underestimating long-term progress
• 012 FF2 Underestimating persistence of current technology
• 014 FF3 Assuming one pattern for all fields of technological change
• 015 FF4 Anticipating end of history
• 016 FF5 Extrapolating trends, example is length of workweek
• 017 FF6 Placing current people and culture into the future
• 018 FF7 Everything that happens in the future will be planned and deliberate (Segway example ... though so-called "hoverboards" outperform Segway)
• 019 FF8 Extrapolating existing technology into the future without considering new and potentially disruptive technology.
  • hey, come on; extrapolators don't yet know about future technology, and "I don't know" doesn't sell copy
• 021 FF9 Assuming the objectively superior technology will always win out
  • Betamax vs VHS, claims Betamax couldn't store an entire movie ( Actually, VHS 160 min, Beta 600 min)
  • DVD killed both (though I still have VHS tapes and a player)
• 022 FF10 Failing to consider how technology will affect people, our options, and the choices we make
  • 1981: Bill Gates says 640 KB memory enough (he was talking about RAM, not hard disk or equivalent)

  • 2020s author claims having 32 million times as much *memory* - 20 Terabytes? Of RAM? Really??

  • Nov 2023, A-Tech 128 GB $113, so 20TB is $17,500. At 3W per GB 20 TB of RAM is 60 KW

• 025 Foundations of Future Studies Wendell Bell 2003 (at PSU)

• 025 The Fortune Sellers William Sherden 1998 (at PSU)

• 040-42 GMO because yield and survivability

• 043 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui 2018 CRISPR edited babies (3 years in prison)

• 053 Stem cell therapy 1958 George Mathé - actually bone marrow graft

• 063 "brain transplant" er no, brains age
• 081 humanlike robots, uncanny valley ... except CGI animated humans are not "uncanny". Robot faces have too few motors AKA muscles.
• 089 instead, task-optimized robots 092 sexbots
• 094 Allen Steinhardt claim, factor 100,000 bit number with billion-qubit computer in 15 minutes ... except noise

• 100 IBM Condor quantum computer 1121 (19x59?) qubits 20 mK

  • note that computing huge integers is O(N²). Transmission is O(N). factoring is O(2ⁿ). Hence an ENORMOUS billion qubit computer will remain vastly more expensive than an O(N²) digital processor.

• 113 Artificial general intelligence ... how many watts?
• 120 Self driving cars "EVs are coming" duh
• 133 "A 2019 study surprisingly found flying cars can get close to ground cars in efficiency" CITATION F*****G NEEDED
  • the only citation is "Flying Cars Will Undermine Democracy ..."
• 139 "The only other way ... rockets" Or evacuated tube transport. Or my favorite, predictive-adaptive telepresence.
• 141 Hyperloop
• 147 Hall-Heroult process, 1930 aluminum 30 cents per pound, now around a dollar (inflation 18.4x 1930 to 2022)

• 156 Magnetorheological materials CITATION F*****G NEEDED https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetorheological_fluid?

• 163 VR induced motion sickness 165 Augmented reality

• 171 Zuckerberg metaverse, stopped 2023

• 190 Selective laser sintering, fused deposition modelling

• 201 US 22% coal, 36% gas, 21% renewables, 20% nuclear
• 205 Current nuclear plants use only 5 to 6% of the energy in the fuel (without reprocessing). The rest becomes waste with half lives in the thousands of years that need to be stored. Fast reactors 95%
• 207 1.2% 112,000 sq.km. Sahara power, but massive storage
• 208 SSPS, but cost to orbit $1500/kg
• 209 Thorium nuclear ... safer?

• 217 Fusion NIF, JET, ITER, SPARC

• 229 Molecular nanotechnology

• 240 Clyde Hutchinson et al 2016 Mycoplasma mycoides stripped to 473 genes

• 243 ATCG plus XY
• 249 Room temp superconductors? Elliot Snider 287K, retracted 2022
• 255 Jerome Pearson Space Elevator 1975

• 264 Lunar Space Elevator Zephyr Penoyre and Emily Sandford

• 277 Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP), Nuclear Electric Propulsion (NEP)
• 280 Solar Sails, Laser Propulsion

• 291 Space Settlements 293 Poop shield 296 Soviet BIOS-3 13m² 78% of food and nearly all oxygen

• 305 Lowest blood-boil pressure, 0.0618 atm. sufficient pure oxygen 0.122 atm
• 337 Transporters etc., mostly no
• 365 SENS