For someone like me, who loves to travel but has to put a huge amount of effort into picking up a new language, this is about as revolutionary as a new technology gets. One can happily imagine what it will look like when it matures.
Just a follow up to an old post about electric cars: While the daily commute for most people is within the range of current EV battery technology (about 60km, I believe), this limited range is still a major obstacle to the mass adoption of non-hybrid electric cars. One interesting solution is to separate car-ownership from battery-ownership and create battery switching infrastructure. Rather than stopping in a gas station, you would stop in a battery-switching station, have yours removed, a freshly charged one installed, and be on your way, all in about the time it takes to fill up a gas tank. You might think the idea is a bit pie-in-the-sky, but a start-up in California has already designed such a station and demonstrated it in Japan. Here' s the video:
As far as I can tell, when someone refers to himself as a "futurist," his job mostly involves serving as a prophet for the coming singularity. If you haven't heard already, "singularity," in this context, refers to the moment when machine intelligence becomes greater than that of the human brain. After this event, when computers begin to program and improve themselves, it's impossible to predict what will come next since it will be an increasingly greater intelligence that propels technology forward. The newest Big Think episode gives a good example of this thesis by one of it's most famous proponents:
Kurzweil is convinced that by 2029 computers will be smarter than people. I can only guess how he arrived at this number, but he seems pretty confident about it. It's fun to think about, but this is obviously a controversial idea. His analysis is partly an extrapolation of Moore's law, but that will eventually hit its physical limits when circuits can no longer become smaller. Kurzweil finds ways around this problem with the possibility of quantum computing, but the fact that he needs someone to invent a non-existing technology makes you wonder how he can be so confident about a year as precise as 2029. And I'm sure there are better arguments against it, but most scientists don't take this sort of thing seriously enough to put the time into critiquing it.
But that aside, this idea is about as close to the "promised land" a secular person can get (unless Arnold Schwarzenegger has something to do with it, but I don't see why super intelligent machines would become evil, necessarily). Almost all difficult questions would become easy; we could just ask the machine. Economies could be coordinated, conflicts resolved, diseases and maybe even old age itself could be cured.
But in the end, life would be so fundamentally altered that the thought of it is a little revolting. It's impossible to know if we should be rooting for it or not.
TED just released a talk by Shai Agassi that is very related to my last post. In it, he lays out a convincing argument for the mass adoption of the electric car, including a system of battery-swap stations based on the idea of a separation in car ownership and battery ownership. It gets really exciting when he starts going over the successes he's already had with the idea, including in Israel and Denmark.
UPDATE: The Times magazine published a great article on Agassi. Here's a particularly compelling sentence:
Agassi figured that a company controlling a world network of charging stations would become so profitable so quickly that it could subsidize its customers’ electric cars, much the way mobile companies give out free phones to people who sign two-year contracts.
Spring is here, and with it familiar feelings of fear and loathing have returned. Now that my bicycle is again my primary means of transportation, I’m remembering how much scorn I feel towards anyone who happens to be in a car. I realize that it’s unjustified self-righteousness, and I completely forget it when I’m driving one, but I really can’t help despising Montreal drivers during biking season. Rather than thanking me for getting myself around without contributing to the coming environmental apocalypse, I get the feeling that most drivers are about as fond of cyclists as cyclists are of them.
The problem for me is mostly the fear of being killed, but no less a source of frustration is the idea that I’m breathing in whatever the tail-pipe in front of me is putting out. There’s a reoccurring thought I have while on the road: future generations will look back on a time when the combustion-engine dominated our city streets, to the point that people shrug off frequent “smog warnings” as if it’s a normal part of the weather report, the same way we think of the coal-polluted London of the industrial revolution. Cyclists may continue to fear for their lives, but the electric car is coming, and soon.
The question isn’t so much “if,” or even “when,” but “who.” Last week, the New York Times had an article describing the Chinese government’s plan to establish an electric car industry. Since it currently doesn’t have much an automotive industry, in a relative sense anyway, China could leap over the old technology in the same way many parts of the country went straight to the cell-phone, skipping land-line technology altogether, while the west and Japan already have factories built for the old technology. According to the article:
Beyond manufacturing, subsidies of up to $8,800 are being offered to taxi fleets and local government agencies in 13 Chinese cities for each hybrid or all-electric vehicle they purchase. The state electricity grid has been ordered to set up electric car charging stations in Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin.
Of course there’s a part of all us that fears China’s march towards global domination, but I see these developments as a clear good. China has already become the world’s leader in global-warming causing pollution, and anything that can be done to ameliorate that will benefit everyone. Also, with any luck, the added competition should spur on the development of electric-vehicle technology everywhere.
The Chinese government isn’t the only one trying to get into the electric car industry. The GM Volt is a plug-in electric hybrid that should be on sale in 2010, and even more promising are the smaller start-up companies working on their own prototypes:
One of the coolest things about plug-in electric cars is the idea of "smart charging." Apparently it’s possible to have the car communicate with the power grid. It would only start charging during times of excess power capacity, late at night. On the CBC radio science show “Quirks and Quarks,” there was talk of future cars that are left alone for long periods of time – such as those sitting in an airport parking lot – buying power from the grid late at night when power is cheap and selling it back during peak hours when it’s expensive. The owner of the car would return from his trip having made money from his parked car. Cars would become batteries that would smooth out power consumption and actually be good for the grid.
Car sales have plummeted during this recession, but people will eventually have to start buying cars again. When they do, we should all hope the cars people are buying are electric. It’s, unfortunately, probably not reasonable to hope everyone will buy bicycles instead.
It occurs to me how often I swing from optimism to pessimism and back again when thinking about the future, depending on which kind of scientist I was most recently listening to. For example, last night I got excited about a TED Talk by a geneticist who claims that with more research we can: "solve our energy problems, reduce CO2, clean up our oceans and make better wine," and then suggests: "stay healthy for another 20 years and you'll see 150 maybe 300." Here's the talk:
In another, even more far-out Ted Talk, a futurist discusses the past 5000 days of the Internet and predicts the very sci-fi world of the next 5000. For example, the web seems to be on course to developing into one giant, integrated machine surpassing the human brain in complexity:
I think a lot of us live with a cognitive dissonance where we believe, on the one hand, society is moving towards some kind of technological utopia and, on the other, a Mad-Max type post-apocalyptic hell following complete environmental collapse. I think the balance between technological optimism and environmental pessimism are key parts of my generation. We waver between hope and excitement and a "what's the point, the world's fucked anyway," attitude. I suppose in the end it'll just come down to timing.
