The future of war

Although drones are already being used on a daily basis in war zones (in some countries the noise of their rotors is a daily experience), they still are piloted by humans. Drones allow technological advanced countries to move their armies within minutes to locations all around the world, an important point in the upcoming oil wars, that this author is predicting for the near future too. It also allows more conflicts than the people of those nations usually tolerate, as own casualty numbers can be kept low.

Google already has an AI that can drive a car through normal traffic. A task that actually is more complex than flying a drone in a war zone. We have algorithms that can recognize human faces and voice. Soon robotics and artificial intelligence will be capable enough for those drones to make decisions no longer controlled by humans. This will give them several seconds of advantage over their foe. An advantage, that will become necessary, when drones fight other drones. Will we allow them to decide about taking a human life?

This blog is about trying to predict the near future. With near we mean 25 years, a quarter of a century. Trying to predict more is bound to be too far off to be of any practical meaning. So, although we believe that drones eventually will be allowed to make decisions of ending a human life (simply because the past has taught us that what is technically possible and will change the balance of power, will eventually happen), I hope and believe that this will be not within the next quarter of a century.

Humans still will have to approve an engagement command, very similar to human pilots drones will have to wait for this command. But we will probably soon have drones that given this command will be able to decide how to aim and to pull the trigger. The next generation might be able to seek and destroy without human intervention, staying within a specified radius of course. Will these drones be able to distinguish children from adults? Probably not so soon. Will they be able to detect fear or a threatening situation, distinguish an ape from an old woman or a Shepard? Probably not, but pilots looking on a screen through a camera probably also not. This engagement command will at first not be allowed in their own country of course, but outside, to prevent terrorism? It will happen, because it still will feel better than sending your son to war.

The Future of Computers

Thirty years we got used to the fact that computers are getting faster every year. The CPU in your mobile phone is probably thousands of time faster than the computer on board the Apollo missions. But we already reached a boundary in computer manufacturing that has forced the whole hardware and software industry to change and that is making it more and more difficult to enhance computer power every year. Computers nowadays have the same frequency as the models of last year and the year before. Ten years ago we still could compare the frequency of CPUs to tell which is faster, this is no longer possible. Raising the frequency of the CPU raises the power consumption and heat production over linear. This was the easiest way to raise the performance in the past decades, but the industry had to find other ways. That was the time multi code CPUs where starting to emerge. Nowadays some mobile devices have 4 or even 8 cores. Cores are nothing else but the inner part of a CPU, so instead of having one of those in a CPU, the industry started to integrate 2 or more of these cores into one CPU. Two cores should theoretically have double the performance of one. Unfortunately this is not true. Software traditionally is written to make use of one core. Adding more cores to the CPU will not speed up this kind of software. You need specially written software that makes use of these additional cores.

But we will hit another performance wall soon and industry analysts already can see this wall as the industry is working hard to keep it at bay. The miniaturization of electronic gate structures onto the silicon chip is becoming more and more difficult with every generation. The cost for a new fab is becoming too expensive for one company very soon.

So, we will have to get used to computers not getting faster every year. The industry will try to compensate, they will try to sell us other features like lower power consumption, but eventually computers will no longer dramatically change in performance. These revolutions in the virtual world that we came to get used to will no longer happen, or become very rare. Computers will still be cheep and they still will be everywhere more than now, but new inventions and breakthroughs will slow down to the pace of other industries.

Humanity will adapt. We will pic computers for their design instead of their performance. Come to think of it, we are already doing that. Finally the computer industry will become an industry as all the others and the enormous human labor we invest into it will be reduced to that of other industries.

Individualized Medicine

A century of magical like success with drugs effortlessly found, like a boy finds cobbles in a dry riverbed, spoiled humanity and has kept medicine from evolving like other sciences. Penicillin and Cortisone and other “throw it on anything” drugs have helped humanity to raise human life expectations within the last ninety or so years, but hindered us thus also to reach further. Medicine is still an infantile science compared with others. We lack sensors that look into our bodies to tell us what actually is going on inside.

If we had those sensors, we would still lack the know how to predict what will happen next. We have no simulations that can help to speed up tests that still take days, weeks, months and sometimes years to conduct. How are we to conquer diseases like Alzheimer that take centuries to manifest?

Science is all about observing, modelling mathematical models of reality and then testing these models. But if we have to wait centuries for the result of an experiment science will be a very difficult and slow process. No wonder medicine prefers to search for cobbles lying in the road.

Looking into the past and the big events in science, they where most of the time advances in our tools to measure the world around us. A new tool that allows us to look into the fabric of reality allowed us to see microbes and understand the big impact they had on our life expectations.

It is difficult to believe that we put a man on the moon and that the device I’m writing this article with is capable of calculating billions of instructions per second, but we still have people who die because their blood vessels slowly within years have closed and nobody had noticed. People still run around with all kind of diseases without noticing. We are just now starting to investigate what kind of microbes live in our bodies and what effect they have on our metabolism.

We are now that far to notice, that not every human is the same and that some therapies that work for one will not work for the other. Although most of the time we do not know why this is so.

That is where the new trend of self measurement is going to help. People all over the world are constantly monitoring their body functions with the sensors nowadays available. None of these measurement devices are new or unique, but being able to measure so many individuals all around the globe, transforming this data effortlessly to electronic data that can be transferred, stored and compared will allow statistically relevant facts to be found, that was impossible using old faction manual methods.

We will find differences in the human body and we will investigate those differences and they will make it possible to predict the success of a therapy to the degree of science. In a similar way it is now possible to predict the weather for a specific town, you will be given your very personal success chance calculated by using facts about what kind of body you have.

Brave New Virtual World

Within a a couple of years peoples interaction with the virtual worlds that reside in our computers will make a dramatic leap forward. 3D capable goggles will allow us to interact with these worlds in a much more natural and intuitive way and finally unlock all the possibilities of 3D that has been laying dormant for over 30 years. Although computers have been capable of computing and visualizing three dimensional objects and whole worlds, only computer professionals or gamers have been using this capability. We do not walk through three dimensional cities when we surf the web and we do not meet in three dimensional forums to chat about the latest episode of “Big Bang Theory”. 3D has never actually dawned on to the computer generation, but it is about to now. The technology is finally ready and affordable. It will enhance our interaction with these existing worlds to the degree, that it feels natural enough that normal people will adopt it.

The move to a 3D web will take a while. Early adopters will have to prove that people stay longer and interact deeper with web sites that use 3D visualization. New graphical user interface element standards need to be found that allow users to easier navigate through this virtual worlds. A lot of these elements will try to simulate the world as we know it. Rooms to display goods and doors to connect rooms with another. Virtual agents users can interact with will become less and less indistinguishable from avatars of real people.

But it will be the real people that we meet in this three dimensional world that will make all the difference. People that move their heads to look at us and listen to what we say. People that can show you around because they know the place you just discovered. People will meet in their private worlds, because this is what our private web sites will become, and get to know each other.

Video chat is a technology that suites to replace the phone if you contact your family or very close friends, but it does not suite your needs when you want to socially interact with people you still do not know well. Chatting with the keyboard is so distracting and slow, voice chatting with strangers too weird as nothing else distracts you from the sound of your own voice.

Gamers around the globe have been playing in these virtual reality worlds using voice chat for several years now and have shown that this works.

If you think about this long enough, it becomes clear why Facebook decided to buy Oculus Rift: because it is the next step in the human social interaction.