Predictions for the future

[[Dimetrodon]]

Speculating about the future is nothing new as it is an activity thousands of years old. That being said, what are your predictions for the future in the coming decades? Are they positive or negative?

Honestly, if crypto and NFTs are the future, I do not see anything positive on the horizon. It being a waste of electricity and computing resources. I expect the future to be at best, not much different than today, or maybe even worse. It is easy to think that tech will solve every problem and it being able to be accessed for the vast majority of people, when that is unlikely to be the case. Everybody thought the internet would bring forth an era of freedom and help spread knowledge and information, alleviating ignorance, even though ignorance and misinformation spreads just as easily as information, sometimes even more so. Not to mention that any semblance of privacy is dead and everything is commercialized by a handful of "social" media companies.

I'm not saying everything will be bad but I'm certainly not idealistic. What do you think the future holds?

[ssl]

ecologically the future is bleak comrade. Asking such a question without mentioning this fact is an aberration.

[[Dimetrodon]]

ecologically the future is bleak comrade. Asking such a question without mentioning this fact is an aberration.

Normally I would mention that as that is indeed true, but I'm from a country where that's "political," so I was overly cautious didn't want to be the one mentioning that. I didn't want my topic locked. That being said, we're certainly not going to reverse course unfortunately.

As the old saying goes, I cannot please everybody.

[ssl]

You can be heroes just for one day

[Lumpy Burgertushie]

I can't be sure that I will wake up tomorrow but I would bet my life that the sun will come up tomorrow.


robert

[[Dimetrodon]]

[First part self-redacted]

You can be heroes just for one day

It's a good song.

[bubbathegimp]

Money cant buy happiness, but you might rent it for a couple hours......
So much money and resources have been wasted developing better more efficient ways of killing each other, that we could already be
colonizing Mars, if not the moon, along with permanent space stations.....

I'm still waiting to see if humanity is smart enough to survive it's own intelligence...

[KevC]

A certain person will still be trying to find a host that will run 3.0 on outdated server software

[Mick]

Musically people are still listening to two guitars, bass and drums, that’s no real advance from 1952 unfortunately. If things don’t change they’ll stay as they are.

[HiFiKabin]

The prospect of living on Mars will still be 30 years away.

Computers will be getting faster so we can fill them with more junk.

[[Dimetrodon]]

The prospect of living on Mars will still be 30 years away.

Computers will be getting faster so we can fill them with more junk.

This is not the best article but it does appear that CPUs will reach their peak in speed: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... mmers-n-ow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremermann%27s_limit

[Mick]

CPU speeds have pretty much flattened out, they’ve been stuck around 3.0ghz for multiple CPUs for years mainly due to physical restrictions. Speed is no longer the issue, quantum will blow all present processing away by hundreds of thousands of times if you can afford the water bill to keep it cool. Having one in your house isn’t going to happen for many years to come but you may be able to ‘borrow’ some processing time from a central machine. What we have at the moment has plateaued and has been pushed as far as it can go.

[[Dimetrodon]]

Quantum computers are pretty much just extremely powerful calculators. They're not going to run anything we'd call software or anything resembling an operating system. They're good for advanced mathematics in things like quantum physics but they will never be household appliances.

[Lumpy Burgertushie]

Quantum computers are pretty much just extremely powerful calculators. They're not going to run anything we'd call software or anything resembling an operating system. They're good for advanced mathematics in things like quantum physics but they will never be household appliances.

“There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.”

- Ken Olsen. head of IBM

“I see little commercial potential for the Internet for at least ten years.”

- Bill Gates.

“Computers in the future may weigh no more than one-and-a-half tonnes.”
– Popular Mechanics, 1949

“I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last the year.”
– Chief Business Editor, Prentice Hall, 1957

“There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.”

Einstein, 1938

[[Dimetrodon]]

Good point, but there is evidence that conventional computers (even with their standard limitations) are still better than Quantum Computers for most tasks: https://www.zdnet.com/article/quantum-c ... ur-laptop/

Everyday processes that involve the manipulation of transactional data -- buying an item or checking revenue projections, for example -- are much better carried out by classical computers, and so are database applications. Emailing, voice and video calling, or social media scrolling all work fine on existing phones and laptops, and there's very little that quantum computers are expected to change in this realm.

This is why even in 100 years, says Fefferman, when a universal fault-tolerant quantum computer might be available, consumers will still using classical computers for many, if not most, tasks.

What quantum computers are expected to excel at is a set of specific use cases. Examples include computation in chemistry and physics, for example to discover better antibiotics and medications; but researchers are also investigating potential use cases in machine learning and AI, as well as ways that quantum computing could speed-up optimisation problems in industries like finance or transportation.

Are Quantum Computers revolutionary? Yes, but they're for specific use cases.