Month: June 2017

Rocket Mail: When Technologies Fail to Rise

One of the episodes which the United States Post Service (USPS) is trying to sweep under the rug, is their attempt to use rocket mail. i.e. send mail on actual rockets. Oh, and you might want to know that the first rocket to be used that way by the USPS was a nuclear missile.

Missilemail.jpg

The idea of rocket mail was originally developed in germany in the 19th century, but never really took off. However, as missile technology improved, the USPS took note of the idea and decided to give it a shot. And so, the first official American rocket mail was launched in 1959.

The USPS chose for that purpose a Regulus cruise missile armed with a nuclear warhead. They stripped took the warhead off, and replaced it with mail containers that were supposed to withstand the impact when the missile hit the ground. The missile was launched from Virginia and reached its destination in Florida in just 22 minutes. Since the two states are around 700 miles apart (~1,200 km) that means the mail got to its destination at a speed of around 3,500 km/h. That’s pretty impressive for mail delivery.

The US Postmaster General got so excited that he publicly claimed that the event is –

“of historic significance to the peoples of the entire world”

and that –

“Before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail.”

Except, as we know very well now, they really didn’t stand on the threshold of rocket mail. The costs of rocket mail were too high – particularly for the infrastructure involved, which included the launch systems and the missile itself which couldn’t be reused. What’s more, at the same time that rocket mail was first attempted, international air travel became dramatically cheaper, so that important packages could easily be delivered in just a single day over the ocean, with no need for rockets of any kind.

Rocket mail is an historic invention which many futurists should consider whenever they gush about new technologies taking over the world. In the end, it all comes down to cost, and if that new technology is more expensive than what you currently use – or even from other technologies that are being developed at the same time – it probably won’t be used after all.

But at least the idea of rocket mail finally found use in Mission Impossible II after all – where Ethan Hunt’s sunglasses are being delivered to him via a rocket. The US Postmaster General can be proud indeed.

 

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This post was originally written as an answer to a question at Quora.  You are welcome to browse my content there and enjoy more answers about the future.

The Future of Bullshit Jobs

Many economists and philosophers are trying to figure out today about the future of work. What will people do once robots and autonomous systems can perform practically all tasks in the workplace better than human beings can?

Well, here’s a little well-known secret: many of us are already unemployed. Many, many more than governmental statistics indicate. We just haven’t realized it yet.

Why? Because plenty of people today are working in bullshit jobs, in the words of anthropologist David Graeber. Here’s what he has to say about bullshit jobs –

“…more and more employees find themselves… working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours… since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.”

Think of your own job. If you work at a desk or at an office, some of your days probably look approximately like this:

  1. You come into the office in the morning.
  2. You chat with your co-workers for 15 minutes.
  3. You open your computer and chat with your friends on Facebook for another hour.
  4. You feel compelled to do some work. You open a document you began work on yesterday, work on it for ten minutes, then excuse yourself to check your e-mails, then your facebook again, then read answers on Quora (try my content for more future-related answers!), then play just one game of Solitaire…
  5. …and two hours later, you return to reality and realize you haven’t done any significant work today. You resolve to work harder, immediately after lunch.
  6. Lunch takes an hour.
  7. And then you’re drowsy for yet another hour. Luckily, that’s the time for the weekly departmental motivational seminar, during which you can safely sleep while nodding your head vigorously at the same time and grunting affirmatively.
  8. Finally, you realize with a shuddder that it’s almost the end of the workday. You feel guilty and ashamed, and so, in a concentrated effort of 1–2 hours, you actually SIT DOWN AND WORK.

And the amazing thing is that in those 1–2 hours of work, you actually complete an amount of work that used to require an entire office of secretaries to perform a few decades ago. That’s because you’re using smart and automated tools like Microsoft Office Word, Excel and Powerpoint. These tools increase productivity, so that a single person who is proficient in using them can do more in a shorter period of time.

So why do so many of us still work for eight hours a day? Why do so many people work at jobs that they know are ineffective, and in which they waste their time?

Simply put, because human beings need the illusion of being useful, or at least of doing something with their lives. They need to preserve a veneer of action – even though much of that action throughout the workday is almost entirely fictional.

Now, obviously, many of us do not work at a bullshit job… yet. But bullshit jobs form when productivity increases dramatically, which basically describes any form of work in which automation is going to have an impact. And that means that many of our jobs will become much more… bullshitty… in the future.

So – what would happen when robots take over all of our jobs? My guess is that mankind would just inflate the old jobs so that the work that can be done in ten minutes, will still engage workers for a full day. In short, we’ll all ‘work’ at bullshit jobs.

Here, I made a diagram of what it’ll look like. And you know where I did it? That’s right – at work, while answering questions on Quora.

Enjoy the future / present!

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This post was originally written as an answer to a question at Quora.  You are welcome to browse my content there and enjoy more answers about the future.

Who Will Be Remembered into the Future?

Meet Omer, my five years old son (in the picture above). He will be remembered for as long as humanity exists.

That’s pretty neat, isn’t it?

Let me explain why. Think of the great inventors, leaders and scientists of ages past: people like Alexander the Great, Isaac Newton, Plato and others. Most of them did not have a personal biographer looking over their shoulders, to record their great deeds. Even for those who did hire such a personal biographer, we only know today what they wanted us to know.

Now consider Omer. He is growing up in a period of time in which he is being monitored continuously. All the pictures I took of him, almost since the very moment he was born, are stored in Google’s and Facebook’s servers, and are being maintained and looked after continuously, so that they will be preserved for a very long time indeed. Every purchase I made for him using my credit card, has been recorded somewhere by a data merchant, and the information was sold to other companies.

As my son grows up, his smartphone will record his activities and health, his electronic devices will keep a close watch over him, and aerial drones in the sky will be able to record his movements on the ground. All of this information will be gathered effortlessly, and will be easily analyzed by AI engines to construct a picture of my son’s life.

So – in the future, we will all be remembered and recognized. Maybe not for our great inventions or prowess in battle, but for our personal, small and intimate stories and achievements. My son will know me – his father – as a real human being, full of nuances and quirks. He will know what I did tonight before going to bed, which websites I visited (yes, even if I used incognito mode – the data is still being retained by my internet service provider and Google), and what made me the man I was. And his kids – my grandchildren – will know my son’s story even better than he will know mine. And so on and on, into future generations.

In a way, I will never die for my son, and neither will you. Our stories will remain here to teach our children the lessons we’ve learned over our lives.

I sure hope they’ll know what to do with them.

 

This post was originally written as an answer to a question at Quora.  You are welcome to browse my content there and enjoy more answers about the future.

How long are you going to live?

A few years ago I lectured in a European workshop about global risks. Before me lectured one of the World Health Organization (WHO) chief officers, who presented a very interesting graph.

What he showed was basically that life expectancy is expected to keep on rising all over the world, so that by the year 2100 it’s going to reach 85–90 years in high-income countries.

Well, I was pretty astounded about that forecast, which seemed to me extremely pessimistic. I talked with him over lunch, and asked whether this forecast included all of the technologies currently being developed in university labs. I asked how the forecasts would be affected by –

  • The development of nano-robots that could hold back cancer, coronary thrombosis (heart attack), strokes and other diseases from inside the body;
  • Sophisticated techniques for genetic engineering, that could produce vaccines against cancer and other diseases;
  • Tissue engineering techniques that could repair entire tissues – sometimes while they’re still in the body;
  • Artificial intelligence engines that would provide real-time medical monitoring and consultation much more accurate than that of today’s best medical doctors;

I’m paraphrasing his answer a little, since it all happened a few years ago, but the gist of what he said was –

“No, we can’t take all that into account. The model can’t acknowledge medical breakthroughs. We know that such breakthroughs will have a dramatic impact, but we just don’t know when they’ll emerge from the lab. But I can tell you that if even 15% of the research currently being done in biomedical labs succeeds, then the forecasts will change dramatically.”

So – there is simply no good forecast that will answer the basic question of how long we’re supposed to remain alive in this century. It is entirely conceivable – indeed, even likely, as that WHO official admitted – that sometime in the next few decades, a ‘perfect storm’ of medical breakthroughs will work together to dramatically halt aging and put a stop to most old-age diseases.

There are even some reputable scientists (like George Church, who is sort of the Thomas Edison of genetic engineering) who believe we’ll be able to reverse aging within a decade.

Personally, I think it’ll take much longer than that – but even if this breakthrough comes in the next few decades, many of us should still be around and enjoy it.

Good luck!

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This post was originally written as an answer at Quora. You can read more of my thoughts about the future and my answers to questions on these topics in my channel there.