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.
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.
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:
You come into the office in the morning.
You chat with your co-workers for 15 minutes.
You open your computer and chat with your friends on Facebook for another hour.
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…
…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.
Lunch takes an hour.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Let’s start with a little challenge: which of the following tunes was composed by an AI, and which by an HI (Human Intelligence)?
I’ll tell you at the end of the answer which tune was composed by an AI and which by an HI. For now, if you’re like most people, you’re probably unsure. Both pieces of music are pleasing to the ear. Both have good rhythm. Both could be part of the soundtrack of a Hollywood film, and you would never know that one was composed by an AI.
And this is just the beginning.
In recent years, AI has managed to –
Compose a piece of music (Transits – Into an Abyss) that was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and received praise from reviewers. [source: you can hear the performance in this link]
Identify emotions in photographs of people, and create an abstract painting that conveys these emotions to the viewer. The AI can even analyze the painting as it is being created, and decide whether it’s achieving its objectives [source: Rise of the Robots].
Create a movie trailer (it’s actually pretty good – watch it here).
Now, don’t get me wrong: most of these achievements don’t even come close to the level of an experienced human artist. But AI has something that humans don’t: it’s capable of training itself on millions of samples, and constantly improve itself. That’s how Alpha Go, the AI that recently wiped the floor with Go’s most proficient players, got so good at the game: it played a few million games against itself, and discovered new strategies and best moves. It acquired an intuition for the game, and kept rapidly evolving to improve itself.
And there’s no reason that AI won’t be able to do that in art as well.
In the next decade, we’ll see AI composing music and even poems, drawing abstract paintings, and writing books and movie scripts. And it’ll get better at it all the time.
So what happens to art, when AI can create it just as easily as human beings do?
For starters, we all benefit. In the future, when you’ll upload your new YouTube clip, you’ll be able to have the AI add original music to it, which will fit the clip perfectly. The AI will also write your autobiography just by going over your Facebook and Gmail history, and if you want – will turn it into a movie script and direct it too. It’ll create new comic books easily and automatically – both the script and the drawing and coloring part – and what’s more, it’ll fit each story to the themes that you like. You want to see Superman fighting the Furry Triple-Breasted Slot Machines of Pandora? You got it.
That’s what happens when you take a task that humans need to invest decades to become really good at, and let computers perform it quickly and efficiently. And as a result, even poor people will be able to have a flock of AI artists at their beck and call.
What Will the Artists Do?
At this point you may ask yourselves what all the human artists will do at that future. Well, the bad news is that obviously, we won’t need as many human artists. The good news is that those few human artists who are left, will make a fortune by leveraging their skills.
Let me explain what I mean by that. Homer is one of the earliest poets we know of. He was probably dirt poor. Why? Because he had to wander from inn to inn, and could only recite his work aloud for audiences of a few dozen people at the time, at most. Shakespeare was much more succesful: he could have his plays performed in front of hundreds of people at the same time. And Justin Bieber is a millionnaire, because he leverages his art with technology: once he produces a great song, everyone gets is immediately via YouTube or by paying for and downloading the song on iTunes.
Great composers will still exist in the future, and they will work at creating new kinds of music – and then having the AI create variations on that theme, and earning revenue from it. Great painters will redefine drawing and painting, and they will teach the AI to paint accordingly. Great script writers will create new styles of stories, whereas the old AI could only produce the ‘old style’.
And of course, every time a new art style is invented, it’ll only take AI a few years – or maybe just a few days – to teach itself that new style. But the human creative, crazy, charismatic artists who created that new style, will have earned the status of artistic super-stars by then: the people who changed our definitions of what is beautiful, ugly, true or false. They will be the people who really create art, instead of just making boring variations on a theme.
The truly best artists, the ones who can change our outlook about life and impact our thinking in completely unexpected ways, will still be here even a hundred years into the future.
Oh, and as for the two tunes? The first one was composed by a human being and performed by Morten Faerestrand in his YouTube clip – 3 JUICY jazz guitar improv tools. The second was composed by the Algorithmic Music Composer and demonstrated in the YouTube clip – Computer-Generated Jazz Improvisation.
Did you get it right?
This post was originally written as an answer at Quora
“Surveys have shown that most Americans vastly underestimate the existing extent of inequality, and when asked to select an “ideal” national distribution of income, they make a choice that, in the real world, exists only in Scandinavian social democracies.”
The amazing thing is that most people simply don’t realize just how bad things are. Human beings have a tendency to compare their life quality with that of their neighbors and relatives, not with the millionaires and billionaires.
Surveys show that Americans generally believe that the top 20% of wealthy Americans possess just 59 percent of wealth [source]. Or that the bottom 40% possess 9 percent of wealth. This is nowhere near the truth (actually, the top 20% possess 84 percent of wealth, and the bottom 40% possess only 0.3 percent of wealth)[source].
Here’s How Bad Things Actually Are:
Between the years 1983 – 2009, Americans became more wealthy as a whole. But the bottom 80 percent of income earners saw a net decrease in their wealth.At the same time, the top 1 percent of income earners got more than 40 percent of the nation’s wealth increase.[source].
Overall, the earnings of the top 1 percent rose by 278 percent between 1979 and 2007. At the same time, the earnings of the median people (that’s probably you and me) only increased by 35 percent [source – The Second Machine Age].
Inequality (as measured by the CIA according to the GINI index) in the US is far more extreme than it is in places like Egypt, Croatia, Vietnam or Greece [source].
Between the years 2009 – 2012, 95 percent of total income gains went to the wealthiest 1 percent [source].
Economic mobility in the US – i.e. whether people can rise (or sink) from one economic class to another, is significantly lower in comparison to many European countries. If you were born to a family in the bottom 20% of income, you have a 42 percent chance of staying in that income level as an adult. Compare that to Denmark (25 percent chance) or even Britain (30 percent chance) [source]. That means that the American dream of achieving success through hard work is much more practical if you’re living in a Nordic country or even in the freaking monarchy of the United Kingdom.
Inequality also has implications for your life expectancy. Geographic inequality in life expectancy has increased between 1980 and 2014. Some counties in the US have a life expectancy lower by 20 years than the highest counties. Yes, you read that right. The average person in eastern Kentucky and southwestern West Virginia basically has twenty years less than a person in, say, central Colorado. And the disparity between the US counties shows no sign of stopping anytime soon [source].
What It All Means
Reading these statistics, you may say that inequality is just a symptom of the times and of technological progress, and there’s definitely some evidence for that.
You may highlight the fact that the ‘water rises for everyone’, and indeed – that’s true as well. Some may rise more rapidly than others, but in general over the last one hundred years, the average American’s life quality has risen.
You may even say that some billionaires, like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, are giving back their wealth to society. The data shows that the incredibly wealthy donate around 10% of their net worth over their lifetime. And again, that’s correct (and incredibly admirable).
The only problem is, all of these explanations doesn’t matter in the end. Because inequality still exists, and it has some unfortunate side effects: people may not realize exactly how bad it is, but they still feel it’s pretty bad. They realize that the rich keep on getting richer. They understand that the rich and wealthy have a large influence on the US congress and senate [source].
In short, they understand that the system is skewed, and not in their favor.
And so, they demand change. Any kind of change – just something that will shake the system upside down, and make the wealthy elites rethink everything they know. Populist politicians (and occasionally ones who really do want to make a difference) then use these yearnings to get elected.
Indeed, when you check out the candidate quality that mattered the most to voters in the 2016 US elections, you can see that the ability to bring about change is more important by far than other traits like “good judgement”, “experience” or even “cares about me”. And there you have it: from rampant inequality to the Trump regime.
Now, things may not be as bleak as they seem. Maybe Trump will work towards minimizing inequality. But even if he won’t (or can’t), I would like to think that the politicial system in the US has learned its lesson, and that the Democratic Party realized that in the next elections cycle they need to put inequality on their agenda, and find ways to fight it.
I was asked on Quora how the tanks of the future are going to be designed. Here’s my answer – I hope it’ll make you reflect once again on the future of war and what it entails.
And now, consider this: the Israeli Merkava Mark IV tank.
Merkava Mark IV. Source: Michael Mass, Yad La-Shiryon, found on Wikipedia
It is one of the most technologically advanced tanks in the world. It is armed with a massive 120 mm smoothbore gun that fires shells with immense explosive power, with two roof-mounted machine guns, and with a 60 mm mortar in case the soldiers inside really want to make a point. However, the tank has to be deployed on the field, and needs to reach its target. It also costs around $6 million.
Now consider this: the Israeli geek (picture taken from the Israeli reality show – Beauty and the Geek). The geek is the one on the left, in case you weren’t sure.
The common Israeli Geek. He’s the one on the left of the picture. Source: Israeli reality show – Beauty and the Geek.
With the click of a button and the aid of some hacking software available on the Darknet, our humble Israeli geek can paralyze whole institutions, governments and critical infrastructures. He can derail trains (happened in Poland), deactivate sewage pumps and mix contaminated water with drinking water (happened in Texas), or even cut the power supply to tens of thousands of people (happened in Ukraine). And if that isn’t bad enough, he could take control over the enemy female citizens’ wireless vibrators and operate it to his and/or their satisfaction (potentially happened already).
Oh, and the Israeli geek works for free. Why? Because he loves hacking stuff. Just make sure you cover the licensing costs for the software he’s using, or he might hack your vibrator next.
So, you asked – “how will futuristic tanks be designed”?
I answer, “who cares”?
But Seriously Now…
When you’re thinking of the future, you have to realize that some paradigms are going to change. One of those paradigms is that of physical warfare. You see, tanks were created to do battle in a physical age, in which they had an important role: to protect troops and provide overwhelming firepower while bringing those troops wherever they needed to be. That was essentially the German blizkrieg strategy.
In the digital age, however, everything is connected to the internet, or very soon will be. Not just every computer, but every bridge, every building, every power plant and energy grid, and every car. And as security futurist Marc Goodman noted in his book Future Crimes, “when everything is connected, everything is vulnerable”. Any piece of infrastructure that you connect to the internet, immediately becomes vulnerable to hacking.
Now, here’s a question for you: what is the purpose of war?
I’ll give you a hint: it’s not about driving tanks with roaring engines around. It’s not about soldiers running and shooting in the field. It’s not even about dropping bombs from airplanes. All of the above are just tools for achieving the real purpose: winning the war by either making the enemy surrender to you, or neutralizing it completely.
And how do you neutralize the enemy? It’s quite simple: you demolish the enemy’s factories; you destroy their cities; you ruin your enemy’s citizens morale to the point where they can’t fight you anymore.
In the physical age, armies clashed on the field because each army was on the way to the other side’s cities and territory. That’s why you needed fast tanks with awesome armanent and armor. But today, in the digital age, hackers can leap straight over the battlefield, and make war directly between cities in real-time. They can shut down hospitals and power plants, kill everyone with a heart pacemaker or an insulin pump, and make trains and cars collide with each other. In short, they could shut down entire cities.
So again – who needs tanks?
And Still…
I’m not saying there aren’t going to be tanks. The physical aspect of warfare still counts, and one can’t just disregard it. However, tanks simply don’t count as much in comparison to the cyber-security aspects of warfare (partly because tanks themselves are connected nowadays).
Again, that does not mean that tanks are useless. We still need to figure out the exact relationships between tanks and geeks, and precisely where, when and how needs to be deployed in the new digital age. But if you were to ask me in ten years what’s more important – the tank or the geek – then my bet would definitely be on the geek.
If this aspect of future warfare interests you, I invite you to read the two papers I’ve published in the European Journal of Futures Research and in Foresight, about future scenarios for crime and terror that rely on the internet of things.
I was recently asked on Quora whether there is some kind of a grand scheme to things: a destiny that we all share, a guiding hand that acts according to some kind of moral rules.
This is a great question, and one that we’re all worried about. While there’s no way to know for sure, the evidence points against this kind of fate-biased thinking – as a forecasting experiment funded by the US Department of Defense recently showed.
In 2011, the US Department of Defense began funding an unusual project: the Good Judgement Project. In this project, led by Philip E. Tetlock, Barbara Mellers and Don Moore, people were asked to volunteer their time and rate the chance of occurence for certain events. Overall, thousands of people took part in the exercise, and answered hundreds of questions over a time period of two years. Their answers were checked constantly, as soon as the events actually occurred.
After two years, the directors of the project identified a sub-type of people they called Superforecasters. These top forecasters were doing so well, that their predictions were 30% more accurate than those of intelligence officials who had access to highly classified information!
(and yes, for the statistics-lovers among us: the researchers absolutely did run statistical tests that showed the chances of those people being accidentally so accurate were miniscule. The superforecasters kept doing well, over and over again)
Once the researchers identified this subset of people, they began analyzing their personalities and methods of thinking. You can read about it in some of the papers about the research (attached at the end of this answer), as well as in the great book – Superforecasting: the Art and Science of Prediction. For this answer, the important thing to note is that those superforecasters were also tested for what I call “the fate bias”.
Neither one seems to work. Sorry ’bout that.
The Fate Bias
There’s no denying that most people believe in fate of some sort: a guiding hand that makes everything happen for a reason, in accordance with some grand scheme or moral rules. This tendency seems to manifest itself most strongly in children, and in God-believers (84.8 percent of whom believe in fate), but even 54.3 percent of atheists believe in fate.
It’s obvious why we want to believe in fate. It gives our woes, and the sufferings of others, a special meaning. It justifies our pains, and makes us think that “it’s all for a reason”. Our belief in fate helps us deal with bereavement and with physical and mental pain.
But it also makes us lousy forecasters.
Fate is Incompatible with Accurate Forecasting
In the Good Judgement Project, the researchers ran tests on the participants to check for their belief in fate. They found out that the superforecasters utterly rejected fate. Even more significantly, the better an individual was at forecasting, the more inclined he was to reject fate. And the more he rejected fate, the more accurate he was at forecasting the future.
Fate is Incompatible with the Evidence
And so, it seems that fate is simply incompatible with the evidence. People who try to predict the occurrence of events in a ‘fateful’ way, as if they obeying a certain guiding hand, are prone to failure. On the other hand, those who believe there is no ‘higher order to things’ and plan accordingly, turn out to be usually right.
Does that mean there is no such thing as fate, or a grand scheme? Of course not. We can never disprove the existence of such a ‘grand plan’. What we can say with some certainty, however, is that human beings who claim to know what that plan actually is, seem to be constantly wrong – whereas those who don’t bother explaining things via fate, find out that reality agrees with them time and time again.
So there may be a grand plan. We may be in a movie, or God may be looking down on us from up above. But if that’s the case, it’s a god we don’t understand, and the plan – if there actually is one – is completely undecipherable to us. As Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett beautifully wrote –
God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising… an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.
And if that’s the case, I’d rather just say outloud – “I don’t believe in fate”, and plan and invest accordingly.
You’ll simply have better success that way. And when the universe is cheating at poker with blank cards, Heaven knows you need all the help you can get.
For further reading, here are links to some interesting papers about the Good Judgement Project and the insights derived from it –
OK, so I know the headline to this post isn’t really the sort a stable and serious scientist, or even a futurist, should be asking. But I was asked this question in Quora, and thought it warranted some thought. So here’s my answer to this mystery that had hounded movie directors for the last century or so!
If Japan actually managed to create the huge robots / exoskeletons so favored in the anime genre, all the generals in all the opposing armies would stand up and clap wildly for them. Because these robots are practically the worst war-machines ever. And believe it or not, I know that because we conducted an actual research into this area, together with Dr. Aharon Hauptman and Dr. Liran Antebi,
But before I tell you about that research, let me say a few words about the woes of huge humanoid robots.
First, there are already some highly sophisticated exoskeleton suits developed by major military contractors like Raytheon’s XOS2 and Lockheed Martin’s HULC. While they’re definitely the coolest thing since sliced bread and frosted donuts, they have one huge disadvantage: they need plenty of energy to work. As long as you can connect them to a powerline, it shouldn’t be too much of an issue. But once you ask them to go out to the battlefield… well, after one hour at most they’ll stop working, and quite likely trap the human operating them.
Some companies, like Boston Dynamics, have tried to overcome the energy challenge by adding a diesel engine to their robots. Which is great, except for the fact that it’s still pretty cumbersome, and extremely noisy. Not much use for robots that are supposed to accompany marines on stealth missions.
Robots: Left – Raytheon’s XOS2 exoskeleton suit; Upper right – Lockheed Martin’s HULC; Bottom right – Boston Dynamics’ Alpha Dog.
But who wants stealthy robots, anyway? We’re talking about gargantuan robots, right?!
Well, here’s the thing: the larger and heavier the robot is, the more energy you need to operate it. That means you can’t really add much armor to it. And the larger you make it, the more unwieldy it becomes. There’s a reason elephants are so sturdy, with thick legs – that’s the only way they can support their enormous body weight. Huge robots, which are much heavier than elephants, can’t even have legs with joints. When the MK. II Mech was exposed at Maker Faire 2015, it reached a height of 15 feet, weighed around 6 tons… and could only move by crawling on a caterpillar track. So, in short, it was a tank.
And don’t even think about it rising to the air. Seriously. Just don’t.
Megabots’ MK. II Mech, complete with the quiessential sexy pilot.
But let’s say you manage to somehow bypass all of those pesky energy constraints. Even in that case, huge humanoid robots would not be a good idea because of two main reasons: shape, and size.
Let’s start with shape. The human body had evolved the way it is – limbs, groin, hair and all – to cope with the hardships of life on the one hand, while also being able to have sex, give birth and generally doing fun stuff. But robots aren’t supposed to be doing fun stuff. Unless, that is, you want to build a huge Japanese humanoid sex robot. And yes, I know that sounds perfectly logical for some horribly unfathomable reason, but that’s not what the question is about.
So – if you want a battle-robot, you just don’t need things like legs, a groin, or even a head with a vulnerable computer-brain. You don’t need a huge multifunctional battle-robot. Instead, you want small and efficient robots that are uniquely suited to the task set for them. If you want to drop bombs, use a bomber drone. If you want to kill someone, use a simple robot with a gun. Heck, it can look like a child’s toy, or like a ball, but what does it matter? It just needs to get the job done!
You don’t need a gargantuan Japanese robot for battle. You can even use robots as small as General Robotics’ Dogo: basically a small tank the size of your foot, that carries a glock pistol and can use it efficiently.
Last but not least, large humanoid robots are not only inefficient, cumbersome and impractical, but are also extremely vulnerable to being hit. One solid hit to the head will take them out. Or to a leg. Or the torso. Or the groin of that gargantuan Japanese sex-bot that’s still wondering why it was sent to a battlefield where real tanks are doing all the work. That’s why armies around the world are trying to figure out how to use swarms of drones instead of deploying one large robot: if one drone takes the hit, the rest of the swarm still survives.
So now that I’ve thrown cold ice water on the idea of large Japanese humanoid robots, here’s the final rub. A few years ago I was part of a research along with Dr. Aharon Hauptman and Dr. Liran Antebi, that was meant to assess the capabilities that robots will possess in the next twenty years. I’ll cut straight to the chase: the experts we interviewed and surveyed believed that in twenty years or less we’ll have –
Robots with perfect camouflage capabilities in visible light (essentially invisibility);
Robots that can heal themselves, or use objects from the environment as replacement parts;
Biological robots.
One of the only categories about which the experts were skeptical was that of “transforming platforms” – i.e. robots that can change shape to adapt themselves to different tasks. There is just no need for these highly-versatile (and expensive, inefficient and vulnerable) robots, when you can send ten other highly-specialized robots to perform each task at a turn. Large humanoid robots are the same. There’s just no need for them in warfare.
So, to sum things up: if Japan were to construct anime-style Gundam-like robots and send them to war, I really hope they prepare them for having sex, because they would be screwed over pretty horribly.
I was asked on Quora what Google will look like in 2030. Since that is one of the most important issues the world is facing right now, I took some time to answer it in full.
Larry Page, one of Google’s two co-founders, once said off-handedly that Google is not about building a search engine. As he said it, “Oh, we’re really making an AI”. Google right now is all about building the world brain that will take care of every person, all the time and everywhere.
By 2030, Google will have that World Brain in existence, and it will look after all of us. And that’s quite possibly both the best and worst thing that could happen to humanity.
To explain that claim, let me tell you a story of how your day is going to unfold in 2030.
2030 – A Google World
You wake up in the morning, January 1st, 2030. It’s freezing outside, but you’re warm in your room. Why? Because Nest – your AI-based air conditioner – knows exactly when you need to wake up, and warms the room you’re in so that you enjoy the perfect temperature for waking up.
You go out to the street, and order an autonomous taxi to take you to your workplace. Who programmed that autonomous car? Google did. Who acquired Waze – a crowdsourcing navigation app? That’s right: Google did.
After lunch, you take a stroll around the block, with your Google Glass 2.0 on your eyes. Your smart glasses know it’s a cold day, and they know you like hot cocoa, and they also know that there’s a cocoa store just around the bend which your friends have recommended before. So it offers to take you there – and if you agree, Google earns a few cents out of anything you buy in the store. And who invented Google Glass…? I’m sure you get the picture.
I can go on and on, but the basic idea is that the entire world is going to become connected in the next twenty years. Many items will have sensors in and on them, and will connect to the cloud. And Google is not only going to produce many of these sensors and appliances (such as the Google Assistant, autonomous cars, Nest, etc.) but will also assign a digital assistant to every person, that will understand the user better than that person understands himself.
I probably don’t have to explain why the Google World Brain will make our lives much more pleasant. The perfect coordination and optimization of our day-to-day dealings will ensure that we need to invest less resources (energy, time, concentration) to achieve a high level of life quality. I see that primarily as a good thing.
So what’s the problem?
The Downside
Here’s the thing: the digital world suffers from what’s called “The One Winner Effect”. Basically it means that there’s only place for one great winner in every sector. So there’s only one Facebook – the second largest social media network in English is Twitter, with only ~319 million users. That’s nothing compared to Facebook’s 1.86 billion users. Similarly, Google controls ~65% of the online search market. That’s a huge number when you realize that competitors like Yahoo and Bing – large and established services – control most of the rest ~35%. So again, one big winner.
So what’s the problem, you ask? Well, a one-winner market tends to create soft monopolies, in which one company can provide the best services, and so it’s just too much of a hassle to leave for other services. Google is creating such a soft monopoly. Imagine how difficult it will be for you to wake up tomorrow morning and migrate your e-mail address to one of the competitors, transfer all of your Google Docs there, sell your Android-based (Google’s OS!) smartphone and replace it with an iPhone, wake up cold in the morning because you’ve switched Nest for some other appliance that hasn’t had the time to learn your habits yet, etc.
Can you imagine yourself doing that? I’m sure some ardent souls will, but most of humanity doesn’t care deeply enough, or doesn’t even have the options to stop using Google. How do you stop using Google, when every autonomous car on the street has a Google Camera? How do you stop using Google, when your website depends on Google not banning it? How do you stop using Google when practically every non-iPhone smartphone relies on an Android operating system? This is a Google World.
And Google knows it, too.
Google Flexes it’s Muscles
Recently, around 200 people got banned from using Google services because they cheated Google by reselling the Pixel smartphone. Those people woke up one morning, and found out they couldn’t log into their Gmail, that they couldn’t acess their Google Docs, and if they were living in the future – they would’ve probably found out they can’t use Google’s autonomous cars and other apps on the street. They were essentially sentenced to a digital death.
Now, public uproar caused Google to back down and revive those people’s accounts, but this episode shows you the power that Google are starting to amass. And what’s more, Google doesn’t have to ban people in such direct fashion. Imagine, for example, that your website is being demoted by Google’s search engine (which nobody knows how it works) simply because you’re talking against Google. Google is allowed by law to do that. So who’s going to stand up and talk smack about Google? Not me, that’s for sure. I love Google.
To sum things up, Google is not required by law to serve everyone, or even to be ‘fair’ in its recommendations about services. And as it gathers more power and becomes more prevalent in our daily lives, we will need to find mechanisms to ensure that Google or Google-equivalent services are provided to everyone, to prevent people being left outside the system, and to enable people to keep being able to speak up against Google and other monopolies.
So in conclusion, it’s going to be a Google world, and I love Google. Now please share this answer, since I’m not sure Google will!
Note: all this is not to say that Google is ‘evil’ or similar nonsense. It is not even unique – if Google takes the fall tomorrow, Amazon, Apple, Facebook or even Snapchat will take its place. This is simply the nature of the world at the moment: digital technologies give rise to big winners.
Curating the Future 