The future of VN's

[Bigbishounen]

Yeah, I can't see people being able to live inside a fantasy "matrix" world dating their ideal woman being ever a good thing. Same with android women, all jokes about "fembots" aside.

Actually, one of my favorite Anime series dealt with this exact phenomena: Chobits. it showed a world where personal computers (Persocon) were actually androids modeled after beautiful girls or guys (mostly girls, apparently) and some people became so enraptured with them they fell in love and married their Persocon. (One of the side characters had his own mini-story around this concept.) Ironically, the main character ends up in exactly this situation as he falls in love with and starts a relationship with the "female" lead, a Persocon named "Chii". It's a pretty good story, based around a manga series that was the very first "shounen" manga done by Clamp, an all-female manga company.

Hard to believe it's 10 years old this year (wonder if there will be any anniversary release stuff?). If you haven't seen it yet, I recommend it. it's available on Netflix streaming if you have that available to you. Otherwise you should be able to rent or buy the DVD set easily.

[ziamatt]

First things First, if you guys are interested in the subject consider reading Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku and The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil, both books are about the near future, a nice read if you are into Trans-humanism or Science.

I can't speak for Michio Kaku's works, but The Age of Spiritual Machines was very interesting. I think Kurzweil's predictions could be a bit ambitious, but who's to say?

Its hard to predict things like this, autonomous artificial entities and fully functional androids belong to the medium-far future, there can be a great number of social and economical changes until then. Who Knows, maybe the poor citizens will have their brains uploaded on a machine where they live a fake reality while their bodies are used as fuel....too much movies, better stop.

I mean Kurzweil basically predicts this occurring in the next several decades. I don't have any of his works handy, but this wiki page [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singul ... redictions] has a nice list of predictions from his 2005 update of The Age of Spiritual Machines. If his predictions are even half accurate we should at least be able to hit some sort of post-scarcity society within several decades, probably within the lifetime of most reading this.

[rydiafan]

we are talking atleast 200 years from now til that kind of vr is safe for the human brain .... though the feeling of lets say feeling lilly touch would be pretty cool

[Tomate]

I mean Kurzweil basically predicts this occurring in the next several decades. I don't have any of his works handy, but this wiki page [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singul ... redictions] has a nice list of predictions from his 2005 update of The Age of Spiritual Machines. If his predictions are even half accurate we should at least be able to hit some sort of post-scarcity society within several decades, probably within the lifetime of most reading this.

The Future according the Mr. Kurzweil wll be awesome, but it reminds me of a certain webcomic:

we are talking atleast 200 years from now til that kind of vr is safe for the human brain .... though the feeling of lets say feeling lilly touch would be pretty cool

200 years is a lot of a time, most things that we are talking in this thread can happen in the next 50-70 according to most futurologists, trans-humanists, Physics and so on.

[gRaViJa]

we are talking atleast 200 years from now til that kind of vr is safe for the human brain .... though the feeling of lets say feeling lilly touch would be pretty cool

Yes, the topic got a bit more futuristic then i intended. I was thinking about the not so-distant future with stuff like computers being able to adapt to what you say and expand endlessly on story and dialogue and hologram technology that is alreayd experimented with at the moment, not about Android Lilly's and Emi's :p

[rydiafan]

Physics

Physics really the most reliable source lol ... sense 2000 how many time was the world gonna end ??

[Tomate]

Physics

Physics really the most reliable source lol ... sense 2000 how many time was the world gonna end ??

I said Physics because its Michio Kaku expertise, and he wrote Physics of the future and theres a whole chapter about how computers will evolve.

And i dont think physics has something to do with the end of the world.

[Beoran]

Well, I think it will be more like thousands of years before all this new technology that emerged in the last 100 years, and the new technologies that will follow get settled. And technology will go forward but also backwards at times. I mean, 2000 years ago the Romans had roads, sewers, running water, concrete structures, etc, but it's only now that these are getting built all over the world, and then still! And of course, it will be probably quite different from what I think it will be in several aspects. And while the primitive android will be made in our own lifetime, one that is convincingly human-like will be not here for centuries, I think. And of course, once humans need not work anymore society and economy will change radically and the way we trade and deal with means of exchange such as money will too. Ah, we live in great times, in a great place! I hope that the generations after us will keep on thinking this.

[ziamatt]

Well, I think it will be more like thousands of years before all this new technology that emerged in the last 100 years, and the new technologies that will follow get settled. And technology will go forward but also backwards at times. I mean, 2000 years ago the Romans had roads, sewers, running water, concrete structures, etc, but it's only now that these are getting built all over the world, and then still! And of course, it will be probably quite different from what I think it will be in several aspects. And while the primitive android will be made in our own lifetime, one that is convincingly human-like will be not here for centuries, I think. And of course, once humans need not work anymore society and economy will change radically and the way we trade and deal with means of exchange such as money will too. Ah, we live in great times, in a great place! I hope that the generations after us will keep on thinking this.

I think you're underestimating the law of accelerating returns. Technology is progressing at an exponential rate. It took us thousands of years to tame electricity, but it took us less than 200 years to use electricity to being powering supercomputers. Even looking at video game technology, major developments are coming much more rapidly now than they did before. Centuries seems like an overestimate to me.

[Mirrormn]

I think you're underestimating the law of accelerating returns. Technology is progressing at an exponential rate. It took us thousands of years to tame electricity, but it took us less than 200 years to use electricity to being powering supercomputers. Even looking at video game technology, major developments are coming much more rapidly now than they did before. Centuries seems like an overestimate to me.

Some people even believe that the growth of technology is accelerating so much that the acceleration itself will soon become self-perpetuating - i.e., that computers will start being able to design themselves to be faster, smarter, and better able to redesign themselves again. If such a thing happens, technology will very very suddenly become ultra-advanced to the point where pretty much anything will be possible. It's a concept referred to as the technological singularity.

[ziamatt]

[quote="Mirrormn"]Some people even believe that the growth of technology is accelerating so much that the acceleration itself will soon become self-perpetuating - i.e., that computers will start being able to design themselves to be faster, smarter, and better able to redesign themselves again. If such a thing happens, technology will very very suddenly become ultra-advanced to the point where pretty much anything will be possible. It's a concept referred to as the technological singularity.

Ray Kurzweil has even predicted this occuring by 2045. It's hard to imagine. Based on what else I've read of his, if his predictions are correct, our generation could become an immortal generation where major medical advancements occur so rapidly that our life will be extanded faster than its expeded. He even predicts the "waking up" of the universe by 2199, which basically means the entire universe will be converted into a massive computer and we will be able to fully control it along-side created AIs.

[Megumeru]

Some people even believe that the growth of technology is accelerating so much that the acceleration itself will soon become self-perpetuating - i.e., that computers will start being able to design themselves to be faster, smarter, and better able to redesign themselves again. If such a thing happens, technology will very very suddenly become ultra-advanced to the point where pretty much anything will be possible. It's a concept referred to as the technological singularity.

Ray Kurzweil has even predicted this occuring by 2045. It's hard to imagine. Based on what else I've read of his, if his predictions are correct, our generation could become an immortal generation where major medical advancements occur so rapidly that our life will be extanded faster than its expeded. He even predicts the "waking up" of the universe by 2199, which basically means the entire universe will be converted into a massive computer and we will be able to fully control it along-side created AIs.

aaand we'll be asked by some random dude in a trench coat with sunglasses whether to take the blue pill or the red pill.
...
...
MACHIIIIIINESSSS

[Paddy]

*leans against an apple tree, holding an apple and a knife, skinning the apple*

All of this is really very interesting reading (well, aside from that computer-powered fleshlight or whatever). And maybe it will happen someday. If it ever does, I won't care.

But I wouldn't be surprised if the US government and the EU collapse, or if a tyrannical and oppressive NWO consumes the Earth, or some Anonymous group overwhelms the governments of the world and smashes civilization into itty bitty pieces, or some other apocalypse like that happens, whatever the case.

Just a premonition. *chomps fully skinned apple*

Chekov's character Tuzenbach, from the play "Three Sisters", once said:

After our time people will fly about in balloons, the cut of one's coat will change, perhaps they'll discover a sixth sense and develop it, but life will remain the same, laborious, mysterious, and happy. And in a thousand years' time, people will still be sighing: "Life is hard!"--and at the same time they'll be just as afraid of death, and unwilling to meet it, as we are.

I'm neither scared nor excited by technology. It's just a distraction from more important things no amount of technology can solve.

Like that fleshlight thing. I'd only have been distracting myself from my loneliness and distance from anyone else. It would be a sad, hollow existence.
My confidence in the promises of God gives me hope that I'll never need it or anything like it to cope with my lot. I will have a wife someday. Or I will find love and acceptance. Whatever God gives to me, that will be enough. Everything I have is gift from him, even when I abuse it.

EDIT: But before I go hijacking another thread, I will say once again, this is still all very fascinating how much man has discovered in the past 200 years. In 1812 we would never have dreamed of seeing anything like some of the amazing gizmos we've got today. Automatons would be amazing by comparison. (Still nothing compared to creating universes, but amazing nonetheless.)

A toast to mankind's next 200 years - may we become not only more technologically advanced, but wiser as well!

[kotomikun]

Ray Kurzweil has even predicted this occuring by 2045. It's hard to imagine. Based on what else I've read of his, if his predictions are correct, our generation could become an immortal generation where major medical advancements occur so rapidly that our life will be extanded faster than its expeded. He even predicts the "waking up" of the universe by 2199, which basically means the entire universe will be converted into a massive computer and we will be able to fully control it along-side created AIs.

I dunno. I don't think it's very likely. They're basically claiming that computers will learn to make recursively faster processors so that we have impossibly fast ones almost immediately, but the laws of physics are bound to get in the way. In fact, they already are; it's become so hard to make processors smaller and faster than the ones we have now that CPU-making companies are switching to just putting multiple processors in single computers to try to keep up with the Moore's Law pace. Processors have to be smaller to be faster, because you can't get around the speed of light; but the smaller they are, the more vulnerable they get to their own heat and self-interference, and there isn't a whole lot we can do about those things. We can't be sure where the upper limit is on how refined they can get, but there definitely is one. And that's not even getting into the issue of AI, and software in general, being way behind the curve compared to hardware; or the fact that no one really knows if computers "waking up" is even a thing that can happen (seems like an excuse to ignore the whole software issue to me).

But, I mean, the singularity is really already happening; computers are already too complex to design without using an existing computer. Good computers make it easier to design even better ones, which is exactly what the singularity is supposed to be. It seems slow because it's taken a few decades, but in that time we've made a degree of progress that puts the entire rest of human history to shame. Not bad for an invention that was only meant to assist people who did boring mathematical calculations for a living.

[Beoran]

Well, I think exponential growth will not continue. As I see it, technology advances in spurts, to then level off and even regress a bit again, before the next spurt. This is because technology is invented by people and the social conditions need to be of the right kind to allow technological progress. And yes, there will be political problems too that will slow progress, not to mention problems such as, harnessing the needed durable energy sources, keeping population in check, etc. So, I doubt any singularity will be reached any time soon, it's more of a matter of thousands of years.