You're In Stasis 100 Years. What's the First Tech You Look Into?
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Most Votes
- By the end of 2026, how useful do you think agentic/multi-agent AI systems will actually be in your daily work or personal projects? Posted on March 11th, 2026 | 14549 votes
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- By the end of 2026, how useful do you think agentic/multi-agent AI systems will actually be in your daily work or personal projects? Posted on March 11th, 2026 | 40 comments
Energy Source (Score:5, Insightful)
That is, I'd look in to the energy sources. All technology runs on some sort of energy. If there's a major change the technology that drives how energy is created, then that is most likely to effect people's lives.
Re:Energy Source (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Energy Source (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, from what I've understood the biggest issue is not the energy release itself, but that most of the energy is in particles that we can't practicly convert to power. So like great for blowing stuff up, great for heat, will make the walls of the reactor radioactive (even though the reaction is pure, these particles hitting the wall will make them so), but not really great at producing electricity. I think that 100 years from now, our biggest energy source will be fusion... the Sun. Oil and gas will be pretty much gone, coal will be halved at *current* production. If we take just the reserves that are ecnomically feasible with today's prices, here are the stats (World Energy Report 2001):
"Natural gas
~ 180 billion t coal equivalent
Mineral oil/shales/liquid gas
~300 billion t coal equivalent
Natural uranium
~50 billion t coal equivalent
Coal (all forms)
~ 600 billion t coal equivalent.
The world total annual energy consumptions amount to ~14 billion coal equivalent."
That amounts to 80 years of energy reserves. Now with increasing prices slightly more can be recovered, but not much as costs increase exponentially. And that's not even counting things like massive growth in energy consumption in countries like India and China. In short, in 100 years very much will have changed, one way or the other...
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Energy Source (Score:5, Informative)
Most all of the high-level waste (that less than 1%) is reprocessed to recover the unspent nuclear fuel (usually U-235, U-238, and Pu-239) which further reduces high-level wastes by near a factor of ten again. Sorry, but most waste ain't radioactive and the radioactive stuff is almost entirely recovered for reuse. The small bit left is easy to dispose of if you are rational. Ever hear of vitrification? Well you take that high-level waste, mix it with sand, and create a (contaminated) glass block. This is a quite stable method of storage and won't be getting into your water supply, for instance. Then you tuck it into a salt mine. Why a salt mine? Well they can only exist in extremely long-lived geological formations since any geological instability will result in water flowing through the area (rain, drainage, etc.) and therefore no salt mine. One such area is Yucca Mountain but we aren't dealing with people that have a clue about either geology or engineering for that matter. My father is a geologist, among other things, and confirmed the geological stability of salt domes, btw.
Next, we have reactor designs now that are inherently safe. They use natural circulation (no pumps) in the primary (radioactive) loop and are designed in such a way such that a complete loss of coolant accident simply results in a natural shutdown of the plant. The way the fuel is stored in the reactor fuel cells is also designed to eliminate the possibility of a nuclear meltdown. This is one reason that the US government is talking about pre-certifying these designs to prevent court challenges to each and every plant that is built. You could quite literally walk away from one of these plants and when it eventually runs out of coolant it just turns itself off with no human intervention. We've had such designs over fifteen years now as a matter of fact.
As for solar and wind, well there are problems. First off, wind turbines are notorious for turning birds into bird hamburger as we've found out here in California. Even safety cages, which reduce power production, still kill the birds as they get stuck against them and eventually starve. Plus you have a problem with the fact that the number of sites which are economically viable are minimal and the best ones have been removed from the potential list of sites by various politicians as the turbines "are unsightly and may reduce property values" (e.g. Sen. Ted Kennedy and Cape Hatteras).
Solar is a possibility if we ever solve the problem that current solar cells are limited as to which frequencies they respond to when exposed to sunlight. Current research into photosynthesis may result in solving the frequency response problem but we aren't quite there yet. Also you have the siting problem. The best potential sites are in the deserts which will send the environmentalists into a massive tizzy (read lawsuits). Still, small scale deployment (roofs of homes, businesses, government buildings) will help at least a bit until we solve that problem.
One technology, which you did not mention, but with great potential is Ocean Thermal Electric Conversion (OTEC). This is nothing more than taking advantage of the temperature differential between the surf
Re:Energy Source (Score:5, Insightful)
Wind, of course, isn't the answer to our energy problems, mostly because a sane energy policy would never depend on a single energy source. Properly managed energy production means you have a mix of power sources in case something happens that taints one of them. I'm in favor of nuclear, too, but not to the exclusion of everything else.
Re:Energy Source (Score:4, Informative)
Solar is a possibility if we ever solve the problem that current solar cells are limited as to which frequencies they respond to when exposed to sunlight.
That's not the problem at all. The problem is how much monocrystaline/polycrystaline/amorphous silicon is used, and current prices for that. It would be hard even in a laboratory situation to increase efficiency more than twofold, but by cutting silicon use you can easy slash prices tenfold, twentyfold, or more. There's no problem with efficiency - desert land is very, very cheap and there are available rooftops across the country.
Solar is an incredibly rapidly advancing tech, with its own Moore's Law-style curve (not as fast, but present!) in terms of energy output per dollar since the 1960s. Worldwide solar usage is increasing at a rate of 30-40% per year. There's no end in sight for the technology either - on the contrary, there are some "leaps and bounds" technologies either in the lab or heading to commercialization right now.
* Sliver cells: Use monocrystaline silicon, but involve splitting the waver tenfold across its thin axis, thus essentially eliminating the silicon shortage's effect and dramatically reducing weight, with almost no efficiency penalty.
* Organic solar cells: Currently very inefficient, there are about a half dozen companies with very sound techniques in the lab working to produce commercially high efficiency organic cells (no silicon required). The problem with current organic solar cells is that the electron donors and recipients end up fairly randomly scattered, and thus light rarely takes a useful path. The technologies involve various ways to do nanoscale positioning (such as laying materials over scaffoldings) and thus get silicon-level efficiencies for the price and weight of plastics.
* Small-scale photovoltaic solar concentrators: Rooftop solar concentrators are about to hit the market. Using a small high efficiency solar cell, they take advantage of gearing to allow a single cheap motor to drive all of the mirrors at once to concentrate light onto the cell as the sun moves. Produced overseas and sized precisely to a shipping crate, they may well be the first home-solar solution to produce at grid-rates after amortization.
* Large-scale thermal solar concentrators: There's currently a solar concentrator plant under construction that will produce more solar power for the grid as all other installations combined, and they're predicting at grid rates, due to economies of scale. I ran into it on Wired a couple weeks ago, if I remember right.
Re:Energy Source (Score:4, Informative)
The reactors used in the US navy are pressurized water reactors (PWR) which is a subset of the light water reactor (LWR) family. (see the wikipedia for details of this).
These reactors are designed to use "thermal neutrons" (neutrons that have slowed (lost kinetic energy) typically through contact with the water molecules (moderator). They derive a measure of their safety from this design since in the absence of water (simultaneously used as moderator and coolant), the fast neutrons produced from fission are unable to maintain criticality (Criticality is the state where for each atom split during fission, one neutron (on average) released from that fission slows down sufficiently to be absorbed into another fuel atom causing a second fission. Super critical is when more than 1 atom (on average) achieves thermal state, is absorbed and causes a second fission. obviously then subcritical is when The control rods that you mentioned are in simplest terms absorbers of thermal neutrons. By inserting more of the control rod into the reactor I remove thermal neutrons from the system, and control the rate if fission. Actual power control of the reactor is then a 2 loop process. The inner loop is basically self regulating and is where we assume that the amount of fissionable material is fixed (short time period). In this loop, as fission increases, the temperature of the core increases. An increase in temperature causes the coolant to increase in temperature. Light water becomes less capable of moderating fast neutrons as it increases in temperature, leading to less neutrons being available to produce follow-on fissions, leading to a decrease in the temperature leading to the coolant decreasing in temperature, becoming a better moderator
The second (longer time line) loop involves the loss of fissionable matter during the life cycle of the core. In order to build a reactor that can provide power for many years, the reactor must be constructed with sufficient fuel to support operation at the end-of-life scenario. Working backward from that, one can calculate how much additional fuel must be available at the beginning of life so that after normal operation, the fuel will always be sufficient. Of course if all of the fuel was exposed to the thermal neutrons at the beginning of life, it would operate at much too high a level, so control rods (and other neutron absorbing elements) are used to limit the amount of thermal neutrons available during the operational life of the reactor, and of course there must be sufficient absorption in the control rods (and other matter) to shutdown (remove all be trace (negligible) thermal neutrons)) the reactor throughout its life.
This is a very rough description since there are far more details regarding reactor design that I won't go into, but this is sufficient for purposes of this post.
As for the use of PU-239 in naval nuclear reactors. PU-239 is a fissionable material that reacts to both thermal and fast neutrons. It is a weapons grade fuel used to make bombs, not reactors.
Your father's good friend may have been confused by the term "highly enriched uranium" which actually relates to how much light and middle weight uranium is used in the production of the fuel. (http://www.nrc.gov/materials/fuel-cycle-fac/ur-e
Plugged In (Score:4, Insightful)
Missing Option: (Score:5, Funny)
eBay (Score:5, Funny)
Silver jumpsuit (new)
1 x pair, ant-grav boots
2 x LesBot 2105 personal companion droid.
"LesBot 2105 hacking, O Reilly" (used)
Items I'm selling:
Working CryoSys(tm) 100 stasis machine (genuine antique)
c2000 period nerd costume (real IT vendor logos)
128MB USB flash drive (generic) containing Debian netinstall image (plus bonus retro-porn).
Screw that... (Score:5, Funny)
Also, I want the scanner thingy that was in the movie Brainstorm? THAT is what I want, plug in and get porn that makes it feel like YOU'RE the one gettin it on!
As Dennis Miller said: "You know folks, the day an unemployed iron-worker can lie in his BarcaLounger with a Foster's in one hand and a channel-flicker in the other and fuck Claudia Schiffer for $19.95, it's gonna make crack look like Sanka."
Re:Screw that... (Score:5, Funny)
Gay: Showing or characterized by cheerfulness and lighthearted excitement; merry.
*Sounds* like it'd be funnier than regular porn...
Re:Plugged In (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Plugged In (Score:5, Funny)
No. Slashdot, to see... (Score:5, Funny)
Then it's back to sleep for me.
uhm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:uhm (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:uhm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:uhm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:uhm (Score:5, Funny)
History Book (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:History Book (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:History Book (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:History Book (Score:5, Insightful)
In history books, there is only one truth. The 'truth' the 'winning' side decides is to be read.
It's not a matter for him rewriting history. Once it's done, that's all there is to it.
Not to invoke Godwin's law, but...
What if Germany won WWII? Television and movies usually portray the world as stuck in the late 1940's, all in black and white. Honestly, if they had 'won', the history books would have shown some great thing they were doing, and how all the evil were trying to stop them.
Since the allied forces won, they show how they were being great, stopping the evil. It's all the spin you put on it. With the proper phrasing, you can make even the most evil events sound like a great thing. I'll summarize in two words. Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Re:History Book (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree that winning sides often put spin on history, but I think your example doesn't quite fly.
Comparing Hiroshima to what the Nazis did (i.e. the Holocaust) is really stretching your argument. Hiroshima today is a subject of great controversy and debate. Back in high school, when my US history teacher discussed the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan, she treated it as a serious, controversial matter, and even opened it up to a little discussion in the classroom. She didn't show us some propaganda video or anything.
Hiroshima deserves controversy. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians were killed; obviously this is a very legitimate reason for saying it was wrong. But there is also a legitimate reason for supporting it; it is believed that hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, Japanese soldiers, and Japanese civilians were saved through the bombs. To simply label it as Truman's decision as undeniably "evil" is a bit too simplistic.
On the other hand, unless you are anti-Semetic, there is absolutely no way to rationalize the Holocaust. There was no military gain from it, and millions of Jews and others died as a result of genocide.
So, there are much better examples to illustrate your point than WWII. A better one, I think, would be Stalin removeing pictures of Trotsky from Soviet history textbooks.
Another lesson we can learn from this discussion is that it's much harder for leaders to rewrite history in a free, democratic country than it is to rewrite history in a dictatorial country. Had the Nazis won WWII, today we most certainly wouldn't be able to debate the "merits" of Hitler's decision concerning concentration camps. Given the real outcome of the war, however, we are able to argue over Truman's decisions (and those of every American leader) as long as we want on Slashdot, or at least until the "Reply to This" link disappears.
Re:History Book (Score:4, Insightful)
The US also wanted to speed up Japan's surrender before they were forced to surrender to the Russians.
The idea that 100,000's of American's were set to invade Japan were the entire japanese population was willing to fight to the death, luckly days before they were scheduled to land, we A bombed them and only then did Japan see the light and surrendered is pure wishful thinking.
Japan was defeated, was looking for reasons to surrender to the Americans rather then the russians, but they didn't want to unconditionally do so. For whatever reason, Truman decided to still use the A Bombs, probably because we had them.
The difference between not using the A bombs and using them isn't 100,000s of US army men, or 100,000's of japanese dieing in carpet bombing, its only a matter of days/weeks of time and the fright of the Japanese surrendering to the Russians.
Re:History Book (Score:4, Interesting)
Who gave the US the moral authority to kill people during a war to save US citizens and soldiers?!? Think about your stupid question for a moment. Do you really think that nations should not defend themselves in war against warfaring aggressors? I think you forget which government started that war.
You might debate the neccessity of using WMD's in that war, given the political climate, etc. but you are completely assinine for suggesting that countries should role over and surrender any time another country makes an aggressive move. Either that or your French and don't know any different.
Re:History Book (Score:5, Insightful)
I dont think the gp is ill informed at all, as you suggest. I always thought this was an accepted bias of history, atleast thats what EVERY history teacher has ever told me. Maybe someone else is ill informed?
Re:History Book (Score:5, Funny)
Re:History Book (Score:5, Funny)
I would contact whomever owned Ameritrade to withdraw some money from my account. After 100 years of compounding returns I'd be a rich, rich man.
Re:History Book (Score:5, Funny)
Re:History Book (Score:5, Funny)
Re:History Book (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine that it would be shocking to see how wrong they get it.
Re:History Book (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly my thought (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:History Book (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because they are crazy and Muslim, doesn't mean that Muslims are crazy.
Every group of people large enough will contain people that will misuse the precepts of that group to their own ends, even if that end is the product of a twisted sense of righteousness.
Someone with a sense of righteousness, of being utterly, completely, and totally Right, is the most dangerous people you can ever meet. Couple that person with a jealous God religion and you get more dangerous. Couple that person with a group of people with similar perceptions and add a strong oppressive force to unite them (or even the illusion of such a force [we have always been at war with Eurasia]) and you get what we see today on both the Christian and Islamic side of the fence.
Death to the infidels and all that, while the Buddhists mutter "The wheel turns."
Re:History Book (Score:5, Funny)
answer from 2105 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Internet Porn (Score:5, Funny)
You mean whether there's anything other than porn on the pornonet?
Nah!
100 Years (Score:5, Interesting)
First thing I would want to take a look at is biotech with regard to medical advancement and...my God, it just has such a widesweeping range. Will there be genetically altered human beings around? Can the bioengineer replacement organs or even bodies?
Are there people bioengineered to live underwater because populations have risen and bioengineering costs have dropped such that it is more economical for a society to use the ocean floor as real estate? What about bioengineering people to survive in low or zero gravity?
Bioengineered foods? What does biology say about traditional eastern medicine and practices like Qigong? How much deeper will we go spiritually though a better understanding of our genetic code? New species of bioengineered animals? How did we resolve the many ethical dilemmas that currently surround our growing understanding of our biological bits and bytes. Do we still have disease? How long do people live? How long will I live? Can I get genetic alterations to see in the dark? To fly? Hrm...
I think all of those options were important, but biotech seems so vastly promising and could go in so many possible directions, it is my choice for a first look.
My educated guesses at answering these questions (Score:4, Interesting)
There are genetically altered humans today. Retroviral gene therapy has been used to try to cure "boy in a bubble" disease. (Unfortunately, two of the patients died from leukemia aftewards due to flaws in the procedure). As for altered-at-conception children and exotically altered people, I don't see us doing that without a huge culture shift. In any case, there'd be massive prejudice against them. For the same reason, we won't see people engineered for underwater or space. Also, even for those who have no intolerance towards the altered, the idea of restricting your kid to live most comfortably in one kind of place will seem cruel to a lot of people. Besides, hardware can solve a lot of those issues.
Tissue engineering and replacement organs is inevitable though. We're getting close to it already. We've got stem cells and tissue scaffolding. Expect announcements of success in growing different organs along the same lines as current annoucements about species cloning successes withtin 20 years.
Bioengineered foods are here now. Eastern medicine is still largely viewed as a placebo effect, but we'll still have people embracing it just like chiropracty, homeopathy, and the flat earth. The willingness of people to embrace nonscientific views passionately will not change. Then again, maybe some smart, skeptical Chinese researcher will scientifically prove a real effect and a reason for it (instead of the flawed research of "true believers").
New species of animals will probably happen in the lab if there isn't already a lab-grown variant that can't breed with its originating species. It's a toss up whether it'll be an unintentional side-effect or a deliberate attempt that makes it.
Ethical dilemmas will persist because most major human philosophical movements extant today will still exist. There will be traditionalists and overbearing moralists, and there will be futurists and amoral tech fetishists.
We will of course still have disease. There's no way to stop that until we can eliminate it in all animals everywhere (think flu & malaria) or engineer a perfect immune system in every human. We'll have better medicines and existing medicines will be cheaper, though. People will live longer, though we don't yet know how long.
You won't be able to get alterations to let yourself see in the dark or fly unless there's some way of making the body kill off all your old cells that are in the way and only use the new cells. (Even the boy in a bubble patients still have flawed bone marrow alongside the modified). You might be able to get custom grown nightvision eyes, but it'll cost you out the wazoo because it isn't a mainstream, common procedure, and it will come at the cost of your ability to see in normal/bright light (and maybe color) just like every other nocturnal species.
Re:100 Years (Score:5, Insightful)
If? We cannot possibly "destroy the environment" in the span of 100 years. I don't understand so many people's opinions that "the environment" is this fragile glass vase and not a robust system that has endured for millions of years.
And if you really think it is possible, please point me to a description of this doomsday scenario that you obviously have so much faith in.
Re:100 Years (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because the environment has endured while humans have been unable to effect large changes, doesn't mean it will continue to endure when individual humans do have the ability to effect large changes with the work of a moment or perhaps a few hours.
Always expect the worst possible behavior from your fellow human beings. In this way, you will never be disagreeably surprised, and you will quite often be agreeably surprised. In the meantime, your behavior is likely to keep you about as safe as possible.
choices, choices... (Score:3, Insightful)
# Biotech / Gengineering
# Nanotech
# Cybernetics
Constrained to one choice, however, I picked Nanotech because I think in 100 years it will have the most widespread influence in the way people live their lives.
Time to switch to PHP (Score:5, Funny)
Missing Option . . . (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Missing Option . . . (Score:5, Funny)
Missing option: (Score:5, Funny)
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sure you'd find it.
A couple of times, in fact.
Admit it... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Admit it... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Admit it... (Score:3, Insightful)
*gulp*
(Given the fact that 21st century women don't want to sleep with me, I'm fairly certain that it would get no better a 100 years from now...)
Only a hundred years? (Score:5, Funny)
the OBVIOUS M$ slam (Score:5, Funny)
Getting Laid (Score:3, Funny)
Overlap (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Overlap (Score:5, Funny)
Not a hypothetical question for cryonicists! (Score:3, Funny)
Incidentally, I'm sure I'm not the only Alcor member here on Slashdot. I've actually given the question quite a bit of thought, though I think a more interesting wording of the question would be "what's the first thing you're going to do?"
Personally, I'm hoping that I have the presence of mind to open my
The Singularity (Score:3, Interesting)
Basically, since technological advances are increasing exponentially, the next "100 years" of progress as we see it today might take 50 years, then 30 years, and so on, so that in the next 100 years we'll have advanced many hundreds of years in terms of our current rate of progress.
In any event, when people and machines can start thinking together, the world will become a very different place. The problems we see as important today may hardly be relevant at all in the future.
Check out more from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singul
Obviously (Score:3, Funny)
An icepick (Score:5, Funny)
Tech is not my first priority (Score:3, Interesting)
Okay, I could go off on a million or so scenarios like these, but I will spare you the boredom. My point is, when your put in stasis, maybe you should have a few cautionary items packed along. I might put a HazMat suit in there, a handgun, some food and water, purification tablets, oxygen tanks, etc. etc. This would make a good plot for a video game come to think of it.
On a personal note, my dreams have always been to go back in time. I wanted to settle all those questions the historians have been asking by seeing the answers first hand. Maybe change events in the past that could have been avoided. Also, drink a bottle of the 'real' Coca-Cola. Storm the beaches of Normandy. Make out with your great great great great great great great grandmother. Carve my name on one of the pyramids. Buy some stocks. Say: "beware the ides of March" to Ceasar. Send Hitler some hate mail. There is just so much to do!
The FIRST thing I look at... (Score:3, Insightful)
FTL! (Score:3)
No matter what else on that list we get, if we don't get FTL sometime in the next few billion years, we're all dead when Mr. Sun goes Red Giant on us!
Wrong! here comes the science! (Score:5, Informative)
As per usual, I claim that moderators in
Alright then, let's start!
All the ideas for achieving it (and time travel) all involve massively warping space. The only known way to do that is with gravity.
Nope. Speed of light limit has nothing to do with space warping. The causal light cone is built upon General Relativity (the theory of gravity). There is nothing to stop you from building all sorts of theories that can go faster than the speed of light. In fact there are plenty, e.g. bimetric theories, lorentz violation ideas to name a few.
Besides massively warping space does NOT allow you to go FTL. What those wormholes people are trying to do is to construct a closed timelike curve, but you are still traveling slower than the speed of light around these curves.
The closest we might get is if we advance fabrication & biotechnology far enough and figure out how to take advantage of quantum entanglement to create a reusable FTL communications device.
Nope, quantum entanglement can NEVER be used to transfer information FTL. Take a read at Bell's Inequality or the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky paradox pages in wikipedia (or even better, a Quantum Mechanical textbook) to see why.
In truth, though, the most economical way to colonize the rest of the universe is with AIs if we ever achieve them.
Why? The most economical way to colonize the universe is to use the cheapest method of propagation, which is E+M waves. Just encode us, and literally beam us around the universe. I have a plan, but I'll have to kill you if I tell ya! (just kidding, but your statement is an opinion, so is mine!)
Pornography (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Pornography (Score:4, Funny)
Wow, you must really please the women with that sort of pick-up line.
Re:Pornography (Score:5, Interesting)
Pornography? I've got an idea of what'll happen...
The internet has done a lot to mainstream pornography. Kids growing up now are exposed to a wide variety of porn starting relatively young (everyone gets addicted) -- it's also their first introduction to sexuality. Their parents often don't accept this fact, but when they have kids, they will, and once older generations have died, this will become the cultural norm. Parents today accept masterbation as normal (it is); in the past, they told kids it'd make them go blind. The same change will happen with porn. It'll be normal.
So what'll the mainstreaming of pornography cause? Well, it's big money: You can expect the corporations to come. The corporate media will get into and stay in pornography, at which point sexuality will be mass-culture.
And people learn what's expected of them from the examples they see. So I expect women will simply come to expect their boyfriends to cum over their faces and in their mouths, and they'll accept anal sex (That'll be their cultural role. People love to feel like they're properly playing their cultural roles.) They already accept that it's simply normal to shave their pubic hair; they didn't in the past. Dermatologists report many more cases of pubic folliculitus than in the past, especially in adolescents!! -- those in the generation growing up with porn (where else would they have come up with that?)
These days some people might interpret much of this behavior as degrading -- especially to women -- but it won't be in the cultural context in which it'll exist. It's easily couched in the language of sexual liberation, and it will be, so women will be proud to have you cum all over their faces.
This picture may cater to your every fantasy, or it may not make you very happy at all. Chances are, a little of both. The big problem I see with turning sexuality into corporate-controlled mass-culture, is that it'll get less personal. Less unique to two people. And that'll take some of the meaning from it. There's also a good chance that it'll get more commercialized. Prime example: "A Diamond is Forever." That's the most successful ad campaign ever; it's gotten itself embedded in our culture deep. So when you get engaged, you have to pay the DeBeers tax. But you know what? It didn't used to be that diamonds were the only acceptable romantic gemstone. Advertising got to the culture of engagements and marriage because they're more public. As sex enters the public domain more and more, advertisers will find ways to prey on us in our bedrooms too.
The only alternative I see right now is presented by the religious right, but they're all fucking insane.
So, sound like fun?
Not to me.
Re:Pornography (Score:4, Insightful)
And why "less unique to two people", anyway? Who says sexuality has to involve precisely two people, anyway? You've already talked about masturbation (which is essentially sexuality involving just one person); why not simply realise that there is no reason to limit sexuality to at most two?
I don't have to say you personally have to be into it, of course, but you should accept it when it comes to other people. Who are you to say that your view of sexuality is Good(tm), Right(tm) or anything like that, and theirs is not?
In fact, that's what I hope we'll actually overcome, and what will ultimately matter even more than sexuality being accepted as something normal and positive - I hope we'll get over this kind of "one true way" ego overinflation that many people seem to suffer from. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, and I really hope that people will finally realise that what consenting partners do with each other is noone else's business. And it really doesn't matter what they're doing or how many partners there are and so on.
Re:Pornography (Score:4, Insightful)
For large corporations like Vivid or Club Jenna, this is what they were already doing. For those mom-and-pop shops (so to speak), they're out of business. This, in conjuction with new regulations, such as changing the definition of simulated sex to include with your clothes on retroactive to 1993 or 1994 (can't recall exact year), will create enough red-tape to corporatize the whole thing.
And what's fun is when you make an episode of the Simpsons NC-17, suddenly NC-17 doesn't mean as much.
credentials: I worked at CCBill for 4 years.
Re:Pornography (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, this WILL have the effect of finally making ancient Greek statuary accurate.
Oh, shit, we're all going to end up with little tiny penises?
Missing option (Score:3, Funny)
The Unknown (Score:5, Interesting)
Biotech or nano tech (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Biotech or nano tech (Score:5, Funny)
You think those are bad? Wait until you get some Sony nanites that shut off your hearing everytime a song that you haven't purchased plays in the background.
AI (Score:5, Interesting)
AI -- Key to Paradise or Hell (Score:3, Interesting)
Human-equivalent AI will essentially mean the end of investment in labor instead of capital. Human society and economics will have to be turned on its head to account for the massive amount of unemployment that AI brings. AI will essentially destroy any balance between capitalism and socialism in moder
read slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Plus, i will write comments with my super low Slashdot ID and all of them will be in the "In my day we ..." theme.
Missing option . . . (Score:3, Funny)
After 100 years I think I'd have to take a piss pretty badly.
Re:Missing option . . . (Score:5, Funny)
Not imagined. (Score:5, Insightful)
Was the concept of an internet around 100 years ago? Maybe to some extent, there was communications technology around, but an internet wouldn't have featured in a similar poll, it would have been all about airplanes and cars, stuff that was in it's infancy then.
So i think none of the above.
That's why you choose FTL (Score:4, Interesting)
Take me to kindergarten (Score:4, Interesting)
To sit down and learn with them. To re-learn how to communicate.
The way we talk and communicate with eachother would be extraordinary at that point, and I think I would have to do a fast track through the school system to brush up on everything that has changed.
The internet would be in IPv6 by that stage, and probably looking at IPv8 or 10.
So many things would be different, the advancement of the way that humans interact is one of the things that I would love to see, so much of the human mind that still hasn't been discovered how to be successfully harnessed and used...
100 or 1000 years in the future would still be a mind fuck, and I think the learning curve will still be steep.
Bathroom tech (Score:3, Funny)
Looking forward from 1955 (Score:4, Informative)
What went wrong?
What if... (Score:3, Insightful)
FTL, of course (Score:4, Funny)
Rinse, lather, repeat.
Now I own the world, at least in that timeline. Over here, I'm still a schmuck.
Check up on Slashdot... (Score:4, Funny)
See if my Gentoo install is finished yet (Score:4, Funny)
Bone-itis Cure (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Biotech definitely (Score:3, Interesting)
"Git off my blog, you varmits!" (Score:3, Insightful)
People taking the time to think about what they type instead of just dumping it out to the world? Don't we already have enough "lol! nternet!"-style "communication" today?
Don't forget being able to listen to music _directly_ (i.e. bypassing the ear and directly stimulating neurons), and havi
Re:Repeated Voting (Score:3, Insightful)
Why bother to make something wildly inaccurate, slightly less inaccurate? They are polls. They are fun. They're not serious. They aren't so inaccurate as to be useless for their purpose. Seriously, don't use web polls for anything important. A certain blogger couple I know, managed to put a poll about what hair color she'd have next. The jok
Re:Time Travel (Score:5, Funny)
Your two options are:
1. Go back in time and freak people out. [imdb.com]
2. Go back in time and post on usenet. [johntitor.com]
Now come on, follow the rules!
Re:missing option (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Impossible (Score:4, Insightful)
If your science was a good as you seem to think it is, you would realize that the very things you claim are "impossible" we only know to be deemed unlikely by virtue of scientific theory, not by any "natural law." Just as Newton's (very, very good) theory was superceded by Einstein's, Einstein's may in turn be superceded by something else. Even Einstein expected it, because his theories don't account for everything — while they work for the observable macro universe, they don't work for the micro universe. That's a pretty certain sign that they're incomplete or simply wrong.
Science gives us a series of metaphors. The accuracy of the metaphors for the observable universe is generally trending upwards, but the size (speaking here of what is known to us) of the universe is increasing in so many dimensions, so quickly, that our metaphors are regularly failing to sufficiently account for the observed facts. There are tons of physical science areas like this — from higher temperature superconductivity to cosmology, the world continues to be a less familiar place than we thought it was on a daily basis.
So while you may be right, then again, you may be wrong.
A proper appreciation for science will imbue you with the knowledge that the landscape of metaphors may be transient, or even illusory.
We now return you to your regular preconceptions.
Re:Maps (Score:5, Funny)
No, in fact China drowned in a pool of its own feces in 2074 due to mass overpopulation. India suffered the same fate and the US and Western Europe are not far behind.
"Is Israel still around?"
No, and in fact neither is the rest of the middle east. Oil reserves were depleted in or around 2025, nobody is quite sure. The ensuing wars over the few remaining reserves resulted in a small nucelar holocaust that turned the middle east into a vast field of glass.
"Has african black population survived in significant numbers?"
No, the rest of the world turned their back on Africa to concentrate on the aforementioned oil problem. When there was no more oil to ship food and other aid to Africa, and because most aid sent was simply burned at the docks by tyrannical overlords who maintained power through starving their subjects, the rest of the world simply gave up.
"Are there more than 5 languages still in use?"
There are three languages still in use in 2105. They are English, Spanish, and what became the morphing of all European languages after the European Union dissolved all borders and declared Europe to be one homogeneous political entity in its final consolidation of power in 2029.
"What happened to European Union?"
The EU declared in 2029 that there would be no more individual culture in Europe. This was more of a political move to consolidate power, and the new Dictator of the European Nation, Jaques Vasquez de Chirac, the illegitimate son of Jaques Chirac and the Princess of Spain, declared that there would be one language and culture in all of Europe. Those who stood against him were quickly put to rest by military force, and Europe became a thriving nation until its collapse in 2030. There has been no electricity or soap in Europe since then and famine and disease run rampant.