Christmas in 2050 307
Makarand writes "A robotic kitchen assistant will help you with the Christmas
meal preparations while you recieve instructions and monitoring assistance in real time from information systems for the cooking.
Thanks to progress in biology and nanotechnology, the molecular processes
needed to convert raw materials into turkey will be understood sufficiently
well to make a good artificial turkey for the vegetarians.
This is what we
can expect this time in 2050 says Ian Pearson, BT's futurologist who is paid to dream,
in this BBC News article.
Absent family will join the celebrations
virtually. There might be technology allowing us to read each
others minds and being able to know what others are thinking may
not always add peace and harmony to the celebrations.
However on the upside, it will make charades a whole lot easier you will never get unwanted Christmas presents.
Lastly, just as this Christmas was hijacked by a consumption fever,
so too in 2050, Christmas will be all about presents."
Old news (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, I think the people that dream up this stuff reduce the time to market by a factor of at least three. The dreams are great and all, but obviously not realistic.
Re:Old news (Score:2)
right here [technologi...icklung.de] =]
Re:Old news (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Old news (Score:2)
'The skyhook(meaning space elevator type thingy) will be built 50 years after people stop laughing about it'
A.C.C didn't invent a thing, but he sure saw a long way....
Re:Old news (Score:2)
Other than the concept of geosynchronous satellites...
Re:Old news (Score:2)
will add: where is the new ice age (not nuclear witer) and where is the global famine (not brutal regime induced, see "A Bed for the Night" by David Rieff)?
How do you like the taste of shoe leather? (Score:5, Insightful)
I found most of the projections timid.
The "kitchen assistant" stuff is largely available in component form (mixers, ovens, etc. that can sync to a recipe and will tell the chef what to put in when, monitor quantities of ingredients, turn the oven on to a defined time/temperature, etc.) NOW. Ambitious would be to project that we'll have fully automated kitchens. That can be done in today's technology, though not in a form that'll fit a household kitchen. In the 2050 fast food restaurant, you'll be able to get things ranging from the current menu to anything available at the 5 star restaurants of today, but fast food restaurants will have disappeared as a separate category whose memory will linger only in brand names. Restaurants with human cooks and service will be considered superpremium places and will have prices to match.
"there will be screens lining the wall."
The price of flat-panel display technology is dropping and the availability is increasing. OLED is screen-printed, not vacuum deposited.
Do you really think that videophones that can be attached to the network aren't going to be available for the price of a cheap one-piece deskphone now, and that the problems building a Net appliance that'll be secure and "Just Works" and of universal broadband availability won't be solved in 48 years?
With the exception of thought recording and transference hardware, everything discussed is in either research or early pre-alpha. It is hardly the author's fault you haven't been paying attention, most of what's in the article has been bloglinked from here.
The problem with this kind of futurism is that the futurist considers the future to be a linear extension of the present... while his predictions might be accurate, they look more like 2012 than 2050 to me.
The problems with a robotic household all-purpose servant that can use human tools will be solved by then, but people may be so used to intelligent point-solution household appliances (automated vacuum cleaners, etc.) that nobody will care.
The writer doesn't deal with space at all. One prediction I'm certain of. Either the human race will be exploiting the Solar System as a whole by then or nobody will have pleasant Xmases by then, people will be too busy suffering the kind of deprivations that go with cultures in a state of permanent war, in this case, over who gets enough of the Earth's dwindling resources of materials required to sustain technological society in order to keep one. I'm not talking about oil here, by then, we won't have a technological culture burning oil for fuel. That's why auto manufacturers are converting their assembly lines over to high-efficiency or fuel-cell vehicles. Even Toyota, who's going over to superefficient hybrid engines says that the vehicles are intended for easy conversion to fuel cells.
However, some dreams are less likely than others. The problem with a personal jet pack is sort of obvious, a device that has to provide all its lift as well as forward motion via reaction sucks up a hell of a lot of fuel.
Will we ever find the exceptions or reinterpetation of physical law that'll make a starship possible? I certainly don't know. Check the NASA "Warp Drive When" site for their Advanced Propulsion project for the latest.
Re:How do you like the taste of shoe leather? (Score:2)
I think it's more likely that all of us will have maids again. The only reason that kind of labor is expensive is because our borders are effectively closed. When we finally recognize the human right of migration again there will be plenty of people to take those jobs and send money home to improve the lot of their families.
Do you really think that videophones that can be attached to the network aren't going to be available for the price of a cheap one-piece deskphone now...
There are already video phones. There's a guy in my lab that spends half his time talking with his family and friends on his laptop all day. Most of us don't want video phones, I for one have no desire to fix my hair and get dressed in the morning before calling someone. All we're really missing now is the gateways between internet phones and the POTS system, and these are appearing in the form commercial internet phone systems. At the moment those work like regular phones, but it won't be long before enough people have them that when they call each other they can have the option of video. So if we all do have video phones in 2, 20 or 200 years we'll still say "the camera seems to be broken."
The writer doesn't deal with space at all. One prediction I'm certain of. Either the human race will be exploiting the Solar System as a whole by then or nobody will have pleasant Xmases by then
We won't be exploiting space by then. Our 1960's space program was much like the pyramids in Egypt, an extraordinary re-direction of reasources away from the people to achieve an engineering goal we're not ready for. We need to develop alternative energy sources before we really get into space. The chinese are the only ones serious about fusion, perhaps by 2050 they will have figured it out. That or something like it is a pre-requisite. Hey maybe we'll figure out a way to get more energy out of geothermal plants, I dunno. But we need massive amounts of energy to create the fuels to get us there, and figure out a way to get the fuels to get back. Between now and then we should be sending more probes and exploring.
I guess its all true about US public schools (Score:2)
Basically, if it requires miniaturization (like 300M transistors on a chip, before the 60s, transistors were made one at a time), low weight and high strength, you can trace the origins of whatever the product is to the space program.
Find a copy of Robert Heinlein's Expanded Universe, there's a short article that'll give you the highlights. Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability is a reprint of that Science article discussing the future alternative energy sources civilization will need when the oil runs out.
Powersats are on the list. As I see it, we are basically a few years of R&D away from being able to build the kind of space infrastructure that will be required to make building them relatively easy. It's basically a matter of government and major corporations being willing to put major money for a project with 10-15 years before a major return on investment. It's not a matter of discovering new laws of nature, it's a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it.
Remember that sooner or later, the Third World is going to become industrialized and will have per capita resource requirements comparable to the US and EU. What's left of the world's oil just won't do it.
With respect to all of us (Americans, I guess) having maids again, either the resource problems of this planet will be solved in such a way that you won't be able to get cheap domestic help from south of the border, or you won't be able to afford it anyway because your tax money at tax rates you don't want to imagine will be going into military expenditures designed to make sure that the US and allied countries have control over what's left of the world's resources.
Re:How do you like the taste of shoe leather? (Score:2)
Cheap easy to use webcams have been around for 5 years, even after setting up system to use them for people, they still don't make video calls.
Peple don't want to be seen while on the phone.
It not just how long until we can build it, its how long until we can build it, and how long till people are willing to use it.
BTW, cooking is not just putting ingrediant in at certian times. There is a very wide range of variables, not the least of which involves tasting.
Re:Old news (Score:2)
Not the same (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Old news (Score:5, Interesting)
IMHO, the problem isn't labor losses through technological employment, it's the inability of society to catch up with technology. Or rather, technology has been improving so fast lately that the job market hasn't caught up with it yet.
First a new technology comes out, or an old technology becomes affordable to everyone (the internet). Next we see a bunch of hiring in that sector. Next we see a crash, and the previously fast growing sector is in a labor crunch, dumping staff left and right.
Also, overpopulation MUST be a contributing factor to the job shortages at this time. Our food methods are efficient enough to keep us all alive (for now, and I'm ignoring the countries that are still having serious hunger problems because many of them have become political balls in our own country and I'd prefer not to approach this subject at this time). Therefore, we do not need hunters. What do hunters do now? Well, they get diagnosed AD&D, er, ADHD, given drugs and spend the rest of their lives as losers living with their parents. But I digress.
When a robot does the work, someone gets paid to make the robot, somehow. Sure, a group of robots might push out cars faster than a group of people, but who builds the robots? Obviously another assembly line packed with robots. So "building" now becomes what "engineering" used to be, and the thug labor that would've done the job before has to do something else. But what?
Therein lies the problem. We don't have enough jobs to go around, but we definitely have too many people. I certainly don't wish suffering upon anybody, but perhaps some mass-killing machine would help. :)
Anyway, many of our labor problems would be solved if we entered a true state of space exploration. When overpopulation pressures hit Europe, they had the fortune of re-discovering America to relieve the pressure. Japan went to war in the '30's because of their overpopulation, and technology has helped to alleviate their problem. But there's literally no place left for us to go, unless we start building underwater or on Antarctica (problematic when the surface altitude changes seasonally, but possible).
So the magical solution to all of our problems is technology, but only insofar as technology helps us to enter either a new period of expansionism or a massively destructive war.
Which one do you *want* to have?
Re:Old news (Score:2)
Now for the Christmas in 2050. It meantions the robot assistant in the kitchen. Where the hell are these things now? Just the other day I wanted a small robot to feed my cats when I was out of town. I'd buy one in a heartbeat. And there are many other simple repetitions physical tasks like this that can be done by robots, but noone has them. Not even the "rich and famous". Why is this? Robots have been around for a long time in industrial settings, and they haven't taken over the world or anything, but there are 0 home robots. We have been writing about robots since at least the 20's with Buck Rogers. Am I the only person out there that would buy a little personal robot for something like feeding the cats?
Re:Old news (Score:2)
Yes. The rest of us would be using our personal robots to take over, if not the world, then at least the neighborhood.
Population (Score:2)
Matter of fact, most 'first world' countries have a population that is stable(as far as numbers) , or is diminishing.
You do have a point thought, what happens when a fast food resturant can replace the cooking staff with a 500,000 dollar auromation unit? Every cook in the fast food industry will not have work with 5 years.
Si the company that makes them may need to hir 2000 people, but there are a hell of a lot more fastfood prepareers then that.
Society needs to start thinking about a way to support itself in an enviroment where fewer and fewer people actually need to be working in order to keep things running. If you don't give the people ane avenue to take so they can support themselves, or you do not take care of your people, they will rebel.
Re:Old news (Score:3, Interesting)
Near as I can tell, it's a resource problem there. If we can get under the oceans safely we might have a shot at mining underneath the oceans, or something like that. The advantage to going to space is there's a reasonable chance we'll get raw materials there to continue our expansion. Going to the ocean's surface doesn't give us that, unfortunately. NOt that it won't help, but it will further sap existing resources.
After that point, yeah, there's space, but rockets probably can't cheaply blast people off Earth faster than they're being born
For this I refer you to Heinlein, but I forget which book he discusses this in (it might well be multiple books). It's not so important to save everybody on the earth right now, it's important to get some good minds and bodies off the planet in an autonomous fashion. The earth can kill itself, but the race will live on. This is something people tend to overlook when discussing these problems. It's just not important how many people leave compared to how many are being born, it's only important to get enough people out there that the race survives.
However, if the race survives but the earth still dies, we haven't prevented the suffering. But first let's deal with the survival problem, then we'll deal with the suffering problem. Can't end suffering, but with any luck we might well be able to prevent foreseeable suffering.
Re:Old news (Score:2, Interesting)
When robots are doing all the menial & skilled labor, and your 'nanoreplicator' is producing all your food and any physical object you could desire, and AI has replaced your programming job :) , well, that'll be the day that WELFARE isn't a derogatory term....... (even though a WORK ETHIC will still be deeply ingrained in many people)....... oh, and we'll have to kill all the landlords so we can live rent-free and shit on each others free property.
--
vegans (Score:2, Funny)
thats great, a few of my friends are vegan and I always which they could have a little more then tofurkey!!!
i wonder when we will have replicators
We already can convert raw material into turkey (Score:5, Insightful)
A real "advance" would be the growth of free range and organic farming -- doing away with industrial farming techniques that involve shutting animals into crates, cramming them with chemical- and antibiotic-laden feed, and generally turning them into objects instead of living beings.
Many people who now object to eating meat might change their minds, if they felt that the animals they consumed were raised in a healthy manner and treated humanely.
I eat some meat, but try to steer clear of the more factory-farmed stuff in favor of organic/free-range products. It's preferable in so many ways: hygeinically, nutritionally, ethically, etc.
Must be nice (Score:2)
Hmmm... (Score:2)
Um... (Score:2, Funny)
Yah...it'll be a white christmas....but I don't think the fourteen living bacteria will really give a damn... =P
Buzzword city. (Score:3, Insightful)
AMD symbol? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:AMD symbol? (Score:2)
Where are the spaceships, flying cars, etc? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm...
And they missed the information age, microchips, the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, the air bag in cars, AIDS, velcro and genetic engineering.
So much for futurists.
Re:Where are the spaceships, flying cars, etc? (Score:5, Interesting)
Currently kids have to wait to open their presents while dad checks his digital camera|video camera. In 2050, they'll be waiting while he hooks up everyone's head-mounted stim-sim recorders - "to capture the moment."
There's been talk lately of "intelligent paper" and "flexible displays." Extrapolating this forward, I'd expect your Christmas presents in 2050 to require you to watch a commercial before you can open them.
Re:Where are the spaceships, flying cars, etc? (Score:2)
Perhaps thousands of years from now when we have evolved into a more compassionate race, capable of getting past such things. You wont see it any time soon however. People are far to paranoid.
Re:Where are the spaceships, flying cars, etc? (Score:2)
To paraphrase Henry Kissinger, 'even the paranoid have enemies'. In every government on earth, people are paid to know. They're paid to know what's going on in their country and in other countries. It's because they make decissions, and knowledge is needed to be able to make good decisions.
It's their job, it what they're paid to do. It's what we, as taxpayers, pay them to do. Could you imagine the outcry if New York got nuked because someone decided that checking out other countries' space travel wasn't important?
Re:Where are the spaceships, flying cars, etc? (Score:2)
You forgot Linux
Re:Where are the spaceships, flying cars, etc? (Score:2)
we didnt miss the mark on any of these..
space travel... it's being done.. you can go too! you just dont have $23,000,000 to give the russkies do you...
flying cars... no problem there.... the reason we dont have them is because 98% of the population is too stupid to handle the current 2 dimensional ground based vehicles... why in the world would you want any of them to have anything that flies? you dont have flying cars because the masses are too fricking stupid to operate one safely.
Nuclear power production... we have it! only the idiot tree-huggers here in the states killed this ultra-clean power source.. (yes it is ultra clean... you can take the waste of the reactor and run a breeder reactor with it) france and many other countries aren't as blind and idiotic as the United states and have embraced nuclear power very well.
Robots... we got em! intelligent? no... not yet.
end of the world by nuclear war.... hey. you just wait.... some of these lunatic groups from the middle east or south asia will gladly nuke the hell out of new york or Washington.. and if you think that GW wont gladly drop one back in their lap? all it takes is one lunatic with a black market russian nuke.. just wait it'll happen within the next 15-20 years.
they weren't off by much, the "furutists" did not take into the stupidity factor of the human race.
Re:I don't think it's wishfull thinking (Score:2)
IMHO, NASA should have handed things over to the private sector after 1972. But of course, no bureaucracy is going to let itself be destroyed that easily.
Re:I don't think it's wishfull thinking (Score:2)
I'm surprised it doesn't already. The technology is pretty much there.
But why AMD? (Score:2)
Why is the article icon AMD's? I don't see any relation to the scrappy little semiconductor company in any of this. If anything, I would expect that we'd have the Christmas Tree icon here, or the Technology icon.
Re:But why AMD? (Score:1)
I think the editors had a few too many glasses of Egg Nog this Christmas days so they might be having trouble telling the difference between Tux and the Microsoft butterfly...
Consumption fever? (Score:1)
Makes it sound like they're comparing Christmas to tuberculosis or something.
However... (Score:1)
Re:However... (Score:2, Funny)
not going to work (Score:1)
In reference to the "trianglature formula," it states simply: "sqrt (pi) times diameter of circle gives a triangle with precisely the same area as that of the given circle, where triangle base is circle diameter."
The formula by itself merely confirms the centuries old quadrature formula which "squares" the circle. Heat of the controversy is over the accompanying statement that either formula (squaring or triangulating) shows the ratio of pi to be arbitrary, which smacks in the face of the longheld academic assertion that the traditional pi is sacrosanct.
This causes huge problems with technology when it comes to developing AI (eg, robots) or even a synthetic turkey, what people arent aware of is that sythetic turkeye could not be exactly replicated the same time, leaving certain mutations.
Oviously, the harmless ones could be a pigment splotch or a cosmetic defect, but imagine a more serious one of note such as something similiar to anthrax, bubonic plague, or something WORSE.
In 2nd Grade (Score:2)
Predicting the future is fun, but I'd put more stake in science fiction becoming true than what any official predictor says.
Re:In 2nd Grade (Score:2)
Re:In 2nd Grade (Score:2)
We are the smoke-free class of 2000
Two triple zero, everyone's a hero!
I remember reading a book in elementary school that said "In 10 years we will all have robot helpers, able to carry objects about the house for us" etc, and showed a picture of something that looked suspiciously like R2 D2
If I hear another (Score:3)
Why not be nice and give gifts to people who need/deserve them throughout the year?
Never ceases to amaze me. (Score:3, Insightful)
New technology is far more likely to be very sensible, merely adding more "grunt" to what we have already, with a few sub-innovations here and ithere. As a people we are already discovering what we want; Fast data communications, medcine, digitalization, AI (a huge umbrella), time savers, entertainment etc.
Let's start being more specific, choose certain already established technology and predict where it will go. All tyhe best technology evolves from working with what we have. We should try and built the bridges before we try to cross them.
*sigh* I've began to sound like a whining, ranting Slashdotter more every day.
Re:Never ceases to amaze me. (Score:2)
That's right, I want an artificially intelligent, extremely large sheltering device. Got a problem with that?
Read each other's thoughts??? Ugh! (Score:3, Funny)
Great... I can envision myself being bankrupted the first time I get a song stuck in my head for an entire day-- because I'm sure the RIAA will buy the laws to make them privy to my thoughts, and will demand a licensing fee for each separate instance that I thought about the song.
~Philly
In The Year 2525 (Score:4, Interesting)
In The Year 2525
In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may find
In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do, and say
Is in the pill you took today
In the year 4545
Ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes
You won't find a thing chew
Nobody's gonna look at you
In the year 5555
Your arms are hanging limp at your sides
Your legs got not nothing to do
Some machine is doing that for you
In the year 6565
Ain't gonna need no husband, won't need no wife
You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube
In the year 7510
If God's a-comin' he ought to make it by then
Maybe he'll look around himself and say
Guess it's time for the Judgement day
In the year 8510
God is gonna shake his mighty head
He'll either say I'm pleased where man has been
Or tear it down and start again
In the year 9595
I'm kinda wondering if man is gonna be alive
He's taken everything this old earth can give
And he ain't put back nothing
Now it's been 10,000 years
Man has cried a billion tears
For what he never knew
Now man's reign is through
But through the eternal night
The twinkling of starlight
So very far away
Maybe it's only yesterday
In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may find
In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do or say
Is in the pill you took today
Taking the piss? (Score:2)
-psy
join us virtually? (Score:2)
Why join us virtually? They should be able to join us virtually becuase they'll "fly" here with their flying cars right?
psst.. wake up, wake up!
Re:join us virtually? (Score:2)
In the year 2050... (Score:2)
Ahh, what days lie ahead. I can't wait!
Robin? (Score:4, Funny)
But will he look like Robin Williams?
Tech predictions ignore basic social change (Score:2, Insightful)
This is, in fact, the reverse of what happens.
We saw this sort of thing in the 50's with predictions about vacuum cleaner robots, almost always accompanied by an image of a very happy woman (assumed to be a housewife). No one could imagine the Women's Movement just one decade hence.
We will (see Kurzweil) experience ever increasing rates of change in technology over the next 50 years; along with that will be slower (but faster than linear) changes in human behavior. The latter are the *really* hard predictions.
One nice change might be to find a way to do away with the compulsive consumption (the latter word used to mean both "using things up" and "deadly disease") that defines our most popular holiday (in the West), and turn it into something more functional, useful, and fulfilling. (btw, all the latter adjectives imply massive behavior change as well, which might happen as the developed world begins to learn the lesson about what 'enough' is).
In keeping with the season, here's 'Santabot' http://mywebpages.comcast.net/ctrevas/santabot.ht
Re:Tech predictions ignore basic social change (Score:2)
Women's rights movements existed before the 60s. And while they were admirable, the contraceptive Pill did far more to liberate women than most of those movements ever could. It's no coincidence that Women's Lib really took off at the same time as the Pill.
In other words, it was a social consequence of a technological breakthrough, and these can be predicted with slightly more ease than the arbitrary changes in society that occasionally (and often temporarily) occur.
In the year 2050 (Score:5, Funny)
Virtual Hot Grits will be the to-get gift of the season.
Linux will be ready for the desktop, but all the desktops will have shrunk to fit in a pill that you swallow.
The entire B*ush family will have died from a drug overdose.
Cheney's heart will continue beating in a small bell jar at the McDonalds Intel Smithsonian.
Michael Jackson will have transparent skin, and have Liz Taylors uterus 'installed' to give birth to an endless stream of monkeys.
Music will be beamed directly into your head, and tinfoil hats make a fashion comeback.
Steven Speilbergs 'Taken' will be on its final installment.
The music industry finally disposes with allusion and inference, and two new acts hit the stage: Britney Bigtits and the boy band "Humpin' Yer Daughters"
Slashdot's Karma will actually apply to real life, and trolls are forced to live underground, cracking human bones for the tasty marrow inside.
Reality shows will move into your own home, with prizes for the 'best'(dysfuntional) family.
The first frozen dead guy is revived, and by an incredible twist of fate, is named 'Fry'.
Dick Clark will be suspended in ammniotic fluid. Just for the hell of it.
The U.S., long since disbanded for mismanagement, will relocate to Kamchaka, and attempt to defend all those borders.
Steven King will be found dead in his home. Even if you didn't like his books, you have to admit the affect he had on late 20th century literature.
Cmdr Taco's daughter will run Slashdot, and in hopes of giving her a better life than he had, he will buy her a dictionary chip.
Go Carts will still be fun, but pale in comparison to GyroCarts which will be super strong, cool and powerful.
Soviet Russia will be a new Disney/AOL/TimeWarner/Microsoft/RedHat theme park, where the attractions ride YOU. Ok. It's a whorehouse.
Steve Balmer will live his dream, starring in "Gorillas in the Mist: Lard of the Jungle"
Grand Theft Auto 2050 is released. It's not a game anymore.
Duke Nukem (We Told Ya!) is finally released, and it like totally blows.
Re:In the year 2050 (Score:2)
Um, yeah... "literature".
Mmmmmm... (Score:2)
Hot Dogs [rinkworks.com].
What an old idea.
vegetarians (Score:3, Funny)
Apparently scientists will by then have understood the molecular processes needed to convert raw materials into turkey sufficiently well to make a good replica.
...does anybody care about vegetarians that much??
Re:vegetarians (Score:2, Interesting)
And then there's the potential for creativity, such as chimeric meat, extinct meat, fictional meat, and, er, forbidden meat..
genetically-engineered Furbies (Score:2)
I didn't know plastic had genes to engineer in the first place...
loser (Score:4, Funny)
At least there will still be trolls, regardless of what happens.
Ya, right...and the DMCA will have been repealled (Score:2)
IMHO...robots will be available (well they technically are in the capacity of that 'Cye' thingy), but in the capacity of tablet pcs or segways are now (Neat, useful, but expensive and somewhat impractical).
Things will have improved, sure, but I wont be expecting a Christmas list include a G10 Titanium Laptop with a Terabyte of RAM and 100 Ghz Proc. Or to be able to browse pr0n in with my implant. Or even to have the US as a totalarian state.
Things with slow down, they already are. Even most tech. companies admit so.
This guys been reading to much lit. from the 50s
Artificial turkey? (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought a good chunk of vegetarians were that way more because of the health benefits of not eating meat. Creating a perfect artificial turkey would still come with all the side effects of eating real ones.
Guess this could possibly help out the extreme vegans though, who don't want anything that came from processed animal products at all - assuming these 'molecular processes' work on 100% non-animal products.
Oh well, futurists are always amusing.
Re:Artificial turkey? (Score:2)
The thing is most people don't care about animal rights, food chain and all of that, so they bring up the health benefits which most people do care about.
Re:Yeah, whatever (Score:2)
Re:Yeah, whatever (Score:2)
B. If in the beginning I had to think about what I was going to eat after a year you stop thinking about it, it is just your normal life. Why do I have to think about anything if I buy only stuff I eat and do not even consider other products in stores as food?
C. Excercise will keep your muscles toned, sure, but it will not do anything at all to protect you from all the crap that you intake. That's all I am saying, did I say anything about not excercising?
D. There are many peope who are neurotic and they are not vegetarians. Some people become neurotic from overexcercising for example; ever heard of guys going nuts about not been big enough and pumping metall 12 hours a day every day? - that's neurotic and not healthy.
Cheers
Re:Artificial turkey? (Score:2)
Re:Artificial turkey? (Score:2)
For example, veggies need to make sure they get enough iron in their diet. Normally you get this from meat, but no meat = no iron.
Without it, all sorts of bad things [google.com] can happen.
what is the point.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Stalled technologies (Score:2)
Now think about the point at which computing will be a mature technology.
Re:Stalled technologies (Score:2)
suspension and other things matter greatly and have improved in the time you say automobile adanvancement stood still((dual)overhead camshafts(in some consumer cars since late 50's or so), hydraulically assisted disc brakes.. things like that that).
and i might not have my leg(s), since if we had been riding with my friends citroen cv2 instead of my other friends fiat punto while doing a relatively low speed crash, my legs would surely would have gotten some damage. now the punto just got written off because it's front-corner caved in.(both fiat punto and citroen cv2 are relatively of same size, and are same type of cars, cheap&small, just from different decades). if we had been driving a suv the elderly man in the other car would have gotten some serious damage.
"artificial turkey for the vegetarians" (Score:3, Insightful)
Good heavens, do you really think most vegetarians WANT artificial turkey? Maybe those who changed during their life "miss" meat, but those of us who have NEVER eaten it (not for the past 150 years in my case as a 4th generation vegetarian) it's not something we would ever contemplate.
The WORST sort of vegetarian food is that which is made to look, feel and taste like meat. Unfortunately, that seems to be what most people think of when they try to prepare vegetarian fare.
Re:"artificial turkey for the vegetarians" (Score:2)
Ok, how do you explain tofurky then, eh? :)
Seriously though, seems there is a number of vegetarians who are only vegetarians because they don't believe that we should kill animals for food (obviously, you are not one of them), seems they would like the idea... or some of them, at least.
Re:"artificial turkey for the vegetarians" (Score:2)
Besides, I believe that most 'cravings' are a result of a deficiency of one sort or another. If that's true, then apparently my vegetarian diet is fulfilling my dietary and nutritional needs and there's no need for me to want to eat meat.
When's the last time you ate meat plain? I don't think many people do, it wouldn't taste good if you didn't add a crapload of non-meat items to it. But you can go in the garden pull up a vegetable and it raw and it tastes fine. So maybe it's not even the meat that people want, but all the dressings on top of it that make it taste edible enough to eat.
Presents? (Score:2)
Whatever. This christmas eve was like many a christmas eve before it at my home: lots of people (14) - some I see only on christmas eve, others I see every day, others I hadn't met before; lots of different food (candided beets, herring salad, baked fish, poppyseed cake, etc); a christmas tree; christmas carols.
It lasted about seven hours, from 6pm to 1am, like it usually does. Sure, we had presents, but they sure as hell weren't the centerpiece. Sure, when I was a kid it was mostly about the loot, now it's totally about the love. It's about having a couple of days when nobody needs to make an excuse to get away from everyday chores, and spend time with they people who they want to.
So lay off the bullshit, for a lot of us christmas is much more than presents.
Xmas as we know it probably won't even exist! (Score:2)
It could also very well be that the larger part of animals with a spinal column have died out due to strange diseases and/or enviromental causes and that most people won't even consider eating meat anymore. Adding stuff about mindreaders and other crap doesn't make this statement any more interessting. How do these people make a living, I wonder?
Notice they're smart enough not to mention. . . (Score:2)
They've 'predicted' that one so many times that they've finally figured out that we're "lost pidgeons" on that topic.
They're still predicting that machines will read our minds and do everything we want for us before we even know we want it though. Kinda makes me wonder just what it is *we* are expected to be doing.
I guess the future is scarier than we thought. A life of maintaining the machines that maintain us, until the machines take that function over too.
Good thing I'll believe this is even possible when the the machines give me monkeys flying out of my butt for Christmas.
Or a flying Alfa Romeo.
KFG
And, (God willing...) (Score:2)
All men won't have beards and all women won't be wearing burkas.
But if we are... (Score:2)
Change (Score:2)
When trying to predict the future, one must always look at the past. What have we seen in the past? Well, usually what happens is something so groundbreaking, so radical is invinted that it changes and shapes the whole course of civilziation in ways no one could have expected, making the current way of life and even forms of government inadequet. Cannons/Gunpowder in the feudal age was such an invention, basically defeating the enitre purpose of castles. The automobile [psu.edu] was another... what part of your daily life is NOT touched in some way by the invention of the automobile? In the future, instantaneous matter transportation (beam me up, Scotty!) could be such an invention. Think of how quickly the world would have to change if anyone could travel anywhere instantly. Think of the implications it would have for crime if there was no way to prevent people from "beaming" into certain locations. Also, this is something that we a currently able to imagine. The really future-changing inventions will be extensions of future inventions, thusly being almost impossible for us to concieve right now.
I have a lot of hope for humanity. I think that in a few million years we could have a maverlous, galactic civilazation, numbering in the trillions. The quality of life would be so vastly improved by the technolgy and the abudant resouces available in the galaxy in the form of solar power and raw elements, especially compared to what we have here on this little blue dot called home. Sometimes, I think I was accidentally born a few hundered thousand years too soon. ;)
Re:Change (Score:2)
Out of curiosity - what advanced alien civilization are you part of? That you know so much about us humans which we don't.
Re:Change (Score:2)
Blinded again (Score:2)
Most vegetarians, in my experience, have more than one reason for making their choice. Sure, there's the obvious, that "animal life is sacred" and that animals should not be killed under any condition. But what about health? Obviously, synthetic turkey would be just as unhealthy and cholesterol-packed as real turkey. (You could bioengineer a cholesterol-free turkey, but I'm not sure if it could still be properly called turkey.)
What about the organic principle? You often find many 'vegetarians' who stay away from red meat for health reasons, but would sooner eat hunted poultry or fished salmon than bioengineered tomatoes; they realize that for humans to live, we must by necessity kill other lifeforms (whether animal or plant), but that we should not interfere with nature until the end.
What about taste? Some vegetarians, believe it or not, just don't like the taste of red meat, poultry, or even fish, because they were brought up not to eat those products and never developed the taste.
There are a certain number of people who would be overjoyed by the development of a bioengineered turkey. However, I believe that those people would mostly be lifelong omnivores living in the suburbs, who have pangs of conscience every time they take their children to tour the local farms. This turkey would make it possible for them to pretend they were actually making a moral judgment. Vegeterians, meanwhile, won't care.
Re:Blinded again (Score:2)
but in the future that won't matter because will will have Nanites in are body keeping are arteries clean and are teeth white. And we will always look like we're 25, and live for 400 years.
In the year 2050 (Score:2)
The Ghost of Christmas Future (Score:2)
Ian
don't forget (Score:2)
Too late for me to get noticed (Score:2)
Alvin's predictions have always been either uninteresting or ludicrous, imho. However, this point is *so* fantastic.
Sure, in 47 years we might have nanotech that can create turkeys. But we might also have nanotech that has turned every human into a turkey. Christmas day will be the least interesting distinction between now and 2050. Ok, now I'll go read the article.
Flying Car (Score:2)
Biggest IPO of 2049 (Score:2)
Acme Foil Hat, LLC
I heard this too (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It may not be there... (Score:2)
Re:It may not be there... (Score:3, Insightful)
Strangely enough, the Hindu far-right also talks of Hindu festivals such as Deepavali, Dussehra becoming extinct in the face of relentless evangelisation from the Christian far-right. And they, indeed, echo the Muslim far-right's concerns over young Muslim girls not wearing hijab, eating non-haleem meat, not celebrating Id-ul-Fitr with "proper" gaiety...
Face it; it's not just (underground real) Christians under "threat".
Re:gobble gobble (Score:2)
We cooked for ~100 people for Thanksgiving, got turkeys for 95 people for about $25 (good deal) - then had to get a $20 tofurkey for the 5 vegans.
Grr.
Re:gobble gobble (Score:2)
If they want to be vegans, fine, but there is no use forcing other people for there decsision.
Remeber Vegans are OK, disrespectfull vegans can suck ass.
Re:gobble gobble (Score:2)
Save a vegetable, eat a vegetarian.
Yeah, we thought about that, but the University probably wouldn't have liked us doing it...
Re:why does anyone take this seriously? (Score:2, Insightful)
That's right, all of the people of the world. FOr, while we don't have Russian communism anymore, there's still China. There's still nuclear-war style tension in the world, and now it's swept under the rug. At least during the cold war it was a fear the government couldn't avoid (so they exploited it). American Imperialism is at it's worst ever, and getting worse every day, and the American Police State is getting closer. As a result of American Imperialism, we now have a "war on terrorism" to replace the *lost* "war on drugs" (not that I'm saying we did the wrong thing and the terrorists are right, I just think that the war on terrorism is the same political ballgame that the war on drugs was, and may well be used in a catalystic fashion to bring on the police state) It won't be too long before Russa will be fighting us again in a cold war, and they'll be the ones fighting for freedom (or so the press will read, anyway).
Of course, my predictions have as much validity as the article's. :)
Re:Christmas in the future (Score:2)
Re:*coughing* (Score:2)
It's called a helicopter.