Many readers don’t seem to grasp the path that new technologies take.
Recently a friend of mine found an early digital camera:
It stores images on 3.5″ diskettes. It is able to store about five images per diskette. When he takes a picture it pauses for about 30 seconds to write the picture to the disk.
I recently bought a digital camera, hardly the top end of digital cameras:
Wow have these things changed! It stores HD movies on SD cards. It can take movies and still simultaneously. It saves 14Mb stills fast enough to do so at 5 frames per second. And on and on.
We periodically get glimpses of the technological offerings of Rossi, Defkalion, and Brillouin. Please understand that 20 years down the road this technology will have advanced like digital cameras have over the last 20 years.
Tags: future, prediction
May 9, 2012 at 9:30 pm |
Yep, in 20 yr I’ll be 93 and maybe I’ll have a Rossi 1.2 kw heart assist pump, a Defkalion powered exoskeleton, and a NanoSpire penis…..wait a minute, it’s already nano.
May 10, 2012 at 8:03 am |
May 9, 2012 at 9:46 pm |
Well, at least you won’t need any funny bone augmentation – yours is already big enough. I don’t suppose you can peer into the future with that thing can you?
May 9, 2012 at 10:20 pm |
Technological progress is generally exponencial. Furthermore, recent technological spread has been more rapid, a crude example would be the spread of the telephone compared to the spread of the cell phone. According to futurist Ray Kurzweil, man will merge with machine around 2045 (he has a remarkable track record of successful predictions). The Singularity is coming!
May 9, 2012 at 11:08 pm |
Some people just jump to new technologies too fast. I started out in mainframe core memory and the bosses made me design with DRAM, needless to say I hit the road and went into minicomputers with bit slice processors, then they invent those big 8 biters and where is the design fun, time to get back to big box where the action is, but this time I won’t make the mistake of main memory, no I’ll pick a good solid career in big box disk drives. I get settled in and some genius thinks they can build them small and put standard interfaces on it. I’m a grown man, I can’t let my wife and kids see me working on something like those toy small drives, a man has pride you know. I know, I’ll go to the valley and do semiconductors, a good solid mans business. I get to the valley and get into Flash Memory and things are going great, but then one of those prior mentioned geniuses says lets make them big and make them look like a disk. I hide out at work designing this stuff, but its worse than those toy hard drives a ran from. I tell the family its all secret and I can’t talk about it and find excuses to not go to corporate picnics for fear they will find out that I work on those small things they put in cameras. I’m close to a nervous breakdown, for fear they will find out, but good old time has passed by and I see my exit, retirement, that’s the Ticket!
I’m now retired and living off my vacuum tube stock, gloating in my foresight to stay where the real core technology is. I should write a book to help guide people away from chasing ever new thing that comes along.
May 10, 2012 at 1:26 am |
As Brad says, once a technology is found to be available and useful, then development is exponential. One reason for this is the large number of humans thinking about it – something that that Agenda 21 doesn’t take into account. With the rising standard of education and more time free from drudge work, we get a higher percentage of people who have the time and resources to follow an idea until it works.
Since cheap energy is vital for every nation, we can expect that developments will go even faster than digital cameras have – taking pictures of things is not that necessary to life comforts, whereas heating, cooling, transport and various electrical devices are pretty well essential to our modern life.
LENR technology will become much smaller and, once the problem of generating electricity without using moving parts is solved, will power virtually everything we use. In 20 years you will look at the Rossi, Defkalion and Brillouin devices in the same way as we look at Stephenson’s Rocket steam engine – inefficient and of historical interest only.
May 10, 2012 at 3:27 am |
http://theeestory.ning.com/forum/topics/inteligentry-manufacturers-gearing-up-for-noble-gas-engine-roll
Not only LENR – maybe we’ll see this too, where force is generatorated without the need to convert heat with the Carnot process (the force is generated at room temperature according to the article). They say they will be coming out with this remarkable engine in the Fall.
May 10, 2012 at 8:48 am |
Technology saturation rates:
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/40321/
May 11, 2012 at 11:21 am |
Forget “people” – yes they will do much, but look instead to the military-industrial-complex: everything weaponized. Tiny explosives, jiggered to maximize radiation seem very likely. Tiny everything murderous, and big and very big as well. Brilloin was lucky, no radiation in their basic product, but a slightly different mix of ingredients may (I am not-so-wildly guessing here) release a torrent of killing neutrons at a very cheap price. Just ONE idea, now realize all the complex ways that can develop from a single radical new technology.
For a glimpse, note that the team leading investigations into extreme cavitation suffered radiation poisoning recently. Apparently spent too much time admiring the isotopes that were popping up in their tank, and not enough on getting a cheap Geiger counter. (Just read this this week and now can’t find a link, sorry.)