Gazing Rabbit wrote:
What will be the next step in technology? After the cellular phones, mp3 players and hand-held computers, what will be the next big thing?
Either useful self-replicating nanotech or useful self-aware AI. Anyone who says the former is impossible is being a bit silly, as it's essentially how our bodies are made. Anyone who says the latter is impossible is likely not a scientific reductionist, which is fine as it goes but not the most tenable position historically. It's hard say to say which will come about first, but my money would be on the nanotech, due to the fact that milestones for top-down assembly of nanoscale structures seem to be progressing at a decent clip, and the limitations of current computer processing power for AI (which probably won't be solved until the advent of novel nanotech processors).
The potential applications for both technologies are too numerous to mention, but the important early ones would probably be in electronics and materials science for nanotech, and taking over/supplementing some service jobs for AI. Tech support and the like. Such things are already currently handled to some extent by simple decision-tree "AI's" linked to voice recognition software, but they're too inflexible to work with the customer on any non-trivial problem (I should know, I get said customers all the time after they've given up on the automated system :)
I'm not too worried about nanotech weapons in the near future, as I doubt they'll be any more dangerous than conventional biological weapons at first.
Any other technologies I can think of near-term are just incremental improvements to existing ones, not really "next steps" (better touchpads don't really seem like a big deal to me, for instance. Tactile finger positioning/feedback is kind of important for keyboards)
My guess is that self-replicating nanotech will come about first (despite the fact that the whole industry is probably due for a crash sooner or later, before dusting itself off and continuing with less hype and more actual results), but that AI will ultimately be more important for the future. Because as soon as we produce something that's even a little bit smarter than a human, or even with the same problem-solving abilities as an average human but essentially immortal and with unlimited storage space, it's the first step towards all sorts of technological-singularity-type niftyness. Any AI will still be limited by the physical substrate it's running on of course, so it's not like it's going to become godlike overnight.
actor_au wrote:
A way to get porn to customers faster than ever before.
Combine AI's to analyze brain structure and nanotech to interface with it, and we may be able to download interactive porn
directly into your brain. Of course by the time it happens you might be too old to enjoy it without radical biological restoration, and just have to deal with all the young whippersnappers laughing at your stories about having to download
2-D pictures of women from the "Interwebs".
actor_au wrote:
All landline phonecalls are priced as local calls
I
work in the telecom industry, and I still don't understand why voice-chatting with someone in China in an online game is so much less expensive than calling them, especially as most of the backend telephone network is IP these days anyway. (Not that I've looked into it much, so anyone who knows, by all means elucidate me)