Predictions for 2301

[Raphael]

true. but, on a related note, I'm not sure there will ever be a time that people can't ask "Did you try turning it off and turning it on again?"

Hey, now that you mention it, that's a very good point!

[Ares Land]

There is some legislation protecting privacy online in Europe. There's a cultural divide there: Americans generally miss the point of the regulations.
Regarding the 'right to be forgotten': you can for instance, ask Google to be removed from search results and sue them if they fail to comply. (I have no idea how often this comes up.)

Cookies are pretty easy to thwart. (I set up Firefox to clear up all cookies and history.) With a good VPN you can do a lot more.

With face recognition software and a good, interconnected networks of security cameras, the police could track someone around the city pretty much as they please. Obvious counters include make up, sunglasses. I'm told T-Shirts with faces on them were pretty successful against the surveillance system during protests in Hong Kong.
The obvious corollary is that the security cameras will be permanently out of order in the bad part of town.

An interesting development is that disinfomation and cyber attacks are now used and recognized as weapons. I'd expect much stricter state control on the internet and the end, more or less, of online anonymity.
Battlestar Galactica had the cute idea that computer networking would turn out to be more trouble than it's worth in a military context, and that the navy would pretty much do without.

[zompist]

With face recognition software and a good, interconnected networks of security cameras, the police could track someone around the city pretty much as they please. Obvious counters include make up, sunglasses. I'm told T-Shirts with faces on them were pretty successful against the surveillance system during protests in Hong Kong.

Masks may not fool the AIs of 2031, much less 2301. But that's why I expect a little arms race of surveillance and counter-surveillance.

[hwhatting]

Moose, Travis: I think H-W was referring to the time when the laws governing same-sex sexual acts and age in Germany were made the exact same as the laws governing opposite-sex sexual acts and age in Germany. Those used to be different.

Yep, exactly. Sorry for being unclear here. With minors I meant persons not yet adults (below 18 years of age), not those younger than the age of consent. Wikipedia has a good summary of the legal situation.

[Ares Land]

With face recognition software and a good, interconnected networks of security cameras, the police could track someone around the city pretty much as they please. Obvious counters include make up, sunglasses. I'm told T-Shirts with faces on them were pretty successful against the surveillance system during protests in Hong Kong.

Masks may not fool the AIs of 2031, much less 2301. But that's why I expect a little arms race of surveillance and counter-surveillance.

Oh, yeah, definitely. I believe in a few decades surveillance network may not bother with video at all and instead track your DNA.

[Travis B.]

With face recognition software and a good, interconnected networks of security cameras, the police could track someone around the city pretty much as they please. Obvious counters include make up, sunglasses. I'm told T-Shirts with faces on them were pretty successful against the surveillance system during protests in Hong Kong.

Masks may not fool the AIs of 2031, much less 2301. But that's why I expect a little arms race of surveillance and counter-surveillance.

Oh, yeah, definitely. I believe in a few decades surveillance network may not bother with video at all and instead track your DNA.

I am not sure if that would ever be feasible - they are better off with just tracking credit/debit card transactions, which is done right now with today's tech.

[keenir]

With face recognition software and a good, interconnected networks of security cameras, the police could track someone around the city pretty much as they please. Obvious counters include make up, sunglasses. I'm told T-Shirts with faces on them were pretty successful against the surveillance system during protests in Hong Kong.

Masks may not fool the AIs of 2031, much less 2301. But that's why I expect a little arms race of surveillance and counter-surveillance.

Oh, yeah, definitely. I believe in a few decades surveillance network may not bother with video at all and instead track your DNA.

That makes me think of biosurveys in places like the open ocean, where Craig Venter (among others) discovered new species by - and here I oversimplify - hauling in buckets of water and scanning it for new DNA sequences.

Given how much skin cells humans shed, gathering the material for the DNA-tracking you mention wouldn't be a huge hurdle...the hurdle would be tracking someone when they are out with friends (or just in a crowd)...maybe wearing gloves and a hoodie to reduce the amount of skin exposed to air, and a dog to swamp the collector with other skin cells.

[Raphael]

true. but, on a related note, I'm not sure there will ever be a time that people can't ask "Did you try turning it off and turning it on again?"

Hey, now that you mention it, that's a very good point!

Second thought: if some current trends continue, there might eventually be devices that can only be turned off by removing them from any external energy supplies and waiting for their battery to run out. (I just had to reset one of those gadgets whose reset button can only be reached by a pried-open former paper clip.)

Edit: I mean, of course, if the devices in question have bricked.

[Travis B.]

true. but, on a related note, I'm not sure there will ever be a time that people can't ask "Did you try turning it off and turning it on again?"

Hey, now that you mention it, that's a very good point!

Second thought: if some current trends continue, there might eventually be devices that can only be turned off by removing them from any external energy supplies and waiting for their battery to run out. (I just had to reset one of those gadgets whose reset button can only be reached by a pried-open former paper clip.)

Edit: I mean, of course, if the devices in question have bricked.

I have encountered devices today which, if they have a hard software crash (which locks up the entire system), the only way to reboot the device is to literally leave it on until it exhausts its battery (and it cannot be turned off manually).

[zompist]

Given how much skin cells humans shed, gathering the material for the DNA-tracking you mention wouldn't be a huge hurdle...the hurdle would be tracking someone when they are out with friends (or just in a crowd)...maybe wearing gloves and a hoodie to reduce the amount of skin exposed to air, and a dog to swamp the collector with other skin cells.

Some surveillance techs may work well for awhile before people (for good and bad reasons) start to counter them. It might be like fingerprints, which were a very powerful tool until people learned to wear gloves.

You can probably minimize spreading skin cells, but aerosols from the lungs might be harder to hide.

On the other hand, no need for a dog... just bring along a canister of fakes. Skin flakes, aerosols, whatever the authorities are looking for. Spray around enough of that and it looks like an entire convention hall walked by.

A little farther in the future-- just change your DNA before a big job.

[Raphael]

This is a pretty belated reply, but I was reminded of this post when I saw something elsewhere on the Web:

There is some legislation protecting privacy online in Europe. There's a cultural divide there: Americans generally miss the point of the regulations.

To illustrate this, here's the cookie warning text from the website where I usually buy my commercial e-books these days:

Diese Website verwendet Cookies
Wir verwenden Cookies, um Inhalte und Anzeigen zu personalisieren, Funktionen für soziale Medien anbieten zu können und die Zugriffe auf unserer Website zu analysieren. Außerdem geben wir Informationen zu Ihrer Verwendung unserer Website an unsere Partner für soziale Medien, Werbung und Analysen weiter. Unsere Partner führen diese Informationen möglicherweise mit weiteren Daten zusammen, die Sie ihnen bereit gestellt haben oder die sie im Rahmen Ihrer Nutzung der Dienste gesammelt haben. Dies schließt unter Umständen die Weitergabe Ihrer Daten in die USA ein, denen kein angemessenes Datenschutzniveau bescheinigt wird. Daher könnten diese Daten einem staatlichen Zugriff von US-Behörden unterliegen. Näheres finden Sie in unserer Datenschutzbestimmung. Ihre Einwilligung zur Cookie-Nutzung können Sie jederzeit wieder in der Datenschutzerklärung widerrufen.

Translation:

This website uses cookies
We use cookies in order to personalize contents and advertisements, in order to be able to offer functions for social media and in order to be able to analyze accesses to our website. In addition, we pass on information on your use of our website to our partners for social media, advertisement and analyses. Our partners might combine this information with additional data which you have already provided to them or which they have collected during your use of the services. This might, under certain circumstances, include sending your data into the USA, which are not certified as having an appropriate level of data protection. Therefore this data could be subject to a governmental access by US authorities. You can find more information in our data protection terms. You can, at any time, revoke you agreement to using cookies in the data protection declaration.

[zompist]

our partners for social media, advertisement and analyzes.

The noun is analysis, pl. analyses; the verb analyze, 3s analyzes. With a real s and z distinction, even. The Brits write the verb with an s, though.

This might, under certain circumstances, include sending your data into the USA, which are not certified as having an appropriate level of data protection. Therefore this data could be subject to a governmental access by US authorities.

It's amusing that they put this in their warning, but the end result is that it's pretty much the same as for any US consumer: to use their website you have to consent to intrusive data surveillance.

Maciej Cegłowski has a lot to say about this sort of thing. Those articles are from 7 years ago and I'm pretty sure things have gotten ten times worse, but fortunately our computers are five times better so we don't complain much.

[Ares Land]

Oh, well, basically this means they're using Azure or AWS.

I'm involved in GPDR and cookie law compliance at work. We spend a noticeable amount of energy on regulation compliance.
The irony of this is, we don't actually need the cookies, and we collect personal data that is entirely useless to us. We do these things because a) we've always done it b) basically, laziness. I've pointed this out numerous times: generally people look at me with a blank expression and move on.

Those articles are from 7 years ago and I'm pretty sure things have gotten ten times worse, but fortunately our computers are five times better so we don't complain much.

That's really a very interesting, and unexpected consequence of Moore's law: storage and processing power have gotten a lot, lot cheaper than good engineers.

Why waste your valuable engineers' time on making better software, when you can ask them to rush the job and through and fix any issues with hardware?

[Moose-tache]

[Raphael]

our partners for social media, advertisement and analyzes.

The noun is analysis, pl. analyses; the verb analyze, 3s analyzes. With a real s and z distinction, even. The Brits write the verb with an s, though.

Thank you!

This might, under certain circumstances, include sending your data into the USA, which are not certified as having an appropriate level of data protection. Therefore this data could be subject to a governmental access by US authorities.

It's amusing that they put this in their warning, but the end result is that it's pretty much the same as for any US consumer: to use their website you have to consent to intrusive data surveillance.

Yeah, I know.

Those articles are from 7 years ago and I'm pretty sure things have gotten ten times worse, but fortunately our computers are five times better so we don't complain much.

Are you sure about that? Sure, computers from 7 years ago were five times better than those from 14 years ago, but I've got the impression that at some point in the past 7 years, computing power reached a plateau. I think I even remember a discussion on the old ZBB from shortly before it crashed where you said something similar.

[zompist]

Those articles are from 7 years ago and I'm pretty sure things have gotten ten times worse, but fortunately our computers are five times better so we don't complain much.

Are you sure about that? Sure, computers from 7 years ago were five times better than those from 14 years ago, but I've got the impression that at some point in the past 7 years, computing power reached a plateau. I think I even remember a discussion on the old ZBB from shortly before it crashed where you said something similar.

Those aren't real numbers; if you want to know what's happening, Google "Moore's law". So far as I know, computers are still improving, but it's getting harder and also more expensive.

FWIW, Apple claims that the current Mac Mini has 3x the CPU speed and 6x the graphics speed than the previous generation, which was a few years ago (they don't say, but it was later than 2015). If there was another generation in between, my made-up numbers were pretty accurate.

[Travis B.]

Are you sure about that? Sure, computers from 7 years ago were five times better than those from 14 years ago, but I've got the impression that at some point in the past 7 years, computing power reached a plateau. I think I even remember a discussion on the old ZBB from shortly before it crashed where you said something similar.

Those aren't real numbers; if you want to know what's happening, Google "Moore's law". So far as I know, computers are still improving, but it's getting harder and also more expensive.

FWIW, Apple claims that the current Mac Mini has 3x the CPU speed and 6x the graphics speed than the previous generation, which was a few years ago (they don't say, but it was later than 2015). If there was another generation in between, my made-up numbers were pretty accurate.

One thing is that today speed enhancements seem to be going more into parallelization and less into straight-line performance, i.e. machines are getting more parallel faster than they are getting faster per core.

[Moose-tache]

One thing is that today speed enhancements seem to be going more into parallelization and less into straight-line performance, i.e. machines are getting more parallel faster than they are getting faster per core.

This is mainly an adaptation to overheating. Miniturization cannot continue without improved heat-pumps, which cost money. So on personal devices, adding more cores makes more sense than putting more power into each core. All exponential trends eventually abut physical limitations or diminishing returns; the problem of heat generation by CPUs is the first such abutment for Moore's Law.

As for computers not getting faster, Raphael you're not crazy. The other thing that's happened is that we've hit a "good enough" point in a lot of our devices. No one is willing to pay more for a laptop with state-of-the-art performance, unless they're playing high end games or mining crypto. Each time we switch to smaller devices it also causes a temporary step down in performance. Basically, market forces aren't pushing the curve to shoot upwards forever. Some companies, like Apple, like to push hardware for its own sake, and it often works for them (most of their flagship products hit the market years before there was any demand for such a device), but generally if consumers don't want a cufflink that can calculate pi to a trillion decimals, computers won't go in that direction. Moore's Law can still be seen in high-end devices, commercial products, and other areas where performance is worth paying extra.

A good parallel is air travel. If you read Heinlein, and the other mid-century prognosticators, they assumed travel would get faster and faster until basically we were commuting at c. But the airline industry hit a very hard point of diminishing returns; it turns out, consumers have a very precise cost-to-speed ratio that they are looking for, and once the airline industry reached it, there was no incentive to stray from it. It's unlikely that the same thing will happen to computing, since computer users do more things with computers than airplane passengers do with airplanes, but it's a good example of how you might think your technology is on an infinite curve, but it's actually just approaching a fixed point.

[Ares Land]

On the other hand, computer storage has gotten really cheap over the fast years. Presumably the big area of improvement right now is GPUs for machine learning purposes.

A good parallel is air travel. If you read Heinlein, and the other mid-century prognosticators, they assumed travel would get faster and faster until basically we were commuting at c. But the airline industry hit a very hard point of diminishing returns; it turns out, consumers have a very precise cost-to-speed ratio that they are looking for, and once the airline industry reached it, there was no incentive to stray from it. It's unlikely that the same thing will happen to computing, since computer users do more things with computers than airplane passengers do with airplanes, but it's a good example of how you might think your technology is on an infinite curve, but it's actually just approaching a fixed point.

There seems to be a lot of interest of supersonic commercial flight right now, interestingly.
I tend to think there's room for growth: long flights are a pain and I mean, technically, supersonic flight could be made technically viable. Of course that's very questionable on environmental grounds, but since when does the air travel industry care about such things?

[Raphael]

Re: Moore's Law, I'm pretty sure I remember a different discussion, in the last year of the old ZBB, where zompist linked to this blog post by Rodney Brooks:

https://rodneybrooks.com/the-end-of-moores-law/