Thursday 17 April 2014

What The Future Holds

It seems unbelievable that the first Back to the Future film was made in 1985 and showed a future of 2015 where people zipped around on hoverboards and there were parking zones for flying cars so unless science has been holding back on unleashing these inventions, they got this very wrong.
That's the problem with the future, we can only guess what its going to be like until we get there and i'm guessing it's not going to be DeLorean cars and flux capacitors.
The Pew Research Centre has been conducting a survey concerning what we want from our future science and our concerns about what the men in white coats and pens in the top pocket may bring.
65% said they'd be concerned about future robots, quite right to i say, while 53% said it would be a change for the worse if most people wore devices that constantly showed them information about the world around them.
What we do want is driverless cars (48%) brain implants to improve mental capacity (26%), lab-grown meat (20%) while 19% wanted flying cars or bikes, 9% wanted the ability to travel through time and 9% mentioned health improvements that extend human longevity or cure major diseases.
2% wanted Hoverboards, 2% immortality, 1% inventions to make household tasks easier, 1% new energy sources and 1% wanted science to bring world peace. 
11% of respondents said that they are not interested in futuristic inventions, or that there's nothing futuristic they would like to have but then i did warn them not to ask at the Luddite Fellowship. 
Quite rightly the advance of artificial intelligence is the publics greatest concern but i'm not quite sure how having Google on your t-shirt stacks up against being enslaved by super-intelligent robots hell bent on taking over the World but that's probably why i wasn't asked.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It seems for some people the future includes CDs. True dat.

Q

Lucy said...

I'm expecting holograms that play the video.

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
This comment has been removed by the author.