We assembled some of the smartest people we know to identify the trends that are most likely to affect our future. What we got was a fascinating discussion about religion, technology and politics and why no one's golf scores seem to be getting any better.

TECHNOLOGY AND US

TIME: WHAT INNOVATION WILL MOST ALTER HOW WE LIVE IN THE NEXT FEW YEARS?

TIM O'REILLY, publisher and technology advocate: Collective intelligence. Think of how Wikipedia works, how Amazon harnesses user annotation on its site, the way photo-sharing sites like Flickr are bleeding out into other applications. I think we're at the first stages of something that will be profoundly different from anything we have seen before, in terms of the ability of connected computers to deliver results. We're entering an era in which software learns from its users and all of the users are connected.

DON'T WE ALSO RUN THE RISK OF HARNESSING OUR COLLECTIVE IDIOCY? EVERYONE WHO HAS BEEN ON THE WEB KNOWS THAT THE RATIO OF SIGNAL TO NOISE IS NOT ALWAYS OPTIMAL.

O'REILLY: Right, but remember what Google did. They basically said, let's look at what all the millions of individual users are linking to, and let's use that information to get the good stuff to float to the top. That turned out to be a very powerful idea, the ramifications of which we're exploring in other areas, such as with tagging on Flickr or blogs. People are finding more ways to have the wisdom of crowds filter that signal-to-noise.

The Netscape IPO wasn't really about dot-commerce. At its heart was a new cultural force based on mass collaboration. Blogs, Wikipedia, open source, peer-to-peer - behold the power of the people.

Ten years ago, Netscape's explosive IPO ignited huge piles of money. The brilliant flash revealed what had been invisible only a moment before: the World Wide Web. As Eric Schmidt (then at Sun, now at Google) noted, the day before the IPO, nothing about the Web; the day after, everything.

Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush outlined the Web's core idea - hyperlinked pages - in 1945, but the first person to try to build out the concept was a freethinker named Ted Nelson who envisioned his own scheme in 1965. However, he had little success connecting digital bits on a useful scale, and his efforts were known only to an isolated group of disciples. Few of the hackers writing code for the emerging Web in the 1990s knew about Nelson or his hyperlinked dream machine.

At the suggestion of a computer-savvy friend, I got in touch with Nelson in 1984, a decade before Netscape. We met in a dark dockside bar in Sausalito, California. He was renting a houseboat nearby and had the air of someone with time on his hands. Folded notes erupted from his pockets, and long strips of paper slipped from overstuffed notebooks. Wearing a ballpoint pen on a string around his neck, he told me - way too earnestly for a bar at 4 o'clock in the afternoon - about his scheme for organizing all the knowledge of humanity. Salvation lay in cutting up 3 x 5 cards, of which he had plenty.

Although Nelson was polite, charming, and smooth, I was too slow for his fast talk. But I got an aha! from his marvelous notion of hypertext. He was certain that every document in the world should be a footnote to some other document, and computers could make the links between them visible and permanent. But that was just the beginning! Scribbling on index cards, he sketched out complicated notions of transferring authorship back to creators and tracking payments as readers hopped along networks of documents, what he called the docuverse. He spoke of "transclusion" and "intertwingularity" as he described the grand utopian benefits of his embedded structure. It was going to save the world from stupidity.

I believed him. Despite his quirks, it was clear to me that a hyperlinked world was inevitable - someday. But looking back now, after 10 years of living online, what surprises me about the genesis of the Web is how much was missing from Vannevar Bush's vision, Nelson's docuverse, and my own expectations. We all missed the big story. The revolution launched by Netscape's IPO was only marginally about hypertext and human knowledge. At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing. And the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking - part human and part machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in history.

Not only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still don't see it today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed into. And as a result of ignoring what the Web really is, we are likely to miss what it will grow into over the next 10 years. Any hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015 requires that we own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago.

"Welcome to the companion blog of the Second Life Future Salon! The Salon* meets once a month in the 3D digital world of Second Life to discuss advancements that are creating the future of digital worlds and culture (broadly defined to include information technology, simulation, video games, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), 3D creation tools, computer-aided design (CAD) and 3D prototyping, the geospatial Web, augmented reality, and all forms of digital environments plus the technology, social, and business dialogues that can be impacted by them)."

In this expanded interview transcript, inventor Ray Kurzweil discusses birth, death, and the potential offered by non-biological thinking processes.
By: Lucas Conley

Fast Company: First off, without death, CEOs will never give up their jobs. There won't be any succession plans.

Ray Kurzweil: I don't think we need to kill people off to provide opportunity for new leadership and creativity. The marketplace of ideas and technologies is going to expand -- it has been for years. Look at the computer industry. 60 years ago it was a handful of research projects, and now it's a trillion-dollar industry.

FC: But biotech? Who's to say how quickly it will advance?

Kurzweil: A lot of people say you can't really tell the future, and there are certain things that are hard to predict. What will Google's stock be three years from now? That's hard to predict. But if you ask me what it will cost to sequence a base pair of DNA in 2010 or the cost to move a megabyte of data wirelessly in 2015, those things turn out to be remarkably predictable.

The scientists and engineers spearheading the creation of artificial beings and bionic people are responding to the magnetism of the technological imperative, the pull of a scientific problem as challenging as any imaginable.

Fascinating scientific puzzle though it is, the creation of artificial beings is also expected to meet important needs for society and individuals. Industrial robots are already widely used in factories and on assembly lines. Robots for hazardous duty, from dealing with terrorist threats to exploring hostile environments, including distant planets, are in place or on the drawing boards. Such duty could include military postings because there is a longstanding interest in self-guided battlefield mechanisms that reduce the exposure of human soldiers, and in artificially enhanced soldiers with increased combat effectiveness. (For this reason, the Department of Defense, largely through its research arm — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — is the main U.S. funding source for research in artificial creatures.) Artificial creatures can also be used in less hostile environments: homes, classrooms, and hospitals and rest homes, serving as all-purpose household servants, helping to teach, and caring for the ill or elderly.

Among these possibilities, the connection between artificial creatures and human implants might be the most important because it promises enormous medical benefits. This connection might be the single greatest motivation to develop artificial beings. Yet regardless of their potential good uses, and apart from any issues of blasphemy, we have concerns about robots and androids. One fear is that the limitations we think to design out of our creations, from cosmetic deficiencies to the existential realities of illness and death, are essential human attributes, and that to abandon them is somehow to abandon our humanity. Something in us, it seems, fears perfection, and artificial beings threaten us with an unwelcome perfection, expressed as rigid unfeeling precision.

There is another menace first conveyed nearly 200 years ago in “Frankenstein,” and now more compelling than ever: the fear that technology will grow out of control and diminish humanity for all of us. That concern is hardly limited to artificial creatures. It appears in many arenas — the loss of privacy associated with new forms of surveillance and data manipulation; the depersonalization of human relationships; the incidence of human-made ecological disaster; the growing gap between the world’s technological “haves” and “have-nots.” It is especially and deeply unsettling, however, to contemplate the literal displacement of humanity by beings made in the human image, only better.

"The future isn't what it used to be," to quote Paul Valéry. And, it seems, neither is the business of predicting the future. Granted, learned men and women still generate hypotheses about the prospects for mankind. But they don't seem to have the public exposure that they did in the first half of the 20th century, when both science fiction and science fact magazines were painting pictures of rooftop airports, nuclear-powered everything, and vacations on the moon. Whatever the reasons for the current lack of a future in Futures, it can still be interesting to look back and see where we were supposed to be by now, and Tales of Future Past offers a thorough selection of the early pulp prophets' hits and - mostly - misses.

Environmentalist Paul Ehrlich has proved himself to be a stupendously bad prophet. In 1968 he declared: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." They didn't. Indeed, a "green revolution" nearly tripled the world's food supply. In 1975, he predicted that, by the mid-1980s, "mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity," in which "accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion." Far from it. Between 1975 and 2000 the World Bank's commodity price index for minerals and metals fell by nearly 50%. In other words, we abound in "key minerals." Naturally, Mr. Ehrlich has won a MacArthur Foundation genius award--and a Heinz Award for the environment.

(DANNY HILLIS:) I have always envied Alexander the Great, because he had Aristotle as a personal tutor. In those days, Aristotle knew pretty much everything there was to know. Even better, Aristotle understood the mind of Alexander. He understood which topics interested Alexander, what Alexander knew and did not know, and what kinds of explanations Alexander preferred. Aristotle had been a student of Plato, and he was himself a great teacher. We know from his writings that he was full of examples, explanations, arguments, and stories. Through Aristotle, Alexander had the knowledge of the world at his command.

Of course no one today knows all that is known, in the sense that Aristotle did. Now there is far too much knowledge for that to be possible. The scientific revolution, and the technological revolution that followed it, led to a self-reinforcing explosion of knowledge. The explosion continues. Today not even the most highly trained scientist, the most scholarly historian, or the most competent engineer can hope to have more than a general overview of what is known. Only specialists understand most of the new discoveries in science, and even the specialists have trouble keeping up.

This problem isn't new. In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an essay for Atlantic Monthly about out the problem of too much knowledge. He wrote,

What new tools to improve human performance will emerge from the convergence of nanotech, biotech, infotech and cognitive science?

This was topic of discussion at the recent NBIC conference in New York, where several hundred scientists, ethicists, government officials and business executives gathered.

Like nanotechnology 10 years ago, speculating about potential NBIC applications is easy. Developing novel tools that solve real world problems remains hard. Always keeping this in mind, Mike Roco, conference co-chair and architect of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, performs the difficult task of distinguishing practical applications from mere conjecture, while cultivating an environment that encourages exploratory discussions. My goal was to explore the political and economic issues that might arise as these converging technologies make possible neurotechnology -- tools that can influence the brain.

Is society ready for NBIC? As nano, bio, info and cognitive technology increasingly converge, proponents of NBIC (the somewhat clunky acronym for this multitech intersection), are calling for the legal, ethical and regulatory implications to be considered from the very beginning.

The architect of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, Mike Roco, co-editor of a soon-to-be updated report on NBIC convergence and human performance, said at a recent conference that "society needs to be prepared for the major changes to come." Convergent technologies such as augmented vision or hearing, pervasive sensor networks and genetic manipulation will challenge the meaning of human nature and privacy, as well as many aspects of trade and international law.

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.
- John F. Kennedy

"Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science."
- Bertrand Russell

Exerpt:

"It is supposed to be a Golden Age after all, the society mankind will enjoy if ever man becomes sane and mature: no doubt they have laws and institutions similar to ours, which they keep as a last resort, should all else fail, the way a wise man packs a first-aid kit before he goes camping. But our society is like a man who is in constant ill health, constantly in the hospital emergency room. To us, the medicine we need to prevent the body politic from dissolving into anarchy is something we must endure every hour of every day. A healthy society, such as only might exist in a future whose moral standard is higher than our own, such distempers would be rare. Men might be wise enough to be glad to avoid even the appearance of pirating another man's ideas, rather than trying to edge as close to the minimum limit as the law allows. Since they life forever, and will never escape each other's censure, never forget a wrong, it would behoove them to settle all difference privately, and before they become inflamed."

The following is an exchange between John C Wright and Rafal Smigrodzki regarding intellectual property laws in the Golden Oecumene and some comments on future standards of morality:

... in three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being ... The machine will begin to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months it will be at genius level and a few months after that its powers will be incalculable...
- Marvin Minsky