Friday Farsight

Psychopaths make up one percent of the population, so you probably know a half dozen of them. They are the prison inmates and the CEOs, the brian surgeons and the mass murderers.

If we could eliminate psychopathy with genetic engineering, should we? We might be safer, but would we lose something as a species? And if everyone is born prosocial or "kind," are we a truly moral people, or just automatons designed to smile all the time?

Join your favorite smiling automatons, Biff and Betty, on this week's Friday Farsight to ask whether it's wise to make kindness an output of technology.

Read the full prediction: Genetic Engineering of Prosocial Humans

Sci-fi has promised us swashbuckling space pirates in the Asteroid Belt, but right here on Earth, at the bottom of the ocean, we have metals in the billions of tons, conveniently packed into dense nodules waiting to be scooped up. Yet -- no aquanaut miners, no undersea mining village, no smugglers in submarines.

Why not? Are we putting humans in space just because it's more adventurous? Or is living under the ocean somehow even harder?

Find out in this week's episode of Friday Farsight.

Read the full prediction: First Permanent Ocean Floor Habitation

Laser pistols may be coming this century, but will they be any fun? No sound, invisible, prone to burn your hand... is Biff right that "This is the show where sci-fi comes to die," or will the race to build laser weapons lead to spin-off technologies that make life wonderous for everyone? (Everyone, that is, who hasn't been shot.)

There's only one way to find out.

Read the full prediction: Laser Pistols

Rebel Yell video: Rare Footage of Civil War Veterans Doing the Rebel Yell, Smithsonian Magazine, Oct. 28, 2011

When buildings go digital—meaning printable, even morphable—will they stlll be buildings, or just very large bodies of content we subscribe to? And if they can change to suit our momentary whims, what is the meaning of place? Does architecture cease to shape the humans who inhabit it?

Tune in to hear Biff and Betty unravel these far-future possibilities, as well as the nearer-term evolution of an industry that is notorious for staying the same.

Read the full scenario report here: The Built World (2025 - 2500)

Harvard Medical School is currently testing a treatment that could cure blindness by stimulating the eye to heal itself. Regenerative treatments of all kinds will be arriving between the 2030s and 2050s, but what about completely regrowing part of the body, like a lost finger or arm?

Can we do it? And if so, does that mean you have to walk around for six months with a little baby limb? Ew.

 Read the full prediction: Full Human Limb Regeneration

Might organic life be so rare that it had to be seeded on Earth by an alien species? Could we someday be the ones seeding distant star systems with our own ectoplasmic goo?

Find out if this is even possible as Biff and Betty discuss "the organism printer" — a machine capable of printing a living creature.

Read the full prediction: The Organism Printer

Civilization was born from terror. The earliest monuments to empire, such as the Palette of King Narmer, first king of Egypt, show the free peoples of the time, the "enemies," kneeling, beheaded, and/or dismembered. The state, even in modern times, can be defined as an organization with a monopoly on violence.

When terrorism, amplified by future technologies, challenges that monopoly, will the state survive? In what form? The surveillance dictatorship? The "antifragile" democracy? Or... maybe something entirely new?

Read the full scenario: The Future of Terrorism

Referenced in the intro:

Why the Future Doesn't Need Us by Bill Joy

Are we doomed yet? by Sheldon Pacotti (original title: "The Criminalization of Knowledge")

Not just stickers. Digital art implanted under your skin, running for months, maybe years.

But — is a digital image you can replace at any time really a tattoo, in spirit? And how far will this go? Will poker players use this tech to mask their emotions? And, if them, what about the rest of us? Do we really want every pixel of our appearance programmed?

Read the full prediction: Digital Tattoos

You are a temporary substrate. True intelligence will arrive only when biology has been transcended — i.e. when humanity is extinct, or at least irrelevant.

That is the future depicted by many Strategic Farsight predictions. It is the consensus future, at least within the AI brain making the predictions, and thus within the corpus of human writing on the subject.

But what if we are exaggerating the AI future, just like we exaggerated space travel, cyberspace, and every other new technology?

Tune in to get the long view of how digital technology would mature in the absence of a species-ending event. Could it be that, as after every other technological revolution, life goes on?

Read the full scenario: Peak Digital (2100)

Cyberpunk daydream, or reality by 2075? Maybe a little of both...

The biggest surprise: hope for Alzheimer's patients, arriving sometime in the 2040s via a memory prosthetic — a "high confidence" prediction.

Tune in for this two-chapter trek into the future of brain augmentation.

Or read the full predictions:

• Implantable Brain Memory Storage Devices
• Consumer-Grade Neural Memory Modules for Direct Knowledge Augmentation