Friday Farsight

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

You can order them today: solar panels that will produce drinking water from the air. But can they scale to entire cities, like Phoenix, which already face a water crisis?

Longer-term, does this tech enable better management of river systems, or is it just another technology that distances human beings from their environment?

Read the full prediction: Atmospheric Water Generation Sustaining a Large Desert City

This week we've had our AI superbrain ponder all the knowledge of the world to tell us, once and for all — are space aliens already here? Perhaps teasing us with playful flybys?

And if so, or if not, when will we have proof? At least of life on another planet. And when will we have our first conversation with an alien intelligence?

Tune in to find out, or just read the full scenario here: Discovery of Space Aliens

Along with the supporting predictions:

• Discovery of Evidence of Life Away from Earth
• First Contact with Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life

Privacy ends when spy drones shrink to the size of insects, not because cameras are everywhere but because we won't know for sure that any given place is free of them.

Is such an invention inevitable? Will we surrender our privacy freely, as we have to digital media? Or will we find the technologies for at least a bug-free house at the local home improvement store?

Read the full prediction: Mosquito-sized Spy Drones

Utopia. In a couple of decades we will have the technology to build it. Why then will we have to wait almost a century to live in it?

Tune in to hear how today's wealth disparity is just the first tremor of seismic forces that could rip society apart, even as we invent the "abundance" economy. Is there no other way? Can we avoid the interim strife if we know the ultimate destination?

Read the full scenario: Post-scarcity Economies 

We can print shoe soles and parts for jet engines. Why not everything in between? Surely it's just an engineering problem, like going from 8-bit color to 16-bit. Or is it?

Are the critics right that traditional manufacturing will remain cheaper than "additive manufacturing" for most products? And, what if consumers actually like sameness? Does anyone even want individually, locally printed toothbrushes, toasters, spatulas?

Read the full prediction: 3D Printing Dominance in Manufacturing

How will belief in God evolve over the next 500 years? Are we heading toward godless secularism, or will those seeking a complete understanding of the universe always pursue spiritual enlightenment?

Read the full trend article here: Belief in One or More Gods