Everything You Know About the Future is Wrong

1. Everything You Know About the Future is Wrong

2. Perfectly Obvious in Retrospect

3. Converging Technologies for human enhancement “could achieve a golden age that would be a turning point for human productivity and quality of life. . . . The Twenty-first century could end in world peace, universal prosperity, and evolution to a higher level of compassion and accomplishment.” Mihail C. Roco and William Sims Bainbridge. “Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance.” NSF June 2002. With Perfectly Obvious Implications

4. Newcomen and Calley steam engine, 1712 Guess its Future! Win Valuable Prizes!

5. Guess its Future! Win Valuable Prizes!

6. Can You Find the Hidden Exponential Innovation Curve?* *Hint: check out the losers

7. This is dangerous new territory for warfare, yet there are no new ethical codes or guidelines in place. I have worked in artificial intelligence for decades, and the idea of a robot making decisions about human termination is terrifying. --Noel Sharkey, Univ. Sheffield, UK, 2008 Things Ain’t What They Used to Be War is now dropping bombs from aeroplanes and killing women and children in their beds; it is shooting by telephonic orders, at an unseen place miles away and slaughtering invisible men. US Clergyman Harry Emerson Fosdick, 1917

8. Who Knew? That this: And this: Came from this?:

9. coming soon to your neighborhood: radical social transformation

10. The Past is a Line The future is an almost infinite set of possibilities—each with an unknown probability.