Turing's Radiator

Futurology is a difficult and inexact science, with a poor history of getting it right. However, there are ways of giving yourself a chance or, at least, avoiding some of the more obvious mistakes and oversights. This post looks at a tool for considering the bigger picture in futurology and reflects on the results of using it with various user groups.

We’ve made the point before that technologists aren’t necessarily (or solely) the best people to ask what the future may hold because:

they only tend to think about technology, or
when they think about things other than technology, they’re not very good at it.

Of course, there’s probably a parallel observation to be made about any focused specialist in a particular field (economists, lawyers, politicians, etc.) but the observation doesn’t invalidate 1 and 2: it just shares the blame around a bit. So, what can be done to help, and where does it take us?

3 Comments | tags: Fermi Paradox, Futurology, Predicting the future, Social impact, The Great Curtain | posted in Computer Science, Engineering, Industry, Philosophy, Politics, Science

Thursday 10th December 2015

Santa in the Continuum

By Vic Grout

This year’s festive offering considers countable and non-countable infinities and follows (very) loosely from last year’s discussion of deterministic and non-determininstic optimisation

[Specially for Alex Irvine, who is either having trouble getting his head around infinite sets or still believes in Santa Claus: we’re not allowed to say which]

Father Christmas has a problem. The Intergalactic Department of Work and Pensions (IDWP) has threatened to cut his tax credits because he apparently only works one day a year. He’s tried to point out that he’s the head of a vast multinational organisation of elves and reindeer, who themselves work all year round, but that doesn’t wash with the IDWP boss, Ian ‘Dunkin’ Smiff, because his dad didn’t go to public school.

So, he’s been given extra work to do: a lot of extra work to do …

2 Comments | tags: Continuum Hypothesis, Countable sets, Equivalence, Infinite sets | posted in Algorithms, Mathematics, Philosophy, Politics

Thursday 5th November 2015

‘Will the Robots Take Our Jobs?’ Isn’t Really the Important Question

By Vic Grout

Professor Stephen Hawking provoked considerable debate recently by suggesting that we could have more to fear from the nature of capitalism in future than armies of intelligent robots. The response was immediate, robust, deeply personal and entirely predictable.

The basic premise of the discussion was Hawking noting that, if most of the work of a future society was performed by machines, then how we occupied ourselves instead was much more of a social, political, economic, ethical, demographic, etc. question than it was technological. The rebuttal was essentially:

That’s silly: the old jobs will be replaced by new ones,
Please don’t say nasty things about capitalism,
Scientists should stick to science.

So how much of this criticism was justified and how much of it was simply The Establishment closing ranks?

8 Comments | tags: Automation, Capitalism, Employment, Technological singularity, Unemployment | posted in Engineering, Hardware, Industry, Philosophy, Politics, Science

Wednesday 7th October 2015

Drop the Dead Donkey! (Is that really ‘News’?)

By Vic Grout

Most of us, watching TV from time-to-time, find ourselves saying, “Why’s that made the news? Surely there are more important stories?” That may well be true so is there a logical way to approach the issue?

Let’s start with a couple of extreme examples, to try to get a feel for this:

On May 7th this year, the UK went to the polls to elect a new government. Just about every news programme on radio and TV, as well as the whole Press, led with variants on the ‘story’ “Voters start voting in the General Election”. But was this actually ‘news’?