I was just reading this today. I thought it was rediculous as well.

Not to mention, of course, how it perpetuates the "technology destroys humanity" meme.

It also perpetuates the idea of an upper and lower social class and economic inequality. As though those things will even exist in 1000 years let alone 3000+ years. I can't honestly believe that they allowed something like this to be displayed on there news page. Actually it isn't suprising given how crazy the idea is, and how it appeals to all the negative stereotypes of social and economic class differences.

Absolutely amazing.  Even in my most naive of days I don't think I would have bought this.  Just looking at the advancements in the past couple decades and it is mind boggling. I can't even begin to imagine the next 50 years let alone 100,000, assuming we will be around that long.

I'm astonished.  When do the jack-booted cyborgs storm my home in the middle of the night because I'm a Morlock who refuses to work?

Anyone for a "you're an idiot" letter-writing campaign?

I think it's good to laugh, but we must not stop there; this shows that these people need to be educated. Ray Kurzweil is doing a good job, but we need more people to explain these *very important* concepts to (at least) scientists and the public in general.

Way ahead of you Eschew... I already emailed him and demanded a retraction.

Maybe you all could copy and paste it and send it to him again, using your own names.

send the email here:  o.s.curry@lse.ac.uk

------------

Time to rethink your predictions

I would just like to politely inform you that you are incredibly off with your predictions about the future of humanity. Technology is progressing so rapidly that we are likely to see a technological singularity this century. Making such tame predictions about what humanity will look like thousands of years from now is absurd. Just looking at Moore's Law alone one gets a sense of the rapidity of technological progress. However, some people such as the inventor Ray Kurzweil, winner of the National Medal of Technology, predicts that it is not only exponential but that "there's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth"

Considering the advanced technologies that are already maturing rapidly such as nanotechnology and genetic engineering, the prediction that in 1000 years the average lifespan will be 120 years is absurd.

I found out about your article from my favorite technology discussion website:

http://betterhumans.com/blogs/simon/archive/2006/10/17/Laughable-forecasting.aspx

I sincerely hope that you retract your naive article and immediately print a correction to take into account this new information. The memes you have spread in your article are dangerous. With the power you have as a writer, you should take great responsibility in what you show to the public.

Sincerely,

Your Name Here

They predict the Morlocks and Eloi....I wonder how much thinking they had to put into that?

Yeah it is utterly clueless. I think they just wanted to stir up the muck and generate some interest in the online nerd culture. It seems like more and more broadsheets and papers are doing this now. I've seen more and more--the NYT, San Fran Chron, CS Monitor, etc. etc. The mere fact we're talking about it is just what the Daily Record wants.

I think it's all to make up for declining sales among the below 50 demographics. Back in the eighties I only read news magazines. I wouldn't touch our local rag of a paper except for the comics and local in-depth stuff. Cut and pastes of AP newswires, vacuous punditry, sports and weather, and local police blotter stuff I could do without. Anyway, most newspapers really began to suck in the 70s and 80s. When the Internet rolled around that was their death-knell.

So now they are trying to reach us online. So periodically various broadsheets run an online story to get us all riled up and generate some page views.

CP and Mr. Farlops agreeing on something...truly, the Singularity draws near!

But frivolity aside, I think that there are a lot of people writing for mainstream publications these days who aren't doing half as much serious thinking and research as a lot of bloggers or writers in less well-known or more esoteric publications.  The article quoted above sounds like some 8th grader's Wednesday night homework assignment.

Nydra, that's an insult to 8th graders everywhere *and* the nature of Wednesday night homework :-P

I am not a troll. I am a regular reader and friendly with the big wigs that run this site. Saying that, I sincerely hope that one day you all come to realize that, as a group, you are as dogmatic and blind as the element you all despise.

The collective opinion of this site is no more valuable then that of anyone else. Demanding a reaction? Come on...

Clueless? How is your opinion any more grounded in reality? Please see the Jetsons for a relevant analogy. NO ONE can predict with certainty what the future will hold in any material respect. This scientist's views are his own and likely based on training far far exceeding anyone who reads/posts on this site. Not that his conjecture is superior to yours...

I have posted this before but it bears repeating...what underlies many followers attraction to transhumanism is the desperate need for change in their own lives (some parties excluded of course). To suggest that infinite life is in the cards in our lifetimes is, at this point, at least, pure conjecture.

Dealing with the present is the greatest challenge we all face. Good luck.

It is the whole world that is in desperate need for change. And what does it matter if some individuals have problems in their lives that only advanced technology that we don't have yet can fix? There is a large overlap between the kind of work being done to fix disabilities and the kind of technology transhumanist are looking forward to.

I don't think that a retraction is a good idea either. It is important to exercise caution when pushing the visability of tranhumanist thought, it may be best that the majority of the population continues to think of the future the old-fashioned way. If they knew anything about transhumanism they will simply try to stop it. On the other hand, if there is not wide spread demand for the kind of changes that transhumanist want, how will that change come to pass? I don't know the solution to that.

Infinite life may or may not be in the cards in our lifetime, the article however, speculated about changes in the human species over the course of millennia. At that timescale it is ridiculous to not take any of the transhumanist technologies into consideration. In fact, it shows gross ignorance.

The fact of the matter is that we live in a time where death from old age is no longer a complete certainty, it also not a complete certainty that we will live forever. The issue is up in the air for the first time in all of human history. In a way, the sure certainty of death that past generations experienced is psychologically preferable to the current situation where you don't know what will happen to you. It's like waited for a test result to see if your life threatening cancer has been eradicated. This is nerve racking compared to the glossy-eyed resignation of inevitable death, or the wide-eyed certainty of immortality.

Gully,

I have proposed similar caution in the mainstream media. One should take into account "future shock" levels.

http://betterhumans.com/forums/thread/5335.aspx

Nevertheless, I think that this article is even tamer than the "old fashioned" view of the future. It is not helpful at all. Maybe they don't have to be privy to the potentials for nanotechnology, artificial general intelligence, and megastructures, but publishing an article claiming that in thousands of years we wont even double our life expectancies is naive and harmful. The general public is certainly at a higher future shock level than the type of thinking in this article.

Simon,

Point Taken

Robot

I'm a little sceptical about asking him to recant, and your e-mail demanding so was a little forcefully worded, and overconfident in my opinion. As absurd as his forecasts sound to us, it's entirely possible he's spot on (I doubt it, though). I think, unfortunately, I must agree with 'robot' when he says that transhumanists can be a little too secure in their predictions, especially since we have yet to see any transhuman technologies of world-altering significance materialise (though I believe they will, I don't like estimating the time scale, and agree that we need simply to get on with inventing them in the present even while we theorise how they will affect us in the future). I must also protest, that the wording of the letter pretty much waded right in to dense concepts like the Singularity and accelerating change that, let's face it, aren't exactly 'hot topic' right now. Nevertheless, I agree with you lot in your general appraisal of his propositions.

I'm new here, but I just had to comment on this first. His predictions are EXACTLY (or at least, 95% exactly) similar to a science fiction scenario I'm in the process of working on, excepting that my time scale was more like > 2,000 - < 5,000 years and the subjects of my own story were in fact the descendants of the bioconservative movement. Unlike Prof. Curry, my story attempted to give plausible forecasts, and gave repeated allusion to the fact the vast majority of humanity's more progressive descendants now lived spread throughout the galaxy. I was really astounded at his timescale of 100,000 years, and his predictions that we would see such decline over that time - even my relatively luddite Terrans had mature nano- and possibly picotechnology, superhuman artificial intellects, cybernetics interlinking nearly everybody on the planet, primitive forms of quantum teleportation (the research for that one killed me), and what I've since discovered is called "angelnetting" in Orion's Arm, all of which allowed the transhuman upper class (Curry's "gracile superiors" or as I called them, the "Superior Curiae") to restore the environment and maintain a period of perennial prosperity and human fulfilment.

I believe what this illustrates is not that Academia has not yet been sufficiently infiltrated by transhumanist memes of accelerating change, but rather that transhumanists simply have bigger imaginations for the future. No matter whatsoever degree of scientific accomplishment Prof. Curry has attained, he seems to have failed even to imagine the most conservative conjecture that I, a transhumanist, could muster of a post-millennial scenario, and despite my reservations against saying so, I do believe that as a man of letters, it was profoundly irresponsible of him to make such claims as he did. Case in point: where were we +100,000 years ago? Apparently, we ought to have been largely where we are now. Even before I became a transhumanist (when I was twelve), I certainly had enough of an idea of the history of the species to know that +100,000 years is a long time in memetic terms.

Academics are liberals and liberals are always at least 40-50 years behind the times. There are rare instances when events are in sync with THEM, but those are rare and they usually lag much further back.

So naturally they are making predictions Wells made in the 1890s.

The prediction was from an economist, not a biologist, who spent two months on the issue.

http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30000-13547374,00.html

Sexual selection doesn't always work the way he thinks it does, though.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-10/qu-fd102306.php

In short, genetic competition between males and females could just as easily mean that we won't bifurcate into two subspecies.

Nor does his take on "pagan virtues" (signs of dominance) and "Christian virtues" (signs of submission) impress me either.

http://homepage.mac.com/scottukgb/Sites/curryvirtue.pdf

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