Bay 12 Games Forum

Finally... => General Discussion => Topic started by: Scoops Novel on November 19, 2021, 10:35:54 am

Title: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: Scoops Novel on November 19, 2021, 10:35:54 am
?
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: Frumple on November 19, 2021, 10:53:07 am
It'll have hypnotoad, so sure.

Less flippantly, the future is always more weird and strange than the present to the folks in the present, and that's a pattern that has repeated itself since prehistory. No reason to believe that'll be any different this time around, one way or another.
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: wierd on November 19, 2021, 10:59:24 am
Puts on Johnny Carson genie hat.


Prognostication:

In the future, global temperatures will continue to rise, even as many climate agreements are met. (not all will be, a good many, especially from heavily industrial nations, will be postponed, or will only be partially met) This is due to climate forcing, as water vapor increasingly enters the atmosphere from evaporation. This leads to changes in weather patterns, yadda yadda.

Green technology will continue to gain traction, but will continue to have pushback from older generations who will view it with scepticism and disdain.

Right to Repair will get more airtime, and will be consistently lambasted by lobbyist groups, despite some gains being made.  the transition to more complicated technologies from less efficient, simpler ones, will create a legitimate bottleneck in home repair for many items (due to product safety, among other things), and economics of replace-over-repair will favor simply throwing out old devices, even though this creates increased e-waste. Self-driving cars will be a significant player in this progression of events, as lobbyists will quickly point to user-modified control systems being implicated in traffic accidents, as reasons not to allow end consumers to modify or repair their vehicles, and the provisions afforded in the name of such safety, will be further extended to other devices as well.

In terms of civil/social reforms, events will continue to smolder with intermittent powderkeg moments.  This will continue for at least another 40 to 50 years, after which culture will progress toward (but not reach) a more inclusive paradigm. (stagnation will then regain a foothold, and this cycle will repeat) Social censure will happen more frequently on social media, and the gate-keepers of such platforms will increasingly lock down in a "Plastic dystopia" style shell game.  Facebook will go the way of MySpace before it, despite Zuck's best efforts, and new replacement platforms will be eager to prevent the same events that led to its downfall.  Considerable efforts will be taken to walk the razor's edge between currying international favor of power brokers, and obeying increasingly onerous legislation (intended to prevent the platforms from being leveraged as nascent incubators for hate and hatespeech, but ultimately being tools for censorship and oppression.)

Otherwise, things will continue as they always have. People will get married, have kids, go to school, get jobs, et al.

Copyright terms will continue to increase without end.

Medical technologies will make significant milestones with regenerative medicine, but insurance will not cover it.

Healthcare systems will look back on the covid era with terror, but actual improvements in health insurance industries will remain glacially slow, as the profit motives that produce the problems with current systems will remain incumbent.

Advert tracking technology will become even more invasive/pervasive.  The notion of actual privacy will become quaint. Some token legislation will be passed, due to the more egregious actions of the more greedy executives involved, but for the most part, it will continue unabated to erode all aspects of privacy.  Life without privacy invading technologies will be considered backward luddism. No-one will question if the same technologies can function without the privacy invading features. They will just consume the product, wth the bads baked in.  Legislation will be passed to help ensure this, as an expansion to the DMCA will be passed that makes disabling of tracking illegal.

The wealth gap will grow.


If you consider such a future "Weird" or "Strange", then the answer to your question is "yes."


Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: martinuzz on November 19, 2021, 11:12:47 am
You forgot to include cloning technology, so I think 'more wierd' is off the table.
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: wierd on November 19, 2021, 11:14:40 am
The world struggles with just one of me in it. Why would you be so horrible as to suggest there should be more? ;)
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: martinuzz on November 19, 2021, 11:16:01 am
Also, I am just a dabbling quantum mechanic, so I am uncertain if there will be more 'strange' in the future.
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: wierd on November 19, 2021, 11:21:27 am
Barring a sudden upset in the second law of thermodynamics, strange will decline, due to its instability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelet

Strange only increases in prevelence as a result of new energetic events, and the second law, coupled with an expanding universe, indicates that strange will become increasingly rare, over cosmological timescales.
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: martinuzz on November 19, 2021, 11:23:17 am
Who knows what shenanigans occur on the inside of a black hole

or, from that article:

Quote
If the strange matter hypothesis is correct, and if a stable negatively-charged strangelet with a surface tension larger than the aforementioned critical value exists, then a larger strangelet would be more stable than a smaller one. One speculation that has resulted from the idea is that a strangelet coming into contact with a lump of ordinary matter could convert the ordinary matter to strange matter.[16][17]

This is not a concern for strangelets in cosmic rays because they are produced far from Earth and have had time to decay to their ground state, which is predicted by most models to be positively charged, so they are electrostatically repelled by nuclei, and would rarely merge with them.[18][19] On the other hand, high-energy collisions could produce negatively charged strangelet states, which could live long enough to interact with the nuclei of ordinary matter.[20]

The danger of catalyzed conversion by strangelets produced in heavy-ion colliders has received some media attention,[21][22] and concerns of this type were raised[16][23] at the commencement of the RHIC experiment at Brookhaven, which could potentially have created strangelets. A detailed analysis[17] concluded that the RHIC collisions were comparable to ones which naturally occur as cosmic rays traverse the Solar System, so we would already have seen such a disaster if it were possible. RHIC has been operating since 2000 without incident. Similar concerns have been raised about the operation of the LHC at CERN[24] but such fears are dismissed as far-fetched by scientists.[24][25][26]

In the case of a neutron star, the conversion scenario seems much more plausible. A neutron star is in a sense a giant nucleus (20 km across), held together by gravity, but it is electrically neutral and so does not electrostatically repel strangelets. If a strangelet hit a neutron star, it could convert a small region of it, and that region would grow to consume the entire star, creating a quark star.[27]
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: McTraveller on November 19, 2021, 11:28:57 am
Unless the speed of light drops to 1000mph or something, or we start getting other localized spacetime anomalies, or people really start having superhero powers, I can't think of anything that would classify as weird or strange.

Most things I can imagine (weather, climate, politics, technology) just fall into the "probably annoying" category.

EDIT: dang, ninja'd on the breakdown in physics concepts.
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: wierd on November 19, 2021, 11:32:51 am
Who knows what shenanigans occur on the inside of a black hole

or, from that article:

Quote
If the strange matter hypothesis is correct, and if a stable negatively-charged strangelet with a surface tension larger than the aforementioned critical value exists, then a larger strangelet would be more stable than a smaller one. One speculation that has resulted from the idea is that a strangelet coming into contact with a lump of ordinary matter could convert the ordinary matter to strange matter.[16][17]

This is not a concern for strangelets in cosmic rays because they are produced far from Earth and have had time to decay to their ground state, which is predicted by most models to be positively charged, so they are electrostatically repelled by nuclei, and would rarely merge with them.[18][19] On the other hand, high-energy collisions could produce negatively charged strangelet states, which could live long enough to interact with the nuclei of ordinary matter.[20]

The danger of catalyzed conversion by strangelets produced in heavy-ion colliders has received some media attention,[21][22] and concerns of this type were raised[16][23] at the commencement of the RHIC experiment at Brookhaven, which could potentially have created strangelets. A detailed analysis[17] concluded that the RHIC collisions were comparable to ones which naturally occur as cosmic rays traverse the Solar System, so we would already have seen such a disaster if it were possible. RHIC has been operating since 2000 without incident. Similar concerns have been raised about the operation of the LHC at CERN[24] but such fears are dismissed as far-fetched by scientists.[24][25][26]

In the case of a neutron star, the conversion scenario seems much more plausible. A neutron star is in a sense a giant nucleus (20 km across), held together by gravity, but it is electrically neutral and so does not electrostatically repel strangelets. If a strangelet hit a neutron star, it could convert a small region of it, and that region would grow to consume the entire star, creating a quark star.[27]

Again, in an expanding universe with the second law holding, these stars will become further and further apart. The rate of cosmic inflation will result in the distance between such object becoming greater than the locally observable universe for such objects-- meaning that unless you have extra-super-warp-drive, you may never encounter strange matter.

Further, before then, the same issue that is mentioned in the article-- small strangelets that would infect such stars with strangeness through a high energy collision-- have PLEEENNNNTTY of time to decay before they reach such a viable spot to collide, meaning the rate of conversion would also decline precipitously as the universe expands and cools.

Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: MaxTheFox on November 19, 2021, 12:28:56 pm
My opinion of the future is somewhere around the midway point of optimism and pessimism. I don't think we're completely fucked... but the future isn't particularly bright. Not particularly weird either.
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: EuchreJack on November 19, 2021, 12:37:04 pm
Our technological advancement seems to be stagnating, so we have time to better adapt to new technology.  So less weird or strange.

Cloning is certainly in our future present (https://www.businessinsider.com/ethics-of-human-cloning-scientific-progress-2020-7), driven by the need to procreate irregardless of natural biological constraints.  It is a natural biproduct of the desire to convert eggs into sperm and sperm into eggs.  Is it ethical to create a clone of opposing gender just to procreate with your loved one?  Is it ethical to create clones without brains to avoid other ethical issues?

The abortion issue shall change from The Right to Choice to The Right Not to Procreate, as technology makes it less and less burdensome for the parent's unborn child to be  brought to term.  If a woman has a fertilized egg in her body, and can have that fertilized egg removed and planted in another person with the same level of invasion required to terminate the pregnancy, can she still chose to have that fertilized egg destroyed?  What if she was raped?  What if it is now a fetus, because a few days have passed?

Conversely, two consenting adults want to conceive a child and successfully fertilize an egg.  Then they break up, and the woman decides to terminate the pregnancy.  Absolutely legal (your jurisdiction may vary).  The real issue is that the man who is the most zealous in advocating for his rights in this scenario is most likely an abusive piece of shit, the last person that anyone wants to give more rights.
...But what if the fertilized egg isn't in the woman, but is in a surrogate?  Maybe a surrogate that is sleeping with the man?  What if the fertilized egg is frozen in some lab?
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: Urist McScoopbeard on November 19, 2021, 12:48:31 pm
It's gonna be... WeIrD
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: wierd on November 19, 2021, 12:53:16 pm
What if said surrogate is fully artificial, and is technology.

(also, the notion that it is always the man that is abusive, is some bullshit that needs flushed, just so you know. It's actually very close to even in both directions. (https://ncadv.org/STATISTICS) women tend to be injured more seriously, but this could reasonably be explained by body plan morphology than by increased aggression. The near even statistic on overall violence suggests it is not aggression difference, but power difference in the body being piloted.)
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: EuchreJack on November 19, 2021, 01:13:50 pm
The new technology that humanity will probably need to come to grips with, and that is unexpected and jarring, is AI sentience.  It is being worked on constantly, and there is big money in making AI smarter and more personal.  Since the only sentient beings are us Humans, we're in a perfect position to deny sentience to other beings.
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: EuchreJack on November 19, 2021, 01:26:53 pm
What if said surrogate is fully artificial, and is technology.

(also, the notion that it is always the man that is abusive, is some bullshit that needs flushed, just so you know. It's actually very close to even in both directions. (https://ncadv.org/STATISTICS) women tend to be injured more seriously, but this could reasonably be explained by body plan morphology than by increased aggression. The near even statistic on overall violence suggests it is not aggression difference, but power difference in the body being piloted.)

Ahem, I would advise re-reading what I said.

As for gender bias in reporting of abuse in Western society, note that women in Western society are usually better capable of reporting and documenting abuse, as they are more socially adept.  The bias of women being victims and men being abusers in Western society is prevalent and tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy/fallacy.  Gender stereotypes further push this bias.  Women who are aggressive are generally characterized as unwomanly, whereas men that are abused are generally characterized as unmasculine.

But note that abusers in general are more socially adept than victims of abuse, irregardless of gender.  Victim usually have some problems going into the relationship, as abusers are like predatory animals in that they pick off those who are already weak.  Except abusers then weaken their victims further.

...in a weird way, women abusing men is a form of gender equality.  Only if we've reached some sort of parity can this be possible.
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: dragdeler on November 19, 2021, 02:21:50 pm
Spoiler (click to show/hide)


Other than that the future will become weirder and the weird will become more mundane. What frumple said basically.



Quote
Unless the speed of light drops to 1000mph or something, or we start getting other localized spacetime anomalies, or people really start having superhero powers, I can't think of anything that would classify as weird or strange.

Afaik they tend to never measure the same value down to the last decimal point whenever they do measure the speed of light, and again >afaik<, at one point the got tired enough of it to prefer to make the meter dependant on the speed of light rather than the other way around. I do like the spirit though, make it just a little slower and sound would be faster than light, now that would be weird. On a more serious note our intellectual categories are being challenged regularely, is cloning, AI, eternal live, etc ethical? Or more down to earth: any debate around socially progressive changes. Sprinkle in some "any sufficiently advanced technology is basically undistinguishable from magic" and some cosmic horror à la "one day everything in the universe will have drifted so far a part that other galaxies will become basically imperceptible"... stratas of weird stacking on eachother leaving eastereggs to the future, how could it not get any weirder?


edit: man some perfect comedic timing on the first video I pick, I just burst out into laughing.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)


fuck, it keeps getting better (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QSZKaye36A)
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: Starver on November 19, 2021, 05:44:52 pm
?
Yes. And probably both.
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: MaxTheFox on November 19, 2021, 11:32:11 pm
The new technology that humanity will probably need to come to grips with, and that is unexpected and jarring, is AI sentience.  It is being worked on constantly, and there is big money in making AI smarter and more personal.  Since the only sentient beings are us Humans, we're in a perfect position to deny sentience to other beings.
I for one would completely accept AIs.

Edit:
My opinion of the future is somewhere around the midway point of optimism and pessimism. I don't think we're completely fucked... but the future isn't particularly bright. Not particularly weird either.
In a sense, I feel post-cyberpunk would be closer rather than the common pessimistic prediction of a cyberpunk dystopia.
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: Putnam on November 21, 2021, 03:44:52 am
The answer is "yes, and weirder than you could possibly expect".
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: Cthulhu on November 22, 2021, 10:27:29 am
probably plod chrimbum
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: Scoops Novel on December 08, 2021, 08:19:47 am
People can only handle so much  of either of these. I wonder when we'll decide to pull the brakes.

The 21st century as it is... is kind of a good game board.
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: Frumple on December 08, 2021, 09:49:49 am
Haha, you assume there's brakes to pull, or that anyone would be able to find or pull them! No, no brakes until our species drives itself off an extinction cliff.
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: Stench Guzman on December 08, 2021, 11:57:20 am
My vote is for unrelenting horror.
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: Starver on December 08, 2021, 12:27:24 pm
My vote is for unrelenting horror.
/makes note of personal preferences...
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: anewaname on December 08, 2021, 02:10:19 pm
A prediction of "the future" is something that needs to be associated with an identification; an identification like "I am Chinese", "I am Uyghur", "I am human", "I am short", "I prefer warm climates", "I am from this nation", "I am from this city", "I am from this planet", "I like animals", "I like distance from others", "I like machines". ...and I see the future like this...

A prediction of "weird or strange" in "the future" also needs to be associated with the ability of individuals (in that future) to distribute information and ideas with others not in their immediate stratification. Because, "weird or strange" only exists where conformity and stratification already exist, and without the distribution of information and ideas with other groups, you cannot have "weird or strange".

Once you have chosen your identifications and your perception of how freely information and ideas can be distributed in this future, you can estimate how weird or strange the future will be.

=================
I think the above needs work but that that you really need to choose "identifications" and to estimate "the ability to transmit and receive information and ideas", before you can measure "weird or strange"...

Look at China... the state is pushing to conform the people to all be "Chinese" and "from China" and "Chinese, Chinese, Chinese...". They do this by monitoring and disrupting the transmission and receipt of information and ideas (as well destroying the information carried in human minds). They are attempting to remove all ideological forms of "weird or strange" from their sphere of influence. And, not that the state of China is the only group that has done, is doing, or will do this...
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: hops on December 09, 2021, 03:52:16 am
It'll continue to be weirder to us people in the past and it'll continue to be disappointingly mundane to people in its present and charmingly quaint to people in its future.

I mean, take our comparison with the 90s for example. We failed to meet a lot of that time period's hopes and dreams, and we haven't solved world hunger or sold consumer hoverboards. And yet it's now considered the norm for your average teenager to have semi-omniscience on popular topics and ofr them to access a vast library which is 90% lies from a handheld personal computer. And our future generations will probably question what the fuck we were doing with our handling of COVID-19.
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: hops on December 09, 2021, 04:10:40 am
Not sure why I accidentally ended up being negative there but I just ment that we're vastly more knowledgeable than our predecessors and thus basically succeeded at the whole transhumanist idea of mind augmentation without even needing to dip into cybernetics, but we also caused a lot of new prblems people in the past didn't even think of.
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: Egan_BW on December 09, 2021, 04:11:19 am
The future won't be the same as the present because time causes things to change. We know this, because the past was apparently not the same as the present. We can't be sure that time really exists or that it does what we think it does, but it seems fairly likely.

There is a lot of future, and it will be very different from itself. Probably. Assuming the universe actually gets that far. Judging from the past, things will start out fairly similar to how things are now, and then gradually become more and more impossible to predict from this standpoint. However, we can make some reasonably likely predictions.

Everybody here will cease to be an organism, and become an organism's corpse. Quite soon really, on the timescale of the universe, but don't worry I'm sure you'll get to do plenty of nice things before then. Then our species of organisms will stop being the species it is, through either extinction or mutation. Quite soon everything we've made will stop being the things we made and start being other things, such as dust or rocks. All of the rocks which are around right now will remain for a long time, but will also eventually stop being rocks. The plates of the earth will shift around and make new cool-looking continents which we won't get to see. Eventually, this planet will stop being this planet and start being part of the sun. Then the sun will stop being a star, as will all the stars.
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: EuchreJack on December 09, 2021, 04:25:14 am
So yeah, the future will basically always be "business as usual".
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: Egan_BW on December 09, 2021, 04:34:31 am
Business is as usual, because that's how business usually is. Is it possible for there to be a universe where the future isn't business-as-usual, for whatever business is usual for that universe?

Hmmm, perhaps a universe of true pure randomness, it could be said that no business is usual. But then, you'd certainly expect the continuation of random business, so you could say that randomness and unpredictability are themselves business as usual. Maybe not the way we'd use the term, though?
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: EuchreJack on December 09, 2021, 04:35:54 am
Hm, I think this is relevant....
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: Scoops Novel on December 09, 2021, 08:11:47 am
Part of me wants to be immortal, part of me finds the whole thing too fucking complicated. Even a extra 100 years.
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: Scoops Novel on December 09, 2021, 10:31:22 am
My conclusion: Fuck Life, Fuck Death, Just Live!
Title: Re: Will the future be more weird or strange?
Post by: Scoops Novel on December 14, 2021, 09:29:26 am
The future only really looks fun with a curveball, and if it gets any curvier it won't be very human.