What are the best futurist blogs?
I see Singularity Hub already, and I second that. Other than that, here are some good ones.transhumanity.netHome - SERIOUS WONDERFuture TimelineAnd my own:Futurist Edge
Why do they usually mention 2020 for futuristic ideas?
I think it’s just a natural consequence of us thinking in base-10. It’s the same reason why businesses charge £0.99 for a product instead of £1.If we split a year into its thousands, hundreds, tens and units digits, an increase in a leftmost digit is psychologically more potent than an increase in the one to the right.The implication of this for futurism is that a prediction is more “believable” and “credible” if you predict 2020 instead of 2019 as it “feels” further away and hence more futuristic. There’s nothing inherently more special about 2020, just as there was nothing inherently more special about 2000. It’s literally an arbitrary completion of an orbit around the sun (and then some considering 2000 and 2020 are both leap years). It’s just how we’ve agreed to structure our calendar in combination with our base-10 number system that imparts a sense of significance to those years.I’m quite happy to celebrate either of these anyway. Any excuse for a party :DThese are reasons I respect futurists like Ray Kurzweil even more. He predicted the year when an AI would pass a credible Turing Test as 2029, NOT 2030. This at least implies the data-driven methodology we know he uses, and that he avoids the temptation to go with the psychologically more satisfying and therefore persuasive prediction.
Futurists: 20 years from now, what will be the experience of renting cars?
Based on the current state of development of self-driving cars, I would predict that in 20 years almost all cars on U.S. roads are self-driving. As a result, these cars do not need to be manually parked and they can be called "on-demand" from the pool of available cars within a matter of seconds or minutes. Consequently, I would predict that we can "rent cars" by a push of a button (or whatever interface we'd use at that point), after which one of the available cars from the pool shows up at your GPS location within seconds or minutes. After finishing your trip, you will return the car to the resource pool for someone else to rent. This is simply accomplished by stepping out of the car and closing the door.This car utility pool would be managed and operated by a third party marketplace company, or an asset based "car rental" company that also owns many of the vehicles. I would predict that private car ownership goes down under this scenario and most of the cars will be owned by specialized companies.
I have a lot of great wild far futuristic technology starup ideas how can I find people to hire?
Are You Sure About This?Altough maybe you had a lot of great ideas, starting and maintaining a startup is’nt easy. there are lots of both Succeeding Startups and failing ones.But to answer your question, start with your closest friends who shares the same ideal as you, and once you done that you can recruit people using direct ads, or from mouth-to-mouth. But my suggestion if you havent any experience with recruiting go hire your friends, at least you know them before.
According to inventor/futurist Ray Kurzweil, human civilization will end by 2045 because computers will become more intelligent than humans. Is this true?
While the possible end of humanity remains a plausible and a seemingly inevitable possibility, the fact the it may occur due to a technological singularity appears to be one of the less plausible routes.. It is more on the realm of technological paranoia.Martin Ford in The Lights in the Tunnel:Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future [99] postulates a "technology paradox" in that before the singularity could occur most routine jobs in the economy would be automated, since this would require a level of technology inferior to that of the singularity. This would cause massive unemployment and plummeting consumer demand, which in turn would destroy the incentive to invest in the technologies that would be required to bring about the Singularity. Job displacement is increasingly no longer limited to work traditionally considered to be "routine."Moreover cultures self-limit when theyexceed the sustainable carrying capacity of their environment, and the consumption of strategic resources (frequently timber, soils or water) creates a deleterious positive feedback loop that leads eventually to social collapse and technological retrogression. In addition to general criticisms of the singularity concept, several critics have raised issues with Kurzweil's iconic chart. One line of criticism is that a log-log chart of this nature is inherently biased toward a straight-line result. Others identify selection bias in the points that Kurzweil chooses to use. For example, biologist PZ Myers points out that many of the early evolutionary "events" were picked arbitrarily.