I’m taking a break from the dating/gender track. I’ll get back to it, but I’d like to opine on an altogether different topic: the technological cessation of aging, and the “immortal” era that might result. This is enough post for two or three days, and I’m not half-done on the topic. so don’t be surprised if I take a day or two off this week. — Cless
Sometime in the third (or very-late second) millennium, an event will pass (or has passed) without recognition. No one will know it at the time, but the first 150-year-old (“Elder A”) will be born. Then the first 500-year-old, who is likely to be the same person, will be born. Then or shortly after, the first 10,000-year-old. Living for several hundreds to thousands of years, with their bodies in a perpetually young state, these people will be the first generation to conquer aging. Although they’ll inevitably die, as all of us will, they will be “immortal” in the sense of having an indefinite lifespan. They might live for millions of years. This is not science fiction. It is an eventual technological likelihood.
What will Elder A’s life look like? He will be born in a time with death is frequent and expected, like now. Coming of age and growing into midlife, he’ll expect a lifespan of eight or nine decades. He’ll probably feel death’s first swing (and a miss) in his late 50s, when he contracts a particularly nasty case of cancer. Surviving this encounter with death, and fully cured at 61, he’ll resolve to live an exceptionally healthy life, wanting to remain physically active into his 80s. He’ll maintain a strict diet and exercise regularly, and be a bit lucky. Into his 80s, 90s, and 100s, he’ll have a few close calls regarding death, but always be saved, always be okay. His physical decline will be slow, but not much slower than can be observed now.
At 115, he’ll become a celebrity, six years short of world’s oldest status, known not only for his age but for his health. With the body and mind of an above-average 80-year-old, he’ll run-walk the Boston Marathon in seven hours, becoming an instant celebrity. By this point, it will be obvious to Elder A, and others alive, that aging isn’t what it used to be, because Elders B, C, D, and so on, will be healthy, and not far behind him. Death in one’s 50s and 60s will be very uncommon, and no one will bat an eye at the thought of a 40-year-old model. The peak of an average woman’s beauty, considered to be 17 in Renaissance England and 24 at the turn of the 21st century, will be widely held to be in the mid-30s. Aging will remain a fact of life, but it will be slower.
Technological progress is exponential (actually, sometimes faster-than-exponential); thus, once aging has been perceptibly slowed, it will shortly after be eliminated. Neither has happened yet. The modern life expectancy is substantially higher than it was in antiquity, but not because aging has slowed. The major reasons for the improvement in life expectancy are (a) reduction in infant and maternal mortality, (b) antibiotics, (c) reduction in the rate of violent death, and (d) an across-the-board reduction in medical death rates, for people of all ages. The last of these causes is mistaken for anti-aging progress, but improved ambulance and resuscitation technologies don’t slow the rate of aging at all. Death reduction without slowing aging is a dead end. Let’s say that we managed to reduce age-derived death rates, across the board, by 50%. This would be an absolutely heroic accomplishment. Life expectancy would grow by only 8 years, since individual mortality rates double in exactly that much time.
We die young much less often than those in the 16th century, and we maintain good health much longer, but we aren’t aging much slower, because the technologies that could appreciably slow this process, at a nanoscopic level, are in their infancy. Let’s assume that we age 5% slower than our natural rate, due largely to our improved diet. Within a technical “generation” (X years, where X is probably between 10 and 50) we’ll improve this to 10%. Then 20%, in another; death rates will now double every 10 years instead of every 8. One later, 40%, at which point athletic centenarians will be remarkably more common. One generation later, 80%, at which point aging will be one-fifth the speed of its natural rate. Most people alive at this point will “make the cut” and live exceptionally long lives, past their bicentennials. In one more generation, 160%, at which point it is possible to reverse aging, and an indefinite lifespan will become reality.
There will be an date where mortality acceleration (aging) ceases and reverses, although no one will know it is “that day” when it occurs. At this point, there will still be very old people and there will still be death. This day is defined as when the aging-retardation factor (currently estimated at 5%) reaches and surpasses 100%. Back to Elder A: he will be in advanced age on this day, probably around 110. At 120, he’ll be in slightly better health than at 110, but not unambiguously so, with some health problems having abated and new ones having emerged. At 130, when he’s likely to be the oldest person alive, he and other “hypercentenarians” will be perceptibly getting younger, and there will be a dearth of newly senescent people. Humanity’s triumph over aging will be obvious, and anti-aging won’t be a luxury. It will be cheap, especially compared to the very expensive alternative. (The millions of dollars of care required to bring Elder A into this era will be affordable due to the rarity of such very-old, that-far-gone people.) Governments will either mandate the use of anti-aging technologies or deny health services to those who refuse them– a few religious cults and the uninformed and very poor, if poverty still exists.
Elder A’s 140th birthday will be a famous event, with world leaders in attendance. He’ll be visibly middle-aged, naturally presenting the gray hair and mild facial wrinkles that other men will have artificially added in order to improve their sexual attractiveness. (Just as obese people would have a considerable sexual-market advantage if they were 0.2% of the population instead of 30%; there will be a considerable niche appeal, in all genders, for an older look that would today be recognized as mid-40s.) His 150th birthday will be the last major event, and remarkable largely for the roundness of the year and for the long-held association of a 150-year landmark with humanity having “beaten” aging (although it will be acknowledged that we have done so, twenty years before this point). He’ll be bodily as young as the man writing this post, and not especially visually distinct from the other 14 billion living humans. His remarriage, at age 158 to a 156-year-old woman– the 239th oldest person alive– will receive only a small article in the world newspapers. When Elder A is 200, over 95 percent of those who were born on his 50th birthday will be alive, celebrating their 150th.
I’m going to call it a slightly favorable coin-flip that Elder A is alive today, and slightly unfavorable that he was alive when I was born (1983). My relatively uninformed 95%-confidence interval on his birth year is 1945 to 2300, with the median at 1995. My 99.6%-confidence interval is 1929 to never, assuming a (somewhat optimistic) 1-in-500 chance that human extinction occurs before an indefinite lifespan is achieved. What makes the calculation uncertain is that we don’t know what most of the relevant technical factors are. It’s likely (although not certain) that this can be approximated by the equation, Y(T) = 1 – a*e^(b*T); where T is the time in years since 2009; a is the current aging retardation (e.g. 0.05 if we are aging 5% slower than our natural pace); b is the rate at which we’re able to decelerate aging due to technological progress; and Y is the aging rate as a function of time. When Y = 0, we’ll be aging-neutral; afterward, we’ll be reversing the effects of aging. The parameters a and b are unknown, but can be estimated. We know that people are living longer and healthier lives, but we don’t have enough data to discern a slowing of the aging rate itself, so a could reasonably be anywhere between 0.005 and 0.15. As for b, it could be zero or negative– this would imply that human bodies our getting worse and more prone to aging as time progresses– but I’m inclined to think that it’s between 0.015 and 0.06.
If a = 0.005 and b = 0.015, the aging-neutral date is 2362. In this case, none of us will ever see it, though a few of this year’s newborns may be technically contemporary with Elder A. If a = 0.15 and b = 0.06, it’s 2041, and most people reading this post are “immortal”. Elder A can be reasonably expected to be born between 100 and 200 years before the aging-neutral date, depending on whether aging deceleration is slow or quick (if it’s slow, expect this difference closer to be larger). My estimate is that a = 0.04 and that b = 0.02, currently, which would place the mortality-neutral date at 2160. However, I anticipate that b will increase over the coming decades, noting technical and economic progress to be hyper-exponential, and I therefore consider it conservative to bump this factor to 0.035– if it ever approaches the rate of electronic progress, even 0.5 is not unreasonable– bringing the mortality-neutral date to 2101. Why do I expect acceleration? Preventive medicine will play an increasingly large role in our lives over the next hundred years, and will become dramatically more effective. Health costs, currently “mounting” as a share of world GDP, will reach a peak– probably in the 2030s– and then recede. When this happens, resources will be freed to combat aging, and this endeavor will be the next frontier of medicine. It won’t hurt, either, that there will be a number of highly productive 90-year-old researchers, still healthy. Ending the loss of our most experienced people (to cognitive decline and fatigue, often, before death) will allow us to reach technical heights never seen before. Of course, these projections and numbers are, still, highly speculative. Not only do I not know what the parameters really are or how they will evolve, but I don’t think anyone does.
Sadly, I don’t think it’s likely that most who are reading this will “make the cut”– although I certainly consider it possible, and if a few of us do, then most of us will. Aging is a hard technical problem, and although we’ll see in-roads into it during our lifetimes, I think overcoming it entirely, although “inevitable” from a macro perspective, will involve a Herculean effort. I’d give myself a 20-percent chance of being alive, in this body, a century from now. (Paradoxically, if I’m alive then, I’ll be “younger”, in terms of per-day death probability, than I am now.)
Frankly, the high probability that I don’t make the cut doesn’t bother me too much; five centuries ago, death was an inevitable guarantee. Now it’s just a likelihood. Moreover, I’m Buddhist and believe that reincarnation is the most likely afterlife. This is most likely my second- or third-to-last human life for a long time. I don’t fear the likely scenario that I’ll die, and be reborn, some time in the next 80 years– and that I might have to do this a few more times. That’s fine by me. What I fear more is the (extremely small, but terrifying) chance of being on the “fringe”, making “the cut” but making it badly– demented or deformed in some irreversible way, kept in a mostly-broken body for centuries. I consider this highly unlikely, of course. Once we are able to stop aging, it should only be slightly harder to reverse it, and tissue repairs considered miraculous now will be commonplace. Severed spinal cord? No problem. Multiple organ failure? All replaced, rest for three days. My hope and belief is that dementia, the most terrifying manifestation of aging, is purely a reversible illness of the brain and does not corrupt the mind; in this case, those who suffer from it when we reach aging-neutrality (and there will be an ungodly number of them) will recover, restored to healthy individuals who remember their lost decades as akin to a very long fever.
What I suspect we’ll never surpass (nor be able to prevent, entirely) is the death of the whole brain. We’ll be able to restore a severely damaged one, and we’ll be enhancing brains quite radically, but death of the whole thing, I suspect, will always mean the end of a person’s earthly existence. I don’t believe in mind uploading. The end of aging seems technologically inevitable, assuming the species isn’t killed off before it happens, but I can’t foresee science ever getting a handle on consciousness and the mind-brain coupling. I believe the mind-brain coupling to be spiritual, and once the mind has detached from the body and brain, I consider it impossible that physical means can ever reunite them. For this reason, I don’t believe that we’ll eradicate death entirely.
The current death rate of a young person is approximately 0.08%-per-year. When humanity reaches aging-neutrality, I believe it will be down to 0.005% to 0.01% per year, although higher for those in advanced age. When those people are rejuvenated, the across-the-board death rate will be at this level. It will continue to decline over time, possibly reaching 0.0001% per year (or much lower). Cybernetic and prosthetic advancements will be focused on protecting the brain at all costs. Surgical implants will exist that serve as backup life-support, able to oxygenate and regulate the brain on their own for twenty minutes– then 48 hours, then 5 years– eliminating the immediacy of a cardiac crisis and making the worst-case outcome of one an organ transplant. “Black box”-style implants will allow humans’ brains to survive trauma that would be unambiguously fatal today. It’s even possible, in a few thousand years, that brains will be stored separately from their (entirely replaceable and mechanically enhanced) bodies, communicating with them electronically and from a distance.
Many project resistance to this “immortality”, and severe social upheaval. I doubt it, frankly. First of all, we tolerate all kinds of mechanical advancements that our ancestors wouldn’t have. I wear glasses to correct my (otherwise horrific) vision. In the 10th-century, these would be a “magical” artifiact and I’d likely be killed for possessing them. Now, almost no one refuses to wear them. Few people refuse antibiotics or chemotherapy either. Obviously, if given the choice between a normal lifespan and a mandated ten-thousand-year earthly existence, most people– including me– would choose the comfortable, conservative option of dying at their normal time. However, technological “immortality” won’t present anyone with this dichotomy. People will be free to age and die, and a few will, even millennia from now. But most will delay it as long as possible, comfortable knowing that the option to die always exists.
Rather than a cause of immediate upheaval, I think the era of indefinite lifespan will be mostly underwhelming, setting in gradually without much noise. I also believe that “eternal” life will be far from a panacea regarding human suffering. Indefinite lifespans will solve some problems and create others. A paradise by modern standards, this new world won’t be a utopia. Pain and suffering will exist as long as humans and animals live. So will anger, jealousy, and even depression (although the biomechanical problem known as “clinical depression” will be a solved problem by then.) Crime will exist, although it will be much rarer than it is today, and it’s possible that a few wars will occur even after aging-neutrality is achieved. There will be a number of woefully immature 500-year-olds running around, and spiritually dead people and cultures will exist. Slavery may still exist; although the economic reasons for its existence will be entirely eradicated in a few decades, the sadistic ones may remain. Perhaps humorously, or not: fierce ethical debates will be held over whether it’s morally acceptable to provide one’s pets with an indefinite lifespan, given that an animal cannot give such consent and might wish or even need to die. Buddhists, for example, are likely to view such behavior as selfish and wrong, denying the animal the chance for a higher rebirth. Regarding religion, apocalyptic cults will still exist. Most people won’t work, but a few of us will be required to, in order to maintain the environment of our planet(s?) and support our increasing population.
More unfortunately: we’re likely to never know, scientifically speaking, what happens after death. This will always bother us, since death remains physically inevitable even after the indefinite lifespan is achieved. Some people will try to “find out” by safely simulating near-death experiences, and others will volunteer to be “killed” and revived, years later. (Some will even take years-long “death vacations”, I predict; but as return will be require keeping the brain in a viable state, these won’t be actual “death”.) I doubt any of this exploration will result in proof or refutation of an afterlife, because none of it is real death. Death, by definition, is irreversible. Evidence for many phenomena considered paranormal now will be established–there’s already a lot— but conclusive proof is unlikely. For example, by the time it’s safe and ethical to run controlled experiments inducing real near-death experiences– not the phony stuff with electrodes or psychotropic drugs, nor the post-hoc hospital studies that have established very little– telepathy and remote vision will be technological achievements rather than “paranormal” phenomena.
Finally, when an indefinite lifespan is a reality, we’re going to face an unpleasant side effect. Death, when it does occur, will always be traumatic and untimely. Aging brings us to expect and accept death, but its cessation will enable people to feel immoral, which we aren’t and never will be. Our own fragility– threatening, at that point, the loss of centuries of life– will be mostly ignored but, when confronted, utterly frightening. Although this will be a transient problem, dissipating as the death rate approaches zero, it will render a few centuries of human existence very uneasy. I don’t believe the first “No Death Day” will occur before 8000 AD.
In a later post, I’ll describe what social and economic changes I do anticipate in the era of indefinite lifespan. Will religion go away? (Answer: no. It will be more moderate but actually more prevalent.) Will economic inequality disappear, in a world of abundant time and resources? (Answer: quite possible, given enough time.) Will human technical progress be hindered by complacency, once our lifespans and conditions are “good enough”? (Answer: I have no idea. I’ll get back to that.)
What about accidents? Are our bodies going to be so invulnerable as to survive a fall from a 50-story window or a head-on car collision?
Not at first, but eventually. I think those advancements will happen some time after aging and disease are conquered (early 22nd century). The key will be to protect the brain, and provide backup life-support, at all costs. The rest of the body will be replaceable (but not invulnerable).
Are you going to analyze how “infinite” life-span would affect dating scene and marriage?
Possibly, in a future post, although that’s extremely unpredictable. I have more confidence about how religion and economics will respond to these sorts of innovations than how dating, sexuality, and love will turn out.
I do believe that a number of couples will have true lifelong partnerships, persisting over millennia, although years-long affairs may be tolerated by a number of couples that right now wouldn’t. This becomes true especially if interstellar travel (25th century?) becomes a reality. (If your spouse was going to be away for 300 years, you’d be pretty tolerant of an open relationship, no?)
Keep in mind that the traditional asymmetries of relationships will be eliminated, making affairs more tolerable to most people. Once we can make the human body “immortal”, it’s very easy, by comparison, to beautify it, so everyone will be good-looking and desirable. Our bodies will be our chosen and customized “avatars”, not our sexual rankings according to nature’s ancient signaling system. Also, by this time, most forms of economic scarcity will have vanished. It will still be expensive and difficult to get an apartment overlooking Central Park or a 50-pound gold statue, and a lot of people will want these things and be upset if they can’t have them, but most people’s material and health needs will be met even if they don’t work at all.
Most of the very-long-term (1+ century) married couples will be able to meet their “novelty” needs, sexually speaking, through body customization, virtual reality, and chemical enhancement.
OK, I’m afraid I think you’ve gone off the deep end with this one, Cless.
I should say in advance that I am absolutely 100% in favor of anti-aging research and think it would be wonderful if even a tiny fraction of what you describe happens in my lifetime. Further, I believe that I personally have a significant probability of making it to age 100, based on family history. And I think that we will start making some visible progress on the aging problem by my prospective 100th birthday (in 2082).
Further, I think that by almost any conceivable economic analysis, we spend VASTLY too little on medical research, and the ROI we are getting on medical research is almost absurdly high. Here is a classic paper on the topic: http://www.laskerfoundation.org/advocacy/pdf/economicvalue.pdf
In fact, that paper understates the case for medical research: the numbers are all based on the US population, but medical research benefits the whole world. The US GDP is about 20% of world GDP, so you should multiply all the numbers by 5.
In addition, I would say that we are starting to reach the point where anti-aging research needs to be a key component of medical research.
But count me as a skeptic of “The Singularity” and of rapid progress against human aging. I think your critical mistake is the following sentence:
Technological progress is exponential (actually, sometimes faster-than-exponential); thus, once aging has been perceptibly slowed, it will shortly after be eliminated.
I don’t think technological progress is exponential. Indeed, exponential trends are, by their very definition, unsustainable, by the very laws of physics. Consider an exponentially increasing human population. Volume of a sphere grows only polynomially with size, so at a certain point, once the population reached a certain level, even if you packed all the humans together into a giant ball, that ball would need to be growing faster than the speed of light. It just doesn’t work.
Key limiting factors imposed by the laws of physics include:
– the speed of light
– the Planck constant
– the laws of thermodynamics
Practically speaking, the size of an atom poses additional limits — ones that computers are getting dangerously close to. There are still clear paths forward from today’s mainstream 40nm and 45nm lithography down to somewhere around 10nm, but it starts getting really quite fuzzy past that. Computer architecture is also now limited pretty heavily by the speed of light and by thermal constraints.
No one can build a 10GHz processor, and single-threaded performance (which still remains critically important for a vast number of applications) has largely been maxed out. We can only look forward to gradual increases in single-threaded performance in the future.
There are also looming economic constraints. Only a few companies in the entire world can now afford to build a modern fab. The cost keeps going up every new process generation.
And at least computers are an area where we have seen 40 years of continuous exponential progress by a number of metrics. But to extrapolate from the experience of computers to other areas is… ahem… just plain ludicrous.
Consider transportation. Speeds of cars, trains, and airplanes haven’t increased exponentially — and they can’t, because drag is superlinear. Nor has the energy efficiency of these modes of transport increased exponentially. Nor has our ability to support increasing traffic volumes. Congestion pricing would help a lot with traffic, but once implemented, we would find that each year, the price would have to go up, because our ability to deliver more road (or transit, or whatever) capacity at a given price isn’t increasing very fast (indeed, in recent years, it has apparently decreased due to increases in commodity prices).
Consider materials: holding weight (density) and price constant, are today’s materials getting exponentially stronger? There have been some major innovations here, but we still build lots of things out of such ancient materials as wood, because by some metrics, lumber still wins.
Consider energy: plot cost per joule by year. Is it decreasing exponentially?
Look, I’m totally pro-technology. But technological advances take time, and in some areas, further advances are difficult.
Aging is one of those difficult areas. How do you do controlled studies on human aging? Even if we completely set aside all ethical constraints and had a bunch of medical slaves who we could run whatever lab tests we wanted on, and even setting aside all budgetary constraints… to do a proper study of the effect of a single chemical (say, resveratrol) on human aging would take decades.
Now I’m not saying resveratrol is bad. I’m inclined to think that the current body of evidence is already adequate to suggest that you should probably take a resveratrol supplement. It probably won’t hurt, it might help, and if you’re wealthy, a few supplements aren’t going to break your budget.
But to make significant progress on any sort of medical research, aging or otherwise, we need to test thousands of drugs. Perhaps millions. Human biology is complex and the results of human tests are highly unpredictable, even when we’ve already done tests on other animals; we don’t have any way to shortcut this process.
I have higher hopes, by the way, for prosthetic technology. That’s a highly tractable engineering problem. I think this is where most of the progress against aging will be over my lifetime. This will be a huge quality-of-life improvement for the elderly.
But the vital organs are a much harder problem (look at the challenges we’ve had in building an artificial heart), and the brain in particular remains troublesome.
I agree with you completely.
I never said “singularity”. A singularity is a point of discontinuity or divergence. In the sense used in the technology crowd, it’s what happens to y = 1/x at x = 0. To call it a “singularity” is bad math and bad futurism, since infinite growth in finite time is a ridiculous notion. I do believe that the fast growth of computer technology will eventually dominate economic growth, bringing us to an era in which 15%-per-year (or better) world economic growth is a reality. It may be 30 or 100 years before this happens. I don’t think strong AI (artificial consciousness) will happen.
In the very-long term, this is completely true. Technological growth may be a S-shaped curve, or may slow in another fashion. It has to end at some point. I haven’t seen evidence of it doing so yet, or any time in the near future. There are obviously challenges facing us in the near-term regarding chips, but there have been since 1980, if not before, and that hasn’t stopped “Moore’s Law” from progressing.
The asymptotic behavior of technological progress, which can’t be exponential, is irrelevant to the nearer-term question of whether humanity will conquer aging in the next 500 years. I believe the latter will happen before technological growth begins (as it inevitably must) to level off.
Your point about human population is solid, but economic growth doesn’t require population growth. Before the Industrial Revolution, population growth was much faster than economic growth (about 0.1%-per-year). This kept the standard of living on a flat trend (with ups and downs, but no discernible direction) for several thousand years. The economy was growing, but humanity was repopulating faster, leading to a Malthusian boom-and-crash cycle. Now, economic growth has accelerated, and population growth is decelerating.
I suspect population growth, after aging is conquered, will be slower-than-exponential, although I have absolutely no basis for this projection. It’s unclear what people will do if they have 200 fertile years instead of 30-70.
My understanding is that, if diamond chips are made, they’ll be able to withstand higher temperatures and faster processors will be available. Obviously, this is a speculative notion at this time, and you’re right that single-threaded performance is reaching a dead end. This is why multi-threaded, concurrent programming is going to be important, and one of the reasons for the increased interest in languages like Clojure and Haskell. Lock-based Java concurrency is brutally painful to write and failure-prone.
On traffic, I think that there probably has been exponential progress in our ability to transport materials. Obviously, the amount of transportation that can occur within, say, Manhattan is finite, but on the world scale, it’s still growing, as Asia enters the modern world rapidly. I think, by 2100, there will be superior transportation alternatives, for most purposes, to driving cars. It will be highly unusual to drive one to and from work, because of faster and safer public alternatives.
Materials are far from my expertise. I think energy would be getting cheaper, except for the oil problem, which will likely take us 20-40 years to surmount.
It’s extremely difficult. As I said, I don’t expect to see aging-neutrality within my lifetime, but I do think there’s a better-than-50%-chance that Elder A is alive today. Keep in mind that some people born this year are likely to be alive in the 2120s, at which point 120 might be what 100 is today– and that would give the extremely hardy about 15 more years of technological growth.
I believe that, once the first person reaches 150, aging will basically have been eradicated. Whether this happens in 100 years or 500 is relatively uncertain.
This is completely accurate. It’s actually surprising how many drugs succeed in animals but don’t work in a human.
I think that we’ll see a gradual process by which larger components of vital organs are replaceable, until we can build the whole thing artificially. The brain, on the other hand, I think will be impossible. Destruction of the whole brain will always mean death.
Basically agree with most of your comments.
I do believe that the fast growth of computer technology will eventually dominate economic growth, bringing us to an era in which 15%-per-year (or better) world economic growth is a reality.
I predict that the opposite will happen: the rate of improvement in computer hardware technology will slow, rather than the rate of improvement in other technologies increasing.
In fact, regarding single-threaded CPU performance, this already happened about 5 years ago. For multicore, we’ve already hit the practical power consumption/heat dissipation limits unless we are willing to reduce single-threaded performance. Process scaling has stopped giving us “free” clock speed and power improvements. A process shrink gives you much smaller die areas, but only slightly faster clock speeds and modestly reduced power — unlike in the old days where it made everything vastly better.
Oh, there are still a bunch of obscure tricks left, but everything obvious has already been done. Intel and AMD have now both claimed nearly all the performance benefits of integration (putting the memory controller on die; after that the only one left is integrating graphics on die, which will happen within a year). Solid state drives are the other big one that will soon make the transition to mainstream (the only important mechanical component in the PC, the hard drive, dies). There are a few other ones left. But then pretty soon you’re back to the same old “impossible” problems like how to build a better (branch, memory access pattern) predictor.
I also do not forsee any silver bullets in the area of parallel programming. It’s a valuable direction, if only because all the other directions have basically been exhausted, but it’s an incredibly challenging problem.
Further, the computer hardware industry has already made the transition to a pure commodity business. For all practical purposes, everyone supports the same basic feature set; vendors compete on price, performance, and power consumption. It is not a growth industry any more; it’s driven by incremental changes, not disruptive innovations.
My understanding is that, if diamond chips are made, they’ll be able to withstand higher temperatures and faster processors will be available.
As far as anyone knows, silicon remains the only viable semiconductor to build logic and memory circuits out of. Non-silicon-based semiconductors may be useful for building solar panels, but not for computers. Also, it’s not clear that they even help us get past the ~10nm process wall, where the problems have more to do with lithography and quantum mechanics than with the unique properties of silicon.
There may yet be undiscovered breakthroughs that will allow us to build <10nm chips, but no one really knows what they would be at this point. All known solutions don't seem to be viable past the 11nm process node, and we don't have very many years left to find new solutions before Moore's Law dies or at least massively slows down.
Solutions that are not cost-effective are not solutions; while we can theoretically build up transistors one atom at a time, we need a technique like lithography to be able to mass-produce entire wafers of chips affordably.
(I've worked in the computer hardware industry for over 10 years. For more details, you'll have to get in touch with me via email.)
I think, by 2100, there will be superior transportation alternatives, for most purposes, to driving cars.
I should certainly hope so; if nothing else, it’s absolutely ridiculous that a person should have to drive a vehicle as dangerous as a car of today.
My personal favorite “futuristic” transportation technology is PRT. (It’s no longer all that futuristic; several systems are already being built, such as the one at Heathrow Airport.)
But with any of these technologies, you’re still subject to certain basic laws of nature. I don’t see average transportation velocities increasing exponentially holding price constant; if you have any evidence that suggests that they have ever increased in this fashion I’d like to see it. Air travel, for example, most likely does not prove the point because it’s way too expensive, because it isn’t viable for most of our day-to-day trips (which are too short to overcome the per-trip overheads of using an airplane, even prior to the days of TSA stupidity), and because commercial air travel speeds remain subsonic (supersonic air travel having been a commercial failure so far).
You obviously know a lot more about hardware than I do.
What do you think about massively-multicore computing? Do you think 64-, 256-, 1024-core computers will be cheap enough to continue Moore’s Law? I have a friend who agrees that single-threaded Moore’s Law is basically over, but that multicore will take it out into the 2020s at least.
The closest thing we have to a “silver bullet” is functional programming. Concurrency with mutable state is a nightmare, which is why languages like Haskell are getting so much attention. I think, just as GUIs brought object-oriented programming into the mainstream in the mid-90s, concurrency is going to force FP into the mainstream, at least among programmers working on anything performance-critical.
This is a bitch in some ways, because it means that a lot of old, single-threaded C and Fortran libraries will have to be rewritten, and some of those have been optimized/perfected over 50 years. On the other hand, I don’t think concurrency is nearly as hard as people make it out to be if one uses an appropriate language.
With the exception of “embarrassingly parallel” problems, no one knows how to write fast software for multicore systems. 4 cores is already more than most people need for most stuff (for the average person, the Core 2 Duo was a better value than the Core 2 Quad; the new 2-core/4-thread Westmeres will be the sweet spot for most people in this upcoming hardware generation). Beyond 4 cores, most algorithms that involve shared data structures w/ locks start to show poor scaling. Very few people are smart enough to be able to code up correct, efficient lock-free synchronization algorithms.
Higher-level languages, functional or otherwise, won’t be ready in time. You pay such a huge penalty in the “constant factor” for using these languages. They’re great for fast development, but not when you need maximum performance. It’s also wrong to think that functional programming is some kind of silver bullet. There’s the problem of how to partition the workload.
A lot of us who are writing massively multicore software are still using C and pthreads — there’s simply no viable alternative for a lot of problems! As for me, I’m writing lots of assembly code these days.
Regarding process technology, remember that since 45nm started shipping in 2007, Moore’s Law requires 32nm in 2009, 22nm in 2011, 16nm in 2013, and 11nm in 2015. 32nm is no problem, shipments are about to begin imminently. 22nm appears to be on track, there have been several public demos. But 16nm seems at risk and 11nm seems a stretch, and then beyond that, no one seems to have a clue how to go any further. 450mm wafers will give you maybe one more transistor-doubling iteration of Moore’s Law, because you’ll be able to sell chips with larger die sizes affordably.
But even supposing that we keep getting twice as many transistors every year, real-world delivered performance doesn’t scale anywhere close to linearly with transistor count any more for most applications.
I think we’re pretty close to the wall. It will become a software problem and there aren’t enough smart software engineers.
Chemical in sperm ‘may slow ageing process’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6267901/Chemical-in-sperm-may-slow-ageing-process.html
Ha. If I went to bars, I’d print that article out onto a T-shirt and wear it when I went out.
[…] As You Think You Are Posted on November 10, 2009 by Talleyrand A while ago, Cless posted on Immortality. He looks to the near future with hope that it is achievable. His post reads a lot like the […]
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I think you neglected one very important factor – when we invent anti- or reverse aging, we will have to do one of two things: Begin colonizing other planets, or sterilize the majority of the population. The sheer jump in population from people not dying would be staggering and devastating, even at best.
It’s going to suck to be told in a job interview “we’re looking for someone with 200 years previous experience”.