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The World In 2030 - 2012 Edition is Ray Hammond's completely rewritten and updated version of the work first published in 2007.
The book is a comprehensive survey of the trends that are going to shape life over the next two decades.
The following section is an extract
from the Executive Summary of the book:
The speed of technological development is accelerating exponentially and, for this reason, by the
year 2030 it will seem as if a whole century’s worth
of progress has taken place in the first three decades
of the 21st century.
By 2030 it will appear as if a mass of dizzying
scientific breakthroughs have suddenly been made
simultaneously – in computing, in healthcare, in
communications, in wealth generation, in materials
performance (including smart plastics), in travel
and in robotics.
In many ways, life in 2030 will be
unrecognisable compared with life today.
But not all of the changes in the world are going
to be beneficial.
Climate change, already the cause
of extreme and unpredictable weather around the
world, will almost certainly have worsened by
2030. Even if the world magically stopped emitting
greenhouse gases today, those gases emitted over
the last thirty years will continue to influence the
Earth’s atmosphere deleteriously until the middle of
the 21st century. For this reason, solving the problem
of climate change must be seen as humankind’s
greatest and most important challenge over the next
twenty-five years.
Any exercise in futurology is a process of identifying
key trends in the present and then extrapolating
from them in a systematic way in order to discern
how they may affect our future. This approach can
yield useful results over a period limited to the next
twenty-five years but beyond that point lies a barrier
which inhibits our ability to speculate meaningfully
about humanity’s longer-term future.
(continued in next column.)
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Most of the world’s futurists, futurologists and
computer scientists agree that at some point
between 2030 and 2040 a milestone in technological development will be reached that will cause a
rupture, a complete disjoint, in human evolution.
Around this time we will build the first computer that
is the intellectual equal of a human. Because of the
accelerating, exponential nature of technological
development (fuelled entirely by faster and richer
information flows) it follows that a short time after
that we will be assisted by our super-intelligent
computers to build a machine twice as clever as the
most capable human. Shortly after will appear a
machine four times as clever as a human, then eight times as clever, then sixteen times as clever, and so on.
This projected point in future human history is
called ‘The Singularity’ by futurists and futurologists
because once super-intelligent machines begin to
take over the task of technological development it is
expected that progress will be so rapid, and will take such unforeseeable directions, that it is pointless
to speculate
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