The World of 2029

Yuli Ban · Feb 11, 2019

What 2029 will look like (as predicted by a STEM/machine learning professor)
From Starspawn0 on the FutureTimeline forums.

Ok, so here is what I think the world will look like in 2029. I decided to take an “optimistic view”; I could have taken a more conservative view, but that would make it boring. I fully expect some large percent of the things I write won’t come to pass.

Here’s what the typical day of someone (not a yuppie, not a rich person, not a poor person) in 2029 will be like; for the sake of brevity, I will refer to them as “you”: you wake up in the morning, and are greeted by your virtual assistant:

Assistant: Good morning. It’s time to get ready for work. Based on what I heard during your day yesterday, and from your emails, I see you have a meeting at 9:30 to discuss the new construction plans. Would you like me to summarize the key points that would come up?

You: That’s ok. We discussed it yesterday. Can you tell me how long the meeting will last?

Assistant: Probably about 1 hour. That’s how long the last meeting lasted when you discussed similar material.

You: Hmm… it’s going to be a boring day.

Assistant: In that case, you definitely should have some coffee to perk you up. I could make some for you.

You: Yeah, go ahead.

And the Assistant activates your kitchen robot and coffeemaker. The robot places a cup in the machine, and starts the process. It then goes to the freezer, pulls out a frozen bagel, and pops it into the microwave. After it is heated, it pulls it out, smears on some cream cheese, and puts it on a plate on the dinner table.

The robot is vaguely humanoid, but very rudimentary; it is, however, reasonably efficient at completing small tasks, like moving objects, pushing buttons, fetching items from the fridge and cabinet. It can also clean off a table, vacuum the floors, and do some very basic tidying-up. It can’t make your bed, do your laundry, fold clothes, clean your toilet, fix plumbing problems, or many other things; though, there are more high-end models that can do many of these. The bot cost about $10,000; though, the most impressive part of it is its software brain. Getting robots to the point where they could do all those basic tasks was a Herculean effort, comparable in difficulty to building high-performing self-driving cars; billions of dollars were involved, massive amounts of computation devoted to “cloud robotics”, and millions of cumulative man-hours of work by thousands of engineers. All those years of improvements in computer vision, navigation, planning, and grasping / dexterous manipulation added up what would have seemed like pure science fiction just 10 years ago -- but, now, people take it for granted.

After eating breakfast, your assistant asks you on the way out the door, “You’re getting low on coffee. I could order some for you, if you want. Would you like me to?” You say “yes”, and it places the order. An hour later, while you are away at work, a little sidewalk robot wheels it up to your front porch, drops it off, and your house robot collects it, and puts it away.

The assistant is so good at these basic conversations that, sometimes, you wonder if it is alive. You can even have some basic conversations about movies, books, and people / celebrities, and it seems to always have intelligent things to say. It does sometimes screw up, and say things that no human would ever utter; but it does seem like another couple years of improvement, and it will be passing a full Turing Test. It can even answer questions about all your old emails and books, as well as a human. However, if you ask it something that requires being inventive or applying sophisticated reasoning, it just says, “I’m sorry, I can’t do that.” Sometimes it’s hard to tell what it can and cannot do.

On your way out the door in the morning, you hop into your electric car, and notice that your route is already planned. The car starts itself, and drives you all the way there -- you don’t have to even touch the steering wheel the whole time. You are lucky to live in one of the geo-fenced areas where your car can work at full autonomy, even in heavy rain and with lots of pedestrians milling about. About 5% of the cars you see in your neighborhood are similarly electric; and most of the newer cars have at least Level 3 self-driving features. Yours is a Level 4 car. It cost about $35,000.

On your way to work, you notice lots of drones flitting overhead. Some are news crew drones, some are for the police, some are responding to emergencies, some are delivering packages -- all manner of uses.

You also notice many different types of robots on the street. There are little robots wheeling packages to people’s houses; some are cleaning up the street; some are police-bots patrolling the neighborhood; others are carrying things for people. You fleetingly remember how people said that the future will feel like the future when you see robots walking down the street -- well, you see that now, but it doesn’t feel that futuristic. It’s just part of the scenery, like how Lime Scooters became part of the scenery by 2020.

A few hours later, after your day at work, and once back home, you decide you want to relax and listen to some music. You put on your Brain-Computer Interface device, and listen to some suggestions by your assistant. As you listen, your assistant learns what you don’t like about the selections, and improves; and within a few tries, it finds the perfect music.

After about a half-hour of listening, you decide to play a video game. Being a minimalist, you don’t have TV or monitor -- you prefer to watch using with your Mixed Reality Glasses (a mixture of VR and AR). You put them on, in your living room, and disappear into another world, rendered at very high resolution with holographic sound and 6-degree-of-freedom tracking, and projected with light-field optics. “So realistic… and light as a pair of glasses. How did they ever fit all of that technology into such a compact device?!” you say to yourself, even after several years of experiencing cutting-edge VR/AR.

The game system -- which uses your home computer network for doing the computational heavy-lifting -- projects your arms and legs perfectly into the virtual world, using input from your BCI + cameras, which can also be used to give your game character superpowers. There are no clumsy drop-down menus or remembering what controller buttons and movements to make -- if you want to cast any of 100 spells or fly away at an odd angle, you just think it, and it happens.

Some games use your brain input to maximize enjoyment. If the game system reads that you are bored, it will try to make it more exciting -- perhaps by changing the scenery, music, monsters, whatever suits your mood. Likewise, if you are confused -- for example, that you don’t know exactly where you are in a dungeon -- it will notice, and offer to help, if you have the game set to “novice”.

After an hour of bliss on a faraway planet, you decide to return to the real world.

Your assistant says, “You’ve spent a lot of time in VR by yourself this week. I suggest you play with some of your friends next time. How about I set up a dinner-and-movie outing tomorrow night with your neighbors? You can talk to them about your gaming experiences.” You say, “Ok, but make it Friday at 6:00.” Your assistant calls them, like Google Duplex only several generations better, and sets it up for you.

Time for bed. You lie down, and your Assistant turns off the lights, makes sure the door is locked, and says, “Good night. See you tomorrow morning.”

….
Click to expand...

Yuli Ban · Feb 11, 2019

In addition to all that, I think we can expect, by 2029:

# AI doctors that not only can diagnose basic illnesses reasonably well, like Babylon Health’s system can right now, but also systems that can even diagnose pretty much every illness, by interviewing patients, reading doctors notes, medical scans, and more. Doctors will say that the human touch is irreplaceable, and they might be right -- but at least for the diagnosis and medicine recommendations, AI systems will be on-par or better. They will even know to ask the right questions and read the emotional response of patients, like a well-trained doctor. Doctors might be superior, still, at improvising -- coming up with a creative solution to a tough problem. And they might be better at looking at the big picture, and weighing options, given the surrounding context that may be hard to process.

# There will be all kinds of media-synthesis Deep Learning-based systems. They will be able to generate realistic videos (that already exists, if you give it the rough outlines of what it is supposed to generate -- but by 2029, the systems won’t even need that); realistic 3D VR scenes, perhaps even ones with animation; very high quality pieces of music (so good people would buy them); news article synthesis (this already exists, but it is based on templates -- in the future, the AI system won’t need templates, and will write news articles from scratch. 10 to 11 years is a LONG time, enough to where there are sure to be breakthroughs); essay and argument-generation (again, already exists in some form); short story-synthesis. I am basing this on the rapid improvements in GAN technology, along with recent advances like the BERT system designed at Google. I also foresee brain data being used to improve AI, which will provide an independent approach to these very hard problems.

# Machine Translation will be so good in 2029 that humans will only be needed for very delicate stuff, like interpreting a novel, taking into account cultural sensitivities and subtleties. These kinds of translations are far from “literal”. Business and legal translations, though, will be done almost 100% by machine.

# Brain-Computer Interfaces will have so many uses that it’s hard to even begin to list them all. They will be used to improve education (e.g. to pinpoint exactly what people are getting stuck on), improve video game experience (as I described above), improve psychological diagnosis (to help model what is going wrong in the brain), improve AI, improve people’s writing (e.g. you could maybe describe an argument or a few paragraphs of a story, in words, and the AI would combine that with your brain data to build a cleaned-up version), and even to make it much easier to write computer code (e.g. you describe what you want a program to do, and the AI listens and combines that with your brain scan to help disambiguate, so that it doesn’t have to ask many follow-up questions, to figure out what your program is suppose to do). Some of these will be here in 10 years -- others may take longer. Hard to predict…

# Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality will be perfect. You’ll put on glasses-like devices (maybe cupped around the eyes) in a dark room, and get holographic sound and full light-field, high-resolution images. It will be multiple levels more advanced than anything we have today. And the software to run it will also be a lot more sophisticated. Various tricks will be used to reduce the computational load, while also upping the realism. Neural net-based approximate ray-tracing is one example.

# We’ll see lots of restaurants with virtual / automated cashiers. There are several companies working on this right now; and by 2029 it will be perfected. You’ll walk up to a flat screen (like many fast food restaurants are experimenting with right now), and tell a virtual robot your order. It will even understand you if you stutter or change your mind, or ask for modifications.

# Biometric tech will be perfected by 2029. Face recognition will be essentially better than human in just about every way you want to measure it. I’m not sure whether people will allow it to be used everywhere; there may be laws in place prohibiting it. But it is so convenient, that people might not complain that much. You could walk into a store, and just take things off the shelves without interacting with a human, and your account will get charged. Look to China for the future of this technology.

# With the continuing rapid decline in cost of sensors, actuators and other robot components, with rapid advances in Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning applied to specific robotics tasks (like grasping), with further advances in battery tech, and further improvements in computing power per dollar (Moore’s Law), I think robots of 2029 will do some amazing things. I’ve already discussed home robots; but I think they will also be deployed en masse to do things like: assist in trash cleanup (on public streets and in parks), janitorial work, firefighting, security / policing, and construction work. It’s possible -- though, I wouldn’t want to put a probability estimate on it -- that there were will general-purpose robots that can build entire buildings from scratch. It would require breaking the task down into a large number of sub-tasks, each of which would be completed in a semi-structured environment. I don’t think we would see such a robot being widely deployed by 2029; only that experimental versions would exist -- headline in Wired magazine reads, “Robot builds building from scratch.”

# Speaking of sensor tech, I think there will be tiny, flat, ultra low-power (down around 2 milliwatts, 13 frames per second, streaming; other experimental cameras are measured in microwatts!) cameras everywhere, streaming content to the web. Prototypes already exist -- there are several papers on this that came out in the past 2 years. 10 more years of improvement will do wonders for that technology. It will be a scary time to be alive for people obsessed about their privacy!

# So much is going to change with the tech landscape that I can’t even imagine what it will do to shopping. There will probably still be some malls and brick-and-mortar stores; but with further gains by online shopping, drone and robot-delivery, and cahierless stores (Amazon Go), their character is probably going to change a lot. Small, locally-owned stores will still be around, and may actually thrive. Larger stores are a another matter.

# Energy? More gains from solar -- further cost-reductions and efficiency improvements to PVs, and the same for battery technology and converters and inverters. Nuclear may make a comeback; and there may be some breakthroughs in fusion -- hard to know for sure.

# Space? Probably a few moon missions and more satellites. Maybe there will be an asteroid or moon-mining mission or two. Oh, and there will be another robot or two on Mars.

# Geopolitics? China will be ahead of the U.S. in tech-deployment, and will be seen as a potential serious threat. They will be so big and powerful that we won’t have much leverage over them. Russia will probably decline even further, though may stabilize. Large parts of Africa will continue to see rapid economic growth. Europe will have about the same level of growth they’ve always had -- nothing to write home about. Japan may make a comeback; and Korea may rise further. India will also see a lot of growth, but not at the rate of China. South America is going to be plagued by more little wars -- dictators, socialists, capitalists, all fighting for dominion. Saudi Arabia will decline; Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, and other countries might rise. It’s such a volatile area, though, that it’s hard to know for sure.

# There will be an AI arms race, as China and the U.S. try to add more and more AI to their weapons and defense systems. There will be killer drones and probably some type of killer robot, at least as an experimental weapon.

That’s about all for now. There are probably lots of caveats and clarifications I should have mentioned; but life is too short to qualify everything.
Click to expand...

Yuli Ban · Feb 11, 2019

I actually did the same thing three years ago, and it's interesting how close both of our predictions are:

Meet Oliver and Samantha Jones. They are a normal American couple—white, middle class, socially liberal, and on the sunny side of 30. They have two kids— 8 year old Benjamin and 3 year old Miranda— and a nice home in New Jersey. Oliver works as a general manager of a popular restaurant, while Samantha works at home as a full time writer. What a life! Is this the American Dream so many have sought? Perhaps. Yet perhaps few dreamt life would be like this…

As Oliver prepares himself for the day, he calls out, “Will it rain today?”
Suddenly, a female voice answers, “No. The forecast calls for a 60% chance of rain beginning at approximately 7 PM and lasting until noon tomorrow. However, there will be an impenetrable blanket of gray throughout the afternoon.”
“Any sunshine this morning?”
“Yes. It is partly cloudy at the present moment, so the sun is shining brightly.”
Oliver grins and says, “Ah, that’s good. You know, I really hate rain.”
“You’ve mentioned this, Ollie. I still don’t understand, what is it about rain that upsets you?”
Oliver makes a peculiar hand motion, as if rubbing his head. “It gets my hair wet. I barely like getting it wet in the shower.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“You noticed!”
This is Dawn, the Jones’s artificially intelligent Virtual Home Assistant. Everybody has one these days, it seems, and they’ve become just as protected by families as the houses themselves. Home insurance doesn’t cover them, though, so Oliver pays for ‘virtual assistant insurance.’
Dawn is present throughout many of the Jones’s appliances. Their fridge, for example. Dawn knows there are several products that must always be stocked, and conducts random checks every hour or so. Not uniformly. That’s the thing with Dawn— she isn’t stupid. At first, Dawn always checked whenever the fridge door had been opened and then closed. Then little Miranda put this learned behavior to the test by opening and closing the door repeatedly every few seconds. Dawn learned quickly.
Ben is up and at the table eating a toaster pastry. Down the stairs come Samantha.
Samantha’s wearing a big smile as she says, “Morning, sweetie.”
“Morning, mom.”
She walks into the kitchen, and stands next to a counter. There’s a gentle little whirring just next to her— it is a coffee maker grabbing a mug. “You see the time?”
“Yeah, it’s on here.” Ben taps his glasses. Samantha can faintly see the colors of whatever video game he’s playing.
She knows that glasses can do incredible things these days. Why, just the other day, she bought a new pair and discovered it could hold every single one of her favorite video games she had played as a child, and still have almost all of its storage free.
These new games, though, she won’t even touch. Like the one her little Ben is playing— he’s wearing an inconspicuous clear hand on his head, and that’s how he plays his games. Goodness, when she was his age, she had to deal with wires and controllers, and yet kids these days play video games with their minds…!
The coffee’s done. The mug slides out of the maker and she takes a sip. Delicious.
Oliver comes downstairs.
“Ollie, can you pick up some more printing wax? Dawn says we’re out.”
He says, “Cool,” and kisses her on the lips. He adds, “Also, check your contacts. I left you something.”
In walks Moville. It’s a robot who is clearly a descendant of Honda’s ASIMOseries. All its motions are graceful and lifelike, and it walks exactly like a human. Its body is white and sleek, with few obvious joints, though it has ASIMO’s classic head. The only difference is the digital face.
“Hello, Ollie!” it says, carrying his sweater. Oliver puts on the sweater and then feels something clawing at his pantleg. It’s their puppy dog, Max. “How are you feeling this morning?”
“Pretty good.” With a slight nod, he asks, “You walked Max?”
“I have.
We move onto Miranda, who is brushing her teeth. She’s set aside a pink teddy bear.
The teddy bear speaks, “Don’t forget to get all those nasty germs!”
“I will!” Miranda brushes even harder.
She finishes and runs downstairs to meet Oliver before he leaves, jumping into his arms. He swings her in and gives her a big hug.
“Mornin’, Miranda. Take good care of the house while I’m gone.”
“I can’t do that!”
“Course y’can.”
Dawn speaks, “That’s my job, Ollie.”
Samantha sits down at her computer desk in her office and logs into her blogger account. Immediately, she receives a message.
A bubble pops up, and a male voice speaks, “Hello, world and hello, Sam! Chui here. Your blog got 204 new subscribers yesterday following your post, ‘Giving Vyrd the Bird.’ You’ve earned a sizable $199 yesterday.”
Sam does a little cheer, “Awesome!”
“The most touted parts, and the parts where readers’ screens lingered the longest, was the eighth paragraph, a new record for you.”
“Hey, at least people are reading further.”
“Lol, I know, right? Maybe you should rehost your earlier content to get them to read further in, too.”
Click to expand...

Yuli Ban · Feb 11, 2019

Inside Oliver’s car, a similar exchange takes place.
“Would you like to hear the news?” a female voice asks. This is Isabella.
“Sure. Top 10.” Oliver is keen to keep his eyes on the environment, but he’s gotten sloppy at this in recent days because his car is just so good at it.
“Top news: Vyrdist movement expands exponentially as unemployed workers forcibly take control of workplaces. Scattered violence against automation has been reported, but for the most part the expropriators use automation for their own welfare. Business owners are running to the federal government for help in quelling violence. The president may be forced to make a decision within days.”
“I don’t get why people would do that. All you have to do is apply for a government issued income, that’s it.”
“The Vyrd movement claims workers should own automation themselves, and adherents do not take kindly to being dependent upon the government.
Number two: stock markets have plunged 400 points.”
“You know, I grew up in an era where that was common. Still remember 2008 and ‘9, when it was everyday news that the Dow gained 300 or lost 500 or whatever. And my parents freaked out, but I didn’t see what was so scary. I dunno, I barely feel anything and I feel I should be more concerned.”
“Considering you’re a child of the millennium, it stands to reason that you are not phased by such news. What was it like, Ollie?”
Oliver pulses his hands and says, “Well, I didn’t have systems like you, for one, so I didn’t really know what was going on. Then again, I was only 8 years old. Literally the same age as Ben is now, and I don’t think he gives a damn about the stock market. Do you?”
Isabella laughs and says, “No. It is beyond him.”
“No, I mean do you care?”
A pause.
“I don’t think it’s something worth worrying about.”
“Exactly! Wall Street’s so disconnected from Main Street, who really cares?”
Chui and Isabella aren’t people. They’re artificial intelligences, powered by a combination of the cloud and deep learning. They’re also subsets of the larger Dawn system.
Stopping by at Oliver’s New York workplace is a coworker who has no biological arms or legs. He had lost them in a terrible terrorist attack several years prior— in fact, the reason why New York City seems to be under this permanent, Big Brother-esque lockdown— and got replacements. Cybernetics that are cheap through 3D printing as well as powerful and versatile. For example, shaking hands is not an awkward and stilted act, but feels entirely natural.
“I even play some old school Xbox 360 these days, just to bring back memories.” Indeed, and he can play without any noticeable difference from a person with biological limbs.
At school, Ben has several classes, but they’ve all begun melting into the same event: using virtual and augmented reality for lessons. It’s easy to visualize things when you have actual visuals, after all.
Ben let out a cheesy but true “That’s awesome!” when he first met Abraham Lincoln in person. It’s this being able to see things with his own eyes that has Ben most excited about school.
He remembers the horror stories his father told him…
“When I was a kid,” Oliver began, “we didn’t have VR in schools. I can still remember the day the Oculus Rift came out, and I was already in my junior year in high school. There was none of that growing up. Maybe a smart board here and there, and there were at least computers, but we didn’t have these Star Trek experiences you have now.”
Ben still doesn’t quite grasp the depth of his father’s words, but he doesn’t need to. As long as the schooling’s fun, it’s alright.
And then there’s Miranda. Out of all the Jones’s, her life has already been the most interesting. She was born with a medical malady where her lungs were deformed and she couldn’t properly breathe. Rather than let her suffer, her parents had her receive bionic lungs, partially 3D printed. They’ve worked well, though she’s close to needing repairs.
And that sounds odd to Samantha, the thought that a human being ‘needs repairs.’ Sure, medicine could be seen as fundamentally the same thing, but it still sounds so sci-fi to mention humans needing literal mechanical repairs.
My daughter is a cyborg, she thinks. It’s not visibly obvious with her. Then again, the cybernetics of modern times is a Borg’s nightmare. Samantha has met many cyborgs in her life, and not one looked like the traditional image of a cyborg— wires sticking out, obviously mechanical limbs, and a collective desire to assimilate.
Same thing with Miranda. She’s an otherwise absolutely normal little girl. And that’s what gets Samantha.
Oliver and Samantha had been discussing it among themselves for a full year now, and they still haven’t reached an agreement. Though they’ve toyed with sending Miranda to a pre-K school, they’re wholly unsure if admitting her to school is the right thing to do.
Samantha recalls the discussion they had last night in bed.
Oliver was tired, and kept trying to slip off to sleep, but she quizzed him multiple times to keep his eyes open.
“I think having that real world social interaction would be a good thing for her,” Samantha went.
“She can get pretty much the same thing in VR.”
“Pretty much the same thing isn’t the same thing.”
“It would still be a waste of her and our time. There’s nothing she can learn at school she can’t learn from home, and besides, what skill is she gonna learn?”
Samantha rolled over in her bed and thought to herself, Something in the arts, maybe?
“Exactly,” Oliver said, responding to the silence. “Whatever she learns’ll just get automated away by the time she graduates.”
That’s not to say Oliver was always against sending Miranda to school, or even that Samantha was always for it. It always seems like, whenever they take a position, the other side takes up the opposite position for that day. And it’s a choice that affects a life.
Miranda was born right on time. The iGeneration had come of age, taking up from the Millennials before them, and iGenners spawned a new generation. This generation, already being called ‘Generation Alpha’. Not to be confused with Generation Z (the iGeneration), it’s becoming more and more apparent with every passing day just what the ‘Alpha’ stands for.
With Oliver watching his workload be done by machines and algorithms; with Samantha letting algorithms write much of her material; with Ben interacting more with holograms and virtual personalities than real teachers— automation.
Generation Alpha is the first generation that will not be expected to work for a living. Whoever Gen A spawn in the 2040s and ’50s, they will be born into a world as different from Millennials and iGenners as the world of the 2020s is for the Baby Boomers and Gen Xers. Except moreso.
It is this age of storm and stress, Sturm und Drang, that divides what came before with what will come now. These three generations— the Millennials, the iGeneration, and Generation Alpha— are the dividing line between the age of labor and the age of leisure.
It is this conflict that plays out over Miranda’s future. Why send her to school, indeed!
Currently, there are still a great mass of jobs out there, but Miranda won’t be in the workforce until the 2040s at earliest. The AI of then is expected to be galaxies beyond the AI of now— and Samantha, who always had the keenest of interest in this things, knows that present day AI is quite capable.
This is the world of 2029 on a more personal level. There are still so many things we can recognize, but that is the nature of life. We can recognize many aspects from the daily life of a person in ancient Sumeria. Until transhumanism dominates, that isn’t going to change.
Nevertheless, the world is changing. The transition from high technology to ultrahigh technology has begun.
Click to expand...

So now the question is: what are your predictions?

paulrichards1203 · Apr 9, 2019

I never trust what people say about the future. Otherwise Flying Cars would exist.

Nadernad · Apr 9, 2019

after the rock's failure of a second term, an actually smart, kind, and thoughtful becomes the president. We go on a roll and leaders of major countries are kinder and smarter all around the world. ignorance is killed off slowly, and everything is better. But thats like a nat20 future.

Yuli Ban · Apr 9, 2019

paulrichards1203 said: ↑

I never trust what people say about the future. Otherwise Flying Cars would exist.
Click to expand...

Passenger drone

TravisBach · Apr 10, 2019

I'm curious about the mind-controlled VR game haha. Like, is the technology for mentally controlling stuff coming along so well that we're inside the 10-year "vaporware" horizon?

Log in or Sign up

The World of 2029

Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

paulrichards1203 Level 2 (Initiate) Citizen

Nadernad guy who reads litrpg instead of sleeping Roleplaying Beta Reader Citizen Aspiring Writer

Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

TravisBach Level 15 (Guardian) LitRPG Author Citizen

Share This Page