Episode description

Celebrating the new decade with a summary of the changes your host expects we will see during the next ten years.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the January 6, 2010 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 35 minutes] This was recorded on January 2, 2010.

Topics: All human knowledge will be available online; the brilliant new movie Avatar (and why my friends Extropia DaSilva and Khannea Suntzu insisted I watch it in 3D on an IMAX); free-roaming surgical robots smaller than insects will allow surgeons to perform delicate operations which are impossible today; cheap solar cells will be everywhere but cheap battery technology may lag behind and limit their potential (temporarily); the long bitter fight against TV moving online has begun and may get ugly; Amazon's Kindle and the inevitable fall of the giant chain book stores; why World of Warcraft will avoid becoming photorealistic; why old municipal waste dumps will become the new gold mines; Fareed Zakaria's recent guest who advocated a geoengineering solution to global warming, thus placing the regulation of the earth's temperature under direct human control; why luddism may become popular and maybe even trendy; professional genealogists as a group will be shamed, discredited and ridiculed as charlatans when personal DNA testing becomes widespread and shows that their work is riddled with errors; the Chinese government will have to make a choice soon, and if they get it wrong many Chinese will suffer and die. Other topics include: human life expectancy, artificial intelligence, the Internet, cell phones, voice recognition, The Singularity, cleaning robots, and why movie theaters will remain popular even though we'll get a better seat, sound and image in our home theaters.