What the...?

So I thought I'd install wxPython on my workstation, so I can run SoulSeek at work. After it had been compiling steadily for over three hours I started wondering how big the thing was anyway. I mean, it's just bindings between Python and WxWindows. How large can it be?

The answer is that it is over one million lines of C++. How the fuck can GUI bindings for a script language be that enormous? What does it all do?

Predicting the future

A week ago I roughly described my Godfire campaign background, and pinkdormouse commented that she would've set it 40 years further forward than I did, which would put it in 2085 rather than 2045.

2045 is 42 years from now. If we go that far back instead of forward, we end up in 1961. In 1961, colour TV was still high tech (having been first introduced only seven years before, in 1954). Computers were big, hulking brutes tended by men in white coats. Computer games hadn't been invented yet (the first one, Spacewar, was written in 1962). High-speed communication used by news bureaus was telex, which I suspect that many of you reading this have never seen in real life. Ponder this: it worked at 50 bps, and was considered fast. Compare that to the old slow-as-molasses 28800 bps modem you've got tossed in the back of the closet since it's so outmoded you can't even give it away for free. It was a pretty rare business that owned a computer in
1961. At I rough guess, I'd say that the iPaq I carry around in my
pocket has more computing power than all the computers on the continent of North America had together back then. Not to mention that its graphics and sound capabilites far outstrips anything that existed then. Heck, in that regard it beats systems that cost a few hundred thousand bucks in 1980.

Consider satellite TV. Consider cheap and easily available worldwide phone calls. Consider the Internet. Try to count the number of things you use every day that has a microprocessor in it. There are far more of those than you suspect. The washing machine in the basement where I live has much more computer power than the first computer I owned had. By the way, thinking about that old machine, my current computer (which is almost two years old and getting to feel sluggish) has one million times more RAM than it had. My computer also has about a hundred times as much diskspace as all the harddisks in Dell Sweden's warehouse had together in 1990. All the disks in the running computers in that building at that time didn't add up to a gigabyte. We sold computers then that had much less diskspace than my iPaq has RAM.

You get the picture. In 42 years we've gone from hardly any computer power at all and communication insignificantly faster than human speech to me looking stuff up on Google on my handheld computer via wireless Internet. In 42 years, we've gone from my parents maybe knowing people two towns down the road to me talking to you right here and now.

And there we get to what I feel is the most significant development in all this long rant. The number of people that I can potentially communicate with is many orders of magnitude larger than it would've been four decades ago. It's much easier for me to talk to my friends in England than it was for my father to talk to his friends in the neighbouring town. This has social consequences. My parents still think it's pretty weird that I have friends I've never met. For my youngest cousin, it's not just not weird, it's perfectly normal and to be expected. I've seen it claimed (and I tend to believe) that the speed of social change is roughly proportional to the speed of communication between people. Over the past four decades, the speed of interpersonal communication has increased enormously. It would be strange if this didn't reflect on society.

The next piece of the puzzle is this: the rate of change in communication speed is increasing. Over here, the Internet went from unknown to ubiquitous in roughly seven years. Always-on broadband connections have gone from almost unknown to 40% market share in two. Wireless is coming, and it's coming fast. It's been the case for years that any computer that you can actually buy and get delivered is already outdated.

I expect the next step in interpersonal communication will be to go from today's instant world-wide in certain locations (those locations were you have access to an internet-connected computer) to instant world-wide and always present. Practical wearable computers and high-speed wireless networking already exist, all that remains is to make them cheap.

In other words, I expect the rate of communication in the future to be even faster than it is today. Which means that the rate of social change is also going to increase.

But that's just computers! There are other technologies out there!

A few years ago, on the train from Linköping to Stockholm, I happened to sit just in front of two medical doctors on their way home from a conference. They spent almost the entire trip discussing a talk they'd been attending, a talk on possible vectors to introduce and activate new DNA in already mature and working cells. I remember this quite clearly, because I had recently bought a roleplaying supplement called GURPS Biotech, which discusses exactly the same thing -- except that they had it placed as being developed around the year 2100. Those doctors were talking about developing it now, in laboratories that I can see from where I sit and type this.

I don't know much about biotechnology, but I've got the impression that it's in roughly the same position that the field of computers was in in 1961. And on the horizon beyond that, we have people already working on nanotechnology.

So. 2045, as I see it. Computers are more advanced over today's than today's are over those of 1961. Biotechnology is fully mature, which is likely to have brought at least as much change as computers and communication has brought between 1961 and today (since it'll have synergistic effects from computing to help it). Nanotechnology has a number of commercial applications, and is on the verge of large-scale breakthrough. The social effects of these changes are extremely hard to predict.

Another forty years beyond that, in 2085. I don't even want to guess which technologies are breaking through, and I fully expect society to be impossible to understand by me as I am today. At some point during those 40 years, a combination of computertech, biotech and nanotech will almost certainly result in practical intelligence amplification. And once we have that, the Vingean Singularity is very close and the dawn of the transhuman era is at hand.

Unless we manage to genocide ourselves first, that is.