iWrite - Walt the salt takes on the future

According to Stephen Hawking, "Humans are entering a stage of self-designed evolution".  If the rate of technological innovations continues, the portrait of the world will be very different.  There will be technology that completely changes the way we fight wars, the economic stability of the world, and even the role that humans have in the workforce.

Right now wars are fought by soldiers, men that come from a mothers womb, and are conceived by two partners.  In the future, our soldiers won't come from a womb crying, but from an assembly line ready to fight, conceived by other machines overseen by one worker.  Wars will become machine vs. machine, and human loss of life will be collateral damage, or taken just to make the other side quit.  The destruction that will be feasible with all this technology will be unimaginable.  This will make smaller conflicts more common, because they don't cost life that makes the general public freak out.  But big conflicts will change what the world looks like.  We can already see this with the use of UAV's to spot and blow up "hostile" targets, that don't always turn out to be hostile.

By 2020 20% of all data will live on the cloud, interconnected servers containing people from all over the world's information.  This data, according to the EMC corporation (don't ask me what EMC stands for, it's meaning has proved surprisingly elusive to obtain) could be stored on 57.5 billion 32 GB iPads.  This is enough iPads to build "a wall of iPads, 4,005-miles long and 61-feet high extending from Anchorage, Alaska to Miami, Florida."  This would have be guaranteed to have the financial and personal information of most of the first world, which would make identity fraud, just plain stealing from people, and extortion a thousand times easier; if one could hack the servers of course.  This puts the economic stability of the world at risk, but I'm sure that our government will promise that it will be able to protect it, and we all know that what the government promises they always deliver on.

By 2035, it is predicted that robots will be able to completely replace humans in the work force.  No more assembly line jobs, no more cashiers, no more garbage men, etc.  There will still be a few jobs in oversight of the robots, and research and development to create new and improved ones, but most of the jobs we know now won't be here then.  This creates two possibilities: 1) We get bored, start to fight over petty things, and a world war starts, there is anarchy everywhere, and the apocalypse begins.  or 2) There is a new age of prosperity with a golden age of culture, one that would rival that of the Romans.  My moneys on number one knowing what most people are like nowadays.

Shout out to networkworld.com for the information on technology in the future