At the final session of the All-Russian Civil Forum, former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin outlined his position on a number of issues in the economy and society of today's Russia, and also drew some features of the Russia of the future, which, in his opinion, should be strived for in the coming decades.
The head of the Civil Initiatives Committee expressed his opinion in a discussion with other forum participants. Edition Znak.com collected the main theses from his speeches. According to the journalists of the publication, these are not direct quotes, but a synopsis.
In the next 20 years, the society that will be able to mobilize the possibilities of human individuality, human abilities will be the most effective. We are moving on to the “knowledge economy” – these are familiar words, but in Russia they don’t think much about them. We are talking about such a management principle that allows people to show their individual capabilities, the capabilities of a human creator. This is a society that will create new ideas, meanings, technologies. Together, new organizations and new products will emerge.
AT developed countries ah, 6-9% of the population work in the creative industry (which can include programmers). We have about 0.5%. Our task is to create creative opportunities and spaces for the growth of this number.
iPhone is 30% engineering and mathematical thought, and 70% design, creating a dialogue between machine and society. The further, the more all technical work will be done by robots, and people will be able to be creative, including creating even more effective ways to communicate with machines.
Technology will soon replace many of the functions of the state. Blockchain technologies can almost completely replace government bureaucracy. The society will be able to resolve various issues on its own, fix contracts and agreements.
If we want to be a competitive society with high level life, we need to meet the challenges of a new technological revolution. To answer them, we must have more freedom - freedom for human creators, including in terms of cultural and social preferences. To be respected and strong (even militarily), we must be free and creative. Are we ready to pave the way to this life and abandon the limitations of archaism that threaten us today? This is the main question of the day.
From TV screens we hear unfounded, as a rule, anti-Western rhetoric. The people who say this have absolutely no idea how it works. modern world. Powerful horizontal connections have already been formed between people, between organizations and businessmen. Our industry, including the military, is 40-50% dependent on the import of technology from abroad. We sell a fairly simple product and buy very complex ones. And this is the work of a large professional community, financiers, businessmen, these are thousands and millions of connections. This area absolutely does not correspond to the rhetoric that is present on our TV channels.
In our country, there are now significantly fewer geopolitical or military risks than the risk of technological or social backwardness. Our infant mortality rate is four times higher than in neighboring Finland. This is what you need to do to be successful. The question is - how do we get to this?
Society is divided into disparate groups that do not trust each other. We must connect these groups, we need to build bridges between them. We need to increase trust in each other, this is one of the key tasks.
It is important for us to change the status of an entrepreneur so that there are heroes among this community and they are respected in society. This will require a change in tradition. For decades, a negative attitude towards entrepreneurs has been brought up. But without this change, reality will not change.
Our society is aging. The state will not be able to bear the full burden of its support. Part of this burden will be taken over by society itself - business, NGOs. Russian businessmen are already investing in universities. We do not yet have a single university bearing the name of a major entrepreneur, but soon they will appear.
More is now spent on preparing for the World Cup than on equipping university laboratories. And it's a disaster. But at the same time, large construction projects inspire some optimism: we can, if necessary, lean in and do it. Were you able to do Sochi? Let's jump in and make our universities technically the best in the world. Let's set such a task.
The developed world is moving towards a basic guaranteed income. Many countries are discussing this possibility. And the “tax on parasitism” proposed in Russia is a movement in the opposite direction. This is a purely fiscal and inhumane measure that runs counter to the global trend.
The USSR collapsed not because of a weak army or a weak KGB. It collapsed due to an inefficient economy. And today, the risks that led to the collapse of the USSR exist in Russia as well. I hope this doesn't happen. Experts say that the current military potential guarantees that no one will mess with Russia for decades to come. Therefore, butting in the geopolitical arena is largely a game. We need to overcome the technological gap, and this is what will allow us to save the country.
http://maxpark.com/community/5652/content/5562278#share
Experts from the American National Intelligence Council in the report "Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds" predict that in 20 years the world will be radically different from today.
According to American intelligence officers, Japan will also fall into decline.
And the governments of the countries will receive "an unprecedented opportunity to monitor their citizens."
According to the report, in 20 years the world's population will increase by 1.2 billion people and reach 8.3 billion. The demand for food products will increase by 35%, the demand for water, as well as for energy carriers, will almost double. Some continents and regions, such as and , are likely to experience severe food and water shortages.
The author of the article ironically notes that experts, unfortunately, do not predict “flying cars”. However, adherents of technological progress should be pleased with unmanned vehicles, which, according to the speakers, will help solve the problem of urban traffic congestion and reduce the number of people.
However, as the document says, the ubiquitous use of communications technology will not only allow people to unite and challenge the government, as was the case during "", but will also give governments an "unprecedented opportunity".
As for the developed countries, they will cede global influence to rapidly developing economies. The role of such states as India, Brazil, as well as regional economies such as Colombia, Indonesia, South Africa, Turkey. In the next 15-20 years, the development of new technologies will also most likely take place in developing countries as international companies will focus predominantly on such rapidly growing markets.
By 2030, the Chinese economy is very likely to overtake the US economy, and Asia will overtake North America and Europe combined in terms of global influence, cites a thesis from the Voice of America report. Pax Americana, the era of American dominance on the world stage that began in 1945, is rapidly ending. However, the United States will retain its central role in world politics by being the only country capable of mobilizing coalitions to resolve global problems, retells The Financial Times.
At the same time, the United States will overcome dependence on imports by 2030. energy resources and turn into their exporter, experts predict. The so-called in America will help this.
As for the hydrocarbon market, new technologies for increasing its production could undermine OPEC's control of oil prices.
"This could lead to a collapse in oil prices and a severe negative effect on economies dependent on oil and gas exports," the report says.
Predictions are tricky business.It is very easy to make a mistake, but it is very difficult to guess. But that's exactly what we're going to do. As the tenth anniversary of the publication of the bitcoin whitepaper approaches, I will try to predict what bitcoin, blockchain, alternative cryptocurrencies and decentralization will be like in 20 years.
This is one of those articles that will seem incredibly stupid or mind-blowingly brilliant when I get old and gray-haired. But I do not care. I'm ready for it.
Instead, we will reflect on how technology and society will evolve along with it.
The idea was born in 1941, when, after walking with a dog through the forest, he discovered thorns on her fur. This concept languished in his mind for the next seven years. In 1948, he began work on the creation of small hooks, and only ten years later he finally succeeded, and he launched mass production.
After opening the company in 1950. he expected unprecedented demand.
But it didn't happen.
He waited another five years before organizing the space program in the 1960s, when Velcro helped astronauts with bulky and bulky spacesuits that were difficult to get on and off. The rest of the world thinks only about their own problems that need to be solved, and not about what idea or ideology will stand behind it. Shortly thereafter, the skiing industry incorporated this idea into boot designs.
How much time has passed from the moment the idea was born to its implementation, to the creation of a successful business?
About twenty five years old.
And finally, we can still learn something from Stoll before I lay out my predictions about cryptocurrencies.
His biggest mistake was the sixth and final reason why people are unable to see the future. He took existing inventions, projected them into the future, and used them to create solutions to future problems. Fundamentally wrong!
Existing inventions can only solve existing problems. The problems of the future require entirely new solutions.
In the article, Stoll argues that CD-ROM books will never replace real books. He was right - reading books on a CD from a terrible CRT monitor that damages the retina was very inconvenient. But having understood this, we can understand what characteristics the future invention should have.
It is almost impossible to know what it will look like, but we can determine its characteristics in order to understand what the invention should be.
Let's see how it works:
CDs are inconvenient. Blurry text on the monitors of the time was hard to read. This hurt my eyes. The computers were huge and not very mobile. Even laptops back then were bricks that worked against your legs. Nobody wanted to read anything on them.
But Stoll also did not take into account the shortcomings of the books.
Books are heavy too. They are made from trees! They can be easily lost or damaged due to the weather. You can only carry a small number of books with you.
Based on this, we understand what the solution should be:
Reading has never been easier with The Kindle. The device is now waterproof, making it even better than traditional books. Successful new solutions must have the same function but with new and improved features. Of course, we already know the answer: Kindle and iPad.
Both devices are incredibly convenient, completely hide the storage from users, protect information with backups and do not harm the eyes.
Solutions start with understanding problems, asking the right questions about how to solve them, and clearly defining what features a better product should have.
From the foregoing, we derive three principles that will help us predict the future:
Great, now let's look into the crystal ball and find out the fate of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
I hope we have better luck than Stoll and this article doesn't become the basis for a Boing Boing article that makes me look like an idiot.
We will start with a few simple predictions, and then move on to more complex and far-reaching, as well as conflicting predictions.
For each item, I've attached a confidence meter that shows how confident I am in the scenario presented.
Cryptocurrency savvy and non-savvy people see it as a bubble that will burst and prices will plummet.
They are right. So what?
This is not the end of the story. This is just the beginning.
Today we are in amazing euphoria. So much potential. We literally already feel a decentralized future. It's around the corner! Will come at any moment.
Of course, things will most likely go wrong. The bubble will burst. Vitalik is right. .
But after this explosion, real working ideas will appear.
Gartner Hype Cycle During the eight-year experiment with cryptocurrencies, we work with hope for the future, but all we have is speculation and smart contracts. Creepy and almost unusable applications are created. When you hit send and send $5,000 online, your nerves are on edge. You hope you copied and pasted the address correctly and your money doesn't evaporate!
When the Internet bubble burst, the shares of many companies that are successful today fell by 85%. And yet they survived, and a bright future awaited them. Amazon and Google dominate.
The same will happen with cryptocurrencies.
The 10% of projects that survive the carnage will become the Amazon, Google and Facebook of the future. The same is likely to happen with JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, not to mention future governments, digital direct democracies or delegative democracies.
Innovation is hard work. You are literally trying to create something that doesn't exist!
You have no leadership, no blueprints, no business models to build upon. Nothing. You are on your own! There is only you and your imagination. 90% of all people and companies will fail!
A blockchain without a coin, like a market without money, is nonsense.
A blockchain controlled by a sovereign, a corporation, an elite or a mob is nonsense.
This is nonsense, because the main purpose of the blockchain is to distribute power throughout the system. By not allowing one group to arbitrarily control or change the rules of the system, decentralized cryptocurrencies and applications provide a powerful system of checks and balances against destructive actions directed against it.
If a blockchain is owned by five different banks, then it is no longer a blockchain, but a database. The real blockchain is when banks, regulators, shareholders and customers of the bank all have access to the blockchain and can interfere with each other's actions. A system of checks and balances that protects power - that's the point!
The state cryptocurrency will become an absolute and perfect perversion of this idea. But it won't matter. They will do it anyway.
Instead of distributing power, they will gain even more influence, gaining the ability to monitor every citizen's spending with impunity and automatically collect taxes on salaries and sales of goods and services. This is why authoritarian governments are so eager to create official state-owned cryptocurrencies. They are looking forward to having that freak show money in your pockets.
They will outlaw cash using one of the three following pretexts:
Of course, when half of your money goes to Amazon, food and rent, you don't care about these points, but if you loudly declare the fight against these three points, then you can easily get half the population to do what you need, and moreover, they will do it of their own free will.
Remember the conversation between American psychologist Gustav Gilbert and Nazi Hermann Goering during the Nuremberg Trials? Goering said that most people will follow their leaders no matter what they tell them, be it democracy or fascist dictatorship.
Gilber naively replied: “There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have a say in the election of representatives, but in the US, only Congress can declare war."
But Goering laughed and said, “Yes, that's very good. But with or without a voice, people can always be forced to obey leaders. It's simple. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and discredit the pacifists for their lack of patriotism and for putting the country in danger. It works the same in any country.”
Government cryptocurrencies will be a very bitter pill for those who truly believe in cryptocurrencies today, but they will have to swallow it.
It can also be assumed that hybrid systems with decentralized and centralized cryptocurrencies will appear, and they can be developed right now to avoid the impending tsunami. It is better to supplement the existing system with blockchain to fix it from the inside than to just ignore it and wait for it to become hostile.
Decentralized cryptocurrencies will not disappear just because centralized cryptocurrencies will have more power. Many governments will try to exterminate them, but in the end they will fail. The reasons are simple.
Governments will not be able to come to a consensus for the same reason that it is difficult to come to a consensus on blockchain. They won't be able to do it. Some governments will love decentralization and some will hate it.
While some countries openly oppose it, many others, especially those most affected by the influence of Europe and the US dollar over the last century, will openly support decentralized cryptocurrencies.
Countries in Latin America, open-minded and uncompromising globalists like Singapore, as well as the historical banker of the world, Switzerland and many other countries in Asia and Africa will embrace decentralized cryptocurrencies with open arms, even if they have to stick to the path of existing powers.
If all countries do not come to a consensus, then decentralized currencies will not go anywhere, even if centralized cryptocurrencies gain power.
But in order to stay afloat, decentralized cryptocurrencies must develop rapidly. They need a killer app that will spread them around the world. It must be something so important that people cannot imagine their lives without it. This will draw the existing power players into the system and they will start using their power to protect the application from attacks from outside.
I outlined one of the ways in my article about the game method of distributing money. But this is only one way. There are many others. If you are currently working on a platform, then remember that this is a race against time until centralized cryptocurrencies take over.
This is a classic example of introducing old inventions into a new system. The Brave browser is great and I'll really love it if it's combined with BAT and/or universal payment system, which will automatically convert cryptocurrencies without the need for an exchange. But I do not believe that this will be the final interface of the blockchain. I think this is just a potential intermediate step.
What should a killer app look like? I dont know. But here's what I know:
It should also be something completely new and original that highlights and develops the best characteristics of the blockchain while minimizing its weakest points.
Maybe a decentralized assistant or an attention filter? The possibilities are endless! Forward!
Blockchain-based systems are only the first successful application of decentralized consensus mechanisms.
People are already coming up with new things like Tangle and HashGraph .
It doesn't really matter if both of these projects fail in the long run, because other projects with a different foundation will emerge. This is the guaranteed truth.
I believe that in the next twenty years there will be dozens, if not hundreds, of experimental distributed consensus protocols that will surpass Visa in terms of transaction capabilities and will be supplemented by artificial intelligence systems.
Also, it is likely that none of these systems will be invented by people.
Artificial intelligence will very quickly consider all ideas and come up with systems that humanity could not come up with even in a hundred years. He will draw inspiration from nature, insect life, roots and other biological systems such as proteins.
One or two of these systems will turn into metasystems and will manage all the coins, uniting them, as well as the entire system as a huge fractal that has an infinite number of child networks.
Today, using cryptocurrencies is very inconvenient.
If I make a typo or copy and paste incorrectly, my money will be gone forever. If there is any horrendous program failure, then I will lose my money forever. If someone breaks into my computer or phone, the money will never come back to me.
See the trend? Any mistake and you're in trouble. It's like riding a motorcycle on the edge of a two-centimeter mountain road with no guardrails.
The mainstream wallets are slow, hard to use, and just plain awful. The last time I upgraded Ethereum, I forgot to save my private keys, so I had to restore them. This year my old bitcoin is stuck in an old version of Multibit from 2013. It took me a week to get it out of there. The software mistakenly thought that I made a transaction that was never made.
Imagine that these wallets will be used for long-term storage, and you decide to use them in five years. Can you use them? What will happen when quantum computers appear and we have to completely update the basic protocols that are the basis of the system?
The average person will never be able to do this. No chance. Two decades in the IT industry have taught me that people can, and certainly will, mess up their computers in ways that the tech savvy don't even think of. Murphy's Law in action.
But the situation is even worse, because we cannot cancel the transaction or protect it from errors. I believe that transactions will be frozen, rolled back and protected by a variety of algorithmic methods, as well as ways to deposit money at home and return stolen funds. It's like an automated call to the bank after your credit card is stolen.
If grandma can't do it, then forget about it. All people are not an IT person who can easily work in a Linux terminal. Only systems that offer all features old system, as well as completely new characteristics, can be introduced in large quantities.
Let's go back to books on CD from the 1980s. They had new stats, tables, and colors that you could keep.
But that wasn't enough, because CDs had fatal flaws. In his book The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil calls this a phase of evolutionary development called the "false pretender." The new technology has some advantages, but it has too many disadvantages that prevent it from becoming popular and replacing the old technology.
Only with the advent of the Kindle and iPad, e-readers began to combine the properties of reading ordinary books, including portability and eye-friendliness, with new features, among which it became possible to carry a thousand books with you at the same time. A dead tree cannot compete with this. Such an invention could indeed be successful.
Cryptocurrencies must follow the same path - from total failure to the transfer of unprecedented new power to people and companies that will ensure world domination.
I also believe that many systems will be created because of the desire of people to pass on digital money to their children. To do this, we will need special banks created by groups of people, or algorithmic banks and bulletproof wallets with multi-signatures, decentralized cloud storage or a foglet service, which will be the final judges.
It will not be enough to just share the keys and give them to your trusted friends and loved ones. It just seems like a good idea at first. Friends stop being friends, people get divorced and die or worse. We need something better, something completely automated.
Consider how difficult it would be to transfer bitcoins to your loved ones today. What if you die tomorrow, or get hit on the head and forget your password?
Even if you have everything ready for it, your plan is not very good.
You would have to make a will, copy your private keys and wallet to a safe place, hand over the password to a real estate lawyer and hope that he doesn't steal your money, and also that your USB stick or Trezor/Nano doesn't get broken. You can also create a multisig wallet with friends and family and hope that no one contributes another version to Github with a backdoor or a bug that ruins everything. All these methods do not inspire confidence. This is simply unacceptable.
By the way, if you want to open a cryptocurrency business that will benefit the whole world in the future, then I propose to solve the problem of inheritance. You will be gladly paid for it.
I foresee drag & drop smart contracts and AI-created self-deposit wills. In fact, the blockchain itself will become a bank and customer service department, perhaps using biometric identifiers and third parties with proof of stake or decentralized artificial intelligence that can verify your loved ones, as well as run the necessary operations after your death. Automated password and key regeneration will be a STOP command.
Regardless of what it looks like, we will need similar algorithmic control systems to give money to the right people and avoid it falling into the hands of robbers. We also need a system to protect against accidents, death, and loss of sanity.
Everything today existing coins are inextricably linked to their protocols.
I believe protocols will be abstracted for the purposes of exchanging, sending and receiving, and protecting and storing coins.
This will be a consequence of the evolution of today's servers, which will turn from metal boxes into virtual containers, and then off-server data processing will be carried out.
First, most coins cannot be scaled. Blockchain, the Holy Grail of any cryptosystem and the subject of so much controversy and controversy, cannot even come close to the level of Visa transactions. Bitcoin can only process a maximum of 7 transactions per second.
It should be possible to send coins as fast, as far and as often as we want.
It must be admitted that the 1 MB limit is a "crutch". Initially, Bitcoin had no limits. Then, overnight, Satoshi introduced a restriction into the main code without even mentioning it or explaining anything. Most likely, it was an awkward attempt to prevent DDoS attacks.
We can come up with a better defense. Are you in favor of 1 MB? What about 2 MB in SegWit2X? Or are you in favor of an 8MB Bitcoin Cash block? Wrong. All these solutions are wrong and absurd.
According to the guys from the Lightning Network, if seven billion people made just two transactions a day, then the situation would look like this:
In order to come up with a real solution to the problem, we need to think differently, and not come up with all sorts of nonsense. For Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to survive, they must change. In the future, it will be easy to introduce new security, new cryptographic algorithms, when quantum computers appear, higher speeds and innovations.
We can't just rely on Satoshi's successes and assume he's thought of everything.
This is not true.
Honestly, who cares what Satoshi thinks? He abandoned the project. If he really wanted to lead it, he would show up as Linus on Linux. But he didn't. He left the project, and we ourselves have to deal with him.
So let's get on with it, because the current system will not survive or will become a slave to expensive processors, as it is now.
One way is to abstract away all the protocols and run the equivalent of the old coins in virtual machines or containers. Thus, the rules themselves will separate from the coins.
This is just one of the ways. For a real breakthrough, blockchain needs real innovation.
We need to think fast, otherwise, while we are arguing, we need a block of 1 MB or 2 MB, there will be a crypto-ruble and a crypto-yuan.
This is also necessary because in the future we will need to protect against attacks by hostile system participants and APT (advanced persistent threat - advanced persistent threat) on protocols. Think of the Great Firewall of China that attacks or blocks transactions by confusing packets and headers, and the "man in the middle" in it is a state representative. The NEM architecture was the right first step, as it includes firewall-like host protection.
The best solution is likely to be external blockchains that protect rules that will be uploaded to all nodes of the network and will detect intrusions, act as firewalls and monitor protocols, have a self-evolving set of rules and an artificial intelligence-based countermeasures system.
Right now we are creating coins for everything. Created an identity platform like Civic? Create a coin. Created a decentralized DNS? Create a coin and ICO!
The dumbest app on the blockchain? You, my friend, need a coin!
In fact, the coin is not needed.
Coins will be divided into different categories. Right now, I can only imagine four types of necessary coins that (or post-blockchain technology) will be exchanged according to need:
Deflation coins are for savings and investments. Over time, they will grow in value and bring profit. Everyone needs such investments, for this, first of all, bitcoin appeared.
The coin of inflation is today's dollar. No one bitcoins to buy a flat screen TV only to realize in a few years when the price of bitcoin skyrockets that they spent $175,000 on it. We need stablecoins that can be spent. It will be the classic "storage medium" that Paul Krugman talks about all the time. Such a coin will be needed to buy and sell everyday goods.
The action token is for free online actions, such as voting or sending a text message. These are not nanotransactions. Changing your password shouldn't cost two pennies. As the guys at EOS say, “If it costs three cents to load a page on Amazon, no one will load that page.”
Reward tokens are intended for interactions in the system. This is digital karma that motivates good behavior and punishes bad behavior.
You can literally build a universal system with these four coins. Any other coin will be just an additional component of these coins with different metadata.
Are you a Keynesian or an Austrian free marketer?
Who cares?
All of our economic theories are based on research on a limited amount of information in the analog age of ink and wood pulp. All existing economic theories will prove to be as advanced as cave drawings as new economic systems emerge over the years.
This is the new coins: the war of microeconomic systems. This is economics according to Darwin.
Some of the basic laws of housekeeping are true, but many of them will simply fall apart along the way. This will happen because the dominant systems on the blockchain will have real-time and global economic data, and not just a few pencil-on-paper guesses, as was the case a hundred years ago.
If artificial intelligence collects real-time statistics around the world, we can see how steel prices in one country adjust, while construction prices in another country skyrocket due to this. We can trace world production with incredible accuracy, and much of what we learn will surprise us very much.
Most likely, the richest DAO (decentralized autonomous organization - decentralized autonomous organization) will be the DAO that offers an open version of Visa. Most likely, it will take its share from transactions and the largest miners, as well as finance the future development and management of the network.
Such an organization will not store all the money, it will play the role of a link that will transfer money to other companies and DAOs using smart contracts, as well as to the state, local governments and other non-governmental organizations that benefit the network.
For this, DAO needs to evolve. Today we are introducing DAO in the form of a smart contract. And this is not at all what is needed.
"O wondrous new world where such people live! DAO will need artificial intelligence to manage the rules and enforce them. The organization will also need to automatically generate template management models. Management in DAO is everything. So far, good enough scalable models for managing large corporations, such as an open meritocratic workspace, have not yet been invented. The first DAOs failed because they ran into a .
Everyone pretends to be the boss, and no one wants to take out the trash. It's very hard to order paperclips when every employee at the DAO is king.
For effective work the team must distribute roles and stars among themselves. People also need to understand their role and accept it, even if it changes after a person gains merit and experience in the system.
It is very difficult to organize management in a corporate environment. How to fire a person for not fulfilling duties in the DAO? How do you make sure the guy in charge of ICO security is qualified and not just chosen because everyone likes him? You can't lose $45 million in Bitcoin just because Bob was chosen for his "Burning Man" stories and his drawing skills.
The automated enterprise and non-profit architectures of the future will have to develop incredible tools for continuous management and decision making, as well as articles of incorporation in the form of code.
People who fought in World War II had one or two jobs throughout their lives. Today we have five or six works.
The people of the future will be working five or six jobs at the same time.
Half of the sources of income will be automated and passive, like, for example, cryptocurrency guaranteed income. Artificial intelligence will select you a job. The machines will know your capabilities and skills and will select vacancies for you in a short time. You don't even have to look for a job.
Imagine a software project that needs insanely huge code, about ten trillion lines. Software projects are getting more complex and growing. AI will write and test the first half, and humans will write the second half. The project will run on a distributed decentralized system that proposes and distributes tasks, acts as a project manager, and offers jobs to programmers on a worldwide network based on reputation and skill.
Imagine Github artificial intelligence married UpWork and the Mechanical Turk system.
Such a system could be used for manufacturing and any other blue collar job that could create a big gulf between the rich and the poor today.
If you are currently developing a system using the “move fast and break everything” DevOps approach, then you should know that such an approach is likely to be destructive to systems that can algorithmically control many aspects of our lives.
Instead, you need to slow down, reflect and not break everything.
You need to think of all the ways to destroy the system, otherwise you will not be able to protect it. It would be naive not to consider all the ways that your enemies, those who do not share your views on openness, freedom and cooperation, can use the blockchain.
I have already finished half of the article called “If Hitler had a blockchain”. To be honest, I don't want to post it because I don't want to give the bad guys fresh ideas, but rest assured, it might not help them much. Their dark minds are already hard at work finding a way to use the blockchain as a system of repression and control.
I'm deliberately throwing dust in my eyes so as not to release all the ideas into the collective unconscious, but think about digital tracking of all aspects of your life, where you go and what you do, the statistical calculation of your behavior, as well as behavioral algorithms that motivate you to accepting an ideology, and finally think of invulnerable digital rights management and open genocide.
In 2045, the world familiar to us today will be completely different. Predicting the future is almost impossible, but when it comes to scientific facts or technological advances, DARPA staff are the best people to ask about it.
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)- This is a well-known agency in the United States for advanced defense research and development. Founded in 1958, it has several biggest discoveries related to armaments. Many of the agency's developments subsequently spilled over into the civilian industry. These are, for example, advanced robotics, a GPS navigation system and the Internet.
In general terms, the picture of the future is as follows: it is likely that, thanks to robots, the industry will completely change, unmanned aircrafts(drones) will appear not only in military aviation, but also in civil aviation, and autopilot vehicles (those without drivers) will make our way to work more bearable.
In addition to all this, scientists from DARPA have some more grandiose assumptions. They share their thoughts on what awaits our planet in 30 years in a video called Forward to the Future. Some excerpts from this video, as well as the video itself in English, are given below.
Dr. Justin Sanchez, a neuroscientist and one of the DARPA scientists, believes that in the future we will be able to control things simply by using the power of thought:
Imagine a world where you could mentally control everything that happens around you. Just imagine being able to control the appliances in your home or communicate with your friends and family just by using your brainwaves.
To date, DARPA already has some innovative developments that confirm the words of Sanchez. For example, brain, controlling prosthetic hands. This study involved a man who had been paralyzed for more than ten years. It was thanks to the futuristic prosthetic hand that he was able to “feel” physical touch.
Stefanie Tompkins, a geologist and head of one of the research divisions of DARPA, believes that in the future it will be possible to produce incredibly strong, but at the same time very light things. For example, skyscrapers made of carbon fiber. This material is much more reliable than steel, very rigid and durable, but has a much lower mass. This is direct evidence that things are getting much more complex at the molecular level.
“I think we will have a very different relationship with machines in 2045,” says Pam Melroy, a space engineer and former astronaut with DARPA. She is sure that we will find a time when it will be enough just to verbally explain to the machine what you want from it, or to press a single button, instead of using a keyboard or elementary voice recognition systems.
Today, in order to land a plane, the pilot will need to perform a certain sequence of actions: check the navigation systems, adjust the brake throttles, pull the handle to lower the landing gear, and so on. For a successful landing, all these steps must be completed in the correct order.
Instead, according to Melroy, in order to land in the near future, it will be enough to say just two words: “Start landing”, and the computer will sequentially perform a series of necessary steps. And who knows, maybe then the pilot will not be needed at all.
Bold assumptions about the near future are put forward not only by DARPA employees, but also by some other scientists. Ian Pearson has some very interesting ideas. You might think that this is just another boring report in the style of “augmented reality and artificial intelligence will become an integral part of Everyday life people, flying cars will fill all the roads, and gadgets will be ultra-smart and ultra-thin.” But no, it's much more interesting.
Jan Pearson
Doctor of Science and researcher, versed in many branches of science: from aeronautics to cybernetics. He writes articles, gives lectures and gives advice on technological innovations that await us in the near future. Below are some of his predictions for what cities and transportation will be like by 2045.
Below are seven of the most interesting assumptions about the future of cities.
techinsider.io Residents will have the opportunity to “ ” with the building and formulate a request, for example, in order to change the temperature in the room.
techinsider.io With land prices as huge as they are now, super tall buildings will be transformed in such a way that they can function as mini cities. That is, they will have floors designed for offices, apartments, recreation and entertainment.
techinsider.io In the second part of the film "", Marty's house was equipped with a virtual reality window that could show anything. Presumably, by 2045, buildings will not have windows, because they will be replaced with just such screens. This will greatly help to build economy-class housing very cheaply and quickly.
techinsider.io This is in many ways similar to solar panels that exist today. But unlike them, a special material made of nanoparticles can be sprayed onto various surfaces. Such surfaces will be able to absorb and convert sunlight into energy.
GaudiLab/shutterstock.com Light will accompany you while moving around the apartment. It will also be possible to adjust the amount of lighting sufficient for you. Some of these developments already exist. For example, Ario is a lamp that mimics the natural light of the sun to help improve the user's health.
techinsider.io Iron Man can boast not only Robert Downey Jr., but also ordinary builders. Thanks to this exoskeleton, a common person will be able to perform many tasks that are normally beyond his power, such as lifting significant loads. In addition, it is an additional protection against damage.
techinsider.io There are suggestions that in the future, robots will work alongside humans on different projects. They will replace a person in those places where the danger of an explosion or collapse is most likely.
The transport industry, unlike all others, is developing relatively slowly. Without a doubt, trains have changed significantly since their invention. But in fact, we still use the old, albeit modified, forms of transportation. However, over the next 30 years we will probably see more changes concerning transport than seen in the previous 100 years.
Some of the most daring assumptions are given below.
techinsider.io In fact, it will be possible to move at a speed of more than 800 kilometers per hour.
NowThis/giphy.com The prototype of the flying car was already presented in 2014 during the festival in Vienna. It is difficult to give an exact date for the appearance of these cars, but it is possible to say that they already exist.
NASA/flickr.com By 2045, there may be buildings built from super-strong materials based on carbon. The height of the buildings will reach 30-40 kilometers. On these giant skyscrapers it will be possible to build spaceports. Now the equipment of the launch pads on the peaks high-rise buildings seems implausible, but thanks to innovative materials, this may well become a reality.
SuperJet International/flickr.com The aircraft industry will continue to develop in the next 30 years. Everything will be done to make the planes fly faster. To increase the speed will help the rejection of windows. Augmented reality will completely replace them.
PatentYogi /youtube.com
The opportunity to fly in an airplane will appear by 2040, however, it will be available only to very wealthy people. The US Patent Office has in fact approved an Airbus project that will be able to transport people from London to New York in just one hour.
Here are the predictions for the near future. Looks like 2045 will be pretty good.
In the coming decades, the Russian people may be affected by major changes. This applies to various processes - demographic, social, ethno-cultural, mental. Even intelligence and appearance can change.
The Russian people at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries fell into several pits at once. And one of them is common with Europeans. This is the devaluation of the concepts of "ethnos" and "people". Many sociologists say that in the not so distant future, self-identification on the basis of nationality may lose relevance. Just as in the USA, say, an Italian by origin will call himself an American, so in the Russian Federation a Russian will become exclusively a Russian.
Today we are facing a serious challenge - an unprecedented flow of migrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus, which in the near future threatens the Russian ethnos, if not disintegration, then a serious transformation, because the birth rate in Asian and Caucasian families is traditionally higher than in Russian.
In Moscow today almost 40% of marriages are mixed. Of course, this is only part of the multiculturalization process. Russian society, which gained momentum in last years. Sociologists predict that meeting a Russian in Moscow in half a century will be as difficult as today a Yakut in a reindeer team rushing along Tverskaya.
But perhaps it's not so sad. The peculiarities of its organism can help the preservation of the Russian ethnos. Recently, Russian and American geneticists have found that even with the total infection of Russians with AIDS, 14% of the country's inhabitants will remain healthy. And it's mostly Russian.
It turns out that there is a deletion gene (CCR5) in the blood of Russians. It counteracts the immunodeficiency virus and prevents it from infecting the cell. In Caucasians, this protective gene is extremely rare. Georgians don't have it at all. But if a Russian woman with such a gene gives birth to a Georgian, then her descendants will forever lose their genetic protection against AIDS, geneticists say.
According to the director of the Federal Migration Service of Russia, Konstantin Romodanovsky, there are about 9 million foreign citizens, about 29% of them do not know Russian. Moreover, experts developing the Strategy 2020 project for the socio-economic development of Russia proposed to bring another 16 million migrants into the country.
Instead of solving the demographic problem, it is proposed to replace the indigenous population with newcomers. “This is not a strategy for the development of the country, this is a strategy for its extinction,” Igor Beloborodov, director of the Institute for Demographic Research, is indignant.
With the current trend falling specific gravity Russians on the territory of the modern Russian Federation below 50% can really be expected already in the 30-40s of the current century, demographers warn. More recently, Veniamin Popov, a spokesman for the Islamic Conference, stated as a matter of course that by 2050 the followers of Islam will dominate Russia's population.
Given that a huge number of migrants are not capable of integration, and the rate of extinction in Russia is the highest in the world (in 8 years the country has lost more than 13% of its population), this is a serious signal for a society that still lives and thinks in the context of the Russian national idea.
However, the prospects for the complete disappearance of the Russian people are most likely exaggerated, but it must be borne in mind that the Russians' ability to self-organize is incomparable with the peoples of the Caucasus or Central Asia. The threat will become real if the Russians fail to consolidate at the crucial moment. Then they will face the fate of a national minority.
And what will happen if the Russian people really end up in danger of extinction as a result of the deterioration of the demographic and social situation? According to sociologists, two scenarios are possible here: a mass exodus of Russians from the country will begin, or, having rallied around the national idea, they will revolt.
But the Russians have already found themselves in such conditions. In 1958, the mass return of Chechens to the restored autonomy in the Caucasus began, which led to a serious conflict with the Russian population. Numerous demonstrations demanding the re-deportation of Chechens then turned into a real pogrom of Caucasians and ended with the storming of the building of the regional committee of the CPSU.
But it may happen that the peak demographic problems coincides with an internal crisis, then the object on which the people will pour out their anger can become the government. Political scientist Pavel Svyatenkov writes: “If in the coming years it is not possible to create an effective economic model, then Russia will inevitably find itself in a situation of revolution. However, these years may drag on. As you know, the Russians take a long time to harness, but they go fast.
Political analyst Valery Solovey warns that popular unrest will soon begin throughout Russia and the authorities will not be able to suppress them, because they do not have the political will to go to large-scale violence. In Moscow, the scientist continues, people will take to the streets under national slogans, in the provinces - mainly under social ones.
Power will change, and large-scale democratization will begin. According to this scenario, there is no threat of the collapse of the country, since a part of the elite that has joined the popular movement will come to power, and everything will be fine, Nightingale predicts.
Nevertheless, another character of the revolution is also possible. The basic characteristics of the Russian mentality have changed a lot lately. Studies have revealed that individualism, the values of success, prosperity and hierarchy are the driving stimuli of modern Russian youth. In conditions of prosperity of corporations and mafias, these qualities will only increase.
Historian Yaroslav Butakov believes that sooner or later a rebellion will be directed against this system, but not for the sake of social justice, but only for the right to participate in the exploitation of the majority. “The successful leaders of such a rebellion will find themselves in the position of the leaders of the slave rebellion in ancient Egypt. Only instead of the palaces of the pharaohs, they will occupy, relatively speaking, dachas on Rublyovka, ”concludes Butakov.
A few years ago, Health magazine published a study by American scientists who told how a person's appearance will change in the near future. According to experts, in 50 years there will be almost no representatives of the Caucasian race. The reason for this is a sharp increase in the number of marriages between representatives of different nationalities and religions.
Such a mixture will lead to the emergence of a new race, and China will play a major role in this. In 50 years, the researchers say, all Europeans, primarily Russians, will look like the Chinese - they will become shorter, their facial features and genetics in general will change. The prospect is frightening, but unrealistic.
Even ordinary people worry about the fate of the Russian gene pool. Oleg Balanovsky, an employee of the laboratory of human population genetics of the Medical Genetic Research Center of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, told reporters about a conversation with a random fellow traveler who began to convince the scientist of the importance of preserving the Russian gene pool, “after all, how many grandmothers from the Swan Lake generation kept Russian traditions, and their granddaughters from the generation Pepsi is only interested in Western fashion."
Balanovsky reassured that the grandmother and granddaughter have the same genes, and they do not change from the fashion for ballet or Pepsi. According to the geneticist, the fellow traveler immediately understood everything, became sad and said: “If the gene pool does not affect anything, why should such a gene pool be preserved?”
Today, the Russian language is the fourth in the world in terms of the number of people speaking it and is second only to English, Chinese and Spanish in this component. But soon the situation may change. Every year there are fewer and fewer native speakers of the Russian language. Moscow State University rector Viktor Sadovnichy said that in 10 years Russian will be left behind French, Hindi and Arabic.
Data from the Center for Sociological Research of the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia show that the number of Russian speakers by this time may be reduced to 212 million people. And by 2025, the Russian language will give way to Bengali and Portuguese.
The Ministry of Education and Science also reports that the Russian language in the countries Western Europe today about 225 thousand schoolchildren study, although before the beginning of the 90s their number exceeded 550 thousand. Experts are convinced that the reduction of native speakers of the Russian language will inevitably deal a serious blow to Russian culture as a whole.
The Russian mentality is a mysterious thing. Last but not least, it took shape under the influence of the contrasting climate of the Russian open spaces. The wilting of nature and the cold lasting more than six months are suddenly replaced by lush flowering and steady heat.
Historian Valery Ilyin says that in this powerful amplitude of oscillations is the secret of the pendulum of the Russian character: decline is replaced by an incredible rise, a long depression - a huge surge of optimism, apathy and lethargy - a surge of strength and inspiration. Recently, climatologists are increasingly saying that from year to year the weather will become more and more unpredictable. And only God knows how the notorious Russian character will manifest itself under these conditions.
Biochemist Alexander Spirin sees a threat to the Russian mentality in something else. “In the age of informatics and computer technology, it became obvious that a person lost to a computer. Probably, in the future it will become a toy for computers, which better and faster understand what and how to do,” the scientist believes. Traditional Russian slowness in the fight against "smart" machines makes us very vulnerable.
Another factor does not give optimism - the state of "Russian brains". In one of his works, Academician Nikolai Shmelev noted that for the past fifteen years, the policy of the top leadership proceeded from the fact that fundamental and applied research, education, the health care system and culture are redundant for the country.
The scientist recalled that Germany, after the mass emigration of scientists in the 30s of the last century, still cannot fully restore its scientific potential. Something similar, according to Shmelev, awaits us in the next two generations. Russia has every chance of becoming a genuine "world intellectual backwater".
In 2010, at the World Exhibition in Shanghai, in the Russian pavilion, the domestic innovative achievement of the foresight project "Childhood-2030" was exhibited. The ideologist of the project, President of the International Methodological Association Sergey Popov, commenting on his brainchild, noted that the project stands for the departure from traditional forms of family life in favor of the development of other diverse options - guest marriages, multiple marriages, various educational communities. Popov pays especially much attention to parenthood, which, in his opinion, should be made a profession.
In the future, the project provides for the creation of special cities where children separated from their families will be trained and learn the basics of life from “competent mentors”. For those children who cannot reach the required level, the foresight project has a program for electronic correction of their abilities by introducing chips into the body.
And in 2025-2030, according to innovative plans, the first children with the given characteristics and capabilities should be born. Even in the prenatal period, this will be ensured by special nanotechnologies. Considering that such children will be brought up by robots according to the project, it is scary to imagine what generation of people we will get in 20-30 years.
