In ancient times, one person in his entire life could see no more than 1000 people, and communicated only with a dozen fellow tribesmen. Today, we are forced to keep in mind information about a large number of acquaintances who may be offended if you do not greet them by name when meeting.
The number of incoming information flows has increased significantly. For example, each of our acquaintances constantly generates new facts about themselves. And there are people whose fate we are closely following, even without the opportunity to meet in person - these are politicians, bloggers, artists.
Quantity does not always translate into quality. World-famous people often generate continuous informational noise that does not affect our real life in any way. The more interesting it is to try to isolate from the white noise the voices of those who can see farther and understand more than the rest.
In an age of meaningless knowledge, the voices of futurologists can be useful in finding new trends and understanding the mechanics of the great gears that turn the world. Below you will find links to the accounts of today's most relevant visionaries of the future.
Bill Gates called Raymond Kurzweil "the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence." No wonder the famous futurist has been the CTO of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing at Google since 2012.
Kurzweil believes that even during the lifetime of the current generation, a singularity will be reached that will allow humanity to rise to a new level of evolutionary existence.
Symbiosis with strong artificial intelligence will help us reach the next step of the evolutionary ladder. In fact, the singularity will erase the distinction between human and artificial intelligence.
According to Kurzweil, intractable problems such as climate change, lack of resources, disease and even death will be eliminated by the singularity.
Theoretical physicist, popularizer of science with an incredibly wide range of interests - from black holes to brain research.
Michio Kaku is one of the co-authors of string theory. He has published over 70 scientific papers on superstring theory, supergravity, supersymmetry, and particle physics. An ardent supporter of the Multiverse - the theory of the existence of many parallel universes. Kaku suggests that the Big Bang occurred when several universes collided or when one universe split into two.
Back in the 1980s, Lanier developed the first glasses and gloves for immersive virtual reality. Actually, he also coined the term VR.
He currently works at Microsoft, working on data visualization problems. He appears periodically in the media as an expert in the field of technopessimism and the author of the book Ten Reasons to Delete Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.
For obvious reasons, he does not maintain pages in social networks, so we give a link to a personal website.
Israeli military historian specializing in the European Middle Ages. Vegan, animal rights activist, assistant lead lay tutor in the late tradition of Burmese Vipassana meditation, author of two prominent books, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.
While the first book is about humanity's gradual movement to date, Homo Deus is a warning of what "dataism" (thinking created by the growing importance of Big Data in the world) will do to our society and bodies in the near future.
One of the leading social activists against the problems of age-related diseases, chief researcher and co-founder of the SENS research foundation. De Gray aims to significantly increase the life expectancy of people so that death is a thing of the past.
Aubrey De Gray started his career as an AI/software engineer in 1985. Since 1992 he has been doing research in the field of cellular and molecular biology at the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge.
In 1999, he published a book called The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging, where he first laid out the key idea of ββhis future scientific research: preventing and repairing the damage accumulated by the body during aging (in particular, in mitochondrial DNA), which should help people live much longer.
Director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, part of the world's largest industrial research organization, IBM Research. David Cox taught at Harvard for 11 years. He received a bachelor's degree in biology and psychology from Harvard and a PhD in neuroscience from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. IBM brought in a life science specialist to work on the problems of artificial intelligence.
Former head and current chairman of the board of directors of one of the most famous startup accelerators - Y Combinator, one of the leaders of the OpenAI artificial intelligence research project, founded jointly with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk (withdrew from the project in 2018 due to a conflict of interest).
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Nicholas Thompson (pictured right) is a technology journalist, editor-in-chief of the cult technology publication WIRED, and an opinion leader on the development of artificial intelligence, the emergence of an authoritarian Internet, and the problems of online anonymity.
No less significant is another key employee - Kevin Kelly, co-founder of WIRED, author of the book βInevitable. 12 tech trends that are shaping our future.β
Co-founder and researcher at the Singularity Institute on the creation of artificial intelligence, author of the book "Creating Friendly AI" and many articles on the problems of natural and artificial intelligence.
In non-academic circles, he is better known as the author of one of the main books of the early XNUMXst century. on the development and application of the principles of logic in real life: "Harry Potter and the methods of rational thinking."
Hashem Al Ghaili, 27, from Yemen and based in Germany, is part of a new generation of science advocates. As a creator of scientific and educational videos, he proved that even with a small budget, you can reach a million-strong audience. Thanks to clips explaining the results of complex research, it has amassed more than 7,5 million subscribers and over 1 billion views.
Author of the economic bestsellers The Black Swan and Risking Your Own Skin. The Hidden Asymmetry of Everyday Lifeβ, trader, philosopher, risk forecaster. The main area of ββscientific interests is the study of the impact of random and unpredictable events on the world economy and stock trading. According to Nassim Taleb, almost all events that have significant consequences for markets, global politics and people's lives are completely unpredictable.
Founder of the Institute for Global Futures in San Francisco, author of Smart Futures: Managing the Trends That Transform Your World. He worked as a consultant to the White House administration on future trends.
Political scientist, founder and director of the private intelligence and analytical organization Stretfor, which collects and analyzes information about events in the world. Known for several controversial forecasts, however, it reflects the opinion of a significant part of US experts on the development of the European region and neighboring countries.
We have put together a far from exhaustive list. Someone might want to add another futurist, visionary or thinker (for example, you like the ideas of Daniel Kahneman, and you are sure that in the future they will change the world) - write your suggestions in the comments.
Source: habr.com