Anyone paying attention would have known that October 21st, 2015 was “Back to the Future’ day for a young Marty McFly. He only saw what life would be like 26 years hence (the movie was made in 1989). What about a thousand years from now?
Looking to the past, we know that we’ve come a long way as humans over the past million years or so. We’ve already undergone several adaptations that enabled us to survive and, in some cases thrive, resulting in around 7.25 billion Homo Sapiens sharing this world right now.
Historically, change has been slow, in fact, almost imperceptible until about 23,000 years ago when the first humans started to grow and harvest crops. Since then, technology has pushed us forward into new frontiers at an accelerating pace. This has never been as obvious as the technological innovations in that same 26 years since the first ‘Back to the Future’ movie hit cinemas. For a start, the ‘World Wide Web’Â was still a couple of years off!
With the astounding pace of scientific and medical breakthroughs, how we will look in 1,000 years? Evolution as we have known it, now has a serious competitor in that we might no longer rely on nature, as much as technology, to handle change.
As of today, the human brain is still superior when it comes to information processing. Though researchers have been continuously working on improving computers, the best ones are still a no match to the power of the human brain. In fact, the K computer in Japan – one of the most powerful computers in the world – last year needed 705,024 processor cores, 1.4 million GB of RAM, and 40 minutes to process data that only takes one second for the human brain to handle.
But that might be about to change real soon now! Scientists are predicting that in just a few decades computers will finally achieve the computational speed of the human brain. By then, Siri, Cortana and robots will not only speak, they will also be able to ‘listen’ and remember information.
And as computers start to become more like us, human life, too, will be more integrated with technology. Watch this video from AsapSCIENCE and have a peek at the possible future humanity is about to go into:
You and I won’t see it, but our genes will. What’s your take? A better world or do you prefer the one you’ve got right now?
