Predicting the Future What does the future hold for the human race? None of us can know that for certain, but there are those who claim they do. Recently a man named Bryant Johnson was arrested in Casper, Wyoming. Johnson claims to be another one of those “Time Travelers.” I say another one, because there have been several people who have either claimed this or have been pointed out as being time travelers. I certainly don’t want to leave the fact out the police had indicated the man was inebriated when they arrested him. Some say was he really was and this was just an excuse to make him sound like a raving drunk lunatic? What I find interesting was what he said, he claims there will be an alien invasion in 2018. Why would I even listen to this nonsense? I was only interested in his statement, because there have been rumors for the last couple of years a false flag operation was going to take place and it involved an alien attack. A false flag operation is one which is carried out by someone which blames someone else for the results. The rumor has been that a false flag operation will take place soon which seem like an alien attack and it will be carried out to try and unite the countries of the world under one government. It may be Mr. Johnson was just an alcoholic, or it could be he has a mental illness. I really don’t think he would have any knowledge of any such false flag operation, but it just reminded me of what I had heard. I do have to laugh about a quote Mr. Johnson was said to have told police when they asked him how he could travel through time. He said he could do it because the aliens filled his body with alcohol while he was standing on a giant pad which then transported him to the year 2017. He said they made a mistake and he was supposed to be sent to the year 2018. I guess even aliens can make mistakes. The amazing part is the alcohol was indeed responsible for transporting him, because it transported him to the Natrona County Detention Center. When we talk about the future we have to mention a man which I have talked about before. No, it is not Nostradamus, or the sleeping prophet, it is Ray Kurzweil. The man is a futurist and also Google’s director of engineering and he has made many predictions about the future. The amazing part of his predictions are they are 79% accurate according to Mr. Kurzweil. You can read a former article I wrote about him and filed on this website. This time he has stated two very important things which he believes. The first is by 2029 machine intelligence, also known as artificial intelligence will reach a point where it will pass what is known as the Turing test. This is a very important test, because scientists and engineers believe if a machine can pass this test it is alive. The second thing Mr. Kurzweil predicts is there will be a “Singularity” in 2045. What he is talking about is a huge change in the human race, an event so gigantic it will dwarf everything that came before it. He is predicting we will join with machine intelligence and it will effectively multiply our intelligence one billion-fold. He is not the only one to predict this, many scientists have been stating this for a while, but they refrain from picking the year and from predicting how much our intelligence will increase. If he is correct people today might not even recognize people in 2045. Their intelligence would be so far above us we would be like ants to those humans. There are certain things we can predict about the future ourselves. We can see electric cars in our future, because they are increasing in number every year so there is a very good chance they will replace gasoline powered cars. We can also see driverless vehicles coming to pass. A good indication was a bill which was passed in the United States which will allow driverless vehicles on our roads. We also know there will be much better medical devices in the future, because we see better ones appearing all the time. Travel time will be cut, because new faster and maybe larger airplanes are being developed along with faster trains. None of these things take a prophet to predict. It is much harder to predict things which are not obvious, but a Professor at Virginia Tech has a team which has been sifting through all sorts of material. They look at tweets, posts, articles and anything else they can get their hands on which pertain to ten different countries so they can predict what will happen in them. He does this using a computer program named EMBERS. He was able to predict the unrest in Venezuela and also predicted unrest in Brazil months earlier in 2013. The unrest had been caused by rising transit fares. The program was created by many people in different disciplines such as computer scientists, statisticians, social scientists, political scientists and one epidemiologist. The program works so well it is being extended to the Middle East. It just goes to show you we don’t even have to be a human to predict the future. MIT announced it has developed an algorithm which can anticipate interactions much more accurately than ever before. These interactions are based on what people are liable to do when they meet. Amazingly a computer using this algorithm was trained by watching YouTube videos and television shows. The developers claim it is much easier for humans to anticipate actions using experience, so they tried to teach these experiences to their software program. While this is very primitive it could be viewed as the first step in predicting future events. If one learns how humans might interact with each other under certain circumstances, is it a far cry to learn how countries would interact with each other under different circumstances? There have always been people in just about every century who proclaimed they could predict the future. Nostradamus has many followers, but many people find his predictions to be so clouded in mumbo-jumbo they discount what he has to say. People are known to try and force what he said into what happened in past events rather than use his predictions to predict the future. On the other hand, Edgar Cayce is much clearer in his predictions and became known as the sleeping prophet, because he made his predictions while he was in a sleep like trance. It is said he had a high success rate in his predictions and one of them was the great pyramid was much older than people thought it was and there seems to be quite a bit of proof which might validate this prediction. Some say he only did it for the money and was a charlatan, but the truth is the man never asked to be paid, but did accept money if given to him. His fame grew as his predictions turned out to be true in many cases. Will we ever reach a point where we will be able to put a dollar in a machine and it will tell us what the future holds in store for us? I am not so sure knowing the future would make us happy and I know in some cases it would make us very sad. |
