Book Byte #364 "Physics of the Future" by Michio Kaku

How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

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📣 Curious Quotes from the Author

“By 2100, our destiny is to become like the gods we once worshipped and feared. But our tools will not be magic wands and potions but the science of computers, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and most of all, the quantum theory.”

“There is so much noise on the Internet, with would-be prophets daily haranguing their audience and megalomaniacs trying to push bizarre ideas, that eventually people will cherish a new commodity: wisdom.”

“To understand the difficulty of predicting the next 100 years, we have to appreciate the difficulty that the people of 1900 had in predicting the world of 2000.”

“Today, your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969, when it placed two astronauts on the moon. Video games, which consume enormous amounts of computer power to simulate 3-D situations, use more computer power than mainframe computers of the previous decade. The Sony PlayStation of today, which costs $300, has the power of a military supercomputer of 1997, which cost millions of dollars.”

“The real bottleneck is software. Creating software can be done only the old-fashioned way. A human -sitting quietly in a chair with a pencil, paper and laptop- is going to have to write the codes... One can mass-produce hardware and increase it's power by piling on more and more chips, but you cannot mass-produce the brain.”

“There are two competing trends in the world today: one is to create a planetary civilization that is tolerant, scientific, and prosperous, but the other glorifies anarchy and ignorance that could rip the fabric of our society.”

“For example, you might have a sever sunburn as a child. Many decades later, you might develop skin cancer at that same site. This means it probably took that long for the other mutation to occur and finally tip the cell into a cancerous mode.”

“The point is: whenever there is a conflict between modern technology and the desires of our primitive ancestors, these primitive desires win each time. That’s the Cave Man Principle.”

“The transition between our current Type 0 civilization and a future Type I civilization is perhaps the greatest transition in history. It will determine whether we will continue to thrive and flourish, or perish due to our own folly. This transition is extremely dangerous because we still have all the barbaric savagery that typified our painful rise from the swamp. Peel back the veneer of civilization, and we still see the forces of fundamentalism, sectarianism, racism, intolerance, etc., at work. Human nature has not changed much in the past 100,000 years, except now we have nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to settle old scores.”

“Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER”

“And Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, said in 1943, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

📚 Cognition of the Book’s Big Idea

Even if we are unable to accurately forecast the future, there are methods available to us that allow us to at least speculate as to what kinds of technologies the twenty-first century will bring. Once-fantastical technological breakthroughs are expected due to the quick acceleration of advances in biology, physics, genetics, and computing.

Until Tomorrow,

Jason (Founder Club255)