Future:Technology Tree

This page proposes a project: to jointly create a technology tree mapping likely future technological developments from a transhumanist perspective.

The idea of making technology trees is not new. See e.g.
 * Planning for the Future, 2002
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_future_in_forecasts
 * http://future.wikicities.com/wiki/Robotics#Timeline
 * http://future.wikicities.com/wiki/Nanotechnology#Timeline
 * http://livingtomorrow.blogspot.com/2005/10/future-of-genetic-engineering-2005.html

A related project: http://cnto.pbwiki.com/Transhumanist%20foresight%20project

What if we make a graph of future technologies and applications, showing their relative positions in time as we anticipate them? What if we show the dependencies between those technologies? We want to make a directed graph of technologies, with the parents of a technology representing its prerequisites. In other words, a Gannt Chart of the future.

To get an overview of the domain model, i.e. what transhumanist technologies we need to explore, see the Transhumanism domain model.

The tree itself is about PRESENTATION, not CONTENT. The content is a list of developments with the following attributes:
 * name
 * anticipated year of arrival
 * uncertainty factor for the date of arrival
 * relations to other developments
 * comments
 * links

Clearly, the production of a technology tree cannot be done manually. It must be automagically generated from a database.

http://future.wikicities.com/wiki/Timeline Producing this list it is very similar to what tech. foresight does. See http://future.wikicities.com/wiki/NISTEP_report and also http://cnto.pbwiki.com/Transhumanist%20foresight%20project

We can take account of ideological positions as value judgements on different sets of nodes. We can consider the present state of the art as the set of currently achieved technologiy nodes. This technique is called a "scenario matrix" - it can be a useful tool.

Presentation
This is an example of a nanotechnology tree. It's in Russian, but you get the idea: there are fields (branches) and specific applications (leaves) that are colored according to their ETA. Nano tech tree

There are better ways to organise this information visually, but they require a lot of work.

There is a number of presentation examples of such technology trees in computer strategy games, such as Civilization and Alpha Centauri. See http://future.wikicities.com/wiki/Gantt_chart for examples.

Problems
It's not easy. We need motivated people to succeed.

Two big problems:
 * 1) it takes a lot of time to make such map, e.g. This type of map required thousands of man-hours to research and design:  http://www.macrovu.com/CCTGeneralInfo.html
 * 2) there are no good tools for working with lots of spatially organised information. See http://futures.wiki.taoriver.net/moin.cgi/GraphRevolution

Interconnections are hard to make generic yet believable - it takes Sid Meyer or James Burke to do that! e.g. You usually need very SPECIFIC things from material science to make tech X in biotech. You can't just draw a link in 2015 material science -> biotech and pretend it's both obvious and useful. Still, it can be done - but it's not easy.

There are some problems with an illustration such as the nanotechnology tree shown above:
 * 1) its specific purpose is not clear (which it is better for than a text)
 * 2) it isn't very scalable; it can't be integrated with an AI or biotech tree easily

There are no common graph representation language that are good enough to do what we want to. Last time I checked, the XML format used by Touchgraph Linkbrowser was one of the best. If I was doing this, I would suggest to begin using nothing only plain text and MS Office.

Why should there be a map at all. A more revolutionary tech tree for a game is for example. You put money into development Your scientists come back with a laser. Now it's got X amount of power and it's use would be say, attack. You pour more money into that laser technology but you tell your scientists to come up with a defensive use, for this laser. They come back and tell you, that (and this happens randomly) that they have found a defensive use for the laser You encorporate it into your ship. Now your laser defence is becoming obsolete. You should be able to kick back that laser defence tech and pay for your scientists to either create a more defensive laser (which may or maynot fail) but during the testing, they find that the laser is a better attack weapon. You can scrap the defensive idea, or try again. And again.

Why can't games make tech trees like that. Instead of a possitive "only a matter of researching the next tech tree to get the super laser" why is the outcome so sure. That sucks.

Project
If this sounds like a worthwhile project, we need to get two or three persons together and start writing this "map of the future".

If anybody is interested in taking this idea to completion - if there is such a thing - why haven't they joined Future Wiki and started to work on it yet? Haven't they heard about it? Anyway, if anybody is interested, say so right here!

If we succeed, the resulting draft technology tree can then be refined by specialists, and we can a create a shared representation of where we are in terms of technology, where we're going, and and what we're going to do about it.

There is a WTA mailing list wta-techtree at http://transhumanism.org/mailman/listinfo/wta-techtree