At least it would be selfless courage, if the whole premise wasn't such total bilge. :-)
]]>True as far as it goes, but the hyperintelligent tapeworm equivalent is that worms are far more capable than bacteria. Doesn't mean they are anywhere near comprehending the true nature of the universe.
Now, what if the worms start modifying their host/universe so that it can better survive and take them to new places?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0766131/
"My ancestors came here on the sandwich!"
]]>I can't be bothered to do the maths but I suspect there would still be a significant population problem in the long term. Fertility of 0.7 children per individual would still triple the population over time. Extended worldwide, a population of 21 billion might be survivable but would be decidedly crowded...
]]>OK, they would have a few centuries to figure out a solution, but any birth rate exceeding the rate of deaths from violence, accidents and other non-aging causes would eventually cause serious problems. Unless of course the "unnatural" death rate rose to compensate. Earn your right to procreate by competing in gladiatorial matches to the death? Or just by playing a few rounds of Russian roulette?
]]>As of 2012, Sweden has an annual birth rate of 10.24 per 1000 population, and a death rate of 10.21. If people stop dying of old age, then (roughly speaking) the population would double in 100 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden
Sooner or later the birth rate would have to be seriously restricted. I'm imagining some sort of Larry Niven-esque "birth lottery" in which the lucky winners get to procreate.
]]>Once public policy catches up with the effects of the drug, I would expect draconian restrictions on the birth rate to offset the fact that almost no one is dying. (As per Our Host's instructions I won't speculate on what form those restrictions might take, or the consequences of people trying to avoid them.)
]]>If Saddam's commanders had been half as clever and well-motivated as Van Riper, the invasion in 2003 might have gone very differently. (To be clear, I'm not saying this would have been a good thing, it likely would have made the war even more destructive than it already was.)
]]>You could end up with a situation where the "offical" language drifts away from the language that is actually spoken. This is happening to some extent with French, and more so with Arabic. For an extreme case, look at the divide between Latin and Italian.
I think the pace of language change is primarily driven by change in the underlying society. In Icelandic, sagas written 1000 years ago are still intelligible to modern speakers... I don't think it's a coincidence that Iceland is an isolated island nation with few drastic social upheavals.
As Charlie notes, we can expect some pretty radical social and technological changes and population movements in the next 500 years, so language change could be equally extreme. Perhaps it would be exacerbated if human beings are two separate populations in the far north and south, divided by the uninhabitably hot tropics. USA/UK English and South African/Australian English might diverge quite considerably.
]]>True as far as it goes. But it's still a useful rough and ready indicator, on the (reasonable) assumption that Japanese-English is not significantly more error-prone than English-Japanese.
Don't get me wrong -- machine translation is already useful, and it will become more so. It might become reliable for factual instructions like "baggage reclaim is that way" or "put down that chainsaw". But the Star Trek scenario of a device that lets you reliably have an idiomatic conversation, on an arbitrary subject, with a native speaker, is verging on "magic wand" AI.
BTW "Turing complete" has nothing to do with AI, it refers to the ability to simulate an idealised theoretical computing machine. You might be thinking of "AI complete". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-complete
]]>even a basic voice translator, however poor, would be a benefit in a lot of situations
If the situation is trying to ask for directions or order in a restaurant, then maybe. For anything more complicated, current automated voice translation is not really fit for purpose.
IIRC the American army in Iraq experimented with automated "translator boxes", and they were a complete failure. Instead they had to hurriedly recruit whatever Iraqi translators they could find. (Needless to say, the consequences of a misunderstanding were a lot worse than ordering soup instead of salad.)
]]>Hope all you want. I certainly can't rule out some kind of amazing breakthrough in machine translation. My point is that for a machine to handle fuzzy concepts like "context" and "sentence structure" is a lot more difficult than a dictionary lookup algorithm.
It is plausible that, 500 years from now, we still won't have worked out how to crack this one.
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