Did you know?

[nicotine]

Incredibility interesting albeit a little boring.

[Justin K]

thats alot to take in, and i got the question right. and it was not that boring.

[dirtyhippy]

uhh wait.. is that video supposed to be optimistic or pessimistic? theres 2 ways of looking it as i see

A) wow how awesome we are, look how far we've come technologically

or

B) wow we're ####ed and we continuing to #### ourselves.

now these can both be debated, however neither can be ignored. i dunno, personally im in the B squad.. so something like 700 babies were born during that 7 minute video? can we really keep striving towards our preconceived idea of "progress"? i for one sure hope malthus wasn't correct, and i hope that if i ever have kids i will be able to show them nature and wild animals that arent found in museums or zoos..

[GravityRider15]

wow that was a great video. makes you think a second about whats going on and about the future

thanks for putting it up


-chris

[tomahawk]

rather skeptical about some of their methods of extrapolation as well as some of their statistics.

much of the stuff about technical knowledge being outdated i feel is just plain wrong. new stuff gets discovered, but the old stuff is as true now as it was 10 yrs ago. more importantly, schools, especially colleges, should be teachings students HOW to learn, not just shoving information down their throats.

as for their comments about increasing the bandwidth of fiberoptics for "free", that made me lol.

as for the extrapolation of computers, i think that's based on the incredible growth shown by the semiconductor industry in the recent decades but doesnt seem to factor in the fact that there's some fundamental limits of how small you can make things (although i will say what the semiconductor industry is being able to squeeze out of light and semiconducotrs is mind blowing).

all in all, interesting for light entertainment, but not suitable for any concrete analysis.

[MillencolinAddict]

I am both scared and impressed. Despite the fact that I believe some of the projections are overestimated, the statistics for even modern day are mind boggling. China is a rediculously big place, thank god we are so indebted to them that if they every decided to wipe us out they'd go with us economically

[swisschez]

well that was comforting.

[HerBDerb]

I saw this a while ago, and just noticed that they need to fix that one slide..
It should say:
China will soon become the number one Engrish speaking country in the world

[R]

You owe me 6 minutes, nicotine!

[hexagon5un]

China will some become the number one Engrish speaking country in the world

I LOLed. I haven't lived in China for almost 10 years now, so the whole damn place could be different AFAIK, but I'm doubting the "number one english-speaking country" bit. I ran into probably 1.2 billion people who didn't speak English at all beyond "hello".

There's still a very large rural/urban divide in terms of education and employment, and they still have a bit of a literacy problem _in Chinese_ much less in English. (I'd bet there's more people who can't read a novel in China than the entire population of the US, for instance.)

A lot of the China stuff in the slides just boiled down to "China's big". Like 4-5 times as many people as the US, on about the same surface area. Overpopulation is one of their worst problems, which is why they've had a "one-child-per-family" policy in place for the last 30 years. They've really got to slim down, and they know it, so I didn't really know what conclusions we were supposed to draw from those slides.

Anyway, like Tomahawk said, a lot of the tech projections are a bit dodgy as well, but I think there's no doubt that staying in school is going to continue to pay off more and more in the future. Study hard and wear your helmets, y'all.

[AJ]

Im pretty happy im a cook...studying to become a plumber.

y'all always gonna need classy food and y'all gonna need plumbing in all them cribs o'yoyz

I feel bad for every one that studied computer sciences and graphic design and ended up unemployed.