Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

causing the present turmoil within the music industry.
    (But the good thing is that unknown singers can now rise to the top,without having to face the de facto censorship of the big music companies. In the past, these music moguls could almost choose who the next rock star would be. So, in the future, the top musicians will be chosen more democratically, via a free-for-all involving market forces and technology, rather than by music business executives.)
    Newspapers are also facing a similar dilemma. Traditionally, newspapers could rely on a steady stream of revenue from advertisers, especially in the classified ads section. The revenue stream came not so much from the purchase of the paper itself, but from the ad revenue those pages generated. But now we can download the day’s news for free and advertise nationwide on a variety of online want-ads sites. As a consequence, newspapers around the country are shrinking in size and circulation.
    But this process will continue only so far. 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. Random facts do not correlate with wisdom, and in the future people will be tired of the rants of mad bloggers and will seek out respected sites that offer this rare commodity of wisdom.
    As economist Hamish McRae has said, “ In practice, the vast bulk of this ‘information’ is rubbish, the intellectual equivalent of junk mail.” But he claims, “Good judgment will continue to be highly valued: successful financial analysts are, as a group, the best paid researchers in the world.”
    THE MATRIX
    But what about Hollywood actors? Instead of becoming box-office celebrities and the talk of society, will actors find themselves on the unemployment line? Recently, there has been remarkable progress in computer animations of the human body, so that it appears nearly real. Animated characters now have 3-D features and shadowing. So will actors and actresses become obsolete anytime soon?
    Probably not. There are fundamental problems modeling the human face by computer. Humans evolved an uncanny ability to differentiate one another’s faces, since our survival depended on it. In a flash, we had to tell if someone was an enemy or a friend. Within seconds, we had to rapidly determine a person’s age, sex, strength, and emotion. Those who could notdo this simply did not survive to pass on their genes to the next generation. Hence, the human brain devotes a considerable amount of its processing power to reading people’s faces. In fact, for most of our evolutionary history, before we learned how to speak, we communicated through gestures and body language, and a large part of our brain power was devoted to looking at subtle facial cues. But computers, which have a hard time recognizing simple objects around them, have even greater difficulty re-creating a realistic animated human face. Kids know immediately if the face they see on the movie screen is a real human or a computer simulation. (This goes back to the Cave Man Principle. Given a choice between seeing a live-action blockbuster action movie with our favorite actor or seeing a computer-animated cartoon action picture, we will still prefer the former.)
    The body, by contrast, is much easier to model by computer. When Hollywood creates those realistic monsters and fantasy figures in the movies, they use a shortcut. An actor puts on a skintight suit that has sensors on its joints. As the actor moves or dances, the sensors send signals to a computer that then creates an animated figure performing the precise movements, as in the movie
Avatar.
    I once spoke at a conference sponsored by the Livermore National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons are designed, and at dinner sat next to someone who had worked on the movie
The Matrix.
He confessed that they had to use an enormous amount of computer time to create the dazzling special effects in that movie. One of the most difficult scenes, he said, required them to completely reconstruct an imaginary city as a helicopter flew overhead. With enough computer time, he said, he could create an entire fantasy city. But, he admitted, modeling a realistic human face was beyond his ability. This is because when a light beam hits the human face, it scatters in all directions, depending on its texture. Each particle of light has to be tracked by computer.