Last night was fun. My friends and I had dinner at this sushi place. I hate sushi so I had some chicken katsu stuff. It was really good. After that we played pool for a couple hours and had some beers. Once we got tired of that it was off to an awesome bar called the Balcony. I got kinda drunk over there. They had live music and I was dancing like a moron. No one seemed to care though. 
VIEW 6 of 6 COMMENTS
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Yes, I do think water will become an issue. A very big one. It sounds like you are only considering the water issue in the First World nations? Of course richer countries have the resources and engineers to create more water purification plants if they need it.
To clarify, water alone won't be the key issue, but it will be a combination of factors. Things like collapsing fish populations and quality of fish stock (ever noticed how Fish Fingers and Filet-O-Fish used to taste so good 15 years ago, but now they not only taste strange they LOOK strange under the breaded batter), tons of topsoil washed into the sea and replaced by hard chemicals from chemical companies counting their profits. It'll all add up eventually, and there is eventually going to be a nation that gets sick of it's situation. They'll probably be called 'terrorists' and blown to kingdom come by Bush III or IV.
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Singapore has built two different plants because of it's situation as a city-nation with NO natural potable water resources.
One creates 'NEWater' which is essentially recycled from human sewage. They've been trying to get the public to accept it. I don'
t know if I've already drunk it. The other takes it from Salt Water. Both in an effort to be self-sufficient and not need to purchase water from Malaysia to the north.
I'm well aware of the technology. What I wouldn't be sure of is how reliable it is. I think salt water purification is one of those tasks that looks good and looks easy on paper, but is difficult to pull off. Salt water is very corrosive and harsh on man-made materials.
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We have the technology now for AI. We just lack the know how and the volume of resources. A physical neural network of a size large enough to do some experiments on would take up a huge building and suck up enough power to run a small country. Most neural network research now uses simulated software neural nets. Only limit is RAM.
IMHO, no human will ever directly program an AI. If we want something based on the human brain, that would be asking for something on the order of a billion neurons all connected to each other, something like a trillion connections. That's more connections than there are atoms that make up the Planet Earth. If a group of scientists were to spend every waking hour implementing one neuron a second, our Sun would turn into a Red Giant and swallow the Earth before it was finished.
What I believe will happen, is that we will program as close to an AI to the best of the combined abilities of the best scientists around, and that pseudo-AI will have one job: Design it's own child AI to be better than itself. And that child-AI, will have it's own child....and so on and so forth. That's the only way I believe it could be done.
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Cloning and the technology around it so far has one sure success already: Weapons of Mass Destruction.
If they can just figure out how to tell a stem cell what it should be, that sci-fi dream of simply growing a replacement liver or heart in a vat could come true. No more rejection problems because it's your own stuff. There is one problem though. If the problem is genetic or hereditary, e.g. cancer, then there is a time-bomb in the replacement part too. New body part, same old flawed genes...
Meanwhile, accept my friendship.