What Happened 2012 ???

Another New Year, and we celebrated it so loudly and with such enthusiasm. Strange, in a world divided by politics, religion, economics, we should as a species , all look forward to a new year. I watched as each major nation welcomed 2012 with a great deal of noisy fireworks.

I look forward to the future with hope because there is no other way to look ahead. Granted I hope to to do better and hope the best for my world. Sadly though I know I will make  a great personal effort I feel the world as a whole will lag behind. As such I will measure our progress on how well we do.

Have we achieved meaningful world peace ?? If not now , when ?? Though there has been positive moves the animosity level has not decreased. One very telling point is why China was not invited to participate in the International Space Station. I have been monitoring , with interest their many successes in this area. They seem intent on building their own space station and we shall see that the next humans on the moon will be Chinese.

The genome was mapped a few years ago, yet where is the cure for cancer ??. Where are all those cheap and wonderful treatments that were promised ?? Now I know that it takes years of very hard research and development to come up with this stuff but I have not heard a peep lately.

Why is it in the twenty-first century we are still using so much oil?? Where are all those wonder fuels that give us plentiful energy without slowly killing the environment ??  We have 'clean' energy via nuclear power but where do you bury , safely all that radio-active waste?? Using fossil fuels will make us fossils eventually!

Last October the seventh billion person was born. When I was a young lad there were about 3.7  billion humans on earth. In my lifetime, spanning many decades I have witnessed it double. I firmly believe that even with 7 billion people, there are enough resources and ability to give every single person food, a decent education and a home to live in with dignity. However the distribution of the existing resources is very upside down.

Have we figured out what human consciousness is ???  I know form reading this letter you may think that humans are not intelligent but even I have to admit there are signs of it appearing from time to time. However it seems that as one philosopher stated, the hard problem does not have any solutions yet. Research continues and has increased over the past few years and hopefully results will ensue.

To end this long winded commentary I ask where is my robot ?? I am thrilled about the amount of interest, research and progress that has been made. A lot of it in North America is funded by the military and this is a cause for concern. There is so much work being done that it is hard to keep track of the latest developments. I am engaged in this most fascinating work. However I have yet to see a conscious, fully functioning robot leave any of our labs just yet.

As in all things all we can do is hope !!!