RE: What Will Life Be Like In 100 Years - Part 1
I think AI that can do basic things and extrapolate orders will be a useful tool VERY soon coupled with drone technology.
Things like building structures for humans to live in, in orbits, on planets, etc. Why couldn't we use drones for this almost now? The issue with doing this at planets and distance is the delay in communication. That is why you need the AI to extrapolate and understand tasks. Be able to say "make the ground look like this, and put your spoils/waste here" and have it be largely autonomous so the delays in communication are not as big a deal but mostly used to update tasks.
We talk about sending a manned mission to mars, and other places. I personally think we should send a small army of drones outfitted for various tasks to such places and construct a place for humans to show up and already have shelter, and such in place.
Mining asteroids. Drones seem like they would be awesome for that. Also though I am saying Drone... they don't have to be small. You could have tons of smaller drones mining asteroids and loading up cargo in a large drone that can bring ore and material to us, to a space based refinery/smelter, etc and a lot.
This is also where I see the true power of VR being super valuable. We can use this VR to make drones potentially be extensions of ourselves. The key though is the delay in communication over distance, so that is why the drones will need to be able to interpolate and fill in steps to accomplish something for a task without needing us to constantly twitch them this way or that.
You hit the nail right on the head. AI coupled with drones will change everything for us. That's why I hinted that drones will play a major role in our future development projects.
Sending them to other planets to have structures ready for us might still take time as sending a lot of them in space requires large rockets as the payload will be just huge. But we will get there eventually.
On Earth, drones will carry out a lot of different functions. Dubai is already making ambulance-drones that will carry people from their location to hospitals. Also, one country (I forget the name) is going to use drones to plant hundreds of thousands of trees to combat deforestation using drones which will shoot seeds from the air and into the soil at fixed intervals to effectively and efficiently grow forests upon forests.
And all this is already in the short term. Imagine their range of capabilities in the future. Very exciting indeed.