I’m looking for a list such that for each entry on the list we can say "Yep, probably that’ll happen by 2040, even conditional on no super-powerful AGI / intelligence explosion / etc." Contrarian opinions are welcome but I’m especially interested in stuff that would be fairly uncontroversial to experts and/or follows from straightforward trend extrapolation. I’m trying to get a sense of what a "business as usual, you’d be a fool not to plan for this" future looks like. ("Plan for" does not mean "count on.") Here is my tentative list. Please object in the comments if you think anything here probably won’t happen by 2040, I’d love to discuss and improve my understanding.
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Energy is 10x cheaper. [EDIT: at least for training and running giant neural nets, I’m less confident about energy for e.g. powering houses but I still think probably yes.] This is because the cost of solar energy has continued on its multi-decade trend, though it is starting to slow down a bit. Energy storage has advanced as well, smoothing out the bumps.
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Compute (of the sort relevant to training neural nets) is 2 OOMs cheaper. Energy is the limiting factor.
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Models 5 OOMs more compute-costly than GPT-3 have been trained; these models are about human brain-sized and also have somewhat better architecture than GPT-3 but nothing radically better. They have much higher-quality data to train on. Overall they are about as much of an improvement over GPT-3 as GPT-3 was over GPT-1.
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There’s been 20 years of "Prompt programming" now, and so loads of apps have been built using it and lots of kinks have been worked out. Any thoughts on what sorts of apps would be up and running by 2040 using the latest models?
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Models merely the size of GPT-3 are now cheap enough to run for free. And they are qualitatively better too, because (a) they were trained to completion rather than with early stopping, (b) they were trained on higher-quality data, (c) various other optimized architectures and whatnot were employed, (d) they were then fine-tuned on loads of data for whatever task is at hand, and (e) decades of prompt programming and prompt-SGD has resulted in excellent prompts as well that fully utilize the model’s knowledge, (f) they even have custom chips specialized to run specific models.
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The biggest models--3 OOMs bigger than GPT-3--are still only a bit more expensive at inference time than GPT-3 was in 2021. Energy is the main cost. Vast solar panel farms power huge datacenters on which these models live, performing computations to serve requests from all around the world during the day when energy is cheapest.
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Some examples of products and services:
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Basically all the apps that people talk about maybe doing with GPT-3 in 2021 have been successfully implemented by now, and work as well as anyone in 2021 hoped. It just took two decades to accomplish (and bigger models!) instead of two years and GPT-3.
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There are now very popular chatbots, that are in most ways more engaging and fun to talk to than the average human. There are many of these bots catering to different audiences, and they can be fine-tuned to particular customers. A billion people talk to them daily.
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There are specialized chatbots for various jobs, e.g. customer support.
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There are now excellent predictive tools that can read data about a person, especially text authored by that person, and then make predictions like "probability that they will buy product X" and "probability that they will vote Republican"
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Cars are all BEVs, with comparable range to 2020s gas cars but much lower operating costs due to energy being practically free and maintenance being very easy for BEVs.
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Cars are finally self-driving, with cheap LIDAR sensors and bigger brains trained on way more data along with many layers of hard-coded tweaks to maximize safety. (Also various regulations that make it easier for them, e.g. by starting with restrictions on what sorts of areas they can operate in, and using big pre-trained models in server farms to make important judgment calls for individual cars and monitor the roads more generally via cameras to look out for anomalies). (I’m not so sure about this one, part of me wonders if self-driving cars just won’t happen on business-as-usual).
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Starlink internet is fast, reliable, cheap, and covers the entire globe.
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3D printing is much better and cheaper now. Most cities have at least one "Additive Factory" that can churn out high-quality metal or plastic products in a few hours and deliver them to your door, some assembly required. (They fill up downtime by working on bigger orders to ship to various factories that use 3D-printed components, which is most factories at this point since there are some components that are best made that way)
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Drone delivery? I feel confused about this, shouldn’t it have happened already? What is the bottleneck? This article makes it seem like the bottleneck is FAA regulation.
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World GDP is a bit less than twice what it is now. Poverty is lower but not eliminated.
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Boring company? Neuralink? I’m not sure what to think of them. I guess I’ll ignore them for now, though I do feel like probably at least one of them will be a big deal...
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Starship or something similar is operational and working more or less according to specs promised in 2020. Maybe point-to-point transport on Earth didn’t work out, maybe the cost per kilo to LEO never got quite as low as $15, but still it’s gotta be pretty low—maybe $50? (For comparison, it’s currently about $1000 and five years ago was $5000) Thus, Elon probably gets his colony on Mars after all, and NASA gets their moon base, and there’s probably a big space station too and maybe some asteroid mining operations?
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Video games now employ deep neural nets in a variety of ways. Language model chatbots give NPC’s personality; RL-trained agents make bots challenging and complex; and perhaps most of all, vision models process the wireframe video game worlds into photorealistic graphics. Perhaps you need to buy specialized AI chips to enjoy these things, like people buy specialized graphics cards today.
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Virtual reality is now commonplace; most people have one or two headsets just like they have phones, laptops, etc. today. The headsets are low weight and high-definition compared to 2021′s. Many people use them for work, and many more people use them for games and socializing.
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The military technology outlined here exists, though it hasn’t been used in a major war because there hasn’t been a major war, and as a result the actual composition of most major militaries still looks pretty traditional (tanks, aircraft carriers, etc.) It’s been used in various proxy wars and civil wars though, and it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the old tech is obsolete.
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Household robots. Today Spot Mini costs $74,500. In 2040 you’ll be able to buy a robot that can load and unload a dishwasher, go up and down stairs, open and close doors, and do various other similar tasks, for less than $50,000. (Maybe as low as $7,500?) That’s not to say that many people will buy such robots; they might be still expensive enough and finicky enough to be mostly toys for rich people. My list is focused on technology because that’s what I happened to think about a bunch, but I’d be very interested to hear other predictions (e.g. geopolitical and cultural) as well.
Energy cost in summer and energy cost in winter will strongly diverge.
One key usage of cheap summer energy will be hydrogen and methane production
Some planes will be Hydrogen-based
Hydrogen will be used more frequently for home heating than gas.
Permanent base on moon and Mars
Vacations on space stations will cost less than 20k (a good chance that it’s less than 10k)
Transporting materials to orbit will cost less then 10$/kg
A majority vehicle journeys will be in rented cars. A majority of cars on the road will be electric.
Common services such as hairdressing will be provided in moving cars, so that it’s possible to book your hairdressing during your commute in at least some jurisdictions.
Delivery costs go down by an order of magnitude as robots can replace humans
Cheaper delivery costs mean that more people will let all their clothes by washed by a dry-cleaner that picks up their clothing and then brings clean clothing back. A lot of the individual labor will be automated which will in turn bring down prices as well.
65% of the world population will live in cities
Insurance payouts for natural disasters will double compared to present levels
A majority of households with a net worth of >100k will have air filters and air quality sensors.
Routing usage of next-generation sequencing for virus and bacteria infections that sequence everything in the blood.
Protein folding is solved to the point where it’s easy to design new proteins. This will be used both in medicine and in other fields that need specialized materials.
Phage therapy will be standard treatment for at least one infection that’s currently not well treated with antibiotics (chronic Lyme/Periodontitis/MRSA).
There will be multivar tests for combinations of using existing drugs as antiaging drugs.
The money that flows through prediction markets will be at least 10x of what it is today.
All police in the Western world will wear body cams.
Cancer vaccines will be part of regular cancer treatment.
Hydra-style darknet markets that combine product quality assurance through human testing and a delivery network will not only be operational in Russia but all Western countries as well
When dark-market organizations provide independent quality control while the FDA just trust manufactures claims, there will be pressure on the FDA to match the quality processes of Hydra style markets that result in new legislation
Multiple countries will pass laws to regulate satellite surveillance within their territory as it’s economical to have real time satellite views of everything on the globe. While it’s unclear from the present point how it will be regulated it will be a big deal for some people.
Chinese politicians will switch to finding the environment important. As a result there will be a global treaty to remove plastic trash from the oceans and reduce mercury concentrations in the ocean. Fishing will be banned in parts of the ocean.
Kinmen will be under Chinese control
Neurolink or a comparable company will produce a product that can be brought without medical diagnosis for an illness.
Copper and iron will have a lower inflation adjusted price compared to today
As robots get used more significantly less food is grown as monocrops the way it’s grown today and agriculture that combines multiple crops which is very labor intensive today will be cheaper given automation.
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Nice list! I’m skeptical of 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 21, 22, 25, 28. I’d be interested to hear more about them and also about 29 and the hydra markets stuff. Also, clearly protein folding will be solved to a significant extent, but *how *solved? Enough for molecular nanotech? Can you say more about what you have in mind?
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2/3/4: Look at the UK hydrogen strategy under Boris Johnson (a good chance that it was partly written by Cummings people). Currently, we have more then a week in Germany with negative energy prices where people are paid to use energy (if the get the energy directly from the energy market). The more solar you have the more days you will have where a lot of energy gets produced that has no clear use. On the other hand you need to be able to produce energy on days where the sun does’t shine. Batteries can be used to shift energy usage over a 24 hour time period but they are not cost effective for moving energy production from summer to winter. If you want to run fully on solar/wind with current technology there doesn’t seem to be a way around hydrogen/methan production on the days where you have too much energy and use those partly when you need them in the winter. Hydrogen for heating is part of the UK hydrogen strategy as proposed at the moment. Hydrogen is very light which makes it a good fuel for planes. 7: 10$/kg is a number that Elon set as a goal for the Starship (https://wccftech.com/elon-musk-starship-launch-cost-reiterate/) I expect that by 2040 there will be successor technology to Starship that’s more efficient so even if Starship doesn’t reach that goal the successor technology will. 9: Given what we know about how transportation works it’s likely that driverless cars will result in people spending more time in cars. Making good use of the time will be important. Rented cars inturn mean that you can rent different cars that are specialized for different usecases. Hairdressers that provide that service will be a premium product that’s brought by business people who are very busy and spent a lot of time in their cars. 10: Reduced electricity costs and driverless cars mean that the ride is cheaper and you don’t need to pay a delivery person. 21: I think I need to qualify, I mean all uniformed police. There might be undercover police where having camera’s wouldn’t work because it allows detection of the police. Camera’s get cheaper by the year and there’s a lot of pressure to take action regarding policy brutality. The power of technology lobbyists who want to convince politicians to use tech solution rises over time. 22: Cancer vaccines that are created based on the mutations that a particular cancer has increase the immune response against the cancer cells. While it might not be enough on it’s own to kill every cancer it’s combinable with a lot of other cancer treatments. If you for example operate out a cancer you want the immune system to go after any remaining small metastating cells and cancer vaccines are a tool to encourage that. If you don’t give a patient drugs that shut down the immune system, giving them cancer vaccine in addition to other treatments will have better effects. This is different from cancer vaccines that go after proteins that are normally only expressed in fetal development which largely flopped in clinical trials. 25: It’s basically saying that within 20 years the needed technology for EarthNow will be deployed. Being able to track all the cars on the street do things like being able to tell how much millionaires who park their cars in their garage engage in speeding has huge privacy implications and EU lawmarkers will want to regulate it. 29: This might be the one I’m least certain about, but I expect advances in mining that might include asteroid mining to bring down prices.
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I think 10x decrease in energy prices is too much. My reasons are:
There are some constrains on solar/wind which are currently not binding, but will be by the time we have converted most energy production to green energy. The main ones are metals (see e.g. https://www.coppolacomment.com/2021/03/from-carbon-to-metals-renewable-energy.html) and land use (in India, China, Europe, Japan and a few other Asian countries especially as population density is high, but that’s most of the world population anyway). This of course does not consider the possibility of major technological breakthroughs in organic solar and energy conversion/transport, which may happen but are not guaranteed so I think they are out of the scope of your exercise.
As the cost of energy lowers, we will consume more. In poor countries especially, plus you mentioned increased consumption by supercomputers and AI. This will partially balance the cost of production falling, so my (uneducated) guess would be that a 2x-3x decrease in prices is a more reasonable expectation. An analysis by an expert could convince me otherwise. Like rayom I also noticed you did not mention anything about biology and medicine. I think there will be some advances from that side. A malaria vaccine seems probable by 2040 (maybe ~80%?) and would be a big thing for large parts of the world. Also some improvement in cancer therapy seem to have relatively high probability (nothing even remotely like "cure all cancer", to be clear). We might get some improvement for Alzheimer, dementia or other age-related illnesses, but my "business as usual" expectation is that only moderate advancements will be widely deployed by 2040. Nevertheless they might be sufficient to improve significantly the quality of life of elderly people in rich countries.
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Extending on point 2: if we want to talk about a price drop, then we need to think about relative elasticity of supply vs demand—i.e. how sensitive is demand to price, and how sensitive is supply to price. Just thinking about the supply side is not enough: it could be that price drops a lot, but then demand just shoots up until some new supply constraint becomes binding and price goes back up. (Also, I would be surprised if supercomputers and AI are actually the energy consumers which matter most for pricing. Air conditioning in South America, Africa, India, and Indonesia seems likely to be a much bigger factor, just off the top of my head, and there’s probably other really big use-cases that I’m not thinking of right at the moment.)
I understand that Malaria resists attempts at vaccination, but regarding your 80% prediction by 2040, did you see the news that a Malaria vaccine candidate did reach 77% effectiveness in phase II trials just last month? Quote: "It is the first vaccine that meets the World Health Organization’s goal of a malaria vaccine with at least 75% efficacy."
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No I missed it, that’s great! I was only aware of phase I. It should be revised way up then.
People argued for metal prices being a problem for a long time and those predictions usually failed to come true.
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You are right of course, and I am going by other people’s analysis so I am not sure how much they are correct or wrong this time around. I do not think we will have hugely rising commodity prices making green energy unfeasible, unless there is a war (or just a trade war) blocking the supply of a key input. Nevertheless, the extrapolation of decreasing costs for solar and wind based on current trends will eventually hit some "hard" limit, and metals are a likely candidate. After all, as manufacturing costs for panels reduce, the fraction of cost coming from raw materials grows even at constant prices. And to get prices going down 10x, we need to supply several times more energy than now (maybe 5x?) meaning growing wind and solar by two orders of magnitude in 20 years. This could plausibly put strain on the supply of raw materials. Of course, if the bottleneck will turn out to be energy distribution and storage, then we could get prices going down 10x at the source (what Daniel is interested in) but not for household consumption, and only a modest increase in demand.
+1 to this, though I think a slightly modified version of jacopo’s argument is stronger: new constraints are likely to become binding in general when cost of current constraints drops by a factor of 10, though it’s not always obvious which constraints will be relevant.
Interesting—source pls? The price of energy is one of the most important things on my list so I’m especially keen to hear more evidence for and against my projected 10x drop.
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As jacopo pointed out the Simon–Ehrlich wager is a key argument. As far as solar costs go, the cost of actual solar cells fell a lot more in the last years then installation costs. When it comes to solar cells for training neural nets, it’s worth noting that those don’t need to be stationed on earth. At 10$/kg or less for transporting material to space with Starship (and it’s successors) it’s possible that it makes more sense to have the data center in space where it gets exposure to the sun 24⁄7 and there’s no sky that blocks sunlight. For earth based datacenters, if energy is the limiting factor and a lot of the energy comes from solar, it’s possible to do all the training for neural nets in the summer where there’s plenty of solar energy and not train your models on days where solar cells and wind farms produce little energy.
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Is refrigeration a big part of data centers energy costs ? This would mean the best places for solar energy are also the worst places for data centers...
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I’ve thought a bit about this, but haven’t done any calculations. My guess is that it would be overall cheaper to have datacenters in sunny regions than to try to get solar panels in cold regions. Your refrigeration (and heat management more generally) electricity bill will be higher, but not *that *much higher, but your electricity costs will be much lower.
If refrigeration becomes a major part of the energy cost it’s worth noting that there’s thinking about putting data centers under water where they can be cooled more easily. At the moment that’s not viable but it might be in 2040.
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True but putting them in Northern part of the world may also be a good idea. Right now looking for example at Google’s data centers map there seems to be a very small trend toward northern locations (at least in Europe), but it may just be a flux due to local financial incentives being more favorable in some countries.
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I think he might be referring to the Simon–Ehrlich wager. And indeed there have been other similar claims in the past, more often proven wrong than correct.
Thanks! I edited my thing on energy to clarify, I’m mostly interested in the price of energy for powering large neural nets, and secondarily interested in the price of energy in general *in the USA, *and only somewhat interested in the price of energy worldwide. I am not convinced yet that the increased demand from AI will result in increased prices. In fact I think the opposite might happen. Solar panels are basically indefinitely scalable; there are large tracts of empty sunny land in which you can just keep adding more panels basically indefinitely. And transporting the energy to other places won’t be an issue for AI because the datacenters can be built right where the solar panels are. If storing energy is a problem, just do your AI training runs during the day when energy is plentiful. So I predict that AI-related demand for energy will mostly just result in vastly increased supply, rather than increased prices—but when supply increases, economies of scale will result, that may even drive the price lower! The point about metals is new to me, I’ll go read up on that, thanks. For some reason your link seems to be broken.
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Thanks for the clarifications! I realized that maybe you are mostly interested on the tech sector in the US and AI-related development, which explains also why you didn’t think of biomedical research immediately. Is this impression correct? If so, you might want to edit further the question to restrict the range of answers. I fixed the link, I didn’t notice but it had taken the ) as part of the address. BTW, I read your post on military tech in the meantime, it was interesting.
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It’s true that that’s what I’m mostly interested in, but I don’t want to restrict the question to that stuff—I asked this question so I could learn more things! Please don’t hesitate to answer with biotech stuff or non-US stuff or non-tech stuff! Thanks!
Anti-aging will be in the pipeline, if not necessarily on the market yet. The main root causes of most of the core age-related diseases will be basically understood, and interventions which basically work will have been studied in the lab.
Fertility will be below replacement rate globally, and increasingly far below replacement in first-world countries (most of which are already below today). Life expectancy will still be increasing, so the population will still be growing over all (even assuming anti-aging is slow), but slowly and decelerating.
Conditional on anti-aging not already seeing large-scale adoption, the population will have a much higher share of elderly dependents and a lower share of working-age people to support them, pretty much everywhere. This problem already dominates the budgets of first-world governments today: it means large-and-increasing shares of GDP going to retirement/social security and healthcare for old folks (who already consume the large majority of healthcare).
Conditional on anti-aging not already seeing large-scale adoption, taxes will probably go up in most first-world countries. There just isn’t enough spending to cut anywhere else to keep up with growing social security/healthcare obligations, and dramatically reducing those obligations won’t be politically viable with old people only becoming more politically dominant in elections over time. (In theory, dramatically opening up immigration could provide another path, but I wouldn’t call that the most likely outcome.)
China’s per-capita GDP will catch up to current first-world standards, at which point they will not be able to keep up the growth rate of recent decades. That will probably result in some kind of political instability, since the CCP’s popularity is heavily dependent on growth, and also because a richer population is a more powerful population which is just generally harder to control without its assent.
When I look back twenty years, it seems amazing how little has changed or improved since then. Basically just the same, but some things are less slow. The arrival of the internet in the nineties was the only real change. The arrival of AI will be the next change, whenever that happens. And in twenty years the looming maw of death will be closer for most of us, like a bowling ball falling into a black hole.
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I share this sentiment. Shockingly little has happened in the last 20 years, good or bad, in the grand scheme of things. Our age might become a blank spot in the memory of future people looking back at history; the time where nothing much happened. Even this recent pandemic can’t shake up the blandness of our age. Which is a good thing, of course, but still.
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Or you are seeing the working out of the logistic function that takes shape in so many systems.
You cover most of the interesting possibilities on the military technology front, but one thing that you don’t mention that might matter especially considering the recent near-breakdowns of some of the nuclear weapon treaties e.g. NEWSTART, is the further proliferation of nuclear weapons including fourth generation nuclear weapons like nuclear shaped charge warheads, pure fusion and sub-kiloton devices or tactical nuclear weapons—and more countries fitting nuclear-armed cruise missiles or drones with nuclear capability which might be a destabilising factor. If laser technology is sufficiently developed we may also see other forms of directed energy weapons becoming more common such as electron beam weapons or electrolasers
In terms of electricity, transmission and distribution make up 13% and 31% of costs respectively. Even if solar panels were free, I am not confident that reliable electricity would become 10x cheaper as unless each house as quite a few days of storage cheaply, they would still need distribution. Industrial electricity might approach that cheap, but I think it would depend on location and space availability otherwise at least some of the transmission and distribution costs would still exist.
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Thanks, this is a good point. I’ve edited my post to be less confident in non-AI energy uses. Also see my reply to Jacopo.
Speaking of transmission costs, I think the 2040 future there is carbon nanotube power lines.
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I have always wondered how high we can push the voltage on transmission lines. Maybe carbon nanotubes being as conductive as copper but lighter and stronger than aluminum could allow significant transmission of electricity across time zones, stretching out the load and allowing solar to power dark areas for some time without increasing storage. Transmission towers would need to get obscenely large, but the lighter lines would a allow for fewer of them.
Anything related to biotech is not included here—care to explain the reason why?
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I haven’t thought much about biotech and don’t know much about it. This is why I made this a question rather than a post, I’m super interested to hear more things to add to the list!
Metaculus predicts with ~75% probability that UBI will be implemented in at least one EU country.
The constant improvements in nuclear tech will lead to multiple small terrorist organizations possessing portable nuclear bombs. We’ll likely see at least a few major cities suffering drastic losses from terrorist threats.
Gene therapy will be strongly encouraged in some developed nations. Near the same level of encouragement as vaccines receive.
Pollution of the oceans will take over as the most popular pressing environmental issue.
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I’m especially interested in the nuclear bomb and gene therapy predictions; care to elaborate & explain your reasoning / evidence?
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Mandated Gene Therapy
We’re trending towards health and medical decisions being looked at from a societal perspective rather than on the individual level.[1] . People who use alternative medicine are increasingly shamed not only for the effect their choice has on their own health, but for the effect it has on the health of others and the financial burden it puts on the medical system. Medical interventions later on are more costly therefore those 4 months you tried on herbal remedies hurt everybody who has to pay for your medical treatment. Refusing a vaccine not only increases burden the medical system will have taking care of you, but increases the risk that others will also get infected.
Gene therapy, specifically editing the genes of newborns, is the archetypal preventative medical procedure. Parents who have a baby they know will more than likely have a genetic disease and likely be an extra burden on the medical system will be shamed for that decision and the solution will be gene therapy.
That shame will be turned into laws. The natural extension of gene therapy laws for preventing known high likelihoods of genetic mutation will be gene therapy to prevent speculative risk and then just possible risk.
Privately-Owned Nukes
Honestly this doesn’t even require improvements in nuclear tech. The only necessary ingredient is a couple of smart people joining a terrorist organization that wants to cause mass destruction and has the disposable resources of a small business. The design of nuclear bombs is freely available online, the actual engineering process is more arcane, but still learnable. The hardest part of the process is acquiring enough weapons grade uranium or plutonium. But even those can be made from scratch with access to a mine (even though spy movies always focus on the terrorist’s stealing their nuclear material). So my first lemma is that even though it hasn’t happened yet, it’s pretty easy for a small group to create a nuclear bomb. And that’s mostly based on my rudimentary knowledge of the comparative difficulty of creating a nuclear bomb vs. making a giant automotive plant or a
What’s been holding private nuke construction back is a lack of impetus and general ineffectiveness of terrorists. But that’s not a real bar to the end result. Over time there likely will be a statistical outlier terrorist organization that has a few smart people and the desire to construct nuclear bombs. And for them it will be easy.
Very cool prompt and list. Does anybody have predictions on the level of international conflict about AI topics and the level of "freaking out about AI" in 2040, given the AI improvements that Daniel is sketching out?
There will still be wars in Europe. I think conflicts will move west of Ukraine, if Ukraine still exists by that point.
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It is certainly possible but what kind of scenario are you thinking about? For moving west of Ukraine the conflicts will have to involve EU or NATO countries, almost certainly both. So that would mean either an open Russia-NATO war or the total breakdown of both NATO and EU. Both scenarios would have huge consequences for the world as a whole, nearly as much as a war between China and US and allies.
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I don’t imagine a big open war between Russia and whoever else, more like a series of ethnic conflicts which would quietly spring up. This scenario is convenient for most players.
...but this is probably just depression speaking, Europe does seem better put together now that I think of it.
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No but all neighbors are, except Kosovo (and Bosnia that is on the track for NATO access). A new Serbia-Kosovo war (or Serbia-someone else) is in principle possible and as you say would not imply NATO breakdown. But US and EU have currently a strong grip on the region, the last war sent the message that they were willing to maintain it with force, and I think they have and will continue to have strong interest in no new war developing. And no country in the area should be suicidal enough to go against them. So I think the probability of open war there is very low, unless EU or NATO breakdown has already happened or is happening at the same time.
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Another scenario would be NATO kicking out Turkey and some Greek/Turkish war.
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Is there any provision that allows members to be kicked out of NATO?
AI-written books will be sold on Amazon, and people will buy them. Specialty services will write books on demand based on customer specifications. At least one group, and probably several, will make real money in erotica this way. The market for hand-written mass market fiction, especially low-status stuff like genre fiction and thrillers, will contract radically.
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...academia will suffer even more from the influx of papers which were not written by their official authors. The job of the scientific editor will become that much harder.
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By this point, academia may have begun shifting away from papers as a unit of information transmission, and away from manual editing. Some combination of NLP and standardized ontologies may replace them, a shift which is already underway.
Epistemic effort: I thought about this for 20 minutes and dumped my ideas, before reading others’ answers
The latest language models are assisting or doing a number of tasks across society in rich countries, e.g.
Helping lawyers search and summarise cases, suggest inferences, etc. but human lawyers still make calls at the end of the day
Similar for policymaking, consultancy, business strategising etc.
Lots of non-truth seeking journalism. All good investigative journalism is still done by humans.
Telemarketing and some customer service jobs
The latest deep RL models are assisting or doing a number of tasks in across society in rich countries, e.g.
Lots of manufacturing
Almost all warehouse management
Most content filtering on social media
Financing decisions made by banks
Other predictions
it’s much easier to communicate with anyone, anywhere, at higher bandwidth (probably thanks to really good VR and internet)
the way we consume information has changed a lot (probably also related to VR, and content selection algorithms getting really good)
the way we shop has changed a lot (probably again due to content selection algorithms. I’m imagining there being very little effort between having a material desire and spending money to have it fulfilled)
education hasn’t really changed
international travel hasn’t really changed
discrimination against groups that are marginalised in 2021 has reduced somewhat
nuclear energy is even more widespread and much safer
getting some psychotherapy or similar is really common (>80% of people)
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I had something like "everybody who has to strongly hide part of their identity when living in cities" in mind
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That suggests that groups that at the moment have no support at all will start to get support. Why do you think so?
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Just an outside view that over the last decades, a number of groups who previously had to suppress their identities/were vilified are now more accepted (e.g., LGBTQ+, feminists, vegans), and I expect this trend to continue.
I’m curious if you expect this trend to change, or maybe we’re talking about slightly different things here?
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The groups LGBTQ+, feminists, vegans are part of one group of values and people we moved to a point where people with that group of values have no reason anymore to hide their identity when being in cities. Most of the identities where people currently have a lot to lose when they reveal their identity don’t belong to that cluster. To the extend that the trend of that cluster becomes stronger continues, many people for whom it’s currently very costly to reveal their identity won’t gain anything and might even face a higher cost of revealing their identity. Generally, the more polarized a society is, the higher the amount of people who have something to lose by revealing their identity. I see rising polarization.
An all out war between China and the USA over Taiwan has crippled the whole world. Good news is AI alignment is not an issue anymore.
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Bold claim! Perhaps you should make a post (or shortform, or even just separate answer to this question) where you lay out your reasoning & evidence? I’d be interested in that. If you think it’s infohazardous, maybe just a gdoc?
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Well it was mostly meant as a joke. But here are my probabilities.- China occupies Taiwan 90% - this is clearly a mid term goal of the current Chinese government.- The USA defend Taiwan 30% (maybe 50% if the invasion happens in the near future). The USA may or may not hold their defense agreement—I think the later the invasion happens, the more likely it is that the USA just let Taiwan be invaded.The war could be a quick win for China (they have home advantage). If it keep going for a few years, I still think China will win (the coronavirus crisis is strong evidence that western democracies in general would not be able to adapt quickly to an existential crisis). But a long wars would mean heavy destruction of infrastructure, and would surely increase dramatically the chances of a nuclear war. I’d say something like 30% chances of a nuclear war, conditional on a drawn out war between the two superpower ?
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Does the chinese government have a 90% success record at achieving their mid term goals? Do you have a 100% success record at judging what the chinese government thinks is a mid-term goal?
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Neither of those seem to me like the right questions to be asking (though for what it’s worth the answer to the first question has been pretty clearly "yes" if by "Chinese government" we’re referring specifically to post-2001 China).
Having said that, I don’t think outside-viewing these scenarios using coarse-grained reference classes like "the set of mid-term goals China has set for itself in the past" leads to anything useful. Well-functioning countries in general (and China in particular) tend to set goals for themselves they view as achievable, so if they’re well-calibrated it’s necessarily the case that they’ll end up achieving (a large proportion of) the goals they set for themselves. This being the case, you don’t learn much from finding out China manages to consistently meet its own goals, other than that they’ve historically done a pretty decent job at assessing their own capabilities. Nor does this allow you to draw conclusions about a specific goal they have, which may be easier or more difficult to achieve than their average goal.
In the case of Taiwan: by default, China is capable of taking Taiwan by force. What I mean by this is that China’s maritime capabilities well exceed Taiwan’s defensive capacity, such that Taiwan’s continued sovereignty in the face of a Chinese invasion is entirely reliant on the threat of external intervention (principally from the United States, but also by allies in the region). Absent that threat, China could invade Taiwan tomorrow and have a roughly ~100% chance of taking the island. Even if allies get involved, there’s a non-negligible probability China wins anyway, and the trend going forward only favors China even more.
Of course, that doesn’t mean China will invade Taiwan in the near future. As long as its victory isn’t assured, it stands to lose substantially more than from a failed invasion than it stands to gain from a successful one. At least for the near future, so long as the United States doesn’t send a clear signal about whether it will defend Taiwan, I expect China to mostly play it safe. But there’s definitely a growing confidence within China that they’ll retake Taiwan eventually, so the prospect of an invasion is almost certainly on the horizon unless current trends w.r.t. the respective strengths of the U.S. and Chinese militaries reverse for some reason. That’s not out of the question (the future is unpredictable), but there’s also no particular reason to expect said trends to reverse, so assuming they don’t, China will almost certainly try to occupy Taiwan at some point, regardless of what stance the U.S. takes on the issue.
(Separately, there’s the question of whether the U.S. will take a positive stance; I’m not optimistic that it will, given its historical reluctance to do so, as well as the fact that all of the risks and incentives responsible for said reluctance will likely only increase as time goes on.)
Are you saying that’s the only scenario that would prevent singularity or are you saying that it’s generally a probable scenario.
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I’m saying a war between China and the USA is a possible scenario (with <50% but >10% probability). The intensity of destruction would depend on how the war is fought, but conditionally on a drawn out war nuclear mutual destruction does not seem implausible to me.It’s hopefully not the only scenario that prevent singularity though.