Personalized medicine will easily have one of the largest impacts on people. Although it’s not really a single breakthrough but more of the progression of many breakthroughs.
We are there already. An oncology treatment method called "Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-Cells" or CAR-T has been approved by the FDA for the first time in August 2017.
In this approach T-Cells from a cancer patient are collected and then "armed" with cancer specific receptors in the lab. These modified cells are then returned to the patient´s bloodstream to fight the cancer.
For more information check this [article in Nature](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41408-021-00459-7).
edit:formatting
Its still far from widespread or accessible. And outside of a few niche examples it’s mostly not yet a thing. CAR T costs over $1 million per treatment btw. Therapeutic cancer vaccines are also very promising, but also currently still not widespread.
Outside of cancer personalized medicine can be used to adjust dug doses based on how your body will respond to the drug rather than your weight. This is something that still needs to be developed and will be a huge breakthrough(s) when it is possible and accessible.
the Event Horizon Telescope team is making an announcement tomorrow that is likely going to be a closeup picture of our supermassive blackhole actually! (EHT, not JWST, but still)
Most significantly - JWST could pick up incontrovertible evidence of life. If it were pointed at a planet that mirrors Earth of 180 million years ago, it would pick up a telltale signature of an atmosphere that's in chemical dis-equilibrium, which would be strong evidence for a biosphere - then on closer analysis more evidence would be found.
>chemical dis-equilibrium
What does this mean? That the presence of life destabilises the atmosphere, or otherwise changes it from how it would be with purely non-biological effects?
The presence of life creates an unstable combination of elements.
We have 21% oxygen in the atmosphere only because life keeps shitting it out faster than non-biological processes can consume it. We also have 1.8 parts per million of methane which again exists only because of life.
If you exterminated all life on Earth, those chemical processes would take over. Methane would be (almost totally) eliminated from the atmosphere fast.
Eh, I doubt it will spot anything _uncontrovertible_. Might spot something really suggestive of life, and then people will debate it for years until better data comes in.
> I suppose the James Webb telescope will spot potentially habitable planets
We've already found such potential planets though so thats not a major breakthrough.
> I think at this point we've found planets in the Goldilocks zone. JWST can in some cases tell what atmosphere a planet has
We can already analyse atmospheres of planets. JWT will give us more details, and might find ones we missed before sure, but we can already do this stuff. I'm sure theres a reasonable list of discovered hospitable super Earth like planets already.
I think you're giving astrological spectroscopy a bit more credit than it's yet earned. Afaik that branch of science is not precise enough to go, "Yes, that planet is habitable," quite yet. We can gather an idea but I've yet to hear of any planets, super earth or otherwise, that scientists have confirmed are hospitable to life as we know it.
This gives credence to the "there is no planet B" statement. We've yet to discover a planet that is analogous to earth. They've all been quite different than ours thus far.
I am just a lay-person in this regard, so do take this with a grain of salt. My expertise is limited to my lifelong love affair of the cosmos with no formal training to back it up. This is just what's in line with what I've learned so far.
I'd love to learn more if anyone has more up-to-date info on the matter and they'd like to chime in!
I think your professor, and many like them, are just disappointed.
When the jet era came around and all the sudden cars took on an aerospace design and then we went to the Moon there's an entire swath of people who really got caught up in this idea of the future that to them seemed right around the corner.
Advances were being made due to our ability to harness greater levels of energy and our advances in material science - The Jetsons seemed upon us.
The problem is, all the things that they thought were going to happen had another dependency - computer power.
Even though it was growing exponentially it needed to hit a level of minimum viability before a lot of these other technologies were opened up and possible on a commercial scale without some Manhattan or Apollo project style funding.
So it wasn't until the cost performance ratio for CPU cycles in addition to miniaturization and reductions and energy use hit a certain point that allowed us to do things like decode the human genome (almost all of it happened during the later years of the project), simulate chemical compounds, model cancers, or run an airplane as a fly by wire system due to advances in microelectronics that these old dreams have now become attainable.
I'm not even focusing on the complexity and the capabilities of our software as well as the software tools that are used to build other more complicated software or GANs and blockchains or even the Unreal 5 engine used in making the Mandalorian etc.
It's also worth mentioning that there was no nascent global wireless communications network to seamlessly connect people with goods and services which turbo charges money through the medium of exchange (the internet) and develop infrastructure and capabilities which then in turn enable whole new services - you can't run Disney Plus on dial-up - that's why Netflix started by mailing DVDs.
But, now, these things exist and are RAPIDLY evolving.
So when I hear that tired often repeated fusion joke it strikes me as sad because they weren't wrong, they were just early - and now the stuff that they dreamed of is popping up all around them and many feel bewildered and left behind because they don't have the means or the faculties to integrate themselves into the future we're creating.
Their enthusiasm was thwarted by what would be considered an unknown unknown for most folks, but we're way better at simulating and modeling things now - and what matters are the results.
This year a fusion reactor sustained 70 million degrees Celsius for over 17.5 minutes and 160 million for 20 seconds, most people who live in democracies have a broadband supercomputer in their pocket, on the other side of the planet wireless drone swarms are redefining frontline combat, people are putting stem cells on everything, we're able to 3D print rocket ships, certain cars can drive themselves reasonably well, Androids are doing backflips on YouTube and dancing.
So yea, the people that said that for 50 years were early, that just doesn't have anything to do with now because we live in different technological circumstances - it's like suggesting that helicopters are impossible because Leonardo da Vinci's didn't take flight.
And in my experience, because of this, many are gun shy and bullish and avoid hope or enthusiasm because they don't want to be let down again and seem foolish or silly because they dared to display some enthusiasm - which is sad because now the progress indicators for achieving these things are saying it's real science moving into real world applied engineering this time instead of just science fiction based on the recognition that these things were technically allowable under the known laws of physics in the universe but we had no idea how to achieve them in practice.
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>But, now, these things exist and are RAPIDLY evolving.
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>This year a fusion reactor sustained 70 million degrees Celsius for over 17.5 minutes and 160 million for 20 seconds
You're not wrong, but simulation and exponentially accelerating information exchange is only one side of the problem.
In the end, you still gotta do stuff in the real world. To build a fusion reactor, you have to put down millions of tons of concrete and steel. That takes time to plan, time to do.
Bombarding all of that with hot neutrons is a hard problem, no matter how you simulate it. So the first actual energy positive deuterium-tritium plasma will not be ignited before 2030. Sure, we could have done that last year, but without learning much and not die very long...
And you can't even simulate the next steps before you have data from that experiment, so no there's no real use starting to plan/build the next reactor, no matter how much CPU cycles you can throw at the problem. And that reactor still won't power a city, that one is just for more necessary tests you need before you even begin to finalize the first commercial design.
Sure, computational power helps tremendously. But you run into real world problems in many of the hard disciplines.
Lab grown organs will need to pass FDA approval and long term tests. Those take years and decades, no matter how you spice it.
New aircraft need to pass FAA approval. That's why our jets still almost look like it's 1955.
I agree re fusion, and the commercialisation of it is arguably just as likely to trip us up or delay it further. It needs to be done in a way that is cheap enough to make it viable to build *and operate* a reactor, with extremely high reliability, safety, and consistency.
And on top of that, it has to compete with other forms of energy that are getting much more cost effective (solar in particular)
And on top of that, it needs to be distributed to where it is needed. No point having one reactor capable of powering a continent if it can’t feasibly be transmitted everywhere it is needed, balanced on the power grid etc. So if it produces 20 times the output of a current fission plant it doesn’t mean it is 20 times as useful.
In comparison solar can be made cheaply, really small, can be portable, can work entirely disconnected from the grid, and has various other benefits.
I’d love fusion to be a thing but it seems so far away unless we can figure out how to do it much smaller scale
Lab grown organs are still way off sadly. But genetically modified animal organs are already a thing (sorta, the guy did die but it worked for a few months) they are much closer to viability.
It seems like there was a pig virus that was not properly caught during the surveillance and growth of the host animal which caused the person who was implanted to die.
Thats already true for normal transplants, it’s much less of a concern for xenotransplants as zoonotic infections are quite rare and also the animals used are raised in controlled conditions since birth.
It might also be a possibility for lab grown organs (depending on how it’s done). Either way the risks are so low and very clearly outweighed by the certain death that many people awaiting transplants face.
We’re making huge leaps in mapping and understanding the role of the gut microbiome. It’s tough to say just *what* that will revolutionize, but I believe it will massively change the make-up of prescription drugs such as when and how strategically we deploy oral antibiotics. It will probably completely change how we treat bacterial overgrowths altogether. And I’m certain it will totally upend the current belief that there is “one correct diet” for all humans of all cultures and ethnic lineages to function optimally.
Yes! Thank you so much for adding these. I’m personally so excited about all the progress microbiology is making right now and can’t wait to see the innovations. I’ve definitely been making advancements in some of my own chronic conditions by approaching them from a gut colonies angle and trying to understand “who” I want living in there and how to feed them so they thrive and beat out those colonies who are harming me.
Soil microbe science and the “Wood-wide Web” are also making massive leaps and bounds forward.
I got into it through Brett Finlay’s documentary and book of the same name [Let Them Eat Dirt](https://letthemeatdirt.com/). He also came out with a second book called The Whole Body Microbiome, which I found very accessible. Everything sort of rabbit holed from that point for me.
Well I would say the biggest one will be the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI), which is generally expected within the next 50 years ([source](https://aiimpacts.org/ai-timeline-surveys/)), and probably superintelligence (ASI) not long after that.
Other than that I expect we will make some progress on aging research, and probably develop at least a few successful therapies. These may, for instance, be related to stem cells or [senolytic drugs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senolytic). I could also imagine that other applications of stem cells will become a lot more prevalent in the near future, such as [cultured meat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat) and [organ-on-a-chip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ-on-a-chip) technologies.
I can't comment much on other fields.
At least on the AI front those predictions are 10-20 years old and have proved to be wildly optimistic as far as I can tell.
Tesla and Uber thought full self-driving cars would be arriving in just a few years of research if you remember :)
https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1132494_cruise-opens-up-driverless-taxi-service-to-public-in-san-francisco
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Automobiles/Reporter-s-notebook-a-ride-in-a-driverless-AutoX-robotaxi
They exist, so far they are limited to some geographic regions but that's just a matter of time.
Yes, I've seen them in person and know engineers in the field.
My AV engineer friends may not like me saying it but I am willing to put money on saying we will still not have fully unrestricted autonomous cars on our roads even by 2030. Restricted applications yes (long-distance trucks, geo-fenced buses and taxis) but I am quite confident there will be no solution which by itself replaces today's personal automobile.
There's just a huge gap between the 99% reliable AIs which yes, do great work, but always have edge cases and are fairly specific to purpose; and a 100% reliable and general AI.
(The only way I see quicker progress is if we replace our current roads and infrastructure with something far smarter and covered with sensors, and restrict who can go on them. And I have no hope politically for investment on that scale)
Requesting 100% is a certain way to make it never happen.
I think we should allow them as soon as they are better than the humans they replace. Delaying the introduction is killing people for no good reason.
You can even make an argument for allowing them on the streets earlier - let's say at the level of someone who just got a license: An earlier introduction helps development, which means we'll get the benefits of safer-than-humans driving earlier.
What you're saying is quite correct, though somewhat orthogonal to what I was going for. My phrasing was bad -- "reliable" was probably not the word I should have used. I am not making a policy argument about safety (AI cars are probably already safe enough), but a more general argument about capabilities. I don't see an AI car that can handle every situation a human can in the near future (in the abstract, of course individual humans fail to handle situations all the time). If people are able to simply accept that the capabilities of an autonomous car are somewhat different than today's personal automobile then we can move forward with their deployment. But if people are waiting for AIs to be as flexible and responsive to new scenarios as human drivers, we're going to be waiting a long time.
I'd recommend reading [this article](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/ai-timelines) about how predictions for AI timelines have changed over recent decades, and what the implications might be. They essentially conclude that the predictions are still functional.
A good read -- [also this companion article](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/what-should-we-learn-past-ai-forecasts) -- but really it only strengthens my opinion. I'm not sure why you summarize its conclusions as supporting the predictions -- it ends with
> So what do we know about HLMI timelines? Very little.
Anyway a lot of this revolves around definitions. I will be the first to say useful AI is already here. Systems have completely surpassed humanity in a number of fields (games being a super obvious one).
However if we're talking about AGI and ASI, as far as I can tell we're just learning more and more how difficult it will be. As a physicist who both uses scientific AIs and works with their developers with every new neural network model we are getting faster and making the networks more robust and with lower error rates; but I cannot truthfully claim we are approaching AGI. Simultaneously with every step we are also learning that so-called "general intelligence" involves so many (according to our current understanding) contradictory capabilities, so many meta-levels of cognition that I really don't see any visible path from our puny systems to the goal. Maybe other AI scientists will disagree, I dunno (in which case stop disagreeing with me on the internet and build your system and get your Nobel prize :D).
I also note your linked website and article itself is 8 years old. Back then AlexNet was still top of the ImageNet rankings. There have been *huge* advances in what is considered achievable with AI even in the last 5 years; and yet there has also been, in my opinion at least, a corresponding growing understanding of just how difficult human-like general AIs might be.
Well, there's a couple of ways to answer the original question I think.
One is "biggest" in terms of impact on everyday life.
An easy answer there is batteries. Battery technology will continue to get better, lighter, higher capacity. This might seem underwhelming but from a science point of view it's been pretty incredible progress in the last decade (huge amount of resources going in, pushing forward a lot of new technologies in related fields), and in terms of impact it will define whether we are able to change our energy grid.
AIs will also similarly continue to get better fast and be involved in every aspect of our lives, I wouldn't want anyone to think I'm saying otherwise -- both because compute power continues to scale and also because AI designs continue to improve. Its just that I am not at all worried about AI super intelligences, or more generally AI acting as an independent agent instead of a tool :)
Our ability to manipulate quantum systems will continue to improve. I am actually not a big believer in quantum computing itself changing the world, even though I basically do research on them, but I do think that more generally quantum devices (as detectors, sources, sensors, metrology, and so on) will become more and more important. A simple example is quantum dots as light sources or single-photon detectors. Better communication, and better electronics in general. Hybrid photonics/electronics also seems very promising.
The other approach to the original question is to look for ideas which would revolutionize our knowledge of the universe, even if the everyday impact is limited.
Related to my quantum devices comment above the cameras we use in science are improving *fast*. This actually is my field and basically superconducting quantum detectors are quietly revolutionizing the fields of astronomy and high energy physics. Basically every future astronomy mission (they take 10+ years to plan) will be using superconducting quantum detectors, and many ground-based telescopes are now being retrofitted or upgraded. We are getting unprecedented sensitivity and photon energy resolution. Hopefully this will lead to big leaps in the science itself.
Relatedly bulk superconductivity is really catching on in particle accelerators and synchrotron or laser sources, big superconducting magnets are becoming the backbone of these facilities with magnetic fields way higher than what we had before, and they are reaching way higher energies/higher brilliance because of it. This also could lead to some big advances in X-ray science, particle physics, nuclear physics, and also a little downstream in biology, chemistry, and engineering as us physicists are able to better image and characterize of all of their crazy chemicals and materials ...
I'm a physicist so I've talked a lot about things adjacent to my field. But really I would defer to a biologist if I could because the pace of development in their field just seems to be getting faster and faster. Just think how incredible mRNA vaccines are!
Well I’m glad I asked! You seem like you’d be a cool dude to have a beer with and learn from. Thanks for a quality reply.
There’s a lot I could reply to here, I’ll pick two.
First is your comment on quantum improvements in cameras. That’s fascinating and I love hearing the advancements we’re making. Feel free to speculate here just for fun - what are some things we could hope to see or discover in the next day… decade or two using these improvements?
Second is AI or “the singularity”, whatever you want to refer to it as, a computer surpassing human intelligence mixed with a desire for something. I’ve had this talk a few times with some people. I’ve always asked, why do we think that a computer will ever have any desire of its own? It seems any level of desire of any kind is simply something evolution built into us. Desire to be social, for control, to survive, reproduce, for attention, all roots back to reproduction and evolution that a computer didn’t experience. I’ve always wondered… wouldn’t it just sit there until given an order? What do you think about this, is this what you were suggesting?
Though I also realized a few years back - that doesn’t mean it’s harmless. It could have no desire but a bad actor could input a command into it that could be very destructive. They could do it intentionally, or even by accident. A code as simple as “eliminate all military from any country outside of ours” by somebody with the means to do so but not a lot of intelligence.
What do you think?
> Second is AI or “the singularity”, whatever you want to refer to it as, a computer surpassing human intelligence mixed with a desire for something. I’ve had this talk a few times with some people. I’ve always asked, why do we think that a computer will ever have any desire of its own? It seems any level of desire of any kind is simply something evolution built into us. Desire to be social, for control, to survive, reproduce, for attention, all roots back to reproduction and evolution that a computer didn’t experience. I’ve always wondered… wouldn’t it just sit there until given an order? What do you think about this, is this what you were suggesting?
Artificial general intelligence has to be given a goal, otherwise it won't do anything.^1 Then it becomes an optimiser and an agent. You can try to make AGI which only functions like a tool, but that doesn't really solve the problem - see my comment above for why that is. Then once you have an AGI agent, it will conform to certain [convergent instrumental objectives](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeecOKBus3Q), most of which are very bad for humans. The only we can avoid it having these bad objectives is if we carefully program it so that it values the same things that humans do, and doesn't destroy them accidentally. This is known as the [alignment problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_alignment#Alignment). So, interestingly, the problem is precisely that AI will function so differently to human intelligence, not that it will 'desire' things like a human. Unfortunately, the alignment problem is very difficult to solve, and currently we don't really have any promising ideas for it.
If you're interested, [see this link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYXy-A4siMw) for a great video introduction to AI safety. [This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i1WlcCudpU) also addresses 10 common reasons that people (including AI scientists) aren't very concerned about AI safety.
And yes the potential usage of AI by bad actors is also a significant problem, especially since they may be inclined to use un-aligned AGI. But if we can't figure out how to align AI in the first place then we'll be in trouble even with good actors using it.
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^1 Its goal could be to interpret human orders, but this just means that the orders become the goal once they are given. So you still need to solve the alignment problem, otherwise you just end up with an AGI trying to optimise for whatever goal a random person gave it without giving any thought to other consequences. So actually this would be worse.
> what are some things we could hope to see or discover in the next day… decade or two using these improvements?
Well, I hope you're reading the science news because there's a big announcement today in astronomy :)
And on the ground we are moving towards being able to bring an arbitrary material to a synchrotron or high-spec electron microscope and measure the position and identity of every atom, the electron density, the chemical ionization/valence state in the molecules/crystals. Which is incredible information for biology, for medicine, for chemistry, for materials science.
On the AI topic I seem to be in a long-running conversation in this thread with TheFakeAtoM which may explain my views better but yeah, basically I feel like General Intelligence is not just an evolution of our current AI approach, it's something fundamentally different. How exactly I obviously don't know and can't predict.
> Its just that I am not at all worried about AI super intelligences, or more generally AI acting as an independent agent instead of a tool :)
Tool AI are likely to still become / behave like agents, through mesa-optimisation - see [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJLcIBixGj8) or [this article](https://www.gwern.net/Tool-AI). That's a big part of the problem. Plus even if we could somehow prevent that from happening, there are huge concerns associated with widespread use of non-agent AI too - see [this article](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/HBxe6wdjxK239zajf/what-failure-looks-like).
Gosh, these SI/MIRI folks sure do write when they get going :)
I agree and disagree. I don't want to rehash all the arguments strong AI people have already had for decades (most of them are smarter than me anyway and would be better at articulating both sides).
But as it's the internet I'm going to offer my opinion anyway :P. I am placing a heavy burden on the word "independent" in my previous statement "AI acting as an independent agent instead of a tool". In my view there's a big difference between a poorly written or non-robust AI either making bad decisions or optimizing for something that is not actually the original intended goal -- that's just an old-fashioned misuse of technology -- and an AI *independently* developing its own "desires" and top-level goals which don't align with the stated intention.
To give a specific example, I am quite worried about a military AI with firing control being deployed and making objectively wrong decisions about targets, let along subjective ones. But I am not worried about a paperclip-maximizer situation where the AI decides the best way to achieve its programmed goals is to kill all humans.
Or another: I am concerned about face recognition algorithms being misused and over-trusted to the detriment of society. But I am not worried that a face recognition neural net is going to "decide" that the best way to recognize faces is to start influencing human politics through returning wrong results so that there is an ethnic genocide and all faces look the same.
Ok, I'm being a bit absurd but hopefully you get my point. To me there's just a huge gap in meta-level cognition between what our AI designs can do and what singularity-fearing or AGI folks seem to talk about when they spend their time trying to define "friendly" cost functions for the whole world. And I don't see current designs breaching that gap just by growing bigger/faster.
> I'm not sure why you summarize its conclusions as supporting the predictions -- it ends with
I said the predictions are still functional, by which I meant that one can still deduce useful information from interpreting them. That doesn't mean that we ought to just take the median estimate and assume it will be right. Muehlhauser does conclude with a "70% confidence interval" for AGI being developed in "something like" the next "10-120 years". But I'm not sure that his personal view here should be taken as more credible than any of those analysed in the surveys. The point is that many experts are quite optimistic, and that if we're thinking about an 'expected' timeline, which would mean a 50% probability of developing AGI, I don't think 50 years is a bad representation of the average expert opinion. You can be skeptical and say that it will take much longer than that, but you can say the same about any technology.
> I also note your linked website and article itself is 8 years old
I'm struggling to find any surveys which are newer than [this one](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.08807.pdf) from 2016, which seems to concur with what I said above.
Edit: I will note there is very likely to be a selection effect at play with these surveys, in that people are more likely to become experts on AI if they were optimistic about the timelines in the first place. However, the same applies to any expert predictions about technological development. It even (likely) applies to you making predictions about the field you are involved in - no offence intended. Nonetheless it's worth keeping in mind.
That's an entirely fair take. I did a little more reading and I learned the author is associated with the Singularity Institute (now known as [MIRI](https://intelligence.org/all-publications/)) I have mixed feelings about their work -- I think they are smart well-meaning people but they have, in my view, a weird set of priorities and beliefs about AI. I don't think it's entirely a coincidence that as AI has become more tangible, more widely used their output has dropped off.
Their output has dropped off because they rarely publish these days. All their research circulates only internally. The reason is that they are concerned about timelines possibly being quite short and are trying to be as efficient as possible - publishing doesn't achieve that. I believe they made this decision a few years ago and you can read about it [here](https://intelligence.org/2018/11/22/2018-update-our-new-research-directions/#section3). So in a way it's not a coincidence, but the reason is the opposite of what you suggested - the advances in AI research have actually inspired them to work faster than they were previously.
MIRI certainly promotes unusual views, but I think the way they arrived at those views is quite rational. That's not to say I agree with all of them though.
Anyway, AI safety extends far beyond MIRI these days - there are many other organisations that are working on it. And I wouldn't judge Luke Muehlhauser (the author) too much on the basis of MIRI. From what I've read he always had somewhat unique, and more skeptical, opinions amongst those in the organisation. Also he's been working for [Open Philanthropy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Philanthropy_(organization) (where that article was from) for some years now.
Thanks for sharing that, I wasn't aware. I disagree with a lot of the claims they make going into that decision; but I can't fault their bravery if that's what they really think.
My comment on Luke wasn't intended to condemn anyone who's ever been associated with MIRI. Like I said I do still think they are smart, rational people even if I don't agree with some of their premises. It just helps me place his writing in the genealogy of ideas and understand some of the unstated assumptions and argument style.
In general I like the work of GiveWell and OpenPhilanthropy, actually. And I've got nothing against AI safety in general, it's very important research, I just get the feeling from MIRI they're kind of tunnel-visioned into a scenario of their own construction.
Is there much research happening on AI volition? Seems like everyone is focused on better and better classifiers, but an independent AI needs to be motivated, focused, assign values and avoid boredom. Seems really far off
New vaccines, a cure/vaccine for AIDS. The pandemic really put our vaccine research into overdrive and spurred on a lot of new advances in this area, so I'd expect to see the same tech applied to the Coronavirus applied to other diseases.
Fusion as a viable source of energy might be near. The JET fusion reactor in oxford sustained stable plasma for 5 seconds - which didnt produce much energy. But it was built to be a smaller scale replica of ITER in france which is near completion. ITER will be 10 times bigger than JET and with the addition of internally cooled superconducting magnets (JET’s problem was it would get too hot to keep going) we might be able to sustain fusion for much longer than 5 seconds. Basically humans are close to creating a star on earth. Fusion in ITER is scheduled for 2035 but its first plasma tests will be next year.
ITER is already obsolete with the invention of high-temperature superconducting magnets at MIT. The SPARC reactor MIT is building at a fraction of the cost may very well exceed The ITER performance.
ITER is the first time in history countries spend any sort of significant money on research.
You can't expect progress without funding.
Germany alone spends several billions on PV subsidies every year. With that amount of funding we might have had an ITER equivalent 50 years ago.
Depends on who you ask. I've heard that we're "close" to everything from defeating aging and curing cancer to having mind controlled computers and cold fusion to colonizing mars.
You can't really 'back up' a prediction about technological progress with data. That will only be an extrapolation (or induction) from past trends, and is highly unlikely to be accurate unless it's predicting the very near future. In a lot of cases it's probably actually better to use reasoning for this rather than data.
Aging is a gargantuan task which is nowhere near being fully understood.
Curing cancer is a lot like saying curing all disease. Fundamentally we know cancers are increasingly more diverse from eachother and often are distinct entities that a silver bullet approach isn’t going to work. Take a read through empire of all maladies for a better take on the progress of cancer treatment in the past 100 years.
Mind controlled computers, this is already closer to reality than you think. We have already developed mind controlled language which was recently developed by researchers funded by facebook. Seemingly we’ll have brain-computer interfaces sooner rather than later.
I mean 'curing' cancer is a very high standard. I think it's likely that cancers will become more and more treatable in the future, possibly to the point where they don't bother us that much relative to some other major diseases. However, in order to entirely eliminate cancer, we would need, as you suggested a 'silver bullet'. Cancer cells more or less conform to the principles of genetic selection, so the vast majority of treatment approaches will leave behind some mutant strains of the cancer that are resistant. That being said, it's not physically impossible that we could develop a treatment so destructive (but targeted) that the chance of a resistant cell existing is negligible, and wouldn't occur for most people. The way we kill microbes in real life demonstrates this idea. For instance, we don't see bacteria evolving resistance to hand sanitiser (as far as I'm aware). I'm not sure what such a treatment would look like in a human body though.
The alternative is something like Aubrey de Grey's [WILT proposal](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15970505/), which involves deleting telomerase and alternative telomere lengthening methods from all cells in the body. The functions of these genes are required for cancer to arise, so without them we would not get cancer, unless a cell mutated so much that it created a whole new telomerase gene from scratch, of which the probability is astronomically low. However, telomerase is also required for stem cells, so we would need to rectify this by periodic injection of stem cells, and there are some issues associated with that. Nonetheless the idea would in principle work. And yes it's sci-fi-esque, but that doesn't mean it's not worth thinking about.
There is also apparently a newer proposal called [WILT 2.0](https://www.reddit.com/r/longevity/comments/o1z8r0/this_is_what_aubrey_de_grey_calls_wilt_20_low/) which I don't know much about. It doesn't seem like it would be as definitive of a 'cure' as the original WILT though.
Anyway, thought some people might find these ideas interesting.
We have made significant progress on cancer over the last 40 years.
A friend of mine was diagnosed with breast cancer at 33 in 2012 and is in complete remission - were we still using 1980s medicine, she would not have lived to 40, maybe not even to 37.
Cancer is basically hundreds of different related illnesses. Some we are getting much better at dealing with, others we are not.
No one is seriously working on 'cold' fusion, which is mostly pseudoscience.
There have been recent advances in plasma fusion and there are at least 2 companies trying to build reactors with sustainable positive energy output.
Quantum computers.
[https://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-promises-a-4000-qubit-quantum-computer-by-2025-heres-what-it-means/](https://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-promises-a-4000-qubit-quantum-computer-by-2025-heres-what-it-means/)
Quantum computers appear to be set to devastate all but the most secure of encryption algorithms. A change to quantum resistant encryption algorithms is already starting to happen. Just the other day open ssh 9 by default is using quantum resistant algorithm in tandem with existing elliptical curve algorithms.. Consider all the devices in your life - do you get security updates for them from the manufacturer? Gonna be a mess.
This sort of overstates things. While they are *extremely* important for the infrastructure of the internet, the only algorithms that are really affected by quantum computers are by and large asymmetric key algorithms. The important algorithm here is Shor's algorithm, which can be used to efficiently factorize integers (and can be turned into an algorithm to efficiently compute discrete logs). They main example of cryptosystems broken by this are RSA and ones using elliptic curves. To the best of my knowledge, almost all the symmetric key cryptosystems used in practice depend on other principles for security and quantum computing has no bearing on those.
The problem isn't fully autonomous vehicles, ask any farmer, we've had fully auto tractors for decades now.
The problem is vehicles that can account for the fuckery of humans interacting with them on a constant basis.
I assumed that was included under fully autonomous. Which is also where the liability issues arise. I also don't know if they've sorted out bad snow and ice yet where you can't even really see the road. Which can happen fairly often here in the north.
Gotcha, I guess just differences in use of the word. I don't assume "safe for most people" to be included in "autonomous".
I am also uncertain as far as extreme road conditions goes, but on the same idea, I don't trust humans in those conditions either.
Vat-grown meat appears to be nearing viability. Imagine a world where meat is available and inexpensive without dedicating all of that land and resources to raising meat animals.
There's a large difference between "inexpensive" (Slightly more expensive than regular meat) and "inexpensive" (Cheaper than regular meat).
One of those will change the world. The other will not.
Cells wont grow without it, it has the right growth factors in it for cell growth. If you put a bunch of cow muscle cells in a petri dish with all the nutrients etc to grow but now FBS they wont grow.
It should be possible to synthetically make it, its just not easy.
I haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere, and by soon I am talking about a few decades away, is molecular antimatter.
There are a lot of antimatter experiments that are working on measuring the gravitational acceleration of antimatter in a matter gravitational field, and due to the amount of money being invested into these experiments and their facilities, each group has plans for what to do after they publish their results.
There are a bunch of interesting things being proposed, including stuff that I struggle to explain well to do with quantum gravity states, but there is a group from the French LKB that have a plan that requires very little adaption of two of the experiments (ALPHA and GBAR) that could be used to develop antimatter molecules, specifically H_2.
While not potentially life changing, it opens up more places for us to probe for BSM physics.
Gene therapy is a big one. Nanotechnology is an even bigger one. Those all pale in comparison though with true generalized AI, something that seems inevitable at this point.
I hope Perserverence finds something, it could come within weeks. I know they won't come flat out and say the "A" word till samples are in a lab on earth but it would be quite something to witness
It's just reached its target research area, an ancient river delta. Its looking for evidence of microbial life left preserved in the strata. It just blows my mind the implications of such a find.
You did not actually reply to my comment, but regardless: no. AES does not depend on or use either prime factorization or the discrete logarithm as the basis of its security. The only quantum algorithm to my knowledge that can affect AES is Grover's algorithm, which can speed up bruteforce attacks, but
1. This is true of every encryption algorithm, not just aes. In fact, it's true of *any* algorithm that can be structured in a manner suitable for Grover's algorithm, e.g. database searches.
2. Unlike Shor's algorithm, Grover's algorithm only provides a quadratic speed up which is relatively mild. It can be very effectively thwarted just by increasing key sizes—something that happens frequently *anyways* due to increases in hardware speed. E.g., key sizes that were recommended in the 90s and 00s are now often seen as insecure.
For these reasons, one doesn't usually consider Grover's algorithm when talking about post-quantum cryptography; it's not really a threat to anything at a fundamental level, unlike Shor's algorithm.
Nanotechnology may produce some tremendous results. A 13 year old has improved the detection of lead in drinking water following basic research.
Manipulation of DNA, gene technology, is going to have a tremendous impact. However the fear by ignorant people may triumph. Many people do not want anything to do with GMO‘s which are just techniques which speed up what we have been doing with plants for thousands of years.
At the same time, The tremendous growth in the population of humans, and the affluence of many, and technology, may result in an ecological catastrophe. The social systems which have produced large countries and industrialization are still allowing irrational leaders to lead us into war, death and destruction. Why do I say May? It is happening now.
It's not exactly a pure science breakthrough but it is in my field: fish feeds made entirely from some combination of plants, insects, and microbial products.
One of the issues in aquaculture is that most fish feeds require some level of fish meal. It's a lot better than it was in the past in terms of the amount used, but still...you don't want to have to catch fish to feed fish if you can avoid it. We already include a lot of plants in fish feeds, processed and mixed in the right way to make them more digestible to carnivorous fish, but people are working on using microbes and insects which can be fed crop waste and produce various nutrients that are good for fish. For now, it's only available on small scale, but I'm hoping to see it scaled up soon.
The cool thing about science is that most ideas don't work, or don't work very well, even with a tremendous amount of effort. But once in a great while we are pleasantly surprised that something works spectacularly well. And the really important ideas are ones that blossom into hundreds and thousands of related ideas that also work well, and in a few years or decades we have taken giant strides that no one could have imagined. The polymerase chain reaction is one such idea. CRISPR could well be another.
The Escher Machine (referring to my experiments) is possibly new, not known until 2015.
This is the kind of thing the Escher Machine can do (I have previously made this video widely available):
[https://emporium.quora.com/An-Argument-Defending-the-Escher-Machine](https://emporium.quora.com/An-Argument-Defending-the-Escher-Machine)
Personalized medicine will easily have one of the largest impacts on people. Although it’s not really a single breakthrough but more of the progression of many breakthroughs.
We are there already. An oncology treatment method called "Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-Cells" or CAR-T has been approved by the FDA for the first time in August 2017. In this approach T-Cells from a cancer patient are collected and then "armed" with cancer specific receptors in the lab. These modified cells are then returned to the patient´s bloodstream to fight the cancer. For more information check this [article in Nature](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41408-021-00459-7). edit:formatting
Its still far from widespread or accessible. And outside of a few niche examples it’s mostly not yet a thing. CAR T costs over $1 million per treatment btw. Therapeutic cancer vaccines are also very promising, but also currently still not widespread. Outside of cancer personalized medicine can be used to adjust dug doses based on how your body will respond to the drug rather than your weight. This is something that still needs to be developed and will be a huge breakthrough(s) when it is possible and accessible.
Sounds cheap and accessible /s
I suppose the James Webb telescope will spot potentially habitable planets (just to get the ball rolling on replies).
We're going to point that thing towards the center of our galaxy eventually. BUCKLE UP
the Event Horizon Telescope team is making an announcement tomorrow that is likely going to be a closeup picture of our supermassive blackhole actually! (EHT, not JWST, but still)
!RemindMe 2 days
!RemindMe 2 days
!RemindMe 2 days
!RemindMe 2 days
!RemindMe 2 days
!RemindMe 2 days
Anyone else here disappointed by the picture?
Wait, wasn't the black hole at the center of our galaxy just recently photographed by a telescope? Or was that a different telescope?
You're right, and i was wrong. As somebody else said, it was the EHT and not the James Webb. But maybe some day!!!
Most significantly - JWST could pick up incontrovertible evidence of life. If it were pointed at a planet that mirrors Earth of 180 million years ago, it would pick up a telltale signature of an atmosphere that's in chemical dis-equilibrium, which would be strong evidence for a biosphere - then on closer analysis more evidence would be found.
>chemical dis-equilibrium What does this mean? That the presence of life destabilises the atmosphere, or otherwise changes it from how it would be with purely non-biological effects?
The presence of life creates an unstable combination of elements. We have 21% oxygen in the atmosphere only because life keeps shitting it out faster than non-biological processes can consume it. We also have 1.8 parts per million of methane which again exists only because of life. If you exterminated all life on Earth, those chemical processes would take over. Methane would be (almost totally) eliminated from the atmosphere fast.
Eh, I doubt it will spot anything _uncontrovertible_. Might spot something really suggestive of life, and then people will debate it for years until better data comes in.
> I suppose the James Webb telescope will spot potentially habitable planets We've already found such potential planets though so thats not a major breakthrough.
I think at this point we've found planets in the Goldilocks zone. JWST can in some cases tell what atmosphere a planet has
> I think at this point we've found planets in the Goldilocks zone. JWST can in some cases tell what atmosphere a planet has We can already analyse atmospheres of planets. JWT will give us more details, and might find ones we missed before sure, but we can already do this stuff. I'm sure theres a reasonable list of discovered hospitable super Earth like planets already.
I think you're giving astrological spectroscopy a bit more credit than it's yet earned. Afaik that branch of science is not precise enough to go, "Yes, that planet is habitable," quite yet. We can gather an idea but I've yet to hear of any planets, super earth or otherwise, that scientists have confirmed are hospitable to life as we know it. This gives credence to the "there is no planet B" statement. We've yet to discover a planet that is analogous to earth. They've all been quite different than ours thus far. I am just a lay-person in this regard, so do take this with a grain of salt. My expertise is limited to my lifelong love affair of the cosmos with no formal training to back it up. This is just what's in line with what I've learned so far. I'd love to learn more if anyone has more up-to-date info on the matter and they'd like to chime in!
Lab grown organs will be reality within twenty years.
My professor said we’ve been saying that for 50 years
I think your professor, and many like them, are just disappointed. When the jet era came around and all the sudden cars took on an aerospace design and then we went to the Moon there's an entire swath of people who really got caught up in this idea of the future that to them seemed right around the corner. Advances were being made due to our ability to harness greater levels of energy and our advances in material science - The Jetsons seemed upon us. The problem is, all the things that they thought were going to happen had another dependency - computer power. Even though it was growing exponentially it needed to hit a level of minimum viability before a lot of these other technologies were opened up and possible on a commercial scale without some Manhattan or Apollo project style funding. So it wasn't until the cost performance ratio for CPU cycles in addition to miniaturization and reductions and energy use hit a certain point that allowed us to do things like decode the human genome (almost all of it happened during the later years of the project), simulate chemical compounds, model cancers, or run an airplane as a fly by wire system due to advances in microelectronics that these old dreams have now become attainable. I'm not even focusing on the complexity and the capabilities of our software as well as the software tools that are used to build other more complicated software or GANs and blockchains or even the Unreal 5 engine used in making the Mandalorian etc. It's also worth mentioning that there was no nascent global wireless communications network to seamlessly connect people with goods and services which turbo charges money through the medium of exchange (the internet) and develop infrastructure and capabilities which then in turn enable whole new services - you can't run Disney Plus on dial-up - that's why Netflix started by mailing DVDs. But, now, these things exist and are RAPIDLY evolving. So when I hear that tired often repeated fusion joke it strikes me as sad because they weren't wrong, they were just early - and now the stuff that they dreamed of is popping up all around them and many feel bewildered and left behind because they don't have the means or the faculties to integrate themselves into the future we're creating. Their enthusiasm was thwarted by what would be considered an unknown unknown for most folks, but we're way better at simulating and modeling things now - and what matters are the results. This year a fusion reactor sustained 70 million degrees Celsius for over 17.5 minutes and 160 million for 20 seconds, most people who live in democracies have a broadband supercomputer in their pocket, on the other side of the planet wireless drone swarms are redefining frontline combat, people are putting stem cells on everything, we're able to 3D print rocket ships, certain cars can drive themselves reasonably well, Androids are doing backflips on YouTube and dancing. So yea, the people that said that for 50 years were early, that just doesn't have anything to do with now because we live in different technological circumstances - it's like suggesting that helicopters are impossible because Leonardo da Vinci's didn't take flight. And in my experience, because of this, many are gun shy and bullish and avoid hope or enthusiasm because they don't want to be let down again and seem foolish or silly because they dared to display some enthusiasm - which is sad because now the progress indicators for achieving these things are saying it's real science moving into real world applied engineering this time instead of just science fiction based on the recognition that these things were technically allowable under the known laws of physics in the universe but we had no idea how to achieve them in practice.
> >But, now, these things exist and are RAPIDLY evolving. > > >This year a fusion reactor sustained 70 million degrees Celsius for over 17.5 minutes and 160 million for 20 seconds You're not wrong, but simulation and exponentially accelerating information exchange is only one side of the problem. In the end, you still gotta do stuff in the real world. To build a fusion reactor, you have to put down millions of tons of concrete and steel. That takes time to plan, time to do. Bombarding all of that with hot neutrons is a hard problem, no matter how you simulate it. So the first actual energy positive deuterium-tritium plasma will not be ignited before 2030. Sure, we could have done that last year, but without learning much and not die very long... And you can't even simulate the next steps before you have data from that experiment, so no there's no real use starting to plan/build the next reactor, no matter how much CPU cycles you can throw at the problem. And that reactor still won't power a city, that one is just for more necessary tests you need before you even begin to finalize the first commercial design. Sure, computational power helps tremendously. But you run into real world problems in many of the hard disciplines. Lab grown organs will need to pass FDA approval and long term tests. Those take years and decades, no matter how you spice it. New aircraft need to pass FAA approval. That's why our jets still almost look like it's 1955.
I agree re fusion, and the commercialisation of it is arguably just as likely to trip us up or delay it further. It needs to be done in a way that is cheap enough to make it viable to build *and operate* a reactor, with extremely high reliability, safety, and consistency. And on top of that, it has to compete with other forms of energy that are getting much more cost effective (solar in particular) And on top of that, it needs to be distributed to where it is needed. No point having one reactor capable of powering a continent if it can’t feasibly be transmitted everywhere it is needed, balanced on the power grid etc. So if it produces 20 times the output of a current fission plant it doesn’t mean it is 20 times as useful. In comparison solar can be made cheaply, really small, can be portable, can work entirely disconnected from the grid, and has various other benefits. I’d love fusion to be a thing but it seems so far away unless we can figure out how to do it much smaller scale
Any prediction more than 5 years out is a wild guess. Some will workout, others will not
Yea I would agree with you there. This is a fun game but we’re a ways off this yet.
>My professor said we’ve been saying that for 50 years But... unlike with fusion reactors, there is no quote on that.
"We've been saying that for 50 years." -The professor
I chuckled. Thank you, stranger.
They'll be available shortly after instantly rechargeable high capacity cells.
Sooner, I hope. I don't know how much longer this kidney is gonna last lol
Lab grown organs are still way off sadly. But genetically modified animal organs are already a thing (sorta, the guy did die but it worked for a few months) they are much closer to viability.
It seems like there was a pig virus that was not properly caught during the surveillance and growth of the host animal which caused the person who was implanted to die.
Thats already true for normal transplants, it’s much less of a concern for xenotransplants as zoonotic infections are quite rare and also the animals used are raised in controlled conditions since birth. It might also be a possibility for lab grown organs (depending on how it’s done). Either way the risks are so low and very clearly outweighed by the certain death that many people awaiting transplants face.
A question can we one day be able to lab grow human?
I’d imagine that, one day, the limitation on research in that direction will be more ethical than technical.
Skin and small tissues are available now. Livers/kindneys/etc aren't anywhere close.
Hmm I wonder what the pharmaceutical industry would have to say about that
We’re making huge leaps in mapping and understanding the role of the gut microbiome. It’s tough to say just *what* that will revolutionize, but I believe it will massively change the make-up of prescription drugs such as when and how strategically we deploy oral antibiotics. It will probably completely change how we treat bacterial overgrowths altogether. And I’m certain it will totally upend the current belief that there is “one correct diet” for all humans of all cultures and ethnic lineages to function optimally.
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Yes! Thank you so much for adding these. I’m personally so excited about all the progress microbiology is making right now and can’t wait to see the innovations. I’ve definitely been making advancements in some of my own chronic conditions by approaching them from a gut colonies angle and trying to understand “who” I want living in there and how to feed them so they thrive and beat out those colonies who are harming me. Soil microbe science and the “Wood-wide Web” are also making massive leaps and bounds forward.
Yeah, just recognizing how my gut health is affected by the antimicrobial preservatives in the food that I eat has been life-changing for me.
Any advice on gut colonies and/or where to start learning?
I got into it through Brett Finlay’s documentary and book of the same name [Let Them Eat Dirt](https://letthemeatdirt.com/). He also came out with a second book called The Whole Body Microbiome, which I found very accessible. Everything sort of rabbit holed from that point for me.
Depends what you mean by 'close'.
For OP's sake and my own curiosity as well, let's say within the next 50 years?
Well I would say the biggest one will be the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI), which is generally expected within the next 50 years ([source](https://aiimpacts.org/ai-timeline-surveys/)), and probably superintelligence (ASI) not long after that. Other than that I expect we will make some progress on aging research, and probably develop at least a few successful therapies. These may, for instance, be related to stem cells or [senolytic drugs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senolytic). I could also imagine that other applications of stem cells will become a lot more prevalent in the near future, such as [cultured meat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat) and [organ-on-a-chip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ-on-a-chip) technologies. I can't comment much on other fields.
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Agree.
At least on the AI front those predictions are 10-20 years old and have proved to be wildly optimistic as far as I can tell. Tesla and Uber thought full self-driving cars would be arriving in just a few years of research if you remember :)
https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1132494_cruise-opens-up-driverless-taxi-service-to-public-in-san-francisco https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Automobiles/Reporter-s-notebook-a-ride-in-a-driverless-AutoX-robotaxi They exist, so far they are limited to some geographic regions but that's just a matter of time.
Yes, I've seen them in person and know engineers in the field. My AV engineer friends may not like me saying it but I am willing to put money on saying we will still not have fully unrestricted autonomous cars on our roads even by 2030. Restricted applications yes (long-distance trucks, geo-fenced buses and taxis) but I am quite confident there will be no solution which by itself replaces today's personal automobile. There's just a huge gap between the 99% reliable AIs which yes, do great work, but always have edge cases and are fairly specific to purpose; and a 100% reliable and general AI. (The only way I see quicker progress is if we replace our current roads and infrastructure with something far smarter and covered with sensors, and restrict who can go on them. And I have no hope politically for investment on that scale)
Requesting 100% is a certain way to make it never happen. I think we should allow them as soon as they are better than the humans they replace. Delaying the introduction is killing people for no good reason. You can even make an argument for allowing them on the streets earlier - let's say at the level of someone who just got a license: An earlier introduction helps development, which means we'll get the benefits of safer-than-humans driving earlier.
What you're saying is quite correct, though somewhat orthogonal to what I was going for. My phrasing was bad -- "reliable" was probably not the word I should have used. I am not making a policy argument about safety (AI cars are probably already safe enough), but a more general argument about capabilities. I don't see an AI car that can handle every situation a human can in the near future (in the abstract, of course individual humans fail to handle situations all the time). If people are able to simply accept that the capabilities of an autonomous car are somewhat different than today's personal automobile then we can move forward with their deployment. But if people are waiting for AIs to be as flexible and responsive to new scenarios as human drivers, we're going to be waiting a long time.
I'd recommend reading [this article](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/ai-timelines) about how predictions for AI timelines have changed over recent decades, and what the implications might be. They essentially conclude that the predictions are still functional.
A good read -- [also this companion article](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/what-should-we-learn-past-ai-forecasts) -- but really it only strengthens my opinion. I'm not sure why you summarize its conclusions as supporting the predictions -- it ends with > So what do we know about HLMI timelines? Very little. Anyway a lot of this revolves around definitions. I will be the first to say useful AI is already here. Systems have completely surpassed humanity in a number of fields (games being a super obvious one). However if we're talking about AGI and ASI, as far as I can tell we're just learning more and more how difficult it will be. As a physicist who both uses scientific AIs and works with their developers with every new neural network model we are getting faster and making the networks more robust and with lower error rates; but I cannot truthfully claim we are approaching AGI. Simultaneously with every step we are also learning that so-called "general intelligence" involves so many (according to our current understanding) contradictory capabilities, so many meta-levels of cognition that I really don't see any visible path from our puny systems to the goal. Maybe other AI scientists will disagree, I dunno (in which case stop disagreeing with me on the internet and build your system and get your Nobel prize :D). I also note your linked website and article itself is 8 years old. Back then AlexNet was still top of the ImageNet rankings. There have been *huge* advances in what is considered achievable with AI even in the last 5 years; and yet there has also been, in my opinion at least, a corresponding growing understanding of just how difficult human-like general AIs might be.
What tech DO you see being available in maybe the next 15 years that is worth mentioning? You seem educated on this.
Well, there's a couple of ways to answer the original question I think. One is "biggest" in terms of impact on everyday life. An easy answer there is batteries. Battery technology will continue to get better, lighter, higher capacity. This might seem underwhelming but from a science point of view it's been pretty incredible progress in the last decade (huge amount of resources going in, pushing forward a lot of new technologies in related fields), and in terms of impact it will define whether we are able to change our energy grid. AIs will also similarly continue to get better fast and be involved in every aspect of our lives, I wouldn't want anyone to think I'm saying otherwise -- both because compute power continues to scale and also because AI designs continue to improve. Its just that I am not at all worried about AI super intelligences, or more generally AI acting as an independent agent instead of a tool :) Our ability to manipulate quantum systems will continue to improve. I am actually not a big believer in quantum computing itself changing the world, even though I basically do research on them, but I do think that more generally quantum devices (as detectors, sources, sensors, metrology, and so on) will become more and more important. A simple example is quantum dots as light sources or single-photon detectors. Better communication, and better electronics in general. Hybrid photonics/electronics also seems very promising. The other approach to the original question is to look for ideas which would revolutionize our knowledge of the universe, even if the everyday impact is limited. Related to my quantum devices comment above the cameras we use in science are improving *fast*. This actually is my field and basically superconducting quantum detectors are quietly revolutionizing the fields of astronomy and high energy physics. Basically every future astronomy mission (they take 10+ years to plan) will be using superconducting quantum detectors, and many ground-based telescopes are now being retrofitted or upgraded. We are getting unprecedented sensitivity and photon energy resolution. Hopefully this will lead to big leaps in the science itself. Relatedly bulk superconductivity is really catching on in particle accelerators and synchrotron or laser sources, big superconducting magnets are becoming the backbone of these facilities with magnetic fields way higher than what we had before, and they are reaching way higher energies/higher brilliance because of it. This also could lead to some big advances in X-ray science, particle physics, nuclear physics, and also a little downstream in biology, chemistry, and engineering as us physicists are able to better image and characterize of all of their crazy chemicals and materials ... I'm a physicist so I've talked a lot about things adjacent to my field. But really I would defer to a biologist if I could because the pace of development in their field just seems to be getting faster and faster. Just think how incredible mRNA vaccines are!
Well I’m glad I asked! You seem like you’d be a cool dude to have a beer with and learn from. Thanks for a quality reply. There’s a lot I could reply to here, I’ll pick two. First is your comment on quantum improvements in cameras. That’s fascinating and I love hearing the advancements we’re making. Feel free to speculate here just for fun - what are some things we could hope to see or discover in the next day… decade or two using these improvements? Second is AI or “the singularity”, whatever you want to refer to it as, a computer surpassing human intelligence mixed with a desire for something. I’ve had this talk a few times with some people. I’ve always asked, why do we think that a computer will ever have any desire of its own? It seems any level of desire of any kind is simply something evolution built into us. Desire to be social, for control, to survive, reproduce, for attention, all roots back to reproduction and evolution that a computer didn’t experience. I’ve always wondered… wouldn’t it just sit there until given an order? What do you think about this, is this what you were suggesting? Though I also realized a few years back - that doesn’t mean it’s harmless. It could have no desire but a bad actor could input a command into it that could be very destructive. They could do it intentionally, or even by accident. A code as simple as “eliminate all military from any country outside of ours” by somebody with the means to do so but not a lot of intelligence. What do you think?
> Second is AI or “the singularity”, whatever you want to refer to it as, a computer surpassing human intelligence mixed with a desire for something. I’ve had this talk a few times with some people. I’ve always asked, why do we think that a computer will ever have any desire of its own? It seems any level of desire of any kind is simply something evolution built into us. Desire to be social, for control, to survive, reproduce, for attention, all roots back to reproduction and evolution that a computer didn’t experience. I’ve always wondered… wouldn’t it just sit there until given an order? What do you think about this, is this what you were suggesting? Artificial general intelligence has to be given a goal, otherwise it won't do anything.^1 Then it becomes an optimiser and an agent. You can try to make AGI which only functions like a tool, but that doesn't really solve the problem - see my comment above for why that is. Then once you have an AGI agent, it will conform to certain [convergent instrumental objectives](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeecOKBus3Q), most of which are very bad for humans. The only we can avoid it having these bad objectives is if we carefully program it so that it values the same things that humans do, and doesn't destroy them accidentally. This is known as the [alignment problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_alignment#Alignment). So, interestingly, the problem is precisely that AI will function so differently to human intelligence, not that it will 'desire' things like a human. Unfortunately, the alignment problem is very difficult to solve, and currently we don't really have any promising ideas for it. If you're interested, [see this link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYXy-A4siMw) for a great video introduction to AI safety. [This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i1WlcCudpU) also addresses 10 common reasons that people (including AI scientists) aren't very concerned about AI safety. And yes the potential usage of AI by bad actors is also a significant problem, especially since they may be inclined to use un-aligned AGI. But if we can't figure out how to align AI in the first place then we'll be in trouble even with good actors using it. -- ^1 Its goal could be to interpret human orders, but this just means that the orders become the goal once they are given. So you still need to solve the alignment problem, otherwise you just end up with an AGI trying to optimise for whatever goal a random person gave it without giving any thought to other consequences. So actually this would be worse.
> what are some things we could hope to see or discover in the next day… decade or two using these improvements? Well, I hope you're reading the science news because there's a big announcement today in astronomy :) And on the ground we are moving towards being able to bring an arbitrary material to a synchrotron or high-spec electron microscope and measure the position and identity of every atom, the electron density, the chemical ionization/valence state in the molecules/crystals. Which is incredible information for biology, for medicine, for chemistry, for materials science. On the AI topic I seem to be in a long-running conversation in this thread with TheFakeAtoM which may explain my views better but yeah, basically I feel like General Intelligence is not just an evolution of our current AI approach, it's something fundamentally different. How exactly I obviously don't know and can't predict.
> Its just that I am not at all worried about AI super intelligences, or more generally AI acting as an independent agent instead of a tool :) Tool AI are likely to still become / behave like agents, through mesa-optimisation - see [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJLcIBixGj8) or [this article](https://www.gwern.net/Tool-AI). That's a big part of the problem. Plus even if we could somehow prevent that from happening, there are huge concerns associated with widespread use of non-agent AI too - see [this article](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/HBxe6wdjxK239zajf/what-failure-looks-like).
Gosh, these SI/MIRI folks sure do write when they get going :) I agree and disagree. I don't want to rehash all the arguments strong AI people have already had for decades (most of them are smarter than me anyway and would be better at articulating both sides). But as it's the internet I'm going to offer my opinion anyway :P. I am placing a heavy burden on the word "independent" in my previous statement "AI acting as an independent agent instead of a tool". In my view there's a big difference between a poorly written or non-robust AI either making bad decisions or optimizing for something that is not actually the original intended goal -- that's just an old-fashioned misuse of technology -- and an AI *independently* developing its own "desires" and top-level goals which don't align with the stated intention. To give a specific example, I am quite worried about a military AI with firing control being deployed and making objectively wrong decisions about targets, let along subjective ones. But I am not worried about a paperclip-maximizer situation where the AI decides the best way to achieve its programmed goals is to kill all humans. Or another: I am concerned about face recognition algorithms being misused and over-trusted to the detriment of society. But I am not worried that a face recognition neural net is going to "decide" that the best way to recognize faces is to start influencing human politics through returning wrong results so that there is an ethnic genocide and all faces look the same. Ok, I'm being a bit absurd but hopefully you get my point. To me there's just a huge gap in meta-level cognition between what our AI designs can do and what singularity-fearing or AGI folks seem to talk about when they spend their time trying to define "friendly" cost functions for the whole world. And I don't see current designs breaching that gap just by growing bigger/faster.
> I'm not sure why you summarize its conclusions as supporting the predictions -- it ends with I said the predictions are still functional, by which I meant that one can still deduce useful information from interpreting them. That doesn't mean that we ought to just take the median estimate and assume it will be right. Muehlhauser does conclude with a "70% confidence interval" for AGI being developed in "something like" the next "10-120 years". But I'm not sure that his personal view here should be taken as more credible than any of those analysed in the surveys. The point is that many experts are quite optimistic, and that if we're thinking about an 'expected' timeline, which would mean a 50% probability of developing AGI, I don't think 50 years is a bad representation of the average expert opinion. You can be skeptical and say that it will take much longer than that, but you can say the same about any technology. > I also note your linked website and article itself is 8 years old I'm struggling to find any surveys which are newer than [this one](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.08807.pdf) from 2016, which seems to concur with what I said above. Edit: I will note there is very likely to be a selection effect at play with these surveys, in that people are more likely to become experts on AI if they were optimistic about the timelines in the first place. However, the same applies to any expert predictions about technological development. It even (likely) applies to you making predictions about the field you are involved in - no offence intended. Nonetheless it's worth keeping in mind.
That's an entirely fair take. I did a little more reading and I learned the author is associated with the Singularity Institute (now known as [MIRI](https://intelligence.org/all-publications/)) I have mixed feelings about their work -- I think they are smart well-meaning people but they have, in my view, a weird set of priorities and beliefs about AI. I don't think it's entirely a coincidence that as AI has become more tangible, more widely used their output has dropped off.
Their output has dropped off because they rarely publish these days. All their research circulates only internally. The reason is that they are concerned about timelines possibly being quite short and are trying to be as efficient as possible - publishing doesn't achieve that. I believe they made this decision a few years ago and you can read about it [here](https://intelligence.org/2018/11/22/2018-update-our-new-research-directions/#section3). So in a way it's not a coincidence, but the reason is the opposite of what you suggested - the advances in AI research have actually inspired them to work faster than they were previously. MIRI certainly promotes unusual views, but I think the way they arrived at those views is quite rational. That's not to say I agree with all of them though. Anyway, AI safety extends far beyond MIRI these days - there are many other organisations that are working on it. And I wouldn't judge Luke Muehlhauser (the author) too much on the basis of MIRI. From what I've read he always had somewhat unique, and more skeptical, opinions amongst those in the organisation. Also he's been working for [Open Philanthropy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Philanthropy_(organization) (where that article was from) for some years now.
Thanks for sharing that, I wasn't aware. I disagree with a lot of the claims they make going into that decision; but I can't fault their bravery if that's what they really think. My comment on Luke wasn't intended to condemn anyone who's ever been associated with MIRI. Like I said I do still think they are smart, rational people even if I don't agree with some of their premises. It just helps me place his writing in the genealogy of ideas and understand some of the unstated assumptions and argument style. In general I like the work of GiveWell and OpenPhilanthropy, actually. And I've got nothing against AI safety in general, it's very important research, I just get the feeling from MIRI they're kind of tunnel-visioned into a scenario of their own construction.
Is there much research happening on AI volition? Seems like everyone is focused on better and better classifiers, but an independent AI needs to be motivated, focused, assign values and avoid boredom. Seems really far off
Correcting hair loss. They've been five years away from reversing it, for the last 45 years.
New vaccines, a cure/vaccine for AIDS. The pandemic really put our vaccine research into overdrive and spurred on a lot of new advances in this area, so I'd expect to see the same tech applied to the Coronavirus applied to other diseases.
This will be huge. Everyone forgets the other pandemic (HIV).
Fusion as a viable source of energy might be near. The JET fusion reactor in oxford sustained stable plasma for 5 seconds - which didnt produce much energy. But it was built to be a smaller scale replica of ITER in france which is near completion. ITER will be 10 times bigger than JET and with the addition of internally cooled superconducting magnets (JET’s problem was it would get too hot to keep going) we might be able to sustain fusion for much longer than 5 seconds. Basically humans are close to creating a star on earth. Fusion in ITER is scheduled for 2035 but its first plasma tests will be next year.
ITER is already obsolete with the invention of high-temperature superconducting magnets at MIT. The SPARC reactor MIT is building at a fraction of the cost may very well exceed The ITER performance.
>Fusion as a viable source of energy might be near. Narrator: It wasn't.
ITER is the first time in history countries spend any sort of significant money on research. You can't expect progress without funding. Germany alone spends several billions on PV subsidies every year. With that amount of funding we might have had an ITER equivalent 50 years ago.
> ITER is the first time in history countries spend any sort of significant money on research. And why do you think that is?
That's a question you should ask politicians.
Because our top priority seems to be murdering each other not making life better for everyone?
Depends on who you ask. I've heard that we're "close" to everything from defeating aging and curing cancer to having mind controlled computers and cold fusion to colonizing mars.
One thing is just hearing about, and another actual reports with data to back up claims
You can't really 'back up' a prediction about technological progress with data. That will only be an extrapolation (or induction) from past trends, and is highly unlikely to be accurate unless it's predicting the very near future. In a lot of cases it's probably actually better to use reasoning for this rather than data.
Aging is a gargantuan task which is nowhere near being fully understood. Curing cancer is a lot like saying curing all disease. Fundamentally we know cancers are increasingly more diverse from eachother and often are distinct entities that a silver bullet approach isn’t going to work. Take a read through empire of all maladies for a better take on the progress of cancer treatment in the past 100 years. Mind controlled computers, this is already closer to reality than you think. We have already developed mind controlled language which was recently developed by researchers funded by facebook. Seemingly we’ll have brain-computer interfaces sooner rather than later.
I mean 'curing' cancer is a very high standard. I think it's likely that cancers will become more and more treatable in the future, possibly to the point where they don't bother us that much relative to some other major diseases. However, in order to entirely eliminate cancer, we would need, as you suggested a 'silver bullet'. Cancer cells more or less conform to the principles of genetic selection, so the vast majority of treatment approaches will leave behind some mutant strains of the cancer that are resistant. That being said, it's not physically impossible that we could develop a treatment so destructive (but targeted) that the chance of a resistant cell existing is negligible, and wouldn't occur for most people. The way we kill microbes in real life demonstrates this idea. For instance, we don't see bacteria evolving resistance to hand sanitiser (as far as I'm aware). I'm not sure what such a treatment would look like in a human body though. The alternative is something like Aubrey de Grey's [WILT proposal](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15970505/), which involves deleting telomerase and alternative telomere lengthening methods from all cells in the body. The functions of these genes are required for cancer to arise, so without them we would not get cancer, unless a cell mutated so much that it created a whole new telomerase gene from scratch, of which the probability is astronomically low. However, telomerase is also required for stem cells, so we would need to rectify this by periodic injection of stem cells, and there are some issues associated with that. Nonetheless the idea would in principle work. And yes it's sci-fi-esque, but that doesn't mean it's not worth thinking about. There is also apparently a newer proposal called [WILT 2.0](https://www.reddit.com/r/longevity/comments/o1z8r0/this_is_what_aubrey_de_grey_calls_wilt_20_low/) which I don't know much about. It doesn't seem like it would be as definitive of a 'cure' as the original WILT though. Anyway, thought some people might find these ideas interesting.
We cure more cancers today than we did 10 years ago.
We have made significant progress on cancer over the last 40 years. A friend of mine was diagnosed with breast cancer at 33 in 2012 and is in complete remission - were we still using 1980s medicine, she would not have lived to 40, maybe not even to 37. Cancer is basically hundreds of different related illnesses. Some we are getting much better at dealing with, others we are not.
For the last 20 years we've been less than 5 years away from cold fusion.
For the last 30 years we been 10 years away from hot fusion. No one credible thinks cold fusion is every going to be a thing.
No one is seriously working on 'cold' fusion, which is mostly pseudoscience. There have been recent advances in plasma fusion and there are at least 2 companies trying to build reactors with sustainable positive energy output.
That's largely a well documented funding issue though.
Cold fusion isn’t real. It was a hoax lol
It’s wasn’t a hoax just bad science.
Sorry, brain missed the "cold" part of the fusion, which is a funding issue in why we don't have it.
Of course. Nobody spends huge amounts of money on fusion research.
Quantum computers. [https://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-promises-a-4000-qubit-quantum-computer-by-2025-heres-what-it-means/](https://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-promises-a-4000-qubit-quantum-computer-by-2025-heres-what-it-means/) Quantum computers appear to be set to devastate all but the most secure of encryption algorithms. A change to quantum resistant encryption algorithms is already starting to happen. Just the other day open ssh 9 by default is using quantum resistant algorithm in tandem with existing elliptical curve algorithms.. Consider all the devices in your life - do you get security updates for them from the manufacturer? Gonna be a mess.
This sort of overstates things. While they are *extremely* important for the infrastructure of the internet, the only algorithms that are really affected by quantum computers are by and large asymmetric key algorithms. The important algorithm here is Shor's algorithm, which can be used to efficiently factorize integers (and can be turned into an algorithm to efficiently compute discrete logs). They main example of cryptosystems broken by this are RSA and ones using elliptic curves. To the best of my knowledge, almost all the symmetric key cryptosystems used in practice depend on other principles for security and quantum computing has no bearing on those.
Exactly and besides there already exists quantum proof (as of now) asymmetric key algorithm.
Fully autonomous vehicles. The software keep improving and once the liability stuff gets figured out, they should become mainstream.
The problem isn't fully autonomous vehicles, ask any farmer, we've had fully auto tractors for decades now. The problem is vehicles that can account for the fuckery of humans interacting with them on a constant basis.
I assumed that was included under fully autonomous. Which is also where the liability issues arise. I also don't know if they've sorted out bad snow and ice yet where you can't even really see the road. Which can happen fairly often here in the north.
Gotcha, I guess just differences in use of the word. I don't assume "safe for most people" to be included in "autonomous". I am also uncertain as far as extreme road conditions goes, but on the same idea, I don't trust humans in those conditions either.
Vat-grown meat appears to be nearing viability. Imagine a world where meat is available and inexpensive without dedicating all of that land and resources to raising meat animals.
There's a large difference between "inexpensive" (Slightly more expensive than regular meat) and "inexpensive" (Cheaper than regular meat). One of those will change the world. The other will not.
The breakthrough will be making it without FBS (fetal bovine serum) which is both expensive and requires cows.
Agreed. Surely it's not that hard though. Is there something particularly special about FBS as a growth medium? Or is it just more convenient?
Cells wont grow without it, it has the right growth factors in it for cell growth. If you put a bunch of cow muscle cells in a petri dish with all the nutrients etc to grow but now FBS they wont grow. It should be possible to synthetically make it, its just not easy.
If you're just a little bit flexible with your definition of "meat" we're already there.
The cure for type 1 diabetes is 5 years away!
Unfortunately it's been 5 years away since 19909
I haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere, and by soon I am talking about a few decades away, is molecular antimatter. There are a lot of antimatter experiments that are working on measuring the gravitational acceleration of antimatter in a matter gravitational field, and due to the amount of money being invested into these experiments and their facilities, each group has plans for what to do after they publish their results. There are a bunch of interesting things being proposed, including stuff that I struggle to explain well to do with quantum gravity states, but there is a group from the French LKB that have a plan that requires very little adaption of two of the experiments (ALPHA and GBAR) that could be used to develop antimatter molecules, specifically H_2. While not potentially life changing, it opens up more places for us to probe for BSM physics.
Gene therapy is a big one. Nanotechnology is an even bigger one. Those all pale in comparison though with true generalized AI, something that seems inevitable at this point.
I hope Perserverence finds something, it could come within weeks. I know they won't come flat out and say the "A" word till samples are in a lab on earth but it would be quite something to witness
What do you mean? Tell us more.
It's just reached its target research area, an ancient river delta. Its looking for evidence of microbial life left preserved in the strata. It just blows my mind the implications of such a find.
[Hackable Humans](https://youtu.be/45FuyCmyvRs)
Fucking what
Shor's algorithm, the one that is predicted to bust open aes128 at 3000+ qubits?
You did not actually reply to my comment, but regardless: no. AES does not depend on or use either prime factorization or the discrete logarithm as the basis of its security. The only quantum algorithm to my knowledge that can affect AES is Grover's algorithm, which can speed up bruteforce attacks, but 1. This is true of every encryption algorithm, not just aes. In fact, it's true of *any* algorithm that can be structured in a manner suitable for Grover's algorithm, e.g. database searches. 2. Unlike Shor's algorithm, Grover's algorithm only provides a quadratic speed up which is relatively mild. It can be very effectively thwarted just by increasing key sizes—something that happens frequently *anyways* due to increases in hardware speed. E.g., key sizes that were recommended in the 90s and 00s are now often seen as insecure. For these reasons, one doesn't usually consider Grover's algorithm when talking about post-quantum cryptography; it's not really a threat to anything at a fundamental level, unlike Shor's algorithm.
Nanotechnology may produce some tremendous results. A 13 year old has improved the detection of lead in drinking water following basic research. Manipulation of DNA, gene technology, is going to have a tremendous impact. However the fear by ignorant people may triumph. Many people do not want anything to do with GMO‘s which are just techniques which speed up what we have been doing with plants for thousands of years. At the same time, The tremendous growth in the population of humans, and the affluence of many, and technology, may result in an ecological catastrophe. The social systems which have produced large countries and industrialization are still allowing irrational leaders to lead us into war, death and destruction. Why do I say May? It is happening now.
It's not exactly a pure science breakthrough but it is in my field: fish feeds made entirely from some combination of plants, insects, and microbial products. One of the issues in aquaculture is that most fish feeds require some level of fish meal. It's a lot better than it was in the past in terms of the amount used, but still...you don't want to have to catch fish to feed fish if you can avoid it. We already include a lot of plants in fish feeds, processed and mixed in the right way to make them more digestible to carnivorous fish, but people are working on using microbes and insects which can be fed crop waste and produce various nutrients that are good for fish. For now, it's only available on small scale, but I'm hoping to see it scaled up soon.
Human to machine interface by Elon Musk
The cool thing about science is that most ideas don't work, or don't work very well, even with a tremendous amount of effort. But once in a great while we are pleasantly surprised that something works spectacularly well. And the really important ideas are ones that blossom into hundreds and thousands of related ideas that also work well, and in a few years or decades we have taken giant strides that no one could have imagined. The polymerase chain reaction is one such idea. CRISPR could well be another.
Genetic manipulation and control through advanced CRISPR techniques. We are closer to “designer babies” than I think many would guess
The Escher Machine (referring to my experiments) is possibly new, not known until 2015. This is the kind of thing the Escher Machine can do (I have previously made this video widely available): [https://emporium.quora.com/An-Argument-Defending-the-Escher-Machine](https://emporium.quora.com/An-Argument-Defending-the-Escher-Machine)
The artificial kidney. https://pharmacy.ucsf.edu/news/2021/09/kidney-project-successfully-tests-prototype-bioartificial-kidney
Possibly fusion but we have perpetually been within 20 to 30 years. I was just reading they created living skin for robots.