author: niplav, created: 2021-08-21, modified: 2021-10-18, language: english, status: abandoned, importance: 1, confidence: fiction
As a response to Applied Divinity Studies
2021, I wrote a long
comment
on /r/slatestarcodex, taking
the premise more seriously. This is a formatted and revised version of
that comment.
I now disavow this text. Most of it diverges strongly from the style of
Applied Divinity Studies' or
Gwern's original post, focussing
way too much on big developments and not enough on small-scale noticeable
changes.
Noooooo, this is boring ;-). Let's actually speculate
about (not so ordinary) life-improvements from a cozy
future.
These are not predictions. Predictions would require confidence intervals
or probability distributions, these are speculations and mostly
fiction. I also expect to not endorse ~3/4 of these after thinking about
them for a couple more hours (I don't endorse some of these right now,
and think this list is too optimistic overall). If you want to have
an accurate view of the future, the joint distribution of community
predictions on Metaculus is a better start.
- After 6 years of hard work, recommender systems are now mostly
aligned with human values,
but much much more powerful than those of 2021. This has
resulted in people spending around half as much time on
their devices, but being much more agentic & fulfilled. The
creation/commenting/lurking ratio isn't 1:10:100 anymore, but
rather somewhere around 5:15:80. People have started meeting up
in person much more (due to good matching algorithms picking out
people who just really enjoy each other's company, both as friends
and romantically). However, porn-addiction is still slightly
worse than it was at the beginning of the 2020s. Luckily, the
social norms that prevent more predatory companies from making
people addicted to their devices again are slowly starting to
apply to porn sites as well.
- Relatedly, AI generated art has become super good. You think
this is good
orchestral music? Wait till you hear the symphonies written
by the neural networks—it's quite usual that half of the
audience is in tears after the concert. The same for movies,
TV series, paintings, sculpture, opera, …
- We actually finally really definitely have an Alzheimer's
cure! Polio is (of course) long eradicated, the last Malaria
case happened in 2028, and the WHO is preparing to announce
the end of mosquito borne-diseases altogether. The killer
that might be responsible for half of all human deaths
ever is finally defeated.
- The number of humans worldwide living at or under the extreme
poverty line is now at 4%, and still falling.
- In 2029, we first reached an experimental fusion reactor with
Q>1. It doesn't look like it's going to go into mass production
just yet, but let's give it another ten years, shall we?
- Clean meat performed much better than most people
expected: The cheapest variants reached price-parity with beef
in march 2027, with pork in september 2028 and are expected to
blow chicken out of the water around 2032. In western
countries, most people have realized that they were reluctant
omnivores,
and with very little fanfare (except from the EA and some animal
rights communities), factory farming is slowly but steadily
declining (chicken farmimg will, unfortunately, likely stick
around until around 2040, and fish agriculture for another ten
years afterwards).
- We haven't engineered
paradise yet, but
through a mix of 5-MeO-DMT, biofeedback and specialized
techniques, most people can develop the first two or three
jhanas
on a 10-day retreat and call them up in daily life after a
half-hour sit. Some governments tried to regulate those retreats
out of existence around 2026, but have mostly given up on it –
it's hard to stop people from just sitting. This means that with
a little dedication, most people can reach hedonic independence.
- Blockchain scalability has been improved so that most
international financial transactions between individuals are
done via some cryptocurrency. Governments are still trying to
find ways how to stop this, but it's looking harder and harder
by the day (this of course has the negative side-effect that
anyone can send anyone any amount of money)
- Battery technology has continued becoming better and better, and
solar panels have continued becoming more and more efficient. Most
industrialized countries are at ~40% electricity production
through solar, most developing countries are at ~50%, most
third-world countries are at ~25%.
- Of course, capitalism has run its normal course, and goods are
slightly cheaper than they were ten years ago, services slightly
more reliable, processes run slightly more smooth
- Self-driving cars are, of course, still 3 years away.
- Around 2024/2025 there was another craze around molecular
nanotechnology, following the development of AlphaFold3, but
completely solving the second 80% of the problem have proven
more difficult than imagined—distributional shift has shown
to reduce performance in molecules that have structures vastly
different from biological ones.
- Relatedly, it looks like
longevity escape velocity won't be reached in
2036
– the updated estimates suggest some time around 2060, if nothing
weird happens. The popularity of cryonics has been following its
trend
with a slight uptake around 2023, after Elon Musk announced he
had signed up.
- Prediction markets have been properly tried (even
though some hardliners still insist that 5 million
participants, with over a billion dollars in the biggest
market, aren't enough), and found to be too susceptible to
mass-delusions
even when they're deep, thick and liquid. Nobody really knows
how to explain why. However, expert forecasting augmented with
large neural networks works pretty well, and is very slowly
being adopted by slightly more progressive governments.
- Cancer is still a huge problem, and has displaced cardiovascular
diseases as the major cause of death.
- Scaling mostly didn't pan out in the end (I don't actually expect
this to happen, but it needs to for this to be plausible –
with proto-AGI, most of this is pretty tame/too cozy)! Something
something causality something neural networks didn't become
modular enough.
- Carbon-capture technology and geoengineering have been
politicized, and are likely not going to be implemented in western
countries. It's very unclear how to deal with the remaining carbon
in the atmosphere after the switch to renewables has been fully
finished. At least proper carbon taxes have been implemented in
most western countries, and around half of all cars are electric.