root wrote:

The future will get here, and it will always be less interesting than we imagined it to be.

But is that because the future is uninteresting, or because we get used to it? As I write this I sit in a building far higher and cleaner than my ancestors could imagine, using a device that stores and modifies information on a faster and larger scale than people could imagine just a few years ago - and it is far cheaper than most pieces of furniture in the room. I am communicating across the world, using technology to maintain a social network that would simply be impossible without a digital exoself. Many of the top news stories today would not make sense to someone coming from 30 years back (both in content and why they are considered news). I travelled over 1400 kilometres to meet with my family, and it took just half a day and cost me about two days' salary. And so on. But all of this entirely ordinary.

Quote:

I am interested in finding out how much of what we discuss here is within reach of current technology and research, and how much of that subset is something that might actually be able to take root in culture. If there is anything non-trivial left, if no one is producing it in the current market, I want to find out who can get the money to get it done. If this turns out to be a decently long list of fundable ideas, we can make it into a checklist and work out optimal strategy for the young seed AI-in-training to make use of if it were to come along. At the very least, this list will give us interesting food for thought. At most? Well, lets just say sitting at the ground zero of a god-AI hard-takeoff Singularity could be wicked fun.

I agree. But it might of course be "Who will be eaten first?" kind of fun. At our institute we try rather hard to think about these things (advert: we have a conference on machine intelligence and its consequences in January), and there are some pretty tough questions here: Is technology accelerating? The question is harder to answer than it looks, because Moore's law and Kurzweil's plots are not the entire story. There are some reasons to think tech is getting better at an increasing rate, but that might be counteracted by more complex economic and social factors. The difference between what we can do with current tech and what we desire is sometimes big, but often the real problem is transitioning something out of the lab and into the market - I have been looking for AR glasses since the mid 90's, but none have become economical. Yet we suddenly have pretty amazing realtime image processing even in phones (which do everything of what I imagined I wanted a wearable computer to do back then). Often new technologies sweep past old ones - optogenetics might replace implanted neural electrodes as the neurointerface of choice in a few years. Predicting future technology is a very hard problem. Past experience with forecasting is that it seldom works well, although it might help guide us a bit. Extrapolating growth curves is a mug's game for various statistical and fundamental reasons. This is extra true for technology we do not know how it is going to work (like AI). Yet there are clearly leverage points: the right amount of funding into a small field and the amount of innovation increases enormously (once funding and research becomes large different factors set in), so we could get a lot more discoveries done by focusing on a bunch of little researched areas. Some technologies have disproportionate effects across the social system (life extension, cognition enhancement, AI, anything that copies human capital), and many are often seriously under-funded compared to their impact.