The Aristillus Series
There’s a contradiction at the heart of science fiction. Science fiction tends to celebrate the engineers and other techies who are its main fans. But there are two conflicting ways to do this. One is...
View ArticlePerpetual Motion Via Negative Matter?
One of the most important things we will ever learn about the universe is just how big it is, practically, for our purposes. In the last century we’ve learned that it it is far larger than we knew, in...
View ArticleTales of the Turing Church
My futurist friend Giulio Prisco has a new book: Tales of the Turing Church. In some ways, he is a reasonable skeptic: I think all these things – molecular nanotechnology, radical life extension, the...
View ArticleHow Does Brain Code Differ?
The Question We humans have been writing “code” for many decades now, and as “software eats the world” we will write a lot more. In addition, we can also think of the structures within each human brain...
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Distant Future Tradeoffs
Over the last day on Twitter, I ran three similar polls. One asked: Software design today faces many tradeoffs, e.g., getting more X costs less Y, or vice versa. By comparison, will distant future...
View ArticleHow Lumpy AI Services?
Long ago people like Marx and Engels predicted that the familiar capitalist economy would naturally lead to the immiseration of workers, huge wealth inequality, and a strong concentration of firms....
View ArticleAliens Need Not Wait To Be Active
In April 2017, Anders Sandberg, Stuart Armstrong, and Milan Cirkovic released this paper: If a civilization wants to maximize computation it appears rational to aestivate until the far future in order...
View ArticleWhy Age of Em Will Happen
In some technology competitions, winners dominate strongly. For example, while gravel may cover a lot of roads if we count by surface area, if we weigh by vehicle miles traveled then asphalt strongly...
View ArticleBig War Remains Possible
The following poll suggests that a majority of my Twitter followers think war will decline; in the next 80 years we won’t see a 15 year period with a war death rate above the median level we’ve see...
View ArticleHow To Prep For War
In my last two posts I’ve noted while war deaths have fallen greatly since the world wars, the magnitude and duration of this fall isn’t that far out of line with previous falls over the last four...
View ArticleUnending Winter Is Coming
Toward the end of the TV series Game of Thrones, a big long (multi-year) winter was coming, and while everyone should have been saving up for it, they were instead spending lots to fight wars. Because...
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Three Futures
Recently, 1539 people responded to this poll: ~0.108T (trillion) humans have ever lived, & only 0.0078T are alive now. How many “humans” (however you mean that term) do you think will ever exist? —...
View ArticleWe Colonize The Sun First
Space is romantic; most people are overly obsessed with space in their view of the future. Even so, these remain valid questions: When will off-Earth economy be larger than the on-Earth? Where in the...
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Future Timeline, in Econ Growth Units
Polls on the future often ask by what date one expects to see some event X. That approach, however, is sensitive to expectations on overall rates of progress. If you expect progress to speed-up a lot,...
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What Future Areas Matter Most?
I made a list of 44 possibly important future areas, and just did 22 Twitter polls (with N from 379 to 1178), each time asking this question re 4 areas: Over next 30 years, changes in which are likely...
View ArticleRemote Work Specializes
We seem on track to spend far more preventing pandemic health harm than we will suffer from it, which seems too much spending given the apparent low elasticity of harm w.r.t. prevention. But an upside...
View ArticleSim Argument Confidence
Nick Bostrom once argued that you must choose between three options re the possibility that you are now actually living in and experiencing a simulation created by future folks to explore their past:...
View ArticleRussell’s Human Compatible
My school turned back on its mail system as we start a new semester, and a few days ago out popped Stuart Russell’s book Human Compatible (published last Oct.), with a note inside dated March 31....
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Elois Ate Your Flying Car
J Storrs Hall’s book Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past, told me new things I didn’t know about flying cars. The book is long, and says many things about tech and the future, including...
View ArticleJoin The Universe
If you spend most of your time arguing with your immediate family, then even the family members with whom you most disagree are at the center of your world, and greatly define you. Or if you spend most...
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