I definitely expect nanotech a few orders of magnitude awesomer than we have now. I expect great progress on aging and disease, and wouldn’t be floored by them being solved in theory (though it does sound hard). What I don’t expect is worldwide deployment. There are still people dying from measles, when in any halfway-developed country every baby gets an MMR shot as a matter of course. I wouldn’t be too surprised if everyone who can afford basic care in rich countries was immortal while thousands of brown kids kept drinking poo water and dying. I also expect longevity treatments to be long-term, not permanent fixes, and thus hard to access in poor or politically unstable countries.
The above requires poor countries to continue existing. I expect great progress, but not abolition of poverty. If development continues the way it has (e.g. Brazil), a century isn’t quite enough for Somalia to get its act together. If there’s a game-changing, universally available advance that bumps everyone to cutting-edge tech levels (or even 2012 tech levels), then I won’t regret that $100 much.
I have no idea what wars will look like, but I don’t expect them to be nonexistent or nonlethal. Given no game-changer, socioeconomic factors vary too slowly to remove incentive for war. Straightforward tech applications (get a superweapon, get a superdefense, give everyone a superweapon, etc.) get you very different war strategies, but not world peace. If you do something really clever like world government nobody’s unhappy with, arms-race-proof shields for everyone, or mass Gandhification, then I have happily lost.
I definitely expect nanotech a few orders of magnitude awesomer than we have now. I expect great progress on aging and disease, and wouldn’t be floored by them being solved in theory (though it does sound hard). What I don’t expect is worldwide deployment. There are still people dying from measles, when in any halfway-developed country every baby gets an MMR shot as a matter of course. I wouldn’t be too surprised if everyone who can afford basic care in rich countries was immortal while thousands of brown kids kept drinking poo water and dying. I also expect longevity treatments to be long-term, not permanent fixes, and thus hard to access in poor or politically unstable countries.
The above requires poor countries to continue existing. I expect great progress, but not abolition of poverty. If development continues the way it has (e.g. Brazil), a century isn’t quite enough for Somalia to get its act together. If there’s a game-changing, universally available advance that bumps everyone to cutting-edge tech levels (or even 2012 tech levels), then I won’t regret that $100 much.
I have no idea what wars will look like, but I don’t expect them to be nonexistent or nonlethal. Given no game-changer, socioeconomic factors vary too slowly to remove incentive for war. Straightforward tech applications (get a superweapon, get a superdefense, give everyone a superweapon, etc.) get you very different war strategies, but not world peace. If you do something really clever like world government nobody’s unhappy with, arms-race-proof shields for everyone, or mass Gandhification, then I have happily lost.
Thanks for explaining!
Of course, nanotech could be self replicating and thus exponentially cheap, but the likelihood of that is … debatable.