Meta question: when you wrote this list, what did your thought process/strategies look like, and what do you think are the best ways of getting better at this kind of futurism?
More context:
One obvious answer to my second question is to get feedback—but the main bottleneck there is that these things won’t happen for many years. Getting feedback from others (hence this post, I presume) is a partial remedy, but isn’t clearly that helpful (e.g. if everyone’s futurism capabilities are limited in the same ways). Maybe you’ve practised futurism over shorter time horizons a lot? Or you expect that people giving you feedback have?
After reading the first few entries, I spent 20 mins writing my own list before reading yours. Some questions/confusions that occurred:
All of my ideas ended up with epistemic status “OK, that might happen, but I’d need to spend at least a day researching this to be able to say anything like “probably that’ll happen by 2040″ ”
So I’m wondering if you did this/already had the background knowledge, or if I’m wrong that this is necessary
My strategies were (1) consider important domains (e.g. military, financial markets, policymaking), and what better LMs/deep RL/DL in general/other emerging tech will do to those domains; (2) consider obvious AI/emerging tech applications (e.g. customer service); (3) look back to 2000 and 1980 and extrapolate apparent trends.
How good are these strategies? what other strategies are there? how should they be weighed?
How much is my bottleneck to being better at this (a) better models for extrapolating trends in AI capabilities/other emerging tech vs (b) better models of particular domains vs (c) better models of the-world-in-general vs (d) something else?
Thanks! Good idea to make your own list before reading the rest of mine—I encourage you to post it as an answer.
My process was: I end up thinking about future technologies a lot, partly for my job and partly just cos it’s exciting. Through working at AI Impacts I’ve developed a healthy respect for trend extrapolation as a method for forecasting tech trends; during the discontinuities project I was surprised by how many supposedly-discontinuous technological developments were in fact bracketed on both sides by somewhat-steady trends in the relevant metric. My faith in trend extrapolation has made successful predictions at least once, when I predicted that engine power-to-weight ratios would form a nice trend over two hundred years and yep.
As a result of my faith in trend extrapolation, when I think about future techs, the first thing I do is google around for relevant existing trends to extrapolate. Sometimes this leads to super surprising and super important claims, like the one about energy being 10x cheaper. (IIRC extrapolating the solar energy trend gets us to energy that is 25x cheaper or so, but I was trying to be a bit conservative).
As for the specific list I came up with: This list was constructed from memory, when I was having trouble focusing on my actual work one night. The things on the list were things I had previously concluded were probable, sometimes on the basis of trend extrapolation and sometimes not.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m just wrong about various of these things. I don’t consider myself an expert. Part of why I made the post is to get pushback, so that I could refine my view of the future.
I don’t know what your bottleneck is, I’m afraid. I haven’t even seen your work, for all I know it’s better than mine.
I agree feedback by reality would be great but alas takes a long time to arrive. While we wait, getting feedback from each other is good.
Thanks for this, really interesting!
Meta question: when you wrote this list, what did your thought process/strategies look like, and what do you think are the best ways of getting better at this kind of futurism?
More context:
One obvious answer to my second question is to get feedback—but the main bottleneck there is that these things won’t happen for many years. Getting feedback from others (hence this post, I presume) is a partial remedy, but isn’t clearly that helpful (e.g. if everyone’s futurism capabilities are limited in the same ways). Maybe you’ve practised futurism over shorter time horizons a lot? Or you expect that people giving you feedback have?
After reading the first few entries, I spent 20 mins writing my own list before reading yours. Some questions/confusions that occurred:
All of my ideas ended up with epistemic status “OK, that might happen, but I’d need to spend at least a day researching this to be able to say anything like “probably that’ll happen by 2040″ ”
So I’m wondering if you did this/already had the background knowledge, or if I’m wrong that this is necessary
My strategies were (1) consider important domains (e.g. military, financial markets, policymaking), and what better LMs/deep RL/DL in general/other emerging tech will do to those domains; (2) consider obvious AI/emerging tech applications (e.g. customer service); (3) look back to 2000 and 1980 and extrapolate apparent trends.
How good are these strategies? what other strategies are there? how should they be weighed?
How much is my bottleneck to being better at this (a) better models for extrapolating trends in AI capabilities/other emerging tech vs (b) better models of particular domains vs (c) better models of the-world-in-general vs (d) something else?
Thanks! Good idea to make your own list before reading the rest of mine—I encourage you to post it as an answer.
My process was: I end up thinking about future technologies a lot, partly for my job and partly just cos it’s exciting. Through working at AI Impacts I’ve developed a healthy respect for trend extrapolation as a method for forecasting tech trends; during the discontinuities project I was surprised by how many supposedly-discontinuous technological developments were in fact bracketed on both sides by somewhat-steady trends in the relevant metric. My faith in trend extrapolation has made successful predictions at least once, when I predicted that engine power-to-weight ratios would form a nice trend over two hundred years and yep.
As a result of my faith in trend extrapolation, when I think about future techs, the first thing I do is google around for relevant existing trends to extrapolate. Sometimes this leads to super surprising and super important claims, like the one about energy being 10x cheaper. (IIRC extrapolating the solar energy trend gets us to energy that is 25x cheaper or so, but I was trying to be a bit conservative).
As for the specific list I came up with: This list was constructed from memory, when I was having trouble focusing on my actual work one night. The things on the list were things I had previously concluded were probable, sometimes on the basis of trend extrapolation and sometimes not.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m just wrong about various of these things. I don’t consider myself an expert. Part of why I made the post is to get pushback, so that I could refine my view of the future.
I don’t know what your bottleneck is, I’m afraid. I haven’t even seen your work, for all I know it’s better than mine.
I agree feedback by reality would be great but alas takes a long time to arrive. While we wait, getting feedback from each other is good.