Some scattered thoughts which all connect back to this idea of avoiding myopic thinking about the future.
Don’t over-anchor on a specific idea. The world is a big place and a whole lot of different things can be going on all at once. Intelligence unlocks new affordances for affecting the Universe. Think in terms of what is possible given physical constraints, and using lots of reasoning of the type: “and separately, there is a chance that X might be happening”. Everything everywhere, all at once.
Massive underground/undersea industrial plants powered by nuclear energy and/or geothermal and/or fossil fuels.
Weird potent self-replicating synthetic biology in the sea / desert / Antarctic / Earth’s crust / asteroid belt / moons (e.g. Enceladus, Europa). A few examples.
Nano/bio tech, or hybrids thereof, doing strange things. Mysterious illnesses with mind-altering effects. Crop failures. Or crops sneakily producing traces of mysterious drugs.
Weirdcults acting at behest of super-persuasive AIs.
Destabilization of military and economic power through potent new autonomous weapons and industry. Super high-altitude long duration (months) autonomous drone flights for spying and missile defense. Insect sized robots infiltrating military installations, sabotaging nuclear weapons or launching them.
Sophisticated personalized spear-phishing deception/persuasion attacks on huge numbers of people. The waterline for being important enough to target dropping very quickly.
Cyberattacks, stealing information or planting fake information. Influenced elections. Deep fakes. Coordinated propaganda action, more skillful than ever before, at massive scale. Insider trading, money laundering, and currency manipulation by AI agents that simply disappear when investigated.
Some other ideas for what could well happen in the 21st century assuming superhuman AIs come in either 2030 or 2040:
Formal methods actually working to protect codebases IRL like full behavioral specifications of software, alongside interventions to make code and cryptography secure.
While I agree with Andrew Dickson that the Guaranteed Safe AI agenda mostly can’t work due to several limitations, I do think that something like it’s ideal for math/formal proof systems like Lean and software actually does work with AGI/ASI, and has already happened before, cf these 2 examples:
This is a big reason why I believe cyber-defense will just totally win eventually over cyber-offense, and in domains like banks, the national government secrets, where security is a must-have, will be perfectly secure even earlier.
Uploading human brains in the 21st century. It’s turning out that while the brain is complicated and uses a lot of compute for inference, it’s not too complicated, and it’s slowly being somewhat understood, and at any rate would be greatly sped up by AIs. My median timeframe to uploading human brains reliably is from 2040-2060, or several decades from now.
Reversible computing being practical. Right now, progress in compute hardware is slowly ending, and the 2030s is when I think non-reversible computers will stop progressing.
Anything that allows us to go further than the Landauer Limit will by necessity be reversible, and the most important thing here is a practical way to get a computer that works reversibly that is actually robust.
Speaking of that, superconductors might be invented by AI, and if we could make them practical, would let us eliminate power transfer losses due to resistance, which is huge as I believe all the costs for moving energy are due to materials having resistance, and superconductors by definition has 0 resistance at all, meaning 0 power loss to resistance.
This is especially useful for computing hardware.
But these are my picks for tech invented by AIs in the 21st century.
Some scattered thoughts which all connect back to this idea of avoiding myopic thinking about the future.
Don’t over-anchor on a specific idea. The world is a big place and a whole lot of different things can be going on all at once. Intelligence unlocks new affordances for affecting the Universe. Think in terms of what is possible given physical constraints, and using lots of reasoning of the type: “and separately, there is a chance that X might be happening”. Everything everywhere, all at once.
Self-replicating industry.
Melting Antarctic Ice. (perhaps using the massive oil reserves beneath it).
Massive underground/undersea industrial plants powered by nuclear energy and/or geothermal and/or fossil fuels.
Weird potent self-replicating synthetic biology in the sea / desert / Antarctic / Earth’s crust / asteroid belt / moons (e.g. Enceladus, Europa). A few examples.
Nano/bio tech, or hybrids thereof, doing strange things. Mysterious illnesses with mind-altering effects. Crop failures. Or crops sneakily producing traces of mysterious drugs.
Brain-computer-interfaces being used to control people / animals. Using them as robotic actuators and/or sources of compute.
Weird cults acting at behest of super-persuasive AIs.
Destabilization of military and economic power through potent new autonomous weapons and industry. Super high-altitude long duration (months) autonomous drone flights for spying and missile defense. Insect sized robots infiltrating military installations, sabotaging nuclear weapons or launching them.
Sophisticated personalized spear-phishing deception/persuasion attacks on huge numbers of people. The waterline for being important enough to target dropping very quickly.
Cyberattacks, stealing information or planting fake information. Influenced elections. Deep fakes. Coordinated propaganda action, more skillful than ever before, at massive scale. Insider trading, money laundering, and currency manipulation by AI agents that simply disappear when investigated.
More. More than you or I can imagine. A big wide world of strange things happening that we can’t anticipate, outside our OODA loops.
Some other ideas for what could well happen in the 21st century assuming superhuman AIs come in either 2030 or 2040:
Formal methods actually working to protect codebases IRL like full behavioral specifications of software, alongside interventions to make code and cryptography secure.
While I agree with Andrew Dickson that the Guaranteed Safe AI agenda mostly can’t work due to several limitations, I do think that something like it’s ideal for math/formal proof systems like Lean and software actually does work with AGI/ASI, and has already happened before, cf these 2 examples:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-evercrypt-library-creates-hacker-proof-cryptography-20190402/
https://www.quantamagazine.org/formal-verification-creates-hacker-proof-code-20160920/
This is a big reason why I believe cyber-defense will just totally win eventually over cyber-offense, and in domains like banks, the national government secrets, where security is a must-have, will be perfectly secure even earlier.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/B2bg677TaS4cmDPzL/limitations-on-formal-verification-for-ai-safety
Uploading human brains in the 21st century. It’s turning out that while the brain is complicated and uses a lot of compute for inference, it’s not too complicated, and it’s slowly being somewhat understood, and at any rate would be greatly sped up by AIs. My median timeframe to uploading human brains reliably is from 2040-2060, or several decades from now.
Reversible computing being practical. Right now, progress in compute hardware is slowly ending, and the 2030s is when I think non-reversible computers will stop progressing.
Anything that allows us to go further than the Landauer Limit will by necessity be reversible, and the most important thing here is a practical way to get a computer that works reversibly that is actually robust.
Speaking of that, superconductors might be invented by AI, and if we could make them practical, would let us eliminate power transfer losses due to resistance, which is huge as I believe all the costs for moving energy are due to materials having resistance, and superconductors by definition has 0 resistance at all, meaning 0 power loss to resistance.
This is especially useful for computing hardware.
But these are my picks for tech invented by AIs in the 21st century.