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 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.