04-09-2021

I was reading an interview on Noah Smith’s Substack with Patrick Collison, who is the co-founder and CEO of Stripe. Link to original article here, it’s a super interesting interview. In one section, Patrick reels off a list of desirable future technologies. He begins:

“In terms of what the world needs, improvements in medical technology are probably still #1. Climate change mitigation technology (cleaner energy generation and CO2 sequestration and so on) is also quite high up. More broadly, we need to make all of the things that you and I enjoy every day cheap and efficient enough for billions more people to afford (with safety/security high on that list)”.

But then the list continues:

• $100 robotic sugeries.
• A machine for cheaply manufacturing arbitrary food.
• A 3D printer for nourishment into which you just insert elemental “ink cartridges”.
• Flying cars, obviously.
• Space-based earth-to-earth transportation.
• Fast-growing trees so that everywhere can be as blissfully arboreal as you like.
• Cities that look like this.
• Technology for comprehensively eliminating air pollution (not just from internal combustion engines but also sand, dust, etc.)
• Ubiquitous detectors for toxins like lead, arsenic and benzene.
• Smart books that are better fir for purpose.
• A babelfish that works.
• Programming environments that are less hopelessly primitive than those today. (Take Mathematica/ Squeak / Genera and go far beyond them).
• Better education technology for everyone. What’s Khan Academy but 10x better?
• Too-cheap-to-meter water desalination.
• Batteries with so much energy density that they need never be recharged.
• Nanotechnology
• Materials science:
  • Self-repairing wood.
  • Flexible glass.
  • Translucent steel.
  • Completely new kinds of matter.
• Quantum computers that accurately simulate physical chemistry.
• Better catalysts for all major chemical processes.

A peculiar feature of human psychology is that we seem to be very good at getting used to the current state of the world, to the extent that it feels very hard sometimes to broader our imaginations and imagine a different one. Can we recognize these biases and consciously correct for them? Sam Altman wrote recently:

The technological progress we make in the next 100 years will be far larger than all we’ve made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel. We have already built AI systems that can learn and do useful things. They are still primitive, but the trendlines are clear.

Forcing oneself to think on un-naturally long timescales seems like a super-power, if done right. Of course, he may well be wrong in this particular case - there are plenty of examples of trend lines that don’t extrapolate.

But reading this list really made me aware of how many things that I don’t know that I don’t think about day-to-day (contrast this to things that I do know that I don’t think about, the “known unknowns”. I like to think that if I were born in the 50s, I might have been able to imagine the iPhone, or the internet. But is this just wishful thinking? Ideas like these seem self-evident in retrospect but take huge leaps of imagination to get to. This is partly why scientific research takes so long. Did you ever consider how strange it is that a huge chunk of mathematics, which took humanity tens of thousands of years to develop, is today taught to most early high school kids?