OK, I’m a bit younger than you, though I still remember having to use a slide rule in school. And I agree, it’s been an exciting ride.
Part of what was so shocking about being shocked was that it was, in some weird sense, exactly what I expected.
Not my impression at all. To me the ride appears full of wild surprises around every turn. In retrospect, while I did foresee one or two things that came to pass, others were totally unexpected. That’s one reason I keep pointing out on this forum that failure of imagination is one of the most pervasive and least acknowledged cognitive fallacies. There are many more black swans than we expect.
In that sense, we are living through the event horizon already. As a person trained in General Relativity, I dislike misusing this term, but there is a decent comparison here: when free-falling and crossing the event horizon of a black hole one does not notice anything special at all, it’s business as usual. There is no visible “no going back” moment at all.
In that vein, I expect the surprises, both good and bad, to continue at about the same pace for some time. I am guessing that the worst problems will be those no one thinks about now, except maybe in a sci-fi story or two, or on some obscure blog. Same with x-risk. It will not be Skynet, or nanobots, bioweapons, asteroids, but something
totally out of the left field. Similarly, the biggest progress in life extension will not be due to cryo or WBE, but some other tech. Or maybe there won’t be any at all for another century.
OK, I’m a bit younger than you, though I still remember having to use a slide rule in school. And I agree, it’s been an exciting ride.
Not my impression at all. To me the ride appears full of wild surprises around every turn. In retrospect, while I did foresee one or two things that came to pass, others were totally unexpected. That’s one reason I keep pointing out on this forum that failure of imagination is one of the most pervasive and least acknowledged cognitive fallacies. There are many more black swans than we expect.
In that sense, we are living through the event horizon already. As a person trained in General Relativity, I dislike misusing this term, but there is a decent comparison here: when free-falling and crossing the event horizon of a black hole one does not notice anything special at all, it’s business as usual. There is no visible “no going back” moment at all.
In that vein, I expect the surprises, both good and bad, to continue at about the same pace for some time. I am guessing that the worst problems will be those no one thinks about now, except maybe in a sci-fi story or two, or on some obscure blog. Same with x-risk. It will not be Skynet, or nanobots, bioweapons, asteroids, but something totally out of the left field. Similarly, the biggest progress in life extension will not be due to cryo or WBE, but some other tech. Or maybe there won’t be any at all for another century.