You could try taking an outside view: go through historical predictions of technological development, and compare how long it actually took to realize a technology to how long the experts predicted it would take.
The FHI in one of its status reports listed a paper being worked on that was similar to that idea:
Meyer, A., Hillerbrand, R., and Bostrom, N., (2007) “Predicting
technological progress. The predictions of the 1960s revisted”, in
preparation
After heavily googling around, I couldn’t find out anything about what happened, so I emailed Hillerbrand (no longer with the FHI) back on 9 September and asked. No reply.
Bostrom said the paper never even reached draft form, and the analysis didn’t turn out to be all that productive. The main thing he learned was that predictions from the 1960s weren’t even specified well enough to be able to tell whether they had come true or not.
You could try taking an outside view: go through historical predictions of technological development, and compare how long it actually took to realize a technology to how long the experts predicted it would take.
The FHI in one of its status reports listed a paper being worked on that was similar to that idea:
Meyer, A., Hillerbrand, R., and Bostrom, N., (2007) “Predicting technological progress. The predictions of the 1960s revisted”, in preparation
After heavily googling around, I couldn’t find out anything about what happened, so I emailed Hillerbrand (no longer with the FHI) back on 9 September and asked. No reply.
Meyer is Andrew Meyer; I just pinged him as well.
Bostrom said the paper never even reached draft form, and the analysis didn’t turn out to be all that productive. The main thing he learned was that predictions from the 1960s weren’t even specified well enough to be able to tell whether they had come true or not.
Meyer just replied; I’ve forwarded it to you.
Please do reply to my comment here or email me if you hear back from them!