Thanks! Good idea to make your own list before reading the rest of mine—I encourage you to post it as an answer.
My process was: I end up thinking about future technologies a lot, partly for my job and partly just cos it’s exciting. Through working at AI Impacts I’ve developed a healthy respect for trend extrapolation as a method for forecasting tech trends; during the discontinuities project I was surprised by how many supposedly-discontinuous technological developments were in fact bracketed on both sides by somewhat-steady trends in the relevant metric. My faith in trend extrapolation has made successful predictions at least once, when I predicted that engine power-to-weight ratios would form a nice trend over two hundred years and yep.
As a result of my faith in trend extrapolation, when I think about future techs, the first thing I do is google around for relevant existing trends to extrapolate. Sometimes this leads to super surprising and super important claims, like the one about energy being 10x cheaper. (IIRC extrapolating the solar energy trend gets us to energy that is 25x cheaper or so, but I was trying to be a bit conservative).
As for the specific list I came up with: This list was constructed from memory, when I was having trouble focusing on my actual work one night. The things on the list were things I had previously concluded were probable, sometimes on the basis of trend extrapolation and sometimes not.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m just wrong about various of these things. I don’t consider myself an expert. Part of why I made the post is to get pushback, so that I could refine my view of the future.
I don’t know what your bottleneck is, I’m afraid. I haven’t even seen your work, for all I know it’s better than mine.
I agree feedback by reality would be great but alas takes a long time to arrive. While we wait, getting feedback from each other is good.
Thanks! Good idea to make your own list before reading the rest of mine—I encourage you to post it as an answer.
My process was: I end up thinking about future technologies a lot, partly for my job and partly just cos it’s exciting. Through working at AI Impacts I’ve developed a healthy respect for trend extrapolation as a method for forecasting tech trends; during the discontinuities project I was surprised by how many supposedly-discontinuous technological developments were in fact bracketed on both sides by somewhat-steady trends in the relevant metric. My faith in trend extrapolation has made successful predictions at least once, when I predicted that engine power-to-weight ratios would form a nice trend over two hundred years and yep.
As a result of my faith in trend extrapolation, when I think about future techs, the first thing I do is google around for relevant existing trends to extrapolate. Sometimes this leads to super surprising and super important claims, like the one about energy being 10x cheaper. (IIRC extrapolating the solar energy trend gets us to energy that is 25x cheaper or so, but I was trying to be a bit conservative).
As for the specific list I came up with: This list was constructed from memory, when I was having trouble focusing on my actual work one night. The things on the list were things I had previously concluded were probable, sometimes on the basis of trend extrapolation and sometimes not.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m just wrong about various of these things. I don’t consider myself an expert. Part of why I made the post is to get pushback, so that I could refine my view of the future.
I don’t know what your bottleneck is, I’m afraid. I haven’t even seen your work, for all I know it’s better than mine.
I agree feedback by reality would be great but alas takes a long time to arrive. While we wait, getting feedback from each other is good.