The Future Is Now

We live in a world we once dreamed of

Here is something I wrote on May 30, 2019:

The year 2020 is now less than a year away. It sounds like science fiction. But is it? Here are four examples to remind you that we are already living in the future:

1. Everyone is running around with a supercomputer that offers instant access to all of the world's knowledge and the ability to instantly connect with hundreds of millions of people by video chat. If you own one of these devices, you can't get lost anymore because they know exactly where you are located on the globe and feature a detailed map of the whole world. You can restrict access to these devices by inbuild iris scanners, fingerprint scanners, and facial recognition.

2. Computers can instantly generate news articles, poems, photorealistic faces, speech, and music. They can beat everyone at various games, including Go, translate text and audio from one language into the other (soon using your own voice) and understand voice commands to an extent that's reminiscent of the board computer depicted in Star Trek TNG. And this isn't even called artificial intelligence; it's just machine learning.

3. Virtual reality is now fun and affordable.

4. Animals such as livestock and pets are now regularly cloned. For example, South Korean police are going to deploy cloned sniffing dogs that offer savings of 65 percent.

Amazing things have happened since then. To name just a few: 1. the scaling hypothesis — the most important hypothesis relevant to AI forecasting and AI development models — has been corroborated 2. protein folding has been solved 3. artificial intelligence can now translate natural language into code 4. knowledgeable chatbots can hold factually consistent conversations over multiple sessions that may continue for days, weeks, or even months.

And there is no sign that progress is slowing down. Generally capable agents seem to be on the horizon. Indeed, it feels like we’re quickly approaching some sort of technological climax.

But don’t get the wrong impression. It’s not just artificial intelligence, mind you: We now got 3D printed rocket companies. Biotechnology is showing enormous potential. There are over 130 longevity biotechnology companies and over 50 anti-aging drugs in clinical trials in humans. We’ve got drugs that can reverse age-related mental decline within days in mice. And we also seem to be in the midst of a neurotech revolution.

Very few people seem to realize that we’re truly living in a world that would have been considered science fiction just 20 years ago and that revolutionary, transformative progress might be only a few papers away.