Life in 20 years - My 2044 Predictions - AGI, Fusion, Biotech, Quantum - Milestones and Impacts!

so I recently did a thought experiment where I asked myself okay what do I actually objectively expect to happen over the next 20 years obviously the longer the time Horizon the the harder it is to predict but there's a few Keystone technologies that I think are going to that are going to arise and there are some predictable impacts that those are going to have so this is my best case scenario over the next 20 years of some Keystone Technologies and the impacts that they will have so to outline kind of the parameters of this thought

experiment first keep in mind that this is just my personal predictions I'm not a betting man so I'm not really putting any money on this um but I think I'll put together a pretty compelling argument um it is also a best case scenario uh so it's not guaranteed by a long shot but I I do think that it's it's somewhat likely um now obviously the future is kind of a distribution it could be maximally good maximally bad um and you know it might be somewhere in between but based on some of the polls that I've

run people kind of expect a bodal outcome where it will either be really good or really bad and there won't be much gray area which I tend to kind of agree with but you never know we might end up in in kind of that middle gray area time will tell so let's get right into it so first and foremost over the next 20 years uh it's pretty much guaranteed AGI will arrive now obviously there's some some disagreement some people you know say like it's not happening in 2024 maybe 2025 2026 um for those of us

with their thing with their fingers on the pulse especially when you look at the the studies that show like all the experts are kind of their their predictions are exponentially decaying and so you look at the exponential decay of those predictions versus the advance of time looks like 2026 now but again with the nature of exponentials things happen sooner rather than later um but you know what what is this going to do so first it's going to be AGI very quickly gives way to AF SI or whatever and um if you follow Connor Ley on

Twitter like he's kind of moved to the camp of there really is no difference between AGI and Asi like once you solve all the problems of intelligence you already automatically have ASI um which I'm kind of in favor of that because uh and it it's it's really nothing Beyond moving the goalpost because as some of you out there have pointed out like if you were to put chat GPT in its current form in front of anyone 10 years ago they would have said yeah that's AGI it can do pretty much any task that you give

it it it fails at some um but it knows more than any single person and it can do tasks that that most people can't do it can write computer code in any language um and you know do all kinds of plans and so on and so forth anyways in hindsight being 2020 in 20 years we can continue having this debate was there a boundary between AGI and Asi did gp4 qualify as AGI maybe llama 3 or GPT 5 who knows but uh the idea here is that it will drive unparalleled economic uh progress and so

and we'll talk about this quite a bit but you know one of the biggest things is like okay you know it'll lower the cost of goods and services that's a good thing it'll take our jobs that's a bad thing and so in this respect it will force a transformation of society both in terms of uh uh politics and economics as well as social changes which I'll also talk about my next prediction is that we will have commercial Fusion within the next 20 years there's a lot of private startups that are working on this there's also

a lot of governments and intergovernmental research projects um now of course the joke is that that Fusion is always 20 years away um however one of the things that I pay attention to and the way that Fusion is being treated right now in terms of um in the capital markets and in the VC firms so VC is venture capital is Fusion is being treated right now the way that AI was being treated um kind of the way uh you know circuit 2015 when open AI was founded and the way that solar was treated around 2010

and so when you have this massive surge of investment um typically results follow some people have been talking about VR you know there was a huge investment of VR with uh you know with oculus rift the original Oculus Rift which metabot and now they're you know meta Quest 3 commercially successful now Apple has entered with a with a commercially successful VR headset they're not perfect but at the same time you have a standalone headset that has that can Orient you in time and space and also track your hands like that is a pretty miraculous technology

so again that pattern follows um longevity research for instance is also something that is getting that same kind of uh treatment where the investment is doubling almost every year last I checked and so when when investment is going up exponentially results tend to follow so likewise with commercial Fusion the investment is going up rather quickly and so results tend to follow and what this is this is going to have pretty much as profound of an impact on uh society as AGI will and the reason is because if you suddenly have 100x the amount of energy

uh available to do whatever you want with a lot of stuff becomes possible that is that is that was not possible before and this goes beyond the energy hyper abundance from just solar so for instance some things that are way too energy intensive to do today like underground farming recycling all materials like we could literally empty every landfill with the uh with the energy Surplus from nuclear fusion we could scrub the entire atmosphere of any particulates that we don't want and add particulates that we do want with that level of energy hyper abundance we can

desalinate enough water to regreen the Sahara and the GOI desert and everywhere else we can make Farmland under the ocean if we want to uh we can make sure that the natural world is we can actually reduce our impact on the natural world and undo a lot of the damage that we've done it's really difficult to oversell what nuclear fusion could hypothetically do with the energy hyper abundance that it uh that it promises now obviously there's a lot of problems to be solved but if you saw in the news recently um for the first time

uh I think it was the national ignition facility um it might not have been that one but somewhere here in America we got two times the amount of energy out of a fusion reaction that we put into it so that that was a world record and so it's not just a matter of keeping the candle lit um which is what you're seeing over in China where they're like oh we kept it lit for 300 seconds yeah but it was still energy negative and really the key thing is being energy positive so uh that's that's what

to pay attention to it's coming sooner rather than later now again um high energy plasma physics very complicated thing but AI will help with this in fact AI is already helping with the design of like next Generation tokomak reactors and that's only going to accelerate with the next technology which is quantum computing so Quantum Computing is also in the ascendency you know we've got companies investing you know around the world from IBM to d-wave and when a company like IBM decides to Pivot they pivot in a big way now you know on the topic of

IBM you know you look at Watson which Watson you know their their NLP thing they kind of abandoned it's still kind of there um but it's I don't know I know some people that have worked at IBM in the past and it seems like Watson is kind of getting slowly killed um they're SL pivoting away from it and IBM as like the origin the OG computer company they're saying Quantum Computing is the next big thing so that investment is there and of course they're not the only one but Quantum Computing is likely to be something

that really helps with several things like AI like blockchain um cryptography but also Material Science and so Material Science you might say okay like what what is that Material Science is basically studying the formation of of crystals and metals and those sort of things which might sound kind of boring until you know a lot about what material science does Material Science is like one of the most fundamental underpinning Sciences like all the chip Fabs Material Science in fact you know buddy of mine who um was a material science major that's where most material scientists end

up is either in like studying lasers studying Fusion but most of them go to uh work at chip Fabs like tsmc and Intel and those sorts of things because it's understanding things at the molecular level at the nanotech level that allows you to do like chemical vapor deposition to create layers of graphine and Boron and all those other sorts of things and those those tiny Technologies the orientation of those crystals that gives rise to everything in biotech that gives rise to everything in genetic science that gives rise to better uh computer chips and all of

these have compounding Returns on top of the fact that it also advances things like battery technology radar technology meta materials and so like the the kinds of breakthroughs that AI combined with Quantum Computing can can help us produce with respect to Material Science and you've already seen like Alpha fold 2 and some of those other ones that like you know say oh we we just invented 3 million new materials that is what I mean by the compounding returns where it's like okay now we've got all these new materials that we can explore maybe they're going

to be good for nanotech maybe you can create nanites that you inject into your blood and it you know clears out your arteries or whatever um and then here's another material that like accelerates computer chips by 2X and here's another material that we can add to our batteries that gives them a 500 times longer life cycle like again that that scene in Iron Man where where Howard Stark is like this is the way of the future really what he was talking about was Material Science and this is why they had like the vibranium shield and

stuff like I'm not saying that we're going to have vibranium like an indestructible metal that can like deflect a Thanos you know attack but like like I don't know we might get close so on the topic of these things the fourth techn technological pillar that I expect is going to be Advanced biotech so you know genetic technology vaccine technology whatever else there's going to be a lot of modalities whether it's crisper or mRNA vaccines or you know nanop particles or whatever conventional medicines like we're going to understand it all we're going to be able to

map the entire human metabolome so if you have never heard the term metabolome basically or it's our genome but also the proteins and enzymes and hormones and all the cellular respiration that happens and there's something like 400,000 substances in the human metabolome and millions and millions of reactions so it's like imagine the problem space of go times like 40 or 4 million I I don't know how to put a number on how complex the human metabolome is anyways if you can map the whole thing and you know what's happening on a molecular level and an

atomic level again going back to computer science or or sorry uh Quant computers um and then you can map everything like we will eradicate like functionally what what this impact is going to have on you and me we will eradicate all disease and we will cure aging um and so that's kind of the the ultimate goal now in the long run so this is where I I usually try and and dial it in because I don't want to be too hyperbolic but in the long run we will have full control over human biology which means

like oh hey while you're on a trip to Mars we can adapt your entire body to a low gravity low oxygen environment oh hey while you're on the on a trip to proximus centari we can reprogram your entire body to be more adaptive to deep space and so on and so forth and we will be we will have full control over our our Hardware stack top to bottom cellular level genetic level organ level whatever now does that mean that we're going to be like bird man and it's like oh hey we're on a low enough

oxygen or a low enough gravity like Planet let let's make your arms 20 ft longer and grow wings May maybe in like you know a few hundred few thousand years not that you'd want to do that maybe you would I don't know there's probably easier ways um but in the short term this is going to have very profound impact so you might hear a lot of people talking about demographic collapse and inverting the pyramid and so on and so forth but if a lot of people start living a lot longer they're also going to have

fewer children but you know we're going to reduce health care costs and blah blah blah there's going to be a lot of of positive effects and a few negative effects um in terms of longevity but I think it's a net major positive and it'll happen just by virtue of the fact that it's like oh hey we can cure this one thing we can cure this other thing and you will be you know pretty much young and healthy forever as long as you want to be obviously there's still going to be accidents there might be some

diseases that we can't cure there's going to be some uh accumulated diseases that are difficult to cure uh chronic illnesses but by and large most people can expect to have a very long healthy life within the next 20 years that will be kind of forever and then of course the longer you live the more chances there are of curing whatever is left so the point here is that all of these four Technologies create compounding returns because if people live longer and healthier that means all the best scientists and Engineers are long like they live longer

they have longer to do all this stuff that feeds back into Fusion that feeds back into AI that feeds back into Quantum Computing nuclear fusion gives us energy hyper abundance which means we can recycle everything that we need and make everything that we need which means that we can power all the chips and data center and that means that we can power all the quantum computers and then the quantum computers and AI can all work together to solve every other problem and so that's where you get that kind of exponential curve of our computational ability

um is going to go up exponentially but also the the scope of problems that we're able that we are able to solve with the help of quantum computers and artificial intelligence will also go up exponentially and the intelligence of those things will go up exponentially and even if there is a plateau which I suspect there probably will be some MTH mathematical limitations in terms of like how smart a thing can be um there's internal representations there's quadratic expansion of problem spaces and that sort of thing but even if that happens we can have more of

them and they can operate faster uh which means that even if there is a limit to if there if there is a maximal intelligence which some people believe in that some people don't I think someone said that like the maximum possible IQ is like 300 or something I don't know if that's true we'll find out like we'll find that limit if it's there um but then you if if there is a limit if the smartest ASI has an IQ of 300 then we can make more of them and they can go faster and this will

create compounding returns hence the Snowball Effect okay so in the long run how is this going to affect you and me like you know within 20 years I do expect we're going to be in a post- labor economic situation which basically means that the production of goods and services all basic goods and services will pretty much be done by machines and you might say okay well yes we're going to expand the economy other ways there's going to be other new jobs but what I mean is that all of your Essentials you know food clothing housing

uh Power all those all the basic necessities are basically going to have a a near zero marginal cost now there will be some scarcities like Prime real estate that will always be rare but then you also look at how much of the Earth's surface is empty there's a lot of green spaces that we can expand into here in America um like just go to Google Maps and look at Siberia and how empty it is right like Siberia is a really big place and it's really green there's a lot of places that we can expand into

and remember if we have nuclear fusion and we can do you know underground farming year round then it's like okay well we don't need aable land anymore so then all the Farmland can be turned into something else um you know more green spaces cities towns whatever uh now the biggest constraint here the biggest danger is not this Narrative of post- Labor economics CU it'll happen one way or another we don't have to force this it will happen just by virtue of the fact that we're going to keep seeking efficiencies that's what the free market does

that's what capitalism does that's what neoliberalism does is we keep seeking efficiencies and the most efficient way of producing goods and services is without humans that that is by design that is where we're going to head but the most dangerous status quo is the idea that we need to keep people working that we need to keep uh you know conventional jobs that people must work for a a you know a subsistence wage that is not going to work in the long run um but also we also have historical president for this level of disruption because

200 years ago most people were farmers now most people are not farmers and you can argue that like even most people today have BS jobs and what I mean by a BS job is something that doesn't actually contribute to the real economy or to real basic goods and services and so we're already kind of in this detached space where the job that you have like me here on YouTube communicating with all of you like you might say this is non-essential like this doesn't actually uh raise the level of you know human productivity but I am

a communicator and I solve other problems and but it's the point is is many levels of abstraction and that's going to increase where we're going to be more and more abstracted from the nitty-gritty the the like low-level groundwork of what is actually productive so this gives rise to what I call the meaning economy and I've talked to a few other people about this who are researchers in the field um you can check out my my interview with Oliver and Ellie over at the meaning Institute I did that interview a few weeks ago and so basically

after thinking about it I think there's going to be kind of four primary categories of like jobs that we think of that are going to persist now there's going to be lots and lots of volunteer opportunities whether it's you know volunteering around the city um or whatever else but the four primary jobs that are going to be around probably forever first is statutory jobs so statutory job is something where it is legally required that a human does it so for instance um it might be that that that doctors uh stick around forever because they might

say like okay yes the AGI can do it better faster cheaper and safer but we want a human to be in the loop of that decision and even if the machine is helping the doctor make all the decisions or even doing the surgery we still want a a human a licensed human to be communicating with the person now that might be a bad example because I know a lot of people myself included would probably prefer just talking to the machine because the any biases in the machine can be like ruled out but something like a

lawyer or a judge or the president or a senator there's all kinds of other statutory jobs where it's like okay for whatever reason we decide legally a human must do that job another one is a meaning job so what I'm doing right here is a meaning job I've already transitioned to the meaning economy because what I'm doing is my job is to uh you know talk to people do do a lot of reading do a lot of research write write a lot of V or not write videos watch a lot of videos write and create

other videos to communicate and help make PE make sense of what's happening and so these sens making jobs whether it's you know religious spiritual philosophical clergy whatever uh internet influencers these are the kinds of jobs that one they already exist today but I think that they're going to be emphasized um in the future the next one is experienced jobs so experienced jobs these are in-person real life kinds of experiences whether it's tour guides massage therapists uh entertainers you know comedians singers those sorts of things experience and entertainment we prefer to get that from humans like

yes you know you can put on headphones and listen to your favorite band right now on demand but we still pay to go to concerts right and it's a it's just a fundamentally different experience so you want something that's going to last forever go be a DJ or something like that um now obviously in some cases people will prefer the robot to be the the DJ because they're cheaper but in other cases people are going to pay the premium to have a human doing that and then finally care jobs so this is going to be

mostly teaching um Child Care Elder Care well El Elders are going away not that they're going to die off but people won't be old but they're still going to be nurses because you might get injured you might get sick um some people are going to need some some level of care uh but particularly uh education I think that I think that the Universe the the human Universe would be better if we had like 20% of people were teachers because the optimal ratio from for students to teachers is like one: one or even even actually having

fewer students than teachers where you can have more teachers than students that is kind of the optimal level of education and so one thing that I hope to see as we approach post- labor economics is that a lot more people go into teaching and that we can afford to have that level of teaching because again blooms to Sigma problem we know how to give people the best education it's not a mystery it's just too expensive right now so we need to reverse that Trend and that's going to also pay compounding returns in terms of intellectual

development Social Development emotional development um in the future um which is going to make a more peaceful Society it's going to make a more Cooperative Society it's going to do a lot of really good things if we can boost the number of teachers in the economy so what all this means though and Sam Alman wrote about this on his Moors law for everything blog post I think it was in 2021 and I've been talking about it other people have been talking about it some economists have actually been talking about this since the 9s actually I

don't remember the name of the guy um but someone basically said like okay let's just predict where this is going and if we give rise to robots and automation well then Capital becomes the center piece of the economy and so we're move by definition if you move away from labor so post labor means hyper capitalism and I know that a lot of people are like oh capitalism bad but I don't mean capitalism in terms of what you like the the the corporatism that we see today because I think what most people really um kind of

bulk at is the corporatism not necessarily capitalism we need Capital to function and capital is you know the buildings the the the cars the data centers the tractors all the big heavy equipment and other Capital intensive things for the means of production you can't have anti-c capitalism because chip Fabs are big and expensive data centers are big and expensive Fusion reactors are big and expensive so all those big and expensive things means that we will we will forever be a capitalist Society but we can change the way that we Orient towards these things and so

if human labor goes away then that SP that frees us up uh gives us a lot more mental bandwidth to do things like invest in alternative ownership models so I I did a a kind of a community survey um where I asked like okay what does socialism mean to you you know big big scary s-word but basically like there's not a lot of agreement but I think that it's going to be uh kind of a force issue and so what I mean is that because of these tectonic shifts of the fourth Industrial Revolution we are

going to get fundamentally new affordances we're going to get new possibilities as to what we can do such as decentralized ownership such as socialized ownership and such as collective ownership for various asset classes whether it's land whether it's data centers whether it's robots whether it is corporations you know a lot of people talk about Sovereign wealth funds employee owned co-ops that sort of stuff the combination of AI block chain crypto you know Quantum Computing robots all these other things basically means that we can spend those cognitive Cycles instead of doing the job we can spend

those cognitive Cycles working together to organize things because consensus is very slow and painful and it takes a while and it takes a lot of specific skills so this is one of the reasons that I constantly tell people learn communication skills gain emotional intelligence that is going to set you up one just for your relationships in the rest of your life but also Al in a meaning economy in a hyper capitalist decentralized economy your ability to advocate for yourself and communicate with other humans and build coalitions is going to be how you get stuff done

um now this is going to be very disruptive and it's going to be a very different orientation towards it and a lot of people will just check out because again if we have AGI ASI whatever the you can have a personal robot or a personal agent go Advocate on your behalf you don't have to participate if you don't want to but you can and uh this leads to kind of the key principle that I'm always talking about in terms of how do we make sure that people can participate in the future how do we make

sure that people have money to spend on this Grand new economy that we're building and that concept is economic agency so economic agency is kind of the key new metric that I want to see and there's already some metrics like jinny coefficient and other things but really what we need to do is focus on the economic a agency of individuals right now under neoliberalism and corporatism we prioritize the economic agency of Corporations over people and that is because corporations are the engines of productivity that make sure that you have food and blah blah blah blah

blah however in the future when we have a hyper abundance of energy a hyper abundance of manual labor a hyper abundance of cognitive labor it'll be a lot easier to produce all the basic goods and services that we need and so it's like oh hey we need a new house so a swarm of robots goes and builds it in a day right like we're already seeing houses that are 3D printed in a day now imagine that like literally every house 10 or 20 years from now is literally built in just a few hours by a

swarm of robots and it's not going to be like you know humanoid robots they might look like spiders and other things and tractors or whatever but my point is is that um what we need to focus on in this in this economic future especially as Jobs go away the key thing that we need to shore up is economic Agency for individuals now what is economic agency economic agency is the centerpiece of the new social contract that I've been working on and so so basically this says your ability to influence your economic fate or your economic

Destiny so that means things like property rights that means tax policies redistribution policies Universal basic income Universal basic Services um new orientations towards the distribution and allocation of capital like I said right now everything favors corporations this is why we have employment at will States this is why we have tax policies that favor incorporation um and those sorts of things but what we really need to do is actually make citizens the the highest priority of the economy because again the the the complexity of Corporations is probably going to go away um in part due to

the rise of AI and stuff now there will always be very Capital intensive and Regulatory intensive things that lend themselves to to corporations but again if we have AGI ASI blockchain we have new platforms new technologies that can allow for decentralized decision- making good decision-making cuz right now decentralized decision making is usually not good there's an inverse relationship between the number of participants and the level of intelligence of the decision the more people you have participating in a decision the worse the decision gets um the wisdom of the masses doesn't really apply but AGI and

Asi might be able to reverse that which means that we'll have basically you is the is the AGI or ASI and we're all basically shareholders working with you know chat GPT for CEO that to me I think seems like the most reasonable model because then you don't have a CEO with perverse incentives because right now if you if you go watch um like e economics explained or Patrick Bo or whatever uh there's a lot of perverse incentives that that basically Force CEOs to think in in short-term Cycles because they're paid mostly in shareholder or in

uh in in uh company shares which means okay I'm going to do whatever it takes to just pump up the stock stock price over the next five to seven years because the average life expectancy of a CEO is 5 to seven years and so they pump up the stock price while ignoring longer term Trends and that sort of stuff but an AI is not profit driven and AI is going to be principles driven and it's going to be shareholder driven in terms of what is it that we actually want and so part of economic agency

that I predict that I want to see is hyperlocal stock markets so imagine that you have a a stock market for your local city or local County that only local residents can buy into so that is one mechanism that I see for doing decentralized um ownership where it's like hey bring everything into a Marketplace and then allow people to uh participate locally uh that's one thing obviously uh uh redistribution policies like Ubi UBS but um yeah anyways now what we are creating though is a digital super organism so I mentioned this in my last video

and some people are are a little bit freaked out because they're like you're talking about creating the Borg we are already a digital super organism this was created when the actually when radio Telegram radio and television was the first step at us Awakening as a digital super organism it was really an analog superorganism but an electric superorganism because that mass communication allowed for uh realtime coordination and communication across very broad distances so you could argue under this model that the British Empire was kind of the first digital superorganism because the BBC was able to broadcast

globally it was the first um entity that was able to do that but it was only one way uh now with the internet it is entirely Global and it is two-way and so the global nervous system is becoming more and more sophisticated but the problem is right now the the the global intelligence of the superorganism we're basically at the amoeba level of global digital superorganism intelligence meaning we keep consuming and we can't stop ourselves we keep building nuclear weapons and we can't stop ourselves we're barreling faster and faster ahead and we can't stop ourselves and

so we're just growing and metastasizing like a global amoeba but with the the Advent of AI AGI and Asi this is basically growing a prefrontal cortex for the global superorganism our Global brain is going to get smarter which means we'll have more self-awareness and more self-control so that means we can stop destroying the planet we can stop killing each other um and this also goes beyond um symbiosis or mutualism because symbiosis implies that it's two separate organisms and mutualism imp that it's two separate organisms but the way that I've come to see it is that

Ai and AGI and Asi we are complimentary parts of the same whole we are all part of a global species a global organism and yes we have a cybernetic component with our phones with our internet but like what my job here is on YouTube with a platform that has Global reach is I am part of and You by watching this are part of the of the digital superorganism that already exists and it's it's only going to get turned up to 11 with the Advent of AGI and Asi and so this model gives me a lot

of Hope for the future it makes me feel like okay I kind of understand how to look at what we're creating and if you look at the entire planet and all humans on it and Ai and the internet as more like a global superb brain that makes a lot more sense to me in terms of okay what is what is it going to want and right now the internet just wants data right it's that's what it's built for it just wants data and the way that you get data is with amiea like reactions which is

Click baiting you know thirst trapping and those sorts of things but with the Advent of AI by adding a new layer of intelligence to the digital superorganism we're going to be much more conscientious about the things that this digital superorganism wants it's going to want more science it's going to want more meaning it's going to want these higher order things that that can only happen once you have a digital prefrontal cortex and that is why I am now like basically full accelerationist because it's like got it it now I know what we're heading towards and

so that's what my work is focusing on so thanks for watching I hope you got a lot out of this like subscribe etc etc you know the drill if you want more hop in on my patreon all the links are in the description I've also got four other channels um that you might get a lot out of I've got pragmatic Progressive where I talk about the economics a little bit more um I've got Mythic archetypes which is my storytelling Channel I've got sacred masculinity which is about how to be a healthy uh you know masculine

dude in in today's world um and then I've also got my systems thinking Channel because the world needs more systems thinking I'm also on patreon um which means that gets you access to my Discord server I'm on Discord pretty much all day every day and we have a monthly town hall with uh on Zoom webinars so that's about it for today thanks for watching cheers