How could we possibly know that? We don’t know what we don’t know. What’s on the other side of a black hole? How can we start more Big Bangs? What are the unforeseen consequences of quantum entanglement? What is the energy source that will finally make flying cars as cheap as Target bicycles? How does consciousness actually work, and when I can buy an ad-supported upgrade to my brain? When will Google Translate speak dog and dolphin? What are the questions we haven’t even thought to ask yet?
I feel like we’re just barely at the start of a multi-millennia journey of discovery and science where we can only begin to even ask the question “What don’t we know yet?”, much less definitively answer it with “Nothing. It’s all done.” I’m sure there’ll be much heartache and backpedaling and nukes and stone ages along the way, but slow and unsteady progress is altogether quite different from “we’re already there”.
I mean, fundamentally every invention ever is just a way to move entropy around in different configurations, some more useless than others. In that sense, I guess we’ve played “atomic pachinko” long enough and can call it a day… but what fun is that?
To use an analogy, we may have long ago figured out how to draw pixels on a screen, or put words on a page. That doesn’t mean we’ve seen every possible picture or read every possible text. In the Lego of our universe, we might’ve turned cabins into spaceships, but none of us are quite master builders yet…
I think not only is it hard to imagine things that might be invented in the future, it’s almost impossible to imagine how those inventions might be used or how they will actually change society.
Take the videocamera for example. When I was growing up, unless you were in film school or something, a camcorder was a device your friend’s dad took out for special occasions. Sure we could imagine all sorts of uses of portable cameras. I don’t think anyone ever considered that in 40 years, a typical home might easily have half a dozen cameras no bigger than a pack of cards that recorded at a higher quality than any broadcast media of that day.
Whatever you say, Lord Kelvin (who famously, just before the discovery of special relativity, said that there were no more big discoveries left in physics. Only more precise measurements.)
Also, it seems kind of crazy to make this sort of claim when it has only been a couple of years since the availability of generative AI… Not something I would have imagined before it was actually possible. I couldn’t imagine something with the “intelligence” of AI but no sapience at all.
Indeed; I’ve been thinking about the future of AI ever since 1962, when Gerry Anderson created the character Robert the Robot, which left a deep impression on me at the age of eight.
I never imagined that AIs which mimic human behaviour would be subject to bizarre hallucinations and confident statements of untruth. Kubrick kind of glimpsed the possibility in 2001: a Space Odyssey, but he never imagined that computers would regularly, routinely and reliably lie at any available opportunity.
Yeah, the Creation of Life could be a biggie.
As could immortality (which would almost certainly be a bad thing).
I’d love to see new inventions based on quantum pairs and other spooky subatomic actions.
(who famously, just before the discovery of special relativity, said that there were no more big discoveries left in physics. Only more precise measurements.)