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.
Drone Warfare is new and evolving. I don’t see that on the OP’s boring list of things we’ll never do better than innovate on from now on. Drones are not new, but the concept of drone combat is, and now that the effects are felt you have every nation on the planet worried about security knocking on the door of Ukranian drone experts.
Until tomorrow when the next innovative concept changes our world.
Generalized AI has been alluded to. That would presumably spur all manner of additional inventions, most notably superior bioweapons. Sure we have them now, but they aren’t quite extinction level. That would be a vast qualitative improvement.
Well… in a way, yes.
But, on the other hand, what makes an Ai lie, hallucinate and act as sycophantic as it does? That seems to be an emergent ‘feature’ and might point to some sort of agency. I’m certainly not suggesting this is some sign of emergent AGI or that it holds a key to human consciousness, but I still think it’s worth exploring beyond fixing the bug.
One possibility I have explored in my own fiction is classical transporters, which take a detailed scan of a person’s mindstate, transmits then replicates it in a newly-built body at a distant location, possibly in another star system. This would be a long way from a simple refinement of existing technology, but it could (in theory) allow travel at light-speed to the stars. And of course, from a subjective point of view such travel would be instantaneous.
Just the capability of copying a human mindstate would be a significant development, but not one I expect to happen in anyone’s lifespan today.
And it seems to me that the capability to replicate, or rather emulate, a specific human mindstate would also imply that we could manufacture new, non-human intelligences at will, with a wide range of capabilities and functions. I sometimes call this future-tech ‘consciousness-wrangling’ and it is a possible, one might even say probable future development which is so far beyond our current LLMs that it can’t really be regarded as a refinement of existing technology.
And of course a very large fraction of experts in the field think ‘consciousness-wrangling’ is impossible or unfeasibly difficult, and they may be right.
I mean… I feel like by this logic almost all your inventions are just improvements in previous fields. The printing press is basically woodblock printing (4th century), improved with movable type (11th century), duct taped to a screw press (1st century). Submarines are enclosed diving bells (4th century BC) combined with engines (1st century). Automobiles are the result of incremental improvement of engines (1st century) and carts (antiquity), and were first invented in the 18th century. Airplanes are just engines (1st century) attached to gliders (18th century), and really weren’t invented earlier only because the engines were too heavy. Even nuclear power is basically just a coal plant with a different heat source.
And that’s leaving aside all the open problems in physics and chemistry… quantum gravity, dark energy, dark matter, high-temperature superconductors, hell the last few years have seen incredible advancement in protein and RNA folding predictions and the development of enzyme based chemistry.
Humans have been using the sharp edge of a rock to cut things for 50 or 100K years now. We now have tools that can pick apart individual molecules from one another.
Imagine you could go back in time to 1980 and described what computers are like today. Anyone who was somewhat familiar with computers at that time would be wowed because they know what computers are and the sorts of limitations they have, but the general concept is the same. Go to 1850 and try to describe a computer to even the smartest individual and it would be nigh impossible. They don’t even have a concept of a screen, or a keyboard, or anything other than pretty rudimentary mechanical devices.
Today we can at least imagine strange sci-fi inventions of the future, even if we don’t know how to make them work. Still, there could be something that’s as foreign and unimaginable enough to us as the computer is to a person from 1850. Even Star Trek, despite getting some technological ideas right (communicators/flip phones, iPads), never even thought of something as simple as wi-fi. The 1990s era shows still had people taking multiple iPads with them and docking them to computer consoles to transfer data. Any sort of personal camera was also not remotely imagined. If they could miss the boat on something so simple, the next big thing could be right under our noses.
(who famously, just before the discovery of special relativity, said that there were no more big discoveries left in physics. Only more precise measurements.)