Twenty for the 20s

Back in 2014-5, after I had been to Arvon, Simon Ings suggested a write  fix-up, which was a very good idea, and I did a series of posts of the world in 2034, 2054... which, I think still stand-up pretty well. I am currently, when things like Christmas, I know, don't get in the way doing in the Institute for the Future Coursera course on futures thinking. Their focus is typically on the ten-year horizon, so here are my Twenty for the 20s:

1. Level 10 Black Swan. Which would be an extinction event. It's quite hard to wipe out the whole human race, but not impossible. No Personal Nanofactories by 2029, so I think this won't happen.
2. Level 9 Black Swan. The collapse of the current technological civilisation. Again, quite hard to do, but again certainly not impossible. Full-scale thermonuclear exchange? Natural or artificial pandemic? Climate breakdown-induced breakdown of global food supply chains? I don't think this will happen, but, of course, that is in large part because I don't want it to.
3. Level 8 Black Swan. That WWI-level event that we have felt lurking our there. Given the current nature if the catastrophe, this is quite likely. You simply can't have the kinds of people in charge who we have in charge in certain countries without something catastrophically awful happening. I think there is a real chance of one of these. History might well be about to return to Terra and change all our lives forever.
4. Heterodox economics. There have been hints towards this including with the Labour Party, but Corbyn was never the man to sell cybereconomics and Beerism. Might Cummings be? Not sure yet about Modern Monetary Theory, but there are enormous possibilities outside the neoliberal consensus. 
5. Neonationalism. We will see how that shows in the UK over the next four years. Can only hope that we can get our acts together to avoid the worst consequences of this. But I am not optimistic. There is that Level 8 Black Swan lying in ambush.
6. Scottish Independence. Both more compelling and harder to achieve than in 2014. That hard border along the Cheviots is really going to be an issue. I think they missed the Scots chance, which is both bad and good.
7. Globalism. The African decade? We have already seen breakouts by companies like Samsung and Huawei. But what about a Nigerian or Brazilian company?
8. A(G)I. We have had an AI Summer. Everyone is expecting an AI Winter. Clearly, Deep (Reinforcement) Learning is not the whole answer. Nevertheless, how many of us expected Go to be solved and solved in the way it was? My hope is that if we let a thousand philosophy bloom, there is a chance that some PhD student in China can come with an idea that a postdoc in Canada can leverage and suddenly open up a whole new front. Plus, we are getting the fourth edition of Russell and Norvig early in 2020. I suspect some time before the end of the decade we will have systems that meet the definition of domain-specific AGIs idiot savants/dog/cat/great ape-level AGI. And remember, humans didn't even evolve language for something like the first three-quarters of existence, which is incredibly freaky, and suggests you can glom language on top of non-linguistic GI.   
9. Self-driving cars. A hard problem, but think where we were in 2009. Does not require full AGI. I hope to own one by 2029.
10. Electric cars. These are already a thing in that I see at least one pretty every day just driving around Preston. I even saw an electric scooter outside a kebab shop the other day. Should be fairly ubiquitous by 2029.
11. Hydrogen/methane economy. If we want to completely decarbonise the global economy by 2045, we are going to need a lot of local hydrogen and methane (for instance, from biodigesters for use in ships) production, so I hope to see the infrastructure for this becoming common.
12. Fusion. There are quite a few fusion startups around. Can one make the breakthrough? This is the thing we need to solve the energy crisis fully and also to open up the Solar System.
13. Quantum computing. This won't break encryption because we already know of types of encryption that QC can't break. It will certainly be good for simulation of quantum systems and quite possibly for various database-related applications and for brute forcing certain problems. Whether we will have desktop quantum processors by 2029, even in the lab, is another matter.
14. True Drexlerian Molecular Nanotechnology. We haven't seen as much progress in this area as we expected in the 1990s. We have seen an AI Summer and we are overdue an NMT one. It is not as though it has suddenly become a bad idea. Might well be helped by quantum computers, which will be good for simulation of chemical systems.
15. Return to the Moon. We should get this. And a moonbase. Yeh! But will it be Moonbase Britannica with the bally Union Jack on it?
16. Heavy Launch Vehicles. If we get the Starship and the New Armstrong , things could get quite exciting quite quickly. Orbital tourism? asteroid mining? Mars base? A golden age of uncrewed missions to the outer planets?
17. Life extension. Would be good to have solid progress here. I do think it is going to be an definite theme of the 2020s (certainly for me personally!), A Methuselah Mouse would be good.
18. New Physics. I fear we will be arguing about string theory and its lack of any empirical backing. Would be fun if the X17 particle is real, but I'd wager it isn't. What would be great would be to have a AGI come up with a Theory of Everything. (I do expect at the least that an AGI will have achieved a first in physics from Oxford by 2029.) What about Dark Matter? Or Dark Energy? Or Inflation? Physics feels as though it has run into the sand right now. Might we be in a Physics Summer by 2029?
19. SETI. We are certainly going to know a lot more about extrasolar planets? Might we have found life on Mars? What about those disappearing planets? Fast radio bursts? Perhaps we might observe something for which the most plausible explanation is a large-scale engineering work in the universe. Or even get the Message.
20. Technological Singularity. Not, I think, by the end of 2029. But I do think we will start getting some crazy stuff after 2025. I think it might feel closer by then. But I am still expecting the Singularity at 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038.

Well, the Razor was here on 31 December 2009 and I can only hope we are still here on 31 December 2029. We will see.