What Important Truth Do Very Few People Agree With You On?
I read this question in Peter Thiel's book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future and I thought it was worth thinking about. Here are my answers.
Background Rate in Technological Progress
The primary factor in the technological progress of a society is a highly chaotic and nonlinear background rate. That is to say, there is a "natural" boom and bust cycle of technological progress, and all independent civilizations would follow roughly the same trajectory. For example, the transistor was invented in 1947, and following that was an incredible explosion of innovation. The innovation during the decades that followed was a "natural" consequence of that innovation.
How is this different than what most people think? People like to talk about the policies that affect innovation, but in my opinion, that's all secondary. "This regulation stifled innovation" or "that immigration policy led to much more innovation". I'm not saying these statements are completely false, just that their effects are adjustments to the baseline of the "natural" background rate.
Put another way, if we were to make contact with aliens and compare our history of technology books, we would find striking similarities. They would have many of the same booms and busts as we did, albeit with variation (in particular the timing of wars would have a significant effect). People talk about the springs and winters of AI research - my guess is when we brought that up to our friendly aliens they would have roughly experienced the same thing.
However, I will caveat this by saying it isn't completely true in all cases, just mainly so in most. There are still specific sectors, such as nuclear power, where this isn't true and the role of regulation (which I've criticized before) has a much larger effect.
Flying Cars
Not that important but I am definitely more anti-flying car than anyone I've talked to about this. I've written about this elsewhere so won't go into it here.
A Permanent Slowdown in Advances in the Hard Sciences
It's likely that we're pretty much done with all the chemistry and physics that affect human lives. Yea, that's pretty much it. I think we're nearly done discovering things in those sciences that will significantly change how people live. Sure, there is more work to do on dark matter and dark energy, and I expect at some point they'll be new things in particle physics unrelated to those, but these aren't the things that will change our lives. I'm completely supportive of finding the Higgs Boson (I even worked at Cornell's Laboratory of Elementary Particle Physics for a summer working on LHC data), but I don't kid myself into saying it's going to change how people go about their daily activities.
I'm very aware that people have predicted this before and been wrong. I'm aware of how wrong they were and how much fun it is to ridicule them, but I think we're reaching that point.
The good news is that a bunch of engineering could have a profound impact on people's lives. And there's lots of biology to do! (Particular insofar as it relates to medicine). We don't actually need more new physics or chemistry to profoundly change the world. An AI revolution could take off with no new physics or chemistry. So I'm not saying that the future will look like the present - it won't, but the differences are unlikely to be because of advances in physics or chemistry.
There are some things, however, that would change our lives and require new physics. Faster-than-light travel and sci-fi teleporter machines are a couple of examples. But the truth is, I just don't think they'll happen. Anytime. Ever. Let's check back in the year 3000 - I'll be glad to be proven wrong.
This does have implications. In particular, if there's no new physics or chemistry it means that space travel outside of our solar system never becomes particularly easy. It's not impossible, but it never becomes "Let's go check out that new bar on Proxima Centauri this weekend". It's always going to be hard (which would help explain the Fermi paradox).
Political Moderates
I think there are more political moderates than most think. When I read the news, I come away thinking most people are into one of two groups. When I actually go out and talk to people, I find that there are more moderates than I would have expected. They don't show up on Twitter arguments, but they are out there. Go talk to them; they're generally quite friendly.