The Fourth Industrial Revolution
Posted: Sun May 23, 2021 8:00 am
Let's talk about the next Industrial Revolution. Perhaps one already underway.
We've already seen three before, as I've discussed at many different points on the old forum. However, I do mean to bring my words to this forum. That'll be another post.
Fourth Industrial Revolution
Ever since the early 2000s, people have felt like technological progress has slowed down. It makes sense to feel this way. What happened in the late 90s? In 1996 alone, we saw Dolly the Sheep being cloned, DeepBlue beating Gary Kasparov, the identification of a black hole at the center of our own galaxy, and more, including extremely rapid growth of the internet. GPS went from a high-tech military standard to a mainstay of every SUV in America, and we also saw the rise of 3D gaming— which was a big deal at the time. Plus who could forget the International Space Station, finally taking shape? All this was leading up to the much-hyped new millennium, heralded as the dawn of a sci-fi age. Heck, we even kicked off the 2000s with a delightfully Japanese robot called "ASIMO" who looked like a spaceman.
Once we actually crossed over into the new millennium, however, everything seemed to fizzle. If you were following the tech magazines and futurist books, you saw a few amazing things in the background— most notably the completion of the Human Genome Project. But otherwise nothing felt different. Instead of our glorious sci-fi diamond age, we got the Iraq War. The present felt boring and you had to stretch innovations past the breaking point just to convince yourself it wasn't disappointing. Think of Ray Kurzweil's sad proclamation that "AI is all around us" in the form of phone apps, dishwashers, and automatic lights. Very disappointing.
But the truth was that the future we wanted was currently being planted and we were merely being impatient like someone expecting an oak tree to mature in a day— not helped by our shortening attention spans and the quickening pace of modern life. What we didn't know in the early 2000s was that that burst of innovation in the 90s was actually the dying gasps of the Third Industrial Revolution.
All the pieces have been coming together and we've had a front row seat this whole time: revolutions in energy, material science, data science, transportation, space, genetic engineering, and more. It's all been happening in the background, commented on mainly by futurology obsessives and skeptics who looked back at the previous 20 years and said "This is nothing and will lead to nothing."
Probably the single most important factor going forward will be artificial intelligence. Anything could have been the trigger to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but the single most likely one is AI. We're currently waiting for something known as "TAI" or "Transformative Artificial Intelligence." Not my term.
TAI is any sort of methodology that leads to a large-scale impact on society, politics, and economics. Think of the collective impact of expert systems, Siri, stock trading algorithms, autocorrect, and deepfakes. Imagine all that done by one network. This is TAI. It needn't be AGI. Indeed, the whole reason behind coining the term TAI was to create an alternative to delineate difference between AI that leads to world-changing upheaval and general AI of science fiction fame. The next generation of language models are likely to be transformative. GPT-3 and LaMDA already show such potential despite their lack of multimodality and limited generality. But they're not transformative. We can't even widely use them.
TAI may be the start and it could happen within the year. And clearly, it doesn't take much imagination to figure out that the central use case will be for automation.
But some other technologies could trigger changes.
For example: room-temperature superconductors. We've already developed two. But both require inconceivably high pressures and aren't metastable. If we can find that magic material that lifts into the air in the presence of a magnetic field even at beachgoing or even steamy temperatures, all our energy woes are solved overnight. We will see revolutions in transport: electric vehicles could run almost indefinitely; passenger jets could become fully electric; rotors will become incredibly efficient; maglevs and vac vactrains would become widespread if not the norm; etc. etc
And we could terraform Mars for a few billion dollars— it would be cheaper to restore its magnetic field and warm it up than to send even a probe to the surface. This artificial magnetic field would be able to remain in place for billions of years— longer than Mars' natural magnetic field lasted. A room-temperature supercomputer would hold a charge for longer than the lifespan of the universe without any loss other than pure material degradation.
And fusion becomes feasible to boot, which may open us up to even higher energy physics like antimatter and kugelblitzes in the long term.
One central aspect of every technological revolution before now has been the matter of connectivity. We've always tried connecting more humans at an ever higher bandwidth, and we've been successful. What's next after smartphones? It seems obvious...
The rise of brain-computer interfaces is a revolution no one in the mainstream's expecting— most still think it all to be a thousand years away— and it's going to lead to some of extreme changes in a very short amount of time. Getting rid of the middle man to allow for direct brain communication with the outside world, among all the other effects of having direct access to the brain, is something beyond imagination.
Honestly, I can't do this topic justice in one post. I didn't even get to talk about genetic engineering, the massive changes in material science with the rise of metamaterials, graphene, and nanofibers, or even the rise of advanced space industry.
But I did want to dwell on just some of what excited me the most and give the Culture & Economics subforum a major post.
We've already seen three before, as I've discussed at many different points on the old forum. However, I do mean to bring my words to this forum. That'll be another post.
Fourth Industrial Revolution
Ever since the early 2000s, people have felt like technological progress has slowed down. It makes sense to feel this way. What happened in the late 90s? In 1996 alone, we saw Dolly the Sheep being cloned, DeepBlue beating Gary Kasparov, the identification of a black hole at the center of our own galaxy, and more, including extremely rapid growth of the internet. GPS went from a high-tech military standard to a mainstay of every SUV in America, and we also saw the rise of 3D gaming— which was a big deal at the time. Plus who could forget the International Space Station, finally taking shape? All this was leading up to the much-hyped new millennium, heralded as the dawn of a sci-fi age. Heck, we even kicked off the 2000s with a delightfully Japanese robot called "ASIMO" who looked like a spaceman.
Once we actually crossed over into the new millennium, however, everything seemed to fizzle. If you were following the tech magazines and futurist books, you saw a few amazing things in the background— most notably the completion of the Human Genome Project. But otherwise nothing felt different. Instead of our glorious sci-fi diamond age, we got the Iraq War. The present felt boring and you had to stretch innovations past the breaking point just to convince yourself it wasn't disappointing. Think of Ray Kurzweil's sad proclamation that "AI is all around us" in the form of phone apps, dishwashers, and automatic lights. Very disappointing.
But the truth was that the future we wanted was currently being planted and we were merely being impatient like someone expecting an oak tree to mature in a day— not helped by our shortening attention spans and the quickening pace of modern life. What we didn't know in the early 2000s was that that burst of innovation in the 90s was actually the dying gasps of the Third Industrial Revolution.
All the pieces have been coming together and we've had a front row seat this whole time: revolutions in energy, material science, data science, transportation, space, genetic engineering, and more. It's all been happening in the background, commented on mainly by futurology obsessives and skeptics who looked back at the previous 20 years and said "This is nothing and will lead to nothing."
Probably the single most important factor going forward will be artificial intelligence. Anything could have been the trigger to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but the single most likely one is AI. We're currently waiting for something known as "TAI" or "Transformative Artificial Intelligence." Not my term.
TAI is any sort of methodology that leads to a large-scale impact on society, politics, and economics. Think of the collective impact of expert systems, Siri, stock trading algorithms, autocorrect, and deepfakes. Imagine all that done by one network. This is TAI. It needn't be AGI. Indeed, the whole reason behind coining the term TAI was to create an alternative to delineate difference between AI that leads to world-changing upheaval and general AI of science fiction fame. The next generation of language models are likely to be transformative. GPT-3 and LaMDA already show such potential despite their lack of multimodality and limited generality. But they're not transformative. We can't even widely use them.
TAI may be the start and it could happen within the year. And clearly, it doesn't take much imagination to figure out that the central use case will be for automation.
But some other technologies could trigger changes.
For example: room-temperature superconductors. We've already developed two. But both require inconceivably high pressures and aren't metastable. If we can find that magic material that lifts into the air in the presence of a magnetic field even at beachgoing or even steamy temperatures, all our energy woes are solved overnight. We will see revolutions in transport: electric vehicles could run almost indefinitely; passenger jets could become fully electric; rotors will become incredibly efficient; maglevs and vac vactrains would become widespread if not the norm; etc. etc
And we could terraform Mars for a few billion dollars— it would be cheaper to restore its magnetic field and warm it up than to send even a probe to the surface. This artificial magnetic field would be able to remain in place for billions of years— longer than Mars' natural magnetic field lasted. A room-temperature supercomputer would hold a charge for longer than the lifespan of the universe without any loss other than pure material degradation.
And fusion becomes feasible to boot, which may open us up to even higher energy physics like antimatter and kugelblitzes in the long term.
One central aspect of every technological revolution before now has been the matter of connectivity. We've always tried connecting more humans at an ever higher bandwidth, and we've been successful. What's next after smartphones? It seems obvious...
The rise of brain-computer interfaces is a revolution no one in the mainstream's expecting— most still think it all to be a thousand years away— and it's going to lead to some of extreme changes in a very short amount of time. Getting rid of the middle man to allow for direct brain communication with the outside world, among all the other effects of having direct access to the brain, is something beyond imagination.
Honestly, I can't do this topic justice in one post. I didn't even get to talk about genetic engineering, the massive changes in material science with the rise of metamaterials, graphene, and nanofibers, or even the rise of advanced space industry.
But I did want to dwell on just some of what excited me the most and give the Culture & Economics subforum a major post.