A friend emailed today and asked me
… could you tell me what you think are the 5 most important/promising avenues on your mind right now, for example in the space of technology development that has value within the next few years and certainly impacts a positive future? E.g. if you had lots of options, which 5 things would you chose to work on right now?
Apparently he’s putting together a summary report for someone…
I didn’t have time to write a careful answer, but here’s the quick list I tapped out. This is totally off the cuff and not in any particular order and probably leaves important things out, but indicates some aspects of where my mind has been at lately..
- AGI, obviously … creating robots and virtual-world robots that move toward human-level general intelligence
- Growing brains in a vat … we can think of this as a different approach to AGI, using a wet medium … extend the recent work on micro-brains by adding scaffolding and sensors, etc. etc.
- I’m sure you won’t use this one, but hey — Finding the biological roots of psychic phenomena via invasive animal studies on precogitive animals. The data strongly suggests such phenomena are real, but the classic “parapsychology” research paradigms aren’t gonna get to the heart of the matter…
- Cold fusion. It seems to almost surely work, but it’s finicky. Way more $ should be going into figuring out what’s going on
- Build a massive graph database of all known info regarding all organisms, focused on longevity and associated issues, and set an AI to work mining patterns from it… I.e. what I originally wanted to do with my Biomind initiative, but didn’t have the $ for…
- Automated language learning — use Google’s or Microsoft’s databases of text to automatically infer a model of human natural languages, to make a search engine that really understands stuff. This has overlap with AGI but isn’t quite the same thing…
- I want to say femtotech as I’m thinking about that a fair bit lately but it probably won’t yield fruit in the next few years…
- Someone should invent a way better method of brain scanning, so we can finally do mind uploading. I think this needs some revolutionary innovation, but all approaches with a prayer of delivering such innovation should be funded.
- Nanotech-using-molecular-bio-tools and synthetic biology seem to be going interesting places, but I don’t follow those fields that closely, so I hope you’re pinging someone else who knows more about them…