My vision for a better future

Imagine a world where technology has transformed every aspect of our lives for the better. A world where we have conquered disease, unlocked the secrets of the mind, and expanded the reach of human knowledge to the stars. This is the future I envision, and I believe it's not only possible, but inevitable.

Healthcare

I strongly believe that death will become a choice, not a compulsion. There is no reason we have to die. Yes, cells will die, but we will get much better at regenerating them. Nanobots operating at microscopic scales will be able to get inside targeted organs, not just healing them and bringing them back to normal, but even "supercharging" them.

Imagine having hundreds of thousands, even millions of these nanobots in your heart. They will control each contraction, ensure optimal oxygen delivery through intelligent swarm-based decision making, enabling you to run for much longer without getting tired. The bots could infuse oxygen into your blood and help with the hard parts.

We already have stem cell therapies that can regenerate basic organs. As technology improves and the pace of innovation accelerates, we'll see exponential progress. In a couple decades, optimistically, any damaged organ could be completely repaired from the inside, without surgery. Just swallow a few pills filled with nanobots and raw materials, and the bots will take care of the rest.

These bots could operate at the DNA level, changing gene expression (CRISPR already makes this possible). Telomeres can be regenerated (also possible today). Any ailment, cured. Any body part, supercharged.

What's impossible today will be pedestrian tomorrow. Children will make artificial hearts in classrooms, playing with designs, gaining an unthinkably intuitive understanding of how things work through immersive learning in simulated and real environments.

Mental Health

Mental health deserves its own section. I've been doing AI-powered journaling this year, equating it to daily "mini" therapy sessions. It's helped me tremendously.

Pedants will argue it's not a "real" human and can't "understand." But what is understanding, really? This technology is already here, already helping people. You're not limited by session length, funds, or fear of judgment. You can even do full-duplex voice journaling, with the app maintaining perfect long-term memory, each session building upon the last.

AI-powered therapy and mental health treatments we can't even imagine will far exceed what humans can accomplish, for a fraction of the cost and time.

Education

Education today is broken. Our school system, designed for the industrial era to create assembly line workers, does our children a massive disservice.

AI is revolutionizing education. LLMs can teach concepts in a hundred ways. You can ask a million "stupid" questions without judgment, probing and exploring wherever curiosity takes you.

Covid showed remote education can work. We didn't do a great job because we tried to shoehorn an old system instead of designing a new one from scratch. AI will change that.

With real-time voice agents that can sense and portray emotions, interact with external systems, education will be transformed. Image and video generation models will create content on the fly, tailored to each student's learning style. I recently saw an AI-powered game generator.

This is without even considering downloading "learned" information directly into our brains via technologies like Neuralink.

Mixed Reality

I have a Meta Quest 3. It has flaws, and it's the worst this technology will ever be. But even so, the immersion is next-level. I played an FPS with my siblings, crouching behind virtual walls. We enjoyed 8-bit games, but AR and VR are already way better. 8K or 80K mixed reality will be incredibly immersive and realistic.

We have holographic displays and haptic simulations of key presses that feel indistinguishable from reality. Mixed reality will allow us to interact with virtual worlds, both internally (e.g., haptic gloves) and externally (e.g., nanoparticles arranging into representations of virtual objects in real-time).

We'll simulate every sense - vision, smell, touch, taste, proprioception. Virtual worlds will be as good as the real thing.

AI

AI is magical fairy dust, despite what naysayers claim. AI is already self-improving through learning. A smarter intelligence is also smarter at making itself smarter, leading to an "intelligence explosion" of recursive, accelerating self-improvement.

Most challenges I've discussed in healthcare, education, and mixed reality are unsolved or even unsolvable at our current intellectual level. But even with our ape-brains, we've come incredibly far. Without AI, we'll still reach the stars and solve most health problems. AI is a powerful accelerant that will make it happen much faster.

Some things are limited by physics or biology, but an AI could create a perfect digital human clone and run billions of trials over thousands of simulated years to test new treatments. We're already using AI for protein folding and drug discovery, with leaps like AlphaFold.

There are the laws of the world, and then there are the laws as we understand them - two different things. You couldn't explain Hawking radiation to a chimpanzee in a thousand years without augmenting its intelligence. What other concepts are out there that we could never grasp with our intellectual limitations?

AI implants will augment our thinking and decision-making in real-time. Imagine ChatGPT, but 100x smarter, directly in your brain. Instant access to all knowledge. Expertise on any topic just by thinking about it.

AI will be pivotal to every single aspect of our existence.

Abundance

We live in a world of scarcity, or so evolution has programmed us to believe as we fight for resources like food and shelter.

But technology costs keep decreasing. We'll harness renewable energy on planetary scales and instantly make anything anyone wants, like advanced 3D printing using only raw materials, practically materializing objects out of thin air.

We'll mine asteroids for abundant raw materials, recycle perfectly, and maybe even master alchemy. If we can change atomic structures, we can turn oxygen into gold (already possible in particle colliders, just energy-intensive). With limitless, nearly free energy, that won't matter.

Space Exploration

Within a decade or two, we'll have habitats on moons and planets in our solar system, even without major breakthroughs. We have the rockets, it's just a matter of cost. Mars trips are expected to be one-way for now, a deal-breaker for many, but that will change.

Wormholes theoretically exist per our current physics models, but they require unthinkable energy and exist for immeasurably small durations. These problems are solvable given enough time and mental resources. An army of hyperintelligent AIs spending the equivalent of a million billion human-years thinking? We'll figure it out.

Work

Work will be dramatically different. People won't work to survive, but to pass time, explore, create, and have fun. Universal basic income and near-zero costs for most things will redefine our economy.

When AI can do most jobs for fractions of pennies on the dollar, only a fool would hire a human that costs hundreds of times more, makes mistakes, gets tired, needs vacation and sleep. If no one has money to buy, who will companies sell to? This requires more thought and perhaps another post.

Closing Thoughts

Our hope for a better future has driven us from the dawn of civilization. It's good to dream, even if optimistically. What I've imagined are best-case scenarios, but I believe they're possible, despite the challenges ahead. By expanding our thinking about what's achievable, we open the door to making those dreams reality. The future is bright indeed.