Anything related to biotech is not included here - care to explain the reason why?
There is nothing magical about it, so yes - AI will help, but humans are enough. I would expect a sustained, 100s of millions/$1bn 10 year effort would bring us a lot closer to this hardware technological 'maturity' (we are not even trying hard now - a mole of carbon-12 has a mass of 12g and it contains 6*10^23 atoms, yet there is nothing stopping us from building small machines with mere thousands/millions of atoms). Obviously you could say that this sort of money would help with anything, but I believe it would be one of the best value/$ projects).
With r...
Digital matter, in other words, molecular manufacturing.
With a Star Trekian autogenous home synthesizer, one could expect Moore's Law-like growth.
Jason,
I appreciate the work that you are doing – you are asking the question of why did the idea of progress fell out of favor and I would like to add my two cents, looking at it just through one particular lens: human nature.
Let’s start with the progress itself – progress towards what telos? I assume most people mean utopia and folks over here at LW tend to envision in a similar way to Bostrom’s Letter from Utopia.
If that’s the case, maybe it did fell out of favour because technology hasn’t delivered on its utopian promise in a reasonable timeframe ... (read more)