Future

Things that Might Look Weird in the Future

History teaches us that in 100 years from now some of the assumptions we believed will turn out to be wrong. A good question to ask is “What might we be wrong about today?”. These are a few things that future humans might see as weird behavior:

• Eat animals.
• Drive manually.
• Give birth without advanced assistance.
• Not caring for all the animal suffering in the wild.
  • Nature is not safe! The default is suffering. The current mentality is that nature is good and disruptions from nature are bad.
• The ignorance of Social Media and its full impact on society.
  • Is “being bad for society” an emergent property of social networks as they grow?
• Current Voting Systems.
• Not relying more on tools like Prediction Markets (e.g: to spot papers that might not replicate).

Predictions

• More experimentation around governance:
  • Charter cities.
  • Holacracy.
  • Cooperatives/DAOs.
• Cities are friendly to humans & wildlife, not cars.
• More experimentation around Learning and education (e.g: teaching game theory as a subject in the modern curriculum)
  • More people aware of the tricks our minds play on us (Mind Field and The Story Of Us) as well as how diverse humans are.
  • More people are aware of how cool win-win games are!
  • More interactive explanations like the ones the awesome Nicky Case does!
• More concern around systems with weird incentives causing large amounts of pain (Moloch).
  • E.g: Criminal system rework. Focusing on the system and not on individual punishment.
• Work valuation changes (plumbing more expensive than some software development) due to Moravec’s paradox. We will automate making a full app before a robot is able to master physical arms and legs like a 5-year-old.
• Open Data will be more important as it can produce better models and help coordinate people providing shared context.
• The current decentralized protocols (IPFS, ActivityPub, …) need to evolve more. Especially around UX. People don’t care about decentralization, they care about UX. Centralization is inevitable.

Exciting Software Engineering Ideas

• Common Digital Infrastructure
  • If you work in tech, this is a fun thought experiment. Imagine you don’t need any money and can devote your time to benefiting everyone by building common digital infrastructure. What would exist in a better future?
• Content-addressed data + immutability
• CRDTs
• WASM. Especially Pyodide.
• Distributed / decentralized data storage systems.
• Multi-party computation (MPC), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), trusted execution environments (TEEs), …
• Prolly/Merkle Trees
• Differential/Timely Dataflow
• Zero-knowledge proofs
• Have a market of ML/AI models each competing to predict an outcome. When the outcome actually happens, rank them on a leaderboard by how close their predictions were and reward accordingly.