For a while I've kept a list of the things that could be "good" swan events, but to be fair I didn't have "room temperature superconductor on that list" :-)
Other things that could happen:
1) Fully decoding the cellular mechanism of cells allowing for the curing of any disease, repairing any genetic disorder.
2) Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of things.
3) An AI subsystem with some reasoning ability (yeah, could go either way)
Etc.
Although I'm pretty sure there are plenty that many people can think of, so it doesn't really detract much from your point.
Shoutout to 50 things that made the modern economy, a great podcast/book.
When I was a kid in the 90's I already enjoyed electricity and electronics and I would play with those low power incandescent lightbulbs powered by 9V batteries. They would generate a lot of heat and very little light, to the point that it wasn't easy to tell if it was on when the sun was bright.
With a modern LED and the same setup you could generate enough light to blind yourself.
There hasn’t been a full scale war between major powers since.
Electric cars mainstream
If it's proven to be the case that P != NP, it would hardly change much on the grand scale of things as generally, that's what most people believe anyway. In particular, the world continues to function mostly in the same way (since, even if it was the case that P = NP, we haven't found any polynomial reductions yet, so we're effectively living in a P != NP world). Of course, for mathematics and CS, this would be huge, because the techniques used in a proof would likely be very interesting and novel.
If it's proven to be the case that P = NP, then it remains to be seen whether this knowledge can be turned into actually efficient algorithms (polynomial algorithms are not all efficient in practice). If that is the case, I think it might have more downsides than upsides, since all of cryptography would collapse.
3) has already happened. The AI chat bots aren't very smart, but they're clearly capable of some degree of basic reasoning.
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...
>Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?
>We show that the [neuroscience experimental] approaches reveal interesting structure in the data but do not meaningfully describe the hierarchy of information processing in the microprocessor. This suggests current analytic approaches in neuroscience may fall short of producing meaningful understanding of neural systems, regardless of the amount of data.
Our civilisation is an energy-junkie who happened to stumble on a huge bag full of cash around 1860 and the discovery of oil distillation. Since then, we have been on a hallucinating trip, burning down our house in the process. Viable fusion is essentially another huge pile of cash being deposited right across the street, just 10 times larger than 2 centuries ago. There is no coming back after that.
With the exception of Avatar, is there any advanced fictional civilization that doesn't use vast amounts of energy in proportion to their tech level? I'd also point to the historical record.
2. Light year capable transport
3. Inertia dampers
4. Mass scale carbon capture technology
5. Robots to prepare space for habitation
6. World recognition to manage resources globally
one of these is not like the others. direct carbon capture works now with the slight caveat that we would have to build 10x our current power supply in fission plants to power them. coccolithophores are an appealing route in principle, but research into their lifecycle and use for sequestration would be a quotidian pursuit for thousands of labs around the world, given funding.
There is a huge amount of what I think in unawarded debate about applying it to the past (IMO, it's very clear where it should be used), but applying it to the future is completely against any kind of logic.
Some of the “good” black swans at the top of my mind…
City of Hope scientists develop targeted chemotherapy able to kill all solid tumors in preclinical research
Apparently. I'm not an expect, but it's what I have encountered elsewhere.
Still great news! But not quite as revolutionary as the headline implies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00016-009-0006-9
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.ns.39....
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/yoon1/
https://www.chemeurope.com/en/encyclopedia/Muon-catalyzed_fu...
> Even if muons were absolutely stable, each muon could catalyze, on average, only about 100 d-t fusions before sticking to an alpha particle, which is only about one-fifth the number of muon catalyzed d–t fusions needed for break-even, where as much thermal energy is generated as electrical energy is consumed to produce the muons in the first place, according to Jackson's rough estimate
But yeah I suspect the people who are most excited about this news are fusion power engineers!
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-plasma-ph...
>2) Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of things.
How would that be any better than commercially viable fission breeder reactors (which seem far closer to reality than commercially viable fusion energy)?
Though there are genuine advantages: for as radioactive as the interior of a fusion reactor may get, if you cut power it'll just sit there safely doing nothing. No decay heat, no potential isotopes to leak - maybe a puff of tritium gas - but that's it. It is a technology that has a perfect control loop for safety because it can't self-sustain at all.
>> 1) Fully decoding the cellular mechanism of cells allowing for the curing of any disease, repairing any genetic disorder.
-- so you want to cure aging then- how many billions of people you think can a planet with a 6k km radius sustain ?
You think Claus Schwabs of the world wont buy it out to keep it to themselves ?
>> 2) Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of things.
-- That will eventually happen, and electricity will be just as "expensive" as it is now, simply because the price of a product has nothing to do with its cost and everything to do with the purchasing power of its intended audience.
>> 3) An AI subsystem with some reasoning ability (yeah, could go either way)
-- No, its cant go either way, the power insatiable psychopaths in power will use it to maximize their power. Period. Its psychopath nature- for them its natural and perfectly normal. Until psychopathy is recognized as a disease and sick people are disallowed from positions of power, the world will continue to be an abusive place.
100%
If we had fusion tomorrow it would help decarbonise our grids, which is a great thing, but the consumer would see zero financial benefit. Companies would charge the same and make record profits.
This is literally happening right now! The market price of energy in Europe has dropped after a huge hike when Russia invaded Ukraine, but customer bills are still extortionately high
Doesn't seem that it would cure high speed lead poisoning. People will continue killing each other just as well.
Considering that we already have a fusion reactor in the skies, I think that the room temp room pressure superconductor is the next best thing. Fusion is good but at this stage, the natural one will just do. Think global network of solar cells interconnected with LK-99.
The creation of a global electricity network perhaps also has some effect on global cooperation.
Now we just need reduce the use of fossil fuels (cars, aviation, heating, industry).
If free-form gene editing were developed today, you would see the elites using it to make themselves immortal, while denying the same to everyone else. If fusion power suddenly became viable, you would see the richest people using it to make themselves even richer, while cementing their stranglehold on vital infrastructure. And it should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention during the past 3 years that artificial intelligence is above all else an instrument of control, and even in its infancy, access to it is unevenly distributed along the same strata of power that already existed before.
At this point, the only "black swan, but good" event that could happen is a cataclysmic reset of civilization that might somehow see a better phoenix rise from the ashes. Barring that, we're full steam ahead to a techno-totalitarian nightmare future.
A bit of history would do you wonders. Top-down control was the norm*. If it has changed, it’s less now.
* For 95% of the peasant/slave population
How do you build a warning system for a unsurvivable event, with not wittnesses? Eternal unease and anxiety, regardless of reality.
webster's dystopia definition is "of, relating to, or being an imagined world or society in which people lead dehumanized, fearful lives : relating to or characteristic of a dystopia"
0. LK99 is so obviously a fraud. They've been dicking around with this substance for 24 years.
1. some diseases will be possible to fix, like metabolic problems, but where structures are already formed in an adult organism this will be impossible. Like Autism. Go ahead, change every chromosome in every cell, the malformed brain structures will remain.
2. Sure there will be ignition, but the facilities will be wildly too expensive for commercial power.
3. will never happen with conventional computing hardware. Maybe if someone figures out how to grow actual neurons
5) programmable matter / nanobots - the applications of a swarm of nanobots or even microbots are pretty much endless.
Honestly that doesn’t seem likely to be a black swan event. Not because it is never going to happen, more because it won’t be an event but a slow progression.
It is more likely that as we understand more and more we will be able to cure more and more. It is not like there is some silver bullet piece of research where sudenly we have “fully decoded the celular mechanism”. Plus even if we somehow suddenly and all at once atained all that knowledge (perhaps a flying saucer takes pitty on us and beams down a whole library documenting our cells) it would take a long time while we turn that knowledge into helpfull interventions. And even that progress would be multiple generations long.
It is how becoming a black-belt martial artist is not an “event”. You don’t go from zero to that in one night. It is more of a progression where every day you are about as proficient as you were the previous one, but maybe a tiny bit better. Just applied on a whole species level.
I feel our generation (I am in my mid-forties) lived through enormous technological advancements but not as many scientific breakthroughs as the previous generation. So maybe it is not surprising that we are suddenly more likely to have breakthroughs in basic science.
I hope there is a phase transition to science mode now, so we that have a chance to solve the hard pressing issues.
Also, pedantic point, you keep referring to good and bad black swan events. I thought the definition of black swan didn't make any assumption about whether the impact is positive or negative? Only that has a huge impact (I haven't read Taleb's book yet, correct me if I'm wrong)
And as technology is getting better, both of those outcomes become more probable.
no way, no how. there is every reason to believe that cells are irreducibly complex. we can understand parts in isolation, yes, but a full model of the cell (however that would look) is almost certainly beyond science and even if you had that good luck measuring the full state of a cell without destroying it
I would be curious if anyone with knowledge in the space could comment on whether or not LK-99 may get us closer to viable nuclear fusion?
My understanding is that magnetic field containment systems are at least part of the technical hurdles required to make fusion feasible.
