The Power Law of Frontier Tech

I was spending some time in my favorite subreddit (r/futurology) awhile back and came across a post titled “What can I realistically expect to happen in the next 10–20 years?

The main poster made a great point about being promised big things with big headlines, only to be “disappointed”.

Every day, you hear the headlines. “HIV almost cured!”, ‘Diabetes destroyed!“, “Google Glass”, “IRL Tony Stark says: Mars in 2025!”

And I’m a little weighed down after the countless headlines that turned out to be too optimistic like the first three headlines, but I’m still inspired by things like the last headline.

My question is: what’s worth putting my hopes into? Is Mars, for instance, possible by 2025? Clean energy? Medicine

Basically, if I woke up in 2025 tomorrow, what could I realistically expect to be different from now? What about 2035?

This is absolutely true, but also a very glass half-empty look at our world.

The next comment was focused on how quickly the mobile phone has changed his/her life, how they wer writing this post while talking into their phone from across the globe, etc.

That’s the mobile phone. It allows us to have a supercomputer in our pocket so we can surf the internet and do lots of cool things in a more fast and convenient way.

But when we think about some of the new emerging frontiers of technology, we can start to think about the implications of just one of them working out. Whether its AI or VR or CRISPR or Space Travel or a slew of other developing technologies that may seem like “un-investable” moonshots, the potential output is massive.

Maybe all of these nascent areas won’t develop how we think, but if just one does, it will have an outsized impact, and that is worth putting your hopes into.

One moonshot will generate enough change that the rest of the failures won’t matter, and that is the Power Law of Frontier Tech.

This originally appeared in my notes