Painting the vision: What does an abundant future consist of?
Energy: Higher standards of living almost invariably involves increasing the amount of energy used per capita (e.g. HVAC).
Housing: Everyone should have their own home, not just as shelter but as a space they control.
Food: Everyone should have enough to eat, for nutrition and for enjoyment.
Water: Everyone should have access to clean water.
Health: Everyone should have the opportunity to have a long life.
Tools and education: Giving people access to tools and knowledge that expand their agency.
Environment: All of the above need to be accomplished without straining the environment.
The map
The following steps are ordered both by feasibility (technological, economic, and political) and dependencies.
Step 0: Tools and education
Reasons
Complexity
The challenges we need to overcome require a mix of skills
Solving these requires both (1) individual people with specialized knowledge; (2) coordination among those people.
Robustness
Properly constructed distributed systems don't have single points of failure
Defense dominance: there are more good people than bad people
Tools in the hands of people who understand their own needs
Removes reliance on a central authority
Step 1: General purpose robots
Reasons
Labor force
Greater demand needs to be met with greater supply
We are not going to meet that demand with human labor, so we need robots to supplement the shortfall.
Hazardous tasks
Many important tasks are hazardous (in many cases, they are important -because- they are hazardous)
Examples
Infectious disease research
Surgery
Sometimes, we are the risk: contamination, imprecision, mistakes.
Critical minerals mining
We don't have enough because it's not easy to produce; it's not easy to produce because it's dangerous!
To accomplish these tasks, both in terms of scale (people do not want to work in dangerous jobs) and ethics (people should not have to work on dangerous jobs), we need a "body replacement", i.e. robots.
Step 2: Energy production
Reasons
Energy is an input to everything
Increases in standards of living are directly correlated to increases in energy use
Higher standards of living require greater amounts of energy to produce the comforts that raise the standard of living
Many domain-specific constraints can be overcome if we assume we have unlimited clean energy
Example 1: Desalination
Example 2: Vertical farming
Example 3: Direct air capture
Step 3: Environmental remediation
Reasons
Progress to date has largely come at the expense of the environment. Even once we are no longer increasing harm to the environment, we need to repair the damage we have already done.
Step 4: Scientific acceleration
Reasons
Health: At the moment, human health is not yet an engineering challenge; there are fundamental knowledge and technology gaps that prevent us from curing disease and properly adopting preventative medicine.
Efficiency: Undoubtedly, the technology stack we currently use (e.g. silicon wafers, lithium batteries, etc.) is not the most efficient nor effective. Accelerating scientific discovery will allow us to continue to push the Pareto frontier of what is possible with the resources we have.