Well almost everything.

With abundant sustainable energy and safe AI the world (and the solar system) is our oyster.

We’ve heard it said by dreamers and techno-crazies that the future has amazing potential. We’ll be zooming around in flying cars, cancer will be cured, we’ll water the deserts.

Is this true?

I’m going to go out on what to me seems like a 30 foot-wide limb.

Yes.

The only slight caveat is . . humanity.

Yeah, a slight catch.

Politics. War-mongers. Meanies. Crazies. Nitwits. Pessimists. Terrorists. Assassins. Aliens.

But that shouldn’t stop us from trying.

The futurists are right.

And it’ll happen during the 2020s.

Futurists always point out that most of us don’t understand exponential growth.

I think they are right.

The average person (and politician) has missed quite a lot of stuff lately including the rise of Tesla, SpaceX & Elon Musk, that the world will switch to sustainable energy, that AI is going to explode and that space industries and space travel will become 1000x cheaper.

3 years ago I had oil industry friends who had no idea about EVs. I told them your indutry has got maybe 15 years.

Tesla now sells more Model 3s in Australia than Toyota sells Camrys.

SpaceX now essentially wins EVERY non-subsidised launch contract because it is 2-3 times cheaper. What if Starship works and it’s 1000x cheaper as Musk claims? You can build solar farms in space in that case. Mine the asteroids. Go to the moon or Mars if you want.

AI & robotics is hugely maturing in front of our eyes. Industrial robots and vacuum cleaners are just the beginning. Get ready for an invasionary encounter of the useful kind. Ai is easy to incorporate into anythign now due to open source libraries. Robot hardware is coming down in price due to generic components.

Everyone from nations to supermarkets are committing to green targets by 2025 or some small multiple of 5 years after that.

Many missed all this including political parties, car companies, oil companies and incumbent aerospace. Becuase of misunderstanding exponential growth. And/or buying into strange extreme versions of ideologies or destructive, selfish, anti-innovation, nitwit short investor loudmouths.

But us fanboys and girls saw it coming 10-15 years ago. No kidding. We watched jaws open 10 years ago hanging on every word of Musk et al becuase we knew it was true. The incumbents? Kind of nitwits really, sitting there, laughing at Musk while Musk becomes 1st or 2nd top dog and some of their busineses become virtually irrelvant.

Energy & AI?

No one would argue that energy and AI (Artifical Intelligence) are or are going to be really useful.

But everything?

Think about it.

If you have abundant sustainable energy then with AI and robotics we can intelligently do most mundane desk jobs automatically, mine, desalinate, do agriculture, transport and manufacture stuff.

I predict by 2025, maybe 2028 we will have near-human non-robotic & robotic AI & androids.

The idea of the farm that manages it self is no more than 5 years away. We’ve got cool robotic tractors already now. Design your plantings and press the button.

Desalinating water and greening the desserts.

AI can even hugely benefit medicine. Automated checkups for prevention. Monitoring & eliminating CTCs (circulating tumor cells). Robotic tumor removal. It’s all on the list of things to do.

Automated manufacturing, building construction and 3D printing.

Full Self Driving (FSD) EVs, particularly EV mini-buses, should be seen as sustainable point-to-point, door-to-door public transport. We need MORE freeways and tunnels. Not many more trains. The biggest beneficiaries will be the disabled, elderly, children and busy workers. Both sides of politics can agree on this, Surely.

Where’s the energy to come from?

Elon Musk claims you could run America on a 100 mile by 100 mile solar farm out in the desserts of Arizona. Less if every house & factory has solar tiles.

The physics checks out. I’m sure you’d wanna make it twice the size to be sure. But we’re talking ballpark. No government has decided yet to build a huge solar farm. I think this will come soon and maybe from the private sector. There’s very positive progress in cheap energy storage happening right now incuding cheap, iron-based fixed-location batteries.

SpaceX’s Starship’s 1000x cheaper access to space by 2023-ish is exciting and may usher in an age of cloudless solar farms in orbit beaming down energy via microwave. It’s now likely. Not just feasible.

There are half-a-dozen compact fusion projects in progress, and not just by slow-as-a-snail 30 year multinational science teams but startups and aerospace skunkworks. They’re talking aircraft that don’tneed refueling. Watch this space.

Off-shore wind should in-principle be really efficient and ubiquitous. Just needs a little more investment to improve resistence against the salty environment.

Climate change can be beaten by technology. We will have more energy than we ever had before. Not less. And it will be sustainable. There are also dozens of approaches to CO2 removal from the atmosphere that look good on paper.

Scary? Or empowering?

None of this should be depressing. (Unless . . it goes wrong. I predict the AI singularity around 2030).

Benign AI and plentiful energy leaves us, as humans, to do the finicky stuff. Think fixing the farm’s fences we thought we’d never get around to. Think doing some of the satisfying manual labor. Inventing stuff. Tinkering. Caring for people, teaching and training kids. Cultural pursuits.

We can choose.

I think it’s positive. We just have to decide to do it.

And watch out for bad AI.

People will need to find new types of jobs. But we’ve got a decade to do it.

And governments WILL spread the wealth through taxes. Why am I so confident? Because if they don’t there’ll be anarchy. Of course there will be some places that aren’t smart enough to make the transition so, as with any transformation, there will be some disasters.

That’s why government & industry needs to be instigating and incentivizing innovation and change now.

Don’t get left behind.