And speaking of Aliens....

4 things that are going to happen soon

Are you tired of reading business stuff like, “To grow ARR, you must minimize CAC while maximizing ARPU, and you must ensure NDR is above 1 in order to increase CLV.”

How about some 👽 instead? Aliens have been in the news lately. The possibility that we aren’t alone in the universe has had me thinking about major discoveries and advancements I’ve seen over the 50 years of my life. So, I asked myself the logical question, “Assuming I live into my 80s, what will I bear witness to over the next 3 decades?” I have four big predictions.

1. AI robots taking over.

2. The cure for all cancers.

3. Colonization of the moon, an asteroid, and/or a nearby planet.

4. Scientific proof of alien life.

Yes, today’s post will be a fun and semi-serious take on the future.

AI robots taking over

I don’t need to tell you how rapidly LLMs are advancing the state of the art in AI. Gone are the days of mediocre chatbots and terrible voice recognition. There’s a lot of computing power required to stand up an LLM today, even after it’s been trained, but that’s a minor hurdle to eventually putting ChatGPT-like capability in a small package.

Now imagine an AI model deeply trained in human interaction turning this robot into a thinking, speaking, reasoning machine:

It’s both exciting and terrifying. As an engineer, I want to build it. As a responsible adult, I worry about not having a fool-proof kill switch. I worry about failures in training that result in it harming humans or other animals.

Assuming we can get the safety and sentient issues worked out so that this doesn’t happen

then we’re in for a world where robots do progressively more and more of both unskilled and skilled human labor. There is no upper bound to where this advancement can go. The better you train an AI, the more capable that AI is. Robotic AIs will build buildings, perform surgery, police neighborhoods, farm food, and so on. At this point, it’s entirely an AI training challenge and a robotics engineering challenge. Thanks to the recent breakthroughs in AI, near-sentient robots are no longer science fiction.

I, for one, welcome our robot overlords.

The cure for cancer

There are over 200 types of cancer, and cancer research is consistently the most well-funded disease research area. People are living longer with cancer thanks to near-constant advancements in early detection and treatment. I realize that a cure is far more advanced than a treatment, and I’m not just predicting one cure. It will likely be a collection of cures tailored to the various cancer types and potentially tailored to the genetics of the individual.

But, take a look at the diseases cured in the 20th century. It’s an impressive list. Remember when HIV was a death sentence? While it’s not cured today, people can live a relatively normal life and still be HIV-positive.

With the rapid advances in AI-based drug research, advances in immunotherapy, and advances in genetic engineering, I predict researchers will be knocking out cancers one by one in the coming years.

We will someday look back on the current era of cancer treatment (predominantly poisons & radiation) and view it much like we view blood lettings with leaches from medicine 200+ years ago.

I, for one, welcome our medical overlords.

Colonization of another planet

I’m using “colonization” loosely here. Do I think I’ll see full-scale, self-sufficient colonies on Earth’s Moon or Mars in my lifetime? Probably not. But I do think I’ll see something like what we have with the International Space Station today except physically on another planet, starting with Luna.

There are many moon missions already in the works. SpaceX is going to Mars. If the reusable rocket concept works, the barriers to frequent launches will be removed, which means getting supplies to other planetary surfaces will be faster and more routine.

Too expensive you say? Today it’s true, but there’s a huge financial incentive behind all of this. Asteroids have massive mining potential. Mars will eventually be mined as well. The profit motive is often a driver of deep technical advancements.

And I’m not even taking into account the possibility that our government, as highlighted in those congressional testimonies, has been secretly reverse-engineering alien spacecraft. Some type of anti-gravity engine and super-efficient propulsion engine would obviously speed this prediction up.

I, for one, welcome our Martian overlords.

Proof of alien life

I once told a work colleague, “We’re going to go from not having discovered any alien life to discovering alien life everywhere in a very short period of time.”

One can look at the recent congressional testimonies in a couple of ways. You could say that the testimonies are just influenced by a trove of sci-fi books and movies. Or you could say that the books and movies have been inspired by reports of actual events.

I’m in the second camp, and not just because I want to believe. The Fermi Paradox says that life should exist given the vastness of the universe and the massive amount of habitable worlds. It’s just that we haven’t seen credible evidence of it yet. Or have we? It appears that military folks are beginning to come out of the shadows and talk about what they know.

I can’t say what the proof will actually look like. Men-in-Black style government agencies revealed? Aliens addressing humanity? The visitation of a massive mother ship? Probably not. But the gradual declassification of ET information seems very likely.

I, for one, welcome our alien overlords. (Also, Elon might be an alien. There, I said it.)

Honorable mentions

Those are my four favorite predictions. They cover a wide range of revelations and technological advancements. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a bunch of other things in the works.

• Accessible personal flight devices like the human-sized drones that are already being deployed.

• Unlimited energy, e.g. Cold Fusion, small-scale fission reactors, large-scale solar.

• Climate management techniques like Solar Geoengineering.

• Population decline (blame the sex robots).

• Room Temperature Superconductors.

Did I miss your favorite thing? Please let me know in the comments.