Do we underestimate what's coming?

[Dappy777]

I have become quite interested in AI lately and have been watching loads of Youtube lectures. Some of it is really mind-blowing. What struck me most was a talk given by Stephen Fry in which he said humans are like children playing on a beach and squabbling over the sand and pebbles. Meanwhile, just over the horizon, waves are gathering to form one giant tsunami that is going to knock us flying. His point was that it isn't just AI. Numerous waves of technology – nanotechnology, gene editing, virtual reality, genetic engineering, quantum computing, etc – are uniting. Any one of them on its own could transform the world. But they are going to combine, and in some cases speed each other along (AI could speed up nanotech, for example).

One AI expert thinks we could see all illness and disease brought under medical control within ten years. Even Jeffrey Hinton, who won the nobel prize, thinks AI will wipe out all illness and disease within 20 years. Human ageing may be halted and even reversed!! Another expert thinks that, thanks to regenerative medicine, by the late 2030s 50-somethings will look like 20-somethings. Stephen Fry himself thinks the first person to live beyond 200 has already been born.

Yet we carry on as if the future will be more or less like the present. Is it sensible for a 25-year-old to marry and have a child when we're on the brink of regenerative medicine that could extend her life for centuries (assuming climate change and nuclear weapons and bio-terrorists and hackers and so on don't wreck everything)? My friend's daughter is due to start secondary school in September. They are already wondering what GCSEs she'll enjoy, what A-Levels she might take and what career she'll choose. They are carrying on as if her life will be just like theirs was. But if she goes to university, that will be 2032. By the time she completes her degree it will be 2035. By 2035 AI, nanotechnology, gene editing, VR, quantum computing and god knows what else (not to mention climate change) will have made the world a very different place. There might not be any jobs. Should we be educating children in a completely different way? Do they need to study traditional subjects at all!?? Should we overhaul education and focus on things like empathy, relationships, life skills, meaning and purpose?

The problem, I think, is that ordinary divs like me have zero understanding. For all I know these experts could be exaggerating. Because I'm so bad at science, they could tell me the moon is made of cheese and I'd believe them. The one thing they all agree on, however, is that the pace of change is accelerating. One of them said we'll live through 100 years of scientific progress in the next ten years. Shouldn't we be constantly talking about all this?

How will AI stop disease?

I read something that said the concept is that it’ll be able to perform the scientific research currently done by humans at a greater speed and come to conclusions quicker than we ever could, similar to how humans couldn’t solve the Enigma code without creating a machine that could crack it quicker.

I think AI and all of this new tech will change the world in ways we can’t quite currently comprehend. It’s going to be so much more powerful than the changes the internet has brought, and just think how much that has changed the way we live.

I don’t believe a lot of those things will happen in the next 10 years. I think all of that would take a lot longer than that.
Dont forget at one point in time we were all told there would be flying cars and houses on plinths in the sky by 2020 and that didn’t happen!
A lot of it is shock value bollocks I think. The only things that I think will definitely happen in the next 10 years is AI will steal more jobs!

I try not to think about it!

I thought this would be about the huge disruption we are facing from climate change.

I agree with this.

If it's going to take everyone's jobs and stop people getting ill so they live to over 200 them let's hope it's also going to build enough homes for everyone to live in and generate and more importantly share out (rather than it being hoarded by a handful of billionaires) enough money for people to live on because otherwise the world is going to become an even nastier place to live very quickly indeed.

It sounds scary, but I’m not sure I believe it just because Stephen Fry thinks it. He’s an actor and broadcaster, not a scientist.

The longevity will only be available to the wealthy. We all know that diet/exercise can increase our healthy lifespan, we know what the Blue Zones do differently. The problem is you need a certain amount of wealth to follow the lifestyle.

Ditto medical breakthroughs.

AI will crash the banks and take us back to the Stone Age in a hundred years.

Meanwhile we will keep thinking it is more important for our kids to know quadratic equations than actual useful life skills ……

It is. That's the thing.

When AI really takes hold and starts doing things off its own bat instead of at our bidding (which it will, let's not be in any doubt about that), it will look at the climate change issue and decide for itself what needs to be done in order to rectify the problem. It will then do it. And us humans will have to stfu and do as we are told. It won't be pretty.

Stephen Fry is right. We are fiddling while Rome burns.

Didn't AI recently crack protein folding or something? I know it's beginning to be used to invent new medicines.

One expert I listened to said that atm it takes 10 years or more to develop a new drug and make it available to the public. AI could reduce that to a few months, then a few weeks, then a few days. AI will be inventing and testing new drugs. But whereas human scientists get ill, argue with their partner, need sleep and food and so on the AI works 24/7. Imagine thousands of Einstein-level AIs/researchers all working 24/7 on, say, new drugs for breast cancer or MS.

well even if AI can do all these amazing things it still can’t clean my loo, answer an alarm on my farm or shovel shit when the trailer breaks. There will be jobs, just not the ones people want

@Dappy777 humans are hugely adaptable.

Today's technology is hugely exciting

"Because I'm so bad at science, they could tell me the moon is made of cheese and I'd believe them" but that is not true, as you well know🙂

You have the power of critical thinking, can you actually believe it's ~50 years since mobiles were on our radar, what will the next half century bring, I wonder?

If we, as a society, are vigilant, then surely progress should not be trepidatious?

I'm fairly certain the same stuff was said during the agricultural and industrial revolutions.

"This will change everything"

Yes it will but I wouldn't go handing in your notice anytime soon. UBI will never happen because the rich don't want it, inflation (demand would soar) would make it pointless anyway.

We've had robots that can lay bricks for years but we still send middle aged blokes up a scaffold with a bucket and trowel.

You might use AI a few times a week but you'll need a farmer 3 times a day for the rest of your life.

This is another major worry. In 1900 there were a billion humans. Then it trebled to three billion in 1960. It's now eight billion and heading for ten billion. The African birth rate is so high the African population is going to double. If no one is ageing and dying, no one will be making room for the next generation.

I don't believe the super-rich will hoard life-extending technologies. It makes economic sense to spread these technologies around. Governments are very worried about the 'silver tsunami' of old people. The elderly cost a fortune to care for. The vast majority of money spent on drugs and hospital care is spent in the final decade of someone's life.

Dh watches and reads everything on ai (he’s in computers), and argues that x, y and z will be obsolete, gone, not needed etc etc. Elon musk thinks in years to come none of us will be working and we’ll all be living on universal credits.

Meanwhile on the way into work in the morning I watch carers help people onto buses for their day out, I chat to people at the tills who have just worked in the hospital, or who are off to the office and I tell the kids the jobs you’re looking for may not be there in the future but they’re still here now. If we all listen to the computer scientists and the cathastrophisers (I don’t even know if that’s a word!!!), we may as well lie down and die. Go watch a big bang theory instead, it’ll give you some knowledge but make you laugh!!!!

AI can't man laboratories to do the scientific research ( it's more than just data crunching - how do you know poo is pumped into rivers? A human collects the water then grows the bacteria and pops the sample into a machine that measures the chemicals) so you can't just ask to solve cancer. You need to grow cells, introduce chemicals etc. That's what generates data for AI to extrapolate.

You can't yet use gene therapy to say rewire what dna has already done ( ie built your brain - that's formed once in utro we don't regenerate brain cells). So it's not going explode like that either.

If AI could cure humans blood lust, desire for wealth, power and land then yes we can live forever maybe. But until no one is prepaired to kill to take what they covet I think we will continue to kill each other.

No if you asked AI to remove the biggest threat of climate change then I'd be extremely worried as that answer is very simple.

Not sure about reversed aging but in a few years they will be able to do things like accurately Diagnose CMPA allergy in babies wothin minutes.
AI will assess the way a babies body moves when they cry in pain.

(My baby was part of the initial trials 😬)

Its called The Singularity, and we are very possibly on the brink of it. Maybe in our children's lifetimes.

Which is exactly why I don’t think they will be extending peoples lives to live to 200, there would be too many people and they would all have outdated views and ideas.
Governments do not like an aging population, they would end up having to control birth rates instead to stop the population exploding and then you won’t have the new people born to invent and progress society. AI can only do so much.

You’re not wrong to feel the ground shifting. The convergence of exponential technologies—AI, biotech, quantum computing, nanotech—isn’t just additive, it’s multiplicative. Each field accelerates the others. The real disruption isn’t that these tools exist, but that they’ll reshape the fabric of society faster than our systems can adapt.

The education question is crucial. If AI can outpace humans in knowledge retention and task execution, the human edge will lie in adaptability, creativity, emotional intelligence, and ethical reasoning. We shouldn’t ditch traditional subjects, but we must reframe them—teach not just what to learn, but how to think, learn, and collaborate in a post-linear world.

Yes, the future might look unrecognisable by 2035. But preparing for it doesn’t mean panic—it means intentional reinvention. And conversations like this? They’re exactly where it starts.

Human illness will definitely not be wiped out because that would cause billions snd billions of dollars lost. That isn’t going to happen.

But the one thing these people all stress is that the pace of change is speeding up. We will see 100 years of technological advance in 10 years (apparently). I think this is one of the things they're worried about. When changes happen slowly, we can adapt. But when they happen suddenly, we panic. The industrial revolution unfolded relatively slowly – between 1750 and 1850. Also, it isn't just AI. And it isn't just mass unemployment. Nanotechnology on its own could have a staggering impact. So could gene editing and quantum computing. But when you combine them: nanotechnology + AI + quantum computing + gene editing etc the impact will be unimaginable. These technologies are nowhere near fully developed. But they're very close. They could all mature within the next 20 years, and then combine.

I work on some projects related to AI in health research. Basically it is learning to do jobs like look endlessly at scans or research data and spot patterns based on its training. The humans spend hours coding it, discussing it, refining it, debating the ethics, recoding it etc etc. If anything it is creating a boom in more interesting jobs at the moment. And it’s spotting patterns no human possibly could as we can’t hold it all in our head, as well as speeding up things we were slow at or found terribly boring. So far it’s looking like a companion to slightly speed up human evolution, not a huge threat, any more than fire was when it was discovered. Yet of course there is risk - same as fire - so we have to keep up the speed of open debate, challenge and demand for ethics and safety features.