What Future Areas Matter Most?
I made a list of 44 possibly important future areas, and just did 22 Twitter polls (with N from 379 to 1178), each time asking this question re 4 areas:
Over next 30 years, changes in which are likely to matter most?
I fit the answers to a simple model wherein respondents either pick randomly (~26% of time) or pick in proportion to each area’s (non-negative) “strength”. Here are the estimated area strengths, relative to the strongest set to 100:
Some comments:
The area with the largest modeling error is migration, so politics may be messing that up.
Governance mechanisms looks surprisingly strong, especially relative to its media attention.
The top 7 areas hold half the total strength, and there’s a big drop to #8. ~20% is in automation, AGI, and self-driving cars.
19 areas have strengths lying within about the same factor of two. So many things seem important.
Relative to these strength ratings, it seems to me that media focus is only roughly correlated. Media seems disproportionately focused on areas involving more direct social conflict.
Areas add roughly linearly. For example, biotech arguably includes life extension, meat, and materials, and pandemics, and its strength is near their strength sum.
There must be a large bias of people with a significant interest in AGI, technology in general and/or economics who voted so not surprised that it doesn't correlate that well to what the media covers.
With respect to life extension, this topic is only beginning to make its way into the public, and I doubt those voting would be higher than 10% in 2010.
I'm pretty sure you couldn't make much progress with this approach, since even in the best case it won't move you past the ~122 year max. lifespan of humans.