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:

1. The area with the largest modeling error is migration, so politics may be messing that up.

2. Governance mechanisms looks surprisingly strong, especially relative to its media attention.

3. 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.

4. 19 areas have strengths lying within about the same factor of two. So many things seem important.

5. 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.

6. Areas add roughly linearly. For example, biotech arguably includes life extension, meat, and materials, and pandemics, and its strength is near their strength sum.