Re: Paths to Uploading

Hal Finney (hal@rain.org)
Wed, 6 Jan 1999 09:50:48 -0800

Regarding future scenarios:

Many hotly-anticipated technologies take much longer to occur than expected. Nuclear fusion, AI, and space colonization have all been twenty years away since the 1950s.

What has happened instead is that an unanticipated technology, the Internet, has arisen and transformed the world.

I suspect that the same thing will continue to happen. Nanotech will keep running into problems which will keep it 20 years away. (Current consensus from the FX game is early 2020's.) AI will also stay at the horizon.

With biotech I am more optimistic, because that seems to be making accelerating progress, similar to computers in the 1970s. Maybe this will be the field with an unexpected breakthrough, like suddenly discovering how to prevent aging. Immortality in a pill by, say, 2015, would be revolutionary.

Hal