Unaligned artificial intelligence, nuclear wars, man-made pandemics, climate change, other technologies we don’t realize and still may be invented.
One night in 1933, the world’s pre-eminent expert on atomic science, Ernest Rutherford, declared the idea of harnessing atomic energy to be “moonshine.” And the very next morning Leo Szilard discovered the idea of the chain reaction. In 1939, Enrico Fermi told Szilard the chain reaction was but a “remote possibility,” and four years later Fermi was personally overseeing the world’s first nuclear reactor. The staggering list of eminent scientists who thought heavier-than-air flight to be impossible or else decades away is so well rehearsed as to be cliché. But fewer know that even Wilbur Wright himself predicted it was at least fifty years away—just two years before he invented it.
Of course, there is no shortage of examples of scientists and technologists declaring a new technology to be just around the corner, when in fact it would only arrive decades later; or not at all; or in a markedly different form to the one anticipated. The point is not that technology usually comes earlier than predicted, but that it can easily do so; that we need to be cautious in ruling things out or assuming we have ample time.
– Via Toby Ord, Precipice