My Tech Predictions — 5 Years In

Lauri Elias
7 min readDec 22, 2024

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Five years ago, I wrote an op-ed throwing my coin on the rails of the techno hype train. It’s in Estonian, and I won €500 for it.

The tl;dr is I pooh-poohed quantum, AI, FSD, fusion, and Rocketman.

Screenshot of Elon predicting FSD utopia by 2020

I knew then and there that some of my confident prose would come back to haunt me, yet je ne regrette rien.

“Shat the bed” category:

Self-driving

Driverless taxi uptake — Waymo in California
https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-waymo-taxi-trips-in-california/

Waymo is finally doing it.

I said it would make little difference if we freed the taxi driver class from its toils. But nobody was arguing this point.

There will be tons of side effects. A simple one is cities sans parking lots.

A fleet of robots on the streets of our advanced economies, recording 24/7. Bluetooth device IDs nearby. All the chatter on the Wi-Fi. Gas leaks and the slightest wobble in radiation levels. Sounds outside the range of any animal… Tell me how you’re gonna get away with murder in this setting.

The endless stream of data isn’t going into a molehole. Analysis from billions of miles logged by these increasingly affordable (talk of $150k each) vehicles will make the entire robot species ever smarter.

People have been doing hardcore thinking in backseats for millennia. That’s not the main attraction. I can’t even come up with a proper list of top implications that will ripple out from mass robotization.

A Cruise driverless taxi stopped by a parking cone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MfyIsPWhTk

Yes, some meatbags will (keep) do(ing) this and strip(ping) them of the expensive cameras. That’s why shithole countries won’t have self-driving anytime soon. And it won’t matter.

Setting the drivers free won’t happen even in 2025, but the problem is solved. I was wrong to belittle so hard.

Mars

Still hostile to all things biological. But thanks to Elon’s SpaceX, getting a pound of stuff there costs orders of magnitude less than it used to.

Cost of launching a kg to orbit has come down dramatically
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/01/how-will-spacex-bring-the-cost-to-space-down-to-10-per-kilogram-from-over-1000-per-kilogram.html

Could be someone ekes out an existence in the radiation-shielding tunnels there before I die of old age (I’m 34). Making Pinterests of Martian homes for the affluent is still funny, though.

Moon

I pointed out we hadn’t gone in 50 years. We’re going in 2027. Don’t expect it to make much of a difference besides a boom in related stocks.

Stock performance of $LUNR
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/LUNR/

AI

GPT-3.5 premiered in November 2022. The progress made over five years has been astonishing. Niche nerd curiosity to mainstream. I’m 100% more productive at work generating code, and people can’t tell AI art from the ‘real’ thing. Many prefer the AI masters.

Five years ago, I dismissed AI as huge Excel tables masquerading as intelligence. And I wasn’t wrong in some sense, as you can still fool them with ease. But the emergent properties that keep coming out of ‘statistics’ are profound. I still don’t believe the current paradigm will kill/enslave us. But who’s to say there aren’t sparks of recursive self-improvement flying around in some lab even now?

I get the feeling my book smarts are gonna be under heavy fire for what remains of the decade.

It doesn’t matter if LLMs can ‘really think’ or not. If the result is the same as if it had thought, that’s enough. I didn’t go all-in on NVidia when they had the world by the balls thanks to CUDA. It was the only trade that mattered.

“Nailed it” category:

Quantum

Google tried to nab their checkmark before 2025 with Willow. People in the know are not having it at all or calling it the plain old (slow & boring) kind of incremental progress. 10 septillion years to do the same (useless) thing on a conventional computer? Implies the Multiverse? All BS, same as last time. I’d have expected to be more scared of quantum breaking crypto 2019–2024, not less.

Aforelinked Aaronson has dedicated his life to quantum. Even he admits supremacy would be a temporary ‘Bletchley Park kind of situation’. Where you can’t let your opponent know you know. Else they’ll switch to quantum-resistant algos.

The time of quantum has not yet come.

IoT

Tweets joking about home appliances being unusable if something happens to the internet
Nobody wants this

Designer babies

The guy who went ahead and did it in 2018 is back at work. Smart people aren’t against it. Most likely, anyone who could afford it would buy their kid 5 extra IQ points in a heartbeat. I can’t see why not. And that makes me think this is already done in some places on the down low.

Thermonuclear

There has been some warming up to fission. Something we didn’t go all in on 70 years ago, preferring to boil the planet. But fusion is 25 years away, as it was at the start of the century.

U.S. stocks reaping the benefits of the nuclear renaissance
https://www.usfunds.com/resource/why-tech-giants-are-betting-big-on-nuclear-power/

A lot of the demand is coming from datacenters needing juice 24/7 to power AI. Our grid might finally get overhauled not to reap boons of energy too cheap to meter. But to power 10–100 GW facilities owned by Microsoft.

Would you have guessed 5 years ago there’d be a counterforce to the anti-nuclear watermelons?

UBI

I have strong hopes that zero interest-rate phenomena are on the way out. If Milei and DOGE do something about the waste, others will copy, and we’re so back. Otherwise, it’s so over.

We must keep printing money to manage 100%+ GDP debt and the demographic toilet bowl swirl.

Gold’s performance against the dollar since the fall of Bretton Woods
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/gold

Demand for capital to build out all the datacenters might arise. If AI-ification improves the broader economy as much as it does software development. But I’m not convinced even today. It could be that the data wall is insurmountable.

Population bust vis-à-vis scientific discovery

The realization that this might become an issue has gotten a lot of play recently. South Korea is going for extinction:

South Korea’s depressing population trend
https://populationeducation.org/a-population-history-of-south-korea/

All the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. For example, element 117 was discovered by an international collaboration who got an unstable isotope of berkelium from the single accelerator in Tennessee capable of synthesizing it, shipped it to a nuclear reactor in Russia where it was attached to a titanium film, brought it to a particle accelerator in a different Russian city where it was bombarded with a custom-made exotic isotope of calcium, sent the resulting data to a global team of theorists, and eventually found a signature indicating that element 117 had existed for a few milliseconds. Meanwhile, the first modern element discovery, that of phosphorous in the 1670s, came from a guy looking at his own piss. We should not be surprised that discovering element 117 needed more people than discovering phosphorous.

Combining these 2 ideas, one would surmise we’re royally fucked. Unless someone else starts chipping in on the research. AI has been doing so, with AlphaFold’s creators getting half a Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year. Gotta keep up hopes, but it feels like a Hail Mary.

“Overlooked” category:

Drones

In 2019, they were toys not worth mentioning, and thus off my radar. Reading war stories from Ukraine for going on 3 years now, I can’t imagine an army without drone battalions. They have rendered the tank almost useless. Modern militaries need EW and dirt-cheap anti-air capabilities yesterday.

The obesity drug

I can’t believe nature missed this free boost over 4 billion years of experimentation. Meaning there probably are strings attached. But when you’re carrying enough extra weight to trigger systemic inflammation and make exercise impossible, the cost-benefit math changes. I’d sure trade the well-known misery for a bunch of unknowns.

“Still confused about it” category:

China

The longer I live, the more I realize I know nothing about what is going on in the average Chinese mind. Ditto their leadership. Have they even realized the disruptive potential of AI? Are they gonna bomb us (or TSMC?) if they see they can’t compete? Are they already going past us because they don’t NIMBY power-hungry data centers?

Countries deploying the most new reactors
https://www.statista.com/chart/30912/countries-with-nuclear-power-plants-under-construction/

Have they ramped up spy efforts against the leading AI labs a ridiculous amount? Have they already “stolen the weights”?

Tweet about letting the Chinese steal my substandard contributions
https://x.com/CATIAManikin/status/1860383419210817897

Is it even possible to brainwash an AGI to believe all the CCP bullshit?

Them doing everything better due to being ~nonwoke or whatever hasn’t panned out at all. Stealing the patents, devaluing the currency is still the playbook. But even they tire.

Complacency

I’m hopeful we’re overcoming our bout of civilizational ennui. You really can just do things.

Here’s to more moonshot thinking. Less fear. Less tall poppy syndrome.

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Lauri Elias
Lauri Elias

Written by Lauri Elias

Not famous enough for a Substack

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