Damien Jemison/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
- Humanity could be on the brink of making major progress in multiple areas of science.
- These are artificial intelligence, room-temperature semiconductors, and nuclear fusion.
- A lesson from ChatGPT: people get excited by progress when they understand what it means.
Exactly a decade ago at the Milken Institute's annual jamboree in 2013, a discussion among some of Silicon Valley's most powerful figures weighed up a critical question: Where's the good stuff?
Peter Thiel, billionaire investor and panelist at the event, reckoned it was fair to ask if all innovation could offer was iPhones that allow people to send pictures of their cat halfway around the world. Not the most compelling reason to be a techno-optimist, by his estimation.
It's not a surprising attitude from the man who also said "we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters."
Happily for Thiel, the good stuff may be coming. But the techies and scientists need to get better at marketing their wares.
Almost anyone who regularly uses the internet will have understood, en masse, the potential of artificial intelligence thanks to OpenAI's release of ChatGPT, a chatbot application that brings the company's underlying GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 large language models (LLM) to life. LLMs have been around for years, but the average consumer only understood their importance when they could see in a tangible way how powerful they can be. That mass understanding has undeniably supercharged the field of AI.
Other equally society-changing discoveries may be on the way, and should provoke as much public excitement.
In South Korea last month, researchers declared the discovery of the world's first room-temperature, ambient pressure superconductor – a rock-like material known as LK-99. If real, that could do away with the massive amounts of electrical waste we have today and open, in the view of its original researchers, "a new era for humankind."
Since the findings were not peer-reviewed, the announcement was first met with skepticism. A paper submitted by researchers at the Peking University in Beijing on August 6 suggests the initial excitement may be overblown. Efforts remain underway to replicate a room-temperature superconductor's creation. Still — few people understand the significance of discovering a room-temperature superconductor.
It has also emerged that US scientists have achieved "net energy gain in a fusion reaction" for the second time, per the Financial Times; it adds significant heft to the case made by nuclear-energy advocates who say nuclear is nothing to be scared of and a good source of green energy.
Hard science needs good PR and marketing
OpenAI's chatbot has enjoyed a rare level of popularity. It might take similar efforts to translate hard-science discoveries into tangible benefits for the average human.
Another issue, according to Silicon Valley accelerationist crowd, is apparent fear of progress.
Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist and Thiel's co-panelist at the Milken Institute conference back in 2013, took the view during a recently aired podcast that the world has "bifurcated into two domains" since the 1970s that have split out where progress can and can't be made.
In Andreessen's view, the world of "bits" that constitutes everything from the internet to social media has seen staggering leaps forward, while the world of "atoms" that constitutes things like nuclear energy has been lost to decades of stagnation.
"If you're in the virtual world it's like wow. It's amazing, everything is spectacular," he said. "The minute you get into a car, the minute you plug something into a wall, the minute you eat food, you're still living in the 1950s."
That stagnation occurs in part, according to Andreessen, because of what happens when a new technology interacts with social systems: "What it does is it threatens to upend the social order," he said on the Hermitix podcast.
Innovations in the atomic world seem to be even more consequential than those of the digital world, in Andreessen's view, saying this is why there were bans on new nuclear power stations in the 1970s in places like California.
The impact of any new technology on society should be thoroughly examined. OpenAI's Sam Altman has been put through the ringer by Congress and other lawmakers globally on AI's potential impact on jobs, misinformation, and potential to sway elections.
But if Andreessen and his ilk want the general public to get excited by nuclear energy and superconductors, they have the answer in their own backyard in ChatGPT. Humans need to see and understand the benefits of progress for themselves.