Regulatory and economic barriers are probably the easiest to overcome. But they are an obstacle. All it takes is for public sentiment to turn a bit more hostile towards technology, and progress can stall indefinitely.
> Opening with the recursively improving AGI and then having a section of "areas of promise for step-function improvements" and not mentioning any chance of an AGI breakthrough?
The premise of the article is that the hardware that AGI (or really ASI) would depend on may itself reach diminishing returns. What if progress is severely hampered by the need for one or two more process improvements that we simply can’t eke out?
Even if the algorithms exist, the underlying compute and energy requirements might hit hard ceilings before we reach "recursive improvement."
> How many autoimmune diseases have been cured, ever? Where does this “Probably” come from — the burden of proof very much lies with that probably.
The point isn't that we're there now, or even close. It’s that we likely don’t need a step-function technological breakthrough to get there.
With incremental improvements in CAR-T therapies — particularly those targeting B cells — Lupus is probably a prime candidate for an autoimmune disease that could feasibly be functionally "cured" within the next decade or so (using extensions of existing technology, not new physics).
In fact, one of the strongest counterpoints to the article's thesis is molecular biology, which has a remarkable amount of momentum and a lot of room left to run.
> We might not be that far away from a plausible space elevator.
I haven't seen convincing arguments that current materials can get us there, at least not on Earth. But the moon seems a lot more plausible due to lower gravity and virtually no atmosphere.
But I'd be very happy to be wrong about this.
> Based on what we know today, there isn’t “a” plateau — there are many, and they give way to newer things.
True. But the point is that when a plateau is governed by physical limits (for example, transistor size), further progress depends on a step-function improvement — and there's no guarantee that such an improvement exists.
Steam and coal weren't limited by physics. Which is the same reason why I didn't mention lithium batteries in the article (surely we can move beyond lithium to other chemistries, so the ceiling on what lithium can deliver isn't relevant). But for fields bounded by fundamental constants or quantum effects, there may not necessarily be a successor.