What is The Next Paradigm Shift For The World?
I don't know what it will be but I think I know when it will happen.
Some of you have heard of the Singularity. It was introduced in Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. I remember reading this in 2005, and all the predictions were so far in the future. The future is a lot closer now. He predicted in 2045 the rate of innovation would be so fast there would be no way to speculate what happens after it.
Before that date however he predicted:
Late 2020s: Longevity Escape Velocity. This means that if you can make it to the late 2020s, the rate of new life extension procedures will give you more time to get to the next life extension procedure and so on until eventually it will go on indefinitely.
2029: Human-Level AI (AGI). This has already happened. Especially if you take into consideration what people in 2005 thought this meant. They keep moving the goal posts but AI already performs better than 99% of doctors, lawyers, phD in their field.
Early 2030s: Computers Inside the Brain. This happened in Jan of 2024 with the first person getting a Neuralink implant.
Here is a list of things that radically changes human life:
Fire — ~1,000,000+ years ago
Agriculture — ~990,000 years later
Writing — ~7,000 years later
Printing Press — ~4,400 years later
Scientific Revolution — ~160 years later
Industrial Revolution / Steam Power — ~160 years later
Electricity Age — ~110 years later
Transistor — ~60 years later
Integrated Circuit — 11 years later
Personal Computer — ~20 years later
Internet / World Wide Web — ~15 years later
Smartphone Era — ~16 years later
Modern AI (LLMs) — ~15 years later
Agentic AI Systems — ~2–4 years later
I would also throw the Nintendo Entertainment System in there somewhere. (Only half joking)
We are now that the point where huge technological shifts will be happening on a regular basis. Looking at the progress here, it seems likely within the next 1-3 years some new technology will be available to us. The important thing to understand about this list is each item on the list made the next thing easier to achieve.
What is it going to be? I personally think nuclear fusion is a very likely candidate. The power needed by AI is extraordinary, which incentivizes people working on fusion even more. Who ever develops it will be in the same position Rockefeller was in back in the day. The good news if it happens is it supplies almost unlimited energy to our planet and solves some of the biggest issues facing us.
Not only can we run more manufacturing with no c02, but we can manufacture DAC (Direct Air Capture) which will pull c02 out of the atmosphere and reverse climate change.
I think all other contenders for paradigm shifts, for instance personal robots, are behind the bottleneck of virtually unlimited power.