Regarding global warming: I’m not seeing the panic. The general vibe I’m picking up in the UK from things like newspapers is that it could be a big problem, but nobody really seems to understand what’s going on and some suspect it’s a scam. Companies are in on it in order to be politically correct, but the average person on the street is only mildly concerned as far as I can tell.

Regarding “new” technologies: most of the publicly visible change hasn’t been about new technology, but rather the maturation of existing technology. I think this is often the case. For example, the internet wasn’t new technology in the 1990′s. In terms of fundamental technological change, I think the story of the 2000′s was the fact that the price of computation (assuming you’re willing to compute in parallel), and the price per bit of communication, has continued to fall exponentially. It was on the back of this that things like Youtube became possible. Youtube itself required almost no innovation at all.

Regarding the longer term rate of change: I think the amount of change seen this decade has been roughly typical of the last century. We haven’t had any really stand out events like moon landings or nuclear weapons, though.

Regarding the next decade: I don’t expect more change in the next decade, I’m actually suspecting that we might see less, at least in terms of visible change. Sort of a continued maturation of all things internet and mobile. The fundamental change I’m expected is a broader understanding of the brain, better machine learning algorithms, and continued exponential growth in computer power. However I think we need at the least 10 years, and maybe 20 years of progress in these areas before their significance starts to become publicly visible.

I look forward to seeing your decade predictions on lesswrong. I’m trying to come up with some myself, but I’m finding it pretty hard going as the changes that interest me still look more than a decade out.

I’m pretty sure Obama was a rare event. I would have put it even lower than 1%.

I’ll probably make some predictions on http://www.lesswrong.com. In general I have found that people who made predictions on the long bets web page haven’t actually taken me up on the bets when challenged.

I think that Roko is being overconfident, as arguments for SL4 positions were presented to him more thoroughly than to most people and he isn’t accounting for this.

As a lowly post doctoral student, calling me a “high priest” of anything is a bit of an exaggeration.

We shall call the next decade: “prelude to singularity” ;-P

What we’ll see in the next decade: the rise of India, the over-reach and fall back of China. Ubiquitous mobile internet. Dominance of the smartphone format. Mobile carriers forced (by Google?) to become neutral data pipes. Hot war for control of free speech and copyright on the internet. Ebooks obliterate paper books at retail. Transhumanism enters mainstream culture. Augmented reality gets big for games and information. The first driverless cars appear on roads. Electric cars start their rise. Key-words: mobile, ubiquitous, data.

I am not a Singularitarian nor really that enthusiastic about unfettered AGI but deriding the high priests of the techno-paradigm while calling for a flowering of pre-Enlightenment systems of belief such as has not been seen since the days of the mystery religions of the ancient world is the pot calling the kettle black and even beyond.

There is no doubt that for people confronted with mysterious technologies there will be some kind of “spiritual renaissance” but we’ve seen that before…

There are serious critics of techno optimism but even the “spiritually inclined” look nothing like your demented blog, a shockwave, yeah! a tsunami… of stupidity.

There are indeed true believers in the Singularity who see your apocalyptic eschatology as possible and desirable, you are just the mirror image of theses nutcases.

As for being eager to create “machines who surpass themselves” haven’t you noticed that every machine created so far (beyond plain hand tools) does surpass man in some respect?

Some predictions for 2015 would be good too, or even earlier… then you won’t have to wait a decade to get some data points.

Be warned: it’s hard coming up with objectively measurable predictions. At least, I’m finding it hard!

Interesting point. I could make a wide variety of 2020 predictions and then, in 2020, judge the accuracy and calibration of my predictions.

“SL4s believe that the creation of qualitatively smarter-than-human intelligence could result in discontinuous levels of progress.”

That is rather vague – but also pretty nutty sounding.