Techno-optimism for 2024

For those who recently started reading Noahpinion, I created this blog as an explicitly techno-optimist blog back in late 2020. The success of Covid vaccines and the explosion of renewable energy gave me hope that the conventional wisdom of the 2010s was wrong, and that technology really can solve a lot of our problems after all.
The years since then have only reinforced that feeling. Since I first started to believe in the Roaring 20s, we’ve gotten at least two huge technological surprises: absolutely stunning progress in generative AI, and the advent of the first really effective anti-obesity drugs in history. Those breakthroughs seemed to come out of left field, kind of like mRNA vaccines did, but this is an illusion; in all three cases, years of hard work and incremental progress suddenly reached a point where the technology was ready for prime-time. Which means that there might be a few more such surprises in store for us in the years to come; the decade has six years to go!
Why are all these breakthroughs coming in the same decade? I think some of it has to do with the productivity slowdown of 2005. When the burst of productivity from computerization and the early internet petered out, some private capital and government grants focused on incremental refinements, but some went in search of long-term breakthroughs that would reignite rapid progress. Now I suspect many of those efforts are bearing fruit. I think another factor is that the economy has running hot for most of the last decade, which gives companies both the spare cash and the incentive (high labor costs) to spend on innovation.
In 2021 and 2022 it seemed like productivity was flatlining, which raised a lot of doubts about the idea of a Roaring 20s. But in 2023 there seems to have been a re-acceleration:


Anyway, it’s time for my annual Techno-Optimism post, where I hype up some areas of technology that I’m excited about. This isn’t an exhaustive list, of course, but it hits the main highlights. I put a list of the previous years’ roundups at the bottom, so you can check and see what I mentioned in previous years, and decide whether my excitement was justified.
(Financial disclosure: I have invested in several startups related to the technologies in this post, including a battery-powered appliance company, a company that connects AI companies to cloud providers, an open-source AI startup, and a company that makes robots for drug testing. I would like to invest in a startup making consumer robots, if I find a good one!)