Important Research Areas

In case there weren't enough.

Source

This is more of a brain dump, you don’t need to read it.

Below is a big list of research ideas, adapted from my old writing; very few are original to me. I’m likely wrong about the value or tractability of some of these areas and I’m certainly unaware of all relevant work in each area. Some ideas have dual-use concerns, so I don’t necessarily endorse further research on all these topics.

Georgism in space: how do we adapt Georgist policy to encourage sharing and efficient use of resources in space?

Bootstrapping public goods: Can the revenue from a crowdfunding mechanism be used to subsidize another public goods funding mechanism? What incentive problems does this create?

Population growth targeting: Population growth and population aging is an important macroeconomic variable. Should monetary authorities target specific population growth rates like they target growth of nominal GDP?

Interpersonal utility comparison: Are there methods to interpersonally compare utilities or incentive-compatible schemes to self-report utilities?

Physical basis of externally-recognized personality: Some part of your brain makes your behavior unique and identifiable to other people. This structure persists for a lifetime and is robust to all sorts of perturbations. How is it encoded in our brains in such a robust manner? Is what makes you “you” much simpler than we think?

Deniable communication: Is it possible to communicate between people in a deniable way? That is, do be able to offer multiple decryption keys for your conversation so that you can deny any one of them being real?

FPGA swarm intelligence: FPGA’s can send and receive information over antennas, so several of them in a room could communicate with each other. They can also be reconfigured to run arbitrary computations. This looks a lot like a swarm intelligence or amorphous computing.

Deep ocean as an industrial heat sink: Industrial processes, datacenters, and buildings need cooling resources. The deep ocean is a massive cold sink at close to freezing temperatures that has little interaction with surface waters. Could we put a heat exchanger in the deep ocean for cooling purposes?

Bulk rock electrolysis: Grinding up rocks to process their ores accounts for 4% of global energy consumption, and is quite complex. Could we simply melt them down in a large furnace and electrolyze the melt to obtain useful elements? This would eliminate many steps of the mining process and reduce waste.

Retroactive public goods funding: Can funding public goods after-the-fact and giving creators tradeable impact certificates circumvent some of the problems with pro-active funding of public goods?

Optimal baby bonus and pronatal policy: How should states invest in population growth, if at all?

Relationship training: can we train people to have more and fulfilling relationships with family, friends, and partners?

Happier livestock: Animal welfare research, breeding, and genetic modification could make livestock happier, reducing suffering on factory farms.

The RNA memory hypothesis: Could some memories be stored as RNA? Could we use this to treat neurophychiatric disorders?

Endogenous neurogenesis: Can we transplant more brain cells onto someones brain to make them smarter?

Agent-based modelling for desining policy: Can we use LLM agents to simulate an economy and the effect of different policies?

Scalable surface sanitation: If far UV-C sanitation can clean the air, what can we do to cheaply clean surfaces? Coat high-touch surfaces in brass? Employ sanitizing robots?

Rapid tests of immune response: Having a test for how sick someone is can help us evolve diseases to be less virulent. People with a mild infection should mingle with others to spread the milder strain.

Modular peptide nanotechnology

Modifying the human compliment system: It seems like one could augment the human compliment system with certain designed proteins specific to a pathogen or utilize the compliment system on cancer cells. Alternatively, finding ways to downregulate the compliment system might help with inflammation or autoimmune diseases.

Genetics of neuron number between species. Humans have scaled-up primate brains, can we scale them up again?

Hydrogen aerostats to lift city-wide sunshades or lighting, raise gliders for drone shipping, and for communications infrastructure.

Hash-functions Based on NP Problems: It would be nice to have a hash function known to be secure. It might be straightforward to do reverse 3-SAT problems where one constructs a 3-SAT problem from a given answer. If this is the case, it would be hard to invert the function (solve the 3-SAT problem) but easy to verify that the solution is correct (though I’m not sure if there would be lots of collisions). This would give proof-of-work systems a useful task to complete.

One-time Programs: A cryptographic primitive that allows a user to run a program once, this would unlock a number of interesting applications. One limitation is the requirement for a small amount of secure hardware. But there is some interesting work on making this possible with existing services.

Certifiable Random Numbers: It’s possible to generate truly random numbers using quantum entanglement and a small random seed, assuming that nothing travels faster than the speed of light. Can small groups of individuals generate private keys using a small amount of quantum computation?

Computational Mechanics: Epsilon machine reconstruction seems useful for understanding neural networks, interpreting them, and identifying agents in physical systems.

Dyson’s Eternal Intelligence: What conditions of our cosmology would allow us to complete an infinite amount of computation?

Post-horizon Computing: If you are willing to make a one-way trip into a black hole, you may be able to observe solutions to computationally hard problems and engage in faster-than-light communication (though that communication can never leave). What are the limits of computation once you pass behind an event horizon?

Reversible Computing: This would dramatically lower the energy costs of computation. This might be a key enabling technology for brain emulations.

Entanglement-based Energy Transfer: It’s possible to use entangled bits and a heat bath to transfer useful work purely via communication. Can we do this in practice? Could we transfer work into a black hole and reduce it’s entropy?

Physical Unclonable Functions: Useful for identity systems and secure hardware.

MM Wave Mining: Quaise is using gyrotrons to vaporize rock and drill deeper geothermal wells. Could the gasses they generate be collected to cheaply obtain useful minerals or build tunnels?

Particle Beams for Asteroid Prospecting and Redirection: Laser coupled particle beams can maintain small spot sizes for extraordinary distances. This makes me think: could we use these beams to ablate asteroids and observe their elemental composition from afar? If we can ablate one side of an asteroid, could we steer it out of orbit? This would make asteroid mining and defense far easier.

Terraforming Venus: Mars and the moon get all the attention, but Venus is another potential destination for life. The existing proposals to inhabit or terraform Venus are unsatisfying to me. Instead of settling for airships or bombarding the surface with asteroids, starlifting hydrogen from the sun and reacting Venus’ atmosphere into organic compounds seems better.

Solar Effects on Albedo: Solar panels absorb a lot of light and generate heat, if we build enough of them, will this significantly increase the Earth’s albedo? Will it have effects on local climates? Is it feasible to put infrared reflectors on solar panels to reduce heating?

Cryptographically-provable Geolocation: Can someone offer cryptographic proof of their location? This has applications for location-based authentication, criminal law, e-commerce, and integrating sensor data (see also: FOAM Maps).

Dynamic Social Choice with Changing Population: Can we extend Harsanyi’s aggregation theorem to situations where members of the group are changing (via birth, death, or immigration)? Can this social choice be dynamically consistent?

Decentralized NGDP targeting: Can non-fiat currencies implement NGDP targeting without a centralized authority? The extra currency could be considered Seigniorage that could subsidize public goods funding mechanisms.

Optimal Subsidy of Monopolies: Monopolies under-produce the goods they provide. The natural solution is to subsidize their sales. But what is the optimal subsidy? How can policymakers determine the optimal subsidy when the monopolist is incentivized to misreport marginal costs? What problems arise from difficulties in identifying monopolies?

Incentive-Compatible Public Debate: Debate styles like Oxford-style debate don’t incentivize people to honestly report their opinions before or after the debate, making it hard to know who won. Are there ways to incentivize honest revelation peoples opinions?

Social Epistemology: What’s the right way to update on evidence obtained through your social network? You probably shouldn’t update “all the way” given that the evidence might be filtered. Given knowledge of your source’s motivations, can you determine how true their statements are?

Language Model Preferences: Do language models exhibit consistent preferences? This is an important thing to know when considering the moral standing of neural networks.

Aligning Recommender Systems: A simple step towards AI alignment, can we build recommender systems that learn to satisfy our preferences without manipulating them?

Interconverting Neural Networks and Programs: Interpreting neural networks and verifying their properties would be a lot easier if we could convert them into readable code. Alternatively, compiling code into a neural network might speed up training or make it easier to run.

Neuromorphic Computing and Memristors: Memristors are a hypothesized 4th circuit component that complements inductors, capacitors, and resistors. There have been some implementations, but none are ready for deployment. What new circuits can we build? Could memristors enable true neuromorphic computing?

Solar Sail Materials: Cheap, lightweight, and robust solar sail reflectors are a key component of interstellar travel. What materials are optimal for this task? Could we design metamaterials that are lighter and more effective than a solid material?

Solar Sail Bussard Ramjet: the Bussard Ramjet is a neat idea, but the interstellar medium is likely too dilute for them to work in practice. Could providing additional acceleration with a solar sail allow them to overcome these limitations?

Programmable Droplets: Moving small droplets around on a chip electrostatic-ally is a more flexible route towards lab on a chip applications. It might also enable small-scale chemistry experiments.

Calcium-based Nitrogen Fixation: Elemental calcium reacts with nitrogen in air to produce calcium nitride, which reacts with water to form ammonia. Could this chemical looping synthesis be a cheaper way to produce fertilizer?

Silicon Dioxide Electrolysis: Can we electrolyze molten sand to produce high purity silicon for solar cells and semiconductors?

Methane Chlorination: We have an abundant supply of methane, but it is pretty chemically stable, making it difficult to react into complex products. Much research is invested into methane activation. One interesting approach is to use chlorine (something we can obtain from seawater) to produce chloromethane, which is more reactive. Can we perform this process cheaply and react chloromethane into complex products?

Plastic to Oil: Similar to trash gassification highlighted in the last post, converting plastics back into oil is one way to recycle atoms. This would make landfills an important resource.

Universal Atomic Force Field: Researchers use force fields to approximate the true motions of atoms for materials simulation and drug design. People have applied machine learning to this problem, but the scope remains limited. I want an AlphaFold-style effort to produce a force field that is fast, parallelizable, universal, differentiable, and accurate.

Inverse Materials Design Using Electron Density: Electron density is in theory sufficient to describe all properties of a material. Can we design materials with desired properties via gradient descent on the electron density?

Sonochemistry: Careful application of soundwaves can create transient, extremely high pressures and temperatures. Could we use this to perform high-pressure synthesis without reaction vessels designed for extreme conditions?

Lithium-air batteries: These could have roughly the energy density of gasoline, unlocking new applications in robotics, electric planes, drones, and shipping.

Superlenses: Metamaterials can be used to perform sub-wavelength imaging. Could we use this to more precisely pattern materials and make even better superlenses?

Implosion Fabrication and Expansion Microscopy: These are clever ideas involving the controlled swelling and shrinking of hydrogels to create densely patterned materials and image biological samples. Can we design polymers that more consistently change shape to a larger degree? Can we iteratively apply these techniques to obtain larger volume changes?

Fragment Screening and Dynamic Combinatorial Chemistry: By screening molecular fragments for binding on a target, we can estimate which combinations likely bind a target well. Dynamic combinatorial chemistry allows us to directly combine these fragments to produce new molecules, evolving strong binding molecules directly. Can we compliment this with in silico approaches?

Diatoms for Microstructured Metal Oxides: Diatoms can create tiny, intricate structures out of silica. Is it possible for them to deposit other metal oxides? Copying the process might give us close to nanoscale precision over certain types of matter.

Small-molecule vaccines: A Fentanyl vaccine has been developed in rats. Using the immune system to counteract small molecules creates some interesting functionalities. Could use this to clear environmental toxins, counteract drugs, modify hormone levels, and target non-protein regions of pathogens.

Cholesterol Vaccines: Using the immune system to clear atherosclerosis or reduce cholesterol levels seems like a promising way to prevent cardiovascular disease, the #1 cause of death in the developed world.

Anti-evolution Drugs: Co-administering antibiotics with a drug that inhibits pathogen evolution could significantly slow or stop the development of antibiotic resistance.

Reverse Ribosomes: The central dogma of biology is that RNA gets converted into proteins, never the other way around. But most processes in biology are reversible, and there are many examples of proteins with inverted functionality. For example, transcriptase converts DNA into RNA, and reverse transcriptase converts RNA into DNA. Ribosomes carry out the process of translating mRNA strands into peptides, so is it possible to do the reverse? Reverse ribosomes would be a spectacular feat of engineering (and easily worth a Nobel prize). They would allow us to sequence proteins using high-throughput genomics, create self-replicating proteins, and employ directed evolution on proteins.

DNA Data Processing: New sequencing modalities like single cell sequencing and ticker tape DNA promise to generate massive amounts of data. But rather than read all the DNA into computer memory and process it, can we use the latent information processing capabilities of DNA directly? Simple DNA computing in-situ might report the most common sequences in a sample, summarize trends, or identify novel sequences.

Self-aggregating Proteins for Precision Fermentation: One problem with precision fermentation is the cost of separating out your desired protein from the growth media. Could we attach clotting proteins from the blood to our desired protein, aggregate them into a large blob, and cleave them out later?

Extremely Cheap Antibodies: Antibodies can be used to seek-and-destroy pathogens, immunoprecipitation of desired molecules, and medical tests. They act as a general search function for biotechnology. But all of these applications are limited by the high cost to produce monoclonal antibodies.

Recombinant Albumin: Making human albumin would allow more people to rejuvenate their blood (and slow aging) while artificial chicken albumin is a step towards artificial eggs.

C4 Rice: Rice and other important crops use a less efficient type of photosynthesis. Can we modify crops to be more efficient?

Blood Metagenomics: Can we sequence all of the DNA and RNA in a sample of blood to identify infections? See signs of cancer? Learn about our microbiome? Sequencing the nucleic acids in the blood could give researchers real-time detailed data on a persons health. At the population level, pathogen movement and evolution can be tracked by sampling people who volunteer as honeypots.

Anticipating Pathogen Evolution: Pathogens change surface proteins to improve binding or escape immune defenses. Can we predict and prepare for the kinds of changes a pathogen might make?

Rapid Tests for Pathogenicity: A pathogen-agnostic test for how bad an infection makes you feel can be used to domesticate diseases. By quarantining individuals with particularly virulent strains, the disease should evolve to be more harmless.

Iterated Meiotic Selection: This would allow for significantly faster iterated embryo selection.

Neural Augmentation: Human brain organoids can be transplanted into rats and participate in cognition. Could we perform a similar procedure in humans to increase intelligence?

Stent-electrode Recording Arrays: Putting electrodes on a stent is a less-invasive way to record and stimulate the brain. What are the limits of this technology? Could multiple stents be used to record different parts of the brain? Could techniques like fNIRS or fUS be performed inside the brain without interference from the skull?

Free-running Circadian Rhythm: Some people have a “free-running” circadian rhythm where they can choose to sleep at any time. Can we help other people escape the circadian prison?

Love Drugs: Can we improve peoples relationships with a daily pill? Should we? What about physical attraction? Should people pursue chemical friendships?

Multiplexed Drug Testing: Can we accelerate drug trials by trying several substances on each subject simultaneously? Changing the drug cocktail over time and using sophisticated data analysis might allow us to determine the effects of many drugs all at once.

Ultrasound Therapy and Diagnostics: Ultrasound can be used to activate brain regions, allow drugs across the blood-brain barrier, and visualize organs. Miniaturizing the technology and making it cheap offers a new level of control over our biology.

Personal Cooling Devices: Extreme heat is one side-effect of climate change which disproportionately affects developing countries. Extreme heat increases mortality, lowers productivity, and hurts test scores. Portable, battery-powered personal cooling devices might be cheaper and more efficient fix than A/C.

Health Effects of Saunas: There are some interesting correlations between sauna use and mortality. Could they help by inducing a temporary fever that kills pathogens? Could it trigger heat-shock proteins which perform protein clearing? How do they lower cardiovascular disease?

Depression, Chronic Illness, and Sleep: Sleep deprivation reduces depression symptoms and suppresses the immune system. Depression symptoms are similar to being chronically ill. Short sleepers have unusually low rates of depression. What are the relationships between sleep, the immune system, and depression? Could immuno-supression fix depression? Or sleep-reducing drugs?

Chronic Illness and Psychotherapy: Is there a relationship between immune system and brain that could explain chronic lyme, chronic fatigue, long COVID and other chronic illnesses? Mechanical back pain can be effectively treated with Sarno’s method, a form of psychotherapy. Given a connection between the nervous system and the immune system, could psychotheraputic methods treat these chronic illnesses? Finding a connection between the nervous system and cytokines might lend itself to effective pharmaceuticals as well.

Social Contagion of Mental Illness: To what degree does discussing mental illness lead to its spread? Could social media be causing an increase in mental illness?

Moral Bioenhancement: Could we modify ourselves to be more honest, open-minded, altruistic, and virtuous?

Social network cryptography. Having your social network verify your identity seems like a flexible, highly secure way to protect your digital life. Combined with passwords and biometrics, nobody has to have their identity stolen again.

Interventions to increase work desire. Keynes predicted a 15 hour work week. In some sense this is already happening, but it leaves something to be desired. Are there ways to increase how much people enjoy working? This is valuable because it increases growth and makes life more enjoyable.

Sleep research. Can we improve people’s sleep to make them more productive? Can we reduce the total amount of sleep people need to be productive?

Smart drugs for the elderly. What causes cognitive decline? Might it be possible to boost the intelligence of the elderly? Keeping innovators sharp into old age would have huge economic benefits.

Idea acceleration. Can we automate or accelerate the production of good ideas? Can we more efficiently search for good ideas? Can we streamline the process of refining them and putting them into practice?

Welfare Biology. Can we measure animal welfare? How do we improve it? Can we trade off between the needs of different species and make decisions on their behalf? What is the welfare of wild animals? Farmed animals? Should living things be uplifted?

Secure hardware. Is it possible to make provably secure hardware? Could hardware be verified? This is the most under-theorized part of the computational stack. We have methods for secure communication, secure software, and secure computation, but all of these require some amount of trusted hardware.

Long-term effects of minor infections. MS has been linked to Epstein-Barr virus, and some diseases are known to cause cancer. Paul Ewald theorized that many human diseases are caused by minor infections (heart disease, cancer, alzheimers, neurological disorders, etc.). To what degree is this true? Can we prevent these infections?

Blood filtering. Is it possible to remove toxins from the blood and slow aging? Could we filter triglycerides from the blood to reduce cardiovascular disease? Could we filter cancer cells to prevent metastasis?

Artificial dairy and eggs. Would make the vegetarian diet suffering-free.

Modified opioids. Could combined formulations of opioids, GAL-021, and naloxone make opioids safe and non-addictive?

Cryonics and cryobiology. Can we safely freeze tissues and revive them? This would be highly valuable for food storage, organ donation, and cryonics.

In vitro gametogenesis. This would allow anyone to create sperm and egg cells from their own cells, removing the need to surgically remove eggs, donate eggs, or donate sperm. It would also allow for multiplex parenting and increase the number of embryo’s parents could choose from.

Safe multi-implantation IVF. The costs of pregnancy could be dramatically reduced if it were safe to implant multiple embryo’s and carry a multiple pregnancy to term.

Variolation. Can we infect people in a controlled way to induce immunity and prevent pandemics?

Methane clathrates. These are a potential source of a lot of energy. On the other hand, they could lead to a climate catastrophe. Seems important to study. How much is out there? Is it accessible?

Trash Gassification. How do we break down waste into its component atoms and recycle it?

Wastewater treatment technologies. Can we efficiently recycle the water and atoms in our wastewater?

Marine cloud brightening. Is it possible to create artificial clouds to cool the planet, create rainfall, and control local weather?

City-wide climate control. Might it be possible to manufacture clouds, raise solar sails, or change air composition to control a city’s weather?

Explosive magnetic confinement fusion. Can clever magnetic confinement using explosive flux compression make fusion power possible? Can we use this for space propulsion?

Induced gamma emission from halfnium. A disputed result in nuclear physics. Offers up the possibility of storing and transferring massive amounts of energy with lower proliferation risks. Are there other nuclei which could support such nuclear states? Could these nuclear states be used for computing?

Space tethers. What materials would work well as space tethers? Logistically, what is required for these to work? Could they be useful for solar system commerce?

High-entropy alloys: A relatively new set of materials with interesting properties and a large, continuous space to explore. This type of disorder might present new avenues for materials science and condensed matter research.

Implosion fabrication for better lithography. Could implosion fabrication be used to shrink photo-masks and create better, cheaper computer chips?

Public goods funding experiments. Only a few public goods funding mechanisms have been studied theoretically, experimentally, and in the real-world. How do we crowdfund effectively without the help of other organizations? How can we get corporations and governments to collectively fund public goods?

Gravity-based energy sources. The gravitational potential energy of the moon is roughly 10³¹ Joules, which is almost 1 trillion times annual energy consumption. Might it be possible to lower pieces the moon slowly towards earth and generate energy? Moving 1 millionth of the moon and generating energy at 1% efficiency would generate enough energy to last almost 1000 years. This approach could be extended to other astronomical bodies.

Black hole engineering. Black holes may be an ideal way to produce, store, and transfer energy. They may also provide thrust for interstellar travel and ideal computers. Are these systems feasible? Black holes are almost like fundamental particles, with mass, charge, and spin. Is it possible to make black hole compounds? Black hole condensed matter physics?

Dark-energy based energy production. Is it possible (on cosmological scales) to use dark energy to generate energy? This would be valuable for interstellar civilizations.

Mad-dog Everettianism. It’s possible that our notion of distance comes out of quantum entanglement directly.

Vacuum entanglement. In some quantum field theories, parts of the vacuum are entangled and you can distill entangled qubits from it. Can we use this entanglement to communicate between galaxies, compute, or create wormholes?

Dark matter, dark energy, and entanglement. If the vacuum of space is entangled over long distances, could this explain phenomena like dark matter or dark energy?

Interpreting physical systems as minds. Can we discover agents hidden in the physical world? Can we discover the preferences of an agent merely by observing it?

RuBisCo engineering. The enzyme that turns CO2 into food is actually pretty bad it its job. Might we be able to engineer better plants? Alternatively, can we switch inefficient plants to a more efficient type of photosynthesis?

Small hydrogen zeppelins. Hydrogen is an easy-to-produce lifting gas. Might we be able to use hydrogen balloons in conjunction with drones for international shipping?

Enhanced geothermal. Geothermal energy anywhere on the planet would ensure access to cheap, clean energy while providing heat to important chemical processes. Advanced drilling techniques could also enhance mining.

Supercritical water gassification. Splitting water becomes much more efficient when it is supercritical. Creating supercritical water might be easy with enhanced geothermal. Supercritical solvents like water might also improve certain chemical processes.

Cooling spacecraft. What are scalable, cheap ways to release heat in space? This will be important for space manufacturing since dissipating heat in space is difficult.

Standardizing science. Can we standardize scientific experiments, materials syntheses, data workups, and publications in order to do research more quickly? This would make science more repeatable, transparent, and efficient.

Supervolcano mitigation. Are there ways to prevent supervolcanic eruptions?

Genetic resurrection. Is it possible to clone someone using only their DNA? What if they have passed away? What are the limitations? Might we be able to resurrect John von Neumann?

Obesity contaminants. Could some chemicals in our environment be responsible for obesity or other diseases?

Fuel and food from air using chemical processes. Can we synthesize food and other chemical products from carbon in the air (and the ocean)?

Alternative cattle feed. Some cow feed additives can dramatically reduce methane emissions, but can this scale? Its possible to synthesize volatile fatty acids from fuel, could these be added to cow feed to replace food crops? Some bacteria eat methane and can be added to cattle feed, might this be a more efficient way to produce food from fuel?

Changing length of childhood. Is it possible to influence peoples development socially, pharmacologically, or medically to change the length of childhood?

Monetary theory of competing cryptocurrencies. What kinds of cryptocurrencies will evolve under monetary competition? What monetary rules will they use? What niches will different currencies fill?

Seawater resource capture. Seawater may become a great source of atoms as energy becomes cheaper and may be especially useful for CO2 capture. Desalination brine may be another useful source of raw materials.

Electrochemical nitrogen reduction. Enables cheap production of ammonia using energy, water, and air. This could be used to make fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, or carbon capture agents.

Wireless power transfer. Has the potential to create a global energy market.

Lifestyle Nootropics. How do exercise, diet, sleep, sex, music, leisure, and other activities affect measurable productivity?

Nootropic Protocol. Psychiatrists often have heuristics for which medications to start a patient on and which ones to try next. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an agreed-upon sequence of nootropics to try in order to increase productivity?

VR for productivity. Can VR be used to boost productivity? Could VR become a good tool for thought?

Online collaboration. How can we make online teams more productive? Could dramatically increase the value of remote work and boost the world economy.

Vertical farming. Cheaply grow food and biologics anywhere with only energy and a few chemical inputs

Solar spirulina farming. It looks like its possible to grow nearly nutritionally-complete food from some chemical inputs and sunlight. Why not make this so cheap that everyone can synthesize their own food in their backyard?

Improving mammalian cell culture. Culturing mamalian cells is hard but fundamental to biology research and the manufacture of certain medicines. Improvements to the cell culture process could enable to organ printing, cultured meat, and artificial wombs.

Cancer-like cells for mammalian cell culture. Some cancer cells are very robust. Could we modify healthy cells to be more like cancer and improve mammalian cell culture?

Solar pumped lasers. Convert sunlight directly into laser light. Could be useful for efficient power transfer, optical computing, and photocatalysis.

Optical computing. Might we be able to convert sunlight directly into computations? Could this make computers more efficient?

Nuclear strategy. Are there ways to incentivize states to reduce stockpiles? Can stockpiles be verified? Could states commit fully to nuclear second-strike capabilities? Could technological developments accelerate this change?

Infectious disease dynamics. How will different diseases evolve over time? Can we manipulate their evolution to make them less harmful? How do social patterns change disease niches and evolution?

In vivo hypermutation. It looks like it’s possible to continuously modify living organisms and evolve them. This could accelerate directed evolution, allow for enhanced gene editing, and open the door to evolving new organisms.

Optimal science funding. How many resources should be devoted to research given the highly uncertain nature of research outcomes? How should funding be divided between projects?

Optimal x-risk funding. How much should society spend towards reducing existential risk? How should funding be allocated between different projects with uncertain outcomes?

Economics of charity. What are the economics of competing non-profits? How should charitable spending change as the economy grows? What is the optimal distribution of charitable funding between different projects?

Grabby aliens model. How can we update this model with new information and strategic insights? What are the implications for long-term strategy?

Self-funding public goods. Might it be possible to borrow from the future to increase the growth rate?

Open borders and political reality: How do we encourage more immigration without causing populist backlash?

Prediction Markets: A clearinghouse of information which gives everyone access to precise, decision-relevant judgements could have amazing benefits for business decisions, individual decisions, and policy decisions.

Fertility technology: How can we use technology make pregnancy and parenting safer, easier, and cheaper?

Brain Emulations: Perhaps the easiest way to achieve AI would be to make a copy of the human brain and just run it faster. Brains-on-computers have a lot of interesting implications discussed in Age of Em.

Fusion: It’s proponents claim limitless, clean energy. I’m not so sure, but even a new type of power plant with similar density and LCOE to nuclear, without all of the branding issues, would be useful for generating clean energy and valuable isotopes.

Automated Experiments: Like I noted before, science is slowing down, requiring more input for discoveries of similar impact. Part of this could be a Baumol effect where experiments performed by grad students and research are getting more expensive. What if we could run millions of tests simultaneously? We could literally test millions of different solar cell materials, cancer drugs, and superconductors to find the best ones to scale up. This vast amount of data will lead to new scientific insights as well, at a fraction of the cost of today’s experiments.

Bioreactors and Directed Evolution: With so many designer drugs, we will need a way to manufacture these compounds efficiently. Luckily, we already have tools for manipulating yeast and bacteria to make a variety of complex chemical products.

Brain Stimulation: This includes TCMS, transcranial pulsed ultrasound, and electrical brain stimulation. I will admit that the current state of the research seems suspicious since it’s hard to have proper placebo controlled studies. But the possibilities for general purpose treatment of mental illness and manipulation of mental states are too exciting to pass up.

Unconventional computing: quantum dot cellular automata, quantum computers, mortal computers, DNA computers, amorphous computers, thermodynamic computing and more. Can any of these paradigms beat the innovation machine that is semiconductor manufacturing?

For completeness sake, here are some other buzzwords that are interesting, but that I can’t be bothered to write about in more detail:

• Longevity research

• Brain-computer interfaces (including VR, AR, XR, etc.)

• Artificial intelligence

• 3D printing

• Predictive processing and active inference

• Zero-knowledge proofs

• Quantum cryptography, game theory, and computing

• Alcubierre drive

• Computational neuroscience

• Nuclear batteries

• Constructor theory

• Lattice cryptography

• Indistinguishability obfuscation

• Lattice Boltzmann methods

• Compliant mechanisms

• Plasma wakefield particle accelerators

• Moveable and modular houses

• Synthetic diamonds

• Optically pumped magnetometer-based magnetoencephalography

• Nuclear propulsion

• Rotating detonation engines

• Rotating detonation scramjets

• Reusable rockets

• Next-generation lithography

• Program equilibrium

• The effect of altruism on public goods funding mechanisms

• Dusty plasma for solar sails, radiators, and self-organizing particles

• Field-programmable gate arrays

• Multiparty computation and zero-knowledge

• Multiverse-wide cooperation and interaction

• Automated chemical synthesis

• Q-drive interstellar travel

• Digital twins and the metaverse

• Optimal redistribution

• Matching markets