Science and fundamental research budgets should be much larger, and at least 20% of those funds should be spent on things that most experts assure us are “impossible.”

It is today these “impossible” technologies that we use daily.

Electricity, LEDs, lasers, airplanes, solar power, nuclear power and the internet entire among them.

When people tell me that things like AI are not possible, I just laugh because I know the history of science very well. The vast majority of people — even experts — said the same things about the technologies I listed.

After all as physicist Max Tegmark said, “Our brains are a bunch of particles obeying the laws of physics, and there’s no physical law precluding particles from being arranged in ways that can perform even more advanced computations.”

Anything that doesn’t directly violate the laws of physics I wouldn’t count humans out of being able to do at some point.

It’s strange that we’ve come to the point that many people now argue that because something is hard that it is not worth doing. Making strong AI is hard. Fixing global warming is hard. Halting senescence is hard. Averting an asteroid before it wipes out life on earth is hard.

Me, I like doing things both because they are worth doing and because they are hard. Otherwise they usually aren’t worth doing anyway.

I just can’t understand the, “Well, it’s hard therefore it’s impossible so I’ll just do nothing” mentality.