I'm sure there are many perspectives one could reasonably take here. But for me, the answer is clear. The most interesting, most important thing in the history of the universe is life.
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So, again, our story: Big Bang. 10 billion years of boredom. Then life! And 4 billion years of natural selection. Then brains+culture! And a ~million years of cultural evolution later, with all of our farms and factories and computing devices, here we are.
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If this view of history has merit, it suggests that the next truly transformative step will involve a new modality for cumulative learning. Is this AI? Machine learning? The answer is "definitely maybe." But we're certainly not there yet.
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AI systems of today are like the brains of early animals. They're capable of some cool feats of learning, but there's nothing cumulative about them. They're built, they learn a few things, and then they dead-end. Where feedback loops exist, they all pass through human culture.
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The big thing to watch for, then, are AI systems capable of self-sustaining knowledge accumulation. An open-ended machine culture. It's a ways off — but it's coming, and it's very important.
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Actually, we've seen two further events at which the learning/growth rate increased as much as it did with the first human cultural learning: farming, and industry.
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Totally. I'm attempting to pull even farther back — but my vision gets blurry at this distance :). If you had to pick only two inflection points in all of history, what would they be?
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There could be an argument that the invention of technologies of persistent symbols (writing) was one of these big transformations, certainly qualifies as a new modality for learning compared to strictly oral cultures.
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Or maybe from a future perspective (currently unimaginable) writing, printing, and computation will all seem like stages of a single transformation, the development of external technologies for language and mind.
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The next big transformative step has to involve a decrease in systemic risk (eg colonizing another planet?). Otherwise, if learning speed is too high, there is evolution against a non-representative sample of the environment, which makes a species/system vulnerable to black swan
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The other candidate is telepathy - neural interfaces used for social purposes (which they inevitably will be). I suspect we're missing concept for thinking accurately about what that will mean.
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