and he is spot on with artificial meat. The artificial meat impact on our civilization will be comparable with that of beginning of meat eating by apes 2M years ago.

Once more nutritious than natural, the artificial meat will allow to overcome the current energy limitation on our brain.

Once artificial meat becomes mainstream and eating natural meat become obsolete, the human race will be able to overcome obsolete concepts wrt. human/animal intelligence, which will have profound effect on social ethic and intelligence (the share of human civilization resources going into issues of violence, enforcement (of bad rules onto good people and good rules onto bad people), wars, etc... is staggering - more than half), and, in particular, as a side effect, will open our mentality to outside contact as well.

> Once more nutritious than natural, the artificial meat will allow to overcome the current energy limitation on our brain.

I think you could rather drink a mixture of a protein, vitamin, oil, enzymes, etc, shake today - and get the same effects, than wait for your enhanced meat product.

The energy limitation was also a leap, when apes (or whatever) started eating meat, and later humans (or whatever) started using fire to cook their foods. And then bigger, more thoughtful, brains could be sustained.

There really is nothing more to improve on that will give you better than marginal results from this point in time. And even then, you'd have to wait for evolution to take its course and produce (well, perpetuate) whatever DNA is required to produce a bigger brain over a millennium or even longer... Assuming that's even a trait that is capable of producing more offsprings than in those that don't have that trait.

>And even then, you'd have to wait for evolution to take its course and produce (well, perpetuate) whatever DNA is required to produce a bigger brain over a millennium or even longer...

the previous 2M were spent on this extensive option - increasing the size (that was enabled by meat eating), and i think we pretty much exhausted that venue. The next step is increasing the intensity of using that big brain. We use only small portion of it, and prolonged sustained thinking activities are very exhausting to our bodies in particular because it consumes a lot of energy. Evolutionary biological changes increasing brain efficiency would take long time (btw, it is very educational to read about specifics of Enstein's brain). This is why in historical short term only increasing of energy intake seems to be a viable option.

Energy surplus is a huge public health problem. Also, the brain runs on glucose, fancy meat isn't going to help with that.

Oh Please. Is OLPC kind of idea good for science fiction? Is it transformative enough? How about Khan Academy? How about Square's idea of empowering small businesses? How about Henry Ford's idea of mass producing cars? Or for god's sake, how about Google's original idea of "searching the web"?

No, the first tablet was transformative. Here the quote means achieving something, not necessarily making it widespread.

A => B doesn't mean B => A. "If it's considered sci-fi, it's probably transformative enough" does not follow from his words.

I think in this case it does. Can you think of anything sci-fi that would NOT be transformative enough?

Three-dimensional chess. (Not really disagreeing. Just couldn't turn down the challenge.)

Video phones also turned out to be kind of boring, once they stopped being part of the shiny future and started being part of the present.