The only things I can think of are:

1) AI. Somehow, we finally get the AI working, and it somehow produces a lot more jobs. I really think the opposite will happen, but who knows.

2) Climate Change. The ever rising waters and the ever worsening storms will cause nations to re/build large infrastructure projects. Think seawalls and repairing the NYC subway. I don't think that will be good, as it'll mostly just be debt spending, but who knows.

3) Biotech. With CRISPR and optogenetics combined, the ability to safely edit in vivo will explode. Change your eye color to pink in a week. New fruits and veggies. Everyone has a really skinny body-type. Etc. The FDA and other nation's agencies will be hesitant, but it'll happen either way. I think this has the biggest chance, though the time horizons are much longer than we are used to, maybe centuries.

> it somehow produces a lot more jobs.

Recall a few days ago some people were trying to reconstruct the genome of the first black man in Iceland. There's no way anyone could have a job doing that in anything but a very wealthy society.

In other words, AI won't create jobs in manufacturing, but it will enable unexpected jobs to be created that would otherwise not be cost-effective.

> Recall a few days ago some people were trying to reconstruct the genome of the first black man in Iceland.

Recall who funded that work.

Nobody would have funded or volunteered for that work if they were concerned with getting enough food put away to survive the winter.

Automation reduces costs. As long as those costs savings are passed on to the consumer that's a good thing.

Maybe. But the issue is growth percentages. Others point out that 3% is now high. The question is if the fractalization of the economy (that AI may allow) will increase the growth rate to 5% or something.

#1 Seems more likely to destroy jobs than create them. It could be an engine for growth, but self driving for example have taken a long time and vast investment. It's useful, but seems to have limited direct benefits.

#2 is a broken window fallacy. It may create some up months, but you need increased productivity for sustained growth.

#3 Biotech has been around for a long time. It's a world of hard problems, and again you need increased effecency not novelty to drive sustained growth.

4) Unmanned mining in space - as automation and machine learning progress capturing the right asteroid could bring in a few Billion or Trillion worth of nickle or whatever.

Honestly, I'm bearish on space mining. The Earth has a lot of unexplored volume left. The oceans' floors are relatively unexplored in terms of mineral wealth, even just 100 miles offshore. Antarctica is also a giant mystery, with many potentially rich mountain ranges sitting under 1/2 mile of ice. Heck, in Australia people will buy land, walk around, and just find nuggets of gold sitting on the dirt, it's something of a 'thing' there [0] So, 10k/lbs flight costs aren't cheap enough yet to justify the very hazardous environment and delta-V costs. Maybe in a century, but for now it's a ways off.

[0] http://www.mining.com/this-australian-man-just-found-a-massi...

Well, there is significant investment in this space (har har), with timelines much closer than a century making investors open their wallets today. And costs aren't really relevant in isolation, it's the ROI that matters.

Space mining is not the answer to things we can find otherwise on the ground. It is the answer to how we build things in space, and get things we can't get in bulk down here. The right rock could reshape our relationship to some of the rare earth metals, for example. Mining en masse in remote regions is no picnic, so if hundreds of millions invested in going up can bring many billions down on demand, the economics will make sense. Mining Antarctica for hundreds of millions of tonnes for a not-so-interesting minerals offers an upside that pales in comparison to the amazing nuggets we have floating around the solar system...

And if the economics are sound, technologically: if you combine a UAV and a brain about as good as we get in a Tesla you're just a few rockets away from some insane riches and the power to crush terrestrial markets on a whim... No soup for you <mineral producer>... that's the kind of thing Billionaires dream of.

The promises of low and micro g manufacturing, the decreasing weight requirements and increase intelligence systems, and holding the economic 'high ground' for humanities next step offer the potential to move the needle more than a little. Launch tech is the big bottleneck, so keep an eye on SpaceX :)

> it's the ROI that matters.

So true!

Your points about some unknown material/process in space being the key are correct. However, I don't think there is anything up there that we can't figure out how to make down here. There are some long, single grain, high weight elemental crystals that we can't make here, but they also takes millions of years to cool down in a vacuum. Space is really empty, and there really aren't any magic rocks up there. It's mostly just feldspar.

> he computer boom is mostly over with the low hanging fruit taken. Prior to that we had IC engines and electricity, but nothing on the horizon seems to have that kind of potential to radically reshape society. And to double the economy every 25 years you need regular dramatic shits.

Then the next revolution happens. I'm sure people were pessimistic during periods of lesser innovation before electricity, telephone, phonograph, movie camera, consumer appliances, radio, television, PCs, internet, smartphones... there's always something new. There may be many reasons to believe there won't be 3% growth — "the computer boom is mostly over" is not one of them.

That's where Peter Thiel screwed up in his pessimistic premise about flying cars vs tweets (used as an illustractive example of course).

At the same time Thiel was making that claim, CRISPR, AI, robotics, VR/AR, blockchain/crypto-currencies and a massive general leap in automation were working their way into the economy. We're also about to take a leap forward when it comes to space tech and transportation improvements (from electric vehicles, electric planes, to hyper-loop and subterranean tunnel transport, those are all likely only the beginning of a new generation of transport tech; the power of combining electric vehicles + radically better software + lower cost, will be vast and will remake every nation). To add to all of that, China throws a big X factor into the global economy, they'll add additional spark to invention/innovation, accelerating competition and improvement between the US-Europe-Asia (Thiel's observations apply primarily to a time range when China was dirt poor, as recently as 1994 they had a mere $500b in GDP).

What's more important, flying cars (which are wildly impractical even if you can do it well), or curing Hepatitis C? We did the latter at the same time Thiel was expressing his pessimism. At least 70 million people have Hepatitis C world-wide. Flying cars are a joke by comparison to the extraordinary scientific accomplishment of wiping out HepC over the next two decades. Thiel set up his bold premise at exactly the wrong time.

Most of those innovations however seem to be playing "catch-up" though and there's a huge question mark as to whether most (not necessarily all) of the benefit goes to capital holders. Even the innovations that do benefit as a percentage how much do they lift living standards by compared to innovations of old? Electricity meant I had light at night; think of your local neighborhood without sewerage, etc.

They are also "costing a lot more" in terms of training and intelligence so there's a question mark of how much the average person without capital or privilege can access them. For me there's also a question of whether they are just playing catch up for increase in human population that's happened since the WW2 era - how many are not required if we just reduce population? Per capita are we really better of? There's a reason a lot of people are "nostalgic" for the period before the 1990's. There's also the negative things to consider of all this "innovation" such as environmental degradation, the massive increase in CO2 emissions, etc.

The "stagnant" economy (e.g food, land, health care) - the things most people need to survive comfortably have been increasing in cost significantly for most world economies. The innovations you state most of the world's population (who are mostly poor btw) would happily trade away for cheap more nutrient rich food, house, cheaper energy, etc.

Not saying hyperloops, blockchains and such aren't cool; I'm just questioning whether technology alone is what improves our quality of life. And all technology requires energy which is generally increasing in cost.

There's quite a bit on the horizon with potential to reshape society. Self-driving cars is perhaps the most obvious example, and the underlying technologies of computer vision and deep learning seem likely cause automation revolutions in a number of other fields.

AI should bring growth to GDP, but it will also most likely bring about even further concentration of wealth and income. The long-term results could depend a lot on public policy.