The Decisive Benefit Of Weak Psychic Powers

In fiction, often psychic powers are portrayed as extreme, ultra-powerful abilities. But even very modest powers could provide a profound advantage.

Take psychokinesis, the power to physically manipulate things with your mind. Suppose that your psychokinetic power is very weak. You have a range of just ten centimeters. You have a strength and coordination comparable to that of a single hand of first grader.

What can you do with that?

You can open locked doors that don't require a key to unlock from the inside. You can shock someone in your close proximity by socking them in the nose or ears or poking them in their eyes. You can trigger the car alarm on someone else's keys when you are near them, or pick pocket their keys or wallet. You can retrieve jewelry that has fallen into a drain or a sink. You can turn cut the power to a car by pressing a start button or turning a key in the ignition from the passenger's seat. You can zip up or button the back of your dress that you can't reach with your hands. You could pull the trigger on a concealed firearm without moving your hands towards it. You could create a distraction by opening a faucet.

Take telepathy, who can communicate silently with their mind. Suppose that you are a very weak telepath. You have to be touching someone for it to work. You can't communicate outright words or images, only vague urges or strong feelings.

What can you do with that?

You could easily determine if someone is living or brain dead, or if they are human or a robot. You could tell if they were seething with rage inside despite having a calm and civil demeanor. You could manage your relationships better. You could help someone understand you when you can't speak even if you can't be very specific.

Consider pyrokinesis, the power to create or manipulate fire with your mind. You are weak. You have a range of perhaps ten centimeters, and can only make a little spark.

What can you do with that?

Sure, you can light a cigarette or a candle or gas stove, when your matches are wet and you don't have a lighter. But you could also trigger pretty much any fuel tank to explode. You could start a wildfire in the vicinity of flammable materials like dry grass. You could squelch the trigger to a stick of dynamite. You could use it to signal a coded message as you flicked it on and off. You could burn the inside of someone's mouth, or singe or ignite their greasy hair, or create the equivalent of a cigarette burn in some unexpected place to distract them so they'd unhand you.

Consider the ability to see into the future, but very weak. Only within the range of your senses and only for a few seconds in advance.

What can you do with that?

This is essentially the main edge that the Jedi have in Star Wars, allowing them to be just a little bit ahead of people that are fighting them. It could allow you do avoid all manner of accidents. It could prevent you from being betrayed by someone at the last minute, or just prevent you from doing something embarrassing. It might allow you to defuse a bomb by foreseeing what happens if you cut the red wire. It could be very useful on game shows. You could win every time at rock-paper-scissors, or could allow you to know whether to call heads or tails in a coin flip.

You can imagine similar ways that other psychic powers, even if extremely weak, could be game changing. 

Random Thoughts And Predictions

* Fraternity gang rape was a widely acknowledge problem thirty-five years ago when I was in college. Apparently, nothing has changed.

* People in the developed and developing world are having fewer children. The extent to which this is happening and the pace at which this is happening is something that most people, even educated elites, don't fully really comprehend. It isn't necessarily a bad thing. Resources will be spread over fewer people, allowing the people who are around to face less scarcity. But I'm not sure anyone has really carefully thought through how it will change society, even though, in a lot of ways, it is a very predictable thing.

* One counterbalancing factor is that I don't think people really appreciate the extent to which medical advances will transform society either. People will live longer and will be healthier during their lives. Sickness and injury, even old age, are fundamentally solvable problems.

* Much of Africa, and pockets like Afghanistan and Gaza elsewhere, are still basically undeveloped. But those pockets will predictably experience economic development and demographic transitions too, just a bit later than the rest of the world. Indeed, the rate at which they experience economic development, once it really gets going, may actually be faster, because they can learn from the rest of the world's experience.

* Fossil fuels will become irrelevant, or at least much less economically important, with renewables, a mild resurgence of nuclear power, and EVs. This will topple a lot of autocracies. This will allow global warming to level off - still at a much hotter level, but that trend won't continue forever.

* The U.S. may be a generation or two behind Western Europe in secularizing, but its getting there. How will Christianity transform as it becomes a minority religion despite being the plurality religion of theists in the U.S. for the foreseeable future?

* Maybe AI will be a transformative technology, maybe it won't. Ditto for quantum computing. 

* There will be bumps along the way, but we do seem to be on a path towards mass production scale self-driving vehicles that make a large share of all vehicles.

* So far, the path towards urbanization has been steady for two or three centuries. Will remote work change that? I don't think that remote work is going away and I expect it will only become more common.

* Will falling birth rates take the economic pressure off of a switch away from red meat, which takes the most land and water per pound of any kind of food?

* Climate change should eventually push people away from the Southern U.S. and further north, particularly to the water rich Midwest.

* It won't take too many generations for mixed race "mutts" to become the norm and for single race people to become much less common, and this will probably drive changes in the way that we classify race socially. In much the same way that Italians, Germans, Scandinavians, Irish, Dutch, Russian, Greek, English, and Scottish people all collapsed into a broad "white" category in which lots of white people don't even know which European countries were home to their ancestors, I think that we'll see similar collapsing of categories now thought of as distinct into a general "brown" category that is a bit analogous to mestizos in Mexico, but with significant East Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, and Polynesian contributions in addition to European and Native America, and with non-negligible African ancestry contributions.

* We've seen the future of war in Ukraine. It is hard to say if it will be stabilizing or destabilizing. What does equilibrium look like in a spy v. spy escalation of drones and AI?