| Forget 20 years, go out 50-100 years. Given a prior where we haven't annihilated the top of the food chain to give the planet a new shot at intelligent life... We will have solved artificial intelligence and that's a game changer. It will create an age of limitless wealth. But what I wonder about is whether our hindbrains will insist on maintaining inequality in an age where everything is cheap and plentiful. And what will the AIs make of us? Who cares about health care if there's cheap immortality? That's the best healthcare of them all. But will we make it generally available or will we try to attach artificial value to it as an entitlement? And that's because once people stop dying from natural causes we're going to have a population problem. That means we're going to have to get off world. That also means that climate change becomes irrelevant because if we can terraform Mars etc, then tweaking the climate of the Earth is trivial. The one true god that has delivered on all of its promises is science and I don't think it's done delivering the good stuff. But it's also a wrathful and vengeful god in the wrong hands. But even then, I'd rather live in the above future then in a future where we continue all of our petty squabbles over which nation state is the best. That's creating misery worldwide. We could end hunger and homelessness today for pennies on the dollar. But we refuse to do so in favor of a huge military and prison industrial complex. All that's doing for us IMO is giving other countries a chance to leapfrog us mid-21st century. So I'd suggest you do as I am doing. Fight your own mortality to your dying breath and try to make a difference between now and your probably inevitable dirt nap because it might not be inevitable because we're heading for one hell of a phase transition (no singularity required). |
Uh-huh. We Boomers are still waiting for that electricity that's "too cheap to meter".