So what if it will take another 30 years? Barely 71 years ago MIT demonstrated one of the first Numerical Control mill for manufacturing [1] that gave us the world as we have it today: from our chairs to our CPUs, nothing could be obtained so fast/cheap/good without automated milling, molding, and so on. It just seems completely unimaginable how by 2094 we won't have synthetic agents being not only great tutors, but also replacing every job that we have today or we will be able to imagine in the interim.
The problem is then with our mental models, our economics, our metaphysics, not with the technology.
Well the world may have burned in 30 years (that doesn't seem unlikely at all). So I can perfectly imagine that by 2094 we don't have those synthetic agents. Maybe we'll just be focused on not starving.
I am starving today, being starved by a system which puts me in artificial scarcity loops, me and who knows how many others. Starvation does not hinder the desire for resolution, if anything, it fosters it.
But yes, the world might disappear tomorrow; it's just not a workable hypothesis. It's much more workable to think that the complexity of our tools will continue to increase, elevating themselves towards higher and higher abstraction layers.
Well in 2023, I think it is reasonable to wonder what will happen to our tools and technology when oil becomes scarce (peak oil was 2008, oil is not unlimited).
I was not saying that the Sun may explode. I was saying that we have good reasons to think that energy will become more and more expensive in the next few decades.
I love your comment. 71 years is less than the age of my mother. I for one expect the world to change a lot more in the coming 30 years than in the last 30 years. In fact, I expect that the speed of change will be so high that it will lead to widespread social unrest, even (or particularly) in the West. But there are incredibly good things coming, if we are prepared and push for them a little bit.
Ah, and our metaphysics, social workings and culture are completely screwed for what is coming, and they are going to screw us good in turn.
We don’t know what the limits are, what the difficulties will be. You can’t just extrapolate from the past. We’ll have to wait and see where things go.
As far as cognitive capacity and consciousness as self-monitoring agency we have N=1, ourselves. Are there limits above us? Probably, but we have no reason to believe we are anywhere near the pinnacle of cognitive or consciousness load.
Sure we can extrapolate from the past, we do it daily when we build something, if we didn't we would get nothing done.
The problem is then with our mental models, our economics, our metaphysics, not with the technology.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_numerical_control#M...