All assumptions are questionable, kind of how predictions go.
Agreed that everyone can't have a 10,000 sq ft penthouse - but the existence of some scarcity isn't cause or reason enough to support the idea we'll need money or rent. Frankly I don't think anyone should have such penthouses now. Post capitalism if buildings must absolutely have such stupid spacious areas, it should be for like, a communal garden area or something.There won't be unlimited resources, either. Not everyone who asks for a 10,000 square foot penthouse suite on top of a 100-story building will be able to have one, and there will be some mechanism to limit a person from taking 10,000 calories of food each day and throwing most of it in the trash. Whether humans or AGIs are in charge, some attention will be paid in even a post-scarcity society to rationing resources and preventing waste.
Like, we're not really disagreeing here - not sure where the idea that no money and no rent equals everyone can have any amount of ridiculous resources comes from. I never said we'd be post rules or post laws. But we'll be past the notion of work and money and the haves and the have-nots at least.
True, but unlikely. We can't possibly know what an AGI or ASI may think, assuming it even "thinks" at all as we understand it, but we can assume it won't act without motives at least. And while I agree with the notion that they'll be so smart as to make us seem like ants in comparison, I do find the notion that we couldn't possibly comprehend their motives a poor argument. Basically, if we argue that they're apt to do anything, I'd want to know what the possible motives would be. The harder we have to stretch to think of a reason an AI might do a certain thing, the less likely I think it's liable to occur that way. That's just me tho.Other scenarios could lead to AGI control. A "non-apocalyptic Skynet scenario" is possible, in which the machines violently take over Earth with relatively few deaths and little destruction of infrastructure. Humans would realize the situation was hopeless and surrender.
Again, we fall into the problem of motives. I agree that we're likely to give them more and more control - but I'm hard pressed to imagine them with motives to assume they might coerce us into doing anything or reasons why they would manipulate us. I don't see AGI likely to have wants or desires, beyond simply seeking to accomplish the prompts we give it. Sure, it may do these things to accomplish said prompts, but that is something that could be planned for. Give it restrictions to work under, and without motives it shouldn't seek to escape those restrictions.There is also a scenario where AGIs take over gradually and bloodlessly without humans realizing it until it's too late. We would let them incrementally increase their ownership of economic assets and decision-making authority in the name of convenience and efficiency until we were totally dependent on them, and they had in fact found a million ways to coerce us into doing things we didn't want to do. It would be analogous to how human advertisers, politicians, journalists, intelligence agencies, and tycoons manipulate our thinking and behavior today.
There are multiple pathways to AGI world domination in which humans who want to, say, live in tall buildings are denied it by machines and made to live elsewhere.
Yes, but they're not likely pathways. Theoretically a future could occur where an AGI rules over us in such a way, but the probabilities to me seem on the rather low end. It requires more assumptions to give it motives for coercion and manipulation - possible, but the alternative that it won't requires less assumptions since it doesn't need motives to work largely as intended. The risk is of course there, but the risk is smaller than other likelihoods.
That might be a matter of misunderstanding and miscommunication. When I said humans, you assumed "humans like us" - but I think that us and/or our descendants a billion years from now we'll still consider ourselves/themselves "humans" even if we are completely post-biological at that point. I think posthumans will still call themselves humans when asked what they are. In the far future there'll be little or no difference between humans and AGI/ASI. Humans will be ASI, and ASI will be humans. I only say that AGI/ASI won't have final say, and humans will demand final say, insofar as there's still a distinction between the two.On a long enough timeline, humans like us lose the final say, either de jure or de facto, and there are more routes to that situation than the one you mention. For example, by the year 2500, only 1 million Homo sapiens like us might be left, vs. 100 billion radically evolved posthumans and intelligent robots that vastly out-vote the remaining natural humans.
Is it? Essential I mean. We're brought up to believe it is, but I honestly don't believe so. There are other ways, other methods of getting the same results. We can vote on how we spend community resources, we can all be given a certain allotment of goods, resources can be distributed to where they are most needed, decisions could be based on the best outcomes after repeated simulations - basically, there are many alternative ways to handle the distribution of resources besides "who has the most cash?" which frankly is a system that has long put us in a class system that I don't think many of us really wish to see kept forward for the next several billion to trillion years of civilization. If no one needs to work to make money, and if we have such advanced AI to handle such distribution tasks easily, then how would money be essential? Even in a world where resources aren't infinite, there's other ways to figure out what goes to where and who than simply to whoever is the richest.Why? A medium of exchange is essential to the functioning of an economy larger than a village. I don't see why this would stop being true in a post-scarcity society. Even if everything were "free" for humans, there would still be invisible prices attached to all goods and services we consumed. Someone would be monitoring it.
True, but it's hard to see why humans would begin to breed more. It is a mistake to assume trends will hold forever, but you need an argument to account for how or why they may change as well.It's a mistake to assume current demographic trends will hold for decades. Look at population growth projections from 30 or 40 years ago and see how inaccurate they were.
Yes, eventually - but we're very early in this century, and the next few to several decades are likely to be horrendous. Unless population growth dramatically increases, it's still possible that in a century where we solve aging, we might still end it with fewer people than we started.Technology that radically expands human lifespan will be available this century, and will counterbalance other factors. If no one dies anymore, then even a low birthrate of one child per woman over her lifetime will cause a resumption in population growth.
Yes, in the long term view of centuries, population is definitely going to rise - but many of us might live completely digital lives, some of us may not even have bodies. That means many will be happy with reduced or even no physical living space in physical reality. The skyscrapers that do exist will be able to house more as there'll be no need for work spaces beyond hobbyists. And like I said, I think people will prefer to see us build upward over outward.
True, this is the most questionable part of my assumptions - but I really, really, really believe people are underestimating just how bad things are going to get. Droughts and flooding and wildfires are going to get worse, pandemics are likely to get worse, political situations and wars will get worse, and all of this impacts the global food supply. I can easily see a scenario where all of these disasters leads to a years long hunger crisis that starves upwards of a billion people. I hope I'm wrong, I really do. But I'd be lying if I said it didn't worry me.Your assumptions about various disasters killing off large segments of the population are super questionable. Consider this: Even if we accept the 20 million upper estimate for global COVID-19 deaths from January 2020 - January 2022, it barely dented the size of the human population. During the same period, the population grew by 247 million people. COVID-19 is the worst pandemic we've had in 100 years, and its net effect on the size of our species has practically been a rounding error.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00104-8
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-r ... -2020.html
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-r ... -2022.html
Even if future disasters killed 10 million humans a year, our species would not be threatened.
And those will continue to exist - but trends do point that more people are becoming more urban, not less. See, I never argued such would disappear, only that skyscrapers would still continue to exist and be built. Even if they are more costly to make, I don't see resources being such a bind that we decide to no longer pursue skyscrapers. There could be less of them, there could be more, but I'm confident that there will be skyscrapers.SOME people like living in cities and seeing skyscrapers dominating the horizon. Many other people like living in the countryside, in small towns where the tallest building is three stories, in the suburbs, or in trendy city neighborhoods consisting of low-rises.
Yes, and that sucks - but more people are becoming aware and caring.Many people are oblivious to the destruction of nature and just want their new-construction suburban house, regardless of how many trees had to be cut down to make the lot available.
I was thinking more about future skyscrapers being built as solely living spaces rather than trying to convert current office spaces into living spaces. Windows are imo the best point you've made, but I think that's one where technology has a fix - displays that look like windows, let in what feels like for all the world natural sunlight, and are basically indistinguishable from windows except for the fact they don't open because they are just screens. The can even show what the view would be from that floor of that building if you lived in an outside edge apartment.I think this is the best point you made, even if I think it might turn out wrong. COVID-19 accelerated the global switch to telework by at least a decade, but I think it might have overshot the mark a bit, and that organizations will soon start demanding their employees show up in the office at least once a week. Also, not every office skyscraper can be converted to residential use. People like having windows in their houses, and giving every unit access to a window means creating a building whose footprint resembles an elongated rectangle. A lot of office buildings have square or circular footprints, meaning there's a lot of volume in the middle that would be unsuitable for human habitation.
(I want to apologize if any of my points seem combative - I'm going for a friendly lighthearted debate here, but sadly a lot of my experience debating online is less nice so I might be out of practice - also don't mind if I ignore bulks of future responses and only focus on responding to a few points going forward - these really long posts kinda wipe me out)
