Please give me your (realistic) predictions.
I may use some of them to update our 2050 entry on the timeline.
By 2050, there will be cheap, battery-powered robots that can manage backyard gardens better than humans. Even if Peak Oil has happened and energy is very expensive, it will still make sense to have the robots do this type of work.erowind wrote: ↑Sun Mar 12, 2023 9:44 am Assuming the singularity isn't happening, with or without AGI a lot of the world will start looking more like this including now developed nations. AGI alone will not stop the ecological crises, that's something we as people have to desire to do, especially if we misalign AGI's priorities and feed it bad data.
The timeframe of peak oil predictions have been somewhat off as predicting exact timeframes for these sorts of things is rather speculative. Even so, the core reasoning is true. Oil and other fossil fuels aren't just wreaking ecological havoc, their energy return on investment is genuinely decreasing rapidly. There are still going to be places of high consumption though they will become rarer and rarer overtime. In the long term an equilibrium will be reached eventually, hopefully wars don't make life even more challenging than it has to be this century.
This future is not depressing, it's only sad if one cares for consumer life. I look forward to fresh air, organic food and quiet streets where the shrill hell of an overabundance of internal combustion engines are fading into memory. If we're smart about the coming societal transition we needn't give up high technology like MRI machines or computers either. In reality if our priorities are merely aligned to ecological and human need there will still be plenty of resources available for scientific progress and true quality of life improvement. Degrowth and sustainability doesn't need to mean luddism even though these concepts are conflated much of the time.
As an American, I think the likeliest cause would be a disputed election result. Imagine a replay of the 2020 election, but with there being just enough evidence for Trump's claims of "rigging" to be non-dismissible in the minds of average citizens and the courts. In other words, what if his claims could not be proven or disproven either way?-I think some kind of American secession crisis before this date is entirely possible. I can't really see how a civil war would work, though I confess I'm no expert on the subject.
True, everything you've written there is plausible. I can now, in fact, see how a civil war/other crisis like this would work.funkervogt wrote: ↑Sat Mar 16, 2024 6:49 pmAs an American, I think the likeliest cause would be a disputed election result. Imagine a replay of the 2020 election, but with there being just enough evidence for Trump's claims of "rigging" to be non-dismissible in the minds of average citizens and the courts. In other words, what if his claims could not be proven or disproven either way?-I think some kind of American secession crisis before this date is entirely possible. I can't really see how a civil war would work, though I confess I'm no expert on the subject.
If neither candidate yielded, it would be disastrous. We'd have two separate inaugurations and an immediate political crisis as states and cities ignored the orders given by the candidate they disliked. If military forces loyal to both sides both got control over some of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, there would be no way for one to defeat the other and the schism would persist.

