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Notes -
Who will replace us?
History is the story of societies being replaced by more competitive societies. The Sumerians were replaced by Semites and the Beaker people by Indo-Europeans. The Diadochoi states' apartheid societies were replaced by Rome's more assimilative state. Roman paganism was replaced by Christianity. Feudalism was replaced by absolutism, which was replaced by republicanism. What is best for society is often not best for the individuals within it, molochian competition is like that. Stalin built a superpower but he paid the price in destruction of Russian lives- but he turned a backwards society one generation removed from functional chattel slavery into a superpower that dominated half the world. The Roman Empire solved the stability problems of the late republic- at a cost that contemporary sources note, but don't let us check.
Who will replace today's liberalism? Christian communities are still hanging on, of course. But their numbers are dwarfed by blacks and Muslims, and despite their paltry human capital Quantity has a Quality all its own. And of course there's AI(I expect AI to never figure out how to do maintenance on its own datacenters). East Asian societies have low fertility now, but their collectivism might give them a leg up in the future- would Koreans or Chinese accept whatever measures to raise the fertility rate, unacceptable in Europe and the Anglosphere? Or will it be a crude, bombastic secular conservatism- popcountry style?
By bringing the slavery back, only on the state level (what do you think people were doing it Gulag, knitting?). And that society barely lasted 3 generations.
They'd just hire humans though a shell company for now.
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Never is a long time. It still seems plausible that even if continual learning is the most important bottleneck, and even if algorithmic improvements fail to crack it cleverly, brute force will still work eventually. Maybe not until 2050 instead of the 2030 the more breathless people are predicting if we have to wait on Moore's Law, but it seems fairly inevitable unless some catastrophe kicks industrial civilization significantly back before then.
Moores law is running into physical limitations before then.
Moore's law, strictly interpreted as "number of transistors you can fit on a 2d die doubles every two years", will be running into physical limitations soon. Moore's law, loosely interpreted as "amount of compute you get for a given monetary or energy budget doubles every two years" is still relatively far from physical limits - Landauer is still about 6 OOMs away, so there's some headroom even without reversible computing. 6 OOMs of continuing halving of energy cost every two years would take us to 2065.
I'd expect further architectural changes to be required before then, because I don't expect the compute to be shaped optimally for the ML techniques of 2025, but "the SOTA ML algos are the ones that are able to take advantage of the hardware available at the time" is nothing new.
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Some people might say that the uncomfortable truth is that women's liberation is incompatible with above-replacement fertility, but I think the problem is broader: personal liberation in general is incompatible with natural above-replacement fertility.
And you can't really use economics to overcome this. Like in that story in Freakonomics about an Israeli daycare, once money enters the equation, duty leaves it forever. Stimuli and fines simply say: "you don't have to have children, if you can afford it". You need a society which treats having children as a sacred duty to the community, where it's unthinkable to go against its will.
Or, conversely, the first society that industrializes childbearing and childrearing will win. Via artificial wombs, as there aren't enough women that are willing to go through regular childbearing many times that you can make this into a full-time job: if the natural replacement rate is 1.2, then we need 1x more child per woman to offset this, or one woman in nine turned into a breeder and having 10.2 children instead of the usual 1.2. I don't think even the most collectivist society is totalitarian enough to achieve this.
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