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You could ask these sort of questions about Rome, and every other empire, right up until the point of it's collapse. The one about democracy could be, and was, asked in reverse right up until the 20th century.
Unless you're actively saying America is not in decline, and will not collapse if it stays on it's current trajectory, you're not even addressing the issue with these questions.
It's better to think about concepts like democracy and capitalism as a form of technology in and of themselves, they're an idealogical technology that people had to bring about and work to optimize. But like the car beat the horse, the free market beat the mercantalists and central economic control, and democracy beat the dictators.
We're on the cutting edge of creating a machine god, if anything we're on the upswing for decades to come. Unless AI does turn out to be a bubble, but it sure seems like we're getting something major at least even if not full AGI. Or I suppose the machine god destroys us all, sure that would be a failure state then.
I have no idea how this addresses my response.
Welp, I guess that leaves us at "agree to disagree". You're not. You're not anywhere close. We might get some fairly radical changes out of it, like a total surveillance state, but nothing like "machine god" from rationalist fanfics.
Because saying "well what about pre car history, horses won then" as a pro horse argument against cars is silly. The same way, talking about history before the modern western ideas took hold doesn't really work out.
Look I don't know what we're gonna get but even if it's not AGI it does seem to be some sort of radical surge in productivity at the very least. Scientists and companies are already exploring AI's potential to improve research and market output, and progress doesn't seem to be slowing down much.
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