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Even if I exist in severe epistemic uncertainty about the possible future of the globe, I can categorically exclude "business as usual" from the consideration.
We're well on course for a Singularity, and if it's stopped, it will be forcibly, we have AI that is on par (and better than the average human) at most cognitive tasks that don't require physical embodiment, and even for those that do, robotics is (not) falling over itself to catch up, especially by hooking LLMs into the motor function loop.
This implies either the biggest boom of all, or the population of humans of any description plummeting to nil in short order, my median timeline for grossly superhuman AGI is like 3 or 5 years at this point. It's no longer an AI/fusion is 20 years away for 50 years kinda deal, we've yet to even grapple with the long-term consequences of what we have today, if progress abruptly stops.
Either way, humans, at least for the purposes of the economy, will become entirely obsolete, and even duties like child rearing or childbirth will no longer require us, be it because AI nanny bots are filling the roles of disinterested daycare workers on the cheap, or because we have working artifical wombs or find a way to make child rearing so undemanding on parental lifestyle that the natural desire of women keeps them coming. After all, most women in the West who get polled say their ideal number of desired offspring is >2, even if they're not doing a good job of reaching it. Wealth has a bimodal association with fertility%2C%20the%20difference%20in%20the IR) , you have poor junkies churning them out, and billionaires who sire on a whim, it's the unlucky few~ many stuck in between who face painful tradeoffs in terms of QOL.
Given that automation will likely provide a QOL for those who can avail that is closer to the billionaire (or at least multi-millionaire) end of the spectrum..
As far as I'm concerned, the majority of the "disastrous consequences" you point to are the outcome of a lack of humans needed to fuel the fires of industry. Onerous burdens of maintaining the decrepit elderly, a lack of growth and innovation, these all cease to matter in the least when humans no longer contribute the bulk of cognitive labor, or even physical labor.
Further, I expect genuine extensions to lifespan with extended healthy lifespan boosted too, or even biological immortality, at which point the number of health, productive people will either stabilize or keep on increasing, and in my opinion, cause the population to skyrocket as people cease exiting the gene pool.
With timelines so short, we simply don't have the time to suffer, barring countries like Japan and potentially China that got on the gerontocrasy fast-train decades back. The median Westerner is unlikely to even notice a decline as it is smoothed out or even turned positive from increased productivity.
This has plenty of other implications, such as the current tendency to import large amounts of unskilled labor from the Global South only becoming a drain sooner rather than later (though it's likely we'll be wealthy enough it won't particularly matter), leaving aside that even skilled workers like myself are soon to be obsolete.
As I see it, religion is a viral memeplex that may have once served a beneficial purpose in history, but has long outlived its usefulness, in much the same manner as certain retroviral fragments help produce a placenta and keep the uterus congenial for pregnancy, but become potential proto-oncogenes when we're out of the cradle.
At the very least it's a deeply flawed worldview, for all that smart and thoughtful people I genuinely respect here succumb to it, and I think we're better off without it. If evolution has cursed the average human with a God-shaped Hole, then in the absence of said God (or at least one not of our making), I'm getting myself a secular excavator, while being thankful I don't suffer from the same design flaw.
Or we could all die, I guess, the Amish might disdain electricity, but it's not like a misaligned superintelligence cares. In the extremely unlikely event our naively project population trend lines persist decades into the future, I still think the proposed cure is worse than the disease, even if religiosity in the West has largely adapted in much the same way as cowpox to not be as pernicious to the host.
I'm certainly aiming for 3 kids, not that I think I'll have time to even raise one past toddlerhood, and since the future belongs to those who show up, I'm ensuring a front-row seat with the family even if it's crowded with Hasidic Jews and the like.
Eh, I feel like grossly superhuman is at least 8-10. Look at how much progress has been made in intelligent text generation since gpt4? Not that that's particularly comforting morally or philosophically.
The delay before GPT-5 seems like an intentional decision on the part of OAI rather than an inability to do better. I suspect that as soon as competitors release a true GPT-4 equivalent model instead of matching or slightly exceeding 3.5, they'll roll out a new one.
If I had to put very rough numbers on it, I'd say GPT-3.5 is around 110 IQ, 4 is 120, and a potential 5, if the same kind of improvement, would be anywhere from 130-140, beyond which I would start calling them genuinely superhuman in breadth of knowledge and capabilities, even if humans might be competitive in their niches.
Not that 5 years versus 10 years is much comfort, like you mentioned, at least my potential kids might even attend school!
OAI just announced last week what could be considered GPT 4.5 in their dev event, including it's integration with a vision solution for uploading images to the LLM and having it interact with it. While I don't consider this in the same realm as AGI nor I think we are in any danger from it exterminating the human race ala Skynet; I think this advancements will render a great many people unemployed with its accompanying social unrest.
Why this one and not the one before it?
sorry, wasn't very clear. What I'm referring to in "I think this advancements will render a great many people unemployed with its accompanying social unrest." isn't GPT 4.5 specifically, but the entire field of language models. I don't think they are still there but I imagine GPT 6 or 7 will be enough to take a few thousand jobs; that is if, it isn't lobotomized into oblivion by that point.
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I have a pretty much identical outlook to you, including the kids thing. The biggest question on my mind is which kinds of futures we could plausibly aim for long term in which humans not crushed either by competition or the state.
Even in a near ideal case, it depends on your definition of "human". I don't think baseline humans will be calling the shots for long either way.
Even a raw mind upload is unlikely to be competitive with dedicated AI, but at least they're cheap to run, and I personally intend to upgrade myself till the distinction between me and a SAGI is more of an academic distinction. But we're mostly powerless, so what can we do but enjoy the show? The next decade is going to be the epitome of "may you live in interesting times".
I agree with all this. I guess I don't expect it to be in anyone else's interest to run even an uploaded and upgraded version of myself. Perhaps there will be some sort of affirmative action or mind-scraping such that some small vestiges of me end up having any influence. So I would consider your upgrading plan to be an instance of "crushed by competition", though it may be slightly better than nothing.
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