Comment by WH WH (wh-wh) on The next decades might be wild · 2022-12-17T09:23:03.524Z · LW · GW

Great read. I’ve used this exact analogy for years with regard to the next half century:

“Taking a person from 2020 to 2050 is roughly similar to taking someone from the middle ages to time square in 2020.”

I think your general timeframe seems pretty reasonable, as far as these things can be predicted. It definitely seems to lay out the basic plot of what’s coming over the next 30-60 years imo.

One aspect I didn’t see mentioned (might have just missed it, apologies if so) was that people will eventually learn how to prevent and reverse the aging process in this same window. Everyone will be roughly the same physical age once they reach maturity. You and your sons and your grandsons will play full-court basketball together at the local gym as though you’re playing with a group of peers. Kids born in the 2070s might look at old pictures of elderly people with disgust and horror.

We must also consider the human response to all of these advancements. People will have brain-computer interfaces of increasing complexity, rich people will basically become cyborgs with increasingly robust exoskeletons… etc all the way to post-human super intelligent entities and maybe even some sort of digitalized consciousness.

In short I don’t think AI will leave all of humanity totally in the dust; rather many people will utilize AI to upgrade themselves accordingly (Although the timeline for some of this stuff will be significantly further out than the 2050s).

There’s also a really cool space exploration and interplanetary angle to these thought experiments but I’ll save that for another comment. Cheers