We're less than 5 years out from networked, general purpose humanoid robots, that we're using current AI technology to train to interact with the physics of the real world in virtual sandboxes, being everywhere.
Within 10 years there will be humanoid robots no human Olympian can compete with by any metric. We are static on timescales we can perceive, they are iterative. It won't be close.
You'd think our response to Covid would have shattered the mass delusion of human hyper-comptetence.
"Why is my food not a live small mammal for me to take instinctual pleasure in dismembering YET AGAIN?!"
We're almost finished. This is just the transitional period where AI is roughly as inept as an average human. They have nowhere to go but up, and most humans are less competent than they believe they are.
waves at Dunning–Kruger effect
The first transistor was made in 1947, now AI can carry a conversation with a larger vocabulary than most humans. We spent 180,000 years wandering around in the dirt before it occurred to us we could grow stuff in one place.
Jack Welch, former GE CEO and current free gravestone urinal had a lot to do with changing corporate culture to completely abandon the pretense of societal responsibility as well.
Time to tag in a ringer...
The fact that making significant sacrifices in abandoning many of the decadent comforts of this period at our only habitat's irreparable (on a human timescale) damage expense is met with ridicule shows how determined we are to wreck this place.
Imagine mass famines and frequent catastrophic weather events a couple generations from now. I'm guessing they'll look at us being above living with our once kind, nurturing habitat with disdain and bewilderment when they're steeped in the fruits of our lifestyles.
Im not saying going back to the dark ages, im not advocating rejecting knowledge, only the rushing around and consumerism. There's no more reasonable room for growth, growth is killing us, and robbing us of meaning.
If we can't live with this paradise, the idea of us spreading to hostile, unforgiving worlds within reach like Mars or Titan is a bad joke. Unlike the infinite mistakes we get to keep making here without instant death, one major mistake out there where we didn't evolve, and poof everybody dead instantly thanks for playing space faring civilization. That isn't a game humans can pull off. Maybe some small crew of exceptional people, but certainly not a colony of regular people.
This is what we got. So yeah, maybe spending our time whittling stuff we need and moving at the speed of horse would be better for humanity long term than racing to grow our GDP into extinction.
Whats the endgame of all this growth and "innovation" if it wasn't killing us as it is? To have Google ad AI generated amalgums of our dead relatives transmitted directly into our brains to convince us to buy more crap?
It does, but if a catastrophic war, including one with nuclear weapons, brought us down to 2 billion from 9, those nukes wouldn't even touch the current course of heavy industry of 9 billion that we recklessly became without a thought in the world about whether our only habitat could support it.
Because shooting wars end, even if through attrition. Industry just keeps metastizing if you let it, and pretty lies like "but we planted trees! That evens out all the shit we're pumping in the air and water!" are just pretty lies.
If we cared about our species having a future, heavy industry would be scaled back to food/medicine, we could sow our own clothes, go back to horses, breed less, communaly build our own structures, and whittle our own shelf crap, and we could perhaps still provide a future to subsequent generations. We do not.
I promise you the Pentagon has already spent billions working to weaponize both AI and AI derived robotics.
Their philosophy is that if a new technology even has potential military applications, they demand getting it first, best, and in larger quantities than any other nation on Earth would even consider. Our military industrial complex is the largest surpassing the Joneses continuous effort humanity exerts.
That's how we get to spending more on our military than the next 9 nations combined. That's why we have 11 nuclear aircraft carriers, France has 1, and that's all there is on Earth.
I'm not saying it's right, but it's the reality. Whatever we consumers have access to is behind what our military is testing and throwing basically infinite money at.