Recently, I looked at the one pair of winter boots I own, and I thought “I will probably never buy winter boots again.” The world as we know it probably won’t last more than a decade, and I live in a pretty warm area.

I. AGI is likely in the next decade

It has basically become consensus within the AI research community that AI will surpass human capabilities sometime in the next few decades. Some, including myself, think this will likely happen this decade.

II. The post-AGI world will be unrecognizable

Assuming AGI doesn’t cause human extinction, it is hard to even imagine what the world will look like. Some have tried, but many of their attempts make assumptions that limit the amount of change that will happen, just to make it easier to imagine such a world.

Dario Amodei recently imagined a post-AGI world in Machines of Loving Grace. He imagines rapid progress in medicine, the curing of mental illness, the end of poverty, world peace, and a vastly transformed economy where humans probably no longer provide economic value. However, in imagining this crazy future, he limits his writing to be “tame” enough to be digested by a [...]