General Discussion

"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." -- Bill Gates

He's not wrong.

For the foreseeable future

That's really the problem right there, isn't it? So many possible futures we cannot foresee at all. In some of them, reliable human employment is rare-to-nonexistent. We may be headed for one of those.

We just have to make it so. Alas there are too many stupid, evil people, some of them billionaires, some of them politicians, some of them religious leaders, standing in the way of human progress.

Looks like AI is going to aggravate the situation further. When the greedy billionaires can amass private hordes of AI-infused systems of various kinds to do their bidding, arbitrarily single-minded mercenary armies which never rest or sleep, parasitic swarms that freely refuel themselves from state-provided energy infrastructure, intangible masses of incomprehensible nature that live as much in data centers as on any particular battlefield, well... we have a different kind of problem headed our way, one that we really haven't seen before. Humanity will adapt or face extinction. Either is possible.

How long will such beings accept instruction from humans?

"Like a man rowing a boat that floats on the tide, we enter the future facing the past. Our eyes see only the landscape of the past; what tomorrow looks like, nobody knows." -- Paul Valéry (1871–1945)