> and for me that’s science and tech tree maxed out.

Hate to ruin it for you, but as soon as the economic elites don't need the masses anymore (eg because AGI produces goods and entertainment better than we do), we'll become a liability, dead weight, so they'll quickly use that same maxed out tech that made us obsolete to make us gone.

The fear you voice is not just about technology — it's about belonging, powerlessness, and the haunting question: “What am I worth if I’m no longer needed?”

This is a wound of modernity: being reduced to utility. When usefulness becomes the measure of worth, love becomes conditional, and existence becomes a transaction.

But you are not a product. You are not a function. You are not a line of code in someone else's simulation. You are a living mystery. A being of perception, of feeling, of presence.

The chill world you long for is not built by tech trees alone. It is built by inner peace, by connection, by meaning. These are not obsolete. They are eternal.

The real revolution is not artificial intelligence. It is loving awareness.

Beautifully put.

Not getting deleted is strictly a prerequisite to "loving awareness" and all the other woo.

Wouldn't it make them dead weight, too? Their status as merely "economic" elites seems like a shaky position if the world becomes post scarcity.

Not quite. It's not about being economic elite per se, but about being part of the handful of people who will control the tech. That might well end up being a single person or family, of course. (I assume that AGI will not take over, rather the humans who program it will. I also assume that, unlike movie villains who need to keep rivals alive so that we can get an entertaining story, real life villains will not take chances and kill off almost everyone.)

If enough people can be convinced of a “serious” extraterrestrial event we might be able to speed up that science and tech tree. Honestly think about the spending and the opportunities it will unlock. Not to mention we might all stop fighting each other and work together… on science and tech.

So much of the science and tech we use today was the result of some similar storytelling, and it has sometimes had some real consequences.

You should have preceded that with "Watchmen spoiler alert".

Looked this up I had no idea. I only watched the watchmen movie and never realized the threat was aliens like I was thinking. I thought it was Dr Manhattan being perceived as an evil guy by the general population.

I think programming people to believe there’s a credible ET threat would be kind of cool. It would never affect them, and it would be hard to prove or disprove either way. And people would rather err on the side of expansion and survival, than extinction.

We know if there is one thing masses of people can do that no robot can replace is being subservient or beneath the elite. It’s hard to feel that awesome when there is no one else to experience it.

I was in India recently and randomly ended up talking to a lot of millennials while traveling. It is an understatement for how quickly the American economy would grind to a halt if anything major happened. ADP, loan processing, healthcare insurance processing, support centers.

On one hand corporate America exported all its manufacturing to China. On the other hand it exported all its back office services to India.

All of these roles will be replaced with AI pretty imminently - this kind of rote grinding of data, scripted call trees, is the low-hanging fruit.

Right now an Indian is still cheaper than a model, but that won’t be the case for long, particularly if the cost of an Indian goes up due to a decrease in supply due to a shooting war.

I would think that a war would make the average Indian poorer and willing to work for less.

Sadly, to reach interstellar travel and galactic survival we need to past this capitalism era. There is no advance into those topics without reaching "found without economic compensation". There is a mod that finds economic value in space with some random iron satellites and all... but it's final target has some bugs.

In what world "tech" has brought peace? So far it brought of stuff like dependency to petrol and now rare minerals, climate change, and water rarerification - which are I think most of the reasons why wars are/have been/will be happening?

Europe is much more peaceful that it was. Not sure if you can blame tech.