League Circles wrote:My main point is just really that I question whether there is really a coherent difference (to us now) between the (likely) inevitable catastrophe of the human species happens 500 years from now or 5 billion years from now. And then to look at how the implications of that blurry difference would or should affect things like how we address AI, jobs, and the environment.
That would get into a philosophical debate on what you feel the purpose of life is.
I enjoy life a lot, I'm glad I have it and exist. To me, there is intrinsic value in the thought that if we made it 5 billion years more that there would likely be trillions of other people who would get to enjoy the same.
Interestingly, I find it highly likely that if we can survive for another 1000 years while still progressing and not creating some type of apocalyptic outcome, that we will then be able to survive for as many years as there are left. To make it 1000 years, we will have to establish a whole lot of equilibrium on this planet and will have likely worked through the threats that potentially doom us all (and also I think within 1000 years we will figure out a way to at least colonize mars and possibly other planets in different galaxies).
I also think that if we get into the billions of years that even problems like the end of the universe will end up having solutions that we can't possibly foresee now despite how impossible it seems, but it's kind of a silly debate since it is effectively unknowable for us right now and the odds of us making it billions of years seem pretty low.