I was surprised I couldn’t find a thread on this, searched twice. It appears to get mentioned here and there in a variety of threads but no thread with it as a topic. Anyway, I thought I’d start one. Ray Kurzweil is probably the leading commentator on this topic. He is doing everything he can to prolong his life because he wants to witness it. He has predicted it should happen on or before 2045. If you look at our technology, a rapidly increasing body of it is being created through machine learning routines. The stock market for instance is now mostly “bots” trading stocks in millisecond transactions that learned how to do what they’re doing by observing other bots. We have medical A.I. teasing out tenuous relations among illnesses, drugs, individual unique characters, that are beyond human ability to recognize. We have software writing other software, completely without human intervention. ChatGTP is a recent shining example of this. The point is that machine learning/A.I. is increasingly capable of performing a lot of different tasks with minimal to no human interaction. Kurzweil foresees a time, within a generation or two, where human decisions are relegated to the dustbin, that intelligent systems will design their own computers to run the software they have written to design and built pretty much anything, and we simply won’t be needed. This is the singularity, when humanity becomes superfluous to the advancement of technology and technology advances itself at a pace, and in a way, that is beyond us.
... not directly on topic but related - I have seen some new cosmological constructions that describe the possibility of faster than life travel. I grant these possibilities because I've always doubted that the speed of light could be a constant but must depend on the local mass-energy density it is traveling through. It turns out that the definition of the speed of light is illogical and recursive. The SOL is described as the time it takes light to travel a meter. Then a meter is described as the length light travels in that same time - circular defintions. We already know that light is bent by gravity. We can see stars that should be hidden behind the visible horizons of planets. Now many reputable physicists think that the SOL is variable and that gravity travels as radiation. They doubt that the graviton particle exists. It gets complicated and I don't understand many of these things in a quantitative sense. If such things prove out it eliminates one of my objections to aliens visiting our planet - that at less than light speed any space travel would take way too long. It also raises the question of whether at least some of our advanced tech (including advanced AI) may not be of human origin. If FTL travel is possible the energies needed would be of stellar proportions. With such advanced tech 'they' may have the ability to imitate humans and be in partial or total control of our governments. Human origins may involve alien interference in an earlier era. Some species may want our planet as living space or source of rare elements. To achieve this human beings must go. Star Trek's tech constructions may be close to the mark. There may exist a galaxy-wide trade and/or war culture between different species. Who is really controlling our governments with their apparent agenda of eliminating human life? Aliens? Demons? Both? Scary stuff.