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Comment by DonnyV | Hacker News Reader

Is it me or is 2040 humanity's inflection point? Around that time general A.I. should be here. Climate change is wrecking havoc, most jobs will be automated, mid point of total insect collapse, severe water shortage will affect the entire planet, etc Just in time for my retirement. The last great kick in the nutz for GenX.

Should I be buying a plot of land in northern Canada and prepping?

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> Around that time general A.I. should be here.

We'll be lucky if at least self-driving cars are on the roads in 19 years.

Very doubtful that there will ever be general AI and significantly more doubtful that it is only 19 years away

I imagine progress in AI is hockey-stick shaped, not linear. We could have 18 years of stagnant progress and then be overwhelmed in year 19. It seems impossible to predict.

Yeah I think thats exactly whats going to happen. I've been watching old episodes of Star Trek Voyager and laughing to myself the model they used for computers then. Still thinking that a piece of digital data had to be put on a pad and given to someone. I don't think people realize how much in the future we live in right now with tech. A.I. now will train future A.I. and it will get faster and faster.

It's entirely possible if we can move to general all-photonic computing in the next 5 years.

In the UK at least and especially UK politics it seemed for years like 2020 was going to be awesome - everything will be done in/by 2020!

Generational distribution of wealth (at-same-age comparison), and how good the health & elder-care industries have become at soaking up one's entire bank account (so, very little inheritance) should mean GenX faces the leading edge of a retirement crisis (that is, a whole lot more elderly poverty and being unable to retire than the Boomers faced) that'll get really bad when Millennials, who are even worse off, approach retirement age.

Then there's healthcare costs continuing to outpace inflation, and GenZ and under having trouble affording housing even in cheaper markets, with that getting worse all the time.

Yeah, I'd say 2030-2050's gonna be a really, really rough span.

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