Humanity will invariably reach a state of utopia in at most 200 years

Well, just saying "your data isn't objective" isn't that strong of an argument. I have real data from which falsifiable hypotheses can be made (and have been made in the past - almost all of them were correct). The data that I am referring to is, for example, computing power value (calculations per second per modern-day dollar) over time and key historical events over time. Both of these variables have followed an exponential trajectory long before Moore's Law was formulated (or was in effect). Feel free to explain what you feel is not objective about these data.

You having the same thoughts as me 40 years ago isn't really convincing, either. If I had to guess, I'd say you probably had these thoughts not because they were logical but because they sounded cool. This is probably also why you feel that "life has [proven you wrong]", even if it hasn't - some of the things that you naively expected to happen didn't happen, so you decided to abandon the entire idea of exponential progress and/or a bright future for humanity altogether. Same reason why so many atheists become believers, really. But even if that wasn't the case for you, personal anecdotes don't constitute a strong argument either way.

I still don't really see what societal issues you are talking about. Could you be more concrete? Since you didn't give me a specific example, let me disprove at least the statement that "technological solutions do not work for societal issues": solitude (not to be confused with "loneliness") was a societal issue that has all but been solved by the internet and smartphones. And, to address your last concern in the paragraph, I do appreciate that people are bound to have differing opinions and thoughts and interests, but: when you are in a world where anything that you desire you receive on-demand - this includes psychological preferences - the word "issue" itself becomes a practical impossibility (again, save for a few areas like exploration of real-world space, philosophical problems, and stuff like that).

Interesting. I don't think this is a mainstream opinion, though. Diseases have existed all throughout history and were actually much deadlier in the past due to inferior medicine. Climate change may reduce the population significantly, I do agree - although this may be balanced out by natural population growth. I don't think it's likely that global population will drop 800% in the foreseeable future - once again, considering global catastrophes like a nuclear war don't take place.

Me too. I think it needs to be strictly regulated though to make sure they're living in good conditions, but I'm really worried about what's going to happen to them. It seems like the conservation effort is going to take a massive blow. Idc if you saw tiger king, but there's this woman called Carol on it, and she tries to "save" big cats, but all she does it castrate them so they can't be bread, and she's trying to outlaw ownership in the US! I know it comes from a place where she's trying to help, but if her law passes, she'll have done more damage to the conservation effort than if poachers killed every single tiger left in the wild!

I think it would require some REAL, HUGE mess-up on the part of many nations and political parties at the same time for such sort of thing to happen. Sure, it's not impossible - let's say people in most developed countries keep electing Nazis and megalomaniacs to power, who then subtly kill the democracies in their respective countries, and then do nothing about the growing gap between the rich and the poor, convincing the public that this is how it was supposed to be in the first place. I can such a scenario taking place, but do so in the same vein as I see a false vacuum bubble engulfing Earth, or a Solar-system-facing gamma-ray burst cooking our plane to Death. All of these scenarios are certainly possible, but neither of them is likely to happen.

The view that big corporations are evil seems to be quite popular nowadays, but I don't think that it's justified. First of all, what is the worst thing that big corporations have done? Your answer to this question would probably be something like "they neglected our privacy". Is that really enough to merit a group of people who have done so much good to society a title of "evil"? Like Ivan the Terrible- or Stalin-level "evil"? I mean, okay, perhaps you may respect the privacy of your data more than others, but if that's the worst that their morals allow them to do, then there is little risk of the human race being put in jeopardy. In my opinion, politicians and religious leaders are much more dangerous - take people like Putin, Rouhani, and Jinping, for example - Jinping is not ashamed to execute people based on their religion, and nor does Rouhani, who also wants to return his country to the Middle Ages, and Putin can leave an entire country in a state of stagnation just for his own personal wealth and power. Imo, if we can avoid electing politicians such as these guys (although Jinping at least cares for the people of his country, so maybe exclude him from this list), we'll be just fine. The aims of corporations and consumers mostly align, anyway.

Interestingly, I am one of those "complacent" people. I turn all the privacy settings to minimum so that I can have the most personalised experience and so that the corporations have more data to work with and improve their final product. I don't really care if some information about my location or web activity or microphone activity gets represented as a data point somewhere in Google's code if that means that I get a better experience. Honestly speaking, I don't really understand why people would worry about this, either: it's one thing if your personal information gets disclosed to the public, but in this case no one even looks at it, so why would you worry? Unless you have engaged in illegal activities or are a very famous person, no one will ever get to look at your private data. Perhaps you can explain this bit to me, because I am genuinely curious.

To address your last point, acting stupid and being stupid are two completely different things. The smartest people have held the silliest beliefs, and their justifications for holding these beliefs were anything but rational (to give you an example, Bobby Fischer believed Jews to be an inferior race, and Newton believed in alchemy). So don't judge people's intelligence by their opinions. Even so, though, the current generation is much less susceptible to PR, scams, and propaganda than older generations. Belief in pseudoscience (including ideologies such as New Age, creationism, homoeopathy) is by far the lowest among the younger generations, and older generations are also much more likely to fall for a scam/fake news story than are younger generations. Of course, these areas are still problematic, but they are definitely less of an issue now than they were previously.

I am not really "dreaming" about anything here - I am just being objective and thinking critically. Thinking critically doesn't always mean thinking pessimistically, and instead sometimes means thinking ambitiously, like in this case.

I never said that we can produce products of our thin air in real life, but, in a digitally simulated world, almost no computing power is required to simulate a single fish. And, yes, in such a world, resources, just like our wants, are infinite, and yes we can produce them out of thin air. That's what I mean by "utopia" - anything that you want, you get on-demand, and there is nothing that you can possibly want that won't get on-demand. As far as I'm aware, that's pretty much what the word "utopia" means - a world where all of everyone's needs are met.

World population will actually stabilise at 10b or thereabouts due to the limitation of resources on Earth. Sure, there are many population projections out there, but all of them agree that population growth will either stop completely or slow down enormously this century and that it won't ever reach 15b. You can read more about this on Wikipedia's entry on "Projections of population growth".

As for factory job automation, I seriously hope you don't still work there because otherwise I've got bad news for you... most factory and manufacturing jobs are already automated, with some factories being fully self-functional (the only human workers in such factories are maintenance workers). But it's not only manufacturing jobs that will be automated in the near future - ALL of the professions that currently exist will get automated within the next 100 years, including those of scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs, etc; it's only a matter of time. There is plenty of evidence for this: if we look at the computer processing power over the past 150 years, we can extrapolate with a very high degree of confidence that, in 15 years, the most powerful computer will have more processing power than the entire human race combined. But yes, I know, processing power isn't everything. How about the fact that the same programme (AlphaZero), which doesn't know anything about chess, go, and many other games other than the rules of these games, can teach itself to become far better than any professional human in every one of these games? And it's not just brute-force calculation, either - its entire expertise actually comes from intuition. With the current super-exponential rate of advancement, what possible reason can there be for programmes such as AlphaZero not becoming more general and eventually being able to perform every human job? In order for automation to suddenly stop, all progress needs to suddenly come to a standstill, which can only happen in the event of a global catastrophe. If that doesn't happen, there is no reason whatsoever to expect automation to stop, and if it doesn't and instead continues at its current rate, all human jobs will be automated within the next 100 years.

Pollution? I agree it's not ideal, and it is certainly one of our very top priorities to reduce the effects of global warming, but it's just not going to make us extinct. Like with fish, I am not convinced that the lack of particular crops (as bees are only responsible for about 1/3 of the pollination of most crops) or honey will kill humanity. On the other hand, I know this sounds a bit "selfish" (probably not as selfish as torturing animals and then eating their flesh, though), but once we are in a simulation, we won't care about pollution or insects. Also, with money having gone extinct, politics will probably die as well. There simply wouldn't be a need for war when the same resources are available to everybody, and there is nothing than anybody can do it about this (as all jobs are now performed by robots, who will always be more efficient at their job than humans). Honestly, I don't think your end-of-the-world scenarios are realistic. Even in the worst possible scenarios that you describe (which aren't realistic to start with, as most bee species aren't even endangered or threatened), there is no way that every single person on Earth will go extinct.

My dream is certainly not "the end of all humanity", and we are not even discussing what my dream is - we are discussing the future of humanity. Sure, there are loads of problems for us to solve (as there have always been), but given that we solve them, it's very difficult to imagine what will stop us from achieving the state that I described in the post. If we can agree that we won't go extinct in the next 200 years, then us not doing so will require some explanation, which I haven't seen as of yet.

Utopias don't exist for a reason - that's because they do. We live in our ancestors' utopia already. You see, everyone's definition of "utopia" is different, so, as long as the world isn't objectively perfect according to everyone, it's easy to argue that the contemporary world isn't a utopian world. But that doesn't mean that our contemporary world wasn't considered utopian in some other contemporary world - I imagine many people in the Middle Ages would think that it can't get much better than having access to free education, having an entire lifetime just to do what they love and nothing more, with all the tedious tasks being done for them, being able to travel physically to any part of the world in less than a day, and having the collective knowledge of the entire human race always available on-demand. But, okay, even if the modern world is someone's utopia, it's only a subjective utopia. The reason why an objective utopia doesn't exist yet is that we aren't quite there yet, but we are getting there at a rapid pace, and are already very close.

Finally, on machine self-reparation: note that modern machines don't have the ability to fix themselves simply because they aren't general enough to do that. However, when AI exceeds both the generality and the intelligence of humans, there will be absolutely nothing that a human will be able to do that a machine won't be able to do more reliably and efficiently. Yep, that includes repairing and maintaining robots.

And is there any particular reason why you doubt that? When all jobs become automated, capitalism won't work by definition - "a system where industry is controlled by PRIVATE owners" - because there are no private owners, aka workers. Also, I am sorry to upset your capitalistic feelings, but UBI will have to be introduced pretty damn soon (15 to 20 years maximum), or else inequality will rise to the point where the majority of the population are in poverty. Capitalism is an efficient system of driving economic growth and progress but only so far as only humans are involved. When robots join the game, the situation becomes very different.

Re-read my comment. All I said is that people with Aspergers who don't have an accompanying intellectual disorder are slightly smarter than the general populace. That's it.

Asperger's people are also more likely to be nonconformist due to their deviant nature, meaning they would actually fit worse into a police state.

None of this is even to mention the fact that Asperger's syndrome will never spread to the general population because it poses a very obvious evolutionary disadvantage (Aspergers are less likely to reproduce), or the fact that there is absolutely nothing to suggest that the world will be a police state in the future - the trends actually tell the opposite story in this respect, with the world becoming ever more libertarian.

I am not sure what trends you are referring to, but if we go by economic growth, leading economies will remain leading economies in the future - just the margin between them and other countries will become smaller, but that's a good thing because that only means that the world is becoming more developed as a whole. You see, human civilisation isn't a zero-sum game. Other countries becoming more advanced doesn't mean already developed nations somehow lose their level of development. And their native population may decrease by 5%-10% in the next few decades to a century, but that isn't near enough to hinder their economy.

Also, current trends actually show a steady increase in global IQ scores, and less developed countries growing in population won't change that: as underdeveloped countries grow in size, they also become more developed in the process, granting them with better nutrition, which is a significant contributing factor to intelligence. While genetic factors may also play a role in intelligence, factors such as nutrition play a much bigger role (as demonstrated comprehensively by the Flynn effect).

Politics won't be needed when money is extinct. When full automation is reached, the same resources will be available to everybody, so there won't be any need for war - every human on Earth will already have the most that he can possibly have. And, if we take that one step further into simulated reality, it would be impossible for someone to want something and not have it - all their wants can be satisfied instantaneously through code (which will probably be done automatically through mind-reading). So war won't really achieve anything either way.

I think you are being too close-minded here. Robot-janitors are already a thing (https://www.cleanlink.com/news/article/Amazon-Explores-Replacing-Janitors-With-Robots--20932). The reason why we don't see these guys taking care of our roads is that doing so requires a high degree of navigation autonomy, as well as scaling of obstacles such as stairs. However, both of these fields are seeing rapid development (e.g. autonomous cars and Spot Mini robot) and will probably reach full automation within the next 10-15 years, possibly becoming mainstream in 20 years. Robots picking up household rubbish face the same problems. But, let me tell you: when these problems are addressed, it's not just cleaning that will be automated - our entire household will be automated, from cooking, to serving food, to buying food, to laundry, to clothes ironing etc. In addition, cars and transport will be fully autonomous as well.

Regarding full automation, you can read my reply to Mammal Lover. Full automation is pretty much inevitable and will in all likelihood happen this century or early next century. All the data points in this direction. I understand that this is tough to imagine and seems very far-fetched, but the reason that it does is that our intuition tends to extrapolate linearly, while progress is not even exponential - it's super-exponential. This means that the next 100 years will actually see 20,000 years' worth of modern-day progress. If even this thought fails your intuition, think of this: what would people in the 70s think of you if you told that, 40 years later, they would be able to access the sum of human knowledge just by asking the question they wanted answered, or order any product on Earth just by asking for it, that they would carry supercomputers many times more powerful than the most powerful contemporary supercomputer in their pockets, that computer games would have open worlds the size of cities with graphics that are close to indistinguishable from real life, etc? That's right, they would probably tell you what you are telling me now: none of this will ever happen, not in 40 years, and not in 200 years. And yet here we are. Think about it - the speed of technological progress is scary, for better or for worse.

Yes, there are indeed fully self-sustaining automated systems (https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-07/diarrhea-bot-sporting-artificial-gut-eats-excretes-all-itself/) out there right now. Sure, they are currently very primitive, because self-sustainment is very hard, but this will be standard when AI becomes more advanced and more general.

I have actually been thinking about the dangers of living in a digital world. For example, disruptions in code could result in massive suffering. This problem in particular can be resolved by mechanically shutting down the digital consciousness as soon as some level of pain is reached, or by not allowing the sensation of pain past a certain level at all. I know this sounds simplistic, but our civilisation will be so advanced by then that a working solution will certainly be found. What other problems can arise? I know that some of them are unknown unknowns, but can you give me an example of what sort of thing you are talking about?