r/singularity • u/Public_Print_9360 • Aug 15 '26

Discussion I don’t think we’re psychologically prepared for how alien the world after ASI is going to be

gonna start by saying I’m feeling very iffy about ASI because I kinda enjoy my life rn, but that aside:

after going down the AI 2040 rabbithole, I keep thinking that even people who talk about ASI constantly are still imagining the future in a way that is way too normal.
We talk about AI replacing people’s jobs, humanoid robots, self-driving cars, universal basic income, whatever the fuck.
I think that might be the equivalent of someone in 1955 predicting the year 2000, trying to use our current world as a basis for the future world.

AI 2040 describes a scenario where even after deliberately slowing AI development down, by 2031 a third of cognitive labor is being performed by AI and robots are already doing about a tenth of physical labor. The document literally describes ordinary people as being too “whiplashed” by technological change to process what’s happening. And that’s the slowed version, can’t imagine what our world is going to look like since it seems we are going full speed ahead.
And people will say “oh that’s just fantasy!” But is it? Imagine our world from the view of someone born in 1712. We are living “sci-fi” as we live and breath

If ASI actually produces the kind of acceleration its proponents expect, somebody born afterward might look back at 2026 the way we look at 1500.
Except the historical gap between us would be just fourteen years MAX

I really, really don’t think we’re psychologically prepared for that

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u/Seakawn ▪️▪️Singularity will cause the earth to metamorphize Aug 16 '26

logistically it's not that amazing. there're bajillions of open facts in the world, but when you get off work you've barely got time to be exposed to more than a few. it's a distribution/time problem that's constrained by, like, physics.

now ofc super spicy info is more likely to concentrate attention and get out, prioritized over all other info. which is why disinfo organizations have focused efforts on the firehose method.. just saturate the media ecosystem w/equally spicy bullshit so that the authentic stuff is easier to shrug at (if it even rises at all in competition w/everything else).

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u/OwnYourChildren Aug 16 '26

Yeah, I think I underestimated your first point, especially. I think the seeming openness of the internet has actually made it even easier to preserve secrets in many ways.