Given a similar freedom of fertility, most of our distant descendants will also live near a subsistence level. Per-capita wealth has only been rising lately because income has grown faster than population. But if income only doubled every century, in a million years that would be a factor of 10^3000, which seems impossible to achieve with only the 10^70 atoms of our galaxy available by then. Yes we have seen a remarkable demographic transition, wherein richer nations have fewer kids, but we already see contrarian subgroups like Hutterites, Hmongs, or Mormons that grow much faster. So unless strong central controls prevent it, over the long run such groups will easily grow faster than the economy, making per person income drop to near subsistence levels.
So for one there might be physical and economic reasons for this trend to continue but also shows how we shouldn’t confuse this period, which will be considered to be so close (in time) to the big bang that it might as well be part of it, with ages to come. This might simply be a transitional phase from which we can draw no particular conclusion for how things will settle in the long run.
This would be the most lasting legacy of this, our explosively growing dream time, when what was once adaptive behavior with mostly harmless delusions become strange and dreamy unadaptive behavior, before adaptation again reasserted a clear-headed relation between behavior and reality.
On the other hand, maybe fully utilitarian humans just aren’t feasible—I don’t think there’s any way to tell at this point.
It would be interesting if fully utilitarian intelligence isn’t possible, that the flexibility required for original thought implies a need for playfulness.
This idea reminds me of Robin Hansons Dreamtime Sequence:
This is the Dream Time
DreamTime
Layers of Delusion
So for one there might be physical and economic reasons for this trend to continue but also shows how we shouldn’t confuse this period, which will be considered to be so close (in time) to the big bang that it might as well be part of it, with ages to come. This might simply be a transitional phase from which we can draw no particular conclusion for how things will settle in the long run.
On the other hand, maybe fully utilitarian humans just aren’t feasible—I don’t think there’s any way to tell at this point.
It would be interesting if fully utilitarian intelligence isn’t possible, that the flexibility required for original thought implies a need for playfulness.