I have been following LessWrong for not that long compared to others, but definitely knew about it for a while, was interested in AI before GPT-3. Have visions of AI future that I don’t really see elsewhere.
Some writing is on https://icely.substack.com/ but it’s probably half on-topic for this site and half too-personal, I wish to do more sane puzzle game writing eventually
I make interactive games (and fiction) on http://icely.itch.io/ all trying to do something innovative and new. (my newest game is an interactive fiction + puzzle game presented in a Discord-like interface)
I’m not sure you could say “in retrospect this was extremely incorrect”, like maybe in retrospect-retrospect 20 years later they could be accurate concerns. It certainly seems incorrect now, but would the ‘overpopulation-signs’ be wrong if somehow the ‘underpopulation-signs’ got reversed? I don’t think people were considering solutions to overpopulation of the “reduce global morale and perceived increased difficulty of life, etc.” as valid paths to take. It might be like if an asteroid hit the earth and that caused population to go to 0, I would be hesitant to ask “what can we learn from this” as if we missed out on this line of argument, when really thinking in that direction in the first place is very specialized and there are very very many potential causes for underpopulation and many wouldn’t pan out.
Besides that, I think maybe the lesson is that trendlines on society and views can be surprisingly flexible? Sometimes people say with regards to a coordination problem that “if only everyone decided to work together we could fix the world’s ills in a few days”, but this would rarely happen besides extraordinary circumstances or a slow growing of circumstances.