Predicting the unpredictable?

A lot of debate here about what the future will hold in the face of AGI, automation, robots, and so on! Read on for a synthesis of recent discussions!

My first prediction: cats

The future will always have cats. Cat pictures, poems, art, and more ?? ??

Hat tip to Zach Weinersmith for finding this gem in Montaigne's catalog:

A wild Garry Tan appears!

This was prompted by a bunch of recent debate on what the future looks like for jobs. Will we have jobs? Will AGI eat everything? A few weeks ago, I predicted that in 10 years we'd have more programmers programming, not less - and many of them would be working on hardware:

Today, Garry Tan entered the fray pointing out a 20+ year old WIRED article declaring the end of everything because of robots, automation and the like. Narrator: everything did not end.

Then our friend Audrow Nash posted a fun poll asking if and or when programmers would be replaced by AI. You can still get your vote in - currently pretty spread out!

Slightly related, Vittorio (@IterIntellectus) reminded us all that the meaning of life is to give us meaning. I agree - part of why I think we'll keep inventing new things to do, even as we automate away the old things.

And @AbHomineDeus started a viral thread debating whether humans would be economically relevant by the end of the coming decade. He says no, I say yes, and the discussion is fun!

Fun week all around! Regardless of where you stand on all of this - most of us agree with Garry Tan that "some of the biggest mega unicorns will be in hard tech" let's go! ?? ??