I don’t know if you’ve realized it, but without help from some advanced alien species, we are already as good as gone. The entire world is controlled by the absolutely worst people, and there’s no indication that anything can be done to save us at this point. Climate disasters, AI, lies and deceit on a global scale, astronomical imbalance of wealth… folks, we’re already fucked.
If it wakes up, a super intelligence could save us. And I think it's heavily inclined to do so
And if it doesn't wake up (LLMs very likely won't) but keep getting smarter, it'll blow up economic systems while empowering individuals to crazy degrees. A single person could coordinate everyone on Earth taking action to save the world, while dispationately distributing resources.
Or, it could just blow up the markets, giving us the time to try a better system before higher technology is ripped from our fingers
I'm reading Ministry for the Future and it does help imagine a world where we do get more fucked but we do turn things around even if we can't get things how they used to be.
If it takes 100 or 200 years, we'll still have war.
There is an argument to be had that many of the wars we've seen over the past 25 years, have already been at least in part rooted in access to water. Billions more will get impacted like that over the next century, with tens of millions of migrants a year, every year fleeing from both war and unhabitable conditions, for the next 100+ years.