How do you envision life to be? Which facet of our lives will be very different? Where will it have the most impact?
Face-to-face experiences and carefully planned group activities will start to earn a "premium" status. People will be divided: the ones who prefer the virtual and the ones who prefer the physical. The ones losing the physical contact in the process will experience more and more mental health problems over the years.
The biggest impact will be on the election process and democracy as we know it.
Though, writing from Europe, I believe governments will take a more active role in creating these "human-zones" with real identity verification. For instance, in the EU we already have the eID project in the making:
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/wikis/display/D...
Moreover, I am still highly skeptical about the labor market impacts upon white-collar jobs. The alleged productivity increases will mostly mean automating boring menial tasks in these jobs.
Impacts upon democracy and politics are also my biggest concerns at the moment.
If that is true, why would it matter?
Practically speaking, as GPT-4 took the world by storm, our ticket sales skyrocketed in response. Of course this is just a correlation but this year we're on track for a record-breaking sellout. So we could predict people craving ownership and authenticity (whatever that means to them) free from the invisible hand of AI.
Life as we know it will end. Humanity as we know it will end. It could be because of an AGI takeover, or because of a few individuals harnessing extremely powerful AIs for their own ends, but there is no path forward that doesn't end with most of humanity either dead or enslaved.
Sure, you will likely see industries collapse, huge numbers of people losing their livelihood etc., along the way. But that's nothing compared to what will come shortly afterwards. A humanity where most humans are effectively worthless is unthinkable, yet that is exactly what's going to happen.
i think all software players will be impacted dramatically. if anyone can produce product much faster, it will be even more challenging to stay afloat when you have only software products.
