You lack imagination then. If you read history and anthropology more, which you haven't done enough of, clearly, then your imagination will expand and you will easily be able to imagine such a future. Why? Because you will become aware of so many other situations where it looked bleaker and plenty of groups of people got by anyway and managed to live satisfying lives as best they could.

To this day there are still some hunter gatherer tribes left in the Amazon, for example, despite all the encroaching modernity. Despite anything that could happen, I can imagine being able to be resourceful and find some mediocre niche in which to survive and thrive in, away from the glare of the panopticon.

Or as an another example, no matter how much humans dominate with their industrial civilization, cockroaches, pigeons, and rats still manage to survive in the city, despite not only not being actively supported by civilization, but actually being unwanted.

Or if you want to compare to disasters, how about the black plague? Living through that would likely have been worse than most anything we complain or worry about.

Your kids will have at least as good a chances as any of those. The key is raising them with appropriate expectations -- with the expectation that they may have to figure out how to survive in a very different world, not some air conditioned convenience paradise. Don't raise kids that are afraid to sleep outdoors or afraid to eat beans or cabbage. Those folks will do poorly if anything goes wrong. If they have a good resilient character, I really think they'll likely be fine. We are the descendants of survivors.

there are people alive today who quite literally are descendants of humans born in WW2 concentration camps. some percentage of those people are probably quite happy and glad they have been given a chance at life. of course, if their ancestors had chosen not to procreate they wouldn't be disappointed, they'd just simply never have come into existence.

but it's absolutely the case that there's almost always a _chance_ at survival and future prosperity, even if things feel unimaginably bleak.

You lack imagination then. If you read history and anthropology more, which you haven't done enough of, clearly, then your imagination will expand and you will easily be able to imagine such a future. Why? Because you will become aware of so many other situations where it looked bleaker and plenty of groups of people got by anyway and managed to live satisfying lives as best they could.

To this day there are still some hunter gatherer tribes left in the Amazon, for example, despite all the encroaching modernity. Despite anything that could happen, I can imagine being able to be resourceful and find some mediocre niche in which to survive and thrive in, away from the glare of the panopticon.

Or if you want to compare to disasters, how about the black plague?

Your kids will have at least as good a chances as any of those. The key is raising them with appropriate expectations -- with the expectation that they may have to figure out how to survive in a very different world, not some air conditioned convenience paradise. If they have that I really think they'll likely be fine.

For what it's worth most of the people in my social circle do not use ChatGPT and it's had zero impact on their life. Exponential growth from zero is zero.