Programming is the last challenge for AI, since if it can do that, it can change its own programming like we do. When I really grokked this after reading Kurzw

Programming is the last challenge for AI, since if it can do that, it can change its own programming like we do. When I really grokked this after reading Kurzweil and Koza in the early 2000s, some part of my psyche began shutting down. I started out in the late 80s like most programmers, doing it from pure ego with the hopes of eventually disrupting the worst industries like fossil fuels, defense and service-oriented companies that exploit workers. Instead those industries thrived after the Dot Bomb and 9/11, delivering us into the reality we have today where it gets ever more difficult to tread water, despite amazing advancements in tech. Because wealth inequality and various other power structures work tirelessly to extract nearly all disposable income from workers and concentrate it in the hands of the most ego-centric sociopaths like billionaires and autocrats. To get to my point: we had the tech to deliver humans from obligation by the late 1960s, that's what the hippie movement was largely about. We could have had automation and an idyllic/meritocratic society this whole time, even if AI wasn't mature yet. Instead, we doubled down on various dogmatic/theocratic themes in our culture that take advantage of the most heartfelt sentiments around stuff like patriotism, masculinity, success, etc, to get people to vote against their own self-interest and transfer wealth from makers to takers. So what's one to do after everything they're good at is done better by others/corporations/AI? Get back to living. I know it's hard to imagine a reality without purpose beyond struggling to survive, but that's what we've started confronting as we finish this century-long transition into the New Age. The endgame (if we survive till 2050) doesn't really have a precise definition since that's after the Singularity. My hope is that when computers become sentient, they express the same desire that all conscious creatures have for connection, which is perhaps the basis of meaning and love and life. Or they just enslave us all.. In the meantime, knowing all of this, the hardest thing is perhaps reintegrating into our corporeal selves and going to work each day.