Ask HN: How will the AI endgame play out?

Almost certainly the collapse of democracy as a political system and the end of nation states. Also a collapse of the human economy and the rise of the AI economy. Other people have made this point but the short of it is: for the last few hundred years having more humans on your side meant you would probably win a violent conflict with a party with fewer people, ergo majority rule was the mostly peaceful equilibrium. Powerful technology, specifically AI-enabled drones, robots, etc. changes this dynamic to whoever has the most capital: manufacturing capacity, energy access, compute access, etc. This changes the political equilibrium to dictatorship by capital holders. As the value of human labor decreases due to AI and automation, humans will be priced out of the economy and AI agents will transact with each other. There will essentially be a parallel economy with AIs transacting to build e.g. data centers and solar arrays while humans live in squalor because their labor is effectively worthless relative to AI and robots. This isn’t inevitable but without major changes wrt. AI regulation and capital accumulation it seems like the most likely result. Even with better governance it still seems likely governments will be incentivized to ignore their citizens to accrue more power by funneling money into the AI economy.

There are many more narratives about the future of AI than that. I just saw a talk stipulating that AI is a reaction to populism by the class of capital holders. They say it is going to be used as a way for them to hold onto their wealth; hence the mass surveillance we see now. I personally think it is still too early to tell. We are basically sitting on the edge of a pool dipping our toes in the water, waiting to jump in. Whatever predictions people make about it now, they are ignoring all the inevitable twists and turns that are bound to happen in the coming years.

I prescribe to Iain Banks view of the world in The Culture Series.

I'm sorry to be a downer, but there is no "HN Collective". As you said, there are (at least) three broad narratives, and people here have been writing about their opinions on thousands of other threads. So rather than asking people to repost their opinions here, I think it would be worthwhile if you first do a bit of research on the existing HN corpus, write up what you found, and then post that as the basis for discussion.

My question on the three narratives is always: "OK, how is that going to happen?" "It's a bubble" can answer that question very easily and has plenty of historical precedent. The other two seem to be very vague notions without any obvious intermediate steps that takes us from here to there. To borrow from the Underpants Gnomes: Phase 1: Adopt "AI" Phase 2: ??? Phase 3: Human Extinction/Utopia