Comment by bonitochips

> Why are we enabling a world that outpaces us?

Because we kinda suck. Wars, poverty, destruction of the environment, etc. Maybe AI will be worse -- the are plenty of movies on that subject -- or maybe it will be better.

> Is this going to lead to anything other than displacement in the long term?

We may have already damaged the environment enough that we're going to die off soon anyway. So without AI, we were already on that path to "displace" ourselves -- I don't think that argument is that compelling.

Perhaps this is the natural evolution of intelligent life. Eventually the sun will die and everything we are will be gone forever, maybe this is the only way that something of us survives.

> Do you ever stop and ask why we’re building the world we’re building?

We're not building a world. We're just ants. Individuals making individual decisions that have nothing to do with the rest of the world. You don't have to look too far to find humans that literally care nothing about humanity as a whole and everything about themselves.

> To what end does a world we cannot comprehend or rebuild from first principles serve us?

We already live in that world. You wouldn't even be able to build a toaster from first principles without the knowledge and infrastructure that already exists.

I mean, ideally to the end of poverty, disease, climate change, war, starvation, etc. You can disagree about whether this would be the outcome in practice, but I don't think 'why might we want to create something smarter than us' is a hard question. Humans losing their status as top dog is really a trivial price to pay for the potential return.