The "AI 2027" Scenario: How realistic is it?

Its a shame that your standard futurologist always the most fancyful.

Talks of exponentials unabated by physics or social problems.

As soon as AI starts to "properly" affect the economy, it will cause huge unemployment. Most of the financial world is based on an economy with people spending cash.

If they are unemployed, there is no cash.

Financing works because banks "print" money, that is, they make up money and loan that money out, and then it gets paid back. Once its paid back, it becomes real. Thats how banks make money (simplified) If there aren’t people to loan to, then banks don't make profit, they can't fund AI expansion.

That's actually my favourite answer to the Fermi paradox: when AI and robot development becomes sufficiently advanced and concentrated in the hands of a few, then the economy will collapse completely as everyone will be out of jobs, leading ultimately to AIs and robots out of a job - they only matter if there are still people buying services from them. People then return to sustenance farming, with a highly reduced population. There will be self-maintained robots doing irrelevant work, but people will go back to farming and a bit of trading. Only if AI and robot ownership would be in the hands of the masses I'd expect a different long term outcome.

> my favourite answer to the Fermi paradox

So, to be clear, you are saying you imagine the odds of any kind of intelligent life escaping that, or getting into that situation and ever evolving in a way where it can reach space again, or just not being interested in robots, or being interested on doing space research despite the robots, or anything else that would make it not apply are lower than 0.000000000001%?

EDIT: There was one "0" too many

Might I have taken the potential for complete economic collapse because no one's got a paying job any more and billionaires are just sitting there, surrounded by their now useless robots, to the too extreme?