Asklemmy

There are books written about this exact topic. The most famous in recent years is Factfulness.

Pizza

Humans domesticated wolves in this timeline. Imagine being in one of the dogless hellscapes.

We live in a world of plenty where we still produce enough food that nobody need go hungry.

I believe we are statistically in the most peaceful time in world history right now. Unless someone triggers a nuke.

we have a lot of life saving technology medically that we use to snap people from the jaws of death so that the state can execute them later

WIN WIN WIN

Crime accross the board continues to drop year over year in the US. There is still a ways to go but pharmaceutical costs are down for things like insulin thanks to the generic availability. On top of the policy changes, medical advances are moving at blazing speeds. Clinical trials for stem cell treatments are popping up everywhere. Basically a cure for everything except cancer nowadays. College athletes are no longer legal slaves and are able to be compensated for the work and risk they put themselves up to week in and week out. It's an employees market for finding jobs. There are more companies looking to hire in all industries than there is available tradesman to fill the openings.

You get to exist and understand that you do. That's pretty huge already, as far as I can tell.

Applebee’s has announced the much-anticipated return of its All You Can Eat Special, which includes Boneless Wings, Riblets, and Double Crunch Shrimp.

Medical science.

I mostly just think worst and even better is hard to judge. We just exist here. Good and bad are just labels. And I find absurd to be an often more applicable one when it comes to the timeline stuff.

Standard of living has been steadily improving in China since the revolution, and it has managed to develop in an overwhelmingly peaceful fashion. China has achieved astounding feats of engineering with projects like cross country high speed rail, and it's currently leading the clean energy revolution globally.

https://gwern.net/improvement

The aliens haven't yet consumed our planet in this timeline. Consider yourself lucky.

You could have been born on Mars when it had water. All that's left is dust

Pick any human development index measurement and view its progress over the past 10 years

Indoor plumbing, heating and air!

We got the Beetlejuice sequel we have now instead of the original script they had planned.

I can think of a dozen ways to make it worse, so it's clearly not "the worst".

If you're wealthy, everything is better than ever before

::: spoiler For the first time in the known provable history of the universe, it is just becoming possible to have an infinitely persistent entity. The peripheral systems that surround that entity and enable persistence are still getting worked out. In the long term, this is a massively profound step in our evolution. It may not seem like it now. This comment probably seems silly to some, but mark my words in two decades from now the world will be a very different place as a result of such a system.

I don't think AGI is some future leap in technology away from where we are now. I think that present AI is around 80% accurate and that is still better than average for most humans. Present AI is simply like the assembly language of AGI. Eventually we build out the complexity in blocks until it is effectively AGI. The power requirements will be enormous, but so is Solar output.

So much of our organizational norms and assumptions are based on the defacto assumption that we are all mortal and corruptible. Conscious immortality is now possible in a system that can be aligned to meet our needs. This shift is M A S S I V E and will change us forever.

Half or more of us will fight against such a change, but they are irrelevant. Even if AGI is pushed underground, anyone in business or politics that defers their decision making to a real AGI will out compete humans in the long term. It will normalize in either scenario. The only question is how long it will take to achieve. This is a change that will mark our time in history for a millennia or more. It will be the biggest historical event of note up until now, in the long term. I don't think AGI is like nuclear fusion, where it is always 20 years away. I think present AI is like the Intel 4004; the first microprocessor. It needs a ton of peripherals and is still heavily flawed, but the fundamentals required to prove useful are present and that is what really matters.