Sam Altman's Lamp Lighter

Fentanyl is a synthetic (man-made) opioid that works like morphine. It may be used to treat severe pain after surgeries and for pain at the end of life in patients with cancer. Carfentanil is another synthetic opioid. It is used as a tranquilizer for very large animals like elephants.

Excerpts from video above:

...the problem is simple, it is the confusion of two words, prosperity and luxury. Our ancestors who like read the Bible and stuff, did not have this brain damage. They would see that while we are rattled with luxury, we have very little Prosperity. Electric cars are a luxury, porn is a luxury, fentanyl is a luxury. What is the difference between luxury and prosperity? At the lowest levels of Maslow's pyramid of needs they are the same. Both luxury and prosperity start with air, proceed to water, then food, then safety. Forty percent of Americans are afraid to walk alone outside at night where they live, and more might be if they weren't more worried about long-term changes in the temperature of the planet. Here, luxury and prosperity diverge. Prosperity is what is good for you. Luxury is what feels good to you.  Luxury serves your present self. Prosperity serves your future self. The greater the productivity you can command, the further apart these targets are.

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...This analysis neatly distinguishes between luxury and prosperity. Luxury does not make a human being valuable, rather the opposite alas, whereas Prosperity does in fact. Whatever we mean by the value of a human being, it is corroded by idleness and luxury, and enhanced by practice, training, and discipline as the Victorians knew well. But we persist in forgetting a Lamplighter is a more valuable human being than a welfare recipient. Lamp lighting may not be useful in and of itself, but the lamp lighter can be reassigned to many tasks involving diligence and care. He is better for the world and he is better for himself, but he has less free time to inject elephant tranquilizer.

Will we be able to transition humanity to a "prosperity economy" before the coming Technological Singularity event hits?   Don't count on it...

From the TS Wiki link above:

The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge – first in 1983 (in an article that claimed that once humans create intelligences greater than their own, there will be a technological and social transition similar in some sense to "the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole",[8]) and later in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity,[4][7] (in which he wrote that it would signal the end of the human era, as the new superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and would advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate). He wrote that he would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030.[4] Another significant contributor to wider circulation of the notion was Ray Kurzweil's 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, predicting singularity by 2045.[7]

Some scientists, including Stephen Hawking, have expressed concern that artificial superintelligence (ASI) could result in human extinction.[9][10] The consequences of a technological singularity and its potential benefit or harm to the human race have been intensely debated.

Imagine a Von Neumann Machine with AGI...