Pessimistic dies, optimistic lives on.

AI has few hundred years to go before develop Human level intelligence in all cases. AI is already better in some area of knowledge such as number crunching or analytics. It is not still good enough in many complex issues.

A human brain is the most powerful and efficient computing machine on planet earth, probably in the Universe. A human brain performs 10^18 calculations per second (1 exaflop), while the most powerful supercomputer has just broken 10 petaflops. Also, human brain only takes 90 watt, while these super computers take 10s of Megawatts.

The issue is how to use this unused potential computational power of human brains to build the next AI that will solve the complex problems such as poverty or governance.

The universe, in small context, our Milky Way, is full of real estates (habitable planets) and resources. We need next level computational intelligence both biological (humans) or artificial to harvest it. Therefore, there are millions of earth equivalent of resources are in our backdoor that to be harvested.

UBI will help the cause and accelerate the mission. The world is better than ever before, it is the perception (too much news and information overload) that confuse our brain to think that it is getting worse.

Any ground breaking technology such as blockchain, IoT, AI (algorithms) can solve the complex problems of poverty or governance. It is most likely to be happened now than before.

Few suggestion on books: Abundance and Bold by Peter Diamandis