Friedberg @ 01:13:34Inconclusive
aitechscience
In the "post‑AI era" (implicitly within the coming decades), advances in AI will make currently infeasible, extremely large-scale engineering projects routine, such as deep mining toward the Earth’s interior for rare earth minerals and large-scale space projects like colonizing the Moon, by enabling coordination and design that would otherwise require millions of people.
I have a thesis that, like AI more than anything, unlocks deeply complicated projects for humans that would otherwise be infeasible in the AI era. I think in the post AI era, we're going to be like, oh, here's all these projects that we do that are like, oh, you know, we on a daily basis, we mine to the center of the earth and we get cool like rare earth minerals from like 500 miles down and we go to space and colonize the moon and all these crazy things, because AI unlocks these large scale projects that would require millions of people to do things in a coordinated way.View on YouTube
Explanation
The prediction explicitly concerns a “post‑AI era” over the coming decades, in which AI allegedly makes routine things like:
- Deep mining toward the Earth’s interior ("500 miles down") for rare earth minerals
- Large‑scale space projects such as colonizing the Moon
As of November 30, 2025, none of this has occurred:
- Current mining operations are limited to relatively shallow depths in the Earth’s crust; there is no technology or active industrial practice approaching hundreds of miles deep extraction for rare earths or anything else.
- Human activity on the Moon is limited to robotic missions and planning for future crewed missions (e.g., NASA’s Artemis program and various commercial lunar initiatives). There is no permanent lunar colony or routine colonization activity in operation yet.
- AI has advanced rapidly and is being used in engineering, logistics, and scientific research, but it has not yet demonstrably enabled the kind of massive, routine, planetary‑scale and space‑colonization projects described.
Because the prediction’s implied time horizon is “the post‑AI era” over the coming decades, and we are only in 2025, it is too early to determine whether AI will in fact unlock the level of routine deep‑Earth mining and Moon colonization described. The relevant future period has not arrived, and the prediction is not framed to be testable this soon.
Therefore, the status of the prediction is inconclusive (too early to tell) given the current date.