My dude, your life story would have broken me about one sentence in. You've overcome a lot to get as far as you are, don't let anyone compare you to their finish line if their starting line was miles ahead of yours. You might have made it farther on your own than them.

The king of capitalism unironically claiming that increased productivity frees people up to do other things is hilarious. Like, I hope so, but it hasn't been the case for at least the last half century, and if we leave it up to people like him, it definitely won't.

Great answer! Just one note: you wouldn't necessarily need to break SHA-256 in order to break bitcoin, you could also just break ECDSA, which would allow you to spend any bitcoin in any wallet. This is possible with a large enough quantum computer, though you would need significantly more than 1000 qubits (in the hundreds of millions).

You're right that symmetric cryptography (like AES) is still safe against quantum attacks, but the Internet relies heavily on asymmetric cryptography protocols, as well. The latter are based almost exclusively on the (elliptic curve) discrete logarithm problem and the integer factorization problem, which are easily solvable on quantum computers, so they wouldn't be secure in a post-quantum world.

The problem is that symmetric protocols need encryption keys, which can't securely be exchanged over insecure channels (like the Internet), so you either need to exchange them out-of-band (infeasible in most cases) or in ways that rely on the difficulty of solving hard mathematical problems. Additionally, things like digital signatures (which are vital in systems like Bitcoin) always use asymmetric cryptography, so it being broken would make it impossible to check the identity of the author of a digital message.

Luckily we've been working on post-quantum asymmetric protocols that use new mathematical problems for which we don't yet have efficient quantum algorithms. The hope is that by the time large-scale quantum computers become widely available, we'll have minted new secure standards.

The future is now and I already hate it.

Your actions are just particularly pronounced thoughts, so you can control at least a subset of your thoughts.

Hard disagree. Any development that helps us better understand and interpret the human brain is likely to accelerate the creation of an AGI.

Not necessarily, since there may be mechanisms entirely unlike the human brain capable of producing intelligence, but there are none that we know of.

The plot thins

Both the agricultural and the industrial revolutions only increased the amount of energy that humanity can use to do work, they didn't introduce new players to the game. The advent of ASI means the creation of an entity with greater capabilities than humanity and (possibly) divergent goals, which is something that's never happened before. Most experts believe the singularity will lead to one of the two extremes for us (total annihilation or AI-powered utopia).

Based on this and your other comments in this thread I gather that you don't really understand the significance of current developments. I suggest you read up on the topics you so confidently misunderstand.