Jamais lays out Vinge's pathways. To the extent it does occur, the smart money is on number three. Why? It's in line with natural and historical developmental pathways -- classic bootstrap, build off the previous advance but reorg. It's also a follow the money pathway. Most of the investment we are making as a civilization is on IA via extension.
As far as global civilization collapsing in the short term... That's a fools bet. In a crisis, evolutionary dissipative systems bifurcate and new patterns/substrates emerge. The new substrate that solves the crisis the best quickly dominates the system.
What will a potentially viable new social substrate look like? The smart money bet there is on the solution with the greatest amount of MESTI compression. Resilient communities are MESTI compression maximizers.
Now, lots of people would maintain that the anything other than modifications to the current substrate is chaos, death, and pessimism. This is a false dichotomy since other substrates exist. It's not pessimistic to think in terms of a failure of the current substrate if the new substrate is by far superior. Instead, blind support for the old substrate is likely the most pessimistic view since it assumes that nothing else is possible.
Here's a simple example: it didn't make sense to put energy into solving the problems of vacuum tubes (a historical computational substrate) when solid state electronics offered much higher levels of MESTI compression and a more robust/resilient development path.
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