> Of course if progress continues forever, we'll all end up as uploads in a Matryoshka brain

I can't tell if you're joking. There is a group of people who think because they thought something was cool or because it appeared in science fiction, this means it's inevitable. Some of these people are sometimes considered influential thinkers that we should all base the future on. (If you don't, you're behind!)

Meanwhile LLMs still don't do really very much, and the only improvement path is "throw more compute at a larger corpus".

I'm half joking and half serious. Nobody knows where the future will go, and if the recursive self improvement people are right, likely nobody alive today will be able to understand the future, let alone predict it.

So the joke is the idea that some particular thing is inevitable. The serious bit is that far future predictions as a fool's errand but that you should think bigger than "what will we do for labor?"