We need a messiah. Humanity has huge problems that we are not addressing (top of the list being climate change), largely because it would require massive scale societal disruption to do so. Over the past 50 years, we've thought that personal computers would help (bicycles for the mind), then we thought the internet would help (organizing the world's information), then we thought social networks would help (connecting the world's people). AI is our current best hope to disrupt humanity's trajectory straight off a cliff. The aim seems to be to accelerate this sucker and hope that this time it'll save us.
Edit: I'm not saying I agree with this notion, I'm just articulating the subconscious desire here. The parent's question was literally, "what's the endgame?"
Interesting. Brief musing. Our collective objective function appears to be a post-scarcity economy. Alas, we physically inhabit a finite world, in which post-scarcity can never be attained -- the exponential curve ruins every single attempt. Another option is to seek peace / shalom / spiritual homeostasis, even when faced with the certainty of decay and death. Quest which perhaps does require a Messiah.
I don't think that most people interpret "post-scarcity" as "anything goes", as in literally unlimited resources. I'd describe it as a situation in which all physical needs are addressed for all human beings (except those who voluntarily opt out) without them having to work for it.
Edit: I'm not saying I agree with this notion, I'm just articulating the subconscious desire here. The parent's question was literally, "what's the endgame?"