Lugh

Submission Statement

When we think of novel interfaces for computing, they are usually voice-based or using sight (AR/VR glasses, etc). When you think about it, interfaces designed around our sense of touch have lots of advantages.

They're private. No one needs to know what you are using them for or what you are talking about. They're less cumbersome than the glasses or headgear AR requires. Sure they have limitations too, but I wonder what applications would work for this medium of communication. Real-time language translation? An AI delivering messages or advice in meetings when no one knows you are using it?

OpenAI has been in the news lots lately, yet one aspect of its story gets unreported. OpenAI is in talks to strike a deal involving employee shares that would boost its value to $80 billion. That would make OpenAI the third most valuable private company in the world. Yet, what merits that valuation?

Even open-source free AI is snapping at its heels. It has no hold over AI technology, which looks to become widely distributed - not in the hands of a few. Is the brand & its employees really worth $80 billion? Somehow all the hype around OpenAI seems all about the money, and not the actual business, which is nowhere near as remarkable or special as all the hype would have you believe.

Still, we should be glad all this investor money is flowing to AI - it is probably accelerating its development, and everyone will benefit from that ultimately.

If you accept the premise, that when the day arrives AI & robots can not only do most work but are far cheaper than humans, then we are in times of revolutionary change. The logical follow-up is how will that revolutionary change translate in terms of power and political structures?

OP's point here is an interesting one. Less educated blue-collar workers have been losing for decades now thanks to automation and globalization. Yet they've lacked the power to do anything about it. Revolutionary change happens when counter-elites form at the top of society. These counter-elites are made up of the educated & what OP calls "failed elite aspirants" - in plainer language people who've gone into debt to be educated, but now can't get the life they feel their education owes them.

Now that AI is coming for their livelihoods we can expect their reactions to be different, but how?

It's thought-provoking to wonder where synthetic biology technology will be in ten years' time. Its development is being accelerated by the rapid advances in AI. Deepmind's AlphaFold illustrates that trend in action.

If a fully synthetic yeast cell is just one year away - how soon will there be a fully synthetic multicellular organism? Evolution has created millions of varieties of those over billions of years, will AI be even more capable?

Robotic exoskeletons are in development all over the world, but what is interesting about this one is how simple it is. That indicates in the future robotic exoskeleton use may be widespread because they are inexpensive.

If you're lucky enough to live to an advanced age, most people expect frailty at the end of their lives. Perhaps that will be less so in the future if you can use tech like this.

Will anyone be left buying new internal combustion engine cars by the end of the decade?

The person making this claim, Peter Chen, is the founder of a successful robotics firm, Covariant, that already sells robots. Here are some of their robots in action packing meal kits. I think this gives his claims some weight and credibility.

Understandably enough, people often focus on the human job loss implications of this. But there are also other economic challenges. A world where robots and AI do more and more of the work formerly done by people will be a world of constant deflation. By eliminating human wages from production, everything they produce will get cheaper.

Many people don't appreciate it, but deflation is extremely destructive to how our economies are run. Over time it grows the size of debts relative to incomes and creates recessionary conditions that then often spiral into further problems. My guess is that we are going to start hearing a lot more about this in a few years.

Great info. Out of curiosity what does your hosting setup say about visitor numbers? Futurology.today uses Cloudflare. They give a figure of about 10k per day for what they call unique visitors. That seems unduly high when you look at how busy our lemmy instance actually is. We have just short of 1K subscribers, so I would assume visitor numbers would be lower than 10k per day.

mmm, Swiss Re have been in the insurance game since 1863. I'd go with the idea they know what they're doing.

This therapy is so new no one has had it long enough to know if it will be a complete cure, but many people involved think it may be.

CRISPR gene-editing was discovered in 2012, but its application in medicine has only taken off in more recent years. There are problems to overcome, particularly around unintended consequences from imprecise targeting of genes. That said, the list of genetic diseases and predispositions to diseases is long, so there is a great deal of potential with this biotech.

I'm left-leaning and sympathetic to the cause of unions.

However, there will come a day AI & robots can do all work humans can do, except cheaper. That world needs Universal Basic Income, and societies harnessing that productive power to ensure everyone's basic needs.

Soon seeing this in terms of labor and unions stopping AI & robots will be counter-producitive. The quicker the better the left turn to Basic Income and accept AI & robots doing as much as work as possible, then the better off for all of us.