Why are they making it so needlessly complicated? They can just use existing highways and vehicles with Level 4 self-driving. They don’t need new separate roads.

That said, this points to the future. Even if true Level 5 self-driving is several years off, there is plenty Level 4 can do now. That includes all cargo driving on highways. I doubt most trucker jobs have long to go. Some will say they are needed for last-mile delivery. Some companies are soon going to figure out a profitable system for having human drivers locally for that, but self-driving vehicles for the long stints on highways.

Why would people be eager to have a place like them joining the fedi?

If BlueSky were federated it would mean you could move to another server and keep the followers you built there. All the Big Tech offerings keep you locked in, and at risk of losing the work you put in at their whim.

Apart from getting funded by crypto-bros, BlueSky promised to allow federation, and hasn’t. Seems any time VCs or talk of IPOs happens, the only way is down.

Most people seem to hate the idea of AI versions of dead celebrities, but I can’t help but be a bit intrigued. I’m a fan of golden-age Hollywood movies from the 1930s to 1950s. Most of that era’s stars are dead now, but I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time before we see some of their likeness in ‘new’ versions of old movies. Some people may not like it, but where there are dollars to be made, things tend to happen.

What would ‘Casablanca’ be like with Spencer Tracy instead of Humphrey Bogart? ‘Gone with the Wind’ with Vivien Leigh swapped out for Bette Davis. Orson Welles always said his masterpiece would have been ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’, not ‘Citizen Kane’, if the former hadn’t been destroyed by the studio in editing. Maybe his vision of it can be resurrected by AI versions of the actors recreating scenes from the original script.

“Of the world’s four largest greenhouse gas emitters the EU has made by far the most progress in slashing emissions. A report released last week by the UN Environment Programme calculated that EU emissions fell 7.5 percent last year – compared to a 1.4-percent drop in the United States, and a jump of 5.2 and 6.1 percent respectively in China and India.”

This is largely driven by swapping out coal for renewables, which means the EU is on track for its goal of being carbon neutral by 2050. China and India have growing electricity demand, that even China with its vast renewables manufacturing capability, can’t meet from renewables alone. There is talk in the EU about speeding up efforts to try to reach carbon neutrality sooner. Crucially, this can now be tied to a pro-economic growth agenda which will get more right-wing parties in the European Parliament on board.

Researchers have been trying to get robots to autonomously wipe tables and fold towels for years with only very limited success

Yes, this has been true up until now, but I think we are in a phase of rapid advancement. Look here at how DeepMind is using current LLM AI so that robots can train themselves - https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/shaping-the-future-of-advanced-robotics/

I would guess robots capable (perhaps messily at first) of general purpose skills like cleaning aren’t far off.

The UBTECH one is definitely not as advanced as the Atlas one. But I would expect, like everything electronic, China will eventually have commoditized versions of robots that are functionally almost as good as more expensive ones, but much cheaper.

https://www.techeblog.com/unitree-g1-humanoid-robot-mass-production/

Customer relationship management software puts its details into structured fields, like many other types of software, a database of sorts. This user is saying that extra step is no longer needed. The AI is capable of extracting, summarizing, and structuring the data from emails, Slack, etc - thus no more need for the software anymore.

I’ve been wondering when current LLM AIs would start to master this ability. I suspect it will be one of the things it’s good at. For many tasks, software usage patterns are relatively predictable and modelable. A trend with current AI, is for competitors and open-source to rapidly follow industry leaders. We can expect AI like this to be widely available in six months.

Many people’s knowledge work employment is tied to software skills and experience. That premium is about to start diminishing. People are familiar with the concept of ‘macros’; automating repetitive sequences of software usage. It seems all but inevitable AI will be doing something similar, but orders of magnitude greater, and that all the forces in free market economics will be driving it to replace expensive humans.

Yes, I also forgot to mention this tech is a safeguard against supply-side shocks. like with wheat after Russia attacked Ukraine.

Some people’s reaction to this proposal might be to wonder why bother? We already have a functional agriculture system using sunlight that’s been working for several thousand years. But there is a lot to be said for improving on it.

This approach could grow many foods where they can’t currently be grown.  Thus we could localize food production, and decentralize it. This could vastly reduce the waste of food transport.  Furthermore, pollution from pesticides could be vastly reduced.  It also allows us to think about rewilding huge swathes of our environments. Finally, this is an approach amenable to full automation.  Ultimately that will reduce the price of food and its availability. Who knows, several decades from now, the standard way to produce food may be via indoor methods tended to by robot farmers.

Yeah, like everything the challenge is to get from the Lab to production. Perovskite solar cells, another type of solar cells that show great theoretical promise, have issues with long-term stability. Solar cells need to survive in tough conditions for many years to be useful. Here I would also wonder about the relative scarcity of gallium being a limiting factor.

That I can help you with.

Without doxxing them, this reddit user campaigns a lot IRL on UBI - their posts/UBI subreddits have loads of stuff - https://www.reddit.com/user/2noame

Also Twitter has load of stuff - search ‘UBI’ there, scroll down based on ‘Top’ and there are lots of accounts devoted to UBI news.

BTW - You’re welcome to setup https://futurology.today/UBI here too & cross-post/double-post if you want

Bet it’s going to be China building most of the humanoid robots too.

apart from posting regularly, sadly I don’t have many ideas. 😞😞

We’ve had real trouble growing this site from the reddit sub-reddit, and the promotional posts we’ve done, in total, have had tens of thousands of views

the people that own the machines have any interest in keeping us alive

I never take ideas like that seriously. Even in sci-fi, the concept seems wildly fanciful.

If AI/robotics follow the typical s-curve of technological adoption, I think the 2030s is most likely. We already seem to be at the beginning of that s-curve in 2024.

That’s a hard no from me. I won’t go near Google or Microsoft’s latest AI offerings either. That said I’m using gen-AI in other contexts more and more. I’m fine with it, as long as it has strictly limited access to my data.

That is one way of looking at this. An alternative view is to say - “The day is coming when AI & robots can do all work, but for pennies on the hour” - will probably arrive by the 2030s. Every day we waste on pointless conversations that are destined to go nowhere, is a day we waste planning for the future. Worse than that, the chaos and despondency the AI/jobs threat creates, adds to the general conditions that are making the rise of fascism and the far right more prevalent.

I sympathize, most of my work falls under the category of ‘creative’ too. But this conversation about AI & robotics needs to quickly move to UBI, or universal access to basic needs like health and housing. The day is coming when AI & robots can do all work, but for pennies on the hour & a free market economy isn’t viable any more. This approach doesn’t acknowledge that; it still assumes a free market economy can work in the future.