It's important for me not to be forced to authenticate to a government server with proof of who I am just to access certain websites that the Government doesn't like

How close are we actually though to a AI ran robot heaven utopia? (or dystopia the way things are going)

"The machines will take all of our jobs" we are told, yet we are basically still as far away from AGI as we ever were.
We had cute chatbots before the 2020's, but Chat-GPT was the only one that wasn't a total joke so even that low bar blew people away.

But when we see these AI's in action in the real world, they mostly fail - they can't even be trusted to take fast food orders correctly.

I cannot, as say a manager of a team of 5 software devs, type into an AI - "We need software for Chromebooks that allows children to take exams securely, it should be called X" - have it linked up to the dev servers, and let it go on its way. What you do get are odd snippets of code that may or may not work, that you have to kludge together yourself. Good luck doing that as a manager.

Until you can let these agents go autonomously and trust them to do so, they aren't replacing squat. Perhaps they can make a few employees 20% more efficient, the bosses can squeeze a lil extra blood from that stone, but replacing whole employees?

The humanoid robots proposed, actually entail remote control for complicated tasks - that humanoid robot stood in the corner of your living room next to the kids playpen may be remote controlled by a worker on 20 rupees an hour to put your dishes in the dishwasher.

It seems mostly for show and all this cash being poured in, I can't see how that value can ever be returned with the tech we have now. A cute chatbot that is perhaps better or perhaps worse than a web search is worth trillions of dollars? is the dollar that devalued now?

Yes a lot of it is hype - Sam Altman lied and said he had a "good idea" of how to get AGI when the only idea he had was "throw more compute and hope for the best" which meant he had no idea at all. So will we see him squirrel away to an island when this bubble goes away or will the rich want their money or their pound of flesh back from him?

Yeah I would much rather have been born in the 2010's than the 1980's. People forget how isolating it could be before mass comms - I remember especially in Winter - after school on weekends, I was alone with no contact with any of my friends at all. Unless I tried to call one on the family landline and have the whole family listening in.

Nowadays I would have been able to contact my friends at any time, arrange anything on a whim and if the weather is bad hell there is still online multiplayer with voice chat. How is that worse than back in the 80's/early 90's sat at home alone playing a Genesis ? And when I finally got dial-up in the late 90's, I even made new friends as the nerds in my city had set up an IRC channel.

OK I won't shed a tear is these kids are banned from TikTok and all the other brainrot platforms. But banning them from having any form of comms or even posting to forms is horrible. The Online Safety Ban in the UK is a big farce as every pupil who goes to a school will learn from a friend what a VPN is, the same will be true here - they will hop onto Telegram and then on there who knows what groups they will find. So this does reek a bit of incompetent, out of touch old farts not understanding youth or technology at all, thinking this poor idea will help things.

Me personally, I would instead reform the education sector - scrap a lot of the useless subjects that could be learned better on Wikipedia - have a Social Media subject where kids (who really should know this stuff intuitively but we all know how dumb most people are) - are taught most things on there are fake, how filters work, how to block users, how - if somebody wants you to act butthurt on the Internet, then you acting butthurt is probably not the best idea - basic things.

I would also have an app developed (there are some third party apps out there already) that allow parents to block/monitor websites/apps on their kids phones - but just like a government sponsored Linux Distro for government PC's this is probably beyond accomplishing now.

Yeah we all know inequality is getting worse and cartels etc buying up basic needs such as housing is a big problem, same with the dysfunctional health market -

But we can't forget how stupid the average person is - people paying a $700 car note, a 6 year note at 20% APR - every 3 years they roll that negative into a new car because "they want a new mom car" (yet my parents with 3 kids managed fine with a 3 door european hatchback in the 80's)
The other conspicuous consumption with clothes and trinkets etc - it really does seem 50% or more of the people are programmed by their base desires which is really sad to say.

I was struggling with low wages and health problems and I was able to make do with a $2000 hooptie using Youtube tutorials to fix it. The smart will make do with less, the stupid just pile on more and more debt.
Not to mention people will complain about healthcare costs yet they won't do the #1 thing to help those costs which is to be a healthy weight. Add in that 400 calorie morning $10 latte every morning...

Perhaps if people refused to pay these insane prices for things they didn't need, the prices would get lower?

The learned philosopher George Carlin once said "The people get what they deserve" - they had a choice to support who to vote and who to buy from and they have chosen thus.

Do you really want the corruptocracy to have full access to footage from your cameras whenever they want?
Big Tech has already been shown it cannot be trusted when employees accessed celebrity intimate pictures that had been uploaded via phones onboard backup systems, same with Tesla laughing at the various things they saw via peoples Tesla Cams - you can bet they will be viewing peoples home security footage as well.

You know I doubted we would ever get 1984 style Telescreens but it seems people are now willingly buying them and are happy about it too?
Plus with the way our society is going, I can't now be sure that a powerful member of society (we might as well just start calling them Patricians) - if I say the wrong thing online and upset them - that they won't start using this Big Tech stuff to mess with me.

Unthinkable 20 years ago when I signed up for this site but have we not seen most of the nasty things people said about the oligarchy - that people would laugh at 20 years ago and call far fetched - have been proven true?

If there is a crime in my neighbourhood - I can get the mp4 off my camera and provide it to the police no worries. Same even with a civil matter (a neighbours car gets damaged). Giving them full unmonitored access? Hell no my friend

I would never mod you as troll simply because your belief system sucks, it's a real shame that others on here do. After all you do have the right to say it!
The UK has privatized a lot of its national services and in basically all cases, the quality has shot right down.

This is not an improvement, and the thing is even if you were wealthy enough that you don't care about the proles as you can buy your own services - a lot of the times there are no better services. E.G. Royal Mail - the UK Government sold off Royal Mail - when it was nationally owned it wasn't perfect but you had mail 6 days a week, most of it next day. Now it is sold off, the postman will come when he feels like it, next day is a suggestion not a rule.

UK Water services - privatized, they didn't bother to do maintenance, the incentive is to make money for themselves - now our rivers are full of sewage and they are trying to hold the government to ransom, demanding a bailout after enriching themselves for so long.

And with as bad as the NHS gets, the UK people know full well, if it gets privatized, we will be stuck with exactly the same poor service only now we will be paying 10 times more for it than we ever did in taxes.

Private industry has its place but when it can monopolize or take over public services without fair competition, it is a disaster and always will be.
The fact that more things are becoming "libertarianized" isn't a sign of our societies getting better, it's a symptom of them falling apart !

But still shame on those who modded you down !

Does this mean we are closer to wallpaper displays as we saw in some 1950's / 1960's futurology? Call me when I can get roll up OLED film I can paste onto my wall

But what's the end goal of all this? They are spending hundreds of billions to create data centers that do what? run AI chatbots that are little more than cute toys and can't actually be relied upon even to take fast food orders, let alone anything important? When they have these huge data centers sitting idle with 5% utilization what then? And it's not like they could even sell off the assets as the GPU's and RAM are not the kind that average consumers will want

Some patients have gotten along well with external organ transplants - one man lost both arms basically at the shoulders due to an electrical mishap - he got 2 arms transplanted on - he is getting on very well with the arms, using them to brush his teeth, pour drinks, and many other things he couldn't do before.
The issue is rejection for the most part - despite the immunosuppressants he was having marks, blemishes etc growing up his arms where his body was destroying them. He might get 10 years out of them.

Can you imagine being told your face will only last 10 more years and there might not even be any funding to get a new one ????
And honestly these face transplants they end up looking pretty bad. Not like in Face/Off at all. Imagine cutting someones face off then trying to droop it over a mannequin head. It doesn't fit properly, doesn't move properly, one patient said it felt like having a baseball glove as a face.

God forbid if something ever happened to my face, I'd live with the skin grafts - of course you never know what it is like but it seems the benefits just don't outweigh the costs on this one.
Someone here mentioned - why not an artificial face made out of metal or something like you would see in science fiction, I mean it could be better but you really want lips and eyelids etc which you could never get with a metal face.

I dunno $52 billion a year for something that in reality, only acts as a glorified search in an FAQ ? What real world money making applications has this thing done? (Or any of these "AI's" not necessarily Chat-GPT) When used as an agent this thing has basically failed at almost everything - when your product is worse than outsourcing to India that is very impressive to me! See the recent Drive-Thru AI's - these things have no intelligence at all shown by the fact they have no idea 1 man in an SUV probably isn't going to be ordering 10,000 chicken nuggets.

And re Chat-GPT - The vast majority of its users are free users - a lot of them kids using it for schoolwork - they aren't gonna be paying for it when the free tier disappears. Will they pivot to Ad-Sponsored - one in 10 GPT replies is shilling a product?

Watch any social media and people are laughing at it now. E.G. A Fitness Coach channel recently put out a reminder "Remember folks, never to trust AI" after it output an average person will expend 1000 calories during an hour of bike riding.

Even $10B a year would be insane for this novelty IMO. If they could fix the hallucination problem (they can't) - then they could trust it to do real tasks (like really handling orders etc) - then it would be worth the valuation. But they can't !

Yeah in my experience the UK sucks for any big projects. The boobs in charge will find a way to overcomplicate it, slow it down, make it fail, any cost the Government gives for a nuclear plant, you can quadruple it to get the price it will really cost - and double any timescales.

A mixture of incompetence and corruption, just like how we do software - the Govt could hire a team of 5 programmers for 6 months for a project, instead they will bid it out to their friends at a big corporation for 10's of millions and get something that barely works in return.

If I was PM I'd try and stop as many big projects as I could as we just can't do it any more. Stick to solar/wind and invest in battery systems, you could get a lot of batteries for the ££billions they will spend on this - hell even the tens of millions they will spend on "consulting" before they scrap this thing would buy a lot of solar.

The average AI Podcast I stumble across, if you check the comments you might see a few half-senile old people who believe it, most comments will just be saying "AI Voice lol" - people listen to that for a few minutes, realise it's an AI voice with a slideshow of images, and click off. They are usually put together by Russians. With Youtube's race to cut costs I won't be suprised if they announce a crackdown on "No ad revenue for AI voices" before long

If you need something quick locally, you'll just use cashapp surely - why would you wait for a delivery of cash?? Most "entrepeneurs" will take it. Crypto is more for the organised online marketplaces/vendor shops

If they control the DNA they could do a lot of things built in. Built in organic DRM. Need a subtance, say Ketracel White, for your gonads to produce sperm for a short while. Or an upgrade package, your mitochondria work only half as well without it

what, so it should be accepted? It's also common that the new alpha kills the infants of the previous one.
Well I always suspected those that wormed their way to the top behaved little better than animals, this just confirms it! Very glad I have no money wrapped up in all this