Lugh

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.

Big caveats here, no peer reviewed results etc. However, I suspect the basic principle is sound. It makes you wonder what more advanced versions of something like this could do.