It often surprises me how much doomerism influences thinking about the future. To be convincing, it seems a classic case of cherry-picking facts, to ignore all the good news about the future.
Here's a great example. AI is rapidly advancing our defense against viruses. It's stunning to think a tool is available that could have predicted how Covid would have evolved. It's reassuring to know this weapon against viruses will be available in the future.
It should also worry investors open-source AI is only months behind the big tech leaders. I looked into AI voice cloning lately. There's a few really pricey options. Like $25 a month for a couple of hours voice cloning.
However, there's already an open-source version of what they're selling.
I would guess in a few years time AI will be able to evaluate a lot about an individual's psychological profile from their language use.
There are smaller models that can run on most laptops.
In benchmarks this looks like it is not far off Chat-GPT 3.5.
One of the prevalent doomerist ideas about AI is that big tech will control it all in the future. Yet reality is behaving totally differently. Open-source AI seems only a few months behind big tech.
I wonder when this is going to seriously affect world oil demand? People used to think "Peak Oil" would be when supply was constrained, it turns out it will be when demand is constrained.
After years of being "almost there" 2023 seems the year self-driving robot vehicles have finally come of age. In several cities in the US & China, people can hail self-driving taxis within city limits. It surprises me that fixed route buses, like the model talked about here, aren't taking off faster. In many ways they are simpler than self-driving taxis, needing only level 4 self-driving. They are also an incredibly obvious solution to help reduce fossil fuels. A self-driving bus network with buses stopping every 5 minutes that served a city's busiest 100 locations would make many people ditch car journeys.
There's widespread awareness in 2023 that AI has started advancing extremely rapidly, but there's less awareness of many of the second-order effects resulting from that. One of those is that AI advances will quickly feed into robotics advances. Robots after all are pure AI embodied into our 3D physical world.
Another thing I don't think people appreciate is that robots of the future may be cheap and ubiquitous. We tend to think of them as humanoid, relatively rare, and somehow "special" because of their near-humanness. Data in Star Trek is a well-known embodiment of this idea.
But what if future robotics is dominated by hundreds of millions of small animal-sized robots, and maybe billions or hundreds of billions of insect-sized robots?
A US company just announced 1,800 new jobs manufacturing 10GW of solar power for India. Those post-coal jobs are out there, it would help if government bodies helped bring them to where they are needed.
Ukraine deserves to be in the EU, but they've a long way to go, and its not just the war. They have a vast corruption problem which needs fixing before becoming one with the other EU nations. The EU should start a process that ties progress on that, to getting nearer to EU membership.
AI is making content automation at vast scales so easy it seems what is just a trickle now will inevitably become a deluge. What's the solution? Perhaps using AI to moderate the AI content? I think there's a market for someone to make personal AI moderator software that filters out all these people and their garbage from wherever you are on the internet. I'd sign up for it.
@lurch@sh.itjust.works
Can you provide a reputable source for these claims? Otherwise I'll delete the OG comment and its replies. There's no point in leaving up misinformation.