It isn't mentioned in this article, but Chinese planning is very specific about the idea of robots taking over the economy and replacing the shrinking number of humans. Another reason for thinking UBI might work there first.
There are still some people who seem unfazed by activity like this. The usual response is - "If I'm doing nothing wrong, what do I have to worry about?"
Those types of people might worry more if they were aware of what AI will soon be able to do with data like this. It's one thing to know the world's spy agencies can track anyone they want. Wait until AI uses it to build up a profile of you & can use black hat methods to manipulate you in ways you don't even know. The people who dismiss all this, or don't understand anything about it, will be the most vulnerable.
I think this will come as a surprise to most people. 2.2 sounds like it's above the replacement rate, but as Jesús Fernández-Villaverde explains, selective gendered abortions & high infant mortality in some countries mean that it isn't.
The figures for South Korea are quite stark. They've engineered a society where they'll shrink to 20 million in size from today's 51 million. His figures rely on the average human life expectancy staying at 85. It's possible in decades to come that may exceed 100. It may not, but there are lots of people working to make it happen.
I can think of few areas more divorced from reality than people who are still convinced nuclear energy has a big role in our future. All of the evidence in front of our eyes seems to overwhelmingly point in the opposite direction. Hinkley Point C seems to perfectly illustrate this.
It's being built by the world's premier nuclear energy nation, France. If they can't get it right, who can? Yet some people in British politics are still blithely talking about nuclear power having a large part in Britain's future. How is this supposed to happen? British government spending is vastly over-stretched as it is. Where are taxpayers going to find the 100s of billions (if not trillions at these costs) to support this? Who is going to build it? There's no indigenous nuclear industry, and outside of French companies, the only other options are China or Russia. Undesirable for obvious reasons.
It's usually at this point that nuclear supporters turn to hopium and talk of small nuclear reactors, a technology that is still 'in development' after half a century.
China is already making and selling EVs near the $10,000 price range with the old battery prices. Are we going to see the advent of EVs selling for near $5,000?
Combustion engine car makers are hurtling towards their Kodak moment. Everyone knew years in advance that digital cameras would crush the old film+processing camera business, yet amazingly some such as market leader Kodak failed to adapt. It feels the same with EVs. Some are still in denial that they're about to take over from ICE cars as the vast bulk of new cars made and bought.
Someone should invent a search engine that allows for curated sources. For most things, I'd love to search among the top few thousand sites, and exclude everything else.
Not that 50% of all web content is AI generated.
On the contrary. It explicitly states that it is.
To quote - "It found that most of the internet is translated, as 57.1 percent of the sentences in the corpus were multi-way parallel in at least three languages. "
So in other words, that majority of web content is AI translations of other content. As its often poorly translated, or entirely mistranslated, it qualifies as "AI-generated garbage" - hence the headline.
One of the ironies of Google leading so much cutting-edge AI development is that it is simultaneously poisoning its own business from within. Google Search is getting worse and worse, on an almost monthly basis, as it fills up with ever more SEO-spam. Early adopters are abandoning it for Chat-GPT-like alternatives; which means the mass market probably soon will too.
The other irony is that it will probably take AI to save us from AI-generated SEO spam. For everyone touting AI products that will write blogs and emails, there will be people selling products that detect their garbage and save you from wasting your time reading it.
It will be interesting to see if they can take this symbolic engine approach further. Geometry problems are very neat and tidy, compared to using logic to solve real world problems. In particular I wonder if this could be some small step towards AGI.
It will make many uncomfortable to say it, but the hero in this story is China. If we didn't have their industrial might making solar cheap, then this wouldn't be happening.
People often talk about declining human demographics, but they rarely consider growing new humans artificially as a means of dealing with it. As nightmarish as it sounds, maybe that day is nearer than we think. Israeli scientists have already grown mammal embryos outside the womb to half their gestation period. If you have cloned embryos of "perfect" humans, perhaps growing them at scale outside the womb is nearer than we think.
Most English language media is poor at reporting on China, so sometimes you come across facts like this that sit up and make you take notice; though I wish I had more context for them.