Lugh

I admit I'm torn here. On the one hand I think the future is to have AI ubiquitous and integrated into everything. On the other hand, fake AI 'friends' on a friend's network sounds hideous.

The logical follow on from this is that EV owners should have cheaper car insurance. With far fewer moving parts they will also have much cheaper maintenance costs. Added to that EVs are cheaper to buy. China has reached the point where 50% of new car sales are EVs much quicker than anyone expected. Most people thought that was years away, but we're already there. How soon before people start talking about a "death spiral" when it comes to gasoline cars?

Relevant Data

Per 1,000 vehicles of 3 year old cars

ICE 6.4

BEV 2.8

The ADAC even noted a growing lead for electric cars in recent years. The analysis was based on the more than 3.5 million call-outs made by ADAC breakdown services last year

That's missing the point. Yes, you could have made a version of Game of Thrones with a smartphone & your friends in costumes made from thrift store clothes, but there's a reason everyone wants the one HBO spent a billion dollars to make. Now (or very soon) that advantage will disappear.

With generative video, such as Sora is demonstrating, everyone will be able to make the same standards as Hollywood. Its financial and skills clout won't count for anything, or confer any advantages any more.

My theory would be that some western people are very disquieted to see China take the lead in various technological fields. When I post in r/futurology on Reddit I constantly observe this in China related comments and discussion.

For anyone familiar with the ideas behind what Ray Kurzweil called 'The Singularity', this looks awfully like it's first baby steps.

For those that don't know, the idea is that when AI gets the ability to improve itself, it will begin to become exponentially more powerful. As each step will make it even better, at designing the next generation of chips to make it more powerful.

Renewables are way, way cheaper. Nuclear is finished. I'm sick of hearing its supporters never ending excuses.

A small Kickstarter-funded startup called Rabbit got attention with a similar concept recently, but they are a minnow compared to Deutsche Telekom.

I suspect AI will eventually come to be the predominant OS of all our computing in all our devices. To displace apps, all that is necessary is AIs trained to operate each one. After that, presumably new protocols will enable AI to interact with services and tasks. That's not all people use smartphones for though. How will they get AI to scroll through social media?

There are a lot of incumbents like Google & Facebook relying on us to stay doing things the old way. News like this from Deutsche Telekom must make them nervous.

Once upon a time, there was a meme-like response to concerns about technological unemployment. Displaced people could just 'learn to code'. What people didn't anticipate was that coders would be displaced first, but here we are.

I'm an optimist about the AI future. I suspect we'll adapt to new economic models quicker and more smoothly than many suspect. But right now, many people don't even realize this train has already left the station, and we're all on it, whether we like it or not.

Our education system is a case in point. Junior/starter software roles are about to disappear forever. Yet all over the world, there are people in training/education preparing for them. You can say the same about lawyers also to some extent. At some point, society has to wake up to the fact that more and more of the job education/training it's currently providing is just wasting the time and money of everyone involved.

I've never understood some people's fascination with space-based solar. Why go to all that over-engineered trouble to do something you can do on Earth anyway, except in an orders of magnitude simpler way.

Also, I love to see people devote efforts to space development, but it depresses me to see people do it and waste their time. I know it's a simplistic way of looking at things, but I wish they'd devote their time to something useful, like creating a commercial space station.

No part of this article involves AI making independent discoveries.

My reading of this is the opposite.

Although there were competing hypothesis, nobody knew how insect wing hinge mechanisms worked. Now they do, and the fundamental insight was provided via AI.

I think this is both a fundamental discovery, and one we can attribute to the AI, more than the humans involved.

The Chinese automaker BYD reminds me of the famous phrase attributed to the sci-fi writer William Gibson - "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."

Future EV cars will be cheap to own and run. Self-driving tech will lower insurance costs. You can charge them with your home solar setup if you want. They'll last far longer with lower maintenance costs thanks to simple electric engines with few moving parts. As their construction gets more roboticized it will lower their costs further. The batteries that make up a huge chunk of their current costs are falling in price too. CATL, the world’s largest EV battery maker, is set to cut costs in half by mid 2024.

Some people still think gasoline and ICE cars have a long life ahead of them, and don't realize the industries behind both are dead men walking.

The US has imposed 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, and the EU is considering increasing its tariffs. I'm sympathetic to the worker/industry protection argument, but many people will look at decent EVs being sold in China for $15,000 & feel they are being cheated.