I've been wondering when current LLM AIs would start to master this ability. I suspect it will be one of the things it's good at. For many tasks, software usage patterns are relatively predictable and modelable. A trend with current AI, is for competitors and open-source to rapidly follow industry leaders. We can expect AI like this to be widely available in six months.

Many people's knowledge work employment is tied to software skills and experience. That premium is about to start diminishing. People are familiar with the concept of 'macros'; automating repetitive sequences of software usage. It seems all but inevitable AI will be doing something similar, but orders of magnitude greater, and that all the forces in free market economics will be driving it to replace expensive humans.

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.

People have often tended to think about AI and robots replacing jobs in terms of working-class jobs like driving, factories, warehouses, etc.

When it starts coming for the professional classes, as this is now starting to, I think things will be different. It's been a long-observed phenomena that many well-off sections of the population hate socialism, except when they need it - then suddenly they are all for it.

I wonder what a small army of lawyers in support of UBI could achieve?

What's your point? We know AI can be deployed in dishonest ways. So can books, and newspapers.

It's Critical-Thinkig-Skills-101 to not fall for the 'one of the blue people is bad, therefore all blue people are bad' argument.

What's your point? We know AI can be deployed in dishonest ways. So can books, and newspapers.

It's Critical-Thinkig-Skills-101 to not fall for the 'one of the blue people is bad, therefore all blue people are bad' argument.

The other benefit here is scale. Skilled human facilitators and their time are in short supply. AI deployment can be orders of magnitude greater.

Honestly, why isn't the world more awake to this? These same scientists also did other studies, where higher concentrations of nanoplastics started causing widespread malformations throughout the embryo. It's deeply disturbing.

Agreed. Sadly though I think we are heading for 2.4c heating, and we also need to prepare for emergency responses.

They are supposed to be far more stable.