The brain, its left hemisphere, makes up the narrative.

Or maybe you aren't being litteral and are just saying that what children see and hear has no influence on their developmemt. Either way, total bullshit.

I'm more shocked that somebody thinks that modern civilization and logistics depend on personal cars. Can ypu expand on your statement that modern industry and logistic depend on persobal cars?

Again, nobody said that they were. You are arguing with yourself.

> You could have one person providing for the entire needs of the world by scaling themselves using AI.

Sure, and if one person owned all the automated system he could blackmail others, choose not to use those automated systems to fulfill the needs of some... it is beyond me that in the world we are currently living in somebody doesn't see it.

Nobody said that they can.

>The techno utopia we imagine is a world where nobody has to work. All our needs are taken care of and we live a life of leisure.

All our needs are taken care of in an imagined techno utopia.

> But as long as there is ownership of the automated systems, those owners will hoard all the wealth generated by that automation.

That utopia can not come if there is private ownership of those automated systems.

History doesn't predict the future. I can't tell you about another time when humans ran out of usefull things to do. What I can tell you is that we humans are biological beings we limited cognitive and physical abiloties.

I can also tell you about another biological being whose cognitive and phyisical abilities were surpassed by technology. Horses. What happened to them then wasn't pretty. The hight of their population in US was in 1915.

And sure, humans like doing things and so do horses, but you can't live by doing things that aren't useful to others, at least not in the current system. If technology surpases our abilities, the only useful things left to do for vast majority of humans is the same thing that was left for horses to do. Entertainment in various forms and there won't be enough of those jobs for all of us.

People were saying that a decade ago, if not more, with machine learning outperforming radiologists. Today we don't have enough radiologists. What has changed since those days that one can again say that so confidently?

Taste and nutritional value a worse then in the past. Arguably the two most important things when it comes to food.

I cannot read minds so I have to go with what you wrote. What you wrote in the post that I replied to is that the reason why you don't listen to podcasts is ignorance. You gave no other reason. This post of yours also gives no other explicit reason besides ignorance.

> I'm just not interested in wading through mountains of garbage to get to what you insist is worth listening to.

Well, there is also a mountain of garbage books so that is not a very good argument for books. Yes, libraries exist so do podcast libraries.

I'm not insisting on anything.

> However, our time on this earth is finite so if I am to choose between ephemeral content and things which have made it through an editing process

Podcasts can cover many of the same topics that books cover so they aren't necessarily ephemeral. Most of the books are also ephemeral. Many podcasts go through editing process.

> When you encounter people who seem incredibly smart, I all but guarantee that your first thought is never going to be "this person must listen to a lot of podcasts!"

It won't be but then again, I never thought "this person must read a lot of books".

> If podcasts make you happy, then I am happy for you.

I don't listen to podcasts. Maybe once in a blue moon as background noise.

This to me looks like an analogy that would support what GP is saying. With modern farming practices you get problems like increased topsoil loss and decreased nutritional value of produce. It also leads to a loss of knowledge for those that practice those techniques of least resistance in short term.

This is not me saying big farming bad or something like that, just that your analogy, to me, seems perfectly in sync with what the GP is saying.

So basically you don't subscribe to any podcasts out of ignorance. Influencers and celebrities hanging out isn't the only type of podcast.

This doesn't mean anything in isolation.

> Here's the citation from the EU parliament itself [1], since I doubt you'd believe non-government sources.

Do we know each other?

> The fact that the UK and Germany are in some aspects still better than the ones I mentioned doesn't make them beacons of democracy.

No, but there aren't many that are much better so when you take all of that in to account, yes UK an Germany are beacons of democracy.

> It's sad that those countries declined so fast that we are now comparing them.

I already asked this but by what metric are they declining faste?

Because his post contributes nothing to the discussion.

> Yes, there are governments that are worse than European, but the decline of European government is the fastest.

What makes it the fastest?

> You may be surprised that the UK is the world leader in the number of people arrested because of internet posts. And that Germany, which is still way behind the UK, has more people arrested for the same reason than Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, and a few others combined.

Don't know about you but I'd rather be arrested for posting something in EU then be disappeared in any of the countries that you mentioned.

> And many people still believe that those countries are beacons of democracy while the others are backward dictatorships.

That is because Germany and UK are beacons of democracy when compared to the countries that you listed.