The core reason why we want to consume more resources is that we want to be happier, which really means we want to make certain physical changes in our brains. If we cut the middlemen and find a way to directly control how we feel, there would be no need to expand, because it wouldn't increase our happiness.

Edit: Just found out someone else has made the exact same point in another comment before me.

In any case, reading summaries (and occasionally following up by reading the full article) is more enjoyable and you learn more per unit of time. Most articles are mostly garbage. And even insightful and informative articles can often be compressed with minimal loss of conveyed insight and information. Typical example is some of Paul Graham essays (I say some because only some are worth reading).

Sure, you will be slightly better positioned if you're excited about this tech, but the impact will be typically marginal, IMHO.

Not sure about UBI. There will be enough jobs for the foreseeable future, AI only threatens the "sitting behind a computer" class of comfy jobs. But this is a tangential topic...

I wonder what's the ratio of these 2 on Hacker News and similar spaces, many posts and comments seem kind of vague about this.

For me, it's mainly about jobs and money. If I was retired or in a safe job, I would watch all of this with excitement. Don't get me wrong, I can fully empathize with the other stuff. I love thinking, creating and inventing stuff that is high quality technically and UX-wise and makes people's lives better.

But at the end of the day, job and money is easily at the top of the "Maslow's hierarchy". I can easily have a similarly happy life without programming or without building products (I don't enjoy programming at work anyway).

Even if the opponent is the latest Stockfish with 1000x more time per move, it will always be a draw.

I asked about this a few years ago in a Stockfish Discord and the above claim is what someone implied, if I remember correctly.

But with robotics, there's no pre-made dataset that can be parroted. Notice that these datasets, e.g. how to fold clothes, need to be created by humans. That's as if humans needed to write algorithms like quicksort to teach LLMs how to code.