A huge impediment to VR uptake is having to go through the process of strapping a brick to one's face.

This isn't quite the "just putting on a pair of glasses" experience, but it's much closer to that than the former.

When asked about how one might attain social mobility in such a society, where the intrinsic value of our intelligence and ability to do labor is gone, I unironically respond with "be hot".

And no, I don't think it will end well.

Quibbling over the academic nature/definition of "true intelligence" is a terrifically useless endeavor from the lens of evaluating "practical impact to the world".

Regardless of whether or not one academically disagrees that these systems are intelligent, they are clearly already capable of permanently displacing a portion of human-based economic value. A small portion currently, but it's very clear that most computer-bound domains are imminently at-risk.

And that will profoundly affect the world, regardless of whether or not they're "truly intelligent" as per your personal definition.

The analogy to humans is that the human brain is "just atoms bouncing around", but there's unquestionably something "more" going on that just that.

Agentic coding and image generation are probably the best examples of this.

There's no guarantee that this trend will be seen with virtual assistants, but if it does, we're on the brink of incredible. Dedicated personal assistants, that actually know and understand one's context and work well together, are unarguably hugely appreciated by those who can afford them.

Horizontally scaling "sleeping dads" takes decades, but inference capacity for a sleeping dad equivalent model can be scaled instantly, assuming one has the hardware capacity for it. The world isn't really ready for a contraction of skill dissemination going from decades to minutes.

Well yeah. There weren't enough "someones" available to look. There are a finite number of qualified individuals with time available to look for bugs in OSS, resulting in a finite amount of bug finding capacity available in the world.

Or at least there was. That's what's changing as these models become competent enough to spot and validate bugs. That finite global capacity to find bugs is now increasing, and actual bugs are starting to be dredged up. This year will be very very interesting if models continue to increase in capability.

AI development game theory is extremely similar to the game theory behind nuclear arms development, but worse (nuclear weaponry was born from Human General Intelligence, and is therefore a subset of the potential of AI development). Failing to be the most capable actor could put one in a position of permanent loss of autonomy/agency at the whims of more capable actors.

Historically, humanity's biological monopoly on the fundamental resource of "general intelligence" has always been that lever. Looking at the world today, it's pretty clear that democracies are just a temporary balance between the general contempt of the powerful towards commoners, and the fact that the powerful begrudgingly need our economic utility, which is ultimately based on our general intellect. Even callous dictatorships had to exercise partial restraint on violence and murder, to retain a pool of general intellect.

AGI will be a multiple-whammy here:

- most people will become economically worse-than-useless, they will be a total liability on the rich and powerful

- those same people are unlikely to be given access to any levers of power or influence, because they no longer have anything of value to provide to the rich and powerful

- AGI in combination with robotic platforms, after a certain threshold, will permit for insurmountable policing. The "rise up against the robots" cliches we see in film simply become impossible after a certain point.

I desperately hope we end up wielding AI to usher in a post-scarcity utopia, but looking at the types of people who own the world...we'll get what we're allowed to get.

As the masses fade into permanent unemployment, this will likely coincide with (and be partially caused by) a corresponding proliferation in intelligent humanoid robots.

At a certain point, "turning on them" becomes physically impossible.

Offering humane end-of-life options to people suffering today does not prohibit ongoing disease research towards potentially helping people in the future.

No, you've actually missed his point entirely.

He is alluding to the fact that over the last decade or so, consumers have unwittingly slid down the slope of "not having true control over personal electronic devices". Iphones are already there, Android devices are a few years behind, as are most desktop PCs.

Once there's critical mass, it would not be a stretch for ISPs to only deliver internet to endpoints that have a secure element that attests to the integrity of the internet-con ected device. This will of course be done under the guise of "fighting the spread of malware" and such.

Piracy effectively ends at that point.

Sure, we wouldn't be able to get there for many decades, but "within a century" would be feasible.

There are so many unknowns surrounding the nature of black holes. Having one in our backyard would give us a chance to test our guesses.

The largest proposed ground observatories already use segmented mirrors. One can use the same approach in space, it's only a matter of launch cost.

It doesn't, and admittedly I don't really care that much.

I care far far more that remote communities can now have meaningful access to the internet, one of the most transformative and enabling technologies in existence, than niche hobbyists being mildly encumbered. And most people likely fall into the same camp.

As already mentioned, I find it really hard to believe that the common person whining about "the poor amateur astronomers" are being sincere. Some of them likely are, but "finding any reason possible to whine about billionaires" seems to be vogue these days.

It's essentially equivalent to a boundary on a phase diagram: Cost/Watt has fallen past a critical threshold, and suddenly this dramatically different approach just makes more sense.

If you genuinely care about the field of astronomy, rest assured that the same falling launch costs that have enabled LEO comsat constellations, will enable the launch of fleets of space-based telescopes.

You might not value that, but lots of other people do.