I think the culty element of AI development is really blinding a lot of these companies to what their tools are actually useful for. They’re genuinely great productivity enhancers, but the boosters are constantly going on about how it’s going to replace all your employees and it’s just. . .not good for that! And I don’t mean “not yet” I mean I don’t see it ever getting there barring some major breakthrough on the order of inventing a room-temp superconductor.
I agree with you, the "replacing people" narrative is not only wrong, it's inflammatory and brand suicide for these AI companies who don't seem to realize (or just don't care) the kind of buzz saw of public opinion they're walking straight towards.
That said, looking at the way things work in big companies, AI has definitely made it so one senior engineer with decent opinions can outperform a mediocre PM plus four engineers who just do what they're told.
> Delaying from 13 (COPPA) to 16 won't change a thing.
There’s been a decent amount of studies to suggest it can actually, since you’ll be pushing the uptake of social media outside the peak age range where things like bullying, body image issues, grooming, etc. start to happen and, therefore, limiting the harm.
It’s also a time when a lot of life-habits start to get set down since 12-13 is when kids start having to assume more responsibility for themselves and begin learning how they manage their time, build their study habits, etc. Not being habituated into doomscrolling during that period seems like it can only be healthy. It’s not as if they’d be cut off from the internet entirely, they’d still have Wikipedia and all the boring, non-attention sapping parts of the web. And they’d still be able to direct-message or group-chat with their friends. They’re just spared the algorithmic feeds.
They’re not proprietary but some of them are expensive and somewhat specialized. I don’t think it’ll be really economical for most normal people to self-service many repairs, but it’ll be very viable to have a corner hardware store that can do it for you for cheap. Self-servicing battery replacements ought to be doable with an eyeglass screwdriver though.
The iPhone was basically the apotheosis of the Internet. I don’t think we will ever see another consumer product able to have an impact like that unless there is some other kind of “substructure” technology with a vast amount of untapped potential lying around.
Even other transformational technological advancements, like home robotics, I don’t think will be encompassed by a single device the way smartphones could. Home robots will be scattered across a bunch of different robotic devices doing independent activities. You’ll have purpose-built laundry robots, vacuum robots, cooking robots, driving robots, etc. but not a single company doing a single thing.
The more abstract the “wealth” becomes the less it means in practical terms. The class dynamics around money mostly has to do with the State actively preserving and protecting claims over assets. If that same wealth becomes sufficiently concentrated with an overclass that it leeches away the competence and legitimacy of the State, then the underclass has other means of correcting the gap and establishing a more sustainable equilibrium.
The traditional means of reestablishing equilibrium are becoming more and more infeasible as state defenses and tactics improve. We are rapidly approaching a time when the asymmetric attacks on state protections traditionally used are less effective than the information asymmetry that the state can enforce. Hong Kong is a great example of these defenses leveraged effectively.
It’s possible, but I know people felt the same during prior technological revolutions like the advent of broadcast media (which fascist movements took too with great enthusiasm). I think people are clever, we learn from every failure and adapt.
you hit the nail on the head. the less wealthy a government the more poor its poorest citizens are because it doesn’t have the money to invest in their wellbeing. the solution has and always will be taxes
I believe Apple Maps uses Open Street Map data for the mapping, which it augments with its own data collection. So it shouldn’t be worse than other vendors, like TomTom, who use the same dataset. Google has its own map data that’s probably better than OSM, but I think it probably has the same bias of USA + large international metros focus as Apple.
Google Maps is definitely still a little better but I find the delta is nowhere near as wide as it used to be. The main problem with Apple Maps I find today is that their data on business listings and locations tends to be a little older than Google’s, sometimes even a year or more out of date. So if a business or meeting place you’re trying to get to has moved recently you can wind up in the wrong spot.
I thought the touchbar was pretty neat, it was just a mistake to replace the function row with them. It also was hard to get adoption because it wasn’t available on desktop Macs or their cheaper laptops so developers had no incentive to really do anything interesting with them.
I think a better implementation might have been to have it be an alternate mode for the trackpad and sell external trackpads that also had it so it could be used everywhere. But I get why that didn’t happen, the touchbar was basically being run with a mini Apple Watch SOC built into the MacBook Pro, and it’s primary use was to have the Secure Enclave on it. The touchbar itself was a deal where they could find a use for having an otherwise idle smartwatch’s worth of computing power in there, but that wouldn’t be doable if it’s sold as an external device.
If you can kick off self-sustaining biological processes it’ll happen on its own eventually, but you’d just be looking at generational time scales to do it.
Of course you’ll probably have lots of side-effects.
How do we do that? I imagine dumping Earth life on Mars it will just die. What if we buried a terrarium at the Martian pole with a radio isotope and solar heater and controls so that it could try growing bacteria inside and controlled-leaking some outside into a nearby warm (liquid water) surroundings, and that could get many chances to evolve strains that could survive further away - analogous to ocean life around deep hydrothermal vents.
The closest thing I’ve heard of is genetically engineering some extremophile bacteria to seed some bacterial colonies with, and then building some domed habitats and dropping plants and fungi into it. And then you could allow some of that life to grow outside the dome and spread over time, slowly bulking up the oxygen levels. There are also proposals that you could have orbital focusing mirrors to beam additional heat at the planet and start to melt some of the water and frozen greenhouse gases.
Any effort is only temporary though, because Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field, so the sun is constantly stripping atmosphere off it. It’s not a renewable resource there like it is here.
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