They're clearly not that optimized when the user ends up complaining publicly. Don't tell others what they're supposed to like because some algo said so. Very cringe.
Being rich is ultimately about owning and being able to defend resources. IF something like 99% of humans become irrelevant to the machine run utopia for the elites, whatever currency the poors use to pay for services among each other will be worthless to the top 1% when they simply don't need them or their services.
Would we just be splitting society in two in that case? Seeing as the poor would have nothing to give to the rich, nor the rich to the poor, wouldn’t the poor 99% just create their own new society with their own units of value?
Or the poor decide the rich have no more right to be rich than themselves and start burning and destroying rich people's stuff and anger turns to blood.
It is far easier and faster to destroy than to build and technology can only protect you so much. Unless someone manages a completely self contained enviroment and has a good enough place to hide with it they could be at risk.
That's where "being able to defend your resources" comes in, otherwise they're not rich. But yes, I'm implying that in the future the defense could be done by something like armed drones. And "defense" would mean enforcement of whatever draconian laws they cook up. When the executive branch is non-human, you can never have a mutiny. You simply don't need to do any convincing or any pretending that you're a good guy. All you need is to outproduce the humans, make more drones than they can put up resistance. And drones are cheap, even today, and would only be one piece of the equation anyway, among direct access to your bank account, real-time AI surveillance for minute missteps, crowd control weapons mounted to autonomous vehicles,... all in all pretty grim. The question is who gets to be the elite. It's not obvious that it should be the Silicon Valley guys. We'll surely have massive elite wars (fought by humans + AI), sold to us as civil/national wars and people's revolutions, before the above pans out. The partial release of the Epstein files is one cluster of the elite (around Trump) threatening another. I'd wager that a lot of dirt will see the light of day in the next ten years and underneath it will be the fight over who gets to command the new kingmaker tech.
I think it would be too depressing to have all these ghost towns and stuff - how would you explain that to your kids? That they're robot towns? Unaliving 50-80% under tragic circumstances like plagues and wars on the other hand...
And as an aside, the naturally rebalancing effect after the black death which killed 1/3 of Europe was that workers were suddenly in higher demand and could negotiate much improved workers' rights, ending serfdom. Such an effect won't be possible when there's something replacing the workers...
Old film makers thought they were compensating for a lack of the kind of CGI and world building options we have today, compensating with rain, mist, camera angles to hide the lack of scale, and with costumes, lots of background actors, detailed film sets, to make the world seem grander. Turns out they had actually hit a sweet spot.
> participants had a robotic arm tap the index finger of their real and fake hands, either at the exact same time or with a delay of up to 500 milliseconds between each tap. (...) Those with faster alpha waves appeared to rule out fake hands even with a tiny gap in taps, while those with slower waves were more likely to feel the fake hand as their own, even if the taps were farther apart.
That's the limit of "you"? Sounds more like a sampling rate/processing speed of the sense of touch.
The "user" is only half of a human anyway, 50% is the max consciousness people spend on whatever Netflix they have running as background noise. That's the target audience Netflix is optimizing for: half-humans. Saves them lots of bandwidth, expenses for quality, and yes, it needs a solid amount of exposition[0] to work.
CF is exposes my own hypocrisy more than any other company. I am always the first person to say that humans shouldn’t be centralizing so much into so few hands, but then… I use CloudFlare, I recommend it to others, and the company has a fairly decent track record.
