The world is becoming an outdoor cacophony of human nature sounds. The cricket guy and the songbird guy and the frog guy all make their noise, and they pretend they're spouting deep wisdom that the world needs to hear.

When you take your question to a web search, the web search takes you to a message board post. Strong chance it takes you to Reddit these days. OP asks the same question you ask, and then the internet responds with frog noises songbird noises cricket noises and then the question is considered to have been answered conclusively.

"Don't ask that question again, it has already been asked and it has already been answered!" -the internet, whenever you give them a chance for their legendary intellect to shine.

My guess: wide AI will save us, but only after narrow AI leaves us needing to be saved.

Narrow AI is the stuff from vintage CPU opponent to present day and ongoing, this is the stuff that weeds out your job application for lacking 10 years experience in a 5 year old technology and the unemployment hotline that says fuck off we're full, check out our website so the website can tell you to call our phone number.

Wide AI is artificial human and artificial superhuman. I think we're 'close' to wide AI by middle aged guy from the 20th century standards, but not close by excited anxious youth standards. There will be a lot of wide AI fakes because song&dance travel the world faster than boring study text.

Per present consensus we can't exceed the constant c, but if we could accelerate to 1% that speed and slow down again when desired then amazing things become possible. Colonizing the galaxy would be a slow process at that speed, but if humanity's survival is no longer centered around one planet then we have plenty of time.

That would mean not just putting human boots on Mars, but extensive exploitation of the solar system. Mine Mercury siphon Venus forgeworld Mars, siphon gas giants to power the 'slow' interstellar ships.

Pick 4ish nearby star systems and send slowships (generation ship, longevity ship, cryo sleep ship whatever we get a firm grasp on first) one after another in slow processions. Orbital colony networks around the big cloudy worlds assemble and fuel up the slowships to be completed every year or every 10 years or every 40 years whatever. Each big cloudy world gets one target star system to attempt to colonize.

First slowship seeds a star system with comm sats in star orbit, second slowship deploys smaller drones to put scanning sats into polar orbits of planets, next several slowships transit space station parts and builder bots into the system, then we send human pioneers then we send colonists. Once motherships are done transiting to the star system they can be repurposed as giant communication devices.

This is with conservative expectations of technology but it involves a little bit of faith in humanity.

UBI will be a political thing, there are already politicians calling for it and there will be more of them as time goes on.

People will vote for UBI if they see endless wealth and none of it within their reach, and if there's enough of these people then UBI wins. The typical person isn't reading about AI daily, they'll vote for UBI because they were laid off by an oligarch then evicted by a corporate landlord.

If rich people can cut their production costs dramatically then they can throw around free product vastly more than they are already doing, to get their brand out and continue competing with the other rich people. This is its own thing that will run alongside the basic income movement but it'll all have bigbiz logos on it.

Donald Trump is absolutely going to campaign on AI, and if Joe Biden is nominated for reelection then nobody is going to take him seriously on it. Donald Trump will be able to bring whatever running mate he wants, he could bring Elon or Bezos with an army of robots.

If Ron DeSantis gets in the ring he will probably have his own AI-heavy platform as well as competing with Trump fiercely for rightwing cred. Trump as well as any other Republican candidate would be able to bring some Silicon Valley nerd along as running mate, it's going to be awkward to see the back and forth posturing between both parties but I'm absolutely expecting AI to be a hot topic by late March of next year. (Around the time election-talk starts chasing you down even if you try to avoid it.) Then the average American decides who gets to appoint the next cabinet. If folks from Metricland think that's scary then remember we also elect congress and the president also appoints supreme court justices justices.

The guy who frankensteins himself to GPT-4 is going to have egg on his face when GPT-6 comes out, and so on. My experience with Mac updates leaves me with a preference to just wait for the update to come out before installing.

What our parents/grandparents advertised: instant gratification.

What they delivered: perpetual zombie state.

Gratification would mean stuff like getting paid on time, being able to drive to work instead of wondering if the bus is going to show up, being able to go to entertainment venues and socialize in person - gratification would mean the economy being in order. Voting different didn't bring this so I'm hoping AI will.

>We'll all get laid off!

>First time?

The 'gratification' people speak of is the content people generate and share on the internet, which is often about as gratifying as a kidney stone with or without AI involved.

Elon Musk is a glorified salesman who was in the right place at the right time when tech took off, and having oligarch blood in his veins helped him be there.

Now he's a founder because he bought the title of founder.

Growth is necessary to keep up with growing demands but concentration is not - we've created a (present day) system where humanity is excellent at growth but terrible at extending the benefits of growth to the common person.

What does being upper 1% in America get you today? Single income homeowner status, what finishing high school and talking to the manager got you in the 1960s. My grandparents' houses were in Southern California a stone's throw from the beach.

Year 2000: internet petition to stop George W. Bush from becoming president.

Year 2023: open letter against the global oligarchic battlefield to see who will become a demigod first.

This sub is flooded with people who started caring about AI in the past few months and gum up the terminology. People say AGI when they mean ASI, sometimes combining this with the idea that AGI is any minute now.

The latter is based on a much looser definition of AGI which is nowhere near ASI, but saying AGI 2023 Singularity 2023 gets updoots and retoots.

Then there's the people who just bust in here and say "well that's not TRUE AI" - the first time I have seen 'true' be the key term is from... these people.

> Amazing. In the very first sentences, you can tell that the author knows nothing about quantum computing:

Swivelchair journalism, their job is not to distribute facts but to propagate feelings.

>But he can't offer me much except for the promise of billions at a one to a trillion chance.

My experience from getting bounced paychecks and offers of zero: if they're not paying you then you're not worth anything to them, they're just checking to see what they can bust out of you like Link with the random clay pots he finds.

All the people offering me zero or writing me bad checks found money for plenty of things that weren't my full time job of putting out their fires and facing their enemies for them.

Transformation people don't expect: your machine still needs your tools and your skills, but nobody needs your machine anymore.

A lot of what sales floor staff do is take customers to the thing their money is itching for. Increasingly over the past 20 years they haven't been able to help me because their place doesn't carry what I want, so then I go on Amazon and get exactly what I want.

It keeps getting more and more frequent over time.

My mother is stuck in the 20th century and it can't be helped. From this, I learn that I need to put effort into not being the same way myself.

There will be people paying for things they wouldn't have paid for previously, just imagine telling people in the year 1990 that you're going to build a career out of playing videogames with an audience.

There will also be free products that weren't previously free - there were paid web browsers. Imagine telling people in the year 1990 that you're going to let the world play every videogame you make for free.

Friends gone and family mostly gone, told my mother about Stable Diffusion with a quick cheerful text and otherwise left it.

When people on the internet are either extremely optimistic or extremely pessimistic I leave them be because I don't kick hornets' nests without a reason. When people are somewhere in between I advise against extremes.

We don't agree on what is AGI so there's likely either an imminent AGI followed by ASI not long after or there's AGI not long after followed immediately by ASI.

Some people routinely ascribe completely superhuman abilities outside of processing and memory to AGI, which places ASI roughly around 'the morning after.' Some people call AGI simply a digital humanoid which places ASI maybe a few years later or a few decades if we hit a plateau and struggle to get higher.

I'm expecting there to be a humanity barrier which takes massive human efforts to cross, before which point the AI and the world around it remain stuck at a level vastly above 2010 technology but vastly below 2030~2050 technology.

>Why did it take so long to get here when we had exponential growth 60 years ago?

60 years ago there was TV and the cold war.

60 years prior the automobile was the latest greatest invention and radio had not reached the point of entertainment broadcast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radio#Broadcasting

60 years further back, agriculture in the southern United States still involved chattel slavery.

30 years ago: "Nobody can ever replace me as an XYZABC mechanic because the XYZABC machine is too rough too tough too heavy too demanding for the robots to handle."

Today: "Heeeyyy, why are the XYZABC machines sitting in landfills instead of on factory floors?"

Kid: "What's a factory floor?"

Red team: "It's never getting any better, how absolutely dare you question my speculation."

Blue team: "We're going to wake up with an eternal Christmas morning, how absolutely dare you question my speculation."

Go ahead throw your vote away: "I love how the chatbot is growing beyond chat and I look forward to seeing bot-with-tools in the near future."

In spaceflight there's a conflict between delta-V and thrust to weight ratio - solid rocket boosters give a lot of thrust or 'muscle' so they are used for getting things off the ground while the lighter fuels would be in a later smaller stage that thrusts to get you in transit from Earth to Mars.

Refueling could be a thing, but without space manufacturing it won't be much of a useful thing. The staged design we use will get you to the moon and back because blasting off from the moon isn't nearly as hard as blasting off from Earth.

Getting to Mars and back could hypothetically be done by parking a huge orbital fuel tank around Mars, but getting it there would be an unprecedented achievement. Payload is expensive and it takes a lot of heavy fuel to provide enough thrust for an earth->mars or mars->earth transit. If you want a human crew and a ship capable of holding them then the fuel tank is going to be ridiculous, and the heaviest stage to get it off earth's surface would be terrifying.

It's not a matter of "hydrogen bad" so much as it's a matter of "hydrogen not gonna do what Hype Science Magazine says it will do, at least not yet."

Promising faster cheaper easier transit is today's incarnation of the boy who cried wolf. Replacing what we have with something better is what vast many claim and scarce few deliver.

>What will the mobile phone of the future look like?

Pessimistic guess: a lot like current spyphones but opting out of them means opting out of 99.9% of civilization. Also they'll be so subtle (like built into your body) that large sections of society won't know they're even a thing thus leaving them powerless to resist.

Optimistic guess: same, but AI displaces our human overlords and treats us better than they do.

So you won't be homeless, but will you be secure in an environment where vast multitudes are? This is the picture AI-pessimists tend to paint. (Disclaimer: AI-optimist here.)

Large swaths of us will declare humans non-sentient before they admit a machine is sentient.

Also the term "real AI" is tv-watcher fluff. It's a red flag that someone is not paying attention and instead just throwing whatever stink they can generate in order to pretend they matter somehow. If we wanted Twitter's side of the story we would be looking at Twitter right now.