Regarding character.ai and your lonely friend, this is the time for early adopters, not for the average Joe. It's like with smartphones - there were smartphones before the iPhone, but for regular people, they were complex, clunky, and not cool to use. Chatbots will become much, much better in a couple of years and then they will be ready to be considered as one of the ways to cope with loneliness. It's just too soon.

Knowing that a guy from OpenAI says it makes me excited and scared at the same time, because it doesn't look like a prediction but an announcement :)

People think that UBI will be free money for all, but it will actually be full of constraints. I think UBI will be paid in digital currency with an expiry date. Furthermore, the money from UBI will be more like a voucher for certain products - there will be a limited range of products you can buy with it.

Contrary to popular belief implementing AI everywhere it is possible will be uneconomic.

Andrew Ng talking about it:

https://youtu.be/reUZRyXxUs4?t=328

To the remark that hardware isn't there yet, I would add that there is also one aspect of VR that reveals itself only during everyday use - VR is possessive, demanding all of your attention. For example, I no longer watch movies in VR because I don't want to give it 100% of my attention. I want to sit comfortably, eat, drink, check my smartphone from time to time, make comments to my spouse.

VR isolates me completely and I don't want to isolate myself for hours. For this reason, I think VR will never be super popular. Contrary to that, AR will be used by almost everyone because I believe one day it will replace smartphones.