https://one.google.com/about/plans

If you pay annually, 200GB comes out to $0.75/mo

Google hates this trick: make a second gmail account and auto-forward your significant mail there (skip newsletters, broadcasts, etc). And delete mail with unneeded attachments, which is where I use most of my disk space. (“Sis, did you really need to send me FIVE vids of my nephew doing the Hokey Pokey?”). When all mail is completely forwarded, delete the original mail at will. When the new acct is full, create another account.

You can do this forever. Each account gets it’s own quota. You’ll have to recall which acct has which mail so name the accounts with the year you created it, ex, Harvey.Cohen.2021

This doesn’t apply to today’s situation:

• corporations are swimming in excessive profits; largely, regulation has not affected their ability to swindle consumers
• unemployment is really low today
• only 10-15% (of the US population) are experiencing a “high cost of living” relative to home prices. Basically, the young (18-25) and the poor.
• renewable energy is making energy way cheaper.
• WFH (Work From Home) is cheaper for workers.

The AI they are already using won’t just do code completion or even just write the code for the games, but direct & produce them, write the story lines, provide artists with starter ideas (both visual and audio artists), and provide smarter chattier responses for, say, non-player actors and adaptive generative scenery. And it’s super efficient, too, taking the effort levels from 1-2 years with 100s of people down to months (also with 100s of people).

Upshot: we should see a lot more games soon (yeah!) and potentially with higher quality.

Downside: big game companies like this are no longer profitable, and so must make their workplace more efficient.

I know a key designer at a major game company. He says they use AI in all their work, today, and that individual game writers will have no ability to catch up. They will always be more informed, better funded, and have more people working on the project; they will always dominate the games in terms of market share, even after it’s democratized by independent game writers.

That’s because you are young, prob’ly have a US-centric viewpoint, & perhaps ignored history class. This transition is tiny compared to growing up in the Great Depression, or in France before the French Revolution, or in Russia (at any time), or in many African countries, or in …

Don’t despair so much. Change is normal, so find a way to go with the flow, untethered from thinking that the past is how it should always be. And stop paying so much attention to social media & AGI guesswork; that’s not the world, for 90% of people on Earth.

• When we invented machines to do our transport — transitioning from walking and horses and sailboats to engine-driven cars, boats, trains and planes — we extended our reach for delivering products, service and tourism to more distant locales

• When we invented machines to do simple calculations — transitioning from abacuses, finger counting, phone-based approvals, hand tools, pencil and paper, mechanical thermostats to calculators, money-counting machines, network-based transactions, CNC tools, smart thermostats — we extended our reach for automation at a distance.

• When we invented machines to do our creative processes — transitioning from writing essays and poems, painting, coding, designing on CAD to specifying production, code completion, generative designs — we leveraged our big data learning & extended logic chains.

If you look at the machines themselves, you see a pattern of replacement, but at the high level, it’s just extend (improve performance) and leverage (new applications). To extrapolate, look at the high level.

The next categories, I predict, are motion & sensing, which includes machines for: VR/AR, transport, communication, accessibility. (There’s more; let’s start with these)

I think that will result in your and your 15 friends playing the game. If everyone can write a game, everyone will, and no players will be able to keep up with all those games. Then, the Epics of the world will create even more fantastic games that you won’t be able to create, and you are left behind again.

A rising sea raises all ships.

Are there filters that could be designed to get exactly the compounds you want, without all that guesswork?

What this fails to consider is that auto-driving cars are reused throughout the day. They might take the main bread-winner to work, then return home (on their own) to take the spouse food shopping and kids to soccer, then take an unrelated person on their chores, then back to pick up the bread-winner from work, and finally off to the cleaning location where the car is sanitized, refueled (electric or gas or hydrogen — don’t matter), and maintained. There’s very little inner-city parking needed since the car is almost always in motion. Passengers will end up waiting for the next available car, but that’s easily fixed if neighbors share cars (a “pool of cars”) or share rides (a “car pool”). A self-driving car can take the dog to the vet, pick-up groceries or dry-cleaning, or return drunk people safely home. Since electric cars are so cheap to run, I expect people will not think twice about sending cars on more errands, and have physical ports built into their residences (like mail boxes but standardized and for larger boxes) where the car can safely deposit deliveries without human interaction.

Note that splitting a large market (that everyone has to drive to) with multiple smaller markets only reduces the mileage of the shoppers. The delivery trucks would travel far more miles, and with more stops, over smaller roads, and these diesel 18-wheeler trucks are more far polluting than electric cars. Those who suggest walking/biking to the market may never have bought frozen food or had to tug a case of beer or 2 gallons of milk home, and don’t have a solution for the disabled, elderly, or single mom with 3 young kids scenarios.

I’m not following most of your rant, like why you think a car factory worker in 1980 was skilled labor that took years to learn. Most simply bolted fenders on cars.

What you got right is that life is hard, and we all do what we can to improve our lot in life. Automation simply replaces the stuff no one wants to do (bolt fenders in place) with stuff we do want to do (design a better bolt). In the 1800s, few people could read; today, due to the industrial revolution, most people can read (in the US) — that’s a good thing, right? The 2nd standard deviation of 1800 doesn’t even exist in modern times, because the entire curve shifted. Yet you think that stopping the curve from shifting again is a good thing? Would you give up your electronics & software, much of which was designed by automated processes?

There is no social contract for labor.

Yes, better, but they still mess up, producing what’s called a spaghetti print.

Lovely idea, but we can't even 3D print plastic reliably and that's 20 years old. I don't see how this can scale atomic printing until they can utilize 1000s of parallel print heads, none of which make a mistake that would short out the circuit.

Printing a lithium battery is also a nice idea, but is much easier to accomplish by layer-based lithographic-style methods -- the ultimate in parallel "printing" -- currently used in chip fabrication factories for 3D chips.

In 1980 it took 1000 people to build a car. Now it takes 250, due to automation (eg, robots). What happened to the other 750 people? They moved on to other fields. Retrained.

Your worth is what you are, not what you do. People are extended by automation, not replaced.

I’ve heard people claim that the generated Dall-e mini images can’t be found in the training set. I think this clearly shows the opposite for it, but supports that claim more and more for the images on the right side.

PROs: Occulus (before FaceBook) solved 6 of the 8 issues of VR that made people get sick within a few minutes of use. That follows Moore’s Law, right? Miniaturization of components has also been proceeding at a nice pace.

CONs: What’s needed is content that inspires... a killer app. Like the PC became commonplace with spreadsheets, and the web was mostly inspired by porn (as far as video standards were concerned), and e-tail later. VR is simply an evolution of monitors & phones displays in that the 3D world is easily simulated enough by them. Games are not all that amazing in 3D over 2D. Even flight simulators are too hard to use to train real pilots. It’s also still way too hard to write apps and the differences between coding on various headsets is significant, still.

AR is actually fairly mainstream now, with GPS HUDs (Head Up Display) on car dashboards, Pokémon, apps like the iPhone Measure app that craftsman use to measure rooms, and real estate agents use to capture 3D room views to support potential sales. Note that AR should be thought of as including 3D scanning and printing, IMHO.

People are mostly concerned about mining when it comes to REMs (Rare Earth Minerals), not just minerals in general. Many commonplace minerals are not mined but found near the surface or in water. And it’s not just the destructive polluting nature of the mines but also the danger to miners. (For more expensive minerals, I’m guessing the danger will be minimized by using robot miners within a decade).

IMHO, the amount of REMs in solar panels is tiny compared to the amounts used for electronics, power systems, and manufacturing in general. This could be checked.

BTW, I took the IMO in high school and scored the second highest grade in the city. [We had a few prep classes that other schools lacked, so I don’t think it was a fair skill evaluation.] Looking back on college and graduate tests, the IMO was perhaps the hardest test I’d ever taken because it had questions I’d never even imagined could exist. So for an AI to score well is really good news.

Niiiice!

Thanks!

But the Wolfram GA generator still outpaces these language models. The question to be answered is: invent new primal & significant math never seen before, not a specific problem like if you eat 2 apples how many are left? Which of the solutions you mention could invent Pythagorean’s c = sqrt( a^2 + b^2 ), or Euler’s formula, or any other basic math that depends on innovative thinking, with the answer not being in the training set?

Which of these could invent a new field of math, such as that used to solve Rubik’s cube?

Which of these could prove Fermat’s Last Theorem?

Reading thru these:

• Minerva seems to neither invent proofs nor even understand logic; it is simply choosing the best from existing proofs. It seems like solutions need to be in the training set. The parsing is quite impressive, tho.
• AlphaCode writes only simple programs. Does it also write the units tests for these programs, and use the output from those to refine the code?
• I’m not sure I understand what PALM has to do with inventing math
• Diverse looks like it might be capable. It would need several examples of inventing new math, tho, in the training set. (That’s a legit request, IMHO).

Can you point me to more advanced work, please?

True, all you said is that it’s weird. Is it perception or reality, tho? (Or something else?)

I propose that it’s not reality.

As Clinton once said: it depends on what your definition of “is” is.

There might be an absolute ground Truth (with a capital T) that is what is really happening. And there might be a number of other truths (lowercase) that have exactly the same math but are not real. Does it even matter to us? For example, we count apples, and add the counts to other counts. We don’t count the actual apples for the sum, but have a system that works 100% of the time; it is not really what is happening. Does that matter if the answer is right all the time?

We don’t have to solve the equations in this (hypothetical) system, just store the values that will define the wave evolution after the probability function will be sampled. None of that time-dependent or time-independent analysis needs to be done!

And, although these values have both time & space parts and are expressed as matrices, they are still just a mean in a complex & possibly curved space. One “simple” example of this is that, instead of PCA, principle component analysis, one can perform PGA, principle geodesic analysis, to account for curved space & time.

Maybe, two cats?

In quantum class, students learn how to calculate the probability that a bullet will pass through a piece of paper without damage. (The answer is about 1 in 10^500, if you are curious). What is the probability that your cat did the same, thru the glass?