You don't believe in the quantum block chain 3D printed AI cloud future mining asteroids for the private Mars colony (yet with no life extension)?
Luddite.
Quantum was popular as "oh god, our cryptography will die, what are we going to do". Now post-quantum cryptography exists and it doesn't seem to be clear what else quantum computers are useful for, other than PR.
Blockchain was popular when the supply of cryptocurrencies was kinda small, now there's too many of them. And also its actually useful applications require having offline power to make decisions. Go on, tell politicians in any country that you want electoral system exposed and blockchain-based to avoid falsifications. LOL. They are not stupid. If you have a safe electoral system, you can do with much more direct democracy. Except blockchain seems a bit of an overkill for it.
3D printing is still kinda cool, except it's just one tool among others. It's widely used to prototype combat drones and their ammunition. The future is here, you just don't see it.
Cloud - well, bandwidths allowed for it and it's good for companies, so they advertised it. Except even in the richest countries Internet connectivity is not a given, and at some point wow-effect is defeated by convenience. It's just less convenient to use cloud stuff, except for things which don't make sense without cloud stuff. Like temporary collaboration on a shared document.
"AI" - they've ran out of stupid things to do with computers, so they are now promising the ultimate stupid thing. They don't want smart things, smart things are smart because they change the world, killing monopolies and oligopolies along the way.
Well that's a lot of words that I wasted time reading.
Too bad
Quantum computing has incredible value as a scientific tool, what are you talking about.
OK, sorry.
No room-temperature superconductor fusion reactors, space-based solar, or private space mining? Luddite.
#1 is like tactical nuke tech available for all civilians, #2 would make sense if all the production line and consumers are in space too, #3 would make sense as part of the same.
Earth gravity well is a bitch. We live in it. Sending stuff up is expensive, sending stuff down is stupid when it's needed up there, but without some critical complete piece of civilization to send up at once, you'll have to send stuff up all the time.
It's too expensive and the profits are transcendent, as in "ideological achievement and because we can". Also they may eventually start sending nukes down.
Thus it all makes sense only when we can build and equip an autonomous colony to send at once. Self-reliant with the condition that they will get needed materials from wherever they are sent.
I suggest something with gravity though. Europa or Ganymede or Enceladus. Something like that.
Are you a Space Nutter?
It's not going to happen. No one is going to move to space or send nukes down or mine asteroids.
Ever.
Are you a round earth nutter?
It's not going to happen. No one is going to get past the edge of the world or sail the whole world or find new land.
Ever.
If you don't see how that's a completely dumb comparison, this is hopeless. I'm reality-based, you are not.
Sure, friend. You can see reality thousands of years into the future and know exactly what happens.
My bad.
Do you think physics and chemistry have changed in some significant way over the last thousand years?
Yet somehow, YOU can see reality in a thousand years, and it matches the sci-fi mindrot you watched as a kid...
Yes? Not the principles behind them, but our understanding of them as a species.
You're a boring doomer who thinks humans will never find, create, or invent something we've never done before? Seriously? What kind of boring hill is that to die on?
Uh, it's called "reality" my friend, try it.
You can't "invent" your way out of fundamental physical limits.
A Boeing 747 looks the same in 1969 as it does today. It still flies over the Atlantic in six hours burning kerosene in turbofan engines.
Sure, you can get a few percent here, a few percent there, but do you think suddenly we'll have warp drive?
Come on. Do you know how empty and huge space is?
Nope, you're right. We know everything there is to ever know and nothing will ever change. We've peaked as a species, there is literally nowhere else to go from here.
Oh OK, the only logical counterpoint is we're going to space.
Wheeee!!! Dibs on Neptune!
In practice my comment means that it's far too early to think of space colonization.
Far too late as well. It will never happen.
I disagree. It just won't be fancy. It has to be an enormous project with existential risks. And you have to really send many people at once with no return ticket. "At once" is important, you can't ramp it up, that's far more expensive. It has to be a mission very deeply planned in detail with plenty of failsafe paths, aimed at building a colony that can be maintained with Earth's teaching resources, technologies and expertise, and locally produced and processed materials for everything. So - something like that won't happen anytime soon, but at some point it will happen.
The technologies necessary have to be perfected first, computing should stop being the main tool for hype, and the societies should adapt culturally for computing and worldwide connectivity.
These take centuries. In those centuries we'll be busy with plenty of things existential, like avoiding the planet turning into one big 70s Cambodia.
Um, OK.
Did you think it was strange when tech bubble burst in 2001 ? And the housing market and San Jose, Tech capital of the world went up.
Soon to lose the r from propping.
It's going to be great when the AI hype bubble crashes
I feel like literally everybody knew it was a bubble when it started expanding and everyone just kept pumping into it.
How many tech bubbles do we have to go through before we leave our lesson?
Never. Some people think the universe owes us Star Trek and are just waiting for something new to happen.
I get that people who sell AI-services wants to promote it. That part is obvious.
What I don't get is how gullible the rest of society at large is. Take the norwegian digitalization minister, who says that 80% of the public sector shall use AI. Whatever that means.
Or building a gigantic fuckoff openai data centre, instead of new industry https://openai.com/nb-NO/index/introducing-stargate-norway/
Jared Diamond had a great take on this in "Collapse". That there a countless examples of societies making awful decisions - because the decisionmakers are insulated from the consequences. On the contrary, they get short term gains.
We know that our current way of economic growth and consistent new "inventions" is destroying the basis of our life. We know that the only way to stop is to fundamentally redesign the social system, moving away from capitalism, growth economics and ever new gadgets.
But facing this is difficult. Facing this and winning elections with it is even more difficult. Instead claiming there is some wonder technology that will safe us all and putting the eggs in that basket is much easier. It will fail inevitably, but until then it is easier.
what lesson? it's a ponzi scheme and whoever is the last holding the bag is the only one losing.
And that's why it's being done. Everyone hopes that they make it out at just the right time to make millions while the greater fools who join too late are left holding the bag.
Bubbles are great. For those who make it out in time. They suck fo everyone else including the taxpayer who might have to bail out companies and investors.
Always following the doctrine of privatizing profits and socializing losses.
Plus everyone else that pays taxes as they will have to continue to pay for unemployment insurance, food stamps, rent assistance, etc (not the CEOs and execs that caused it that's for sure).
Everyone knows a bubble is a firm foundation to build upon. Now that Trump is back in office and all our American factories are busy cranking out domestic products I can finally be excited about the future again!
I predict that in a year this bubble will be at least twice as big!
As someone who works with integrating AI- it’s failing badly.
At best, it’s good for transcription- at least until it hallucinates and adds things to your medical record that don’t exist. Which it does and when the providers don’t check for errors - which few do regularly- congrats- you now have a medical record of whatever it hallucinated today.
And they are no better than answering machines for customer service. Sure, they can answer basic questions, but so can the automated phone systems.
They can’t consistently do anything more complex without making errors- and most people are frankly too dumb or lazy to properly verify outputs. And that’s why this bubble is so huge.
It is going to pop, messily.
If you want to define “failing” as unable to do everything correctly, then sure, I’d concur.
However, if you want to define “failing” as replacing people in their jobs, I’d disagree. It’s doing that, even though it’s not meeting the criteria to pass the first test.
And they are no better than answering machines for customer service. Sure, they can answer basic questions, but so can the automated phone systems.
This is what drives nuts the most about it. We had so many incredibly efficient, purpose-built tools using the same technologies (machine learning and neural networks) and we threw them away in favor of wildly inefficient, general-purpose LLMs that can’t do a single thing right. All because of marketing hype convincing billionaires they won’t need to pay people anymore.
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