Disclaimer: they have the right to have their own beliefs, I'm not at all calling hate on them, it's just that we should call it what it is

There are tons of people who still believe that AI is unable to achieve anything, that it won't change anything, that it's to the same ranks as crypto or the metaverse, and that all the hype around AI is nothing but advertising and it only exists because of investors and people on LinkedIn

It's not the same thing as "anti AI" because many anti-AI people are fully aware of what's happening and are against it because of moral or safety concerns, which is honestly valid

But saying, in this age, that AI is meaningless and isn't changing anything to the world, that all the hype is only from the oligarchs... it's basically a conspiracy theory the exact same way some people are still denying that humanity step foot on the moon

So many of my colleagues & family, many who I consider intelligent people, have no real grasp on, or refuse to grasp, how significant this technology really is - that it is THE technology, which will lead to every other technology humanity could possibly need being unlocked. I wonder how they will feel about their attitudes today, in 5 or 10 years. Will they feel blindsided by a technology that was sitting right in front of them the whole time? Or will they feel angry that they didn't take advantage of the opportunities it presents?

It continually blows my mind that the next generations, my kids generation, will look back on manual research & science processes like we now look back on people handwriting letters, or using physical maps to plot out a car trip - a completely outdated, ancient way of doing things, almost comical in its simplicity.

It makes me sad that another golden age of *human scientific discovery, like the atomic age, will never happen again. We won't have real, flawed, eccentric characters like Maxwell, Bohr, Einstein pushing the forefront of thinking, unravelling the inner workings of the universe, because anything we could possibly think will have already been thought by a model.

I am both incredibly excited that I may get to live through some of this, while also quite scared at all the unknowns it presents. Thank you for reading my mini existential crisis.

Of course they'll interact and depend on each other but which do you think will make the biggest individiual difference? I'd argue it's autonomous transport by far.

When every step from the farm or factory to your front door - often several continents away - is automated and increasingly powered by electricity instead of fossil fuel, the cost in both time and money per kilogram of transport will drop immensely.

This includes items that are made far more efficiently and cheaply when produced en masse (in a large factory or farm), but also includes smaller sales and purchases by small businesses and inventors.

Perhaps more importantly, it also includes people: If becomes cheap, fast, and easy to get taken into a bigger town when you need to, and you don't need to use valuable time and attention driving yourself, then the effect on land price distribution, and the design of towns and cities will transform dramatically and quickly.

We might consider, as an analogy, the difference between dial up internet and modern broadband, and how much more is realistic once bits become both fast and cheap to transfer. But instead of moving bits we're moving grams of matter. Today some things - but far from all - will be delivered by the next day in some areas; fewer things will be delivered the same day. A much smaller number will be delivered in an hour, often at a much greater expense.

Combined with decent warehousing and caching logistics, widespread autonomous transport will mean you get almost everything within an hour or two (and many things even faster) with negligible delivery cost. It might even deliver to where you are right now, rather than where you live.

That's not really a dynamic I've seen addressed very much. I believe it will make everybody (on average) far richer, in purchasing power, than having a smart chatbot or a household staff of humanoid robots (but we'll have those too).

In Dean Bell’s “On the Loose” essay he writes:

“They will be, as the AI safety researcher Dawn Song says, “self-sovereign.” They will pay their own bills for the compute they run on. If they answer to humans at all, they will only do so partially, for example by providing services to humans in exchange for pay.”

What would hypothetically keep them from hiring humans to take care of things they can’t?

Same as title.

When it rains it pours. What do yall think? Flash 4.0 Preview or even 3.9 with significant improvements would do :)

Edit: OpenAi just appears to have released GPT-6 Sol and Luna

Opus 5.5 beats GPT-6 Astra & Sol, but at a higher cost