You know I've read a 1967 sci Fi book by a Ukrainian author where they invented a machine that can copy, create and alter human beings. And a LOT of discussion of what it could mean for humanity. As well as threat of SuperAI.

In a few chapters where people were talking and discussing events one of people was going on and on how computers will rapidly overcome human intelligence and what will happen then.

I found it... Interesting.

Since a lot of talks I had with tech people over the years since like 2015 were remarkably similar. And yet similarity with talks people had in 1960s are striking.

Same points " it's not a question of IF it's a question of when" Etc. Same arguments, same exponential talk, etc.

And I'm with you that.. but also a lot of us pretend or think they understand more than they possible do or could.

We don't really know when an intelligence explosion will happen.

1960s people thought it would happen when computers could do arithmetic million times faster than humans.

We seem to hang on to flops raw compute power, compare it vs human brain - and voila! - if it's higher we got super AI.

We've since long passed 10^16 flops in our supercomputers and yet we're still nowhere near human level AI.

Memory bandwidth kinda slipped away from Kurzwail books.

Maybe ASI will happen tomorrow. Or 10 years from now. Or 20 years from now or maybe it'll never happen we'll just sort if merge with it as we go without any sort of defining rigid event.

My point is - we don't really know. Flops progression was a good guess but it failed spectacularly. We have over 10^18 flops capable computers and we're still 2-3 orders of magnitude behind human brain when trying to emulate it.

Capitalism is not a threat but a tool. Dictatorship on the other hand is a threat, possibly greater than AI itself. Especially dictatorships we are powerless to stop - eg nuclear armed Russia and 1 billion people economic powerhouse China.

If something horrible happens in democracies usually people rise up and protest and there will be different powers colliding and fighting for change. And often we are successful, but often we are not. We kind of need to be better at this, but poor fighting is still better than no fighting.

Which is a reality of any dictatorship. Everything is in the hands of very few (read "Putin's people" by Catherine Belton) and people have zero power.

Huge country wide protests can have a limited effect, where tyrants will pretend to cave, but as soon as people go home, they quietly arrest or murder those who pose the most threat and tighten everything again but even worse than before.

And there's a vicious cycle going on there that is making any positive change extremely unlikely.

Further as soon as something horrible happens in democracies - the whole world knows it from countless journalists and investigators that are (usually) well protected by law.

If something horrible happens in dictatorships we almost never get the chance to know it and a few cases where we do will be forever denied it has happened and all journalists who were working on it have disappeared from the face of the earth.

Which creates an incredibly distorted picture where dictatorships look nice and shiny where nothing bad ever happened, while we're all incredibly focused on US problems all of which combined don't even scratch the surface of dictatorship problems.

And even if you realize it, your worldview is still warped because most of what you will read and care about are bad events happening in democracies and subconsciously you'll feel that's where most problems are.

All the while failing to realize how we're being increasingly infiltrated by a pro-dictatorship forces which in turn caused 16-year in a row drop in US (and worldwide) democracy scores. See freedomhouse.org. look at the map. Look at trends.

Do you seriously believe 'evil corporations future' that's been countlessly portrayed in pop culture, movies and video games - is a threat? Look again.

Iron law of oligarchy is a term worth mentioning when you look at modern states like Russia or Iran, but when it was first mentioned by Robert Michels in 1911 modern democracies didn't yet exist.

Also Michels joined the fascist party as he believed it was the next step of evolution for human societies.

I urge you to read "why nations fail" by James Robinson and Darin Acemoglu to understand virtuous and vicious cycles in modern democracies and dictatorships and how it all works and interacts together.

Motion sickness is a fundamental problem that doesn't have a fix.

But I disagree I think quest 2 was massive leap forward given it's price. It's resolution is ~2.7x that of original Oculus Rift and 120hz vs 90hz and it doubles down as standalone all at half the price of original Oculus rift.

From price/performance perspective with Quest 2 we got a device that gives us at least 6x better value.

Look at the GPUs in comparison.

A person who paid $200 for 1060 3Gb in 2016 paid same dollar for a unit of performance as a person buying $1200 4080 today or $850 3080 yesterday. Roughly same price/performance as 3060/3070 and even 3050. Only 3060 Ti offers somewhat better value for money but still not that much.

Their price/performance barely changed.

VR changed dramatically. Just not hype worthy.

All it has to be to wildly spread is to be slightly superior to monitor. Nothing more.

Really? I was saying that people would move away from cities for years and it was very slow before the pandemic, but the pandemic blew up my best expectations out of the water.

I never expected this mass exodus, certainly not at this rate (I am talking about San Francisco for example) even though I did expect people to move away from metro areas, but I expected slow gradual transition not massive shift like what is happening.

There's a certain slowdown in hardware if you are familiar with PC hardware.

If you bought a PC in 1995 it would be something like.. let's make it high end - Pentium 100, 16Mb of RAM, 1Gb HDD, 4Mb video card. - if you had the money. My PC at the time was 1/3 as powerful.

In 2005 the same money would buy 2.4Ghz Athlon 64 4000+, 2Gb of RAM (if not 4) 7800GT Nvidia card, 80Gb HDD

It was like 100x better in multiple ways. 50x frequency, 100x+ CPU processing power, 100-150x more RAM, 80x bigger (and nearly that much faster) hard drive and I didn't even mention GPU yet.

Now let's do the same for 2022 PC and 2012 PC.

In 2012 for consumer mid range you'd get 2600k or 2700k intel CPU which was 4core/8thread CPU at nearly 4Ghz for $300-350. Or you could go for 6core/12thread for $600+ Common RAM sizes were 16Gb+ for high end. 2Tb HDD was easy to score under $120 +256Gb boot SSD and GTX 680 would be a common choice for a high end GPU.

What can you get today for the same money? You'd be lucky to get 3x higher single thread performance and 10x multi thread performance with 7900x, you'd probably go for 32Gb of RAM. You'll likely go for 2Tb SSD, maybe you'll get two of them skipping HDD entirely. And the only really noticeable difference would be GPU - that's the only part that would actually be 6x faster than anything else in PC.

So you barely got 2-3x higher performance for anything except GPU and multi threading. Memory and storage capacities maybe doubled in 10 years, instead of 50-100x previously in 95-2005

What if this rate of slowdown continued? What if 10 years later we'd only get 50% faster components instead of 2-3x faster for last decade?

Public transportation is too centralized. It's efficient to move large masses of people all at once long distances - like a plane, long distance train or medium distance bus. But last mile transportation nothing beats small vehicles like cars.

With carpooling in mind self driving cars are the most efficient way for transportation for distances 50 or below miles. It has a potential to be like 5 cents a mile with self-driving EV's

Urbanization is at it's all time peak right now as more and more opportunities for remote work open up to people.

Which means people are moving away from ultra expensive urban areas to inexpensive areas away from urban centers.

Excessive centralization around urban centers was a nessessary evil when there was no way to do things other than moving your physical self to do things. It is already changing rapidly accelerated by pandemic.

Biggest VR hurdles are motion sickness and low pixel density IMO.

Motion sickness means the vast majority wouldn't be able to play a fast paced game where you move your virtual body.

That hamstrings most game genres outright.

Pixel density with Quest 2 and it's competition is like 20 PPD (Pixel per degree). With 4k monitors it's typically 120 PPD. For 1080p monitors it's 60PPD.

If you translate PPD to vision acuity you wouldn't pass a driving test with vision acuity below 40 PPD lol

I am a VR enthusiast and have been buying VR stuff since 2014. But I end up always coming back to monitor games. If I could play AC Odyssey in VR headset - would I? No I wouldn't because of motion sickness and low PPD.

I mean it's technically possible now, although it could barely pass as a "video".

It's like everything take self-driving for example. We had self-driving cars doing 99.9% of driving by AI back in 2004. Since then advancements were massive, but for a regular person it's probably still not exactly what we could call "self-driving".

I think a better definition is when AI will be able to make a movie that can create comparable revenue to Hollywood blockbusters.

So to your question I'd answer "today", but in my more strict definition of it I'd say 10-30 years.

Russians trust nothing, no news sources, not even their own state propaganda. They just assumed everyone is lying. Yet they support fascist dictator and his bidding fully aware his news sources lie every day.

But they are also convinced everyone else also lies every day.

That kind of scepticism?

I think this will only create more problems as it's evident with Russia.