I think you're correct in thinking that AI disruption of our lives is here, and will only ramp up in the coming years - even without getting to AGI.

That said, I'm very confident that the shape of our lives will be very similar to today in 2025. Most people will still have jobs. Most people will still carry smartphones. Most car owners will still be the ones driving. Etc. (And you do say something like this towards the bottom of your post.)

Basically, even if next-gen narrow AI expert systems on better hardware are exponentially better by 2025, the timeframe is still so short as to appear linear with respect to impact on people's lives.

Wen Full Dive VR New Zealand?

Spending a lot of time in the Shire from Lord of the Rings would probably be peaceful and cozy.

It looks like I have to sign up to use the service. I'll definitely check it out later.

Honestly, one of the biggest filters that I need is: "Show me only the papers I actually have access to. Don't show me PubMed links that don't include a full paper. Don't show me links to Elsevier journals that I look like I have access, but I really don't."

Google Scholar does usually indicate an actual, downloadable paper with a link in the margins, but it's not perfect. Sometimes I need to scroll through a few pages of results to turn up a few papers I can even access, and then they're not always relevant. Other times, there actually is a version of the paper I can access, but Google Scholar doesn't indicate that as an option, so I have to click a few times to dig deeper.

I assume it won't be too long before I can have an intelligent agent/assistant that can do a really good job finding papers for me. Keyword searches aren't bad, but there's often a fair amount of filtering that I have to do myself.

>Do you think AR is this decades most/only truly revolutionary tech

It's definitely the one I'm most certain about. My feeling is probably because it's the smallest leap in technology for adoption among the types of innovation discussed here.

>I'm not so sure I see AR glasses as a replacement to all devices, simply because of how vain humans are. Selfies would be impossible barring the use of some kind of avatar.

Yeah, I agree that smartphones are likely to be a personal area network hub for a while, including the early 2030s. That said, just like I usually reach for my phone before my laptop or a tablet, I think people will just use their AR glasses more and more. The arbitrary "screen" size is what does it for me. For example, I bring a Kindle on my commute, because I like to read on a larger screen than my phone. With AR glasses, I can leave that at home. If the glasses hardware ever equals the smartphone, I can leave that at home, too. At that point, maybe I can carry a little selfie drone, or something, if I really feel the need.

>I do think narrow AI will make big waves by 2025/6. I think that's when employment issues will start to crop up, before being a crises shortly after.

My feeling is that the next decade will be one where AI augments some workers and deskills others. Maybe some industries will be virtually eliminated. (I can see everyday journalism being taken completely over by AI writing stories based on data from oracles by 2030.) But I'm open to being wrong. A lot of the most common jobs are still centered around retail or food (salespersons, cashiers, etc.), which can be eliminated if we get comfortable with stores like Amazon Go, or management, which can probably be supplanted by software. Two other of the most common jobs are personal care assistants and registered nurses. I think these are more likely augmented than eliminated.

I'm slightly more conservative, because I'm not convinced that AGI is coming like tomorrow. I also subscribe to the thinking that we tend to overestimate near term progress, while underestimating the longer term future. 10 years hits kind of that boundary between near and far future enough to be pretty fuzzy.

I also don't remember how obvious it was at the time, but there's a pretty clear progression from PDAs through early smartphones like BlackBerries and Palm Treos. The idea that people would want to combine their PDA, phone, and camera into a single device seems like an inevitable one waiting for processing power and memory to catch up. But if social media and video on the internet didn't happen the way it did? Maybe we stayed with those physical keyboard devices for people that email or texted a lot and dumb phones plus iPods with great cameras for everyone else.

I think AR glasses do a similar consolidation of devices. Done right, and with enough cycles of Moore's Law, they can replace your smartphone, your laptop, desktop if you still have one, and many of the screens that exist in your life. (I've been dreaming of having a single computing device ever since Canonical's failed Ubuntu Edge crowdfunding campaign, the same year I got my first smartphone.) But yes, a small, durable slate in your pocket may be more convenient than carrying glasses. People deal with sunglasses, though. At the very least, AR glasses are better for privacy without people being able to look over your shoulder to see what you're doing. That alone might be their "killer app."

I think we're looking at 2024-2026 for AR glasses to really start being a thing. I'm basing this on the idea that Apple will get their initial product (their glasses, not their headset) "right" enough to start mass adoption ramping up. I'm not an Apple fan boy. I just think they're the most willing to wait on releasing until they have a product their users want.

I think we'll land a person on Mars in the mid to late 2030s. I'm basing this on there being ~5 launch windows between now and 2032, and we haven't made it back to the moon, yet, even. 2032 just sounds early for a human mission, unless a space billionaire decides to YOLO it.

My predictions:

I think AR will become a common, if not preferred, interface for personal computing devices in this timeframe. It's possible/likely that a lot of the processing and communication will still be offloaded to smartphones and cloud. Most people will probably still have smartphones in 2032, but they will be on their way out as the dominant personal computing form factor.

Life expectancy in the developed world might go from increasing by 0.1-0.2 years per year to closer to 0.5 years per year. I think it's likely that personalized medicine, regenerative medicine, cell therapies, lab-made organs, etc. will start to come to a head toward the end of that period. Lifespan and healthspan will start to edge up a bit more quickly, but we won't yet be at the stage of really slowing or reversing aging, at least not outside the clinic.

UBI will be discussed more and more, but probably won't yet be widely implemented by 2032. That will depend on if we get a "major" industry disrupted by then or not. We'll probably see a lot of jobs be really augmented by AI by that point. A large number will probably continue to be de-skilled, too, but unless something like autopilot, and the associated laws, are solved, there won't be a large enough shock to encourage governments to act on UBI.

Renewable energy will continue to make up a greater portion of the energy mix, but still won't be moving quick enough to stave off climate change. We might get serious about funding fusion and building smaller scale thorium fission reactors by this point, as a reaction to green energy and battery tech not moving as quick as we need it to (which will mostly be due to lack of will, not lack of tech).

A nascent space economy will continue to form. Moon base will start to be built, but won't be continuously occupied by 2032. Elon Musk, afraid of not getting there before he dies, will make sure SpaceX launches something toward Mars in this timeframe. Probably won't be a person, yet.

I figure that by the time any of this is real, we'd have quantum-resistant cryptography.

Patents typically have expiration dates. Even then, parents only stop you from commercializing something, not making it. If such a nanofactory were to exist, DRM would go further in preventing people from making their own than a patent would. Like, it could in theory make anything, but it's locked down to not make weapons or copies of itself.

It doesn't necessarily need to. Someone circa ~2005 might have said that you can't automate a grocery cashier/bagger, because a robot would have a tough time orienting barcodes towards a scanner and bagging groceries without wrecking them. Turns out a lot of people are fine scanning and bagging their own groceries. You only had to make a better UI for the register, and add enough security to convince corporate that people weren't stealing too much. People would probably be fine walking to the end of their driveway to pick their package out of a small delivery bot.

An alternative that I thought of a while back would be to have a delivery truck with a bunch of drones. The truck parks when it gets to a neighborhood, and drones ferry packages to doorsteps.

Even if you just cut out delivery jobs with something like the above in suburban and rural areas, that's still a lot of jobs.

What even is an "average office job" in 2022? Do you mean like data entry? Accounting? Sales? Design? Research and Development?

AGI implies consciousness. I don't think that anyone doubts that we'll have very powerful generalist AI before AGI.

A few years back on a different site, I noticed what I thought was a fairly simple Markov chain-based chatbot making forum comments. I called it out, and got a smiley face as a reply. It wasn't spreading information. It was just participating in the conversation, badly.

Given that it's easier to do this today, and to do a better job of it, I'm sure they're still out there. I just don't now how pervasive they are. Is this kind of like the "are we living in a simulation" hypothesis, where the existence of the technology implies that more accounts than not are bots? Or are bots just something a few people are doing for fun and/or research?

As for good vs. evil, I believe that most people are good. Therefore I think that most bots, being deployed by humans and not yet being intelligent in their own right, are either good or benign. Of course, people with nefarious intentions could be deploying more bots than good or benign people.

>So how we can simulate this perfectly in a computer?

There is the possibility that general intelligence doesn't have to come in the form of a brain evolved on Earth. That is, we could get to general intelligence without simulating a known brain. That's absolutely the most straightforward way to go about it, though, if AGI doesn't emerge other before we get the knowledge and processing power for such a simulation.

Well before 2100.

I really think somewhere around 2035 with a huge error bar towards the next century. I think the first thing we think is AGI will probably be an expert system that is just really good at making us think it's an AGI. Like, it probably wouldn't be too hard to train an AI on near-present speculative fiction to get it to learn the right things to say. Combine that model with a few others (MuZero comes to mind, one of the image creation models, etc.), and it would probably be pretty convincing, but not actually do anything of its own volition.

A system that has human-level competencies in enough areas and a convincing amount of free will might take some more time.

I'm excited for AR displays, but I think having the phone will still be helpful for some time. Offloading processing and communication to the cloud to another device will allow AR displays to be as light and unobtrusive as possible.

What I'm really waiting for is for my phone to completely replace all of my other computing devices. Convergence/Continuum/DEX haven't yet delivered on this promise. Good AR displays may finally solve some of the problems in this area.

I think the dates you mention are going to turn out to be early. That said, I found college worth it, even when not strictly considering future employment prospects.

• I'm far more well-rounded after college. I had little interest in literature, religion, sociology, etc. when I entered college. While I certainly could have learned about these topics on my own, I probably wouldn't have. Having a more diverse education has also helped me be a better learner.
• Networking and other opportunities are easier when you are a student. I got access to two undergraduate research experiences, a scholarship, and an internship basically by showing up to things I wouldn't have known about if I had been teaching myself topics at home. One, I got literally just by talking to an invited speaker after a talk. Without these experiences, my ability to get hands-on learning in my field would have been diminished significantly.
• College was especially worth it for me socially. My closest friends today are some of my first year dormmates and people I've met through them.

I think if you're a super-motivated, well-networked high school student (e.g. someone who would get a Thiel Fellowship), or someone who knows exactly what they want to do, and how to get there, you can probably skip college. If you have any doubt, would benefit from a more structured learning environment, etc., you should at least try college. If AGI concerns you with regards to employability, try to orient yourself towards something where a significant portion of the work is non-routine.