weweweoo

What I'm most worried about is how farming will adapt. Either food production needs to shift to geograhically new areas, or we'll need massive storm-proof greenhouses where hostile weather conditions don't matter. Large scale desalination of seawater will be likely needed too.

Given enough money, anything is possible of course. In my country we grow things like cucumber and tomatoes during winter in heated greenhouses with artificial light, even though it's dark and freezing outside. They just cost 2-3x more than same stuff produced further south.

I believe most of the misery could be still avoided with massive amount of investment into green technology, AI and robotics to take care of the old and so on. But if Americans continue to elect people who hate science and have ideological love for fossil fuels, then we're probably doomed indeed.

If most people are unemployed, modern capitalism as we know it will collapse. I'm not sure that's in the interests of the billionaires. Perhaps some kind of a social safety net will be implemented.

But I do agree, there is no reason to be enthusiastic about any progress in AI, when the goal is simply automating people's jobs away.

Babies can at least manipulate the physical world. Large language model can never be defined as AGI until it can control a general purpose robot, similar to how human brain controls our body's motor functions.

Personally I loved history, social science and geography, but none of that has been useful in working life. Being good at mathematics is prerequisite for nearly all well-paying jobs, humanities are not of much use except for being able to write and read well.

Obviously extremist attitudes don't disappear overnight when a regime promoting them disappears. Still, I would prefer to see a comparison to other parts of the world. Were antidemocratic, racist and antisemitic attitudes more common in postwar West Germany compared to other countries?

What is particularly lacking in research is perspectives from countries beyond Western world. Humankind's history is full of racism and xenophobia everywhere, but most research has a Western perspective.

Yeah, I'm no fan of Musk or Trump, but I think Twitter always was a spam-infested, hateful cesspool where people with online-addiction yelled at each other. There was nothing for Musk to ruin, because the whole concept was rotten from the start. Allowing only short messages doesn't promote intelligent discussion, it does the opposite.

Yes, firing ordinary workers and moving production elsewhere is definitely going to fix bad management and rotten company culture on top level.

Boeing management created the 737MAX fiasco and killed those people.

Mainly the various physical operations many of them perform on daily basis (due to limitations of robotics), plus liability issues in case things go wrong and somebody dies. And finally, huge demand due to aging population worldwide.

I do believe some parts of their jobs will be automated, but not enough (especially with growing demand) to really hurt career prospects. Even for those parts, it will take a long a while due to the regulated nature of the sector.

The question is, why wouldn't nearly all other white collar jobs be professions of the past as well? Does the average MBA or whatever possess some unique knowledge that you couldn't generate with an LLM fed with company data? What is the alternative career path?

I think software engineers who also understand business may yet have an advantage over pure business people, who don't understand technology. They should be able to tell AI what to do, and evaluate the outcome. Of course "coders" who simply produce code from pre-defined requirements will probably not have a good career.

To be honest, if the bottom 50th percent of coding talent is going to be obsolete, I wonder what happens to rest of the "knowledge workers" in those companies. I mean people whose jobs consist of attending Teams meetings, making fancy powerpoint slides and reports, perhaps even excel if they are really competent. None of that is any more challenging for LLM than writing code. In fact replacing these jobs should be easier, since presentations and slides do not actually do anything, unlike a program that must perform a certain action correctly.

What's the alternative? If AI is going to replace software engineers, there is no fundamental reason they couldn't replace almost all other knowledge workers as well. No matter the field, most of it is just office work managing, transforming and building new information, applying existing knowledge on new problems (that probably are not very unique in grand scheme of things).

Except for medical doctors, nurses, and some niche engineering professions, I really struggle to think of jobs requiring higher education that couldn't be largely automated by an LLM that is smart enough to replace a senior software engineer. These few jobs are protected mainly by the physical aspect, and low tolerance for mistakes. Some skilled trades may also be protected, at least if robotics don't improve dramatically.

Personally, I would become a doctor if I could. But of all things I could've studied excluding that, computer science has probably been one of the better options. At least it teaches problem solving and not just memorization of facts. Knowing how to code may not be that useful in the future, but the process of problem solving is going nowhere.

I agree with the hypothesis. My country has a significant shortage of doctors, and guess what the few doctors spend a large amount of their day on? Paperwork that used to be done by secretaries, whose salary would be maybe 1/3 or the doctor's. It's a massive waste of both money and doctor's potential, but somehow that's what the free market prefers.

Yes, the pi is perfectly fine for many projects, and in fact I have a couple of old pi's (even the original pi 1!) running tasks, such as listening sensors over bluetooth, pihole as DNS server etc.

The reason I prefer mini-pc's over pi is the x86 architecture and possibility to add more RAM. For maximum flexibility, I mostly run my self-hosted services inside virtual machines that I manage with Proxmox, and pi isn't ideal for that. Admittedly I found even the mini-pc's too limited due to lack of space/pcie slots for a GPU, and ended up with a custom desktop build. That allows me to experiment with stuff like self-hosted AI, and game remotely. Support for ECC RAM and more SSD's was a big plus too.

So, indeed it all depends on what and how much you want to do with the machines.

Definitely do that. Old Fujitsu thin clients make awesome DIY routers.