I wouldn’t mind the idea of everything going digital. So long as we actually own the digital copies we buy. So long also as we are able to continually access said digital copies. We wouldn’t be having this physical vs digital debate going on for so long, if the practices of what companies like Sony and other media companies have been going about with handling digitally purchased content.
It’s a very stupid easy of a solution that has been continually fumbled time and time again. Because greed got in the way.
How cool could AI be if corpos hadn’t thrown the environment, artists and creators, the home PC market, and basically all ethics under the bus in implementing it?
Ask me again in 20 years and the answer will be self-driving cars. They have the potential to be great but I don’t see it going well.
I don’t see them ever working in city traffic because as much as I hate to admit it, you literally need to break traffic laws to get around sometimes, especially during rush hour. In like 2017 I took an Uber to a concert and it was when they were doing extremely early prototypes of self driving cars. Didn’t even know I was taking a self driving car until I got in.
This thing couldn’t drive on highways so we went downtown instead and it waited to yield for a left hand turn for no joke like 10 minutes before it was possible. Bunch of people just honking and going around us (illegally). The only viable way to take that turn is to creep forward until you’re a sitting duck in the middle of the intersection, then gun it and run the red light.
This also is all in Pittsburgh which we have some of the oldest and most fucked roads because of the geography and the paths for them were laid out in the late 1700s / early 1800s. Uber picked Pittsburgh because our roads were the most “challenging” to learn on and do R&D then one of their cars killed a pedestrian who was walking and they canned the whole project.
AI in general, IMO it’s actually a very useful tool, Had it not been shoved into everything that makes no sense to… if we didn’t have an absurd amount of companies trying to make “frontier models” that require carpeting the country in data centers, If we put more focus on… self run AIs where people could train it on their own stuff, in their own environment, without leading into a dependency on outside cloud resources.
US is basically doing the cellular race all over again, except on something so much more stupidly environmentally destructive and expensive.
(IE when the cellular race went on, we had basically 8 or so companies building towers that only were compatible with their own networks… rather than just making the towers public infrastructure and allowing providers to compete with 1 array of towers, instead of everyone making their own).
People who knew me were shocked I was against AI since it seemed right up my alley. Imo it should have remained one of those niche tech tools scattered across a couple githubs requiring you to build from source and self host. Not some garbage slop generator trying to appeal to the general consumer.