There are some interesting lessons to be learned here. It seems having lots of near-empty space is driving this. Solar is being built in poorer rural areas with low planning and permitting requirements. More densely populated places can't always take such an approach easily, but it points to the fact that planning authorization may be placing a bottleneck on reducing climate change damage.

The AI Investor hype bubble always seemed ultimately doomed. AI will be profoundly deflationary, and will likely lead us to end up dominated by a very different economic system than today, with a far smaller role for capitalism, stock markets, and investors.

This article is interesting as it neatly illustrates the schizophrenia at the heart of the AI investor worldview. On the one hand, it berates people who made claims that 300 million jobs would be automated - because they've failed to live up to that "promise" to AI investors fast enough.

What you never see is anyone joining the dots, and asking what sort of economic model society will evolve to when job automation is at that scale. (Hint: It probably won't have much room for high stock market or property prices, or prosperous investors).

I'm fascinated by people's tendencies to anthropomorphize AI & robotics; it's hard to see how this is truly analogous to the human mind and depression.

Yes. I don't think enough people realise the significances of this fact. Unlike us, AI will never peak; it will always relentlessly get better.

One of the difficulties with ending the fossil fuel age is transitioning workers and economic activity. Geothermal energy like Fervo, apart from all its other benefits, might help solve that problem. There's a large cross-over in terms of skills between them and the oil and gas industry. They even sometimes use sites of former fossil fuel extraction for geothermal plants. Now they seem to have successfully demonstrated proof-of-concept it's frustrating things aren't moving faster with this energy source.

It makes sense China dominates manufacturing standards; it's the world's biggest manufacturer. It seems an odd thing for the article writer to get worked up over.

Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) is very similar to human contractors getting paid by the hour.

As this allows for clearer image resolution of smaller planets around the nearest stars, I wonder will it do the same for their atmospheric composition? It seems that will be the key to first detecting alien life elsewhere in the universe. I've a sneaking suspicion that if any life (or its remains) are found on Mars or Europa, it will have been seeded from Earth, and not have arisen independently.

Any time I hear claims that involve hitherto unknown laws of Physics I'm 99.99% sure I'm dealing with BS - but then again, some day someone will probably genuinely pull off such a discovery.

Good news for pigs. I'll be delighted to see factory farming disappear and be replaced by tech like this.

The Chinese automaker BYD reminds me of the famous phrase attributed to the sci-fi writer William Gibson - "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."

Future EV cars will be cheap to own and run. Self-driving tech will lower insurance costs. You can charge them with your home solar setup if you want. They'll last far longer with lower maintenance costs thanks to simple electric engines with few moving parts. As their construction gets more roboticized it will lower their costs further. The batteries that make up a huge chunk of their current costs are falling in price too. CATL, the world’s largest EV battery maker, is set to cut costs in half by mid 2024.

Some people still think gasoline and ICE cars have a long life ahead of them, and don't realize the industries behind both are dead men walking.

I think fediverse people are wildly overestimating how much 99% of Reddit users care about this. The mod team on r/futurology (I'm one of them) set up a fediverse site just over a month ago (here you go - https://futurology.today/ ) It's been modestly successful so far, but the vast majority of subscribers seem to be coming from elsewhere in the fediverse, not migrants from Reddit.

This is despite the fact we've permanently stickied a post to the top of the sub. r/futurology has over 19 million subscribers, and yet the fediverse is only attracting a tiny trickle of them. I doubt most people on Reddit even know what the word fediverse means.