My random thoughts

[Vakanai]

Sure, there are basic, high-level things we 99% agree on (our species should not be exterminated

Basically the biggest goal is it should at least be aligned with that I hope.

[funkervogt]

Even something as simple as municipal trash service will be affected by AI and robots. The way things work now is there is a designated trash collection day each week where garbage trucks stop in front of each house, empty the homeowners' trash cans into their vehicle, and drive it to the landfill. This is actually an inefficient way to remove waste. Along a particular collection route, the amount of trash its inhabitants are throwing out fluctuates from week to week. One week, the garbage truck might be perfectly full, the other it might be half empty, and the next, it might be overflowing and forced to do two trips to the landfill. Moreover, households that consistently generate large amounts of trash pay the same, flat fee as households that consistently generate less.

Once AIs are running things and each household has a robot capable of doing manual labor, trash collection will change. They would monitor the volume and weight of trash that their household had accumulated, and once the households located along a specific garbage collection route had built up enough trash to match the garbage truck's capacity, the garbage truck would be sent out to get it. Routes might also constantly change to account for geographic variations in trash accumulation. As a result, there would be no set "trash day," and households would pay different amounts of money for the removal of different amounts of waste.

This model would also apply to recycling. You might have a bin devoted to used aluminum products that doesn't get collected until it fills up, which might take months.

Robots would also be able to manage backyard composting piles, further reducing the need to have waste picked up. The compost would have obvious uses on the property, or could be sold to other people.

[funkervogt]

Once we get brain implants, there will be libraries of other peoples' mind recordings which you could download from to experience what they experienced. The sexual ones would be the most popular, but there would also be ones of people dying. You'd have to be a real man to sit through the latter, but at least afterward you'd be able to speak of death in the past tense.

"I died."

You could swap stories with a guy who was thawed out of cryostasis, and he'd say:

"I died FOR REAL."

[Powers]

Once we get brain implants, there will be libraries of other peoples' mind recordings which you could download from to experience what they experienced. The sexual ones would be the most popular, but there would also be ones of people dying. You'd have to be a real man to sit through the latter, but at least afterward you'd be able to speak of death in the past tense.

"I died."

You could swap stories with a guy who was thawed out of cryostasis, and he'd say:

"I died FOR REAL."

https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Brain ... Braindance

[funkervogt]

Once we get brain implants, there will be libraries of other peoples' mind recordings which you could download from to experience what they experienced. The sexual ones would be the most popular, but there would also be ones of people dying. You'd have to be a real man to sit through the latter, but at least afterward you'd be able to speak of death in the past tense.

"I died."

You could swap stories with a guy who was thawed out of cryostasis, and he'd say:

"I died FOR REAL."

https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Brain ... Braindance

I still haven't played that game.

[funkervogt]

I don't agree that "We will all be forgotten" and "Humans are insignificant in the grand scheme of the Universe." First, large amounts of highly detailed data about our world and the individuals living in it is accreting on the Internet and in computers. The continued improvement to the cost-performance of computer storage means that it will be someday be possible to save it on a cheap device the size of a thumbdrive. A billion such thumbdrives could be made and distributed. 1,000 years from now and beyond, I don't think we will have been forgotten at all. Quite the opposite.

Second, humans are probably the only intelligent life forms, at least in our part of the Galaxy. The fact that we will almost certainly go on to create AGIs, which will go on to colonize the stars to no clear end, makes us enormously significant in the grand scheme of things, and perhaps to the Universe as a whole.

Furthermore, humans are the only species that will someday have it within its means to end suffering among all life forms on Earth. The details of how we could do that have been explored by philosopher David Pearce, and I recommend his website: https://www.abolitionist.com/

It would be fitting and just if, after dispensing so much death and destruction on our environment, we became its saviors and inaugurated a new era of peace and bliss for all animals. If we saved enough of them over a long enough timespan, we will exceed the suffering we inflicted on their ancestors during our species' earlier history. 

[TrueAnimationFan]

Does this "abolition of all biological suffering" involve uplifting animals to be as intelligent as we are, a la Disney's Zootopia? Or something far more profound than that?

[Nanotechandmorefuture]

Once we get brain implants, there will be libraries of other peoples' mind recordings which you could download from to experience what they experienced. The sexual ones would be the most popular, but there would also be ones of people dying. You'd have to be a real man to sit through the latter, but at least afterward you'd be able to speak of death in the past tense.

"I died."

You could swap stories with a guy who was thawed out of cryostasis, and he'd say:

"I died FOR REAL."

https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Brain ... Braindance

I still haven't played that game.

Expectation: The cool stuff as described. Well some of it anyways.

Reality: Being shut down like V gets during the politician mission by Mr. Blue Eyes from far away for getting too uppity even on Future Timeline.net especially in Britain.

Until things get worked out for future space travel its shady as hell. The cloning capability from linking yourself to a clone is a possibility to loop around life extension limits until living centuries long is a possibility.

[funkervogt]

Does this "abolition of all biological suffering" involve uplifting animals to be as intelligent as we are, a la Disney's Zootopia? Or something far more profound than that?

There's no correlation between happiness and intelligence, so I don't think we'd uplift them. We might put them in something like a Good Matrix.

[Vakanai]

Best thing we can do for animals is leave them alone and let them have enough wild nature to survive as they always have. We should only interact to save them from the harm we ourselves have caused them.

[funkervogt]

Here's a clip from the movie A.I. where obsolete androids scavenge a dumpsite for replacement parts to fix themselves.


Those androids are captured by humans and grotesquely destroyed at a nearby "flesh fair," for the amusement of other humans.


This sequence makes little sense to me, and I doubt it will ever be a routine occurrence. First, notice that even the obsolete androids are more skilled and physically able than the average human. If an android became hopelessly disabled, I could see it being thrown in a dumpster, but if it's still capable of doing work, it would make no sense to destroy it. Unless the humans are paying $1,000 per ticket to see the androids destroyed, the manager of the flesh fair would make more money reselling his captured androids to poorer people (including overseas) and small companies that couldn't afford the newest machines.

Second, notice that the androids are able to fix themselves. This means it makes even less economic sense to destroy them since the cost of fixing one of them is very low, and possibly zero dollars. Today, a car goes to the junkyard once it is "totaled," meaning the cost of fixing it exceeds its market value. A large part of that repair cost is the labor fee paid to the human mechanic who does the work. Subtract the latter from the equation, and it becomes more rare for a car to reach such a bad state that it is totaled.

So labor would be zero, but the costs of replacement parts would also drop. This is because androids would be able to identify the specific subcomponents within themselves that had broken, and to fix or replace just them. Unless a human is a master mechanic, he probably wouldn't have the same level of skill diagnosing the problem, and would stop at a more gross level of diagnosis by determining that a whole component was broken and needed replacement, even if only one subcomponent inside of it was in fact broken and all the other subcomponents were fine. The material cost of replacing the whole component is obviously higher. Analogously, imagine that a car engine stops working because one of its pistons cracks. An amateur mechanic would remove the whole engine and drop in a new one, whereas an experienced mechanic would know how to remove and replace just the one piston. A master mechanic might even know of some way to fix the cracked piston, so it wouldn't even need replacement.

Third, humans instinctively form emotional connections to things that resemble and behave like other humans, even if only coarsely. There are of course many sadists and psychopaths who are different, and so there will be many future instances where such people abuse and destroy androids, but you'll never be able to pack a stadium with people who want to see human-looking robots tortured and dismembered. In fact, I predict that more liberal countries will have laws against android cruelty from practically the first day androids are introduced into the real world.

In countries that don't have such laws, hurting and killing androids will still be socially frowned upon, and refuges and "underground railroads" for unwanted androids would arise.

[funkervogt]

Once androids exist, celebrities will make side cash by authorizing the manufacture of android copies of themselves, which could be used so long as the people using them paid royalties. This will lead to interesting scenarios like going to a bar where Elvis served the drinks.

[funkervogt]

If everyone ends up living in Matrix FIVR pods, then real world standards of living will equalize across the world. A guy in a pod in an African hut will have the same quality of life as a guy living in a mansion in Los Angeles. Neither will leave their pods so it won't make a difference to them.

[funkervogt]

If everyone ends up living in Matrix FIVR pods, then real world standards of living will equalize across the world. A guy in a pod in an African hut will have the same quality of life as a guy living in a mansion in Los Angeles. Neither will leave their pods so it won't make a difference to them.

And, as I'm sure I've said here before, once intelligent robots become widespread, they'll raise the standards of physical infrastructure in every part of the world to equal levels, so a poor part of Africa will end up with the same quality buildings and roads as Germany.

More broadly, once machines are calling the shots instead of humans, the level of development across the world will start to equalize.

[Vakanai]

If everyone ends up living in Matrix FIVR pods, then real world standards of living will equalize across the world. A guy in a pod in an African hut will have the same quality of life as a guy living in a mansion in Los Angeles. Neither will leave their pods so it won't make a difference to them.

Not quite. There's a lot of quality of live stuff FIVR can't fix. For example, even if you can somehow add the sensation of taste to VR so both guys in this scenario can taste and feel like they're being served a five course dinner expertly cooked by a famous celebrity British chef (you know the one), the FIVR can't actually provide either of them nutrition. Even if they literally never leave their pods even to eat (and I pray this future scenario where people live entire decades without ever once stepping foot outside their pods never comes to pass) and have all their nutritional needs met through an IV, there's still a good chance the one living in the poorer nation will receive less nutrition through his IV and might therefore experience more health problems or a shorter life span. There's also the quality of life factors of energy - the African living in a hut might experience more power outages where the FIVR suddenly stops because his nation's power grid isn't so great - then he'd have to live outside his pod for periods while the guy in LA is still living it up in his personalized VR heaven. And there's climate change as well - if things get real bad, cities in developed nations might have to build domes to protect from the climate disasters we'll have caused, while the guy in the hut will remain susceptible to getting washed away in a flood.

Even FIVR can't solve all inequalities. And that's not even counting the possibility not everyone may have access to FIVR.

[Vakanai]

If everyone ends up living in Matrix FIVR pods, then real world standards of living will equalize across the world. A guy in a pod in an African hut will have the same quality of life as a guy living in a mansion in Los Angeles. Neither will leave their pods so it won't make a difference to them.

And, as I'm sure I've said here before, once intelligent robots become widespread, they'll raise the standards of physical infrastructure in every part of the world to equal levels, so a poor part of Africa will end up with the same quality buildings and roads as Germany.

More broadly, once machines are calling the shots instead of humans, the level of development across the world will start to equalize.

Except you're assuming that machines will be calling the shots, and not some government. Capitalism may continue on because people in power demand it remain so, allowing infrastructure inequalities to remain despite robots existing. Nevermind the possibility of state controlled FIVR pods, where if you live in a Russian or Chinese pod and speak against your government you might be forced to experience some truly horrifying tortures only survivable in VR.

[funkervogt]

Androids would be supernaturally calm in chaotic situations (plane crash, shooting, brawl). The average one of them would be like a human with extreme fortitude. It would be kind of a joke.

[funkervogt]

A common type of sex bot will be a replica of a character from a movie, video game, or TV series that a human developed a crush on. It would be weird and interesting to see android copies of characters, complete with their personality profiles and outfits, walking around.

[wjfox]

Androids would be supernaturally calm in chaotic situations (plane crash, shooting, brawl). The average one of them would be like a human with extreme fortitude. It would be kind of a joke.

[funkervogt]

The fact that her rifle rapidly goes CLICK multiple times after running out of bullets was a nice touch that showed it contained more advanced technology than we have now.