There have been "real" gains since 1970, at least in the world I live in. Houses are larger, better appointed, cars are much higher tech/safer, foods are... well, fancier if not necessarily better in all ways, and people seem to spend much more time and money on services like restaurants, movies / entertainment, etc. than they did 40 years ago.

The house we bought in 1973 was in a "golf course neighborhood" where people with a lot of money would buy an annual membership to the club for roughly 1/2 what our house cost to build. Main benefit of membership was to have a place to go where you didn't have to be with people who couldn't afford it. Though things like that still exist, it seems less prevalent than it used to be. I'd call that an improvement, too.

It's certainly not rosy all around, but it has been awhile since our last big urban riot, hasn't it? We managed to get through "Occupy" without anybody being shot or killed, and I think the U.S. is showing signs of getting out of Afghanistan before completely imploding economically, unlike the U.S.S.R. just recently did.

I'm all for adopting the German approach to unemployment: persistent rate of 8%? Try programs to encourage workweek reductions: 40*0.92 = 36.8. Change labor laws that quote 40 hours/week to quote 36 hours 40 minutes instead, raise corporate tax 5% across the board, then give the extra revenue earned back as credits to companies that implement 37 hour or lower workweeks for their employees. As an option, 2 weeks standard paid vacation could get expanded to 6 (50*0.08 = 4), and that would stimulate the domestic tourism industries.

If businesses and corporations whine that they can't be competitive while implementing these programs, somebody needs to remind them that taxes are also used to pay for the unemployed, those lacking health care, and the police that keep vagrants out of their doorways. Isn't it better to spread the wealth through employment than to use taxes to pay for the care/feeding/housing/control of the poor?

But, without customers bitching about substandard service and pointing to carriers that are doing better, there's absolutely no business sense in building out killer bandwidth for everyone when only 1% of customers even notice.

As everyone else is saying, Netflix is more than a 1% customer visibility... when Netflix users get pissed, it'll get fixed.

If you want an AI assistant with "common sense" then, perhaps the approach is flawed.

If you want an AI assistant that can interpret your requests and respond with information gathered from the internet, I don't see why it can't succeed.

Questors for AI have been winning a slow and steady game for the last 40 years, this next step won't be HAL 9000 or Commander Data, but it will be a little bit closer.

Naked in the cloud is a bad idea, VPN'ed on the common internet infrastructure has real tangible benefits in infrastructure costs.

I think you mean serfs - there are precious few miles of "surfable" beach in the entire planet, if everybody has nothing to do, the good breaks will be paved in solid fiberglass from the boards of all the people who think it's a fun way to spend their lives.

I see real potential in giving every high school senior their own Baxter that they need to learn how to maintain... then they send them off to work and people's only remaining job is to fix them when they break down.

Of course, that's not how capitalism works, instead, we'll have robot maintenance specialists who maintain thousands of these things, specialists in highly specialized types of robots will be the most highly paid, flying all over the country on no notice to fix them when they break. For every working robot maintainer, there will be 99 people unemployed, or working in some sort of "service" industry like wiping the foam off of barrista's frothers, until they figure out how to get a robot to do that too...

On an emotional level, I can't help feeling that Kurzweil is a cracked loon about the singularity and all, but listening to him talk, it all sounds so rational how we're moving out of an economy of scarcity into one of abundance, just 15-20 more years and solar power will replace fossil fuel, 10 years after that, electricity will be virtually free to generate.... there will be a small problem with overpopulation and obliteration of the natural world, but with unlimited energy, computing power and machines that do everything for us, what can't we overcome?

And, then, there's the matter of timing.

Fresh BS degrees in electrical/computer engineering earned $30K in the '80s (if they could land a job in-field, sometimes that took several months to a year), slowly climbing to maybe $35K in the mid '90s, before shooting up over $70K (sometimes well over) in the space of less than a year, during the bubble.

After the bubble burst, it got... chaotic, but mostly worse for new grads. Post-bubble, there are still high paying opportunities around, and those are generally risk-reward tradeoffs. Risk more (for instance, by skipping college) and you'd better be getting good pay - it could pay off, handsomely, or you could be chucked out on the street after a couple of years, no fault of your own - just bad luck that the company you jumped to before college had a bad turn and laid a bunch of people off. You can always pick up the pieces and start over, but it can be hard to give up that house/car/wife.

Congrats on making it 6+ years, you've got a good argument that your work experience is as valuable as a college degree, but there will be many doors that are closed to you, not because you are incapable, but because the gatekeepers are incapable of making exception to their "degreed persons only" rules.

gog.com - the most rational application of the long tail I have ever experienced.

In my experience, everyone has demons, but it takes external stimulus to waken them - and it's mostly during childhood when we are vulnerable to that.

It's bad, but misses the pinnacle.

Expensive, and presumptive regarding infrastructure/adoption. There aren't enough bike lanes in my town (and most others) to make Segway riding practical, even if I wanted to afford one. Plus, the fuel burning Sterling-engined version never came out, so I believe range is a problem for me as well.

There's no profit in fresh food. The only reason a grocery store carries produce is to get you in there to buy the high-margin packaged goods.

There's this persistent myth that people are in control of what they choose to do.

People are much closer to their animal ancestors than is commonly acknowledged, and that's not an altogether bad thing.

I worked for Cyberonics for a couple of years. During those years, a bulimia researcher did a presentation at the company about a small (12 subjects/1 year) study in which she used Vagal Nerve Stimulation to help treat bulimia. The underlying hypothesis was that the massive vagal stimulation of purging becomes addictive, sort of like orgasm? (I'm not sure if that's my analogy or hers, she certainly implied it to me), and that electrical vagal stimulation can be a substitute for vomiting to "scratch that itch."

I think her subjects were mostly female, and prequalified as seeking to stop their bulimic behavior but unable to do so through conventional therapies. She reported a remission rate of 11/12 dramatically reducing their purging behavior with something like 6 or 9/12 completely stopping for the period of the study.

The company declined to fund additional research, mostly due to small size of the bulimic population and therefore limited economic incentive. Of course, I'm one to cast judgement on them, when they cancelled their employee stock purchase plan, cut bonuses (20% reduction in my effective annual income) and switched to a crappy healthcare plan, I hit the door in short order... not for just those reasons, but still.

If anyone is interested in similar therapies that don't involve $30K worth of implant surgery, you can get a weaker effect with transcutaneous neurostim. If targeting the vagus with TNS, I'd highly recommend physician guidance and likely no self-applications of the therapy.

Steganography will drive the analysis bot programmers absolutely nuts, they'll either have to shut everything down, or let some amount of stego traffic through.