I do not agree.
Extrapolating the current situation, my best guess for 2030 is that cars will very much look like horse carriages.

Barometers are very accurate for determining atmospheric pressure. And if you know the local sea level pressure (e.g. from a weather station) and temperature, you can infer the altitude with better precision than a standard GPS.

Electricity being wasted ?
I suggest mining bitcoins in winter only.
The Joule effect will convert all the "wasted" electricity into heat which you need anyway.

So what do they want to do?
A massively parallel simulation of a human brain?
Assuming it succeeds, what is the point? We already have 7billion of them around, and much cheaper and we still will not understand how and why it works.
At this point what we need is a few more bright theoreticians and it will not cost nearly as much.

Where is the gold?
Not in Fort Knox apparently.
Tungsten maybe?

"And I'm sure if the guy could communicate more than yes/no he would be saying "Kill me""

Well, he could answer "yes" to the question "do you want us to kill you?",
and "no" to the question "do you want to live a little longer?".

Locked-in syndrome is to me the most terrifying end I can conceive.

Story title: "Study Finds Unvaccinated Students Putting Other Students At Risk"
I suppose this means vaccination is not effective.

You made a nice point: you don't mind shitting on everyone else's lawn.

Grammar darwinesquely evolved to become a near optimal disambiguation mechanism.
As a byproduct, it also serves as a mutual recognition system among the intellectual "elite".
The result is that proper grammar and spelling are perceived as snobbish artefacts and there is a strong popular pressure to degrade linguistic purity at the expense of understandibility.
This tendency is rather obvious if you compare today's barely readable fora with those of only ten years ago, at least in french.

You might get diabetes from american fattened sweetened "chocolate", not from swiss chocolate.

Or, to put it in more naive terms, people are idiots and democracy is doomed to failure.

Solar justice is being served.

I would rather fire those academics publishing more that five papers per year.
They are just wasting valuable readers' time.

No encryption. I prefer steganography.
Whenever my partners receive a picture of my cat, they promptly retrieve the nasty contents hidden inside.
And the police spies won't even suspect I am an outlaw.

So called quantum computing does not break the computational complexity barriers, it just shifts them a bit.
What is exponential (like the RSA) remains exponential; we may have to increase the key size a little and that's it.