So would they say it's going to be a "great leap forward" then?

In such communities, the chances of a drinking establishment being walking distance from home is close to nil. Yes, the solution is not to drink, but for better or worse drinking is pretty ingrained in our social fabric. Another problem is there's a fuzzy line. It's perfectly legal to go to a restaurant, have a beer with dinner and drive home. Two beer is probably ok. Four beers? Well, how much do you weigh, how fast did you drink, and what else did you have in your stomach? Even if you carry a breathalyzer around in your pocket, your BAC could increase during the drive home. You only really know if you crossed the line if you are pulled over and administered a test.

The problem with "just bring in public transit" is the lack of density. Public transit is extremely expensive where density is too low to promote a critical mass of ridership. Nobody wants to pay for a bus stop that may see only single digit riders per day (much less a train). Sure, we can say "just build cities denser" but the economics of that are difficult. Unlike most of Europe, land is much of the U.S. is very cheap and it's a lot less expensive to build out instead of up. I'm no expert in Australia, but I strongly suspect they have many of the same dynamics in play.

Narration is basically a form of acting, but one that is a bit easier for AI since it only needs an audio component. That's why the SAG went on strike for so long recently- they were justifiably worried that actors would do one or two gigs and then AI would simply replicate their performance going forward. Existing AI tools mean that you could have any famous person you think of narrate your book (setting aside legal rules). Want your book read by Brad Pitt? Taylor Swift? Barack Obama? Donald Trump? AI can have your book read by anybody for whom there's a decent amount of public audio available.

The one thing AI wouldn't necessarily get right is the dramatic tension. Old text to speech just read in a wooden monotone. AI can anticipate inflection to a degree, but it's not going to always recognize a particularly dramatic note or appreciate a sarcastic statement. So I can imagine a lot of the AI-read texts will sound a bit "off" for now. If the authors themselves are commissioning the AI reading, there could probably be a tool to tag passages as ironic or climactic so the AI gets it right.

The problem is that the technology just isn't there yet to make this an invisible/seamless experience. Interlock devices have been installed for DUI convictions for decades and they have a track record of being extremely unreliable. Your car will simply not start when needed, or may even shut down unexpectedly when equipped with these devices. Nobody, if given a choice, would ever drive a car equipped with interlocks as they currently exist. Any false positives (or even the prospect thereof) would make an interlock-tech equipped car be highly undesirable. If you forced it today, people would simply refuse to buy cars with interlocks and continue to drive pre-interlock cars.

The proponents of this law seem to assume there is going to be a big technological leap that can make DUI interlocks seamless, but I would suggest that the difficulty of a seamless DUI interlock is on-par with full autonomous driving. In order to accurately recognize impaired vs good driving behavior, the system basically has to be able to drive itself (even then, it's iffy). A pure chemical-recognition (i.e. a breathalyzer) cannot work reliably without a dedicated volume of air to analyze. Even if you could create an accurate breathalyzer just from cabin air, that would lock people out who are transporting drunk passengers too (which defeats the purpose of preventing drunk people from driving).

The U.S. has a relatively unique situation in that large swaths of the country have effectively no public transit and the cities are so spread-out that non-motorized transit like cycling is often not viable. In many parts of the country, the only way to hold down a job and carry out the necessary tasks of daily life like buying groceries is to drive a car. Recognizing this, the legal system is far more reticent to impose outright bans to first-time offenders than places where there are other options besides driving.

Scanning is not common where I live. I am rarely carded, and when I am it is a quick glance. To the extent it happens, it's at the discretion of the establishment.

The "real world" places may check your ID but do not record it (and they won't usually check IDs at all if the customer is obviously an adult). There may be a tech solution to prevent recording the ID, but that assumes these laws are being passed in good faith (or will always be used in a good-faith manner). The problem is that that once this infrastructure is in place, it can be used to restrict all sorts of sites that the government simply doesn't like.

It's a very regional thing. The only things I order from Amazon that take more than 48 hours are drop shipped from a third party, and I can get most things next day (or even same day). But I live close to a massive Amazon warehouse.

Not even remotely the same situation, and such false equivalences are a favorite tactic of Russian trolls.

I hope that someday I will have the honor of being convicted in absentia by a Russian court. It means you are doing something very right.

I am a tax professional, and we talk about the coming AI singularity in taxation. The end game is going to be a tax system run almost entirely by AI. AI will look at payment inflows/outflows and automatically set a total tax bill and arrange appropriate withholding. You'll be able to protest the AI generated number, but most taxpayers with simple returns will never have to file a return. Obviously, that requires buy-in by tax writers, but the revenue impacts would be large enough that it will become difficult to resist as the tech improves.

The interim step will just be AI audits. The IRS is already piloting the use of AI for the audit selection process. This in and of itself is a huge efficiency booster. It's a waste of everyone's time to audit a compliant taxpayer and have an audit with no adjustments. You want to identify taxpayers where there's a high likelihood of adjustment before you even start auditing them.

What does "overtake human intelligence" even mean?

First, Human brains do a lot of things that are considered "intelligent." Some of those things have been trivial for computers to perform for decades. Only a savant could do something like compute the square root of 573 to 10 decimal places in their head, but even the most basic calculator can handle that faster than a human could blink. Other human cognitive tasks that are completely subconscious and not "intelligent" like rendering inputs from the optic nerve and categorizing/prioritizing visual stimuli are extremely difficult for a computer to perform. Then you have the inchoate "general intelligence" which is a whole series of cognitive tasks, some of which are clearly defined and others not so much. A computer may be able to read and summarize a book nearly instantly, but be unable to size up a human they've never met from subtle context clues and come up with a good guess about what parts of the book that specific person is interested in.

Second, whether a task requiring intelligence is being done "better" is often a normative judgment. Sure, you can easily quantify that the computer can calculate a square root faster than a human with a pencil and paper. But you can't quantify whether the human has created a more beautiful painting or composed a better song.

Third, the latest LLMs that have created al the AI hype are only "learning" from absorbing the cumulative output of human intelligences. One could argue it is not the AI that is intelligent, but rather the AI is simply recording and then repackaging human intelligence.

It's not a question of "smart." Have you ever attempted to look directly at the sun? It's almost impossible even if you really wanted to. You will instinctively close your eyes/turn away. During a partial eclipse, it's still way too bright, and you couldn't even see the eclipse even if you forced yourself to look. During a total eclipse, you don't need the glasses.

It's really unlikely that someone is going to go permanently blind. Looking at a less than total eclipse (even 98%) is going to be too bright for most people to be able to look without instinctively closing their eyes after more than a split second. You don't hear about people going blind after a quick glance at the sun. There is danger during the totality because it won't be too bright to look at but there will still be a lot of UV incoming, but you'd still have to look for a long time before you'd experience serious and permanent damage. Most are going to look around rather than starring for the duration of the totality. Still, it's a very good idea to have the glasses available so you can get the full experience.

The standard for welding helmets and eclipse glasses are actually the same (shade 12 or darker). Many welding helmets have adjustable shade settings (some have a light shade for things like grinding, and you'd want a darker shade for a long bead on thicker material than a tack on thin material. .