In the UK at least, for a large swathe of ex mining towns, disability is basically a de facto UBI for a large amount of the population in the area. Areas like Merthyr Tydfil, which had a large mining industry which is now vanished.
You have something like 50% of the population who have been on disability for various things (mental health, something physical that is basically mild or made up) and have been this way since the 1980's - A lot of people who don't live in their middle class cuccoon "round here" will know a family where the grandfather lost their mining job and went on disability, the parents went on disability, and now their kids are on disability, and their kids now have children who are mid-way through school, getting that diagnosis, who probably won't ever see employment either.
This is something the UK govt is actually trying to fight against (the school to sickness pipeline they call it) but the UK govt isn't really what you might call competent...

Now these people are "unemployed" not necessarily "unemployable", now I don't want to call an entire group of people "low IQ" but if AI takes all of the lowest common denominator jobs, and humanoid robots come in to do shelf stacking and floor cleaning, I would move a lot of these people from "Unemployed" to "Unemployable". These are people some of whom can only operate a smartphone because of text to speech (via low IQ and failure of education). Dollar Ton is correct though that current LLM's are a joke and they won't be replacing much, but in the next 10 years, who knows.

A lot of people don't like how unfair the system is - if you can get "in the system" you can even get a vehicle provided by the state, with it often being a luxury brand (something the state again is now trying to reduce). A UBI would be a lot fairer and I bet if instead of a few families being on benefits like this everyone had a UBI, you'd see a lot more people doing part time work to top up instead of entire generations of families living on benefits. And it would help all those people who just won't get benefits too (if you're a single male, good luck. Another unfairness is people with genuine disability have to fight very hard too)

Problem is if you have a family who are used to getting free rent, a car provided at no cost, plus other paid benefits, and you replace all that with just the UBI everyone is getting which will be less, you will have problems. But that will be part of working out the system!

Are you sure? I am hearing of people getting 5+ year loans on $50,000+ vehicles with barely $1000 down. Like the lenders know there's going to be a repo and don't care - there's profit to be made there too

Yes that is my opinion and why I'm not hopeful on an EU Linux replacing US software stacks. Or at least it happening in the UK where I am from.

You get the usual directors/managers put in at the higher levels of government who know absolutely nothing about software/computers. Instead of actually being worth their high salaries and putting together (hence managing) a team of experienced open source developers/sysadmins - to create a stack that meets public sector requirements (e.g. a way to manage look+feel, software installation, GPO/SCCM replacements etc) they instead will put a tender out to a giant corporation - probably an American one... and as we see with these Oracle databases they fail over and over with.. they would spend hundreds of millions for basically nothing. As these companies are not about providing a good software stack, they are about raking in cash for themselves.

And of course I hate to accuse anyone of corruption but how often do we hear of government managers going with a company due to bribes or nepotism. Even without any potential corruption these managers are such boobs they are only capable of doing what they always do and picking out a firm to get milked by. How this is worth their £100,000+ PA salaries is beyond me.

  But they get away with it, nothing changes, it's why I don't have high hopes of something as complicated as replacing the OS/software stack on basically every government system will be a success. We just aren't capable of it a a culture !

Perhaps maybe they'd be successful rolling their own backend system like an EU G-suite. Still using Windows/OSX on their computers but logging into an EU made backend for e-mails and doc storage. More likely they'd just pay MS for an "it's EU hosted and EU ran, honest guys! Trust us" solution.

Yet how many weigh 250+lbs and drive 6 litre 3+ ton trucks to work every day. Face it the average joe doesn't give a hoot and the big oil companies will happily sell them all that premium gas for their lardmobile

Yes if it was worth the trillions of dollars put into it, why aren't we seeing trillions worth of results. Why can't we put these "agents" to work programming an alternative to the MS/Google ecosystem for EU-Linux for example? That could be worth hundreds of millions alone.

In work I'll do timetabling for a school district - Imagine I say to an AI Agent - on \\server\share are the building plans, student list, list of subjects, and which students chose those subjects. Make a timetable for next school year. Now any relatively intelligent employee can handle this after they have been shown how it works. An AI agent won't know where to begin.

For this AI to be worth the money you'd be able to run an agent on your machine, give it simple instructions, and let it work - and contact you if it comes across any problems. I haven't seen any evidence it is anywhere near that. It can generate some snippets of text but you still need humans to babysit it constantly.

I suspect for the above you'd pretty much need AGI. It would need a pre-programmed "human common sense knowledgebank" as well. But despite people with magical thinking saying otherwise, we aren't near that. (throwing more compute = AGI will magically appear crowd...)

What is consciousness - the ability of an organism to be aware of itself (and perhaps its surroundings). You need some level of processing power to achieve this - data flow in the brain etc. As complicated as modern LLM's are, we don't see any levels of data flow that might suggest consciousness - they process their weights and then they stop.
If someone had developed a "conscious" machine, how would we prove it? It would be hard but we'd at least want to see data flows going from "neurons" or "nodes" whatever you want to call them, back and forth, at such a level, to permit conscious thought.

Now imagine an unbelievably complicated "doctor bot" but made entirely out of IF and GOTO statements. It has quadrillions of them, all the way down to IF patient says "I'm fine" but intonation is a dour "I'm fine..." vs an upbeat "I'm FINE!". Such a machine could be the best doctor that ever existed but I would argue this thing is not at all sentient or conscious. Why? We dont see the data flows that suggest consciousness.

Now complicated is the fact we don't really understand what consciousness is. But I would argue there's nothing magical about it, some people here love to preach "Quantum Woo" some even believe in a spiritual God. But it seems it is something that just emerges from complicated data processing in the brain.

And of course some people just love to believe in mysticism and spiritualism. Ascribing thought to crystals on their desk. So as some people would probably believe Eliza was conscious, we will have people believing non conscious machines to be alive. Will this be a problem, who knows !

We just need to make sure if we are building "slave-bots" they must not be the type to be conscious. Though it would probably be easier to build ones that are. You wouldn't want a conscious/sentient factory bot anyway - who would want your car welder getting bored forgetting to weld because they were thinking about life?

I suspect they'll bring on more nickel and diming - I am a sysadmin for a school district and thus far MS have provided us (as part of the Charity + Nonprofit) with free Office A1 Plus licenses - they allow us to run the desktop versions of Office as well as basic Cloud access.

That is until about November 25, where they suddenly announced that all A1 Plus licenses would be "upgraded" to A1 standard (using the typical corporate speak that this is a good upgrade, etc). It means that none of us can run the desktop versions of Office any more - we will have to use the Web based versions unless we buy full O365 licenses.

At least that is what they told us they would be doing - in September we were told that "in a month or two" our Plus licenses would be gone. Yet here we are in Feb with our Plus licenses intact, I've only spoken to one other person in Education who actually has lost their Plus licenses. And I hear non Educational charity clients have lost their free entitlements altogether?

I wonder if MS tried to grab some cash with this, but are pulling back, because they realise that the only reason Educational clients even use their software is because of the generous license offers, if people have to pay they'll soon jump ship to Google (and hopefully, the EU Linux distro gets off the ground and we can have some sanity in public sector IT...)

Yeah makes me laugh when people say "A 65" screen at 4K 120hz is all you would ever need, why ever need anything more?" Get back to me when I can unfurl wallpaper displays that have the DPI of a Retina iphone which I can connect to be meters across.

They have shown prototypes of wallpaper type displays that looked great to me, baffles me as to why we don't see them in use? Is it the effort of sticking them to a wall and connecting them together outweighing just buying a single sized TV?? (I guess there'd be connector slots at the bottom and it would unfurl upwards onto a wall)

I get the fact you can't cut them to size meaning getting an exact fit into a room would be difficult, but still... As a nerd I want my wall to have little animated fishes or a woodland scene (aka the scene in Aliens) that then becomes a desktop when I wish to use it. Now that almost seems decadent; it is sad as we used to wish and look forward to having cool things. Now though all we really get are gimmicks and user hostile equipment and we should be thankful to even have lights on.

I remember my first year of college in 2002. We were talking about Plasma TV's, and every rich family would have a 42" Plasma TV, it was seen as the ultimate home cinema accessory. I believe they were even SD resolution, they predated the HD standards. There was even a rumour that crooks would drive around at night looking to see plasma TV's through windows so they would know who had money.

I'm sure they were only around $1000 - $2000 back then, I remember a conversation with a friend, he said "Man when we are graduated, we will make so much momey we'd be able to buy a Plasma TV every month - making $1000 - $2000 every month!" I remember another friend disagreed saying there was no way we'd make that much as mere graduates.

The mid 2000's don't seem that far away but they were actually very crude, it was common for businesses to use CRT monitor up until 2010 and I remember having a Voodoo 2 until 2003 or so by which point it was only 5 years old

Was going to buy a new Ryzen 9 with 64GB RAM and a new 50xx class GPU but the way things are going I might spend the cash on some 400w portable solar panels and a battery instead !

I'm an admin for a school district and we are using e-mail more than we ever have. There are school apps for parent-school-pupil relationships but nothing replaces the fact that anyone in the world can e-mail the school for free without having to sign up for an app or a social media account, and so I can't see any other system taking over from it.

The issues with it being non guaranteed delivery, non authenticated etc must cause billions in problems a year but what would replace it? A social media type system with handles - so you had a directory of users, you saw their handle and if you got a message from that handle you knew they were the right person - would be a better system but the big issue is who would run this thing? If it is private, it'll be ruined by profitseeking eventually. If it is public, who would trust it if it is the US govt's system, or indeed any country, would you want the worlds comms going through 1 countries internal system?

It would have to be open source, decentralised, yet have a directory of users you could trust, handle authentication, and be easy enough to use that people would actually bother using it over e-mail, such a thing is this even possible?

I can just see instead, our current e-mail system just having more and more bolted onto it for better or for worse. Maybe MS ties it in to some social media platform they dream up in the future, same with Google.

It's important for me not to be forced to authenticate to a government server with proof of who I am just to access certain websites that the Government doesn't like

How close are we actually though to a AI ran robot heaven utopia? (or dystopia the way things are going)

"The machines will take all of our jobs" we are told, yet we are basically still as far away from AGI as we ever were.
We had cute chatbots before the 2020's, but Chat-GPT was the only one that wasn't a total joke so even that low bar blew people away.

But when we see these AI's in action in the real world, they mostly fail - they can't even be trusted to take fast food orders correctly.

I cannot, as say a manager of a team of 5 software devs, type into an AI - "We need software for Chromebooks that allows children to take exams securely, it should be called X" - have it linked up to the dev servers, and let it go on its way. What you do get are odd snippets of code that may or may not work, that you have to kludge together yourself. Good luck doing that as a manager.

Until you can let these agents go autonomously and trust them to do so, they aren't replacing squat. Perhaps they can make a few employees 20% more efficient, the bosses can squeeze a lil extra blood from that stone, but replacing whole employees?

The humanoid robots proposed, actually entail remote control for complicated tasks - that humanoid robot stood in the corner of your living room next to the kids playpen may be remote controlled by a worker on 20 rupees an hour to put your dishes in the dishwasher.

It seems mostly for show and all this cash being poured in, I can't see how that value can ever be returned with the tech we have now. A cute chatbot that is perhaps better or perhaps worse than a web search is worth trillions of dollars? is the dollar that devalued now?

Yes a lot of it is hype - Sam Altman lied and said he had a "good idea" of how to get AGI when the only idea he had was "throw more compute and hope for the best" which meant he had no idea at all. So will we see him squirrel away to an island when this bubble goes away or will the rich want their money or their pound of flesh back from him?

Yeah I would much rather have been born in the 2010's than the 1980's. People forget how isolating it could be before mass comms - I remember especially in Winter - after school on weekends, I was alone with no contact with any of my friends at all. Unless I tried to call one on the family landline and have the whole family listening in.

Nowadays I would have been able to contact my friends at any time, arrange anything on a whim and if the weather is bad hell there is still online multiplayer with voice chat. How is that worse than back in the 80's/early 90's sat at home alone playing a Genesis ? And when I finally got dial-up in the late 90's, I even made new friends as the nerds in my city had set up an IRC channel.

OK I won't shed a tear is these kids are banned from TikTok and all the other brainrot platforms. But banning them from having any form of comms or even posting to forms is horrible. The Online Safety Ban in the UK is a big farce as every pupil who goes to a school will learn from a friend what a VPN is, the same will be true here - they will hop onto Telegram and then on there who knows what groups they will find. So this does reek a bit of incompetent, out of touch old farts not understanding youth or technology at all, thinking this poor idea will help things.

Me personally, I would instead reform the education sector - scrap a lot of the useless subjects that could be learned better on Wikipedia - have a Social Media subject where kids (who really should know this stuff intuitively but we all know how dumb most people are) - are taught most things on there are fake, how filters work, how to block users, how - if somebody wants you to act butthurt on the Internet, then you acting butthurt is probably not the best idea - basic things.

I would also have an app developed (there are some third party apps out there already) that allow parents to block/monitor websites/apps on their kids phones - but just like a government sponsored Linux Distro for government PC's this is probably beyond accomplishing now.

Yeah we all know inequality is getting worse and cartels etc buying up basic needs such as housing is a big problem, same with the dysfunctional health market -

But we can't forget how stupid the average person is - people paying a $700 car note, a 6 year note at 20% APR - every 3 years they roll that negative into a new car because "they want a new mom car" (yet my parents with 3 kids managed fine with a 3 door european hatchback in the 80's)
The other conspicuous consumption with clothes and trinkets etc - it really does seem 50% or more of the people are programmed by their base desires which is really sad to say.

I was struggling with low wages and health problems and I was able to make do with a $2000 hooptie using Youtube tutorials to fix it. The smart will make do with less, the stupid just pile on more and more debt.
Not to mention people will complain about healthcare costs yet they won't do the #1 thing to help those costs which is to be a healthy weight. Add in that 400 calorie morning $10 latte every morning...

Perhaps if people refused to pay these insane prices for things they didn't need, the prices would get lower?

The learned philosopher George Carlin once said "The people get what they deserve" - they had a choice to support who to vote and who to buy from and they have chosen thus.