Battery swapping systems are in use in several parts of the world, mostly Asia, for trucks and taxis. There's no reason it can't be applied to construction equipment. In fact there are fully automated and fully electric open pit mines in China already.

Your timeline is in the wrong order, AI and robotics have already replaced hoards of factory jobs, especially in China. Amazon, Uber, Waymo and others are replacing delivery drivers already. Retail is automating slower, but Amazon and others are experimenting with replacing cashiers, there are shelf stocking bots in testing now, and there are several systems for unloading trucks and managing inventory already. Automated excavators and cement pouring and smoothing machines are already in use, and automated office cleaning systems are in beta.

Execs will be last, not because they're hard to replace but because they make the decision on where automation is going to be implemented.

I wonder how that works with graphene? Lay a strip of Scotch tape on a chunk of graphene and peel it off and you have a one atom thick two dimensional layer of graphene.

What's missed here is that China installed more than that just in December, 65 gigawatt hours. They also installed more solar last year than the rest of the world combined, and opened more nuclear plants than the rest of the world has opened in all the years since the 1970s combined.

"One thing we learn from history is that our leaders rarely learn from history."
  - historian Barbara Tuchman

Their "justice" is not like ours. Of course he was only charged because he ripped off rich people, if he had looted a widows and orphans fund while working at Goldman Sachs he probably would have gotten a bonus. From Wikipedia.org.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

On July 13, 2005, federal judge Barbara S. Jones, of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, sentenced Ebbers to 25 years in a federal prison in Louisiana. Ebbers was allowed to remain free for another year while his appeal was being considered. His conviction was upheld in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in July 2006.[33] On September 6, 2006, the presiding judge ordered him to report to jail on September 26 to start serving his 25-year sentence. Ebbers reported to Oakdale Federal Correctional Institution in Oakdale, Louisiana, on September 26, 2006, driving himself to the prison in his Mercedes-Benz vehicle.[34][35] Ebbers served in the low-security portion of the complex, which typically houses non-violent offenders and is built like a school dormitory. He was granted early release after serving 13 years in December 2019, due to health problems.

This thing was auto-launching some ugly terminal emulator to the AS400 in the Autoexec.bat, which took almost 5 minutes to connect and open. Until you got to the AS400 prompt it was unusable.

Baloney. Stopping and restarting network services was a 30 second process, 15 if you had to do it often and put it in a batch file. And plugging in a new mouse has rarely required a reboot since Win2K in my experience, just the patience to wait while the Plug-And-Pray service did its thing (serial mice being the rare exception).

Back when DOS 5 was new I actually wrote some end user documentation that started:

1) Press the power button, the green light on the left of the computer should turn on. If it doesn't make sure your power strip is turned on.
2) Go down the hall to get a cup of coffee, this is going to take a while.

How many times has Paypal been hacked and lost control of its user data? Six? Eight? More? I opened a Paypal account once to buy a specific item, and once it was delivered closed it down. A couple months later it was hacked, and fortunately I had recently cancelled the credit card associated with it. I see no reason to go back, if you insist on Paypal for your payments you don't want my business.

Actually many AI companies are doing very well, just not the ones that get the news. AI has enabled robotics to do things like sort recycled trash and package croissants without making a crumb, plan Amazon delivery routes more efficiently, and translate dozens of languages on the fly. They're not valued in the billions, but they're viable profitable companies with rational business plans for the future. Can Boston Robotics AI program carry on a conversation with you? Hell no, but then ChatGPT couldn't teach Atlas to unload a truck or Spot to walk a security patrol either. You shouldn't dismiss all actors out of hand because not all of them are Tom Cruise, and you shouldn't dismiss all AI companies because they're not all like ChatGTP

Newt Gingrich's moment of brilliance was when he realized that he didn't have to get rid of government regulators, just separate their enforcement division into a separate line item and squeeze. And squeeze they have, the IRS, EPA, FAA, FCC, CPD, etc. enforcement divisions are all skeletons of their former selves. As neo-con 'thought leader' Grover Norquist told a group of conservative lawmakers in the '90s, "You'll never convince voters that government is broken if you don't break it first."

Russia is giving the territories affected the opportunity to vote whether to join the Russian Federation or stay with the poorest and most corrupt country in Europe. Oddly enough so far they've all voted to join the RF.

And wars that they didn't start? Seriously? I'll just refer to my post:
https://slashdot.org/comments....

There has never been a "prospect for peace" in our entire lifetimes, even 1948 was too late.

OK, so how do you propose to implement that foolishness when the more powerful "partner" adamantly rejects the very concept? Right now Israel has annexed East Jerusalem, is preparing to annex the whole of the West Bank, has destroyed Gaza and crammed the survivors into a few tiny concentration camps, and openly says that Israeli "settlers" will be allowed to occupy the majority of it. Where are you going to establish the second state? Since the Sadministration's plan is to remove the Palestinians before creating it's phantasmagorical "Middle East Riviera" maybe in Ann Arbor or Minneapolis?