The imaged applications are not about a VR Second Life rip off, or gaming at all. That’s just the demo — ignore it. The Metaverse is also about AR. Augmenting your vision affects you in your walk-around life, adding live captions that tell you the name of a person you’ve met before (but can’t recall where), adding walking navigation aids where GPS fails to locate you exactly (like malls, airports), and showing you which pan is still hot on the stove before you touch it. It might tell you — just by looking at them — that your kid has a temperature before he even starts whining, or when your plants need water, or the gluten content of food on your plate, or that you are about to drive over black ice and should slow down or steer around it. And (and this is very important for many wives) tells the husband where the Orange juice is in the fridge when he is looking straight at it, or finds his socks.

AR glasses can save lives, and make life more interesting, safe, and convenient. It can also inject unwanted ads into your life, which is why it’s considered such a valuable asset. But sometimes (rarely, for me), the ad presented shows exactly what you need, and with AI predicting behaviors, it might even become useful enough to pay the price for the intrusion. Ads are not FBs strength, however, many other companies are competing in this space, and the companies that offer the best advances with the least annoyances may win over FB.

Meh. The innovation and discovery programmers do simply doesn’t have the million examples that other digital fields have. Where are you going to get the training data on how a programmer interacts with a client? How about most of my clients who say they “don’t know what they want but know when they see it”? What type of mass training can you possibly collect on this activity?

It’s easy to mimic software that goes “when I click here, make this object red”. It’s much harder to ask a different question of a infinitely-patient mom than of a doctor who will give you 5 minutes of their time. Imagine an AI running a focus group where they don’t even control the conversation, and knowing that they need to interrupt with the right questions and/or comments, but without even having seen a focus group before. Because every client is different in the same way that moms, docs, and focus groups differ.

Our perceptions of reality are created in our heads. Our brains don’t need to get through simulations of infinite worlds to be functional and useful.

For example, the first thing the visual system does to a nice crisp straight line is to blur the heck out of it at the back of the eye. Then our visual system calculates how these blobs move across the eye, and looks through past experiences for things that look like the blurred image (including motion) and makes you perceive a straight line. The same thing happens for the other 5 senses.

If it works so well there, why not use it to perceive consciousness, ideas, and emotions in the same way: as reconstructions?

You make a convincing argument, overall, with 2 exceptions:

1. housing is a basic need that’s neither scalable nor sustainable. Sure, we can bring costs down a little by 3D printing a house but we’re still going to pave over some forrest to make new land. We’re out of land in most major cities.

2. One big fly in the ointment is the mega-billionaires, who accumulate assets needed for the shift. The shrinking middle class has been trending towards indentured slavery in the last decade, worldwide. As the saying goes: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The powerful Uber-rich have to be convinced to change this trend, as they make money by keeping scarcity at the forefront. And they have not changed in 100 years so why change now?

Even China, who has centralized control over their business processes, allows mega-billionaires to accumulate wealth and power. People gladly sign up for 100-year leases on apartments in Shanghai, and call that progress because their salaries increased 4x in the last decade. They’re just production slaves, who have to cheat, steal, lie and work 70 hours/week to a maintain their places in the world, not equal partners with the billionaires, and that’s in a country that claims that everyone is equal.

I think that people will continue the current trend of descending into poverty. There are already a considerable percentage of people in the US who have to decide whether to take meds or to eat, because they can’t pay for both, and those folks, who have gotten the benefits of, say modern household heating, are suffering to the point where they don’t care if Wikipedia exists or not.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t do it. I’m saying that it won’t solve most of our societal issues.

Isn’t this what pharmaceutical companies do, rearrange atoms? And bakeries? And chip manufacturers? Isn’t this already happening, but in safe and tested ways that are highly reproducible?

Another input is energy… lots and lots and lots of energy is needed to manipulate atoms.

Only 4% of rural China has a computer in the house. 40% of India citizens lack a computer, too. 1B people have no hope of sharing in the improvements of tech, let alone the improvements you’re hoping for the rest of the world.

The impact of tech on these people has been negative! The main concerns in their lives are finding enough clean drinking water — because the local Pepsi plant is using it — and not dying from diseases brought by tourists. When the nearest healthcare is a day away, and almost no one has a motor vehicle, you don’t really care about Wikipedia.

If we call them Artificial Intelligences, do we also have to call it Artificial Consciences?

Why would intelligence have a dividing line that consciences lack?

We might be in the first phases of a societal evolution, but looking back at the technological revolution of the last 100 years and how it’s only affected 10% of the populace, I have my doubts. I don’t see the upper castes in India sharing this with the lower castes, nor do I believe the lower castes would accept it because they think their place is to serve others, not to share in the bounty of others.

I don’t see bad guys deciding that they have all their basic needs met and so they don’t need to be bad anymore. They steal because they want more than basic. They cheat because that’s how they were brought up. They harm others because they were harmed.

Brilliant idea, but the trend does not imply it will ever happen IRL over a large population.

Anything can be automated, even “thought” can be automated (which is what AI does), but it’s a long way from “it can be done” to “people will want to do this”. Why?

• Because competition is inbred. Siblings fight over attention. People compete over ideas, credit, honors, and being heard. Even when people are alone, they compete with themselves to better their condition & sharpen ideas. Large-scale Communism fails because it ignores these basic human behaviors. (Small-scale Communism actually works well, because it embraces the behaviors, ex, my group against your group).
• Only 10% of the world has Uber or computers. The rest is working on it, but needs to find clean water & a stable political systems first.
• If you can automate production, you can also automate destruction, like war robots, virus based weapons, info system invasion, and computer-destroying nanobots. You can’t get rid of bad guys by imagining them away.

Who is this “we” you speak of? I think you mean the 10% of the world that has grubhub & 3D printing, right? You are projecting your first-world experiences onto people who spend all day finding clean drinking water, for whom $25 is a major investment. 45% of Chinese people have no computer in the house. 4% in rural India have access to a computer.

Results matter, not attempts. There are very few results worth commenting on, IMHO, just big data effects. AGI needs to be general; everything I’ve seen so far is specific.

Looks like you feel worse around holidays. Can you overlay potential causes and cures on this?

How does “looking around” help me edit a spreadsheet? It’s the utility that leads users, not the tech.

Yes, overall functionality is what killed flipphones, definitely. IOW, smartphones excelled because they made it easy for third parties to write apps, so I could have an app that is useful to me (and to folks in similar situations). Flip phone apps were written by the manufacturers, IIRC.

I think of VR as a smart phone display with a better mount, nothing more. Remember the first popular VR displays were just cardboard boxes that you slipped your cell phone into. Lenses help move the image away and adapt to pupil distances, boxes keep excess light out, elastic bands help with balance — all tweaks. All the really useful stuff - forward looking cams, accelerometers, barometers, depth cams - are in the phone itself.

How many common products are produced using AI? 25%? 50%? Do you think they use machine learning to find oil reserves? To predict market demand so they know which products to make? To design safer cars? To distribute products more efficiently to resellers? To genetically engineer plants and animals?

I think we are already ahead… you just don’t know what you don’t know.

It should be meaningful to what normal people need above what a cell phone, tablet, or computer can do.

So if it’s just for maps, no go. If it shows you the next exit visually, no go (HUDs do this now). If it navigate within a building to get out of a fire that has no wifi, that’s value you can’t get from a cell phone.

If it shows a video of a recipe, no go. If it highlights where you left the spatula, or detects that your sauce is boiling too much, ok.

If it interacts with your computer by adding depth to the display, no go. If it shows you which keys to press to show a special character, or diagnoses that your right hand is .5” too far to the left to hit keys accurately, ok.

If it lets you meet with people in 3D, and walk around a virtual convention hall to experience different audiences, no go. If you can augment faces with a person’s name and what you talked about the last time you met them, ok. If it can diagnose a person’s health by examining their gate and skin color from multiple angles, ok.

Also: compatible with glasses (2/3 of adults wear glasses), and not get in the way.