Anything fast moving is disruptive. Even if its for the better. Its like an ecosystem where a fast change in one thing disrupts an entire wave of something else. Labor markets fall into an equilibrium over time. Especially for a small town where changes more than 1-2% per year are pretty massive.

We are in an era of very fast disruption, and its going to get extremely fast over the next several years. That whole equilibrium will be constantly thrown off balance and could make some major swings.

COVID will not be the most disruptive aspect of the 2020s and people of the future will largely remember the 2020s for other disruptive technology. We who endured COVID will have it burned into our memories, but like, kids being born today will probably be fairly dismissive of it when they are adults. They will likely remember other things.

Maybe AI can do all that work for us and instead of making us obsolete, it can make us more useful.

Not VR. I think it would require some sort of computer/brain interface and the computer would have to be running some sort of simulation for the person to experience.

I can imagine some sort of 31st century version of Jackass where they hook the guy up to the machine and then let it run for a minute and then pull him out and are like "Haha, got you, just a prank bro, just a prank" and the guy is like "WTF you assholes, I just spent 40 years in prison".

Anyone in Russia who would be going to the Olympics would be a Putin Stooge. No way would they even consider someone who was not 100% on board with the regime to be selected as an athlete.

Thats human thinking. The AI will become become dependent on humanity for its survival and progress.

I take the principal that Humans, although unique in detail, are more or less typical for what we should expect for the type of life that develops ET. I say this not that we are special or super stars, but that we are probably more normal and and typical rather than some sort of extreme edge case.

The whole us using oxygen thing is probably nothing special and if we ever get our hands on Encyclopedia Galactica and get to browse the countless known sentient species that consuming oxygen will be more or less the norm.

We can have two takes. Oxygen is something that makes us special, it is our unique, or at least very, thing in the galaxy that makes life on Earth very special, and very rare. Something that makes humans special is our ability to breath oxygen.

And then the other take. Oxygen consuming animals are super common, most life that isn't microscopic consumes Oxygen. The Great Oxidation Event is probably a fairly typical thing to happen early in a planet's history. We are not special because we consume oxygen.

More than 15GW of solar capacity will be added to the CAiso in California. An additional 5GW of wind capacity will be installed in the state. 100 GWH of batteries will be installed. It will be a near daily occurrence when the renewable supply surpasses the demand. Load shifting programs will change to encourage people to use their high demand appliances during the middle of the day when the sun is out.

AutoTaxis will take over service in the California Bay Area, Greater Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Diego, Phoenix and a few other places. This is going to be extremely impactful, the response of developing parking lots into urban places will follow, but not in 5 years. A lot of people, particularly young people and retirees start to see this as a viable alternative to car ownership.

EVs for commercial vehicles will take off. The Rivian van for Amazon and the Tesla Semi for a lot of logistics hubs. They will still be mostly human driven, but towards the end of the decade that is going to quickly change.

The California High Speed rail will face some setbacks but it will get closer to limited 2029 service opening.

15-20 million people in the Boomer-Silent Cohort will pass away. Greatly reducing their political strength. Millennials and some Zoomers will continue to take over political offices. Gen X is a much smaller Demographic than the Boomers, they are not nearly as conservative, the same with millennials who will be aging into their mid 40s in 2028.

The fossil fuel industry will start to face periods of financial distress. Investors are going to see fossil fuel companies as industries that are in long term decline and will be pulling investment money. We will still be using oil and gas, but actual demand will start to decline.

Well, give it a few tens of millions of years and maybe we can get those numbers up to the quadrillions.

And yes. We do need to plague every other planet we can with our existence.

To be fair, Mars doesn't have the sort of crazy ass Nimbys that California has. Much of the slow down in the CHSR was litigation. The project is getting built and we are punching it out.

Why would that be sarcasm? If we colonize 500 earth like planets over the next million years and each one of them has a population of 8 billion that would be 4 trillion humans (or whatever our descendants identify as). There are probably a hundred billion habitable worlds in our galaxy.

They need to be cleaned, and if something breaks they need to be fixed, but they are pretty low on maintenance.

The parts are fairly standardized and are a commodity product. Servicing them is not a huge deal. I have seen several of these covered parking lots here in California. 3ish acres of parking would be a 1MW system, which would generate enough energy for 3000-4000 miles of driving per hour of sunshine, if they were selling it to EV owners for 15 cents per kWh they would be selling like $150 per hour, 2500 hours per year, $350-$375k per year, on a system that was maybe $2M to build, not a bad investment, $100k per year profit after financing costs for the first 10 years.

11GW of solar at this scale would cost somewhere around $11-$16 Billion. 10 Nuclear reactors would cost $150B or more. Even with 4 hours of storage, or 50GWH, at $100 per KWH would add an extra ~$5B to the bill. If all the panels did was store power during the day and then use the power like a peaking plant in the early evening that would be useful.

I am convinced that a huge portion of modern hardware is just keeping up with the constant software bloat. Its sort of weird when people will be like "I am looking for a new computer that will do (thing that computers did just fine back in 2007), do you think that a brand new $4000 can handle that?!"