Holy shit, you broke so many comma usage rules in your first sentence alone!

I wish humans created fewer pollution.

That's funny because the whole post was sarcastically outlining a distopian nightmare.

If that kind of stuff was actually to become real, some dictator would take control of it and subjugate the entire country, or world... forever. There'd be no way to resist that level of surveillance or machine policing.

Don't limit your thoughts to just generative AI, which is what you are talking about. Chat bot and media generation aren't the only uses for AI (by which I mean any trained neural network program that can do some sort of task.

Motor skills

AI can solve learn to solve the marble maze "Labyrinth" much, much faster than a human, and then speedrun it faster than any human ever has. Six hours. That's how long it took a brand new baby AI to beat the human world record. A human that has been learning hand-eye coordination and fine motor control all of it's life, with a brain which evolved over millions of years to do exactly that.

No special code needed. The AI didn't need to be told how balls roll or knobs turn, or how walls block the ball. It earned all of that on the fly. The only special code it had was optical and mechanical. It knew it had "hands" in the form of two motors, and it knew how to use them. It also had eyes (a camera), and access to a neural network computer vision system. When the AI started taking illegal shortcuts, and they had to instruct it to follow the prescribed path, which is printed on the maze.

Robots could in work factories, mines, and other dangerous, dehumanizing jobs. Why do we want workers to behave like robots at a factory job? Replace them with actual robots and let them perform a human job like customer service.

Think of a robot that has actual hands and arms, feet and legs, and various "muscles". We have it learn it's motor control using a very accurate physics system on a computer that simulates its body. This allows the AI to learn at much faster speeds than by controlling a real robot. We can simulate thousands of robots in parallel and run the simulations much faster than real time. Train it to learn how to use it's limbs and eyes to climb over obstacles, open doors and detain or kill people. We could replace police with them. Super agile robot cops with no racial bias or other prejudices. Arresting people and recording their crimes. Genuine benefit.

Computer Vision

AI can be trained to recognize objects, abstract shapes, people's individual faces, emotions, people's individual body shape, mannerisms, and gait. There are many genuine benefits to such systems. We can monitor every public location with cameras and an AI employing these tools. This would help you find lost loved ones, keep track of your kids as they navigate the city, and track criminal activity.

By recording all of this data, tagged with individual names, we can spontaneously view the public history of any person in the world for law enforcement purposes. Imagine we identify a person as a threat to public safety 10 years from now. We'd have 10 years of data showing everyone they've ever associated with and where they went. Then we could weed out entire networks of crime at once by finding patterns among the people they've associated with.

AI can even predict near future crime from an individual's recent location history, employment history, etc. Imagine a person is fired from his job then visits a gun store then his previous place of employment. Pretty obvious what's going on, right? But what if it happens over the period of two weeks? Difficult for a human to detect a pattern like this in all the noise of millions of people doing their everyday tasks, but easy for an AI. Genuine benefit.

Managing Production

With enough data and processing power, we can manage the entire economy without the need for capitalism. People's needs could be calculated by an AI and production can be planned years ahead of time to optimize inputs and outputs. The economy--as it stands today--is a distributed network of human brains and various computers. AI can eliminate the need for the humans, which is good because humans are greedy and neurotic. AI can do the same job without either. Again, human's are freed to pursue human endeavors instead of worrying about making sure each farm and factory has the resources it needs to feed and clothe everyone. Genuine benefit.

Togetherness

We will all be part of the same machine working in harmony instead of fighting over how to allocate resources. Genuine benefit!

I could imagine a tool that makes cloud storage act like a remote hard drive, with sectors and everything. Where these "sectors" are just small binary files.

You have software locally that is setup to track local files and calculate how they are mapped to the remote sectors. When a file gets updated, or new ones are added, it shuffles things around in an efficient manner to keep the number of remote updates to a minimum, and then it only updates or adds the required sector files. This way a tiny edit to a 4 GB local file would only require a tiny upload to the server instead of resending a new encrypted copy of the entire 4 GB file.

Not only are the little sector files all encrypted with a private key known only to you, the file structure in this system doesn't even make any sense to anyone but you.

However, if you lose you home PC and the file structure DB, the cloud copy becomes absolutely useless. Even if you had a backup of the private key.

Something like this surely already exists. Maybe there are even cloud storage providers who offer hard-drive like access to a block of data instead of being file-based.

EDIT: Turns out that's what Proton Drive does. Kind of.

End-to-end encryption for large files

Proton Drive's unique technology enables high-performance, client-side end-to-end encryption with large files by splitting large files into 4 MB chunks. Each chunk is signed with a hash to prevent removal or reordering. When you open or download a file, our file transfer and decryption algorithms ensure your data is rebuilt quickly in the correct order.

They say it's client side, but the hashes that control the ordering must be stored on the server or else you couldn't easily download the file on a other device. And I wonder if it's still efficient if you make an exit in the middle of the file. Does it need to send the full 4GB all over again? Even having to send 2 GB all over again would be a lot.

People have given you some good ideas, but here's another: DuckDuckGo has free email aliases. You generate a "duck" address and it's just some random email address that gets forwarded to your real email address while also blocking any trackers in the emails. And you can easily turn off an alias if it becomes spammy.

It's free and you don't even have to make an account of any kind. To "log in" to their web browser and use this feature, all they do is send you an email with a link to click to make sure own that target email address. Then you can generate unlimited aliases that get redirected to it. But it's up to you to track which alias was given to which website.

There's also a master duck address that you make up manually. I guess that's technically an account and that's the one you "log in" with if you install the browser on another device. You don't have to actually use their browser, and they even have a plugin for Firefox to generate the aliases.

Not as easy as having your own domain and forwarding email going to any address to your real account, though. But it's totally free.

They're talking about making it a nonprofit, I'm sure. People working for nonprofits can have good salaries so its not like they're not good to work for, and any profit can be reinvested into the company or donated to other nonprofits. But you can't sell the company to a for-profit (I don't think), and the ownsers can't take all of the profit for themselves.

Yes, but known 3rd party tracking cookies are already blocked. It's not like these tracking sites pop up every day, but the list is updated when new ones are found. Meanwhile, 3rd party cookies for legitimate uses are allowed.

Whereas Google just blocked them all with no regard to their purpose.

You can also choose to block all 3rd party cookies in Firefox, although it might break certain sites. And you can also keep 3rd party cookies (that are more functional than tracking) but maintain a different copy for each website so they aren't effective at tracking you.

Firefox gives you a lot of choice.

Damnit, that makes me sad. I was better off being ignorant.

Still, I guess they're just dumb little insects. What should I care? It helps all the spiders that hang out near lights to catch them.

Man, I'm old. I was wondering how in the heck you 3D printed a glass and metal vacuum tube.

They were being sarcastic and quoting something a phone manufacturer would say.

Merely skimming a video which explained all of the details in the first 3 minutes--addressing everything their comment complained about--just so they can say things that make no sense if you had spent 3 fucking minutes watching the video!

(They said they only skimmed it in a separate comment.)

That is what I call willful ignorance. That's what's wrong with social media today. People comment nonsense without knowing anything about what they're commenting on. Then other people read the stupid comments and upvote it, also without watching the video, and that's all they walk away with. "LOL Vox is dumb!"

And when they get called out, people like you defend them. And you probably didn't even watch the video either!

Yes! Willful ignorance all around. That's exactly what it is.

Thank you for the hot take. You've really added to the discussion.

Dude, you made the comment. Your words are all the evidence I need.

It was the role of a lifetime.

Every hospital I've been to has these lamps in various places in the hallways like on the way into the ICU. Stop your ignorant fear mongering.

"Oh, I skimmed the video, but I don't trust science, so I'm going to question the intelligence of everyone involved with this website because I don't believe anyone else but me knows anything about UV light. Here are some irrelevant facts..."

Willfully ignorant people like you make me so angry. Especially when they spread their ignorant horseshit like they're so fucking smart. As if we don't ALL know about the dangers of long exposure to sunlight. Appropriate UV lamps for killing viruses do not equal sunlight!

This is the internet. What did you expect?

I do think its funny people are like. "I wonder what kind of bulbs are needed." Basic shit that's probably in the video! But I wouldn't know because I didn't watch it before commenting.

If we applied that logic to everything, nothing would be permissible.

"Let's not use very safe and effective technology because it requires that people read!"

We all know that the louder an opinion is expressed the more correct it is, so your opinion is very correct.

If you don't receive the email containing the bomb threat because you banned the email domain, does the bomb really exist?

No! The bomb just goes away. Checkmate, terrorists.