I found the AI 2027 paper to be overly optimistic, but not wholly fantastical. This paper feels wildly speculative, and relies on premises I am not confident even pass surface reasoning. Even under optimistic conditions, we are not going to see robots "capable of 95% of all cognitive and physical tasks" by 2035. Nor do I think a 74% unemployment rate is even remotely possible. Economic collapse would implode AI development long before those figures were plausible.
The "and physical" is the part I'm particularly skeptical of. Sure, drones are scary, but nobody's really solved getting a robot to deliver a package to your front porch in a civilian setting, and it seems unlikely to be solved quickly.
The book Sentient is not about AI but abount the most amazing physical senses some other animals have.
The theme of the scientific findings is that while humans excel with none of our physical sensors, we do very well across the board in making use of them thanks to our relatively huge brains.
And fantastical amounts of compute power is exactly what are handing over to AI. The fact that their training data isn't perfect may matter less.
Nobody’s even solved a self-driving vehicles yet, not in in the sort of “they took over everything and put every uber and truck driver out of business” kind of way.
Maybe they will soon but it’s massively far behind the kind of timeframe AI 2027 would have implied.
I actually think self-driving is one of the easier paths of development. The main thing holding it back right now is regulation and liability.
But, if you could wave a wand and eliminate all legal and liability hurdles to self-driving, automobile deaths would plummet. They're way safer than the average human driver. The technology is definitely capable, our society just isn't ready for it.
I disagree. It has not been figured out enough to take humans out of the equation from a functional standpoint, not just a regulatory one.
This past 4th of July weekend a Waymo ran over an actively burning firework in a low speed scenario, the kind of thing a 95 year old driver would have avoided.
It has. For example mechanization of argiculture in places where it didnt coincide with a manufacturing boom (latin america, india, africa) resulted in shantytowns and long term unemployment.
If I took you back to 2020 and said in a little over 5 years there will basically be no human coders writing code anymore you'd almost certainly not believe me.
And similar things can be said about many technologies in recent history – cars replacing the horse, first flight to man on the moon, even the creation of early internet to its mass adoption.
You're talking generally a decade or 2 for society to completely change from the rapid advancement of a new technology.
I'm not saying I agree with the 2035 prediction, but it doesn't seem impossible to me, if AI can help us improve the pace that we're already developing disruptive robotics.
In 2010 the idea of self-driving cars and autonomous delivery drones seemed very sci-fi and a long way out. But today, just 15 years on, these things are increasingly starting to be rolled out.
If they dropped that 95% number to 50-60%, I think I'd probably lean towards agreeing. Not because it makes sense in my gut, but because the logical part of my brain knows exponential trends (if one exists) do things that we wouldn't instinctively predict. But even if you assume exponentials 95% does seem very high.
> "If I took you back to 2020 and said in a little over 5 years there will basically be no human coders writing code anymore you'd almost certainly not believe me."
It's 2026, one year after your predicted date, and that still hasn't happened though.
You say "just" 15 years, but Waymo is still only available in a few cities. That seems more like a slow, cautious rollout to me, not a fast takeoff. Society has had a lot of time to get used to (and tired of) the idea and come up with regulations.
My guess is that the deployment of other types of robots will often be a similarly slow grind.
That's unlike the Internet, smart phones, and coding agents, which got user adoption at a much quicker pace.
For a specific technology to become viable, you often need progress in several individual technologies to occur. Some of these will be exponential and surprise us, but many will see slower progress.
Either way, I suspect progress in robotics will be slower than AI, but I also think we'll see a lot of investment in robotics over the next decade given that AI opens up a lot of new potential applications for robotics.
I suspect any task that doesn't require extreme battery life or extreme dexterity will be doable by robots much sooner than most people think today. I think we could have decent-ish humanoid robots within a decade – robots that can prepare food, clean hotel rooms, empty bins, etc. I think Elon's bet on Optimus is quite likely to be viewed as very ahead of the curve with time.
However, it will take much longer for robots to do everything a human body can, but then most jobs don't require we push the physical limits of human body.
That's why I think 60% is reasonable. And even then I'm not saying it will happen, I just don't think that's a bad bet if given even odds.
I'm really on the fence about the Steam Machine. The Deck had the benefit of occupying a market niche no one else figured out yet, and the price was good. With component prices at an all-time high I'm not seeing how they can get the price at a compelling point. The living room niche is already occupied by consoles, and that's the first thing people are going to compare it to.
For many, the appeal of a Mac is that it isn't running Windows. I'm not seeing how this won't be a repeat of the OG ARM Surface, just with a higher spec'd GPU.
It's not a valid comparison. Up until this (theoretical) machine, the playing field wasn't equal. Windows laptops in general couldn't really compare in many aspects with Macs since M1 (outside of gaming), batteries were horrible due to bad efficiency, performance wasn't amazing even with the best SKUs, and the distance between the vendor and Microsoft was always impacting different aspects of the finished product. Even with the ARM Surface, the ecosystem still wasn't ready for ARM, the performance was lacking. If this device doesn't cost an arm and a leg, it will offer something that is really the first instance of a Windows device that's a better choice than an M-Macbook in many ways (at least on paper).
Back when Macs were suffering under poor Intel chips there were valid competitors in battery life and size and weight from Dell. Except they ran Windows, and the trackpad was never as good as a Mac, and you'd find yourself searching for driver updates for things like the built in camera, which also wasn't very good because Dell doesn't have an entire division building amazing tiny cameras for phones.
Microsoft maybe had a chance when they decided to build their own Surface tablets/laptops but trying to make an OS that worked for that but also worked for your corporate issue Lenovo laptops is (as Apple seems to know), impossible.
They were only suffering and had great battery life because they were kneecapping their own machines with improper cooling. It's pretty obvious their last few Intel laptops were intentionally designed so that the M1 would look better in almost every way. It was still an incredible chip, but I personally didn't believe that it was a fair comparison.
I mean, yeah ok? Not sure what your point is? This isn't directly related to this machine though. First Nvidia SoC and a much better vertical integration with now non trivial amount of experience in hardware stands to offer something that wasn't avaliable before.
A little earlier than that. With Intel's Lunar Lake / Panther Lake, x86 laptops are again in the same ballpark as a Mac efficiency-wise. There are reputable reviews where people are getting 16-20 hours of battery life out of them doing real work, in both Windows & Linux.
M5 is probably still better, but at least the x86 machines don't embarrass themselves any more.
Outside of that though, there's still hit and miss quality on the PC OEM side of things. 1080p screens are still the default for a ton of models, even higher end ones, and the OEMs keep missing the point of why people prefer Apple hardware.
Several are coming out with 8GB machines now at macbook Neo price points with....1920x1200 screens, probably a low quality panel, and questionable trackpad. Again, missing the entire point of the Neo.
That works both ways: The macs run MacOS which for my work at least is a non-starter. I write win-only apps and sell to win-only customers who run only windows-machines. I do want to run local AI models on my machine though so I really do see the need for shared memory laptops.
ARM Windows laptops are a pretty different scenario now than when the Surface came out. They have pretty seamless x86/64 emulation built in similar to when Apple started their Mac transition to ARM. In contrast the OG ARM Surface didn't run any existing Windows software.
Most people could pick up a modern Windows ARM laptop and everything they do would work just fine, just potentially with less heat and longer battery life than their older Windows laptop.
The primary annoyances would be Windows itself and its ad and engagement driven UI reminding you about Copilot and Edge every chance it gets.
I wouldn't call it "seamless"; a lot of Windows applications don't work. An example is some software packages common in the construction industry which want to install all kinds of ancient x86-only thing likes old ODBC drivers. So that wipes out one of the compelling reasons to have a Windows laptop. Quickbooks (Enterprise Desktop) is another example of one; not supported on ARM, although with some hacking you can get it to sort of work.
And for many others, the appeal of a Windows PC is that it doesn’t run macOS. But I agree that ARM is still a caveat for those machines, in particular long-term driver support.
What do you mean by the OG ARM Surface? The Surface RT from 2012, or the later Qualcomm-powered ones? The Qualcomm-powered ones are vastly more capable than than Surface RT was.
I've been using a Qualcomm ARM laptop for the past year, and pretty much everything I use runs natively on it.
>For many, the appeal of a Mac is that it isn't running Windows
Pretty much. I broke down and finally bought my first Windows machine in over a decade to play Subnautica 2. It was so infuriating to use I returned it a week later. You literally have to hack it with shell commands to bypass Microsoft login now. Never again.
This is false in my experience. You can use the cli to clear the quarantine bit, or you can take the (admittedly annoying) trip to system preferences to override. This is rarely something I need to do; most software is already signed and notarised.
Also not at all equivalent to being forced into linking an online account before being allowed to use your computer at all.
You can still bypass the login requirement for Win 11 and that annoyance only happens once during install vs. every time you try to run a non-notarized app.
It’s easily in my top 3 most hated things about my MacBook. Plus, knowing Apple and the history of that “feature”, it will only ratchet towards becoming even more of a pain over time (it was actually tolerable back before they removed the hotkey to bypass).
For me, after running Win11debloat one time Win 11 disappears into the background 95% of the time, like an OS should. Unfortunately I don’t the luxury of doing something equivalent on MacOS without completely disabling SIP.
Local account on Win11 isn't a workaround, its a fully supported option but only on Windows 11 Pro. Its a work around on home edition. The UI to get there on Pro isn't intuitive (Other Options->Domain Join Instead->Create local account), but it's there and 100% supported.
Still unacceptable for home edition users, but Microsoft has been segregating its userbase and features into Home/Pro/Enterprise for decades.
Very true, it’s a shame apple software and OS has gone to shit lately.
I have been leaning more into framework myself. My current devices are aging out but I am in a place where I am fully separated from apples walled in garden so switching is easy
I used to help build the CTFs for BSides Orlando. I ended up moving to another con, and at our last event we collected extensive logging for post mortem analysis.
We found that AI usage is basically guaranteed now, but certain challenge designs did thwart it. Challenges built with temporal visual elements made AI fall flat on its face, as it could not ingest/process the data fast enough to act on them in time. We also found that counterfactual challenges (ie. the result you get did not match what we suggested you'd get) made AI-assisted solve time slower compared to pure humans, indirectly penalizing over-reliance on AI. Multimodal challenges combining audio and visual elements were also very effective, but were not as accessible to players.
For our next event we figured out a way to thwart AI in our CTF: embed the CTF in a game engine. The loop essentially becomes something like this: Connect to a simulated access point in the game, the K8s cluster connects their attack container to a private network with the challenge box(es). Hacking the boxes doesn't render a flag, but rather changes in game state. AI did very poorly coping with this in our testing, as it can't derive the spatial state of the game world very well and it soft decouples the inductive reasoning loop it relies on to know if it is on the right track.
The downside to this approach is it is far more labor intensive for CTF organizers, and requires players to have a computer capable of running the game. We are also betting on AI to not advance enough by the time we ship to be able to just ingest the entire game state in realtime and close the loop that way.
You should not consider Tim Sweeney's comments on the matter as a reliable source. He was veiling his true motivations behind that statement. The Switch does not run Linux either, it's a custom OS descending from the Wii's iOS.
The cheating issue isn't really a matter of being able to run custom kernel code. You can do the same thing on Windows, which is why remote attestation is a thing for some games. As someone who has developed games for Linux (and Windows / Mac), it's an endless cat and mouse game. So long as the system can execute code that is not yours, you never really are getting perfect anticheat. Ease of loading custom kernel code isn't really a hurdle to that.
I find that client and server based in combination is the robust approach. I once implemented anti-cheat in which the server lied about game state, which a regular client without cheats would act predictably on. Deviation from that behavior is a useful heuristic to build a suspicion score.
I have unlimited access to every single frontier model, I've tested all of them, they are not good at writing software.
They are basically slot machines, sometimes you win a little bit and sometimes you win a lot but usually you just burn a ton of time and money sitting and staring at a screen (and frying your brain).
In theory, the market should be pricing in based on future potential. As it has become increasingly clear this past decade, the market is not rational.
My experience was the same while helping to adapt a Steam Deck game for wider Linux support. The issue wasn't Waylandisms, most of those have already by figured out. It was GNOME. Their preferred resolution to issues seems to be dropping support rather than bug fixes, and they go out of their way to adopt implementations that are against the momentum of the wider community. I can get why they make some of their decisions, but things like killing the tray indicator or server side decorations are insane. To be an outlier in name of a greater or grander goal is one thing, then there is whatever GNOME is doing.
It might be wordsmithing to skirt around "robot" as a fully autonomous entity. Much like their FSD, I expect they aren't going to deliver full autonomy anytime soon.
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