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When people tell me AI will eventually replace everyone
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
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I remember when it was just as laughable for a phone to dial itself, anything to update itself, computers to write code, etc.
This doesn't show that AI won't eventually be constructing buildings. It just shows you're laughing that a thing that's pretty much certain to happen will never be possible.
Yeah, robotics and AI aren't at a point where they can build a row of houses with zero humans involved... that doesn't say that won't happen "eventually."
The vast majority of technology we use daily was unrealistic science fiction just 50 years ago and completely insane to consider much farther back than that.
I believe BMW and others are already operating humanoid robots that work in a factory setting doing tasks a typical machinist would do right now.
Just imagine in 10+ years when the frontier agent models get optimized enough, or more effectively streamed into the robotics and the robotics are robust enough to handle "heavy lifting" tasks. I don't think there is much some combination of AI and robotics can't do. Other than suffering the soon to come mass poverty.... They'll never be able to do that.
Quite. As soon as robotics and AI reach a point where they can take care physically creating the needs and wants of the uber wealthy... that's bad.
Any time the idea of UBI comes up I think it's way more likely for them to decide 99% of us are now redundant and that some convenient pathogen/disease that they have access to a cure for the rest of the world doesn't know exists would be a fantastic way to get rid of us before we form giant mobs to demand equality. As an added benefit, having ~7.9 billion less humans in the world and no longer needing to produce food or goods for them would reduce pollution and emissions on a massive scale, helping the global environment while also getting rid of all the clutter ruining the views at the nicest beaches.
They'll still need some of us to boss around and feel superior to, not to mention to breed attractive children for their enjoyment. Just a small enough number broken between enough locations on the planet to get the odds of large scale physical resistance as low as they can.
It's literally what I tell my friend who seems to be convinced they'll suddenly be altruistic.... Like dude, you're saying the very same people that fight any form of taxation whatsoever will magically be ok with "giving away" their wealth to people who do no work? They'd rather start a new company to make more money that just films nation wide "bum fights" as they treat us as entertainment, fighting over a chance to eat, than they would give anything for a UBI.
One of the weird things that came out about Covid was that they were doing research on Gain of Function.... actively trying to make the disease more transmissible specifically in humans. That isn't a fantastic line of research.
Knowing that's a thing that large, well funded places are still researching, the idea that a more deadly disease that transmits through humans even easier could be created along with a vaccine to prevent the disease before it ever becomes public is way, way less unrealistic than I wish it were.
A handful of ultra wealthy folk could fully fund that in secret behind strict NDAs very easily. Hell, one of them could. The same people making policies that their AI should sex chat with kids to increase the kids usage time, visiting rape islands, saying only the extremely wealthy should vote... fuck, some of the Epstein files directly involve conversations about that topic. I think that's one of the conversations Bill Gates was part of. How to get rid of poverty in the the world by getting rid of the poor folk.
But you can't even discuss it with most people without seeming like a batshit insane, tinfoil hat conspiracy nut. Bit frustrating.
No, the vast majority of things we used today were not science fiction in the 70s.
Mobile phones, the Internet, satellites, etc. all of these things existed before the 70s.
The biggest technological innovation of the last hundred years has been miniaturization.
What a silly thing to bicker about.
Of course every one of us having a computer many times more powerful than anything that existed at the time yet small enough to fit in our pocket with plenty of room to spare and using wireless earphones (that also boost external sounds if needed) to communicate with it by simply saying in whatever language we speak what we want the computer to do or research and having the resulting confirmation or information read back to us, again in whatever language we'd prefer, as part of our professional remote-work career, as we sit in the back of a driverless car heading home from a nice lunch, where we'll see that the groceries that were automatically ordered and delivered based on the contents of our refrigerators and cabinets compared to the eating preferences and any special requests made by each member of our household are waiting for us... was science fiction in the 70s.
We can add in having whatever music we prefer automatically follow us from our home to our earphones to the car speakers, watching any movie/show or playing any video game from anywhere in the world, using your far more powerful computer at home to do the more demanding tasks but wirelessly using your phone as a monitor to stream whatever game it's playing to wherever you are and having a wireless controller paired with your phone control the character in the game being played hundreds of miles away nearly seamlessly, being able to hold a face to face conversation with someone who speaks nearly any language you that don't via live translation, to share any sort of book or movie or what would amount to a more information than is contained in a typical library to anyone else on the planet in a few seconds to a few minutes without either of you ever needing to stand up from wherever you're sitting... I can go on for a few pages easily.
Yes, those things and way more that we take for granted daily now were nothing more than science fiction in the 70s.
Cassette tapes existed in the 70s I could listen to the same music in my car and in my house, by simply ejecting the tape and carrying it in with me. The way you’re describing shit you might as well say it was science fiction in the 90s too you’re splitting hairs that don’t need to be split and that more importantly have nothing to do with your original argument.
And a rich person in 2000 BC could have produced the exact same effect by hiring a troupe of bards to follow them around. Just because the core function is the same, does not mean true innovation is impossible.
Okay… but the point was that wasn’t unrealistic science fiction 50 years ago.
Dear God. The point was that your music can follow you and jump from home speaker system to earphones to car speakers to office speakers without you touching or doing anything.
You seem to have hit the age where you need to be crotchety and bitch several hours per day lest you break a hip next time you shower. I can commiserate, but thankfully I only need to bitch two hours per day to stay safe so far. Good luck with your complaining, hope it goes well.
No, the point was that wasn’t unrealistic science fiction in the 70s. The idea that someday you wouldn’t have to touch the cassette was not unrealistic science fiction.
Just because you’re wrong doesn’t mean you need to be an ass.
Bud, you chose to bicker entirely on whether I was a decade or two off on exactly when many ideas in science fiction stories stopped being considered unrealistic and started to be considered plausibly realistic future technology.
"Woolworth's didn't close down in 1972, it was November of '71!"
Be honest with yourself, that's completely senseless old guy bickering. It's absolutely irrelevant to the point.
I'll validate you here. You made a good point and you were wrong about nothing that mattered, if anything at all. Yet this dude slid in, in classic online asshole style, to redefine the conversation and cherry pick what it's about and what would matter or not and even went so far to correct you "no, the point was [what I said, because you don't matter]."
I don't know what the fuck is wrong with people who do this. What is the fucking point of attempting to reframe a discussion you didn't start and die on the hill of "that other person sucks because they said something I argue is technically inaccurate and has little or nothing to do with a valid point they're making". I keep saying to myself I have to quit Lemmy, and it's primarily that exact type of asshole behavior that causes me to think that way.
Thank you. I'm not sure how old you are, but I found out that somewhere in a man's mid to late 40s a change starts to happen. No one really talks about it, but if you don't bitch about something every day then the next time you shower you fall and break all your hips.
At first you only need to bitch or be generally contrary for no good reason for a few minutes each day, but it slowly increases each year. My dad just hit 70, and at this point he seems to need around 5 hours per day. I know it seems tiresome and pointless and annoying as all hell, but the truth is old guys just don't want their hips to break.
Unrelated, but very similar, you start to need to ramble on endlessly about something no one around you cares about more and more each year, or else your head explodes. This is why eventually most older men end up either bitching about something or rambling pointlessly pretty much every time you see them. :/
lol, well, I'm at the age where that's gonna start impacting me soon I guess. I'm not sure that my issue with online interactions like this is as much related to general bitchery as it is the distinct inability to let someone make a point. Either this guy hated your point, judged you based on something random, or just genuinely cannot see the forest for the trees. In any case, it's infuriating to me. Your point was that technology, given enough time, makes inconceivable things real. Any moron could see this if they tried. Both through observation in the world and by reading what you wrote. But somehow none of that mattered. Just the fact that they thought your examples were subpar could possibly matter. (btw they weren't, they illustrated the point just fine). Being crotchety is something I'm no stranger to and it's often unpleasant. But focusing on shit that doesn't matter in order to make another person "wrong" is some pointless bullshit. It's not even pedantry. It's something else, imo.
Yeah, I get your point. It's like the internet (or something else) has caused people to become worse at openly communicating and exchanging ideas and view points when we all expected it to help that become easier. So many people stick to the view they're comfortable with, and insist anyone else is wrong, stupid, or evil.
I sort of think text messaging is part of it. Even when we started with email and online chats it was generally in the form of long email or conversations about more than one thing. Now people are so used to constantly texting that if you send texts that are more than a sentence or two people think you're weird, and most people even places like this where you can write as much as you need to convey your meaning stick to tiny blips that could be texts.
That's one of my two old guy conspiracy theories. The other is that the reason everything else in the world got way more expensive but somehow it's now almost cheaper to panel a house in huge 4k TVs than it is to use drywall is because most guys like huge shiny TVs and we're less likely to be out rioting that everything else is getting shitty if there's 80" football and elf boobies at home.
I chose to bicker because it was a ludicrous statement. Whatever else you need to tell yourself is for your own comfort.
Alright, now that you've had time to collect yourself, lets discuss this.
You're saying my statement was ludicrous, because as you said "No, the vast majority of things we used today were not science fiction in the 70s."
The first early electromechanical computers began to pop into reality at the very end of the 1930s. ENAIC, the first general purpose digital computer showed up in the mid 1940s and weighed 30 tons. Until the mid 1970s "computers" were massive mainframes coded with punch cards. It wasn't until the late 1970s that dumb CRT terminals became more common.
The very first foundational models of what we now call "computers", the MITS Altair 8800, Apple II, and Commodore PET, were born in 1974 and 1977. All three combined sold an estimated 60,000-100,000 units from those years until 1980. While the bulk of these sales were to hobbyists, professionals, schools, and small businesses we can be generous and go with that 100k figure and say that all 100k went to individuals for personal use.
That's still 100k out of the 4.5 billion person population at that time. That's about .002̅ % of the population. Being a generous as possible with the sales numbers and purchasers for the hot new consumer computers that existed in the 1970s, perhaps 1 person in every 45,000 people had one.
Now lets be even more generous. Of course if you get a shiny new Apple II in your home you're going to want to show it off to everyone and let everyone use it. And of course even though this was many years before The Oregon Trail or Prince of Persia, and even the first "killer app" VisiCalc, the life-changing home spreadsheet program didn't launch until October 17, 1979 at the very end of our "70s" window, so there wasn't much to do with it other than trying to learn coding and typing in code examples from magazines they will all want to.
So even though absolutely best case only 1 in 45,000 people has a computer, each of those 100k PC owners will show 50 other people, let them all use it just as much as they do, and teach them everything know. Fucking amazing. Saints all of them. And everyone really cared because most random people can't help but love BASIC. So even though only a maximum of 100k of the earliest potential home PCs had been sold, we're going to say 5,000,000 people have real experience using them by the time 1980 rolls around.
Even in our absolutely ideal, computer loving utopia where everyone adores plain text and basic coding without even being able to conveniently make something as thrilling fun as a spreadsheet at home....
That's still .11% of the population, 1 in 900, people having any experience with a potential 'home computer'. For the vast majority of humans having a home computer at all was the stuff of science fiction, not reality. The vast majority of humanity and nearly everyone all of those people interacted with didn't have one or know anyone who did. Even for those who did have one, the concept of virtually all humans walking around with a computer in their pocket that's hundreds of millions of times more powerful than that Apple II, only .3" wide, with a built in screen with a resolution 83x better than than the High-Res Apple II monitor, and all the other capabilities a modern phone has... it wasn't even science fiction. It wasn't even something genuinely imagined and described in fantasy books for nerds. Science fiction had devices roughly analogous but I honestly can't think of a single science fiction example from the time that comes close to describing a modern phone. Most of the similar devices are laughable weak and nearly functionless in comparison.
If you've read more and can point me to some 1970s science fiction containing devices very much like the phones of today, please let me know. I'm a huge nerd and technology and reading are my main passions. I'd love to read them!
That explains my statement. It wasn't ludicrous, it was simple fact.
On the other hand the statement you made in your first reply was:
"No, the vast majority of things we used today were not science fiction in the 70s.
Mobile phones, the Internet, satellites, etc. all of these things existed before the 70s."
That's all bullshit.
Mobile phones? There was an initial prototype in the mid 70s, but the very first commercial model cell phone didn't exist until 1984. It cost the equivalent of $13,400 and was something very few people had any actual contact with even in the mid 80s. For virtually all of humanity, it was the stuff of science fiction well beyond the 80s much less the 70s.
The internet? Of course the 'modern' pre-ad and AI raped internet didn't exist publicly until 1993, but even Usenet access wasn't established for approved university researchers until 1980. A tiny fraction of a percentage of humanity, engineers, researchers, and military building and learning to utilize restricted computer networks that few people had knowledge of let alone access to is not at all "the internet". Any of those researchers would be completely shocked if we teleported them from 1974 to today and showed them what we consider normal use a few decades later. "The internet" most certainly did not exist for the average human in the 1970s beyond science fiction stories.
Satellites? That's your third example? You're trying to say that most people in the 1970s used satellites daily? Of course you're not. That would be nonsensical. You're just saying that satellites existed. So? Of course the bulk of people had zero interaction with them. They weren't riding around on them, or programming, or launching them. They didn't have a pet satellite to be friends with their pet rocks.
Today?
Right now I can pull up a live satellite feed showing the earth. Several of them, actually, in many different places. That isn't something restricted to just military access, anyone can do that. I've seen my general area through satellites in orbit, live, on my home computer. I've seen it on my pocket computer. I've worn VR glasses and walked around a virtual recreation of my neighborhood from before I moved here, and done the same to visit areas of the country I used to live and missed seeing.
Yes. The vast majority of the technology we interact with daily in 2026 was a science fiction fantasy dream to humanity in the 70s. I don't know if you were bickering just to bicker, because you feel like you were there when few people online were so you know the real truth, or if you're just very behind on the technological advances that can be used in the home or on the go from the last 10-15 years. Perhaps a bit of both.
If you've never bothered to set up your personal favorite songs streaming from the cloud or your phone to follow you and connect automatically to whatever other of your speakers or vehicles you move to, it's really cool. I loved the sound system in Cruel Intentions, and always nerdily dreamed of being able to drunkenly wander the house and have Vangelis Bladerunner soundtrack follow me along wherever I went.
I'm not a fan of connecting everything to the live internet, but done right home automation has gotten so much better over the last handful of years than it was even a decade ago. What we consider old cell phones are capable file/media/ftp/http servers. I take a lot of photos for work, and now when I take a photo or video with my cell phone or DSLR it automatically syncs to my work computer and a home backup drive. It works within seconds from the bulk of the planet.
I have full access to everything on my home network from anywhere, on my phone, laptop, or virtually any TV screen. From most places I can do anything I want with them and have it streamed to me on whatever screen I'm using with low enough latency that my eyes can't tell a difference to if I were sitting there at home.
I can wander hundreds of virtual worlds and games from a genuine first person point of view, turning my head and moving to move around the virtual environment. If that technology never improves at all from this moment on it's already better than I'd dreamed it could be as a kid. And it is still improving, if not as slowly as the financial giants who wanted to force it to grow fast so they could own it has hoped. You can now create and share digital replicas of places. Visiting your parents house. Your kids. Favorite places. As someone with Aphantasia finally having the ability to revisit those places and times is priceless, and even though in time a lot of them will likely become things that make me want a drink it's a stockpile of places and times I want to keep building so that even when they're lost in time they won't be lost to me.
Don't miss out on it, and not agreeing offhand that so much of is is the stuff of science fiction in the 70s... that seems like you are missing it. Lots of things are shit in the world at the moment, but still try to look at the wonders and the toys and the advances as if you'd just stepped forward from the 70s to today.
I hope you enjoy your day, and find something new to marvel at today and every day to come.
Mobile phones have existed since the 1940s.
The Internet has been around since the 1960s.
Satellite TV became established in the 1970s, which is just one way people do in fact use satellites every day.
I stand by my opinion that you saying that technology today was unrealistic science fiction just 50 years ago is ludicrous and I hope you enjoy your day too.
Jesus, I tried to be nice. MTS and IMTS? IMTS lifetime maximum capacity in the NYC metro area was 2,000 extremely wealthy people... in a region with 16 million people.
0.000125 of the population. It's something that could serve 1 in 8,000 people. Maybe you're a billionaire, but the other 99.99% of the human population is not. For the overwhelming majority of humanity mobile phones did not exist. The few that did were extremely pricey, extremely hard to acquire, and nearly completely functionless compared to the most basic cell phones of a decade ago much less today.
You can't provide a single example of something much like a modern cell phone even in science fiction from the 1970s and want to insist that nothing from today would have been considered that then because you had pencils.
It's like saying that the ability to dictate to a device and have it format, edit, and draft revise whatever you say into whatever format you request existed then because people could speak. It's reductionist to the point of stupidity.
At this point I honestly believe you're either very autistic or developmentally disabled in some way. You seem unwilling to engage with actual thought and discussion, even when it's well wishes towards yourself. You simply regurgitate the same nonsense endlessly, stomping your foot like a petulant child and shouting "No, I'M RIGHT!"
I can do without you starting to insist they had televisions in 1432 because a man drew a flip book and that's pretty much the same thing in your mind, so I'll be blocking you now. I sincerely wish you luck in your future endeavors, and I hope you find a way to deal with whatever is wrong with you and enjoy the great things in life while you can.
You really need to learn to handle people disagreeing with you better.
And yet they made a valid point. Your response here has nothing to do with anything but pointlessly shitting on someone. Which apparently makes you feel better?
This is a public forum, are you saying that they are allowed an opinion and I am not?