https://youtu.be/8nt3edWLgIg

This is the only video you need to watch to get a grasp on what the future looks like, and what needs to be done to safeguard.

Using VR to showcase projects is already going on. When it comes to planning blueprints in VR I am not sure. However planning them as 3D models is already common practice in a lot of industries.

When it comes to using VR in the future for blueprints etc. I am positive that it will find usage.

I think the only thing that hasn't been solved to, at minimum, workable specifications is localization -- as in, taking media in one language and converting it into another. Too much creative work goes into it that -- rewriting jokes that are reliant on cultural references or puns, recontextualizing norms that are unspoken but not universal, even rewriting characters who fit a trope that only exists in a single culture.

Only a general AI would be capable of that, and we may still be decades away from that, since most funding has been diverted away from it towards ML. But for communication? We're already there for the most part. Might not be able to get good machine translation for.... idk, Georgian, but any major language is already good enough to write a business email, so long as the other party knows a machine did it.

Eventually they are going to be smart enough to know what they were being used for. Using A.I. as sex slaves and to power killing machines may not be the best idea.

True. Is there a word for “mass produced individuality” yet? If not, coin one now, here, for posterity sake. Your 15 minutes awaits!

If people went for it, I’d learn it as a universal language, we could all be learning it from childhood along with our native language and all be on even ground professionally, though it seems like inevitably we’d start asking ourselves why we’re bothering with our native languages, maybe not all of us, but enough to started sliding into a single language planet with a few holdouts.

I agree. When I studied Japanese I realized that the verb is at the end of the sentence, forcing the listener to pay attention until the end.

10-15 years probably for spot on simultaneous interpretation.

Nothing much to disagree with except one point - AI media will not be mass produced. It will be as individualized and addictive as your Facebook and tiktok feed.

I wonder if this could be used to treat nerve damage? Or, perhaps, augment soldiers' natural nervous systems to provide quicker reflexes?

From what I’ve seen machine translators are not currently always clear on the jargon for each subject matter, that is, as in an example from a movie I heard, to some people a floater is a dead body taken out of the water while to some it’s someone who works as a freelancer. Similarly, different professions use the same words differently and machine translation can miss the context. Potentially it could be trained to recognize it, but might take a lot of effort and language keeps evolving. Beyond that sometimes it needs to know not to translate something, names of towns, acronyms, etc. Not saying it can’t be done, but I think that especially in professional jargon heavy documents and speech, there might be a higher concentration of word choice mistakes. Potentially, that could be helped with a simple “Profession” selector, but you’d have to build lexicons for each and keep it up to date, for every language, and if you change topics you might have to manually change. I wouldn’t make that automatic or I’m betting if they happen to use a couple words fitting another topic it might accidentally trigger a change, and suddenly you’re using nautical navigation terms, while they’re talking about cooking seafood.

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The things learning A language (as in one) does to the brain is important, and due to concepts not being fully expressed across all languages, you could end up with a sum total that would be lossy at best. Also, the language you speak shapes your mind and how you are able to look at the world. There are things that the meat puppets served by those AIs would irretrievably lose in the conversion, and I'm not sure that we even fully understand what all of those would be until well after.

Right now AI development is like old 'solutions' to conservation problems by dropping in X or Y species. We will find many disasters, some that can't be undone, for each mild success. The rates for wild successes will be even worse. Humans are a natural system, as is their society, and our brains develop and have evolved to develop within that system. We have to make sure that we don't leave behind important information and development chasing developing ease.

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It would be useful.

Altho learning languages I feel gives me context for understanding nuances that I wouldn’t be able to if someone just translated. No matter how accurately.

I thought idioms would be the hardest. Then I asked ChatGPT the following:

'What would be the German equivalent of "down the drain" as in "All that work was for nothing, it's down the drain"?'

And damned if it didn't answer:

'The German equivalent of "down the drain" in the context you provided would be "umsonst" or "vergeblich". So, you could say: "Die ganze Arbeit war umsonst/vergeblich, es ist alles für die Katz."'

fuer die Katz was my understanding of translation of the English idiom. And an AI "knew" that. Although it threw in as an afterthought, deciding to concentrate on the "...for nothing" instead of "down the drain".

I don't think you understand what I'm saying. If nobody has a job, or a job with wages reduced by a significant amount, it doesn't matter what any employer or shareholder wants. The population won't have the income anymore to buy whatever you're selling. Do you think if the minimum wage was reduced to 5$ an hour everywhere in the U.S., that anyone would have any money to buy anything?

Methane emissions are a serious driver of Climate Change and fast action on this issue is critical to avoiding the mounting costs of Climate Change..

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Without going into specifics due to NDAs and such, as a contracted linguist I can attest that there already are third party technologies that allow for instant translation and transliteration with minimal and acceptable amount of loss vs a human. But the government still wants humans to do it in matters pertaining to public safety, national security or the military because human linguists and translators may be required to give deposition in court cases. When you take into account things like FISA warrants where the judges are especially stringent and the government has to clear a high bar, the government absolutely prefers human agency lest the courts or other observers accuse it of rigging the AI/machine. So, I don't think we'll see it in the government sector due to hose accountability and judicial concerns.

Batteries really are at an early stage of development and often the biggest problems are the cost of production, the effective life of the battery, and the energy density it can hold. So probably to early to assess a lignin/polymer battery but it'd be a pretty green product and as lignin is a papermaking byproduct there'd be no scarcity, or mining issues.

Well, ChatGPT's training is pretty simple. It's trained on how accurate it can predict the next words in a training document. It's trained to imitate the text it was trained on. The data is all "correct", which amusingly leads to bad traits as it's imitating bad things. Also amusing is the qualia of the AI seemingly being able to have emotions. Is it saying the text because it's angry or because it's just trained to imitate angry text in a similar context?

But yeah, general intelligence is super vague. I don't think we want an AI that would have the capability to get angry or depressed, but these are things that evolved naturally in animals as they benefit survival. Pretty much all dystopian AI movies are based on the AI thinking that to survive it has to kill all humans...

And knowing more words/languages expands your capability for thought.

Language is more than just some sounds and scribbles that directly translate to person's/places/things. It is very often impossible to express exactly the same thought in a different language because the idea itself has cultural context and meaning imbued by the language.

For example, in English we would say "I like bananas". In Spanish the closest translation is "me gusta bananas," but those are fundamentally two different statements. In English, you are the subject taking affirmative action on the object (banana) by "liking" it. In Spanish, you are instead the passive object being acted upon by the subject (the banana) which is "pleasing" you (gustar ~ to please). Think about that, it seems subtle but consider the implications of being passive, acted upon by the world vs being active, acting up on the world.

Probably not for remote communication but yes for real life communication with people from other countries.

sounds like a case of forbidden chocolate.