"Pixie, book that car service for me and remind them they promised a free brake fluid replacement"
"Pixie order all the ingredients I need to make my wife her favourite dish"
"Pixel, buy everyone in my family birthday presents"
I will 100% pay for that capability, and as someone that uses GPT4 to basically do my job for me, it really does not seem that far off. And I do think Google has an advantage here over Apple or anyone else, not just in Hardware, but in the enormous amount of data and information they have about both people in general, and specifically me.
Similar. Waited ages in Australia for the Y to arrive, then Elon went nuts, then real competition started to arrive. Everything from Audi to BYD here now, some even have buttons where buttons make UX sense.
I randomly chose a Spotify playlist recently called "Programming music". Was a few hours in, and was like, "hmmmm, this music sounds weirdly familiar", checked the playlist, it was a few hours of Deus Ex music! It was perfect to write code to!
I don't think they expect to do they? They are just using an unlimited bankroll to punish people they perceive as their enemies with hugely expensive and stressful litigation.
Worldwide? Definitely. Enough that also have the resources to pay? Not 100% sure, but I would imagine so. I think I read 500,000 Australians alone live in places with very little internet connection, or are currently served with Geo-Sync internet heavily subsidized by our government.
Why would we not tax the source of the problem. ie dirty energy generation via a carbon tax? That would then incentivize all energy use to become greener, rather than ad-hoc singling out individual use cases? A decent carbon tax would eliminate most dirty proof of work mining, as electricity is the major cost
The problem with that approach is that nobody agrees on what is frivolous. So it ends up being counter-productive as everyone squabbles about why their most hated thing is frivolous and should be banned/regulated, whilst the thing they like provides enough benefits that is should be left alone.
Off the top of my head, the things I have seen people argue should be banned due to climate effects:
- Eating meat
- Plane travel
- Cars
- Only large 4WD's ( but not cars)
- Clothes dryers
- Bitcoin
- AI
- Computer games
- Christmas lights
- etc
People have been hyping up small modular reactors for as long as I have been alive. They make total sense. And yet, there is not a single one is operation? I don't really care what tech gets us to cheap, abundant power, but given the cost curves of solar and batteries, it's hard to see anything competing.
Both are here, right now, and getting cheaper every year. Nuclear seems to be something climate skeptics points to as a way of doing nothing.
Tether should be making money though right? You give Tether $1b USD, they issue some tethers you can redeem later, and in the meantime, they invest those tethers, in say treasuries, and earn 4% or something? You earn no return, so don't they basically have an interest free loan of 60B or whatever? So unless they are incredibly greedy, they can just sit around making bank, without actually having any good reason to take on too much risk?
With enough energy we can pull CO2 out of the air, and turn into a myriad of useful things[1], not just making $$ off the things produced, but also lowering CO2 concentrations. The biggest cost input is energy itself. We need MORE energy, not less, to solve the problems we have created.
Technology got us into this mess, and only new better technology can get us out of it, asking people to live worse lives just seems to me to be a political non starter.
If the energy is clean, what difference does it make how much we use? Should a break through happen in fusion tonight, and clean limitless green energy became available cheaply, would you still argue we should use less?
The fact remains that what people say they care about, and what they are prepared to sacrifice for, are two totally separate things. What you are suggesting is essentially an enforced recession ( drop in consumption and quality of life).
Politicians are never rewarded for having a recession on their watch. It's just never going to fly. It's as realistic as we can end war if everyone would just be nicer to one another.
Are you making the argument that we should be striving for a decrease in consumption? Because I can see no compelling argument that that should be so. In fact, we should be using way more energy. It should be green, but trying to tell people to use less is a guaranteed way for any kind of climate action to fail. Cheaper, cleaner, more abundant, is the only way we are going to move forward, people are just not going to sign up to a future we're we use less than our parents generation.
It's not quite so simple though is it? Electic cars require a lot more resource intensive mining to make, and I believe you are looking at around 50,000 miles before a Tesla is better for C02 ouput than a prius? And an electic Hummer is going to be worse for the environment than a Prius no matter how many miles it's driven?
Lol. If you dropped the average westerner into Chennai, they would either: a) stop moving b) kill someone