Comment by weinzierl

> so much stuff is basically free

It really isn't. Have a look at daily median income statistics for the rest of the planet:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=t...

  $2.48 Eastern and Southern Africa (PIP)
  $2.78 Sub-Saharan Africa (PIP)
  $3.22 Western and Central Africa (PIP)
  $3.72 India (rural)
  $4.22 South Asia (PIP)
  $4.60 India (urban)
  $5.40 Indonesia (rural)
  $6.54 Indonesia (urban)
  $7.50 Middle East and North Africa (PIP)
  $8.05 China (rural)
  $10.00 East Asia and Pacific (PIP)
  $11.60 Latin America and the Caribbean (PIP)
  $12.52 China (urban)

  $7.75 World

+100w chargers are one of the products I prefer to spend a little more on, so I get something from a company that knows it can be sued if they make a product that burns down your house or fries your phone.

Flashlights? Sure, bring on aliexpress. USB cables with pop-off magnetically attached heads, no problem. But power supplies? Welp, to each their own!

Democracy (and Republics) are thousands of year old. Computation is also quite old though it only sky-rocketed with electricity and semiconductors. This is not the first time the global world created a potential for exponential growth (I'll consider the Pharaohs and Roman empires to be ones).

There is the very real possibility that everything just stalls and plateau where we are at. You know, like our population growth, it should have gone exponentially but it did not. Actually, quite the reverse.

> One revolution I'm still coming to grips with is automated manufacturing. Going on aliexpress, so much stuff is basically free. I bought a 5-port 120W (total) charger for less than 2 minutes of my time. It literally took less time to find it than to earn the money to buy it.

Is there a big recent qualitative change here? Or is this a continuation of manufacturing trends (also shocking, not trying to minimize it all, just curious if there’s some new manufacturing tech I wasn’t aware of).

For some reason, your comment got me thinking of a fully automated system, like: you go to a website, pick and choose charger capabilities (ports, does it have a battery, that sort of stuff). Then an automated factor makes you a bespoke device (software picks an appropriate shell, regulators, etc). I bet we’ll see it in our lifetimes at least.

> "The revolutions shorten in time, seemingly exponentially."

The Technological Singularity - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

Democracy is 200? You're off by a full order of magnitude.

Progress isn't inevitable. It's possible for knowledge to be lost and for civilization to regress.

That is very true, but for now we have a baseline of videos that we either remember or that we remember key details of, like the persons in the video. I'm pretty sure if I watch The Primeagen or Tom Scott today, that they are real. Ask me in year, I might not be so sure anymore.

It's worse because many humans don't know they are.

I see a lot of outrage around fake posts already. People want to believe bad things from the other tribes.

And we are going to feed them with it, endlessly.

It's even worse than that. Most people have no idea how far CGI has come, and how easily it is wielded even by a couple of dedicated teens on their home computer, let alone people with a vested interest in faking something for some financial reason. People think they know what a "special effect" looks like, and for the most part, people are wrong. They know what CGI being used to create something obviously impossible, like a dinosaur stomping through a city, looks like. They have no idea how easy a lot of stuff is to fake already. AI just adds to what is already there. Heck, to some extent it has caused scammers to overreach, with things like obviously fake Elon Musk videos on YouTube generated from (pure) AI and text-to-speech... when with just a little bit more learning, practice, and amounts of equipment completely reasonable for one person to obtain, they could have done a much better fake of Elon Musk using special effects techniques rather than shoveling text into an AI. The fact that "shoveling text into an AI" may in another few years itself generate immaculate videos is more a bonus than a fundamental change of capability.

Even what's free & open source in the special effects community is astonishing lately.

I mean, it's already apparent to me that a lot of people don't have a basic process in place to detect fact from fiction. And it's definitely not always easy, but when I hear some of the dumbest conspiracy theories known to man actually get traction in our media, political figures, and society at large, I just have to shake my head and laugh to keep from crying. I'm constantly reminded of my favorite saying, "people who believe in conspiracy theories have never been a project manager."

>Humans losing their ability to detect AI content from reality ? It's frightening.

And it already happened, and no one pushed back while it was happening.

It's worse: they don't even care.

This video's worth a watch if you want to get a sense of the current state of things. Despite the (deliberately) clickbait title, the video itself is pretty even-handed.

It's by Language Jones, a YouTube linguist. Title: "The AI Apocalypse is Here"

https://youtu.be/XeQ-y5QFdB4

I find issue with this statement as content was never a clean representation of human actions or even thought. It was always driven by editorials, SEO, bot remixing and whatnot that heavily influences how we produce content. One might even argue that heightened content distrust is _good_ for our society.

It's a defense lawyer's dream.

Oh they definitely are. A lot of people are now calling out real photos as fake. I frequently get into stupid Instagram political arguments and a lot of times they come back with "yeah nice profile with all your AI art haha". It's all real high quality photography. Honestly, I don't think the avg person can tell anymore.