I am curious who buys generative AI services? The consumers seem to be people making memes or questionable porn with free services. It can’t prepare food, unblock drains or tile a bathroom. You can’t use it for anything like medicine, law or engineering where you would be professionally liable if it fucks up. How is it sustainable?

The social aspect might be underappreciated. My guess is people are mainly introduced by family and friends and it becomes a big part of their identity. It becomes difficult to separate the individual elements.

Micro-electro mechanical systems (MEMS) are extremely successful. You have them in your phone and lots of other devices. It turns out semiconductor manufacturing techniques could be leveraged to make some useful devices but that is about it. There is obviously a lot happening at these scales in biology, semiconductors, materials science etc but the grey goop of nanobots turned out to be a fantasy based on extrapolations that don’t seem to hold up well with physical materials thankfully. One less thing to worry about. Now we only have climate change, pathogens, war etc. Hopefully the machine learning bubble will blow over in a similar fashion, genuinely revolutionary in some areas but increasingly difficult/uneconomical to scale into others.

I have a very pragmatic view on capitalism. It isn’t inherently good or evil. Social democracy provides the best compromise where regulated capitalism generates wealth and funds innovation while responsible democratic government protects employees and the environment and provides services that have a strong social benefit.

Unfortunately social democratic policies are undermined in many countries and resisted in others to the point where some young people become frustrated and look to answers in hateful extremist politics which really is a horseshoe.

Regulated capitalism can direct capital to innovation in low/zero emission technologies and disincentivize investment in polluting technology very effectively,. More effectively than a corrupt command economy could do it. Fossil fuel companies have fought against interventions to push the market towards alternatives but the biggest failure has been on the political class and voters who haven’t done enough to push the market in the correct direction. Photo voltaics, storage technology and wind turbines have received a lot of investment and are growing rapidly despite the work of the big polluters to stall action.

Australia. My local water supply is sourced from a muddy river. Not ideal as there is agricultural runoff and occasional algal blooms but it is a semi-arid region and the only option. The towns water supply has sediments settled out then is filtered, treated with chloramine, then UV, then fluoridated for dental health. We mainly drink it chilled through an inline fridge filter. There is no need to boil as the chloramine and UV kill any microorganisms. The bigger concern is probably agricultural chemicals but I am sure the quality is monitored. Some people still buy bottled water because they are ignorant. We take water bottles filled with tap water to school and sports and the schools all have chilled tap water for refilling water bottles.