This is largely a Hollywood myth, though. Ask anybody with time in the military: Most things are BEHIND by years or decades.

Now an agency like the NSA, this may be more accurate. But much of the U.S. military is still using 20-year-old (or older!) solutions.

ChatGPT isn't a generic term for AI.

The military has specialized AI (neural networks) for military tasks: Logistics, air war, land operations.

Other specialized tasks: Identifying radar signatures and sonar signatures as friend or foe in noisy background environments. (Think Whisper for the Navy.)

It doesn't make sense to use LLMs for things that are not focused on language or text.

This is like using ChatGPT to play Go instead of using Alpha Go.

Inevitable at this point. Once people who don't even understand how their smartphone works adopt LLM AI en masse, good chance a majority thinks it's sentient.

No, society is mostly oblivious.

Most average people see ChatGPT as just a "chatbot" and image AI as "that TikTok filter" -- neat, but not world changing.

People don't yet understand why the transformer and neural network are revolutionary, because these are hard concepts to explain.

Imagine someone who has a vacuum tube radio. Show them a new transistor radio, and they probably said... "Neat so it's a bit smaller. So?"

The transistor revolutionized the world and allowed PCs and smartphones but this is hard to "grok" until it happens.

General prepping for broad scenarios -- from power outages, riots, ice storms, or pandemics -- without going totally crazy is the smart approach, historically.

At some point, there may be a serious push for AI TO BE THE JURY.

Not any time soon. But there's a path to this.

Modern security systems don't "record onto tape," either.

Machine learning and Reverse Engineering.

You sample "what things feel like" and then you replay them, and with AI you can likely predict / extrapolate similar sensations.

There are only so many base sensations. Remember the joke about seven sneezes being one orgasm or whatever? It's not really so far off from being true.

Or you could learn a language?

Full Dive VR doesn't depend on AI or AGI. It depends on brain computer interfaces.

Of course there's going to be some overlap, where better AI helps us interface with the brain, and understanding the brain helps us do AI.

But it would be possible to reach a point with BCIs that let us project VR into the mind without having AGI.

I'd pay for it right now, especially if Premium let me adjust filters (I'm a grown up dammit) and use it via API.

10 years isn't a very long time.

It's only extremely recently that society and technology develops anywhere near rapidly and we're spoiled.

Also Uber. I forgot about that. That wasn't around and would have been seen as strange. Now it's part of life in any city.

Oculus Rift CV1 came out in 2016. That was only six years ago.

A decade ago was 2012. Nobody I knew had ever seen or used VR.

Current VR headsets while not perfect, are very good. Not sure what timeframe you'd be impressed by?

I am in my mid 30s and remember 2002 clearly. Here's a snapshot:

The Internet was around but streaming video really wasn't. Being able to find everything on YouTube and stream it instantly is a big change today.

Physical media was required to watch anything (outside of television, cable TV, or movie theater), so that meant buying or renting a VHS or DVD (not in HD).

Scheduled TV shows were still a big deal. You couldn't watch on your own schedule. Recording shows became easier with things like Tivo, but that wasn't mainstream in 2002. Recording anything on TV still meant a VCR / VHS tape (bad SD quality and like an hour maximum.)

If you wanted to follow a popular show, you had to watch it at its time slot or you missed it until a Rerun. ("Don't miss CSI, Tuesday at 9 Eastern only on CBS!") Primetime television still mattered to people.

Internet speed was dramatically slower. But there were still many good websites, for almost any topic you could usually find good resources online. Many people still only accessed the Internet at the local library or net cafes, and it wasn't uncommon for someone to go days not logging online.

Web shopping was just beginning to be accepted as safe. Amazon was still seen as a niche site mainly for books. EBay was very popular, but people still mailed physical paper money orders for items. It was slower.

The idea of ordering almost everything online and having it arrive next day wasn't around, although this was predicted as the way it would go.

Cell phones were far, far more basic. No smartphones but we had basic texting. People talked on phones far more, but minutes and per-text charges were a concern.

Kids and teenagers didn't all have cell phones the way they do now. It was common for young people not to have their own phone until they were of driving age, and then it was more to have in case of emergency. Many people kept their cell phones literally turned off most of the time.

Home phones / landlines were still everywhere. You memorized important phone numbers.

Cars were about the same, really. Today we have more nav systems and touch screens but a 2000 car is perfectly usable and about the same.

Car GPS was far less common then. Road trips or even just driving places was a bit more challenging, services like MapQuest existed but you often printed turn by turn directions onto paper and had to follow along during the drive. This seems archaic now.

There were nav systems like Garmin and Magellan but they were seen as "fancy / expensive" and still pretty rare.

Drones! These were not around. The average person or even tech enthusiast in 2002 still saw drones as sci-fi / Star Wars-y. The motors, sensors, computers, and batteries weren't good enough yet. Military drones got attention because of Afghanistan but these were huge and still fairly classified.

We didn't think drones would just be flying around like normal in the near future, this wasn't on anybody's radar. The idea that you could just buy a quadracopter able to hover, stabilize itself, take video, and avoid obstacles was seen as some far-future Terminator stuff.

Overall, life was mostly the same really, just far less "always online." Nobody had the Internet in their pockets yet. People's "spheres" or worlds were smaller.

I'd say smartphones, drones, and always-on, streaming Internet and video are the biggest changes.

Every job will be replaced (or change dramatically) on a long enough timescale. That's always true.

The question is the timescale. I believe many blue collar jobs are in fact safe for a while, because humans will be better at those jobs for some time yet. (A decade or two?)

For example, I recently needed a semi-truck trailer refrigeration unit fixed overnight. This involved a technician climbing around the opened unit (a combination of diesel engine and HVAC unit) and physically doing diagnostics, electrical and mechanical checking, pulling and replacing bad parts, "get your hands dirty" technical work.

I find it difficult to imagine even the most advanced currently-existing robot or AI to do this work. That would be deep sci-fi territory. Or at some point this type of mechanism won't be around to need repair, but there are millions of them. They aren't disappearing overnight.

This is not true of every blue collar job. It is likely true of some, or many. Regardless, many changes are coming.

I have a hunch that generative AI for 3D is not orders of magnitude harder than 2D.

Now that much more is understood, they are / soon will be able to train systems to "understand" 3D models quickly.

This plus immersive VR and AR will be like....... Well I'm not even sure what to compare it to. Like the explosion of creativity from the web but all around us in our living spaces.

Interestingly, I just read Sid Meier's memoir (released 2020) and he's surprisingly skeptical of advanced AI.

His view seems to be that AI can simulate smart behavior in specific cases (Civilization) but not approach real intelligence. Not sure I agree, but he's Sid Meier.

Full Dive VR will probably require the Neuralink approach with anything resembling current technology.

It seems likely that large tech companies will have a leverage advantage, due to having world-class GPU/AI datacenters and top AI talent.

Who has some of the largest AI-ready computing centers? Based on my research, NVIDIA, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Tesla are all up there.

A tech-heavy index fund like QQQ seems to me like a solid bet over five to ten years. As always, do your own research etc.

2025 is two years away. We're at "monkey playing pong" currently.

Can it accelerate? Yes, but there are many, many tech and bio problems that need to be solved and then perfected before FDVR.

I admire your optimism but wouldn't be surprised if Neuralink (or equivalent) takes five more years to be usable, and then another five to ten more to reach FDVR level.

AGI could accelerate that timeline if it is able to show us a biotech path we're not seeing. AGI also needs to exist first.

Lately other LLMs have impressed me more than GPT-3.

Models trained for specific use-cases.

Yes

"How should this (thing) likely move? Apply movement parameters."

Unreal Engine 5 is literally free for individual creators.

This is an incredibly pessimistic and already factually disproven view....