It's getting to a point where referring to people as NPCs will be a compliment.

It's a similar leap of film becoming as respected of an artform as theater from the earliest silent films to ones like Citizen Kane. The video game equivalent of Citizen Kane probably isn't too far off.

It seems like you're defining free will as the ability to make decisions that are fundamentally unpredictable. That's not what the vast majority of people seem to mean by free will. What people seem to mean by free will is something like they can make decisions that are not completely caused by things they ultimately never chose and/or not completely random. That's the type of free will that seems to matter to people, and it's the type that has moral implications, and it's the type that's impossible.

The thing that keeps me somewhat optimistic is that overall, technology has helped us much more than it has hurt us. Let's try to make that trend continue.

Yeah, reminds me of a late Seinfeld episode about whether or not it's impolite to make an important phone call on a cellphone.

Things are getting worse when it comes to income inequality, but things are getting better when it comes to dire poverty. So much more progress can be made if we focused on the issues that matter most, poverty and global warming.

https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/april-2022-global-poverty-update-world-bank#:~:text=The%20global%20poverty%20rate%20%28at%20the%20US%241.90%20poverty,pace%20in%20more%20recent%20years%2C%20as%20previously%20noted.

JWST has dramatically increased the chances of finding evidence for ET. Try not to die right before it's discovered.

Yeah, I think people underestimate how much corporations focus on the short-term over the long-term.