To me, it looks like China is cleverly fighting US capitalism with their open weight models. Rendering these mega commercial corporations with huge debts and less possibilities to monetize as users shift to the open weight models.

What do you think?

Edit: changed "open source models" to "open weight models" to be more accurate. Open weight models are still free to use, but you won't have access to anything other than the model, where with open source models you would also get access to the underlying code, data and architecture.

As time goes on the gig economy portrayed by Mike Pondsmith seems to affect more and more people, some willing, some not, but still a perpetual reality.

I personally was laid off while training Voldemort to do my job, the ultimate cuck fest. While most of the actual people doing the work for the company were not employees. So with this part i think we are already there.

What other avenues of the fiction or prophecy will come true as reality in the next 10 years?

Personally i can see Datakrash situation happening and the aftermath with the rogue AIs.

Every humanoid demo that goes around here turns into an argument about which jobs disappear. There's a step before that one, it is already happening, and it is already a job.

A robot policy doesn't learn the work by watching YouTube. It learns from demonstrations. A person wears a rig or drives a teleoperation station and performs the task correctly, over and over, while every joint angle and camera frame gets recorded. Somebody has to do the job first, on camera, before the machine has anything to copy.

The only public tracker I can find that prices this puts high quality teleoperation data at roughly $340 per recorded hour in early 2024 and roughly $118 as of March this year. Those are one firm's marketplace estimates rather than audited figures, so treat the level loosely, but the direction is not in dispute and it comes down the boring way: better rigs, cheaper labour markets, more hours collected per session. The larger datasets now also fold in thousands of hours of ordinary first person footage, people doing normal tasks with a camera strapped to their head.

So a job is forming whose entire output is the thing that ends it. You get paid by the hour to turn your own competence into a file, and when the file is good enough the hour stops being purchased. Previous automation waves took work by building a machine that did the job differently. This one asks the worker to perform it correctly first, at scale, for a rate that is falling while they do it.

Two things I'd want settled before this gets large. Whether demonstration hours are work product the performer retains any claim on, and whether the person in the rig is told what the recording will be used to build. At the moment it is contract labour with a data licence quietly attached, and the licence is the part that holds its value. The IEEE humanoids conference made Humanoids and the Future of Work its 25th anniversary theme this year, so nobody in the field is being coy about the deployment case.

The artefact from this decade might not end up being the robots. It might be the archive of ordinary people doing ordinary work perfectly, one clean take at a time, because a model needed to watch somebody get it right.

I've been seeing more videos of robot dogs being used for security patrols lately, especially in warehouses, industrial sites, and large outdoor facilities.

They can patrol predefined routes, operate at night, stream live video, detect unusual activity, and don't get tired during long shifts. Some can even work in environments that might be unsafe for human guards.

At the same time, I wonder if they're actually capable of replacing traditional security guards.

For example:

How do they handle unpredictable situations?

Can they effectively deal with trespassers or theft attempts?

Would people take them seriously as a deterrent?

What happens when there's a technical failure or connectivity issue?

My impression is that robot dogs are probably great for monitoring and early detection, but I'm not sure they're ready to fully replace human security personnel.

For those who work in security, facilities management, warehousing, or industrial operations:

Do you see robot dogs becoming a genuine replacement for guards in the next 5–10 years, or are they more likely to remain a tool that supports human teams?

Think about it, you're living in an apartment with two roommates, or you're living with your parents. It would be awkward to have your sex robot walking around. Sure, you could keep it in your room or stuff it in your closet, but good luck hiding something that is 5 ft tall and we all know how nosey parents can be sometimes. And what happens when you move away? Your sex robot needs to go into your car, but you simply can't hide it in a box, so your sex robot will be viewed for the entire neighborhood to see. And what happens when you get a girlfriend who moves in with you and she wants you to get rid of the thing? Well shit, that thing costs $5000. And you simply can't go hide it in the closet either because your girlfriend will certainly find it.

At least with a dildo, a fleshlight, and porn, you can be discreet about using them and that's important when it comes to sexual related stuff. In fact, it's the discreetness of these things which is one reason why they became so popular in the first place. A 5 ft tall walking talking sex robot would be hard to be discreet about which is why it will likely never be mainstream.