And that is the (broken) promise of AI, to bridge that gap. It won’t, not for a long time, and not without great costs. And only if profit is not the motivation, so never.

I agree, and those “problems” will never be fixed by AI. Not everyone who laments that AI should make life easier is a supporter of AI, though. Sometimes it’s a general “[technological] advancement should be for the good of the people, not the good of the select shareholders”.

I am fully against the current application of AI and think it is a horrible waste in so many ways. Yes, the dream of a Star Trek like utopia with “good” AI applications is what my ideal is, but I know in the real world it just generated suffering. What it should do, and what it ever will do are two separate circles that don’t touch in the ven diagram.

That still requires gathering the dirty items together, loading/unloading, keeping track of when it is full/time to run. People saying this mean they want a robot like Rosie from the Jetsons to take care of that sort of housekeeping, not for a machine that makes the task easier to do themself.

Edit: to be clear, I don’t think a washer machine or dishwasher is a hassle and problem that needs solving, but that doesn’t take away from the message of “AI should help make life easier, not replace the creative outlets additional free time should allow”

I disagree that it would be as clear that people would become less isolated. I do agree that people would adapt to life without Internet; we were there once before, we can be there again. However, this dismisses the good the internet has done and neglects to account for the reasons it has turned out the way it has.

I think people would fall into tribalism offline as much as they do online. Maybe it would be regional and physical community based, and they would have more social interaction -in person-, but they would still fall into little insular pockets of one form or another. The cure is a variety of interactions with people of different mindsets, whether that is online or offline. But we, as people, don’t like that. We like the comfy communities where we can form an echochamber together.

Man Shellfish has lived rent free in my mind for over a decade

What about Keyboard Cat :(