The German Personalausweis seems to offer something like this (basically returning a bool indicating whether a user is below or above a certain age), but it seems as if the service indicates which data it requests from the ID card. As a user, I would not be able to state that this or that porn site should only see this age verification.
Not sure how the requestable data are in turn requested by the service.
When people starve and have no means to revolt against their massively overpowered AI/robot overlords, then I'd expect people to go back to sustenance farming (after a massive reduction in population numbers).
A while later, the world is living in a dichotomy of people living off the land and some high tech spots of fully autonomous and self-maintaining robots that do useless work for bored people.
Knowing people and especially the rich, I don't believe in Culture-like utopia, unfortunately, sad as it may be.
This is a problem our ancestors faced with the enclosure of the commons. As dispossessed subsistence farmers, they had no other option to survive other than selling their labor. Their land was privatized and with it their way of life destroyed.
We still live in the world where the commons is enclosed, subsistence farming is effectively illegal.
That's assuming the AI owners would tolerate the subsistence farmers on their lands (it's obvious that in this scenario, all the land would be bought up by the AI owners eventually).
I wouldn't believe that any sort of economy or governmental system would actually survive any of this. Ford was right in that sense, without people with well-paying jobs, no one will buy the services of robots and AIs. The only thing that would help would be the massive redistribution of wealth through inheritance taxation and taxation on ownership itself. Plus UBI, though I'm fairly sceptical of what that would do to a society without purpose.
Cannot find a graph of battery capacity growth for Germany right away, but anecdotally (stories in the news and number of startups I‘m aware of), that market is super hot right now.
Edit: according to [1], numbers predict a coming tsunami of battery installations for Germany
Battery capacity in Germany is growing exponentially, but most batteries being installed right now are home systems that don't help much to stabilize the grid.
If consumers can get up-to-the-minute pricing, they can. It's not uncommon to charge at night and discharge during the day if you're on such a system and it saves you money.
That's actually my favourite answer to the Fermi paradox: when AI and robot development becomes sufficiently advanced and concentrated in the hands of a few, then the economy will collapse completely as everyone will be out of jobs, leading ultimately to AIs and robots out of a job - they only matter if there are still people buying services from them.
People then return to sustenance farming, with a highly reduced population. There will be self-maintained robots doing irrelevant work, but people will go back to farming and a bit of trading.
Only if AI and robot ownership would be in the hands of the masses I'd expect a different long term outcome.
So, to be clear, you are saying you imagine the odds of any kind of intelligent life escaping that, or getting into that situation and ever evolving in a way where it can reach space again, or just not being interested in robots, or being interested on doing space research despite the robots, or anything else that would make it not apply are lower than 0.000000000001%?
Might I have taken the potential for complete economic collapse because no one's got a paying job any more and billionaires are just sitting there, surrounded by their now useless robots, to the too extreme?
Unless you expect people to react really badly (a nuclear war isn't bad enough, from a large margin), then yes. And by "expect", I mean more certain than people get on physics.
The service economy will collapse, finance as a whole will collapse, but whoever controls the actual physical land and resources doesn't actually need any of that stuff and will thrive immensely. We would end up with either an oligarchy that controls land, resources and robots and molds the rest of humanity to their whim through a form of terror, or an independent economy of robots that outcompetes us for resources until we go extinct.
Up to the 80s the science and engineering of the soviet union was top notch, they were mostly equal or even better when you look at the space program. I was thinking similarly to you about the superiority of capitalism to generate engineering progress, but for some stuff I‘m not so sure anymore. China, for example, is an interesting mix of long-term governmental planning and capitalist cambrian explosions.
Not sure cause and effect absolutely determined by now.
For me, the problem is that while I find these videos extremely fascinating, I'm missing the whole interaction part - it is unclear to me how much of these movements are preprogrammed and how far away the engineers are from having these robots being able to respond to complex requests. This mapping from human language to motor action needs to be the next step (something that Nvidia is working towards).
If that is your experience with companies and managers, you have to choose your jobs more wisely. In good companies managers were engineers at some point as well and know what is important technically and motivationally.
Leadership at Cariad also seems to have a background in mechanical engineering, so those processes translate. You need people with hands-on software engineering experience to create a new culture that works for software development.
Am not sure about Cariad leadership, but the three failed projects I have been part of, the leadership was adequately technical(some mechanical, some aeronautical, some electrical, some material and many other, but they had been removed from the ground for so long that they mostly forgot how the actual engineering works and start hiring expensive consultant-management to insulate themselves from all liabilities of dealing with the actual people.
I kid you not, one of the failed project had only 1/7th of actual engineers building the software(and partially hardware), 4/7th were mostly leadership and management and rest 2/7th mostly HR, finance, regulation, legal, supply chain etc. And out of that 1/7th, only 10% were inhouse engineers, rest were expensive rented consultants, who were mostly busy doing politics.
The other two were slightly healthy ratio but managed to burn out the hardworking people by not understanding the actual requirements and introducing 200 steps of red-tape on everything.
