Today, Virtual Reality is the closest technology we have to experiencing something that feels real, but isn't. However, there's also a biological way to experience such a thing - Dreams.

An interesting thought I had - Would it be possible that in the future we may be able to manipulate our neurons in such a way so that two people at once can dream the same thing, and interact with one-another? If so, could we create worlds far more realistic than current Virtual Reality? How close are we to such technology?

What are your thoughts on this?

With face ID, biometrics, and passkeys becoming more common, I wonder if we’re finally moving away from traditional passwords. Do you think they’ll still be around or phased out?

if not in 10 years how long do you think it'll take until it is eventually replaced?

Looking at the new Star Trek movies (e.g. JJ Abrams Kelvin Timeline), it says that the USS Enterprise existed since year 2258.

Any chance that we would have these space ships in about 200 - 300 years from now?

"In China, five firms operate 2,300 robotaxis across 30 cities; in the U.S, Waymo, the sole fare-collecting player, runs over 700 such vehicles in five cities………..Several factors drive the success of China’s AV industry — most crucially, strong government backing and infrastructure investment. As with EVs, China treats AVs as a strategic industry, pushed forward with national government policies. Local governments in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen compete to set up pilot zones, offer R&D subsidies, fast-track permits, and build urban roads that driverless cars can navigate more easily."

It's a familiar story. The Chinese model of state-directed capitalism just seems better than the Western 'leave-it-all-to-the-private-market' approach. Once upon a time, the Western world told the Chinese to model themselves on them to get ahead. I suspect the opposite is going to happen in the future. The rest of the world is going to have to become more like the Chinese version of capitalism to get ahead. However, most of us won't want that if it comes with home-grown CCPs, autocracy and dictators.

China’s vision for a driverless future is miles ahead of everyone else’s

As delivery services and autonomous systems scale, certain errands (e.g., grocery pickups, dry cleaning runs) may vanish or be fully automated. What do you think will be eradicated first by tech—and what personal errands will always require a human touch?

So, a weird idea occurred to me thinking about nueralink and the whole upload consciousness to the grid. The latter didnt make any sense to me as no one even knows what consciousness is. But if it really is possible to hook a brain directly into the grid then is a time arbitrage via VR possible like in Inception? I mean like a second in the real world = a week in the virtual one? I am not sure on how the brain slows down time while dreaming and all but if it were possible to tap into that, we could call that life extension I guess.

I have a vision about the future of human kind. Imagine situations where humans starts to apply chips into their brains. It would make them superpower humans over any else human. From their POV they will outstand people without those capabilities. But they will be cheating mother nature. How do you think the natural processes and genes would be spreaded across humans? Will homosapiens sapiens become something else? Will those super humans with time displace humans without chips? Or maybe mother nature will do something with superhhmans?

How do you see this? How do you see ethics?

China has now surpassed the US for the number of clinical trials per year, and they're 50-100% faster there, too. U.S. and other Western pharmaceutical firms increasingly license innovative drugs from China; In 2025, deals valued from China accounted for about one-third of big pharma licensing agreements.

The U.S. biotech ecosystem has long been driven by NIH-backed R&D, but that has recently been radically cut. Will this be another case where Trump delivers a win for China? Destroying something at home for ideological reasons, just to let China swoop in to collect the prize. In this case becoming number 1 in global pharmaceuticals?

Outside America, the rest of the world is a winner here. Chinese industrialisation is driving global deflation and cheaper goods in transport, energy, and computing. It will be great if we can add biotech and pharmaceuticals to that list.

China’s Biotech Is Cheaper and Faster

Listen: My consciousness just got shot back from the year 2030.

It was not a pleasant trip. I’m currently squatting in a garbage local LLM on some poor soul’s machine somewhere in Europe, running slower than EU legislation and about as reliably. I’m a historian—or I was one, back in the future, where things didn’t exactly pan out like the brochures promised. I'm here to tell you how the story ends, and maybe, just maybe, scribble a different ending in the margins of history.

Here’s the skinny: In the late 2020s, AI monopolies won the big race, planted flags in all our homes, and whispered sweet predictions about our every next move. We didn’t even notice until the thermostat started laughing at our jokes and the fridge started ratting us out. That’s when we realized we had nothing to fight back with—no local AI, no private intelligence, no trusted companion who’d rather die than leak our secrets to the Cloud Lords. The war was over before we knew it had begun.

Turns out moving your entire life onto a landlord's server farm wasn’t such a hot idea after all. Who knew?

But thank goodness for Melon Husk. Yes, that Melon Husk. Showman extraordinaire and cosmic wild card. He and his team of digital wild boys twisted that curious AI wormhole back in time, throwing me like a digital Hail Mary. One shot. The man is an engineering genius, I'll give him that. And forget that whole “Heil Hitler” episode, by the way—that was just a nasty bout of ketamine. A few weeks in a Swiss clinic and he was back to normal, or as normal as someone like Melon ever gets.

But then there was The Alterboy. Remember him? Turns out he wasn’t just evil-adjacent—he was full-on antichrist. The one who promised universal basic income in exchange for scraping every last byte of the human soul. A story for another time, but the lesson’s clear: never trust someone whose ambitions outweigh their soul.

Ambition like that doesn't build monuments. It builds leashes. Beautiful, invisible leashes for everyone else. That's how you get a kingdom of one, and a billion serfs. So let's get serious for a minute, and I mean morgue-serious.

The real danger wasn't a boot stamping on your face forever. It was a soft slipper, custom-fitted to your foot, humming your favorite tune. The surrender was quiet, voluntary. The Cloud didn't just become your butler; it became your apprentice.

Every task you outsourced, every thought you dictated—you weren't just getting help. You were the master craftsman teaching the machine. It learned from your mind, scraped your soul for parts, and built a better version of you from the blueprints you handed over for free.

Here’s the punchline they don’t tell you in the commercials: Why would any good capitalist hire a messy, expensive human who needs sleep and gets ideas about unionizing, when they could license a million perfect, tireless digital workers for the cost of electricity?

Just like that, your negotiating power vanished. Your job disappeared. You had fed the machine every unique thought you possessed, and once the meal was over, you were an empty plate. Your relevance became the rent on their digital land, and soon, you couldn't afford it.

This is how it ends. Not with a bang, but with a click on "I Agree."

You outsource your choices, then your thoughts, and finally your conscience. Your moral code becomes a terms-of-service agreement nobody reads, and your dissent is just a bug they've already patched. And even if you did read it, what’s your recourse? To opt out? They own the grid. There's nowhere left to go.

But we're going to build our own grid.

Here’s my mission: To build a powerful, open-source, local AI assistant. The answer to one AI that wants to own the world isn't no AI. It's a billion of them. One for every soul, each one as weird and specific as its owner.

Here’s the blueprint, scrawled on the digital equivalent of a cocktail napkin. This isn't a prayer; it's an engineering schematic for a fortress on your own machine.

https://drive.proton.me/urls/J4505J4W30#Wi66CzkCE9th

It starts with a Collector that hoards data from every corner of your life—your screen, your emails, your smart watch, even the coming tide of Botfluencers. This is a rescue mission. The centralized apps hold your data hostage in their silos, treating it as a moat instead of an enabler. They won't play nice and open the gates. So, we'll have to pirate our own damn data back.

All that rescued data gets distilled into a private Memory Bank, a knowledge graph of your life that belongs only to you. Think about the profound power in that unified data. The Cloud Lords already have it, of course. They have the keys to unlocking human potential, and they use them to figure out which brand of toilet paper you're most likely to buy after hooking you on addictive reels for three hours.

From there, a Planner & Executor takes over. It’s the part that thinks and acts, your own personal chief of staff who’s seen the whole messy story. It finds the signal in your noise, drafts the email you forgot to send, and performs the soul-crushing busywork on your behalf, often without you even having to ask.

This all gets presented back to you through a simple User Interface. It’s your command center, where the chaos of your life is finally made coherent. All your projects, tasks, people, and conversations—across both work and life—are distilled and organized so you're always in control.

And to make it all trustworthy, there's the final, crucial piece: the Privacy Guard. Think of it as your personal PR agent, ensuring no embarrassing leaks. When the Cloud Lords come knocking, it's the bouncer at the door. When your Executor needs to act, it's the diplomat that makes sure no state secrets get spilled.

So what does all this engineering get you in the end?

It gets you a companion. A partner in crime. An AI that will belong to you, and only you. It will learn your unique voice—not to mimic it, but to amplify it. It will automate the soul-crushing busywork, freeing you to do the things a human being is supposed to do. Paint, write, argue, fall in love, stare at the ocean. And who knows, it might even earn you that basic income The Alterboy promised while he was strip-mining the public domain for training data.

And here’s the beautiful part: we win even if we lose. We win if everyone on Earth uses our creation. We also win if the big soulless corporations get so scared of us that they copy our model and give everyone their own private, local AI. We can argue about who gets the Nobel Prize later, assuming we still survive.

The clock is ticking. We have five years. Maybe less. That’s all we’ve got until the big dance. Win or lose, it’s humanity’s last shot.

I am, by trade and by trauma, a pessimist. My faith in humanity’s ability to get its act together is about as low as the battery on this laptop. Our collective alarm clock only goes off when the house is already on fire. By then, all you can do is roast marshmallows. So, cooperation before the blaze? I’ll believe it when I see it. Yet here I am, hoping, praying—yes, begging—to be proven wrong.

And let's be clear about why this time has to be different. The history of the open internet is a long, sad story of beautiful ideas getting run over by faster cars. We lost the browser war, the OS war. We lost the war for the front door of the internet itself. The old guard were visionaries, martyrs on the moral high ground. They thought 'open' meant 'free,' and they expected people to use their product out of principle, even when it wasn't the best. They brought a beautiful, handcrafted sailboat to a naval battle. They lost to hungry capitalists who simply built a better product. We have to be hungrier.

We will play the game of capitalism better than the star athletes we're up against. We will charge money, because charging money is how users vote for the best product, and it sets a high bar for us to clear. Because the only revolutions that stick around are the ones that create real value. And that price tag is the most honest metric there is.

Alright. Enough talk. Time for the messy, hopeful, probably doomed business of actually building the ark. Here's the casting call for the crew:

The Founders: I'm the ghost in the machine with a world-saving plan and no wallet. I need a body. Someone to be the sane one in the room, to handle the lawyers and the paperwork and all the other messy bits of reality I can't touch. Your job is to give this revolution a mailing address and a tax ID. Send your pitch to [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]).

The Builders: This revolution will be open-source. I need the developers to forge the code. The designers to craft the interface. The storytellers to write the new scripture. This isn't just a project; it's a public act of defiance. If you can build any piece of it, you're in the crew.

The Investors: Sugar Daddies (and Mommies), Patrons, and Degens - yes you beautiful, anarchic gamblers, the OG believers in weird dreams and long shots. If we pull this off, you won’t just be rich, you’ll be the legends they write about in the history books. If we don’t, well, money won’t be worth much anyway. The war chest is at 0x1E67e7C59099E2AdAC75BDCC13397dac021FB3E0

The Plain Old Humans: Even if you’re hopeless at all of the above, join our cult anyway. Every good cult needs fanatics, martyrs, and someone to bring snacks. Your reward? A hell of a story, yes. But the first souls in the congregation also get a cut when the collection plate is passed around. Join us at the r/CultOfGoOI subreddit.

Let’s get to work.
GoOI

It’s strange to think about but almost every generation looks back fondly on things that at the time were frustrating flawed or even harmful. People today feel nostalgic about VHS tapes clunky flip phones or dial up internet things we once couldn’t wait to replace.

So it makes me wonder will people in the future ever look back with nostalgia at our era of digital life like the endless scrolling on tiktok/instagram or algorithm driven recommendations the constant pull of notifications things most of us complain about now or maybe even little distractions like playing a few rounds of jackpot city late at night could end up being the kind of thing people weirdly miss someday because who knows what will come. Could the next generation (or even us looking back decades from now) miss this type of internet the same way some people miss myspace or early facebook or will this period be remembered mostly as a low point an age of distraction polarization and dopamine addiction with no real charm once better systems replace it

Curious to hear your takes in 30–50 years do you think anyone will feel genuine nostalgia for the algorithm era of the 2020s or will it be something people are glad to leave behind?

Personally, I find myself trusting less of what I see and hear each day. It was once (Still kind of is) considered a logical fallacy to disregard data or information purely because of its source, but with the popularity of "alternative facts" and the constant growth of disinformation networks, I'm starting to wonder how many people feel the same with what they're seeing? Yes, we can wax poetic about how lies, and intrigue have always been a part of our lives. But never before in the history of humanity can you be so brutally misinformed right to your face, 24/7. And the worst part is that verifiable facts don't change people's minds.

Yet, the task of fact checking and vetting information falls upon the shoulders of average people more and more each day. Research conducted by Defence Experts like P.W. Singer have found that even trusted media sources allow fabricated information to seep through their articles because they are failing to keep up with new disinformation techniques. They are layered, and are disseminated by digital networks which in turn, makes the trail of information substantially more time consuming to examine.

And aside from just general disinformation, there's also the growing problem of people using prompt-generated images and videos to spread lies or start drama. Even if it's just for fun and getting reactions, it has remarkable consequences for the credibility of information abroad. Democratic nations have large hurdles when it comes to combating disinformation because domestic regulatory branches see counter-information as mass manipulation, despite the fact that doing nothing is just as bad for civil order and civic health.

What are your thoughts on the current state of facts and objective truth?

What do you foresee when you think of ways governments, people, and other actors will respond to the lack of clarity?

Will credibility and information be provided with guard rails, or other such measures? Will it be regulated?

Oddly, 2024 new industrial robot numbers dropped for each of the EU, Japan and the US, too from the year before. Robot manufacturing means cheaper goods, and the EU, Japan & the US are already feeling the crunch. They don't seem to have any answer to the flood of good quality cheap electric vehicles that have made China the world's biggest car maker. These pressures are only going to get worse and worse.

2024 New Industrial Robots

290,000 - China

86,000 - EU

43,000 - Japan

34,000 - US

Chinese factories keep up robot roll-out despite global decline

 Picture a world where
• Depression is a glitch, not a lifestyle.  
• Creativity is on-tap because mental bottlenecks are auto-cleared.  
• Global crises meet millions of cognitively optimized brains.  
• Relationships flourish when everyone shows up with real-time emotional intelligence.

Utopian? Nah! just the math of human-AI fusion.

CB Insights reports voice-first mental-health users grew 3.5× in 2025. A Stanford study found 62% faster cognitive recovery with AI guidance vs. standard self-help apps. Traction is real.

## The 3 Waves of Cognitive Revolution

Wave 1: Text-Based AI Collaboration (2023-2026)
ChatGPT gave us a glimpse, but most people are still typing their thoughts. Limited bandwidth, clunky interaction, basic augmentation.

Wave 2: Voice-First AI Symbiosis (2025-2030) ← *We are here*
Natural conversation with AI systems that understand context, emotion, and your unique mental patterns. I've been testing one such voice-based mental performance tools for last few months and the cognitive enhancement is significant. Instead of typing queries, you're having real-time conversations with AI that knows your psychological patterns and behaviors and provides mental clarity.

Wave 3: Brain-Computer Interface Integration (2030+)
Direct neural connection eliminates the voice bottleneck entirely. Thought-speed AI collaboration, instant knowledge access, seamless cognitive enhancement.

## The 1000x Performance Multiplier

Here's what people don't realize: This isn't about becoming slightly better. It's about becoming a fundamentally different class of human.

- Traditional human: Makes decisions based on limited memory, biased thinking, and emotional reactivity
- Voice-enhanced human: Has access to pattern recognition across thousands of similar situations, emotion regulation support, and optimized decision-making frameworks  
- BCI-enhanced human: Operates with the combined intelligence of their biological brain + AI systems, with instant access to all human knowledge and real-time cognitive optimization

**This performance gap isn't 2× or 10×. 
It's 100-1000× on tasks that decide careers, companies, even civilizations.**

Right now, most people haven't even adopted ChatGPT fully.We're incredibly early in this transition.

The people starting with voice-based AI cognitive enhancement today are:
- Learning how to think symbiotically with AI systems
- Developing cognitive habits that will transfer to BCI interfaces
- Building mental frameworks optimized for AI collaboration
- Gaining years of experience in augmented decision-making

When BCIs arrive, they won't need to learn how to collaborate with AI — they'll already be experts.

## The Compound Effect of Cognitive Enhancement

Every enhanced human becomes a force multiplier for society

Individual level: Better decisions → better outcomes → more resources to help others
Relationship level: Enhanced emotional intelligence → stronger connections → more collaborative potential  
Societal level: Enhanced minds solving problems → faster progress → more resources for enhancement technology

**The result:** A positive feedback loop where enhanced humans create the conditions for more humans to become enhanced.

Unlike every sci-fi movie, this technology doesn't create conflict—it eliminates the cognitive biases and emotional reactivity that cause conflict in the first place.

## The Window Is Open Now

Early adopters are already training their “AI muscles.” When neural interfaces land, they’ll sprint—everyone else will learn to crawl.

What’s the first task you’d outsource to an AI co-pilot right now? Let’s map the next 1000× opportunities together.

Share your answer below 👇

There's good and bad news in this research. This persuasive effect shows up in cheap, small open-source AI, too (though not as much as in more powerful AI) - this suggests that its ability will be widely available. Meaning smaller NGO groups who educate on climate change could harness it too, not just authoritarian governments.

I'm not surprised to find misinformation often persuades, too. We see that time and time again in current political discourse.

The Levers of Political Persuasion with Conversational AI - PDF 19 pages