There's some pretty strong limits on how complex dark matter can be. In particular, its not "clumpy" like regular matter, indicating that if there are any "dark" forces that only act on dark matter particles, they can't be significantly stronger than gravity.
A stronger-than-gravity attractive force would cause dark stars, dark planets, etc to form and a stronger-than-gravity repulsive force would prevent dark matter from clustering around galaxies and the like. But as far as our observations have been able to see, dark matter behaves pretty much exactly as you'd expect when you apply only gravity (of course dark matter isn't particularly easy to observe, being dark and all, so there's a bit of wiggle room but not a whole lot.)
Well hanging a bit on definition, but I'm going to call you wrong. Engineering equipment that can maintain superposition long enough to be useful is very difficult. But once you have that equipment, the computations that are amenable to quantum algorithms are much much easier to compute (exponentially easier, to be precise) and non-quantum algorithms would, in principle, run no worse than a classical computer by simply ignoring the superposition capability and forcing the desired classical state onto the qubits.
So the engineering is much harder, but actual computation is easier.
Given that we're talking about the Big Bang, most likely Genesis. And really, if you're willing to play a little fast and loose with interpretation:
1) Light created. Check. 4) Heavenly bodies (in particular, the sun) "controlling" day and night. Check. 2) Firmament created. Check. 5) Creatures come to exist. Check. 3) Water recedes to leave dry land. Check. 6) People come to exist. Check. 7) God rests. Given the above time scales, maybe that's why we haven't heard from him in 6000 years? It could be another hundred million before he gets back to work for all we know. So lets call that a Check too.
Note that the ordering is a bit out, and of course breaking up all of the universe' evolution into a couple dozen paragraphs leaves just a tiny bit out to say the least, but it can be loosely interpreted to follow the universe and Earth's actual history if you're you're not a literalist.
So for me God exists and my existence is the proof
Maybe you're right.. who am I to say? But that's not "proof." I could just as easily claim that "my God is a carton of milk and my ability to eat soggy cereal is the proof."
I don't mean to mock your faith.. just arguing that what you call "proof" is indeed still just taken on faith.
Then again if you want to get really philosophical, even your own existence that you're premising your "proof" on is up for debate;).. There's actually no way to prove that you (and the rest of the universe) aren't just some figment of my fever dream and I may wake up at any moment and you all just poof into nothingness.
The NSA is not known for flawless performance in keeping secrets.
Nor is anybody else, including yourself. But just like we trust locksmiths to own and responsibly use lock picks, somewhere along the way we'll have to trust someone with these master keys. I'm just proposing a way to limit the amount of damage that trust can do should it be broken (intentionally or otherwise.)
making sure it doesn't reveal any keys without a court order
While there will always be the odd unscrupulous person who decides to covertly snoop on their girlfriend's phone or whatever, the whole point of the plan is that revealing a single key is relatively worthless beyond the specific phone its tied to. Yes there could possibly be 2 or 3 other phones in the world that happen to use the same key but good luck finding them. And if the NSA intentionally releases the entire key database, well then we have bigger problems anyway. (Also, I used the NSA as an example as they're the most relevant agency with regards to cryptography, but you could potentially have a 1-of-3 system where the NSA and FBI each have their own set of keys or whatever, scaled to however many agencies "we" decide should be able to access your phone, potentially including international equivalents of such agencies.)
One thing I specifically didn't address is the fact that strong encryption schemes are well documented all over the place by this point and if you're really worried, you can always just roll your own and know for sure that you aren't being spied on.
The great thing about Windows is that it will do exactly what you tell it to do.
Not anymore. MS took a look at Apple and wondered why they were so popular, and decided the solution was to take all of the worst aspects of Mac and jam them into Win10, and then add a few more terrible aspects of their own.
I mean its certainly better than the Metro disaster, but the main reason I've always hated Apple products is because they insist you do things exactly one way and if you don't like it then tough beans. Not that I was ever one to customize Windows all that much but the customizations I did do, I certainly did with purpose. And now MS is slowing wandering towards the "we know better than you" mentality that Apple has always espoused.
There is one major difference: malware. Whether you want to believe its due to the larger market share or if you want to blindly believe that Windows is somehow inherently less secure than any other OS for "reasons," there's no escaping the fact that most malware is written for Windows.
And no a gaming laptop isn't nonsense. Its certainly not going to be good enough if you want to be a top tier gamer, but as long as you have an external mouse and sufficient hardware specs, laptops are perfectly usable as gaming machines. It takes some adjusting if you're used to a desktop with detached screen/keyboard of course but I've done it before and its not actually terrible after you've given yourself that adjustment period.
1) You can't. Updates come whether you like it or not. You can't even put off the reboot for more than a week. That said, I think you can still disable the entire Windows Update system via registry hacks, but then you don't get any updates and that's an even bigger risk.
2,3,4) This is for the submitter's 14 year old kid. Good luck with that. A better suggestion is to give the kid an install disk and tell him that when it gets screwed up, its up to him to fix it. That will give him both more caution (at least after the first time!) and a little bit of technical expertise.
Its not about spying by the manufacturer. Its about attack vectors coming from random crappy websites. We're talking about a 14 year old kid here. 90% of the laptop's non-gaming use will be questionable porn sites.
Speaking of which, whatever browser you choose make sure to get things like Adblock/uBlock, Noscript, etc (though I imagine that part is the same on Mac anyway so hopefully the story author already knows that much.)
Actually that said, I can think of at least one way that might be plausible without placing undue burden on the manufacturers.
The NSA (or whoever gets to control this) publishes a list of say a few billion public/private key pairs (well technically they'd only publish the public half of course!)
Then devices can have a 1-of-2 encryption scheme (that is, 2 keys of which either can equally unlock it.) One of the keys is the user key, and the other key gets encrypted with one of the NSA's public keys. The specific NSA key used is then stored on the device in a way that can be accessed without needing to unlock it (a sticker isn't sufficient since bad guys would just remove it and then the NSA wouldn't know which key to use, so it would have to be some internal port they could plug into or something, but the point is you don't have to protect it from hackers since its a public key.)
So the actual "back door" key on the device is protected (as long as the NSA can keep their private key list secret) without actually having to make it universal or placing a huge burden on the manufacturers beyond using a slightly more complex encryption scheme and figuring out a way to make the public key available that can't just be scraped off by a bad guy.
As long as its insecure and useless. That sounds great. It would be nice if these politicians would get a clue about how math works before making stupid claims like this.
I mean yes you can bake a "back door" into basically any encryption scheme. But if that back door ever gets compromised (which it almost certainly will, sooner or later,) there is no way to fix or change it, and adding a way to fix or change it would itself be yet another attack vector and probably even harder to keep closed than trusting the FBI or whoever to keep a secret universal key secret.
Seriously though.. antivirus software is software, and many of them are very complex pieces of software given that they all seem to incorporate some combination of the primary AV, a firewall, malware scanners, webpage scanners, filesystem monitors, kitchen sinks, etc.
Its kind of like expecting that your doctor can't get sick just because she's a doctor.
The eugenics solution isn't exactly great either though, even if its not in the form of actively culling people.
Is this gene dominant? If not, then there's a high probability that his children will be perfectly fine, and his children's children and so on given that its a rare condition and the chance that he hooks up with another person who also has it is therefore slim.
But even if its dominant, you never know what his life may bring. Perhaps his experience will lead him into the field of biology and he'll make breakthroughs there. And even if he ends up being just a "normal" person, perhaps his specific condition will have a cure by the time he's of age to have his own kids. That's a lot of "ifs" to be sure, but there's a zero percent chance for any of that to happen if we just let him die.
Never mind the moral implications of letting a child die that you have the ability to save.
Who needs to learn? Most of the folk generally considered to have influenced or caused the crash in 2008 made out like bandits. And those same people are currently lobbying to remove the protections Obama put in place to try and prevent another such crash, which they'll probably succeed at (and I think already have partly) given how much Trump loves undoing everything Obama did, without knowing or caring about the purposes for any particular regulation -- simply having Obama's name on it is enough for Trump to hate it.
The people I'm talking about did learn. They learned that they can get rich off of the suffering of the masses, and then when that goes belly up they learned that the government will give them another $700bn to try and undo all of the problems they caused, much of which they also just pocketed.
All us average people with no political and almost no economic influence have learned is that those people are scum who will happily screw over the entire world for a dollar, and that there's pretty much fuck all we can do about it when they try again.
We use the most common definition here: Socialist: Anything we don't like. Capitalist: Anything that keeps the status quo.
What people forget is that the US is already highly socialized: You aren't paying for your own roads, your own police force, your own fire department, your own military, etc. All of those things are socialized goods already. But most of the anti-socialist people just ignore those facts, or they think that if the government pays a private contractor to build the road that its somehow capitalist. Its not, the taxpayer is still paying for it, its just being filtered through an additional layer of obfuscation.
There may or may not be benefits to that extra layer.. It allows for bidding and thus at least a bit of competition, but often the bidding process itself is highly flawed either because bidders severely understate their costs knowing that once they have the contract its unlikely to be taken away, or in an unfortunate number of cases the bidding is just flat out skewed or ignored all together in favor of nepotism as with the recent Whitefish Energy scandal.
But even with the bidding introducing some capitalist aspects, fundamentally the road is still being built with public dollars and is a social good.
Healthcare, the current poster boy for capitalism vs socialism.. is a social system, even without Obamacare. Your premiums (whether you pay them yourself or your employer does) all go into a big pool and then get distributed by the insurance company as they see fit -- sounds very similar to how the government takes taxes to provide social services, but with less oversight.
- Voice recognition works OK for simple 2 or 3 word commands, but its still kind of spotty for general conversation.
- Language translation is still a fairly large disaster, at least if Google Translate is anything to go by.
- Voice generation is still pretty spotty and robotic and drives quite fast into the uncanny valley.
Now the translation aspect may or may not be necessary for tech support (why not just build the AI in whatever language you're trying to serve?) and its by far the worst of the three points I've listed, but the other two still need a good few years of work I would say before people would accept them as commonplace and not just get frustrated.
Then again, even if "a good few years" is a decade or more away, I suppose that's still soon enough that its worth trying to preempt the problem.
Because they don't care. Support is a cost center for most companies and when 90% of your calls can be resolved by "did you try restarting it?" or "did you plug it in?" its not worth the cost of highly skilled labor (even in cheap labor countries) to handle the other 10% that have actual problems with the product.
That's of course also why they have tiered support as well -- they only need 10% of the level 2 techs and maybe 1% of level 3 techs that they do for level 1. Unfortunately level 2 these days seems to be almost as clueless as level 1 in a lot of call centers, and level 3 is like getting an audience with the king.
That just means they have to incentivize a foreign manufacturer to build a local plant and source local materials. I don't know what kind of incentives that India is willing or able to provide but I'm sure they could come up with something.. its not like they're a small powerless country.
Horses are a tool used by humans. We switched to a new tool.
Most humans are a tool used by other humans as well. And they will get replaced. Keep in mind that the unemployment rate during the great depression was 25%. We don't need "every" human to be unemployed to run into problems.. not even a majority of them. And a lot of it seems to be focused on things like the service industry which isn't well known for employing people who have a huge array of better options..
The bigger question is: Retrain them for what? They lose their job to an AI today so they retrain for a new job.. and by next year that job is being replaced as well. If the path of technology continues as it has historically, AI replacement will likely follow an exponential growth pattern and once it finally starts taking things over, it will quickly start taking other things over until there's nothing left to take and the vast majority of humans are left unemployed.
The upside is that production and transportation costs of basically everything will trend to zero since machines are close to free after their initial purchase cost, and that itself will also trend to zero. Raw materials of course will always have a cost -- the planet only has so much of everything and the more that gets used, the harder it is to obtain the next little bit. Designing these machines will likely have a cost for the foreseeable future, though its entirely possible that even the task of designing new machines could also be taken over by other machines as well, leaving raw materials as the only significant cost of goods.
We're probably jumping the gun on it a bit given that AI is only starting to take off and there's nothing beyond hype and theory suggesting that it will ever be as big a problem as is claimed.
But that said, if it does get to that point then we'll be at a whole new era in human history. It would be the first time literally ever where our time and labor isn't worth anything. Compare the plight to that of say, horses when the automobile was introduced. Sure there's still a few niches where horses can outperform cars, but those are few and far between.
Probably more than they do now. There's not a whole lot of people who think their jobs give their lives meaning -- its just a way to get money so that they can pursue other things that they hope will be more meaningful.
I don't think having things to do is a problem, if there's low or no cost to doing things.
The problem with people right now that go "squirrely," as you put is isn't that they don't have things they want to do -- its almost always a situation where they can't afford to do the things they want to do. Free them from that cost limitation and most people would probably do alright.
I mean don't get me wrong.. there's a lot of them who would decide that what they want to do is say, "heroine and lots of it!" Some will turn to bloodsports and other (currently) underground activities. And the first generation or so to hit this scenario will likely have trouble coming to grips with it after a life of being trained to work for a pissant wage while their boss goes to Hawaii every 3 months. These things would sort themselves out over time though and humanity would find itself at a new equilibrium.
And don't forget -- through much of human history, we had fuck all to do. Old-timey farmers (ie: a large portion of the population until the last century or so) only really did heavy work a few weeks a year for planting and harvesting. To the extent that there's been the occasional instance where wars would get paused so that the soldiers could go home and bring in the harvest and things like that -- they had enough free time that they could go out fighting for king and country over the summer and still be have time to maintain their crops for the most part (with I'm sure wife and children picking up the slack for the much lighter summer workload, but still..)
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There's some pretty strong limits on how complex dark matter can be. In particular, its not "clumpy" like regular matter, indicating that if there are any "dark" forces that only act on dark matter particles, they can't be significantly stronger than gravity.
A stronger-than-gravity attractive force would cause dark stars, dark planets, etc to form and a stronger-than-gravity repulsive force would prevent dark matter from clustering around galaxies and the like. But as far as our observations have been able to see, dark matter behaves pretty much exactly as you'd expect when you apply only gravity (of course dark matter isn't particularly easy to observe, being dark and all, so there's a bit of wiggle room but not a whole lot.)
Well hanging a bit on definition, but I'm going to call you wrong. Engineering equipment that can maintain superposition long enough to be useful is very difficult. But once you have that equipment, the computations that are amenable to quantum algorithms are much much easier to compute (exponentially easier, to be precise) and non-quantum algorithms would, in principle, run no worse than a classical computer by simply ignoring the superposition capability and forcing the desired classical state onto the qubits.
So the engineering is much harder, but actual computation is easier.
Given that we're talking about the Big Bang, most likely Genesis. And really, if you're willing to play a little fast and loose with interpretation:
1) Light created. Check.
4) Heavenly bodies (in particular, the sun) "controlling" day and night. Check.
2) Firmament created. Check.
5) Creatures come to exist. Check.
3) Water recedes to leave dry land. Check.
6) People come to exist. Check.
7) God rests. Given the above time scales, maybe that's why we haven't heard from him in 6000 years? It could be another hundred million before he gets back to work for all we know. So lets call that a Check too.
Note that the ordering is a bit out, and of course breaking up all of the universe' evolution into a couple dozen paragraphs leaves just a tiny bit out to say the least, but it can be loosely interpreted to follow the universe and Earth's actual history if you're you're not a literalist.
So for me God exists and my existence is the proof
Maybe you're right.. who am I to say? But that's not "proof." I could just as easily claim that "my God is a carton of milk and my ability to eat soggy cereal is the proof."
I don't mean to mock your faith.. just arguing that what you call "proof" is indeed still just taken on faith.
Then again if you want to get really philosophical, even your own existence that you're premising your "proof" on is up for debate ;).. There's actually no way to prove that you (and the rest of the universe) aren't just some figment of my fever dream and I may wake up at any moment and you all just poof into nothingness.
The NSA is not known for flawless performance in keeping secrets.
Nor is anybody else, including yourself. But just like we trust locksmiths to own and responsibly use lock picks, somewhere along the way we'll have to trust someone with these master keys. I'm just proposing a way to limit the amount of damage that trust can do should it be broken (intentionally or otherwise.)
making sure it doesn't reveal any keys without a court order
While there will always be the odd unscrupulous person who decides to covertly snoop on their girlfriend's phone or whatever, the whole point of the plan is that revealing a single key is relatively worthless beyond the specific phone its tied to. Yes there could possibly be 2 or 3 other phones in the world that happen to use the same key but good luck finding them. And if the NSA intentionally releases the entire key database, well then we have bigger problems anyway. (Also, I used the NSA as an example as they're the most relevant agency with regards to cryptography, but you could potentially have a 1-of-3 system where the NSA and FBI each have their own set of keys or whatever, scaled to however many agencies "we" decide should be able to access your phone, potentially including international equivalents of such agencies.)
One thing I specifically didn't address is the fact that strong encryption schemes are well documented all over the place by this point and if you're really worried, you can always just roll your own and know for sure that you aren't being spied on.
The great thing about Windows is that it will do exactly what you tell it to do.
Not anymore. MS took a look at Apple and wondered why they were so popular, and decided the solution was to take all of the worst aspects of Mac and jam them into Win10, and then add a few more terrible aspects of their own.
I mean its certainly better than the Metro disaster, but the main reason I've always hated Apple products is because they insist you do things exactly one way and if you don't like it then tough beans. Not that I was ever one to customize Windows all that much but the customizations I did do, I certainly did with purpose. And now MS is slowing wandering towards the "we know better than you" mentality that Apple has always espoused.
There is one major difference: malware. Whether you want to believe its due to the larger market share or if you want to blindly believe that Windows is somehow inherently less secure than any other OS for "reasons," there's no escaping the fact that most malware is written for Windows.
And no a gaming laptop isn't nonsense. Its certainly not going to be good enough if you want to be a top tier gamer, but as long as you have an external mouse and sufficient hardware specs, laptops are perfectly usable as gaming machines. It takes some adjusting if you're used to a desktop with detached screen/keyboard of course but I've done it before and its not actually terrible after you've given yourself that adjustment period.
1) You can't. Updates come whether you like it or not. You can't even put off the reboot for more than a week. That said, I think you can still disable the entire Windows Update system via registry hacks, but then you don't get any updates and that's an even bigger risk.
2,3,4) This is for the submitter's 14 year old kid. Good luck with that. A better suggestion is to give the kid an install disk and tell him that when it gets screwed up, its up to him to fix it. That will give him both more caution (at least after the first time!) and a little bit of technical expertise.
How do you even start IE on a modern Windows 10 machine?
1) Open Edge.
2) Go to damned near any website.
3) Click the "try it in IE button" when it tells you Edge isn't compatible with that site.
Its not about spying by the manufacturer. Its about attack vectors coming from random crappy websites. We're talking about a 14 year old kid here. 90% of the laptop's non-gaming use will be questionable porn sites.
Speaking of which, whatever browser you choose make sure to get things like Adblock/uBlock, Noscript, etc (though I imagine that part is the same on Mac anyway so hopefully the story author already knows that much.)
Actually that said, I can think of at least one way that might be plausible without placing undue burden on the manufacturers.
The NSA (or whoever gets to control this) publishes a list of say a few billion public/private key pairs (well technically they'd only publish the public half of course!)
Then devices can have a 1-of-2 encryption scheme (that is, 2 keys of which either can equally unlock it.) One of the keys is the user key, and the other key gets encrypted with one of the NSA's public keys. The specific NSA key used is then stored on the device in a way that can be accessed without needing to unlock it (a sticker isn't sufficient since bad guys would just remove it and then the NSA wouldn't know which key to use, so it would have to be some internal port they could plug into or something, but the point is you don't have to protect it from hackers since its a public key.)
So the actual "back door" key on the device is protected (as long as the NSA can keep their private key list secret) without actually having to make it universal or placing a huge burden on the manufacturers beyond using a slightly more complex encryption scheme and figuring out a way to make the public key available that can't just be scraped off by a bad guy.
As long as its insecure and useless. That sounds great. It would be nice if these politicians would get a clue about how math works before making stupid claims like this.
I mean yes you can bake a "back door" into basically any encryption scheme. But if that back door ever gets compromised (which it almost certainly will, sooner or later,) there is no way to fix or change it, and adding a way to fix or change it would itself be yet another attack vector and probably even harder to keep closed than trusting the FBI or whoever to keep a secret universal key secret.
News at 1942!
Seriously though.. antivirus software is software, and many of them are very complex pieces of software given that they all seem to incorporate some combination of the primary AV, a firewall, malware scanners, webpage scanners, filesystem monitors, kitchen sinks, etc.
Its kind of like expecting that your doctor can't get sick just because she's a doctor.
The eugenics solution isn't exactly great either though, even if its not in the form of actively culling people.
Is this gene dominant? If not, then there's a high probability that his children will be perfectly fine, and his children's children and so on given that its a rare condition and the chance that he hooks up with another person who also has it is therefore slim.
But even if its dominant, you never know what his life may bring. Perhaps his experience will lead him into the field of biology and he'll make breakthroughs there. And even if he ends up being just a "normal" person, perhaps his specific condition will have a cure by the time he's of age to have his own kids. That's a lot of "ifs" to be sure, but there's a zero percent chance for any of that to happen if we just let him die.
Never mind the moral implications of letting a child die that you have the ability to save.
a propensity to never fucking learn.
Who needs to learn? Most of the folk generally considered to have influenced or caused the crash in 2008 made out like bandits. And those same people are currently lobbying to remove the protections Obama put in place to try and prevent another such crash, which they'll probably succeed at (and I think already have partly) given how much Trump loves undoing everything Obama did, without knowing or caring about the purposes for any particular regulation -- simply having Obama's name on it is enough for Trump to hate it.
The people I'm talking about did learn. They learned that they can get rich off of the suffering of the masses, and then when that goes belly up they learned that the government will give them another $700bn to try and undo all of the problems they caused, much of which they also just pocketed.
All us average people with no political and almost no economic influence have learned is that those people are scum who will happily screw over the entire world for a dollar, and that there's pretty much fuck all we can do about it when they try again.
We use the most common definition here:
Socialist: Anything we don't like.
Capitalist: Anything that keeps the status quo.
What people forget is that the US is already highly socialized: You aren't paying for your own roads, your own police force, your own fire department, your own military, etc. All of those things are socialized goods already. But most of the anti-socialist people just ignore those facts, or they think that if the government pays a private contractor to build the road that its somehow capitalist. Its not, the taxpayer is still paying for it, its just being filtered through an additional layer of obfuscation.
There may or may not be benefits to that extra layer.. It allows for bidding and thus at least a bit of competition, but often the bidding process itself is highly flawed either because bidders severely understate their costs knowing that once they have the contract its unlikely to be taken away, or in an unfortunate number of cases the bidding is just flat out skewed or ignored all together in favor of nepotism as with the recent Whitefish Energy scandal.
But even with the bidding introducing some capitalist aspects, fundamentally the road is still being built with public dollars and is a social good.
Healthcare, the current poster boy for capitalism vs socialism.. is a social system, even without Obamacare. Your premiums (whether you pay them yourself or your employer does) all go into a big pool and then get distributed by the insurance company as they see fit -- sounds very similar to how the government takes taxes to provide social services, but with less oversight.
- Voice recognition works OK for simple 2 or 3 word commands, but its still kind of spotty for general conversation.
- Language translation is still a fairly large disaster, at least if Google Translate is anything to go by.
- Voice generation is still pretty spotty and robotic and drives quite fast into the uncanny valley.
Now the translation aspect may or may not be necessary for tech support (why not just build the AI in whatever language you're trying to serve?) and its by far the worst of the three points I've listed, but the other two still need a good few years of work I would say before people would accept them as commonplace and not just get frustrated.
Then again, even if "a good few years" is a decade or more away, I suppose that's still soon enough that its worth trying to preempt the problem.
Because they don't care. Support is a cost center for most companies and when 90% of your calls can be resolved by "did you try restarting it?" or "did you plug it in?" its not worth the cost of highly skilled labor (even in cheap labor countries) to handle the other 10% that have actual problems with the product.
That's of course also why they have tiered support as well -- they only need 10% of the level 2 techs and maybe 1% of level 3 techs that they do for level 1. Unfortunately level 2 these days seems to be almost as clueless as level 1 in a lot of call centers, and level 3 is like getting an audience with the king.
Most corrupt is North Korea at 176th and a score of 8.
Can it still be called corruption when that's practically the definition of their political system?
That just means they have to incentivize a foreign manufacturer to build a local plant and source local materials. I don't know what kind of incentives that India is willing or able to provide but I'm sure they could come up with something.. its not like they're a small powerless country.
Horses are a tool used by humans. We switched to a new tool.
Most humans are a tool used by other humans as well. And they will get replaced. Keep in mind that the unemployment rate during the great depression was 25%. We don't need "every" human to be unemployed to run into problems.. not even a majority of them. And a lot of it seems to be focused on things like the service industry which isn't well known for employing people who have a huge array of better options..
The bigger question is: Retrain them for what? They lose their job to an AI today so they retrain for a new job.. and by next year that job is being replaced as well. If the path of technology continues as it has historically, AI replacement will likely follow an exponential growth pattern and once it finally starts taking things over, it will quickly start taking other things over until there's nothing left to take and the vast majority of humans are left unemployed.
The upside is that production and transportation costs of basically everything will trend to zero since machines are close to free after their initial purchase cost, and that itself will also trend to zero. Raw materials of course will always have a cost -- the planet only has so much of everything and the more that gets used, the harder it is to obtain the next little bit. Designing these machines will likely have a cost for the foreseeable future, though its entirely possible that even the task of designing new machines could also be taken over by other machines as well, leaving raw materials as the only significant cost of goods.
We're probably jumping the gun on it a bit given that AI is only starting to take off and there's nothing beyond hype and theory suggesting that it will ever be as big a problem as is claimed.
But that said, if it does get to that point then we'll be at a whole new era in human history. It would be the first time literally ever where our time and labor isn't worth anything. Compare the plight to that of say, horses when the automobile was introduced. Sure there's still a few niches where horses can outperform cars, but those are few and far between.
Probably more than they do now. There's not a whole lot of people who think their jobs give their lives meaning -- its just a way to get money so that they can pursue other things that they hope will be more meaningful.
I don't think having things to do is a problem, if there's low or no cost to doing things.
The problem with people right now that go "squirrely," as you put is isn't that they don't have things they want to do -- its almost always a situation where they can't afford to do the things they want to do. Free them from that cost limitation and most people would probably do alright.
I mean don't get me wrong.. there's a lot of them who would decide that what they want to do is say, "heroine and lots of it!" Some will turn to bloodsports and other (currently) underground activities. And the first generation or so to hit this scenario will likely have trouble coming to grips with it after a life of being trained to work for a pissant wage while their boss goes to Hawaii every 3 months. These things would sort themselves out over time though and humanity would find itself at a new equilibrium.
And don't forget -- through much of human history, we had fuck all to do. Old-timey farmers (ie: a large portion of the population until the last century or so) only really did heavy work a few weeks a year for planting and harvesting. To the extent that there's been the occasional instance where wars would get paused so that the soldiers could go home and bring in the harvest and things like that -- they had enough free time that they could go out fighting for king and country over the summer and still be have time to maintain their crops for the most part (with I'm sure wife and children picking up the slack for the much lighter summer workload, but still..)