As far as I know, the easiest ways are still:

1. Plant some fast-growing plants
2. Harvest them
3. Bury the biomass or convert it to biochar and bury that

Repeat.

A dedicated model that's fine tuned for specific tasks and then the temperature set to not allow variation is the key. If you want some variation, have a separate agent/model do that part, but some things you don't want creativity once you'd defined what the job is and have it working. I think the weak point in all that you mentioned is still the voice detection. It doesn't take much to break understanding of a clear command, much less some not said well or low or noise in the room. At best you have the system say it didn't get that and to try again. Don't let it try and figure out what you said, that will end badly at some point.

You don't want to know what the Tupac hologram had to do to pay his electric bill. I'll give you a hint. Butt stuff.

To be clear tony stark was rich. So in the realm of that:

there's small bad holograms for cheap I think, probably with enough money you could make a built in holographic display somehow. It's just that no one usually does that because it's a waste of money and resources.

Deliver your drinks from the other room, I'm sure for rich people building a home with things like that in mind is possible. For the average household I'm not so sure. Robots can deliver food ok-ish (autonomous delivery robots) but I'm sure they need to be calibrated to the exact home layout. And anthropomorphic robots are turning out to be an incredibly inefficient design in general. Building the robot to serve it's specific purpose seems to be way more useful.

Thinking AI is kind of where we recently made the most progress and imo we're basically there. Deploy whisper for speech detection, maybe some cleanup in between, then an LLM like Qwen for thinking and run all your appliances as tool calls. The AI will automatically know how to handle it. I would say for simple things it'll probably get it right 95% of the time "lights on" "set an alarm" etc. That said, for more complex tasks like "plan a trip to the museum at x and share it with x contacts" these AI models are not there yet. They might get it right somewhere between 30%-50% of the time. AI models are great now, but they're not consistent enough and they are too resource hungry. Scientists are currently focusing on better compression so models get smaller and more people can just use them on their own hardware but it'll still be a while.

Conclusion: We're at like 80%. They kind of work. Depending on the dedication, money and nature of the tasks.

Ok... here goes something absurd:
I found that the Neutrino Background, emitted when the Universe was one second old, has a cosmological redshift of... hang on to your Stetson, fellas... z = one billion.

Using an online redshift calculator from UCLA, the distance works out to this ballpark number, which can't be right, can it?
46,374,897,217,000,000,000 light years.

Because the point of battle is bloodshed, not digital sport contests.

Russian war casualties just reached 1.5 million. Think of the price of a robot able to traverse a wildness and flight...then multiply it times 1.5 million.

People are cheap to some/most leaders.

Without getting into the shortcomings of AI or the dangers of autonomous weapons platforms: it's cheaper to send in the meatbags

Personally, I believe a country that's most likely to embrace this technology would be one whose economy is stimulated by wars of aggression: therefore cost matters much more than trivial details like casualty figures and operator safety

Because AI isn't reliable enough to stay on task until lunch time. Which would also be twice as long as the batteries last.

Even a marine has a magnitude greater mental capacity, and even more energy density.

Academically more able? This could inspire. 'To most people through history it has always seemed obvious that the teeming diversity of life, the uncanny perfection with which living organisms are equipped to survive and multiply, and the bewildering complexity of living machinery, can only have come about through divine creation. Yet repeatedly it has occurred to isolated thinkers that there might be an alternative to supernatural creation. The notion of species changing into other species was in the air, like so many other good ideas, in ancient Greece. It went into eclipse until the 18th century, when it resurfaced in the minds of such advanced thinkers as Pierre de Maupertuis, Erasmus Darwin and the man who styled himself the Chevalier de Lamarck. In the first half of the 19th century the idea became not uncommon in intellectual circles, especially geological ones, but always in a rather vague form and without any clear picture of the mechanism by which change might come about. It was Charles Darwin (Erasmus's grandson) who, spurred into print by Alfred Russel Wallace's independent discovery of his principle of natural selection, finally established the theory of evolution by the publication, in 1859, of the famous book whose title is usually abbreviated to the Origin of Species. He amassed an overwhelming quantity of evidence for the fact that evolution has occurred, and, together with Wallace (independently) he thought up the only known workable theory of the reason why it leads to adaptive improvement – natural selection. Some fossil evidence was known to Darwin but he made more use of other evidence, less direct but in many ways more convincing, for the fact that evolution had taken place You should distinguish two quite distinct parts of Darwin's contribution.. the rapid alteration of animals and plants under domestication was persuasive evidence both for the fact that evolutionary change was possible and for the effectiveness of the artificial equivalent of natural selection. Darwin was particularly persuaded by the evidence from the geographical dispersion of animals. the presence of local island races, for example, is easily explicable by the evolution theory: the creation theory could explain them only by unparsimoniously assuming numerous 'foci of creation' dotted around the earth's surface. the hierarchical classification into which animals and plants fall so naturally is strongly suggestive of a family tree: the creation theory had to make contrived and elaborate assumptions about the creator's mind running along themes and variations. Darwin also used as evidence for his theory the fact that some organs seen in adults and embryos appear to be vestigial. According to the evolution theory such organs as the tiny buried hind-limb bones of whales are remnants of the walking legs of their terrestrial ancestors. In general the evidence for the fact that evolution has occurred consists of an enormous number of detailed observations which all make sense if we assume the theory of evolution, but which can be explained by the creation theory only if we assume that the creator elaborately set out to deceive us. Modern molecular evidence has boosted the evidence for evolution beyond Darwin's wildest dreams, and the fact of evolution is now as securely attested as any in science.'

The golden days of Reddit are over. Reddit is now unusable. Censorious, sanctimonious and petty moderators. Bans for expressing 'inappropriate' veiws and now the inability to get rid of advertisements and the inane time limits.

Get rid of all religions and superstitions. For thousands of years, humanity has asked the same question: Why are we here? Religion answered early, confidently, and critically without evidence. That confidence became its greatest strength. When answers arrive before questions are fully formed, they harden into tradition, authority, and eventually taboo. From an atheist perspective, religion is not mysterious; it is familiar. It follows well-documented psychological, sociological, and evolutionary patterns. Gods look like people. Moral codes mirror ancient survival needs. Sacred texts reflect the scientific ignorance of their era. This is not an insult it is an observation. If religions were divine revelations, why do they look exactly like human inventions? Religions make the most extreme claims imaginable: An invisible, omniscient being created the universe. This being intervenes in daily life. It listens to prayers. It cares deeply about sexual behaviour and dietary rules. It rewards belief and punishes doubt. Yet not a single one of these claims has been independently verified. Contrast this with science. Science makes modest claims, backed by evidence, revised when wrong. Religion does the opposite: maximal claims, minimal evidence, zero revision. Why is belief without evidence praised in religion but rejected everywhere else? Would you board a plane built on faith? Accept a diagnosis based on prayer? Trust a bridge designed by revelation. If faith is a virtue, why is it never used outside religion? Prayer is often defended as personal, harmless, and comforting. But when evaluated, prayer performs no better than chance. Large-scale studies, including the STEP Project found no measurable benefit of intercessory prayer and in some cases, those who knew they were being prayed for had worse outcomes, due to anxiety or pressure If prayer worked: Hospitals would replace ICUs with chapels. Insurance companies would track prayer frequency. Casinos would ban worshippers. Instead, prayer functions psychologically: it creates the feeling of control in an indifferent universe. Comforting? Yes. True? No. Religions claim ownership of morality, yet moral behaviour predates organized religion by tens of thousands of years. Empathy, cooperation, and fairness are evolutionary traits observed in social animals, primates, elephants, dolphins. Sacred texts routinely endorse slavery, genocide, misogyny, child marriage, collective punishment. Believers now reject these practices not because of scripture but despite it. If morality comes from God, why has moral progress required ignoring holy texts? Gods evolve because humans do. Early gods-controlled weather and fertility because humans could not. As science advanced, gods retreated. Lightning → electricity. Disease → germs Earth’s creation → cosmology. This pattern is called the God of the Gaps. Every gap filled by evidence is a god quietly evicted. Why do gods always explain what humans do not yet understand and never what they do? The defining feature of religion is not belief in gods; it is belief protected from questioning. Doubt is framed as sin. Scepticism as arrogance. Evidence as temptation. Any idea that cannot be questioned is not sacred it is fragile. Why would a true god fear honest inquiry? Atheism: Not a Belief, a Conclusion Atheism is not the claim “there is no god.” It is the conclusion that no god has met its burden of proof. This is the same standard used everywhere else in life. The universe does not owe us meaning. Reality does not bend to comfort. Truth does not care what we wish were true. And yet, despite no divine supervision, humans create meaning, ethics, art, love, and progress. If life has value only because a god grants it, what does that say about human worth? If your religion were false, how would you know? Why does faith require belief before evidence? Why do all religions resemble the cultures that invented them? If a god exists, why is it indistinguishable from a natural universe? Is truth defined by comfort or by reality? Religion was humanity’s first attempt to understand the universe. It was a starting point, not a destination. Clinging to ancient explanations in an age of evidence is not humility, it is fear of uncertainty. Atheism does not offer eternal rewards or cosmic surveillance. It offers something more demanding: responsibility. No gods watching. No divine safety net. Just humans accountable to each other. And that is why the idea is so threatening.

I agree with you.

How would you keep score if no-one is getting killed?

The people creating the technology are still humans though. Rather the main point is on AI creating AI or AI training another AI, but is AI today sentient on acting like as if it's a living person? How would you know current AI won't turn against its creator? A "soldier" bot can terminate its creator if they deem themselves superior.

That's probably about the direction some of these companies are heading towards.

I mean, you look at those VR treadmills and those Atlas robots, then you can easily see how a human could fully control a robotic avatar on the battlefield now the humanoid robotics of Boston Dynamics and Co are pushing that frontier.

Computer, engage cloaking!

Cloaking engaged

What evidence? I do not believe in leprechauns, pixies, werewolves, jujus, angels, Tooth Faeries, Odin, Thor, Zeus, Ra, Brahma, Athena, Hera, Poseidon, Yahweh, Allah, or the Trinity, demons, devils, or Satan. For the same reason in every case: there is not the tiniest shred of 𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦 𝐨𝐟 𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥, empirical, 𝐡𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥, 𝐨𝐫 𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐆𝐨𝐝 and the burden of proof lies with believers. We can make a case for some unspecified "intelligent designer" or "prime mover" or begetter of "something rather than nothing"? By far the most appealing version of this argument is the biological one - living things do present a powerful illusion of design. But that is the very version that Darwin destroyed. Any theist who appeals to "design" of living creatures simply betrays his ignorance of biology. Go away and read a book. And any theist who appeals to biblical “evidence” betrays ignorance of biblical scholarship. The burden of proof rests with those who wish to believe. Even given no evidence for specific gods, could 'his ignorance of modern scholarship. Go away and read another book. As for the cosmological argument, whose God goes under names such as Prime Mover or First Cause, the physicists are closing in, with spell-binding results. Even if there remain unanswered questions - where do the fundamental laws and constants of physics come from? Obviously, it cannot help to postulate a designer whose existence poses bigger questions than he purports to solve. If science fails, our best hope is to build a better science. The answer will lie neither in theology nor - its exact equivalent - reading tea leaves. In any case, it is a fatuously illogical jump from deistic Unmoved Mover to Christian Trinity, with the Son being tortured and murdered because the Father, for all his omniscience and omnipotence, could not think of a better way to forgive "sin". Equally unconvincing are those who believe because it comforts them (why should truth be consoling?) or because it "feels right". The wife of a former UK prime minister may stand for the” feels right” brigade. She based her belief on “an understanding of something that her head cannot explain but my heart knows to be true.” She aspired to become a judge! My’lud, I cannot provide the evidence you require. My head cannot explain why, but my heart knows it to be true. Why is religion immune to the critical standards we apply not just in our courts of law, but in every other sphere of life?

We are not even remotely close to such a thing, and a cure or treatment for Alzheimer's will come up way before that.

In the next few years (10, maybe) they may invent a cure. What you talk about is sci-fi and won't be possible for decades, if ever.

Naw, most of the stars you can see in the sky are close enough that's probably not true.

Using a telescope, that's a different story.

Yes, and as per the comment you originally replied to - there isn't a moment there where the star appears to "turn on". To put it more simply, a star sort of "fades in". You wouldn't really percieve the fade beginning, in the same way you don't perceive hair growing... Probably not the greatest analogy but I thought it'd help make sense of it...

I think "barely visible" isn't going to be a lightbulb turning on moment.

Hair grows over time and yesterday it was under 3 inches today it's over 3 inches. A tiny change over a threshold.

There's a threshold of visibility for stars. Yesterday it wasn't visible to the eye. Today it's barely visible.

Well, not exactly...

Sure, hair grows long over time - but there isn't really a day where you'd look at someone and suddenly see the "Long hair" .. It happens gradually...