Well, I will say one thing: The bit about automation increasing people's free time is a bit of a mirage. In practice, that doesn't happen. At the local level, if automation allows for greater productivity, workers are expected to produce more. At the global level, if automation allows for greater productivity, you don't get a shorter work week or more money for employees. You get some combination of higher unemployment, creation of demand such as by marketing more luxuries or planned obsolescence, and bullshit jobs. More broadly still, creation of more surplus normally just means that more surplus goes to the rich. Productivity has been decoupled from income or leisure since at least 1980--basically, since the fall of "new deal" and "social democratic" thinking. I mean, when most women in North America joined the workforce and so typical nuclear families went from one "breadwinner" to two, in theory that should have meant both could work half time. Instead, the cost of living was changed so that maintaining a half decent middle class household took two incomes.

Maybe with some kind of bottom-up socialism, automation would result in broadly shared prosperity and leisure. But with the system we have, not so much. This is why unions so often end up opposing tech change--their experience is that it leads to speedup and layoffs, while the productivity increase does nothing for them. Sure, it may make the firm more competitive . . . but that's a Red Queen's race for workers: They run faster and faster just to stay in the same place and shovel a few more billion to Jeff Bezos or whoever.

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I don't think that's going to work out the way top executives think it will. My prediction: Managers and executives will have the clout to avoid being laid off and will instead lay off people who do the real work. Then, they will find out that AI can't do most of that real work, and a lot of stuff that is supposed to be getting done will not.

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As to productivity, AI seems to be one of those things like multitasking, where people think it makes them productive but it doesn't. There was a study done that found it seemed to make people slower at coding . . . but they thought it made them faster.

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Wasn't always Fedora the testbed for everything new?

Not every new thing is the same.
It would be new to have the default desktop do a constant strobe effect at the best frequency for inducing seizures. And yet, new though the idea is, I suspect some would have quibbles about it. Some people just don't understand progress.

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NFTs died. Crypto's still griftin' away pretty hard. Especially in the US--buying up politicians and deregulations like anything.

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The whole idea that a for-profit company that frequently shifts its strategies, or gets new executives with different ideas about how to make a profit, is doing preservation has always seemed a bit underwhelming to me. If there is ever a conflict between "preservation" and "making or saving money" . . . which seems fairly likely . . . "preservation" is not the primary mission, "making money" is. And while some executives may value the idea that a good reputation may lead to more revenue, others pretty much do not. Preservation is a long term thing, and corporations are not entities that keep doing the same stuff in the long term.

I do also have an instinctive "So, this company wants to make more money by just having people . . . give it to them for free?" If I give money it's gonna be to a charity. GOG may like trying to blur the line to pretend to be sort of partly a charity . . . but they aren't. They're a thing that's there to feed money to the shareholders or CEO or whatever. And again, I don't see why I should be giving those guys my money for nothing.

This isn't about not liking GOG in particular or anything. Valve are one of my least-unfavourite companies, but I still wouldn't donate to them on Patreon either. If a company wants my money, it can offer me a product in return.

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They're going to fire the managers and the devs will be given even more space to be creative!

Right?!?

A lot of managerial/exec jobs are among the few that probably COULD be automated with AI. I mean, if there's one thing AI can probably do fine, it's belt out a bunch of buzzword bingo that doesn't mean anything in particular, suitable for deployment at a pointless meeting. Probably wouldn't be able to make actual executive decisions, but that's a bonus because when that kind of executive decides the buzzwords should have real-world impacts is when things start going really badly.

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Snoop Dogg lends his voice, looks, and personality

I'm not really up on pop culture . . . does Snoop Dogg have a personality?

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Hrm, I would like to admit that while I talk about the AI bubble bursting, the Chinese stuff is a very different question. That could well prosper, which is something I find worrisome even though at least some of the Chinese stuff is open source.

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Man. Those kids are so sweet and wholesome playing fun games together. Not like the ones that used to chase me around the schoolyard hoping to beat me up. Envy.

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