Businesses are usually allowed to refuse service: "Sorry, we're closed" or "sir, this is a Wendy's." There's nothing dystopian about that.
But it's a rather annoying service if the customer can't predict in advance what sort of tasks they're willing to take on. You should have some idea about what they're normally willing to do for you.
Maybe, combined with a buffer, there need to be plans in place to get a factory up and running in six months? Or it could be running at a low level with plans to scale in six months.
I don't find empty platitudes like "you can just do things" all that inspiring. I prefer seeing a specific example of something you could do and an explanation about why it might help.
If you say you're doing research for a novel, should it consider that plausible? How much does it need to know about its users to vet them?
I think part of the answer is that AI chat doesn't need to be general-purpose. It turned out that people really liked using a chat UI that seems to be general purpose, but you don't need to make answering any question a user asks your business. You don't need to provide therapy if you're not in the therapy business. It should be possible to specialize.
But in order for that to work, a company needs to explain to its customers what business it's in.
"Consistently wrong" seems a bit much. Seems like being directionally right early that AI would be a Big Deal and scary should count for something? It doesn't mean any details or other predictions are right, though.
You could rotate the inventory. Normally companies try to minimize inventory, but someone could pay them to keep six month’s or a year’s supply as a buffer.
You say "just" 15 years, but Waymo is still only available in a few cities. That seems more like a slow, cautious rollout to me, not a fast takeoff. Society has had a lot of time to get used to (and tired of) the idea and come up with regulations.
My guess is that the deployment of other types of robots will often be a similarly slow grind.
That's unlike the Internet, smart phones, and coding agents, which got user adoption at a much quicker pace.
Edit: actually, that's a Node.js-specific API. For browsers, it seems like they should have a platform-independent JavaScript/TypeScript API that includes a WebAssembly file (if needed) instead of expecting you to compile WebAssembly yourself.
The "and physical" is the part I'm particularly skeptical of. Sure, drones are scary, but nobody's really solved getting a robot to deliver a package to your front porch in a civilian setting, and it seems unlikely to be solved quickly.
Accordion videos I like: https://mastodon.social/@skybrian/tagged/accordionsongs
Social media: https://bsky.app/profile/skybrian.bsky.social https://tildes.net/
Blog (inactive): https://skybrian.substack.com/