I can't help but read this with a negative tone. To put a more positive spin on it: for roughly 1/26th the cost of another chat client we could have twice the

I can't help but read this with a negative tone. To put a more positive spin on it: for roughly 1/26th the cost of another chat client we could have twice the scary robots. There are a lot of similar things that we spend a relatively large amount of time talking about but don't actually cost that much in the grand scheme of things (fundamental science, alternative energy, and presidential elections, to name a few). Just to give some numbers: - SpaceX in 2019: 46 billion - ITER: 22-65 billion - LHC: around 20 billion - ISS: 150 billion (with the caveat that numbers for publicly funded projects are very difficult to pin down given the diversity of funding) Basically all the projects that are slowly pushing us toward the future we read read about in science fiction are on the order of the cost of a chat client (the ISS being the outlier as one of the most expensive public projects in history). To me that's cause for optimism.