r/Futurology • • 10h ago

Discussion I read that 11%+ of US adults are on Ozempic/GLP-1s. How will society change in 10 years? Will obesity disappear?

1.1k Upvotes

Yesterday, I came across a statistic stating that more than 11% of adults in the US are currently taking Ozempic or other weight-loss alternatives. Honestly, I was absolutely astonished by how high that percentage already is.
It got me thinking about the future, and I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions on how this will reshape society over the next 10 years:
Will obesity disappear? Do you think "plus-size" or overweight people will become a rarity, or will socio-economic gaps (insurance coverage, high costs) prevent total adoption?
Will these medications become over-the-counter (OTC)? Do you foresee a future where weight-loss pills or oral versions of these drugs are sold casually at local drugstores or pharmacies without a strict prescription?
Will fast-food chains have to pivot? With millions of people experiencing suppressed appetites and fewer cravings for greasy, sugary foods, how will the fast-food and junk-food industries adapt to survive?
How do you envision the cultural, physical, and economic landscape of the US in 2035 because of this GLP-1 revolution?


r/Futurology • • 4h ago

AI Sam Altman to Decoded: ‘The world should accept some bad things happening’ for the benefits of AI

Thumbnail politico.com
259 Upvotes

The OpenAI CEO sought to distinguish his policy stance from rival developer Anthropic.


r/Futurology • • 12h ago

AI Germany Unveils Open AI Model for Public Sector

Thumbnail
forklog.com
797 Upvotes

r/Futurology • • 10h ago

AI AI May Force 11 Million Workers Into New Jobs, McKinsey Says

Thumbnail
bloomberg.com
407 Upvotes

Artificial intelligence could create more jobs than it destroys, but millions of Americans could still be left scrambling.


r/Futurology • • 14h ago

AI OpenAI says its review into hacks, including on Australian government sites, is costing $500,000 a day

Thumbnail
theguardian.com
325 Upvotes

r/Futurology • • 4h ago

AI Adversarial artificial intelligence: Implications of strategic stability attacks on military AI systems

Thumbnail
rand.org
26 Upvotes

Implications of strategic stability attacks on military AI systems


r/Futurology • • 1d ago

AI Experts Reveal What Could Actually Happen If AI Enters ‘Recursive Self-Improvement’ — And It's Scary

Thumbnail
huffpost.com
2.6k Upvotes

This advancement could lead to “humans losing control over AI,” one leading AI lab says.


r/Futurology • • 17h ago

Robotics No battery needed: Robot skin harvests power as it walks

Thumbnail
eurekalert.org
71 Upvotes

r/Futurology • • 1d ago

AI If AI can hack a government, the time to pull the plug is now

Thumbnail
independent.co.uk
2.2k Upvotes

r/Futurology • • 1d ago

AI 'Looks Like They're Firing Whistleblowers': Alarm as OpenAI Reportedly Ousts Safety Experts

Thumbnail
commondreams.org
5.8k Upvotes

r/Futurology • • 16h ago

Discussion What if we built government systems around accountability instead of trust? Where would it break?

23 Upvotes

​

I've been thinking about this for a while and want to hear where it fails.

A lot of the technology needed for more accountable identity, policing and public services already exists. What's missing is connecting it with a rule that no one gets unlimited access.

Take a traffic stop. You authenticate with a secure device instead of handing over five documents. The officer sees only what the stop needs: license status, registration, insurance. Not your medical file, not your full record. If they need more, they have to request it and give a reason. The officer is authenticated too. You'd see "Officer #47291", but the system knows exactly who that is. Every lookup is logged, and the officer can't delete the log afterward.

That cuts both ways. If an officer abuses their power, there's a record. If someone lies about what happened or assaults an officer, there's a record of that too. Speed cameras already do something like this: the violation exists before the stop, so there's less room for made-up reasons or bribes. They also give false positives, so any version of this needs a real appeals process.

In an emergency, authorized personnel could get temporary access without waiting for the normal process, but that access would automatically create an audit trail that can be reviewed afterward.

Estonia is the closest thing to a working example. Agencies keep their own data (X-Road), and citizens can see who looked at their records. India's Aadhaar shows the opposite risk: when one ID becomes mandatory for everything, people can get locked out and breaches can become extremely damaging.

My bigger idea is that healthcare and education could work around the same principle, with shared global baselines for things like medical protocols and core education, while local governments adapt them. A kid in Tunisia shouldn't receive dramatically worse healthcare or education simply because they were born somewhere with fewer resources.

And the point isn't to make everyone live the same life. It's the opposite. Give people a strong baseline of safety, healthcare, education and rights, then let them decide whether they want to become engineers, doctors, artists, entrepreneurs, or something completely different.

AI could eventually help operate and monitor parts of these systems, but I don't think AI should be the authority. It should be constrained by laws, permissions, audits and human oversight.

The part I can't solve is the same one that worries me most: who controls it?

Someone writes the code, holds the keys and chooses the auditors. Audit logs don't help if the people running the system can simply capture the auditing process. Hardware-protected keys, separated databases, independent auditors and multiple layers of authorization help, but I don't think they completely solve it.

The same problem exists with education. Saying "teach critical thinking" still means someone has to decide what gets taught.

So that's my question:

Is there a system where nobody can quietly take control of something this powerful, or is that fundamentally impossible?

Where would this design actually break?


r/Futurology • • 1d ago

AI I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken

Thumbnail
theatlantic.com
542 Upvotes

The industry’s approach to safety will guarantee more failures unless something changes.


r/Futurology • • 1d ago

AI Pope Leo says AI concerns are not ‘fake news,’ must act on safety issues

Thumbnail
thehill.com
1.9k Upvotes

r/Futurology • • 1d ago

Society I keep hearing AI experts say that electricians, plumbers, construction workers, gardeners, etc. will be some of the safest and best-paid jobs in an AI-driven future. Is that true?

372 Upvotes

I keep seeing AI experts say that electricians, plumbers, construction workers, gardeners, etc. will be some of the safest and best-paid jobs in an AI-driven future.

But isn't there a pretty obvious supply/demand problem here?

If AI replaces a huge percentage of today's jobs, millions of people could move into these "AI-proof" trades.

Today, maybe there aren't enough electricians. But if suddenly 10x more people want to become electricians because everyone says it's the safe career, wouldn't wages eventually fall?

This makes me think the more valuable jobs might actually be above AI rather than outside it, people who build, program, manage and supervise AI and robots, especially in situations where humans still need to be accountable.

We've already had an industrial revolution. Machines didn't just replace workers; they changed which skills were valuable.

So are we making the same mistake by assuming that "AI can't physically do this job" automatically means "this job will be highly paid"?

Curious what you guys think.


r/Futurology • • 1d ago

AI arXiv's new rule limiting submissions to 2 papers per month takes effect as AI-driven surge strains moderation system

Thumbnail finance.biggo.com
106 Upvotes

r/Futurology • • 1d ago

Biotech The dawn of the age of the exoskeleton: the devices continue to show noticeable benefits for users in various real-world tasks.

Thumbnail
arstechnica.com
192 Upvotes

r/Futurology • • 1d ago

AI French Air Force plans loyal wingman flight in 2028 in sovereign AI push

Thumbnail
defensenews.com
53 Upvotes

r/Futurology • • 1d ago

Discussion Please explain to me how Anthropic succeeds as a business without labour replacement.

213 Upvotes

You've all seen the rumoured numbers. The company is aiming to list at $2 trillion, has committed to spending $518b over the next decade and is currently a loss making business on a GAAP basis (even stripping out the one-off accounting charges)

Can anyone explain how the company makes enough profit to reward its investors, if not by building a product good enough to let companies do the same work with fewer people?

On the flip side, if it fails as a business, will the ripple effect be widespread or contained. I do believe that AI could be beneficial to humanity but it's not clear to me how the business side of it doesn't lead to pain for a huge amount of people one way or the other.

I wouldn't wanna see friends and family lose jobs and their livelihood.


r/Futurology • • 1d ago

AI Google launched first prototype satellite for Project Suncatcher into orbit and released a peer-reviewed version of its white paper on orbital data centers, on how compute gets to orbit.

Thumbnail
blog.google
81 Upvotes

Our Project Suncatcher prototype satellite is in orbit


r/Futurology • • 7h ago

Discussion Impossibilities

0 Upvotes

perhaps something of an ambiguous question, but does anyone think there's anything that we, humanity (providing as a species we survive the next few hundred years) isn't capable of?

From curing all disease, figuring out immortality, space travel, terraforming, Dyson Spheres. Given enough time, is there anything that anyone genuinely doesn't believe will ever be possible?

Arguably the galaxy/universe is our oyster.


r/Futurology • • 3h ago

Economics Human-Machine Symbiosis will define post-labor production. The only question left is whether it's owned by a few or by everyone.

Thumbnail
det.io
0 Upvotes

Production is shifting from human labor to autonomous agents. The open question is not whether machines can do the work, but whether people remain beneficiaries when they do.


r/Futurology • • 4h ago

AI AI is being taught how to do your job. Will artificial intelligence replace us, or just change the way we work?

Thumbnail
cbsnews.com
0 Upvotes

r/Futurology • • 2d ago

AI “The window for action may close”: an intelligence explosion warning

Thumbnail
thenextweb.com
504 Upvotes

More than 20 researchers, including Geoffrey Hinton and OpenAI’s chief scientist, say automating AI research could trigger an intelligence explosion. They want governments to prepare now.


r/Futurology • • 1d ago

AI Cloudflare says its new Clef model means humans no longer need to be in the loop for AI agents

Thumbnail
the-decoder.com
316 Upvotes

Cloudflare has released Clef and Clef-flash, two decision models for AI agents that compete directly with TypeSafe AI's Jev.

Rather than generate text, the models assign probabilities to predefined answer options, letting downstream systems act automatically on the results.

Both models are built on Qwen and support text and images. Cloudflare reports median response times of 39 milliseconds for Clef-flash and 209 milliseconds for Clef, faster than competing decision models.


r/Futurology • • 4h ago

AI Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has emerged as the biggest foil to AI doomerism about the existential risk to humanity

Thumbnail
fortune.com
0 Upvotes