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?

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

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

Implications of strategic stability attacks on military AI systems

​

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?

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.

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.

The jobs apocalypse hasn’t arrived. Something else is happening instead.

Of all the US's export successes, surely its most pervasive is the soft-power export of culture. Movies, TV, music, etc And as much as China has surged to take every other 'top exporter' world crown, it's hard to imagine it taking the culture crown too, or is it?

Micro-dramas are not as big in the West as they are in China, where they generate twice as much revenue as movies. Micro-dramas have immense production cost advantages: the cost per minute of footage for AI micro-dramas is roughly 1,000 yuan ($140, https://yicai.com/news/103084978.html) while a typical Netflix drama costs $5M to $10M per hour-long episode, so $85,000 to $170,000 a minute. In other words, it's roughly a thousand times cheaper to produce. Furthermore producing localized versions in Thai, Spanish, Swahili, Arabic, etc is trivially cheap.

State Administration of Radio, Film and Television: 430,000 short dramas were launched in the first eight months of this year, 13 times the total for the whole of last year, and AI dramas accounted for more than 90%