The standard type aliases like uint64_t weren’t in the C standard library until C99 and in C++ until C++11, so there are plenty of older code bases that would have had to define their own.
The use of to make type aliases never made sense to me. The earliest versions of C didn’t have typedef, I guess, but that’s like, the 1970s. Anyway, you wouldn’t do it that way in modern C/C++.
If you’re directly interacting with any sort of binary protocol, i.e. file formats, network protocols etc., you definitely want your variable types to be unambiguous. For future-proofing, yes, but also because because I don’t want to go confirm whether I remember correctly that long is the same size as int.
There’s also clarity of meaning; unsigned long long is a noisy monstrosity, uint64_t conveys what it is much more cleanly. char is great if it’s representing text characters, but if you have a byte array of binary data, using a type alias helps convey that.
And then there are type aliases that are useful because they have different sizes on different platforms like size_t.
I’d say that generally speaking, if it’s not an int or a char, that probably means the exact size of the type is important, in which case it makes sense to convey that using a type alias. It conveys your intentions more clearly and tersely (in a good way), it makes your code more robust when compiled for different platforms, and it’s not actually more work; that extra you may need to add pays for itself pretty quickly.
I’m reminded of laundry detergent for some reason.
We’re not currently on a trajectory toward automata like that, at least not with the kind of AI that’s currently heavily being invested in, but even if we were, it would not lead to a positive outcome with the way society is set up right now. The problem is that someone would own the automata and therefore be in complete control over in whose benefit the automata would work. Unless the automata are easy to make (and the patents easily bypassed), making it difficult for someone to monopolise them, it would take a fundamental change to the way the economy works for this to benefit everyone, and that’s not an inevitability.
But this video isn’t really about that, it’s about the much more likely scenario that AI does not end up living up to its promises and the money eventually running out, and what the economic fallout of that will be.