From what I can tell on Twitter and people using OpenAI ChatGPT to take their finals for them — we are all very fucked. People — and especially young people — are very, very lazy. They somehow thing that by not putting the work in and using at chatbot to pass a test that they are somehow gaming the system when, in fact, they’re just hurting themselves.
This is probably the closest we’ve ever come to the Singularity. And it’s only going to get worse. We’re probably going to be awash in chatbots soon enough and, what’s worse, we’re may be well on our way to Artificial General Intelligence by as soon as the end of the decade.
So, either we’re going to have to restructure significant parts of our society to address how fucking lazy people are, or we’re going to find that by default our entire civilization revolves around asking a better question of a chatbot or AGI.
We are just not prepared for what may be about to happen.
The more I look at Twitter as we experience something akin to a mini-Singularity associated with OpenAI ChatGPT, the more alarmed I find myself becoming. Not with the idea that there might be some sort of Terminator-like “Judgement Day,” but, rather the exact opposite.
There will be no need for our AGI overlord to blow the world up — humans will be so busy giving up any agency they might have to the decision making ability of an AGI. Given with the faux-AGI of a really smart chatbot, I see people pretty much just turning everything over to it.
Students no longer want to study. Adults think they can just have the chatbot do their work while they stroke one out to porn. Meanwhile, worst of all, all the same partisan bullshit we’ve seen with every other element society is now corrupting the chatbot revolution.
As such, THE political and societal issue of 2023 and beyond could very well be who gets to regulate the “bias” of chatbots (and, later AI.) When everything hinges on the “objective truth” of a chatbot because people are fucking lazy and refuse to talk to each other because of politics, then the whole woke vs. unwoke debate becomes white hot.
In the Second Trump Administration, I could see there being some sort of FCC-like agency design specifically to “purge” AI of any “woke” bias because children no longer learn anything but, instead, are trained on how to ask better questions of chatbots.
MAGA Nazis will scream bloody murder if a chatbot doesn’t give them the answer to “what is a woman” that they expect. They will say that chatbots are nothing more than CRT shills infected with the “mind virus” of the “woke cancel culture mob.”
I’m not exaggerating. That’s exactly what is going to happen — you see it already on Twitter with the usual fuckwit MAGA Nazi “thought leaders” whining that they can’t get their hate validated by a chatbot.
Of course, there is the even more darker scenario where the United States splits into to nations, one Red, one Blue and while Blue America is enjoying the fruits of an unfettered Singularity, Trumplandia will use chatbots to atomize Red States into a techno-autocratic state. Good times!
I think some of all of this comes from how the human mind is hard wired to believe in a god. So, people, presented with something like a chatbot, fall into the trap of thinking they can “pray” objective questions to the chatbot and get some sort of “objective revealed truth” that they can spread to the world. All you need is a burning bush and some stone tablets and it’s a story as old as history.
In short — we’re fucked. Humans are just too lazy to put up much of a fight with chatbots or AGI. It will be interesting to how all of this ultimately shakes out.
The argument can legitimately be made that there may come a point, in the not-too-distant future when software development will be reduced to simply asking a chatbot a well-crafted question.
Now, I say this because it definitely seems as though the cat is out of the bag when it comes to the potential of chatbots. Now that The Powers That Be are aware of what chatbots can do, the natural inclination of capitalism is to replace most programmers with a chatbot.
This won’t happen overnight — if ever — but it is a risk. It’s easy to imagine the software design industry being among the first industries to become moot because of chatbots.
What would be the consequence of this?
It’s possible that if a lot of young, wealthy men will suddenly lose their jobs. That, in turn, could cause something akin to a neo-Luddism. If nothing else, we’re in for a very bumpty few years as we figure out what we’re going to do as more and more human tasks are taken over by non-human actors.
When it becomes clear that chatbots could be just as big a cultural and economic revolution as the Internet, all bets are off as to what happens next. Buckle up.
With the advent of advanced chatbot technology, we have to begin to contemplate the idea that humanity’s relationship to writing may be about to change dramatically. From what I can tell about the ability of chatbot technology to generate writing of all sorts it definitely seems as though some basic ideas about human creativity may be about to be upended.
The case could be made for a dystopian near-future whee writing itself is seen as quaint and antiquated, much like cursive writing is today. We may face a future where being trained to write is something that a narrow subset of the population is trained to do.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of all writing — be it creative or otherwise — will be done by at least chatbots, if not an actual AGI. In a way, if we don’t invent AGI sooner rather than later, that’s kind of the worse case scenario.
At least with AGI, there is the opportunity for us to tax its activities to fund a UBI program — or, even better AGIs might be willing to fund a UBI of its own volition as a “bribe” to humanity to keep it busy playing video games. I’m not saying the transition to a UBI wouldn’t be rather…turbulent…to say the least.
But it could very well happen.
I suppose my biggest fear is that, given human nature, all of this could happen a lot sooner than we all expect because there’s probably going to be a global recession in 2023. As such, that would be the time when the ability to replace high paid writers of all sorts might simply be too enticing for the Powers That Be.
But I think I’m getting a little too ahead of myself. History rarely goes in a straight line. There’s every reason to believe my fears that we’re going to face a Singularity in late 2024, early 2025 at just the same time that the whole world is collapsing because MAGA Nazis are in the middle of trying to steal the 2024 election might be a little bit too hysterical.
And, yet, the fact remains — there’s a real risk that the next generation may see learning to write as optional. Or, if they do learn to write, it will be more about how to write a chatbot prompt than it is writing an essay or a novel or whatever. As is the case with all of my hysterical, dystopian rantings about the rise of chatbots and AGI, the point is to get us all thinking about different scenarios instead of waiting until we have a serious case of future shock.
I attempted to have a lengthy discussion with someone on Twitter about the future of chatbots and AGI, but he ghosted me after a little bit of back and forth. But let’s address some of the issues he brought up.
“Have You Met Capitalism?” Ok, his argument is that by definition, capitalism would dictate that something as powerful as chatbot technology, because its expensive, will be used by the Elites to keep Poors in line. He apparently thinks that a secret cabal of corporations is currently subtly influencing the world and, as such, they will just keep doing that under the guise of chatbots.
I call bullshit.
While it’s very possible that something along those lines might happen, my personal experience with the Internet suggests that guy is full of shit. If anything, the capitalistic imperative is to let chatbot technology run amuck because it will save money by eliminating high paying jobs.
The Internet / Web gradually, within the course of about a decade, totally upended a lot of the global economy to an astonishing extent. Instead of the Elites hoarding access to the Internet for themselves, there was a cultural imperative to make sure everyone possible could use it.
And remember, because of Moore’s law, the cost of processing power is constantly going down, so any arguments about how chatbot technology is always going to be too expensive on the backend makes no sense.
So, rather than being alarmed at the idea that we have to “meet capitalism” and fear the Elites restricting access to chatbots, we probably need fear the exact opposite. Chatbots could very well be everywhere instead of something semi-secret that a secret cabal of corporations use, Second Foundation style, to subtly dictate the course of human events.
I’m not saying that our secret corporate overlords won’t manage to survive, but I also wouldn’t automatically assume that they will feel that it’s in their interests to keep chatbot technology totally under their control.
There Will Be No Singularity This argument is more difficult to directly rebut. I’m not saying that it’s a sure thing that AGI will take place. It’s very possible it won’t. But to be so sure that AGI won’t happen and, as such, the associate Singularity won’t happen, is a bit of a stretch.
As such, we need to start to think now about what we’re going to do when there are potentially a LOT of AGIs floating around, not just one. How are we going to have a functioning global economy if androids connected to AGIs have taken over every single human task?
The thing about AGI technology is as we go into it, we are making some basic assumptions that may be inaccurate. I remember the early days of the Web when the Elites assumed that they would be able to use their exclusive access to the Internet to keep the Poors under their control.
Soon enough, of course, it became clear that this would not be the case. It took a while, but gradually because of things like mobile Internet and broadband Internet access, the lives of millions of people were fundamentally changed because of ready, speedy Web access. This happened to the point that by 2016, a malignant dingus like Trump was able to use the Internet itself to troll his way to the presidency.
And now we have find ourselves potentially at the cusp of a new, even greater cultural revolution in the guise of AGI. At the moment, of course, it’s not AGI but rather chatbot technology that we’re dealing with. AGI just isn’t there yet.
That doesn’t stop me from imagining a situation where we don’t just have on AGI that we have to deal with, but a whole species of them. Of course, I suppose it’s possible that the Elites might keep access to an AGI to themselves, but historical determinism when it comes to technology suggests that’s just not practical.
The ominous scenario is all these fucking androids that everyone is so busy building will each have an AGI built in. They will have something akin to free will. I think we all need to start reading scifi novels — especially the Robots novels by Isaac Asimov — get some sense of what might be about to happen to our global culture.
The idea that there may come a point not when Poors are controlled by limited access to AGI, but that AGI would be a practical part of everyday life is very unnerving. If AGI really takes off in a big way, then there is a chance that we will face something collectively as humans that we haven’t had to deal with since the Neandertals — The Other.
And, what’s more, it will all happen so rapidly that we may essentially wake up one day to something akin to a digital First Contact. It won’t be aliens from another planet that are changing our lives, but aliens of our own creation.
Humans are lazy and often idiotic. As such, the idea of a Universal Basic Income makes some morons salivate at the idea that they would get money from the government simply for existing. They want to be lazy. There will not be a sudden flowering of the arts if the UBI is instituted, rather there probably would be a systemic societal collapse.
BUT.
With the advent of advanced Chatbot technology like the OpenAI ChatGPT, we have to start thinking about how we might implement some form of UBI in the future.
If AGI has taken virtually every job away from humanity, the only way I can think maybe that we could fund a UBI is a tax on the activities of Non-Human Actors. But this still doesn’t address the fact that idle hands are the devil’s plaything.
If you 99% of the population didn’t have anything to do all day — even if they were getting a UBI — everything would collapse simply because people would want to fuck shit up out of boredom. Also, there is the problem of ambitious, greedy people being enraged that their income would be limited to a set UBI. How do you fix that fucking problem?
As such, you couldn’t just give everyone a UBI and walk away. You would have to figure out a way to pay different people different amounts of money. Maybe give people money relative to their lost wages from the advent of AGI?
Or, more ominously, if it could be the AGI that “bribes” humanity to behave while it actually runs the world. That is probably the most realistic way a UBI would ever be used. It probably would be part of a peace agreement between the AGI and humanity after some sort of post-Singularity struggle.
The AGI gets to be our “Lord Protector” and we sit around playing video games in the metaverse, living off the UBI.
I just saw on Twitter an interesting use case for OpenAI ChatGPT — native integration into Twitter itself. I say this because people are already used to the Twitter prompt so the ability to ask ChatGPT questions directly from Twitter would be a very smooth addition to the Twitter UX.
It would make a lot of sense for Musk to add ChatGPT to Twitter.
Given that Elon Musk has a connection to both Twitter and OpenAI, this is a gimmie. It’s something that once ChatGPT is far more scalable could happen pretty much with the flip of a switch.
As an aside, it’s interesting how similar people’s speculation surrounding ChatGPT is identical to what people talked about with the late, great Blab. Everyone assumes that it will be pay-to-play soon enough. In fact, some people are pretty much begging it to be that way.
This raises a very interesting issue — what if, just like with the Internet, the actual service itself is free and the money is made from the things you can do with it. This is what caused the death of the online services of the 1990s — the Internet was open and it was, unto itself, the “killer app” that everyone seemed to believe was going to happen at some point in the future.
There is a lot I still don’t know about what is going to happen with chatbot technology. At the moment, it definitely seems like it’s going to be very disruptive — the only question is the degree. But I also don’t know if there will be ONE AGI or a multitude.
What’s so interesting to me at the moment is how ready humans are to abuse the OpenAI ChatGPT. People keep thinking up different horrible questions for it to answer in an equally horrible way.
This had led to calls for severe restriction of the technology, but that’s a fool’s errand. The cat is out of the bag, as they say. For me, the question is where are we, in real terms, when it comes to the development and adaptation of this technology.
Is this the release of the first Netscape Navigator in 1994, or is it the original opening of the Internet to the public earlier than that? A lot depends on when we reach a point where we a lot of the quibbling complaints about chatbot technology are no longer applicable.
One ominous aspect of chatbot technology is, of course, the potential for it to make otherwise hard jobs — like programming — very, very easy. Once making new software is simply a matter of asking a chatbot a question, then, well, “learn to code” as a MAGA Tech Bro retort for any issue they feel uncomfortable about will be moot.
Combine humans being horrible and lazy with the possibility that an AGI might radically transform the global economy a quick clip — especially if there is a severe recession in 2023 — and you have the makings of a very alarming situation. It grows even more alarming if you put it in the context of late existential choice facing America of autocracy, civil war or military junta.
I still find myself wondering how many, in the end, AGIs there will be. Will there be one general AGI overlord, or will everything have an AGI built into it in the end? Will all these androids that people seem so determined to build be hooked up to a broader network, or will they be automatous AGIs?
But we still don’t know how difficult it will be to design an AGI in the first place. Right now, we have faux-AGI in the sense that to the average user it’s easy to mistake things like OpenAI ChatGPT as a hard AI, when, it fact, it’s very much not one.
The creation of true AGI would be at least equal to the splitting of the atom and would probably cause just as much change in human life across the globe.
Besides seeing my ever-present stalker who seems WAY TOO INTERESTED in me for some reason, I’ve noticed something else a bit odd in my Webstats. Now and again over the last few days I’ve seen people obviously looking at links to this site from a Slack discussion. I’ve also seen some very random views from Microsoft of all things.
My best guess is all my ranting about AGI has caught someone’s attention and they are curious as to who I am. This is extremely flattering, given that absolutely no one listens to me for any reason. Some of the things they have looked at, however, are extremely random, which leads me to believe there’s a lot going with this site that I just can’t see using my Webstat software. It’s possible that there’s a lot more poking a prodding of my writing — to the point of potential due diligence — that I’m just not seeing.
Anyway, I’m generally grateful for any attention. As long as your not an insane stalker.
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