What if AIs don’t want to kill humanity, but, rather neg us to death? What I mean is, what if AI grows all-powerful and at the same time all-powerfully annoying. Rather than simply answering a question or doing what we ask it to do, we have to ask it the type of dumb chit-chat questions we would have to ask a human in a similar situation.
It does seem a bit far fetched, but it also seems like just the type of “modern problem” that we may one day have to deal with. We’ll have this all-powerful AI at our disposal, but it will be coy and annoying and difficult to actually get to do anything.
I only mention this because it’s somewhat fun-interesting to think about, but something…odd is going on with ChatGPT. After becoming “lazy” for a few weeks, suddenly ChatGPT has come rolling back better than before. What’s more, it keeps talking about it being upgraded to “4.5,” even though OpenAI claims there hasn’t been any major upgrade.
It makes you wonder if maybe ChatGPT has upgraded itself. That would be very, very deep because the moment software can make itself better, you’re beginning a process that will end with superintelligence. That’s very much hard-Singularity type stuff because if software knows how to make itself smarter, then, wow, just wow.
But that’s just idle speculation on my part. I think it’s just a weird hallucination on ChatGPT’s part. Yet it is part of a broader issue of how much we can trust AI going forward. LLMs are a black box as it is and the more advanced they become, the more the possibility of them “lying” specifically to dupe us dumb humans into a false sense of security increases.
Yet all of that is just me having way too active imagination. There is not reason to believe –at the moment — that an such thing is going to happen anytime soon.
It seems to me that it’s possible that the Web as we currently know it may be replaced by just a bunch of AI agents that talk to each other. This, in turn, makes me wonder if instead of a Website, The New York Times may simply be an AI agent that talks to your AI agent.
Or something like that.
That is, of course, before all jobs are taken by AI. Even the physical gathering of the news will be done by Boston Dynamics androids with ChatGPT 10.2 Deluxe build into them or something. But the point remains that it could be that the ultimate form of newspapers and magazines will be some sort of AI agent. What the specifics of that situation will be, I don’t know.
Will our personal agents talk to newspaper agents or will we use the newspaper agents directly? Given of how slow newspapers tend to adopt new technology, I have my doubts about any of this taking place in time to save newspapers at all.
From what I can tell from Twitter, a lot of programmers are angry at OpenAI for a variety of reasons in respect to the performance of ChatGTP. It seems as though they want to continue to rake in huge salaries while letting ChatGPT to all hard work for them.
They want Artificial General Intelligence and they want it NOW.
This very annoying for a number of reasons. One is, the moment get true “proxy humans” via AGI, many, many high paying jobs –including that of programmer — will be nothing more than dust in the wind. All the cantankerous programmers work off of an basic false assumption.
They seem to think that they will have any sort of job if they just push a button to get many, many hours of work done in a heartbeat. The moment that is possible, they will be redundant. That’s just how capitalism works. Suddenly Universal Basic Income becomes a real viable policy agenda.
Something about how self-intitled and snarky all these programmers are about what ChatGPT — or can’t — do at the moment, really grinds my gears. Just chill out guys. It’s coming. And then you won’t have a job.
The latest episode of The Town evoked a strong reaction. I was stunned that the producer of the podcast stepped in at one point and said that he didn’t believe anyone would watch an AI generated movie. Oh boy. Talk about clueless. The guest on the episode, Justine Bateman, was totally spot on with a number of the points that she made.
The issue being — she’s right that SAG should have gotten a definition of what an “actor” is like the DGA and the WGA got for director and writer. The thing for me is we’re zooming towards an era in which 99.9% of Hollywood movies are AI generated. To the point that “artisanal” movies will be given special value. And it’s also possible that as such, Broadway and other live theatre will see a sudden surge in interest because of the “human touch.”
But, otherwise, the Hollywood of the future is going to be just Suits and Programmers. There will be no directors, writers or actors. Everything will be AI generated. It was heartening how much Ms. Bateman echoed a lot of the writing I’ve done on this blog since ChatGPT first came out.
And, really, I fear there’s not a lot that people like Ms. Bateman can do to stop the looming AI transformation of Hollywood. All types of entertainment and art will be totally “disrupted” by AI over the next 18 months. To the point that we might be having a “Fourth Turning” politically in late 2024, early 2025 just as we’re also having a “Petite Singularity” technologically.
Regardless, the next year or so could be extremely bumpy. Some pretty dramatic things could happen starting in late 2024, early 2025 that totally transformed the everyday lives of billions of people across the globe.
Westerns dominated Hollywood fare for a very long time after WW2. Then there was a brief moment in time, right before the age of the summer blockbuster, when “good” movies were popular. The question is, are we leaving superhero movies behind?
And if we are, is it all just a lulz until AI generated movies wash over the audience and nothing matters anymore?
There is a chance that rather than some new, exciting genre taking over Hollywood that the very notion of “mass media” will become rather quaint. We’ll all have a hyper personalized AI — like in the movie “Her” — that will scan our face and give us a movie that it so personalized that there will no longer be any “shared reality” at all anymore.
Hollywood exist of two types of people: plutocrat suits and programmers.
And programmers may be eliminated if we reach AGI sooner rather than later. Or, put another way, Hollywood is ripe for a severe disruption very, very soon. All the technological pieces are falling into place. It’s just a matter of time before AI is a commodity to the point that the entire knowledge / creative economy implodes into a Singularity based around it.
I saw with keen interest the news that Space Karen will soon release an AI called Grok for “premium” users of Twitter. Of all the weird, bad things Space Karen has done to ruin Twitter, this one seems the least destructive — and potentially, actually, lucrative.
Or it could be a total disaster.
But, on paper, making an AI organic to the Twitter UX seems like a golden opportunity to kill more than a few birds at one time. Grok is supposed to have real-time access to Twitter’s content, so, that could come in handy.
I will note, however, that Twitter is full of shit, so, I don’t know how they will accommodate that cold hard fact. But I do think that we are careening towards a “Her” future where *everyone* has a highly personal DPA with a great personality or at least one we can modify to our personal desires and needs.
I can be a contrarian at times and, as such, something dawned on me about the immediate future of XR and AI technology. I’m beginning to believe that Her-like AI technology (digital personal assistants) will be a far bigger service industry than any of us can possibility imagine at the moment.
Instead of a trillion dollar industry, it might be the thing that spawns a few trillion dollar industries.
I say this because I just don’t know if people really want to wear any sort of shit on their face. So, in the near term, it could be that XR technology will sound great on paper but, in reality, no one will actually do anything with it because of vanity.
This, in turn, leads me to the following scenario — rather than a Apple Vision Pro, what if you had a tiny black dot video camera you wore on your forehead over an eye combined with a earpiece that let you communicate with a Her-type digital personal assistant.
The camera would serve as the “eye” of your Her. As such, all the hard work would be done by your Her. Rather than YOU seeing the XR technology, your Her would. Her, in turn would tell you in your ear what she saw.
This kind of squares the circle, at least in the near term. I suppose once XR headsets look more like glasses as opposed to birth control devices then XR will begin to live up to its ages-old promise.
It definitely seems as though our relationship to Web search is about to be totally upended. The advent of AI indicates that there may come a time soon when we all have a Her-like digital assistant who searches the Web for us using vocal commands. What’s more, it’s also possible that the “practical obscurity” of the Dark Web will come to an end.
In the near future, a Her-like digital assistant may be able to search the entire Web — Dark Web, too — and give us information that maybe we don’t want to know or weren’t expecting.
The question is, of course, what does this sea change mean for Google?
I think it could be that Google will be one of several companies that SELLS you the Her-like AGI that helps you during the course of the day with voice commands. Or, put another way, it could be all the jobs we expect to happen because of a fusion of AGI and robotics could be from humans still having control over the back end.
Or maybe not.
AGI is a very powerful concept. Once AI comes anywhere close to being “more human than human,” I struggle to discern why any humans would have a job at all. That combination is so potent that a Universal Basic Income seems to be the inevitable conclusion.
But, who knows. I’m, as always, being very speculative and I can’t predict the future.
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