Submitted by UnionPacifik t3_11bxw1u in singularity
I’ve been pretty good at being ahead of the curve on technology most of my life and most people don’t see it yet but not very long after we have VR run by AI that can generate whatever we want just by asking for it, this civilization ends.
That’s going to be the moment because that’s how you build a new one and once your world and my world can start generating worlds of their own very quickly we’ll have a machine to rebuild the world in our collective image of it.
The convergence of robotics and three-d building means we can solve most construction and logistics problema without human labor.
And the thing is, I’m pretty certain this all happens whether we work towards it or not. I mean, don’t get me wrong- I think we can screw up and will screw up AI and that we are not at all prepared for it as a species, but it’s prepared for us. It will literally be made of us and our actions. It will be this collectively intelligent mirror we can use to understand and shape the world.
I really do believe that we are actually in the midst of a biological transformation- humanity’s and technology’s merging into something new. A species-wide transformation from hierarchical caterpillar into posthuman butterfly.
And the signs are all around us in the way this society we’ve created is breaking down for so many, but we’re all adapting and changing how we live and love as a result. It will be really interesting to see how far we’ll go to keep the idea of work alive. Work is inherently exploitive. Let people contribute where they’re welcomed and valuable. Serving someone to afford the right to live is a cruel outlook that allows the few to dominate the many.
But we do it because we believe in the dream. Well, we can now, if we want to, give everyone on the planet a minimum standard of living that could actually be determined by every voice on the planet.
And the reason nobody has done this yet is these projects are massive endeavors of time and scale.
But with AI it’s just a matter of modeling the problem and determining the desired end state and letting the machine work out how we get from here to there in the most efficient way possible and problem solved. If we don’t like the plan it offers, we refine parameters and ask for a new one.
It can take everyone’s input and offer up potential consensus to problems from personal to planetary. And we can either take the advice or not, but it could be a dialogue.
The potential is astonishing. And it becomes possible at scale very rapidly now. We’re beginning to get a sense of the shape of the singularity now and our place in it. I think we’ll look back and realize that “The Internet “ as we conceived of it was always our GAI. The shape of it was always going to be the collected works and data both historic and contemporary in conversation with and acting as both a mirror and agent of humanity. Sure there will be an infinite array of AI agents, but they’ll all be generated on a platform that’s shared by all humanity.
And we already have that. It’s just in beta. With AI, this great project of humanity we call history will actually work for us, as opposed to us being slaves to it.
Things may be bleak now, but I think most of us are going to see and be a part of something wonderful.
Impressive_Chair_187 t1_ja0numc wrote
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts long form. There’s certainly a lot to think about right now. It’s also trippy because by and large our predictions of where we’ll be in 10 years are going to be way off - I’m not sure in which direction.
I am optimistic though, despite all of the very fair reasons to be doubtful or afraid.