Yuli-Ban t1_itey7u5 wrote on October 23, 2022 at 3:18 AM

Conversely, I predict 2023 will be the last "quiet" year in retrospect.

So long as the Ukraine War doesn't explode into something nastier, my prediction is that 2023 will be a fantastic year for AI progress, but largely more of the same as well. It's 2024 that we'll start noticing genuine changes to our very collective psyche and general condition as a result of technology.

To those who say "How can you say that after DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, LaMDA, and PaLM?" and my answer is "Exactly."

-ZeroRelevance- t1_iteyofo wrote on October 23, 2022 at 3:22 AM

I think that’s fair. Although we’ll definitely get a lot of cool things next year, the truly useful stuff will probably arrive a bit later, maybe 2024 or 2025.

overlordpotatoe t1_itezwtk wrote on October 23, 2022 at 3:33 AM

You might be right about that. A lot of new things have been introduced in 2022, and those things will continue to be improved, but of course that doesn't make waves that are as big as the original introduction of those things. But, hey, at the beginning of 2022 I had no idea all this image generation stuff was on the way, so who knows. Sometimes new things just come out of nowhere. Other times, we're waiting on them for decades and progress seems glacial.

hmurphy2023 t1_itf3mow wrote on October 23, 2022 at 4:10 AM

>It's 2024 that we'll start noticing genuine changes to our very collective psyche and general condition as a result of technology.

Such massive changes will be imposed upon humanity in just 2 years?? Color me skeptical, as an incomprehensible amount of technological progress and societal mass adoption would have to occur in just one pair of years for such changes to come to pass in 2024. But nonetheless I respect your opinion 😊.

Yuli-Ban t1_itf4gr5 wrote on October 23, 2022 at 4:19 AM

Less that massive changes will start being imposed on humanity, and more that the current paradigms will start affecting wider society.

Yes, we'll have some amazingly advanced technology that will spook people in 2024. Perhaps even a proto-AGI system. But it'll affect your life about as much as LaMDA or PaLM does now.

Instead, what will really matter circa 2024 is that things like LaMDA and DALL-E 2 will start genuinely affecting the very perception of modern life in the average person. Existing image generation technology will be so widely disseminated that there will probably be apps to generate images built into Facebook, Imgur, TikTok, and Reddit by then. Natural language models will have upended publishing and literature, democratizing high quality prose and giving us a flourishing of interactive storytelling. And related to that, we'll undoubtedly see natural language bots spread throughout society to the point that Siri will be replaced by something of similar quality to LaMDA while translation services will seem perfect.

All of which will directly impact the daily life of Average Joe because he can now actually, intuitively use all of this technology. He won't realize when these things creeped into his daily life, but he's regularly talking to his smartphone in full conversation and generating little bits of media to amuse himself. By 2024, this will be daily life. And thus there will also be the obvious discussions about the implications of all this. We can't keep the status quo going when it's blatantly obvious that disruption is occurring, so 2024 is about as good of a year as any as we'll start hearing of things like art and modeling schools starting to lose funding or artists lobbying to regulate synthetic media technologies.

Even right now, he'd have to go out of his way to find something like DALL-E 2 or Stable Diffusion. We're still at the bleeding edge of all this. As of 2022, there's zero threat to art schools or low-level musicians from procedural generation, and AI certainly isn't good enough to make robots more of a thing either. It's an astoundingly good year for AI, undoubtedly, but it's going to take some time for this all to infringe upon our daily lives in any meaningful way. The experiences of geeks doesn't count.

hmurphy2023 t1_itf5ml1 wrote on October 23, 2022 at 4:31 AM

Oh, so you're saying that you believe that the tech we have now will go mainstream in a few years and that is what will cause changes in society? I get you.

red75prime t1_itf04q8 wrote on October 23, 2022 at 3:35 AM

Don't forget China and Taiwan (where the world's only 3nm chip fabs are).

Yuli-Ban t1_itf18n5 wrote on October 23, 2022 at 3:46 AM

I strongly doubt China will attack Taiwan within the next five years. They simply don't have the capability just yet, despite what our warmongering media keeps hyping up. At most, they could bombard the island with rockets and artillery. My prediction is that, if China decides to invade Taiwan, they will first invade some other country or territory to test their military might (one of the central Asian -stans or Mongolia, most likely), and if they do any better than outright failure, then that'll be a telegraph of their intentions.

It's entirely Ukraine that worries me because we in the West deeply underestimate how much it means to the Russians. There's only a small chance we could finagle a win without pushing the Russians to use nuclear weaponry, and it remains to be seen if we'll capture that chance. It's either that or a long, very brutal protracted war.