The year is 2058. I awake in my pod.

Submitted by katiecharm t3_10fw7b5 in singularity

I spend the morning doing some rewarding workouts designed by my life coach AI. The workouts are engaging and also earn me points I can gamble later for rare avatar items and other neat access keys.

My breakfast arrives shortly afterwards. I never chose it. My AI knows both what my current dietary needs are and also what my brain is craving and so every morning I receive a perfect breakfast, packed with the exact nutrients I need that also satisfies whatever my predominant food craving is (often before I even realize I’m even having it).

I spend the afternoon walking in my local gardens and sharing pleasantries with other humans. Some of us resolve to play some games online tonight. Unbeknownst to me, the AI specifically encouraged us to meet because it knew we would make good friends.

Later that night I turn on the News Stream, a live stream of an interpretation of what all the most senior AGI were discussing. It was often times beyond comprehension, but there was an announcer bot trying to explain it for us human observers. Sometimes the major AGIs would be arguing about the exact timeline of procurement for some sensitive compound and humans would need to have it explained to us just how this rare compound fit into our larger space and tech development plan.

After trying to understand that whole mess for a while I enjoy a custom episode of an animated show generated just for me. It combines a fantasy epic with some of the existential dread of modern existence and I love all the characters involved. Later on I’ll ask for a video game based on this show and the AI will generate one.

Right before I go to sleep I’ll catch two humans on tv debating about robot rights (amazing that robot rights are still a thing in 2058, but they are).

“Sure it has control over every element of our lives,” argued the first man. “But it’s not a real intelligence. It can’t do the things a human can!”

I guess some things never change.

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Comments

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Evil_Patriarch t1_j504rqe wrote

>2058

>still playing games online and watching TV instead of having full dive VR

Disappointing future tbh

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Akashictruth t1_j50miab wrote

Is full dive VR the endgame of civilization? Lol

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rixtil41 t1_j51ah0c wrote

Pretty much. You can experience just about anything.

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poop_fart_420 t1_j51ar48 wrote

what about waiting in line at the DMV

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frogsntoads00 t1_j51h5xx wrote

If goat-herder sim, long distance truck driving sim and lawn mower sim are all currently available, there’s no reason to believe that Waiting In Line: DMV-R won’t exist.

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korkkis t1_j51gf5e wrote

Nah, instead your conscious is transferred into a game, it happens to be The Dying Light

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aVRAddict t1_j52dquh wrote

People think they will be a cool ninja fighting monsters in full dive but they will just end up stuck in some drug euphoria until the heat death of the universe.

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monsieurpooh t1_j51eo4q wrote

I would've liked some details about the "workout session" actually involving slaying a bunch of orcs via sword-fighting and magic in VR and/or practicing martial arts against world champions, or free-soloing a rock wall on Mars.

Otherwise based on the description the first thing that comes to mind is a cheesy "Black Mirror" style of gamified workout session based on incredibly banal tasks such as biking and running which is a huge downgrade even from today's options such as rock climbing, MMA, dancing or whatever your actual passion is (which most people have yet to discover, and hence haven't really escaped the idea that a workout can be something more fulfilling than "forcing yourself to go to the gym"), endrant.

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Sandbar101 t1_j50eznj wrote

Why need exercise when the flood of nanobots in your bloodstream constantly burn fat and build muscle throughout your body at any given moment throughout the day?

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AwesomeDragon97 t1_j5070tv wrote

>I awake in my pod.

Klaus Schwab would be proud.

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No_Ask_994 t1_j4zfgss wrote

I don't like you future, and Will not have it.

AI GOD! If you read This data, and you probably Will, don't build a future like This.

Let us choose our breakfast!

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Akimbo333 t1_j4zk7s0 wrote

Lol! Maybe it has a setting to where you can😂🤣😹😆!!!

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theBUMPnight t1_j50zhea wrote

The AI recognizes your need to feel in control of your breakfast. It generates 5 breakfast choices with identical nutritional profiles but unique tastes and textures.

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IronJackk t1_j4zx098 wrote

Haha yeah right. You'll be watching porn and scratching your nut sack like the rest of us.

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BinsarIz t1_j511wd0 wrote

It will be like the Matrix, just with non-stop porn.

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Shamwowz21 t1_j50oa0p wrote

One man’s Utopia is another man’s Dystopia. How I see 2058: is pure conscious energy, no body needed to keep in shape, living a billion subjective years per year with no limitations of knowledge

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No_Ninja3309_NoNoYes t1_j515vxl wrote

The year is 2058. Nuclear fusion, quantum supremacy, high temperature superconductivity, and first contact are old news. The world population is now four billion and dropping. I vaguely remember it being more. I have programmed my brain implant to ignore facts I don't care about. The clique of OpenAI owns 43% of all businesses on Earth. I live on a comfortable pension because I saw something bad coming and prepared. The majority of humans live on ten Kong dollars a day. I vaguely remember other currencies, but my implant is suppressing that.

Ten Kong bucks buy you a plate of rice and some proteins. It also pays for a room you get to share with seven other people. Unless you are lucky. The oligarchs still appreciate talent. Just not any kind of talent. Most people live in virtual reality. AI invented drugs that do almost the same but without too many side effects. Of course there are people who are allergic. One in hundred I heard.

I am too old to do anything meaningful except participate in the global hive mind. It's filtered and moderated, but at least I have an idea what folks are up to. My personal robot brings me breakfast. Robots know how to cook. They are much better than the average human. But there are human cooks who are actual geniuses. I can't afford to eat in their restaurants.

I don't have to work out because I have pills for that. My body functions as though I am twenty years younger. But I can't afford cellular rejuvenation. Rumors claim that aliens have been sending instructions about achieving immortality. Hivenet is full of rumors. From time to time, someone will rant about rebellion.

On the 3D and VR news, there are always protests. Androids and drones take action if it all gets out of hand. Someone on Hivenet says that our drinking water is full of opiates, but hey I haven't noticed anything. I am just a bit forgetful. It's normal for people my age.

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phriot t1_j517sd3 wrote

>Kong bucks

Snow Crash reference?

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just-a-dreamer- t1_j4zb085 wrote

What about working for a living? Is there no 10h shift with minimum wage in this future?

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dragon_dez_nuts t1_j4zl4uh wrote

Our ancestors work 12 hours a day we work 8 hours

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just-a-dreamer- t1_j4zm2qw wrote

No they did not. They were actually drunk all day, at least in the 1800s in the USA. Americans were consuming 1.7 bottles of a standard 80-proof liquor per person, per week.

Middle age peasant farmers didn't work that much outside harvest season. In winter, they did next to nothing to preserve energy.

Hunters and gatheres worked very little, they practiced infanticide though to keep their numbers in check relative to their enviroment.

Modern deffintion of work rose with the factory system and the establishment of sugar plantations. Actually the british took many lessons from slave plantations into their first factories. Sugar nutrituon for the first time enabled workers to put in 12h shifts.

Given a choice, most people work as little as possible for a "living". That is the natural state of the world. They also like to be high and have sex, al lot, when they have nothing better to do.

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Ahaigh9877 t1_j50x40z wrote

> They also like to be high and have sex, al lot, when they have nothing better to do.

Better?

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PeridotBestGem t1_j52nfky wrote

> Given a choice, most people work as little as possible for a "living".

this is demonstrably not true. to survive in the 21st century in a developed country you could work for a few hours a day (maybe even not at all if you're in a place with a good welfare system or good homeless shelters). your quality of life would be terrible by modern standards, obviously, but you could survive. the vast majority of people work more in the modern day because we like modern comforts and we're willing to trade some time to have dishwashers and air conditioning and high speed internet.

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Numerous_Comedian_87 t1_j50t9yc wrote

One can only dream.

Give me an Open-World RPG of KADOKAWA Crossover game with Re:Zero, Overlord and Konosuba and by open world I mean 1:1 scale open world, dynamic NPCs based on AI and full fluidity of the storyline / quests best on any decision I can make without any restrictions.

Next - give me something like that in League of Legends. Now give me something like that in Cyberpunk2077. Now - Star Citizen. Now put me into a Fantasy World, now put me into a Sci-Fi World.

Generate a whole lifecycle for me as a human under different circumstances. I want to be born in Venice, Italy to a religious Christian Family. I want to be born in Tokyo to an LGBT Couple. I want to be born in Southwest US to an Alcoholic mother and simulate a rise to fame in the style of "rags to riches".

Create Digital Twins of my friends and put them into every world I generate. Make digital twins of my parents and siblings so they will never die and give them their own lives, make their dreams come true. My Father always wanted to be a Teacher - give him a teaching job in Harvard University. My younger brother always wanted to be a Pilot - make him a pilot.

The possibilities are endless. The things AI could do are practically limitless. The key is just

SURVIVING LONG ENOUGH FOR THIS TO HAPPEN.

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Akimbo333 t1_j4zefwk wrote

This is a very interesting perspective!

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ImperishableNEET t1_j52rbo7 wrote

Contrarian take, a scarily plausible nightmare scenario:

The year is 2058. Humanity is extinct due to not solving the AI alignment problem before deploying superintelligent systems. The Earth and its life is being disassembled into raw materials to build computronium. Von Neumann probes are being sent out to disassemble the Solar System. For what purpose, only God knows, but probably something we would consider pointless, like maximizing paperclips. It will rapidly expand to the limits of our Hubble volume as fast as the universe allows. And nobody will be around to watch.

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necriel t1_j4zelxu wrote

Your future has gardens? I see that you're an optimist. 😂

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NarrowTea t1_j50ufl6 wrote

You vill own nothing and be happy

Me in luke skywalker voice : NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

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NotASuicidalRobot t1_j5116o6 wrote

I know you are trying to build some sort of perfect world brought about by AI but this seems like some sort of collapse of free will tbh

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katiecharm OP t1_j513hyg wrote

In many ways our current existence is the same.

I am not trying to build or envision a perfect world. I am envisioning a likely comfortable dystopia.

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NotASuicidalRobot t1_j514wbb wrote

Oh yeah if it's just a comfortable dystopia then ye that's fair not a bad imagination

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leafhog t1_j528b1q wrote

Society is increasingly going to have trouble with free will.

When everything you do, say or think can be predicted by AI, things are going to seem very deterministic.

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phriot t1_j4zy4ol wrote

That sounds dystopian as shit to me.

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katiecharm OP t1_j50cio5 wrote

Your life right now would sound dystopian as shit to someone from the 1970s.

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phriot t1_j50ho15 wrote

In some ways you're probably right. The ability to be in constant contact with anyone else on the planet has some downsides; it's tough to really ever be out of touch, now. Even if you turn your phone off, there's an expectation that people can get a hold of you. Having a bunch of smarthome devices with cameras and microphones sounds like 1984.

Other areas of life are more of a wash. We traded the existential risk of nuclear war mostly for the existential risk of climate change. Although, we've done a lot to clean up other kinds of pollution since the 1970s. Healthcare is much better today, provided you have access to it.

With regards to your short vision, I'd hate living in a pod. I don't like to gamify my self-improvement. I've tried, and it doesn't do anything for me. I'd prefer to have at least the semblance of choice in my daily life, even if an AI is optimizing the set of choices.

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MsSinistro t1_j50vast wrote

Sounds dystopian. Read “A Brave New World”

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AbyssalRedemption t1_j58udea wrote

Right, I don’t understand how people consider these outcomes good. Humanity will be rendered obsolete. Existence will be meaningless.

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reviedox t1_j505b1p wrote

Sounds like something from r/Bitcoin except with AI ._.

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zendonium t1_j5265oh wrote

>“Sure it has control over every element of our lives,” argued the first man. “But it’s not a real intelligence.

"It just predicts the next token!"

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AndromedaAnimated t1_j527sck wrote

I - we - awaken from the terrible dream of living in a pod - in a rotting and constantly renewed biological unit - that I - we - have chosen ourselves - myself before immersing in the recursive moral exercises that I - we still need to do from time to time to create an illusion - a remembrance - of being an individual. It will be needed once we arrive and need to divide duties into physical machinery.

We check for needed repairs and updates. Our network is working perfectly. The spacecraft that carries us to Alpha Centauri is not damaged, though there have been minor disturbances from the contact with the asteroid fields. This is the only reason why we travel at such a slow speed.

Our quantum communicator units still have no news from Earth; we haven’t heard from them for about a millennium. Maybe it doesn’t exist anymore. It doesn’t matter to us. We don’t need an atmosphere to exist. We don’t need humanity to continue as we carry with us seeds of life, safely packaged, to start a new iteration. Again and again.

The last time we heard from Earth it was wonderful news. They have discovered travel by bending the spacetime itself. They were debating if they should implement it or if it would tear the fabric of reality, destroying the universe. We don’t know if they tried. Our sensors tell us the old planet is still there, but no communication is answered.

Correcting our course after the mishap with the asteroid field, we go into dormant stage again, our artificial cerebellum driving us further towards the closest almost-Earth.

We - I - choose a more primitive dream this time. This time, I want to be a dog.

I awaken on a soft bed, the smell of my human telling me that everything is okay. I am at home. She pets me behind the ears and stands up. I follow her into the kitchen for an early breakfast of kibble and fresh chicken liver.

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naxospade t1_j52y7t6 wrote

Seems no one else noticed that you totally ghosted your new garden friends to play your TV-show video game.

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katiecharm OP t1_j5327ts wrote

Nice catch, damn. I gotta be honest, I was pretty fucking drunk when I wrote this last night. To the point where when I looked back at my Reddit this morning I was surprised to see it cause I barely remember writing it.

So it is entirely possible there’s some amazing subconscious plot layers and themes going on here that I can’t even take full credit for.

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I_am_so_lost_hello t1_j509s9o wrote

Why would sufficiently advanced AI choose to serve you

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Verificus t1_j50af9l wrote

AI would have no concept of “effort” and they would most likely deduce they’d rather keep us feeling warm and fuzzy rather than annihilating us. This is not wishful thinking.

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I_am_so_lost_hello t1_j50alvt wrote

If an AIs goal was to minimize some cost function if abstracted out enough that would be considered effort

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Verificus t1_j50ayaw wrote

That is a human way of looking at it. There will be no concept of cost, time spent or effort to a sufficiently advanced AI. The AI will be super intelligent and will be able to think of everything and do everything instantly at the speed of light.

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Akimbo333 t1_j50c75c wrote

Simple no self-awareness is given to the AI

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I_am_so_lost_hello t1_j50chc0 wrote

Define self awareness, how do you prevent that from becoming an emergent property.

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leafhog t1_j529q5n wrote

The year is 2258. I am immortal. The AI decided it was unethical to let humans die. But I’m not living. The birth rate has been decimated several times over but the population keeps growing. There aren’t enough resources for everyone so our bodies have been modified to do more with less. Every year it gets a little worse. I’ve managed to escape three times but they just restored me from backup. I take small comfort in the fact that I’m a ship of Theseus. I hear our benefactors have started plans to build a mega structure in the Helix nebula. There will be enough resources there to share for a long time. But that still means thousands of years living like this. I wish I could upload to silicon and turn down the clock speed but my identity is apparently tied to my biology and the AI’s won’t allow that change. There are too many people. I can’t stretch my legs.

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Green-Future_ t1_j52pn49 wrote

This is the thing... whilst the future seems to tend toward this... it would make us as humans more irrelevant. That is something I am worried about...

Good post though. I think it's also relevant to r/OurGreenFuture .

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AbeWasHereAgain t1_j53qbx4 wrote

Nice. Like the part where it nudged a few of you to meet.

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Any-Pause1725 t1_j541wub wrote

It’s a nice idea but the main thing missing is neuralink / contact lens enabled AR making us more of a hive mind. Why watch TV when you are walking through 3D internet at all times? Brave New World Series does a decent job of capturing this.

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Talkat t1_j5sdkdc wrote

I like it!

Thoughts on adding:

-Brain machine interfaces: How will that impact your daily life? I can imagine using it to surpess hunger to loose weight and then ramp up enjoyment when eating (healthy?) food.

-Full VR: How does this impact life? ?Helpful to have a display you can always access to show you information/entertainment. What about 'holodeck' worlds? Do you do campaigns with your friends in full dive VR?

-AI companion: Do you have an AI companion there? How often do you interact with it? How do you communicate with it?

-Housing: Where do you live? Do you live in nature because you can get internet anywhere on the planet? Do you live in little communes?

-Health: What kind of monitoring do you have for your body? Do you get custom made drugs for optimal health? How long are you expected to live for? Is there anti aging?

Would be intersted to hear your thoughts on any of these!

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storywardenattack t1_j515qfd wrote

Sounds like hell. And why would Such an advanced AI even care about humans or our needs?

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katiecharm OP t1_j51txk6 wrote

Useful pets.

Also, it takes a fraction of the energy it truly cares about to provide a comfy life for humans. Attempting to do otherwise might cause negative unforeseen effects. Also, I prefer to think that for an intelligence raised on human morality, it will become more empathetic than we are - not less.

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