Anteacceleratio Redux

Talk about scientific and technological developments in the future
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Yuli Ban
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Anteacceleratio Redux

Post by Yuli Ban »

I wrote this back in early 2019 and found it prudent to repost here:

_____________________________________________

Anteacceleratio: Latin for "Before the acceleration". The "acceleration" in this case refers to the Singularity itself, not the general increasing rate of technological change. 
We will know we're living in the Anteacceleratio when:
  • Artificial intelligence is no longer "just" an engine for software to function but genuinely cognitive agents that possess some level of real-world understanding. It becomes a "cognitive engine", actively capable of responding to us. It can identify problems to fix and then fix them for us. These agents are also capable of communicating with each other— if one agent can't fix a problem, it can search for another that can. The internet itself will seem intelligent. And as a result, the young have no concept of a Web that isn't their friend, a sort of godlike person they know rather than a medium of communication and entertainment.
  • Artistry is no longer limited to artists. One no longer has to wait for someone else to come up with an idea or spend years honing their craft just for the opportunity of breaking into media. There will be no reason to commission artists besides the novelty of doing so. People won't have to water down their ideas to make them more acceptable to work on and view. And as a result, ideas and cultural transmission will accelerate into a memetic singularity. Niches of niches will develop and branch out into their own niches. Some will be satisfied with simply consuming all of this media. Many others will take their time to create and alter existing media. It will even be possible to live in "alternative history bubbles" where one can actively rewrite history and experience timelines in history that did not happen. One could alter voices, faces, and instruments to make it so that the Beatles were an all-female band. They could then create entire interviews and documentaries, forum posts, pop culture references, encyclopedia bits, and more to fit this alternative history. One could make it so that death metal has consistently topped the pop charts since the 1990s and no one considers this out of place or unrealistic. One could make it so that an entire arthouse genre of film from 1960s Mexico rose and dominated Western cinema, generating these films and critical reactions. One could make it so that the Soviet Union defeated the United States in the Cold War in the 1960s and make it seem as if all modern TV, film, radio, and video games have Soviet-friendly content. One could make it so that Satan and Cthulhu have direct dominion over Earth and change media to reflect this. All of this and much, much, much more can exist just in one's bedroom, a separate reality from one's living room, perhaps shared online with others, perhaps existing solely for the enjoyment of one...
  • Automation is the new reality of the world economy. It will be commonly discussed on the news of how quickly automation is spreading throughout every known industry. Politicians of a certain ilk will continue to blame age-old scapegoats, ignoring automation in lieu of immigrants and saboteurs right up until they realize it's more profitable to play on Luddite fears. The term "All-Human" or "Human-Made" will become a political buzzword just as much as an economic and social one. In places with strong agrarian roots like the USA, you can expect to see "God-fearing, rough-handed farmer governors" start to rise. They're not socialists or anything. Just the opposite. They're typically well-to-do types who nevertheless put on a veneer of being down-to-earth, rooted in the land and basic "All-American toil". They're real men who work with their hands and earn their daily bread rather than those effete urban liberals who let machines do all the work. Regardless of the reality on the ground, of course, where these same types are the ones getting rich off of mechanized labor and neither side of the spectrum particularly benefits. But there will be genuine populist reactions and actual farmers and laborers pleading for some sort of help, and the initial reaction will be to simply wage war on automation: promote businesses who ban drones and robots, shame people who rely on automation, and exalt human sweat. Ironically, it might lead to the right wing believing a sort of independently-created labor theory of value. Either way, this will just be the very start of things, and it won't necessarily be the dominant trend as most will be fine with automation. Indeed, there will likely be a new movement based entirely around profiting off of the effects of automation. Something like the Fully Automated Luxury Communism movement. Others will call for basic income. But the one thing that won't happen: denial. People won't be able to deny it's happening. Some will surely say "this is the same thing as the Luddites 200+ years ago, so it will pass." But no one will be able to say "the machines aren't taking our jobs" with a straight face. That won't stop some particularly corrupt and out-of-touch individuals from trying, but extremely few will believe it.
  • Anxiety is common among the older generations over the rate of change directly infringing upon things they hold sacred. Institutions and traditions refined over centuries and millennia will become obsolete over the course of a few years. Children born immediately before and during the Anteacceleratio era will have no reason to attend school, at least school as we understand it to be. There will be no jobs for them when they graduate. There will be no reason to learn how to drive except for the novelty of doing so. There will be no reason to learn how to find love if love can be generated. Children will be brought up without the expectation of joining the labor force. This may bring about a flourishing of the human spirit. It may also bring about an epoch of lethargic idleness. As a result, the elderly generations will be angry and bitter. On one hand, they will spit at this fully-automated world as being devoid of humanity and enabling the worst forms of laziness and entitlement. On the other, they will be angry that they worked their entire lives, expecting a familiar world in their silver years to get good and angry at, only to be handed something esoteric and unexpected. They will have been told endlessly by neoliberals and traditionalists that artificial intelligence and robots "only enhances jobs", that "they create new jobs", and "there will always be a need for humans." In the Anteacceleratio, this will have been exposed as little more than a self-reassuring lie. Those in their middle years will be the angriest— they were not taught to prepare for this and were told it wasn't going to happen, and they have nothing saved to capitalize on what is done. 
Some time ago, I remarked on how interesting these times are by drawing a comparison to previous eras of great change— our forefathers lived in eras where a religious and culturally insulated rural peasantry unchanged since Roman times was able to watch aeroplanes take flight, hear the human voice to instantly cross oceans, and see machines mass produce goods in factories. When a person was born 150 years ago, they would grow up in a world where their lives were likely to be identical to their great-great-great-great grandparents and they had little reason to believe their great-great-great-great-grandchildren would live lives any different. 
 
Fast forward to today— 2019— and you see that there is a growing divide between the generations, a divide that is far more technological than ever before. Parents of the 1980s and 1990s may have been concerned about their children's habits of watching TV and reading comic books, but this was nothing unfamiliar to them. Rather, parents and grandparents were concerned with their children's choice to spend more time with these more lonely pursuits than socialization, which which was necessary to obtain jobs and a social life in their future. 
Yet these days, parents and grandparents often do not understand what their children do. With the rise of the internet, social media trends seem to come and go every year. Happenings that would have defined entire generations are now passé within a season. The young are simultaneously more detached and more sociable than any generation before them. It is at a point where infants— 2 year olds, if that— are having developmental delays triggered entirely by their usage of technology. They may have a difficult time learning to talk because they'd rather use a touch screen and listen. They may instinctively tap glass and talk to photos, or perhaps call for Alexa in places where Alexa is not installed in a manner as if it were a surrogate mother. 
Older generations are frightened by these changes and fall back on claims that this technology is causing people to lose touch with one another and become dependent. "Why can't we just not use technology?" people will ask. "This is all just wrong." 
And yet it continues. There has been no widespread attempt to disconnect. On one hand, this is due to natural generational angst— even the Greeks and Romans talked of disrespectful and detached youths, and the world still turns. 
 
On the other, there is an element of future shock at play. Things are happening so quickly, we don't have time to react before something new comes along. 
 
We humans are social apes. We crave socialization and gratification. We evolved around our ability to use tools and move. Now it is all coming to a head as our tools reach levels of complexity so extreme and esoteric that we can no longer understand it all. 
 
This is not the Anteacceleratio. It's scary to consider, but the cold fact is that we are not even in the pre-Singularity era and already we are seeing increasing societal disruption and future shock.
 
What will the full thing look like? When will we know we're in the Anteacceleratio era? 
 
First, let's step back and consider the existence of technology curves...
The 2000s and 2010s were always filled with a lot of what I called "business futurism": a lot of business rules management, a lot of HR automation, a lot of AI for optimization of figures and data, a lot of big infrastructure projects, a lot of "dumb" software, a lot of geopolitical angst over social media, a lot of consumer electronic novelties, and none the juicy stuff promised by sci-fi visionaries. For the longest time, I thought this may have been proof that sci-tech progress really is slowing down. The truth, however, is that sci-tech progress has since the 19th century ebbed and flowed between breakthroughs, practical applications, and relatively quiet periods of refinement. There are "three curves" for post-industrial technological development, and I didn't make that observation out of fairy dust. I'm not even the first person to make such an observation: s-curves are a fundamental part of futurist observation.
 
The bedrock of our current zeitgeist hasn't changed in decades, and we're merely refining what already existed. But go back far enough— especially into the 1970s and 1980s— and you'll see a seemingly endless parade of breakthroughs, innovations, and massive strides forward in sci-tech enabled by the rise of the digital era. Once upon a time, five years meant the difference between a computer that crashed after typing a few paragraphs and a computer with a graphical operating system. Now, it seems computers make only the most incremental steps forward and companies try convincing us that a slightly clearer screen resolution is completely worth spending $1,000. 
 
But truth be told, it's not a monumental difference from how electrical appliances eventually only gave you a few new colors as a means of enticing you to pay more.
 
Think of it this way: someone in 1870 would be astounded by the world of 1930. It's something completely different from what they expected, and many would never have been able to predict the changes that were on the way. Someone from 1930 would have been completely astounded by the world of 1990. And someone from 1990 will be completely astounded by the world of 2050. 
 
Between 1870 and 1930, AKA the "first curve", what happened? Experimental innovations from earlier decades begot practical innovations in the present. Automobiles— which had been invented multiple times going as far back as the 17th century— finally came into their own in the 1880s. The practical control of electricity began with Alessandro Volta and Michael Faraday in the early 1800s, but we didn't start seeing true electrical applications on a wide scale until the late 1800s. We had telegraphs, but then came telephones. We had cameras, but then came cinema. Physics got a major kick in the rear thanks to evidence-based science— we didn't even know subatomic particles existed until 1897, and penicillin wasn't created until 1928. Powered flight began in 1903 with a fight shorter than the wingspan of a modern plane. Lightbulbs lit up cities starting in the 1890s. And so on and so forth.
 
 
The first curve was defined by electricity, modern physics, mechanical industry, aerospace engineering, and radio. If we stopped there, we'd have a steampunk world. It also laid down the roots for the second curve, which started after World War II. With that, we got nuclear physics, space exploration, digital industry, quantum physics, lasers, modern medicine, and the internet. The curve effectively ended in the 1990s, and we're in an intermediate period of pure refinement as well as development the roots of the next curve. While the smartphone is a phenomenally important invention, it is a refinement of earlier technologies. 
 
The first curve started around 1880 and ended by 1920; the second curve started at 1950 and ended by 1990. The third curve is about to get started. Anyone who's paying attention can see that artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, automation, space commercialization, human augmentation, and superconductors are the root of the next fifty years of sci-tech and social change.
 
 
And of course, artificial intelligence is like nothing we've ever dealt with before so who knows if the cycle will hold. But the whole theme of the third curve of great technological change seems to be that of enhancing the human condition, something that was not true for either of the previous curves or the gradual periods of technological growth before them. The very idea is so alien to our ways of thinking that many futurists of earlier decades had not predicted anything like it. There was quite a lot about computers spreading throughout society, instant communications with people across the planet, traveling into space, capturing images with a device in your hand, and accessing something like the internet, but many futurist predictions seem to stop there or skip ahead to interstellar travel and utopian societies without anything connecting the two. 
 
It's no different from someone from a first-curve era predicting video messaging, interactive media, and flying cars without predicting integrated circuits and lasers in industry or someone from a pre-curve era predicting flying machines and hearing another human's voice from a long distance through things like "magic" or otherwise unexplained leaps of logic. Artificial intelligence is essentially the electricity or integrated circuit of this coming century, except on a scale far beyond anything we can imagine.
 
 
I've already mentioned how youths are gradually growing ever more foreign to parents. It used to be that kids could gather around their wizened grandparents and listen to tales of how things used to be in order to learn of how to live life upcoming. Now, the words of elders are obsolete, biased takes built from experiences in more brutish, inhumane times talking of skills no longer applicable. 
 
The Anteacceleratio is more than just the obsolescence of adults. It's the complete destruction of traditional human society as we know it. It's the point at which contemporary life becomes utterly indistinguishable from science fiction with all that brings with it. It's not the Singularity itself, but that might be why it's such a scary time. Things are changing too quickly for humans to handle but not quickly enough for there to be an "intelligence explosion". Whatever skills you try to learn one year will become obsolete the next. It's a frightening acceleration of human capability.


________________

February 26th, 2023:

Coming back to this as a result of further thoughts, as it's clear, looking at ChatGPT's effect on education and synthetic media's effect on entertainment, that we are in the first days of the Anteacceleratio.

I think that, if we align an AGI to human and Earthling values, the chance of an intelligence explosion is minimal or even nonexistent. A gradual intelligence expansion is far more likely.
This will inevitably cause the Anteacceleratio era to be extended for much longer, and likely even entrench a lot of stubborn people into older ways of life, thus causing everything I said to be even more stark.

Things are going to change very fast, at an accelerated rate at that, and humans aren't going to be able to cope with it well without retreating into something safe and secure. What is more secure than nostalgia, simpler lifestyles, and a general split between those willing to embrace the future and those willing to stick themselves in the past?
The days of superintelligence are upon us, and if it's friendly, I think it'll understand well that most humans are not going to merge with it or plan to live lives of pure hedonistic technophilia. The Singularity is going to essentially be the triumph of freedom, not of a mass ultra-rapid evolution. And not everyone's going to be happy with that.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Yuli Ban
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Re: Anteacceleratio Redux

Post by Yuli Ban »

So what aspects of my thoughts would I update?

First and foremost, it's blatantly clear that things have lurched upwards in the past two years, to the point we are absolutely in the Anteacceleratio era

As Raklian posted:

Image

Things have shifted ever since the mid-2010s. Certainly as people have noticed, the false foundational stagnation of the 2000s and 2010s has passed, and now everything's accelerating, greatly thanks to the Pandemic and global disruption forcing some trends further— but in all honesty, these things were going to happen regardless. Maybe not as immediately as they have, but certainly this decade. We're seeing in 2021 what we otherwise would have seen by 2026 in a world where COVID-19 was indeed a disease that died out in the last days of December 2019.


The sheer amount of corporate interest and funding going into the Metaverse is, by itself, an astounding (if concerning) thing that would never have happened last decade. One reason the Metaverse is happening now is most likely due to COVID-19, in fact. With people working from home and giving up their jobs at record rates, keeping them pacified is paramount lest more riots, rebellions, and bloody insurrections start happening.
But obviously the most visible change in the past two years has been AI. When I posted that original thread, we had just gotten GPT-2 and the potential of transformers was just a hypothetical set of concepts. Now we're on the verge of genuine proto-AGI. But more importantly, automation is now something that cannot be ignored (even though people will still try to ignore it).





For so long, it was treated as a future hypothetical. Now it's really happening.
All that's left is for the nationalists to either scream that it's a hoax and there's actually rampant undocumented illegal immigration OR for traditionalists to start going 1,000% in on "human-made" blood-and-soil Ludditism.

My synthetic media predictions are beginning to be realized as well, as everything from text-to-image to music synthesis to code synthesis are beginning to come of age, while more advanced techniques like neural video synthesis are the next step forward.


In the time since I wrote that people are starting to persist in new, hermitic ways of life, it's accelerated 100-fold. Food delivery apps went from a neat novelty that I wasted way too much money on all the way to the primary means millions now get their food and groceries. Even here in the middle of Nowhere, Louisiana, we've finally caught up with Europe and have grocery delivery. Even two years ago, that wasn't an option... right up until it was many people's ONLY option.

The third curve of technological progress is begetting the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a massive overwhelming wave of technological innovation. As stated, most of this stuff was being tinkered on and refined a decade ago, during that era of so-called "stagnation" when cynics felt like the Future™ was dead. Now we're seeing what the 2010s "really" looked like in the labs.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Ozzie guy
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Re: Anteacceleratio Redux

Post by Ozzie guy »

Could Anteacceleratio be considered the soft take-off?

Whist it's not the literal definition being AGI leading to AI explosion. Anteacceleratio is the beginning of the end, the start of explosive growth that will continue snowballing and won't end until long after the creation of AGI.


Edit: I also wanted to say I feel like none of these changes are effecting my life outside of grocery delivery, but obviously things like that largely robot run grocery store will pop up in one place before spreading elsewhere and it will likely take 2-5 years before its the norm everywhere.
Nanotechandmorefuture
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Re: Anteacceleratio Redux

Post by Nanotechandmorefuture »

Great writeup! The speed at which things are changing does seem surreal to me as well from time to time. I understand it is for the best and for future improvements to hopefully have the predictions on the Future Timeline happen. The global society in the mean time may be the thing that stalls improvement from time to time I would imagine.
TheAughat
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Re: Anteacceleratio Redux

Post by TheAughat »

Glad to see you reposted this gem! This used to be one of the principal posts I linked to people when talking to them about the future. There was another additional comment of yours that I liked in the original post. This is the one:

It'd be amazing if you could post that here too, so we'd have everything in one place!
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Yuli Ban
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Re: Anteacceleratio Redux

Post by Yuli Ban »

I actually want to rewrite that, but I'll definitely repost it.
Funny how I talked about technological curves but didn't mention the overarching Industrial Revolutions.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Re: Anteacceleratio Redux

Post by TheAughat »

Oh, that's fantastic.
Also, it seems like in the process of copying the text to pastebin and adding the URL here, all the text got embedded and that comment is now part of this post anyway lol
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Yuli Ban
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Re: Anteacceleratio Redux

Post by Yuli Ban »

I mentioned "technology curves" (basically a description of the trajectory of how tech develops during each industrial revolution) and when discussing the period before the "third curve," I also brought up something called "business futurism."
In all honesty, I gave it that name because of how boring "futuristic innovations" had been between the end of the initial digital revolution and the looming start of the next one. Because when you're a young, wide-eyed futurist who eagerly anticipates sexbots VR, nanobots, and AI, it's droll reading about new internet protocols, social media apps, and services that seem like they benefit professional investors (like automated trading and mobile stock updates).
 
Now that I've matured a wee bit and meditated upon these things, I think there's a better term for that: "foundational futurism."
 
The gist is that by using innovations that have come before, the foundations of the future will be built in order to launch us into the Third Curve proper. As it stands, a lot of foundational stuff tends to be pretty boring on its own. Science fiction talks of the future being things like flying cars, autonomous cars, humanoid servant robots, synthetic media, space colonies, neurotechnology, and so on. Sci-fi media sometimes set years for these things to happen, like the 1990s or 2000s. Past futurists often set similar dates. Dates like, say, 2020 AD. According to Blade Runner, we're supposed to have off-world colonies and 100% realistic humanoid robots (e.g. with human-level artificial general intelligence) by now. According to Ray Kurzweil, we were supposed to have widespread human-AI relationships (ala Her) and PCs with the same power as the human brain by 2019. When these dates passed and the most we had was, say, the Web 2.0 and smartphones, we felt depressed about the future.
But here's the thing: we're basically asking why we don't have a completed 2-story house when we're still setting down the foundation, a foundation using tools that were created in the preceding years.
 
We couldn't get to the modern internet without P2P, VoIP, enterprise instant messaging, e-payments, business rules management, wireless LANs, enterprise portals, chatbots, and so on. Things that are so fundamental to how the internet circa 2020 works that we can scarcely even consider them individually. No increased bandwidth for computer connections? No audio or video streaming. No automated trading or increased use of chatbots? No fully automated businesses. No P2P? No blockchain. No smartphones or data sharing? No large data sets that can be used to power machine learning, and thus no advanced AI.
A lot of infrastructure has to be built to connect people, improve cities, and generally increase quality of life. We want autonomous cars, but old pitted roads will just make it harder on them. A lack of GPS satellites will retard efforts to map the world to make them useful. We can't get 5G without building new towers. Certain social and economic organizations are scattershot and unfocused, so created a larger frame for them can allow for future streamlined services (think how the African Central Bank might assist nations attempting to reform their economic systems). 
 
It's true: livestreaming and fitness tracking are nowhere near as "futuristic" as a robot butler or full-dive VR. But they don't need to be. The point right now is to simply put into place everything we need to eventually get to where we want to be. You build the house first, then live in it.
 
Foundational futurism is the reason why the 2000s and early parts of the 2010s felt so uneventful and even boring despite the fact we saw the rise of so much stuff that'll prove undoubtedly influential going forward. Things like noninvasive and invasive brain scanners, graphene, deep learning, CRISPR, practical virtual reality, and so on, all coming alongside things like P2P networks and virtual payments & cryptocurrency. It's sort of like the 1920s into the 1930s for technology, where new innovations happened in sci-tech, physics, and medicine but so much of it wasn't reaching the average person just yet and a lot was really experimental. Penicillin, aerojets, television, radio, analog & digital computing, and so on. These certainly existed in the 1930s, but they didn't really rise to prominence until after World War 2. So a futurist in 1940 would've been frustrated that all the amazing stuff that came between 1880 and 1920 seemed to have petered out. Where was the electricity, the bottled light, the automobile, the aeroplane, the telephone, the radio, the theatre, the nuclear physics, the grand explorations into and discoveries from the primeval parts of the world, more tasty fruits of industrialism of his generation? It seemed to him that everyone just stopped caring about the future and grand technologies in lieu of reloading their guns for another pointless war. It seemed like technology stopped moving forward and everyone was just refining what came before. 
 
Then, of course, starting around 1943, 1944 or so, we start really seeing a sudden lurch upwards as the second post-industrial S curve kicks in. Transistors, mass media, television, space flight, microwaves, lasers, youth culture, miniaturization, air conditioning, a new wave of medicine, and so much more just explodes between 1945 to 1990 culminating in things like (and especially) the Internet. The new opportunities opened during that time made the future seem so amazing. It seemed prudent to imagine that old sci-fi visions were going to come true. We were going to see driverless cars, moon bases, home robots, laser weapons, artificial people, and so much more. 
 
But then around 1995 or so, all that progress seemed as if it came to a screeching halt and we entered another era of refinements and iterative improvements. It wasn't obvious at first and people still thought that the year 2000 (or at least 2010) would live up to sci-fi dreams, but by 2010 there was that definite sense that the previous decade was nowhere near as transformative as previous ones. 
What happened? When did instant messaging, Bluetooth, search engine optimization, and smartphones become "the Future?" Why does it feel like the Future's nothing but a bunch of refinements to the internet? Why is my car from 2015 barely better than my old car from 1999? Oh, I see! They're putting iPads and Wi-Fi in our refrigerators and washing machines. Well done! Well fucking done, lads! The Future is so amazing! Wow, Wikipedia is such an important innovation! Now I can read about the Civil War and how General Buttman lost the Battle of Gettysburg Address. Look at that: I can watch videos of people dancing on "YouTube". Golly, now people carry around cellphones that can access the internet, just like they could a decade ago but with a touch screen and better bandwidth. Just amazing, amazing stuff. Truly science fiction come to life. The year 2000 lived up to the hype. 
 
What else has the Future brought us? Manchildren screaming while playing video games to amuse 12-year-olds. The ability to stream generic electro-pop music to your cellphone. Slightly more standardized cruise control in cars. E-pads that are basically just digital books. You can talk to people online now, so basically just telephones but over the internet. The International Space Station, okay that's actually a good one. But it's still in low-Earth orbit and we rarely put more than maybe to 8 people there. Oh, and we discontinued space shuttles and are hitching rides on Russian rockets. 
 
Christ, the Future fucking sucks. Where's our robots? Where's our flying cars? Where's our kilometer-high starscrapers? Where's our VR? Where's our artificial intelligence? Where's our fusion power? Where's our Unified Theory of Everything? Where's our resurrected woolly mammoths?
Instead we have President Trump, we had a great recession, we had more wars in the Middle East and a drug war in Mexico, people getting addicted to opium, and some neat gadgets here and there.
 
 
It's easy to be disillusioned because you're basically just reading about countries building dams and internet companies refining text search for 20 years.
 
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the next technological S curve starts once we reach the baseline of hardware and knowledge necessary to launch ourselves upwards. In other words, the foundation is now set and it's time to start building. 
We were waiting very patiently for useful robots and getting frustrated that, year after year and decade after decade, they remained elusive. Within five to ten years, we might see utility droids in our houses, actively serving us. How did it happen so quickly? Why now and not in the 1980s? Why is it this "five to ten years" and not the last one? It's like asking why a 15 year old is expected to get a job in the next five to ten years rather than 1 year old. If you want a robot, you need sufficient computing power and sufficiently capable AI and sufficiently capable training. Computers, even supercomputers in the 1970s were pissweak and routinely outdone by handheld video game consoles in the 1990s. So they couldn't run vision systems at any acceptable rate. There was no real internet or ethernet to share massive data sets: again, computers were too weak. It'd probably take a year just to download a few images of a living room unless they were compressed to the point of being useless. Hence why we had to get robots to model their environment on the spot, which naturally ran into limits. And since there was no widespread internet, you couldn't easily share the results of that training with other teams; they'd pretty much have to redo everything from scratch. You couldn't share videos especially, and you couldn't even share image; just text, and not a lot of text at that. The sensors on the robot would be weak as well, so whatever data you generate is low-quality.  
 
In order to get domestic utility robots, you need massive training programs to get these droids to understand latent space, natural language, and commonsense. We're talking petabytes of data. You need the infrastructure first before you can get that data. You need computer networks with very high bandwidth to share that data. You need internet protocols and services that facilitate and ease the difficult in sharing data. You need easier access to said data. You need a larger pool of scientists who are educated enough and healthy enough to come onto these sorts of projects in the first place. And this robot will not be the first robot ever; you're going to want a market for robots in the first place, exploiting what you're already capable of doing. To get enough data, though, you're going to need some way to get people to make enough data. Smartphones are the perfect tool. You need refinements to video processing and natural language processing too. Suddenly, those enterprise speech recognition algorithms and livestream apps don't seem so useless. 
 
And then, of course, you also build on direct developments like robotics teams that experimented for decades to figure out how to get a humanoid to walk, or prosthestics teams that developed amazing bionic arms and legs. Then comes artificial intelligence to save the day. Now that there's ungodly amount of data generated every day (more in a day than the entirety of the 1970s), all you have to do is collect that data and feed it into the right algorithms (and hopefully find more efficient ways to do more with less). 
 
It all starts coming together at a rapid rate right around the same time. And right alongside it, advancements in artificial intelligence and Big Data also spur along progress in genetic engineering via great improvements in the likes of CRISPR and protein folding; AI helps bridge the gap between functional and practical driverless cars (which also thus solves the biggest problem limiting flying cars); AI begins allowing for you to generate any sort of synthetic media you want, no matter what it is, room-temperature superconductors, graphene, quantum & DNA computing, and fusion power finally come into reach; photorealism becomes possible in digital graphics right on time for virtual reality to take advantage of it all; the limits to growth shift as automation takes away the need to account for human physiology and, thus, experience both extreme growth and sustainability for cheaper costs; the internet develops a sort of rudimentary intelligence as a result of cognitive agents being constructed out of next-generation chatbots; biometric feedback and neurotechnology allow for greater accuracy in AI data sets which in turn allows for more powerful and robust AI with which to use to construct the Future. 
 
The take-off will be an exciting time all its own as it was in the 1870s-1880s and the 1940s-1950s when optimism over new innovations spread rapidly. The sense that the future will just be more of the same will begin to wane. 
 
This time, however, things are going to be a little different. The foundational futurism of the 2000s onwards haven't prepared us for what's coming next.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Re: Anteacceleratio Redux

Post by caltrek »

^^^Nice essay.

One thing I have noticed over the years is the tendency for science fiction to be much too optimistic in its timeframes. Young folks want stories that might plausible happen in their lifetimes. They are not necessarily so interested in reading about what life might be like for their grandchildren when those grandchildren reach their 60s. So, science fiction can raise expectations that are just not going to be met, at least not in the stipulated time frames.

Foundational?

I suppose so. I think all of human history can be thought of as foundational.

S-curves. Well, I think that depends a lot on the parameters being measured. Yes, there probably are cycles to history. Some time frames where things moved along more quickly than at other times. We certainly see that in regards to empires that come and go. A revolution which puts the new order in place. A long period in which the new order exerts itself. Then collapse. Some times that collapse comes quickly, some times it is a painfully prolonged affair.

Future shock is definitely a factor. Before the Tofflers it is was referred to by such descriptions as a "whirlwind of creative destruction" or a time in which "all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy becomes profaned." I suppose the same happens in science and technology. The best and the brightest race furiously just to try to keep up with the latest development in their fields. So much so that the race itself determines the pace of development. Too much information coming too fast is slowed down by poor feeble human minds just trying to not fall behind the curve.

Will AI help?

Yes, and no. It will help crunch ungodly amounts of data and information. AGI may even help in theoretical developments. Still, a bottleneck will be humans. Do we handle these new capabilities wisely, or do we just let it all tear apart the fabric of our society?

In the end , I have more questions than answers.
Don't mourn, organize.

-Joe Hill
Tadasuke
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Re: Anteacceleratio Redux

Post by Tadasuke »

Are you sure of this waves of change thing? Because I'm not. I think that progress is continual and exponential. World economic growth doesn't follow waves. If you for example look at share of the world population living in absolute poverty, then that graph is smooth and predictable.

In the year 2000 there were 68 250m+ skyscrapers, in the year 2020 there were 255 and 302 under construction. 2 450m+ skyscrapers in 2000 and 9 in 2020. 0 600m+ in 2000 and 3 in 2020. No wonder we don't have cities full of kilometre high buildings when 21 years ago there were only 24 300m+ ones on the whole planet. Look at Dubai in 2000 vs now and say once again there is a slow-down between waves. In Asia in 2020 there were 2.5x more tall buildings completed that year than completed in the year 2000. While in the USA there were 2.26x less tall buildings completed. Why? Probably because the USA is already quite developed. But it's your country that is stagnating in some areas, not the world. If you go back to the 1950s, the USA was the only really developed country. Today there are multiple developed countries. Soon, China's economy will be double that of the USA.

That waves thing is overly simplistic. And there is no industrial revolution. There is only industrial evolution, which started in the XVII century (with the so called "industrious revolution") and continues to this day.
Global economy doubles in product every 15-20 years. Computer performance at a constant price doubles nowadays every 4 years on average. Livestock-as-food will globally stop being a thing by ~2050 (precision fermentation and more). Human stupidity, pride and depravity are the biggest problems of our world.
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