Future Timeline

A part of me can't believe I'm asking this question so early in life, haha.

Anyway. I've seen how AI is advancing as of late, with (as far as I can see) no signs of slowing down. Generative AI can do quite a bit and is improving by the month.

Let's say I write novels - as in full-length novels of (subjectively) decent to high quality for income. How worried should I be that I'll be automated into irrelevance in the near future? By "near", I'm referring to the next 10-20 years or so.

I've seen various takes on this question, ranging from "don't worry about that for a long time yet" to "you're fucked". The first opinion is the most common I see, but no matter how often I see it, I can't shake the feeling that it's wrong and just people coping with how effective AI might become in a freakishly short time.

It's all well and good to go on about ASI, the singularity, UBI etc. etc but in the interim I'm one of the people with a decent chance of being completely fucked over. I'm not at all confident that governments will respond quickly and effectively enough to upcoming automation, so I could either be stuck back in a job I hate (after putting in great effort to avoid exactly that) or straight up stuck with no job and an ineffective social safety net.

Anyway - thoughts on this question?

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As someone who programs and encounters a similar question within a different field, my best advice would be to leverage AI to improve your writing productivity and creativity. In the short term, people who utilize AI for enhancing their output or ideas will have a clear advantage over those who don't. I do suspect there will always be some kind of market for "pure human" works even in an age of AGI, but telling if such actually is that is another matter entirely by that point.

Next 10-20 years can't be for certain, but I'd hope the job market would've had enough time to transition, at least to a point where people can receive a basic living income when creating collaborative works with AI. Apologize if this post isn't helpful or anything you haven't heard before.

erowind wrote: ↑Sat Dec 23, 2023 7:43 am
But for writing something novel that isn't just reconfiguration of existing tropes I don't think AI will be able to do that within even 100 years. These algorithms aren't genuinely creative, they keep getting more impressive but they're not intelligent.

Within this century, I think it's likely we'll have realistic human-like androids, each with their own subjective experiences and memories, etc. and possibly with visual, auditory, olfactory and other senses that far surpass human capabilities. At that point, why wouldn't they be creative or intelligent?

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I don't think the "miracle" of subjective experience resides within the brain as an emergent property. What I'm saying is all this focus on the brain in an attempt to explain subjective consciousness is a red herring. The more plausible explanation is that there is a higher dimension of physics we're unaware of.

Think about this - for the observer residing outside of our own multi-dimensional space, it may be difficult to discern the difference between a rock and a brain. It might be the case the brain and the rock experience the "miracle of subjectivity" in their own ways. In other words, different but equal.

The implication of this reasoning is we humans aren't conscious by virtue of our own evolutionary path which produced physiological characteristics that are unique to humans or primates in general.