"We Live In The Future": Post things that give you future shock!

[wjfox]

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

I dunno why I love this thing so much.




I dunno, it's giant late-capitalist waste yes, but I love the sphere, I love the concept


"I love the Sphere" - Yuli Ban, 2024

[Powers]

I dunno why I love this thing so much.

I dunno, it's giant late-capitalist waste yes, but I love the sphere, I love the concept

"I love the Sphere" - Yuli Ban, 2024

[wjfox]

[firestar464]

Took me a second to notice the robodog

[raklian]

It's a bit cringe people still overreact seeing a robot. It's 2024 for god's sake.

[firestar464]

"I love the Sphere" - Yuli Ban, 2024

"I love the [Dyson] Sphere" - Yuli Ban, 3100

[citali_]

It's a bit cringe people still overreact seeing a robot. It's 2024 for god's sake.

[wjfox]

[Yuli Ban]

It's a bit cringe people still overreact seeing a robot. It's 2024 for god's sake.

Remember that my ENTIRE FUTUROLOGIST BREAKDOWN, the entirety of the past 10 years of my actions on this forum and its predecessor, my entire identity forged on Reddit and KurzweilAI and other spaces, my epiphany about synthetic media, my yearly predictions, my optimism about future technology....

.... all stemmed from me watching a video of ASIMO walking around a bit and serving some drinks one random day in March 2014 and badly overreacting to how cool that was

Yeah, just imagine me circa 2014 give or take a few months watching this exact video with the dumbest awestruck look on my face and freaking out that "it's 2014! We're living in the Future™! Why isn't anyone talking about this?!"


I was forged in the fires of cringe

[Yuli Ban]

This, too, is something I would regularly dream about.
Story time! So if anyone here remembers things I was into last decade circa 2014, 2015, 2016 or so, one of those things was "futuristic realism" and "slice of tomorrow" storytelling. Basically one of two things; either real life resembling science fiction (so sweeping panning shots of futuristic cityscapes and real life cyborgs were cool), or science fiction that strongly resembled the mundanity of real life (so sci-fi that avoided sweeping panning shots of cityscapes and overdesigned cyborgs). Around September 2015 into October and November 2015, I was getting REALLY excited about the prospect of robots, AI, and mixed reality in daily life and decided to quasi-LARP/do a mental exercise by writing a daily journal/diary entry of whatever I was doing that day, narrative-focused.... but added various elements of the Future™. Not randomly, but basically "reimagining" my day. So if I walked around on campus, I'd imagine I had a companion robot with me, and that there was a derelict old unused humanoid behind the stairwell of one building that no one paid much attention to. I'd imagine using an MR headset while sitting outside, mostly just to "scan" trees and birds and various cloud types while browsing my smartphone. I'd imagine my car was self-driving. I'd imagine I owned those Moley Robotic Kitchen arms and they'd cook whatever food I actually prepped that evening. And obviously, there was the robot wife/companion.
It took a bit of imagination, but it was quite the fun exercise. And it was all rooted in this desire to see EXACTLY THIS.

This exact scene, of robots in our daily life, infringing into our mundane reality in a cool and creepy way. This was years before I came to appreciate the "pre-acceleration" era, so I was more bummed that all this technology wasn't here.

If I could send this video back to myself circa that time, the I of then would have been so desperate to jump to 2024.

[Cyber_Rebel]

^ Has @Wjfox noticed any walking robots out in the wilds yet? I would be pretty excited to see that walking down the street ngl, in the same way I saw my first Cybertruck up close recently. It makes you kind of feel the aesthetics of the future are now being actualized. I imagine at some point the newness will wear off though, and it will feel like futuristic cars and walking robots were always here.

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Imagine something like this, but with the real time conversational quality of GPT-4o or perhaps something much better.

[wjfox]

^ Has @Wjfox noticed any walking robots out in the wilds yet?

Not yet, but hopefully soon!

Amazing.

[Yuli Ban]

Imagine a person from the Stone Ages witnessing this scene.

You know, part of the sense of "We Live in the Future™" for me also comes from anachronisms— like the Vatican (which I always associate with medieval and Renaissance times) talking about artificial intelligence, or seeing the Amish and Mennonites (who still maintain a very early/mid 19th century way of life) use smartphones

And to that end, you actually COULD reasonably imagine a person from Paleolithic or Neolithic times seeing such a massive volumetric display, or a drone show, or a fleet of robots
Because there are in fact a few neo-Neolithic tribes still out there, most famously the Sentinelese. I do use "neo" Neolithic because, unless there is still some tribe in the Amazon or Outback or Siberia that has somehow eluded detection to this day, technically all human groups are accounted for and have been contacted, but there nevertheless are some "uncontacted peoples" who reject all modernity and live pretty much exactly as we used to as a species prior to civilization or even agriculture. The Sentinelese are probably the purest example of them all, as their little slice of Earth is as primeval as it gets and, beyond scrap metal and a few gifts from the outside world, the past 10,000 years might as well never happened for them (allegedly; their linguistic drift all but confirms that they have to have been isolated for at least a few thousand years, but they probably haven't been isolated for "60,000 years" as some sensationally claim; after all, how could they have a language even remotely similar to neighboring tribes if they've been isolated that long?)
And that always boggles the mind to consider.

If there was EVER a chance to have a "Stone Age" human experience the proverbial "future shock" of being taken out of time, out of a lifestyle of horticulture and hunter and gathering where the tallest manmade structure is a grass hut and the most advanced technology they use might unironically be a bow and arrow, and placed in a modern metropolis, surrounded by every ultra-high tech amenity we know of, probably the best chance would be a Sentinelese islander who elects to leave the island (and get inoculated against diseases) and visit some place like London, Las Vegas, Dubai, Tokyo, or Hong Kong.

[Powers]

If there was EVER a chance to have a "Stone Age" human experience the proverbial "future shock" of being taken out of time, out of a lifestyle of horticulture and hunter and gathering where the tallest manmade structure is a grass hut and the most advanced technology they use might unironically be a bow and arrow, and placed in a modern metropolis, surrounded by every ultra-high tech amenity we know of, probably the best chance would be a Sentinelese islander who elects to leave the island (and get inoculated against diseases) and visit some place like London, Las Vegas, Dubai, Tokyo, or Hong Kong.

At least the closest we have at the moment.
Bonus for Dubai, that city must be weird

[firestar464]

Imagine a person from the Stone Ages witnessing this scene.

You know, part of the sense of "We Live in the Future™" for me also comes from anachronisms— like the Vatican (which I always associate with medieval and Renaissance times) talking about artificial intelligence, or seeing the Amish and Mennonites (who still maintain a very early/mid 19th century way of life) use smartphones

And to that end, you actually COULD reasonably imagine a person from Paleolithic or Neolithic times seeing such a massive volumetric display, or a drone show, or a fleet of robots
Because there are in fact a few neo-Neolithic tribes still out there, most famously the Sentinelese. I do use "neo" Neolithic because, unless there is still some tribe in the Amazon or Outback or Siberia that has somehow eluded detection to this day, technically all human groups are accounted for and have been contacted, but there nevertheless are some "uncontacted peoples" who reject all modernity and live pretty much exactly as we used to as a species prior to civilization or even agriculture. The Sentinelese are probably the purest example of them all, as their little slice of Earth is as primeval as it gets and, beyond scrap metal and a few gifts from the outside world, the past 10,000 years might as well never happened for them (allegedly; their linguistic drift all but confirms that they have to have been isolated for at least a few thousand years, but they probably haven't been isolated for "60,000 years" as some sensationally claim; after all, how could they have a language even remotely similar to neighboring tribes if they've been isolated that long?)
And that always boggles the mind to consider.

If there was EVER a chance to have a "Stone Age" human experience the proverbial "future shock" of being taken out of time, out of a lifestyle of horticulture and hunter and gathering where the tallest manmade structure is a grass hut and the most advanced technology they use might unironically be a bow and arrow, and placed in a modern metropolis, surrounded by every ultra-high tech amenity we know of, probably the best chance would be a Sentinelese islander who elects to leave the island (and get inoculated against diseases) and visit some place like London, Las Vegas, Dubai, Tokyo, or Hong Kong.

Bottom line is that technological advancement happens only because it is needed, or if neighbors import the technology. Something worldbuilders often fail to realize

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

This is 2024-era China
Something we'll never see here in the States, except maybe in Las Vegas



It actually meets my expectations of what 2024 was "supposed" to look like in the bigger cities.

[Yuli Ban]

And I agree with this take


Part of the issue ultimately comes down to the fact that people have a specific image of what AI is "supposed" to be able to do
Science fiction/cartoons/sitcoms always portray AI voices as very computerized and robotic, and that was the true state of the technology itself until very recently (the first AI voice that actually stunned people for how "realistic" it sounded was Google's WaveNet voice back in 2016 or so, and Duplex's use of it in 2018).
You see this same issue everywhere. People get this idea of what AI can and can't do, and whenever AI does what it "shouldn't" be able to do, people get scared or astounded.
My point for years now is "It will be able to do EVERYTHING." It doesn't matter what you think it can't do; it will do that too... or it will at least so perfectly mimic it as to not matter. People constantly say "Well, it can't create a freeform soulful bluesy prog-rock album" and that's one of the first things it did years ago with OpenAI's Jukebox. It can't create a Jackson Pollock painting with the same energy and chaos, and I say "Literally just give it time."
And that's a very scary thought, because it just feels wrong in so many ways. My perspective has always been "But WHY does it feel wrong? Is it because it actually is, or because it's continuing the trend that started centuries ago of displacing humanity from thinking he is the center of the universe?"
It's not going to get any better in the coming months, and I fear for a lot of people who may be extremely anxious or hostile to this field of technology because at some point, they're going to encounter some AI breakthrough that is so astounding, so otherworldly, so "good" that they might have a nervous breakdown. Already, so many are coping hard now saying that this is all a scam that will soon implode and go the way of Beanz and Pets.com, and absolutely it's starting to get angrier and more hostile the more AI as a field DOESN'T collapse.
"Look at all these charts, all these indicators, AI WILL collapse in two more weeks!" *said 16 weeks ago*
Because the scariest part is that point that'll cause a nervous breakdown, is in itself still extremely early in the age of AI development, and will soon be surpassed by exponentially more incredible and insane AI progress.

I really just don't know how the current anti-AI contingent is going to react to that. They have no idea that these are quite literally the waning days of even being able to seriously argue that AI is a nothingburger. And by the time that AI shows clearly that it's not the scam or fake trend so many seem convinced it is, it'll be too late to ban it or do anything to stop it.