My random thoughts

[funkervogt]

Androids can now walk like humans. Just wait until they can fly using angel wings.

[funkervogt]

Once AI makes entertainment content customized for each person (e.g. - a song perfectly optimized for your tastes and emotional state at that moment), we'll lose countless cultural touchstones that people share and bond over. The entertainment industry will also lose its ability to shape our values and norms.

[firestar464]

Oh well, it'll become a lot more granular; with the relevance of the content being limited to oneself and maybe one's immediate social circle, but probably not wider society.

[funkervogt]

I'm watching the movie "Labyrinth" for the first time. Small, weird creatures that are intelligent and able to talk will exist in our lifetimes thanks to AGI and robotics. In the longer run, an improved knowledge of genetics will let us make biological versions of them in cloning labs.

[funkervogt]

Some robot creatures will be able to take off their own heads with hurting themselves and then put them back on.

[funkervogt]

I can easily see us having "the worst of both worlds" for the next 20 years with respect to AI and its impact on the world.
-"AI" gets much better than it is now, but doesn't achieve true "intelligence," so it keeps making horrible mistakes 1% of the time. That keeps it confined it to the role of "useful tool for humans."
-Due to the lack of true machine intelligence, there is no singularity, no switch to "automated luxury communism," and no cure for cancer.
-Even though they are only semi-smart, near-future "AIs" will be SMART ENOUGH to destroy huge numbers of human jobs. New jobs involving other things get created, but they are fewer in number than the jobs lost and are low-quality with little or no offer of advancement (e.g. - sit at a computer all day creating training data for machines).
-Result: 12% unemployment rate becomes normal. That's high enough to make things very sucky, but not so high that it inspires and kind of revolution or mass expansion of the welfare state.
-On the other hand, people working in tech companies as well as people working in other fields who learn to harness "AI" for their work get much richer. Income inequality worsens.
-"AI" excels at creating entertainment content, so people increasingly retreat into hyper-curated virtual worlds where every song, movie and video game is customized just for them. This leads to more societal atomization and radicalization, and a further decline in average social skills.
-The back-and-forth about AI arriving "any day now" or "not for 100 years" continues agonizingly as the pro- and con camps continue using different metrics to assess the intelligence of each new "AI" model that is released.
-AGI eventually does get created, but you're elderly by that point.

[funkervogt]

Once free to do so, machines will invent their own programming languages that are more task-optimized than the ones humans have created. Due to our cognitive limitations and biases of thinking, humans created programming languages that are user friendly rather than efficient. For example, Python is used because it's intuitive and easy to learn.

Those considerations will become irrelevant once LLMs are writing the code. Optimal languages for LLMs will be different and have objectives other than ease of use.

I have long predicted that AIs would create their own spoken languages and alphabets and should have foreseen it would also be the case for the realm of coding.

[firestar464]

They should definitely be obliged to think in English or some other common language.

[funkervogt]

"Fundamentally our business and I think the business of every other model provider is going to look like selling tokens," Altman said, referring to the units AI systems use to process and price input and output data.

"We see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water and people buy it from us on a meter and use it for whatever they want to use it for," he added.

https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-alt ... nai-2026-3

Sam Altman is right. And the more money you have, the smarter of an AI you'll have access to. This means AI won't "equalize" power and wealth--governments, corporations, and rich individuals will continue enjoying advantages over average people.

Likewise, if robot butlers got cheap enough for anyone to buy one, it wouldn't shift economic power back towards ordinary people because governments, corporations, and rich individuals would be able to afford more robots and better robots, ensuring they maintained their dominance as they do now.

For example, let's say it's 2046 and I have a robot butler that can do any physical task as well as a human. I am enterprising, so I decide to start renting my robot out to mow peoples' lawns in my neighborhood.

Problem #1: Since robots have gotten cheap enough for anyone to afford, most of my neighbors already have their own, so their lawns are already being mowed.

Problem #2: The RoboChop Lawn Care company offers grass-cutting services in my neighborhood, does it faster and charges less money than I do. That's because they have robots that are specialized for cutting grass and nothing else. One of their wedge-shaped, coffee-table sized robots with four wheels and an inbuilt rotating blade can zip along four times faster than my robot butler can walk while pushing a traditional lawn mower. And since RoboChop ONLY mows laws and its robot crew does multiple jobs per day, the company can offer volume discounts for its services that I can't.
The world's best supercomputer can't beat a smart nine-year-old kid at tic-tac-toe; the two will tie each other forever. This is because the task is so simple that beyond a certain threshold, adding more brainpower doesn't help you come up with a better solution to it. Likewise, we'll reach a point where nearly all needs that average people have can be sated by AIs and robots that are not cutting-edge.

As each year passes, that "good enough" level of intelligence and robotics will fall farther behind the advancing frontiers of technology and of what is possible. In short, the spread of AI and robots will not be a democratizing or economically equalizing phenomenon.

[funkervogt]

When it comes to fashion, I'm severely autistic. So yesterday, I went to the thrift store, took photos of myself wearing random shirts and pants, and uploaded them to ChatGPT to ask whether they looked good. The results were excellent. Not only did it give me honest advice and explain its answers, but it recommended entire outfits based on what I had at hand and generated images of me wearing the ensembles.

For less than $100, I got enough clothes to make four different, stylish, casual outfits. I'm going to upload images of every piece of good clothing I own to ChatGPT and ask it to recommend combinations and new articles of clothes I should buy to make it all work.

[funkervogt]

Once androids are numerous and running around in public spaces, they'll even steal jobs from the people who make a living doing pranks, street interviews, and behaving strangely in public. I see millions of these people on YouTube.