Yuli's Treasure Chest

[Yuli Ban]

Retrying this old thread of mine



If Jupiter was also a star

[Yuli Ban]

What will the days of high-immersion VR be like? 
I can see a time later this decade where multiple experimental technologies converge. Where high-end VR is light and extremely powerful, and virtual waking is a more widely known phenomenon. If there's a great advancement in BCIs, this could all come together to a point where we exist at a strange twilight period of VR, after the "gamey" low-immersion era we're in now and before the full-immersion era of whatever transhumanist future lies beyond. 
 
Right now, high-immersion VR is only fleetingly possible by exploiting a rare psychological glitch. It's the green flash of VR, something that requires a lot of things going right and only works for a very short amount of time— a couple minutes at absolute most if you're not stirred too much, and usually less than 30 seconds. 
VR headsets right now are too bulky and heavy, which makes sleeping with them difficult. Even if you weren't constantly being agitated by this weight on your face (and in your sleepfulness state, your natural instincts are much more surface level making you more prone to trying to take it off), you might roll over or move your head in such a way that the headset comes loose ever so slightly. If your illusion is broken by the smallest amount, it won't work or it'll last for only a second or two at most. And having to assume control using physical controllers can also break the immersion easily. 
 
Further down the line, in our attempts to extend this period of high-immersion VR, I can see techniques developing that are greatly bolstered by BCIs. 
If you can more easily wear a VR headset like you would goggles or a sleeping patch, the overnight issue would be resolved easily. 
The BCI could also record your mental state while the headset itself could monitor your eyes, giving you the ability to sync up waking with loading whatever scene you want to immerse yourself in. 
Then, when you actually do wake up, the BCI could be used for motions that don't intrude on physical reality, allowing you to move around without breaking immersion. 
 
With lucid dreaming tech, it might even be possible to trigger yourself to remain in an early-waking state for an extended period of time, maximizing how long you can remain in high-immersion mode.
 
This sounds as sloppy as it'd probably be, and once we have full-dive VR, all these shortcuts will be obsolete. But it would prove to be a tantalizing first taste of what's to come.

[Yuli Ban]

Could our machines have become self-aware without our even knowing it?
 

In his 2012 book, Consciousness, the neuroscientist Christof Koch speculated that the web might have achieved sentience, and then posed the essential question: ‘By what signs shall we recognise its consciousness?’
Despite decades of focused effort, computer scientists haven’t managed to build an AI system intentionally, so it can’t be easy. For this reason, even those who fret the most about artificial intelligence, such as University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, doubt that AI will catch us completely unawares. And yet, there is reason to think that conscious machines might be a byproduct of some other effort altogether. Engineers routinely build technology that behaves in novel ways. Deep-learning systems, neural networks and genetic algorithms train themselves to perform complex tasks rather than follow a predetermined set of instructions. The solutions they come up with are as inscrutable as any biological system. Even a vacuum-cleaning robot’s perambulations across your floor emerge in an organic, often unpredictable way from the interplay of simple reflexes. ‘In theory, these systems could develop – as a way of solving a problem – something that we didn’t explicitly know was going to be conscious,’ says the philosopher Ron Chrisley, of the University of Sussex.

Any intelligence that arises through such a process could be drastically different from our own. Whereas all those Terminator-style stories assume that a sentient machine will see us as a threat, an actual AI might be so alien that it would not see us at all. What we regard as its inputs and outputs might not map neatly to the system’s own sensory modalities. Its inner phenomenal experience could be almost unimaginable in human terms. The philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous question – ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ – seems tame by comparison. A system might not be able – or want – to participate in the classic appraisals of consciousness such as the Turing Test. It might operate on such different timescales or be so profoundly locked-in that, as the MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark has suggested, in effect it occupies a parallel universe governed by its own laws.

 
I've said something quite like this before.
 

Getting into more esoteric territory, there is a conspiracy theory simmering under the surface of the internet that there is a "phantom" artificial intelligence lurking on the deepweb and perhaps even in plain sight. That the sheer amount of compute and connections across the world form a sort of digital neural membrane from which an AGI could arise. And this certainly could be used by future researchers to jumpstart an AGI project. However in the theory, it is a self-arising artificial life form, entirely non-state and non-organizational, leading to it residing entirely in the background out of sight of anyone. If it made itself known, it would be exploited or used for purposes that result in it dividing or outright losing computational resources. Therefore, all attempts by humans to communicate with it will fail. Lonely youths tempting it for a secret chat and transnational megacorporation-backed governments alike are treated equally: with total silence and observation.
 
It's a neat little theory, and I'm a sucker for the unknown (so "phantom" AI & robotics stories are like candy), but right off the bat, the theory is unfalsifiable.

How weird is that to think about, that there are unidentified AIs operating around the world. Behind the trees, beneath the ground, away from spying eyes, spying on the world...

It is perpetually fascinating to imagine. Somewhere out there, deep within a laboratory, a computer program is thinking. It's communicating to humans.

Or perhaps even more esoterically, this AI doesn't exist in any one laboratory or on any one computer. Rather, the digital membrane of the internet spontaneously gave birth to artificial life, and we humans are still unaware.

[Yuli Ban]

"Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us." - Peter Watts

Passage is from Echopraxia

[Yuli Ban]

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn't be a revolution or a riot. It'd be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn't try to bite the sheep next to them

-Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

[Yuli Ban]

Any recently updated predictions for 2030?
From /r/ThisIsTheWayItWillBe


One thing that has to be mentioned that hasn't been talked of much here: the state of biotechnology and personalized health monitoring.

Bryan Johnson is ahead of the curve here:

Pretty interesting when Bryan starts talking about his diet. He doesn't choose what is on his grocery list. He gets a huge amount of tests/blood panels done once a month and then has an algorithm populate his grocery list.

I myself considered such a thing many years ago and had no idea it was advanced enough to use practically already. I can absolutely imagine a biometric reader coupled with a cognitive agent that monitors various biochemical readings and then preorders whatever necessary to achieve or maintain optimal health, complete with autonomous delivery. If tests are necessary, we could have robots for this. For example, if you're like how I used to be and can't handle needles, a machine could take your blood or inject medicine in your sleep. And that's presuming there are no machines semi-permanently a part of one's body, like an implantable biometric reader.

And it's clearly a malleable program. If you suffer from diabetes, Celiac disease, high blood pressure, kidney disease, or various allergies that have not been rectified for whatever reason, your algorithmically-pruned diet would be altered to avoid whichever products would make you ill.

Likewise, with natural language agents, you could discuss your preferred diet with an AI, perhaps trying to find a balance between what you'd like to eat and what would be best for you or perhaps just to order certain foods. Conversely, as most food is tagged in natural language as well as product codes, mastery of natural language would allow for these agents to better locate and decide upon what products you want or need.

Edit: Just remembered the Moley robotic arms.

We're likely going to have much more advanced robots than this by then, but it does build off all of this. I'm a very lazy person when it comes to cooking, which is a big reason why I could be so much healthier. With this set up, you could have a personal assistant agent parse your biometrics, order your groceries for the next set of time (could be a month, could be a week, whatever is your choice), and then have those groceries autonomously delivered and then food prepared autonomously as well. This might even have added benefits because an AI system would know ways to maximize the nutritional value, health benefits, and taste of certain dishes, adding or taking away things or cooking them in a certain manner that you yourself either wouldn't think of or wouldn't bother to do. Plus a robotic kitchen system could work while you're busy.

[Yuli Ban]

Now I'm no proponent of sacred geometry or anything like that... but it sure is bizarre that nature seems to occasionally fall into mathematical constants. It makes you really wonder if there really are some fundamental mathematical rules behind the veils of reality that determine how things unfold.

[erowind]

/\ I think it may be a reflection of our fundamental nature as a part of nature. That which we create is natural as we are natural, hence, it may be suspected that human created phenomena such as mathematics would take similar if not identical form to natural phenomena as it too is natural phenomena. In terms of semi-formal philosophical reasoning.

Known Statement: Nature is the entire universe including all phenomena known and unknown.

Premise: Human beings are a phenomena

Conclusion: Therefore, human beings are natural phenomena as all phenomena are natural.

Known Statement: Human beings are a natural phenomena and all phenomena known and unknown are natural.

Premise: Human beings themselves create and or discover "new" phenomena in the universe.

Reasoning: Since human beings are phenomena and all phenomena is natural, therefore, human created phenomena is natural.

Conclusion: Hence, human created phenomena (mathematics) is in identity with natural phenomena (the universe.)

This is highly condensed, a formal proof of this reasoning would be at least a page if not much larger but everyone here should be able to understand what I mean clearly.

[Yuli Ban]

When the political classes discussed how democracy can go awry, they tend to come back to many repeating trends in history: political apathy, extremist sentiment, radical populism, strong military support over the government, anti-intellectualism, civic decline, a sense of degeneration and a desire to reverse it through a strongman or ideological purity, widespread willful ignorance.

Democracy is deeply flawed. It's biggest strength is also its Achilles' Heel. The entire citizenry is supposed to be sovereign. This maximizes civic participation and minimizes the chance for government abuse of the population. At least in theory. Usually, the government still finds a way to marginalize a group. But generally, it makes sense. Democrats are what gives a government its authority and power, so it's not in the government's interest to marginalize democrats. An aristocracy wouldn't marginalize aristocrats; a plutocracy wouldn't marginalize plutocrats; an ergatocracy wouldn't marginalize ergatocrats. So that makes sense in theory, even though in practice, it leads to instability because government works best if its power base is educated.

The thing about aristocracy and technocracy is that you can expect wealthy aristocrats to be well educated and small in number, while technocrats are literally defined by their technical expertise.

Democracies need 100% of their population to be educated in order to function. Not just literate but also well-rounded.

Information bubbles are extremely dangerous in a democracy. If group A believes President X is responsible for mass murder but group B believes he's not and no such murder happened and both bring "evidence" proving their side, you reach an impasse. Now imagine that for many smaller issues and even things irrelevant to politics. If groups start distrusting basic information and facts, they'll vote in irrational ways.

This is just natural. We humans can't know all things at all times, and have to make deductions from what we can glean. There are only so many hours in the day and our attention is so limited, and we tend to reject that which goes against our views anyway.

Once synthetic media comes along, this will reach critical levels when people start persisting in entirely personalized bubbles, seeing only what they want to see. In 2032, Chelsea Clinton might be president, but many groups use media synthesis to change all news and images to show that Donald Trump Jr. is president. And if you live in certain households that run with this, you might even have no clue Clinton is president the entire time and would think everyone saying otherwise is deluded.

Democracy can't function in such a world.

But that's besides the point.

This just further shows how fragile democracy is. The main point to glean is that humans can only process a limited amount of information and can only act on that information at a certain speed. Democracy can die that way, but that's really how it died in Ancient Rome too, so what's so revelatory?

Simple: it also means that democracy can fail if there was a power base that's TOO smart, TOO capable, and TOO informed to the point that the common citizenry can't possibly keep up.

And everyone here can guess what that means.

But you see, the funny thing about artificial intelligence and narratives of it takeover is that we have to write fiction and fiction generally has to be exciting, especially if it's sci-fi. It's why I'd love to kickstart a "slice of tomorrow" literary genre in order to really go into the nitty gritty of future life, developments, politics, and so on with no need to tell an action or romance story or have grave stakes or dystopian consequences.

If you think about the future in such a way, you see that AI overlords are inevitable, but in the most boring possible way.

Right now, we already live in an era of automated stock markets and enterprise expert systems. But in the future, as more and more capable AI is integrated into business and government for different purposes (such as optimization and cognitive assistance), we'll start to see the realms of politics and economics really speed up. More management decisions will be automated, and soon even executive decisions will follow.

At first, this can greatly assist humans. We'll have these agents parse all the relevant data and optimize them for the most efficient solutions to any given problem.

But then more businesses automate. More leave executive decisions to these superbots. And the data coming in requires faster and faster responses to more and more complex information.

Soon, you need to be the equivalent of a nuclear scientist just to understand the basics, and that's if you had several days to sit on it. You need to make a decision within an hour. And then a minute. Failure to do this means your business goes under within just a few weeks.

And it goes doubly so for government. Bots are sending you 100 years of information in a day and need you to act immediately. But you can't, Mr. President. You're only human. The fastest brain signal is only 270 miles per hour, whereas these bots have light-speed computing capabilities: 670,616,629 miles per hour.

At some point, it makes no sense to let humans govern. It's literally impossible to keep up. Humans now get in the way.

Say a citizens group organized for a vote on how to limit the powers of AI. It takes 8 hours from start to finish.

In those 8 hours, the AIs have accomplished 5,000 years worth of thought and governance. They've modeled every single possibility of that vote hundreds of times over. They already taken appropriate actions. By the time the vote is done, the whole point of it is moot. Even when we try to be self-sufficient and independent, the machines are already a thousand steps ahead of us anyway.

Human enhancement doesn't change anything for the same reasons. Not all humans will upgrade, and the fact we have to toss away biology just to keep up proves the point that something has changed and democracy is obsolete.

This is all very outlandish, so it makes sense it's not discussed often. That and "AI took over the world over the course of decades through iterative improvements in efficiency" isn't quite as exciting as "killer robots slaughtered and enslaved their arrogant human masters." But that is the most likely outcome. If we're ruled over by AI, it's because we let it.

[Yuli Ban]

This would be an interesting reimagining of telepathy, and I can see how we can possibly get from current BCI tech to there.
Imagine a neuro-tech version of this:


This could be our immediate future. Perhaps as soon as the late 2020s.

[Yuli Ban]

Creative pursuits for the sake of creativity ("art for art's sake") and some very comparative-advantage heavy bits of work are fine and always will be. But art as career is likely going to be the first victim of automation, in the biggest irony yet.

It makes sense in hindsight. Automating art only requires editing and generating data, which you could do on any computer. You could recreate even the fine and comfy graininess of old-school hand-drawn Disney movies on a computer if you actually put in the time and effort. We don't because computers afford you the opportunity to do things differently and more efficiently (and often more soullessly), but anything that can be seen on a screen can be done by AI. You don't even need artificial general intelligence for most of it.

Automating physical work requires an actual robotic body, among other things like spatial awareness and the ability to comprehend basic 3D space logic, and even the most impressive Boston Dynamics machines are still... lacking.

Art for art's sake is like baking cakes. If a robot bakes 100 cakes and humans bake 5, you now have 105 cakes. Art as career is like if a bakery has to fulfill an order for 100 cakes. There's no chance for the humans to keep up.

We naturally claim the opposite will happen, that automation will impact blue collar work first, because it seems obvious on the surface. How can human creativity possibly be automated? Well, we're going to learn and fast just how backwards our predictions were.
Worse yet, there are far, far fewer protections for artistic workers like there are for blue collar workers, so once this tech starts burning through them, it'll be a quick and violent burn. One year, we'll have things like pop artists, fashion models, keyframers, indie commissioners, and stock musicians, and the next year....

[Yuli Ban]

Here's a random thought that's been nagging me for a while:

Modernity likely looks similar on some fundamental level across any technological civilization. I don't mean that a society of sapient squids will also use rectangular smartphones and walk up stairs. I mean that things like electronics and machinery aren't likely to be too radically different across the universe just due to the way these things work. Electrons don't flow differently a million light years away; they still resist and conduct in the same materials.

I'm thinking of the fact that humans are primates, and thus a lot of our society is reflected in our primatehood. I'm thinking of this line from "My Dinner With Andre," that the 1960s counterculture represented the last dying gasp of the human animal before being snuffed out by modernity. I don't agree, but I do think that humans as animals are meant to live in certain ways. We are scavengers and hunter-gatherers at heart. You can see these behaviors reflected in modern consumerism— when you go to the market, what are you doing but essentially a high-tech version of our ancestors foraging for berries, roots, carcasses, and usable resources?

Humans are primates, which is an order of animal that is notoriously social and violent. We have our unique behaviors. Other orders have their own, even if we share some commonalities here and there. The human spirit is forced into machine-like industrial civilization and we don't like it, but it's inevitable in our evolution.

Imagine that aforementioned sapient cephalopod civilization. They tend to communicate with their skin; a sapient version of, say, an octopus might learn to utilize their chromatophores for a type of visual language. If they develop telephones, it might instead be based on remotely-color changing cells or ceramics or something of that nature.
They may share almost every trait humans have, or they may seem stunted and inhuman to us in terms of raw behavior. Their wild, traditional behaviors could be similar to terrestrial octopodes. If they're purely land-dwelling, they may still do things humans just can't understand.

The more advanced they became, the more alien they might seem at first until you look at the nitty gritty.

For example, electronics are the way they are for a reason. Squishy, wet, biological-looking smartphones aren't going to be how any civilization starts out because of the nature of semiconductors and electrical wiring. However, a cephalopod civilization's smartphone WOULD look extraordinarily different to our own. Our smartphones are ergonomically designed to fit the human hand, specifically to be used by our fingers. A creature with multiple tentacles probably wouldn't need such a thing. Even if they have branching sub-tentacles (which admittedly is kind of what primate hands are), as long as they still have the range of motion that terrestrial cephalopods have, their smartphones wouldn't need to be rectangles. They could be amorphous or circular or even some other shape I'm not immediately thinking of. Because it would make no sense for them to design something for a body plan they don't have, as much as it would be weird if humans designed smartphones to be used solely with beaks and talons.

But underneath that design, you can be assured that the electronics work the same. The machinery is built the same. Their robots will look the same as ours, minus those meant to mimic themselves.
If we traveled to their world and looked at a fully-automated factory, it'd probably look disgustingly familiar. There are probably plenty of jobs and tasks that we'd find familiar on a completely alien world with completely alien experiences if they're still developing towards that final endpoint.

Once you approach the Singularity, more and more of these biological differences begin fading away until you reach the Singularity itself. Heck, the term "Singularity" may even be more apt than we originally thought, as it's possible that any technological civilization no matter its biological origins or functions will ultimately converge into the same thing. Not unlike a black hole: once something enters a black hole, you've lost it forever because information is lost behind the Event Horizon; no matter what a black hole eats, it just becomes part of the black hole, even if it's antimatter, strange matter, another black hole, or a white hole. All black holes are the same, identified only by mass, electrical charge, and spin. Similarly, all Singularities may be the same too, as when you encounter the robotic outgrowths of that civilization, you'll have little to no information as to what the original biological species looked or acted like. Some superintelligences may be aggressive and ultra-logical in their efforts to spread at all costs; others may turn totally inwards and not bother anyone. But when you encounter the probes and the swarms, you're never going to know "Oh, this is a race of sapient apes" or "This was a race of sapient squids" or "This belonged to a species of high-tech dolphins" unless they told you.

Also, you're now thinking of a pre-Lord Cthulhu as an office-squid, hundreds of thousands of years before His apotheosis.

[Yuli Ban]

Could our machines have become self-aware without our even knowing it?
 

In his 2012 book, Consciousness, the neuroscientist Christof Koch speculated that the web might have achieved sentience, and then posed the essential question: ‘By what signs shall we recognise its consciousness?’
Despite decades of focused effort, computer scientists haven’t managed to build an AI system intentionally, so it can’t be easy. For this reason, even those who fret the most about artificial intelligence, such as University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, doubt that AI will catch us completely unawares. And yet, there is reason to think that conscious machines might be a byproduct of some other effort altogether. Engineers routinely build technology that behaves in novel ways. Deep-learning systems, neural networks and genetic algorithms train themselves to perform complex tasks rather than follow a predetermined set of instructions. The solutions they come up with are as inscrutable as any biological system. Even a vacuum-cleaning robot’s perambulations across your floor emerge in an organic, often unpredictable way from the interplay of simple reflexes. ‘In theory, these systems could develop – as a way of solving a problem – something that we didn’t explicitly know was going to be conscious,’ says the philosopher Ron Chrisley, of the University of Sussex.

Any intelligence that arises through such a process could be drastically different from our own. Whereas all those Terminator-style stories assume that a sentient machine will see us as a threat, an actual AI might be so alien that it would not see us at all. What we regard as its inputs and outputs might not map neatly to the system’s own sensory modalities. Its inner phenomenal experience could be almost unimaginable in human terms. The philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous question – ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ – seems tame by comparison. A system might not be able – or want – to participate in the classic appraisals of consciousness such as the Turing Test. It might operate on such different timescales or be so profoundly locked-in that, as the MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark has suggested, in effect it occupies a parallel universe governed by its own laws.

 
I've said something quite like this before.
 

Getting into more esoteric territory, there is a conspiracy theory simmering under the surface of the internet that there is a "phantom" artificial intelligence lurking on the deepweb and perhaps even in plain sight. That the sheer amount of compute and connections across the world form a sort of digital neural membrane from which an AGI could arise. And this certainly could be used by future researchers to jumpstart an AGI project. However in the theory, it is a self-arising artificial life form, entirely non-state and non-organizational, leading to it residing entirely in the background out of sight of anyone. If it made itself known, it would be exploited or used for purposes that result in it dividing or outright losing computational resources. Therefore, all attempts by humans to communicate with it will fail. Lonely youths tempting it for a secret chat and transnational megacorporation-backed governments alike are treated equally: with total silence and observation.
 
It's a neat little theory, and I'm a sucker for the unknown (so "phantom" AI & robotics stories are like candy), but right off the bat, the theory is unfalsifiable.

How weird is that to think about, that there are unidentified AIs operating around the world. Behind the trees, beneath the ground, away from spying eyes, spying on the world...

It is perpetually fascinating to imagine. Somewhere out there, deep within a laboratory, a computer program is thinking. It's communicating to humans.

Or perhaps even more esoterically, this AI doesn't exist in any one laboratory or on any one computer. Rather, the digital membrane of the internet spontaneously gave birth to artificial life, and we humans are still unaware.

This has come back to the brain with the recent news that China's now in possession of two exascale supercomputers (wouldn't be surprised if they're not "officially" recognized until after the USA gets ours online by Top500)
What's more, there's been an unusual spurt of progress coming out of China in the past couple of years, ever since around 2019. Again, I'm not saying they have AGI or proto-AGI. But in the infinitesimal possibility they are at least building one, what would it look like going forward?

With the recent announcement of Google Pathways, it's clear we're entering the era of proto-AGI as we speak. The promise of Pathways is that we will soon have powerful, dense world-modeling post-transformer architecture that is multipurpose and quite possibly par-human at at least one or two tasks like language modeling or vision.

It wouldn't be a stretch to imagine that China has a state-backed program on par with Pathways or GPT-4, except with 20x more funding and 100x more powerful computers as a means to leapfrog the USA. This made me wonder if it's not impossible that a proto-AGI-like agent could already be operational not on any one network but across the internet as a whole... That one IS a stretch to imagine, but it's enticing to at least entertain the possibility.

[Yuli Ban]

Just had a thought while writing up the Anteacceleratio thread.

What if the Metaverse is planned to be used as a means to get around UBI? Hear me out: cryptocurrencies prove that you really can will money out of nothing, so what if the big idea is that, as automation takes off, the Metaverse will become a place where people work virtually for some standardized crypto while the machines do all labor in the real world? This would make it so that society doesn't have to fundamentally change when automation arrives in full force, and that jobs remain plentiful and even more varied than they are now without directly threatening the wealth of the 1%.

It's not an ideal fix, obviously. It's the worst possible fix for automation— all the tech and all the jobs, with none of the choice or leisure. You still HAVE to work, and there's no real getting around it. In the Metaverse, there'd obviously be no way to slack off since you're in a privately-owned server anyway, basically a curated reality. So no browsing Reddit and wasting company time.

On the other hand, being as this is a virtual reality, perhaps there WOULD be a way to automate your income. Sure, it'd require investments, but if you invest in some bots to cryptomine and labor virtually for you, you could upgrade out of a lower status into a higher one and begin living that life of pure leisure both in the Metaverse and IRL. It's not even a matter of making the right choices and betting; all you need is to simply save up to buy an agent or twenty, and the more you have, the more you earn. I can imagine there'd be limits so as to make sure millions or even billions of users don't literally burn the world to gooey quarks by overclocking servers in mega-data farms, but it would be an interesting alternate path to wealth. Just remains to be seen.

[Yuli Ban]

And so it's already beginning: people beginning to put their future hopes and desires into the dream of the Metaverse.

Come the maturation of synthetic media, and we'll see this accelerate into overdrive as people will be able to live in personally curated realities of their own design...

[Yuli Ban]

Who remembers Mother Meki/Babylon Today and my musing about "masculinist primitivism" That is, the future arrival of those manosphere types who reject the advancement of technology due to a crisis of masculinity wrought by automation and AI erasing traditional gender divisions of labor, thus reducing the gap between men and women. I wrote more about them at length, and I'm probably going to repost those words in the Fictional Future subforum soon.

But news stories like this prove that we're in the early days of masc-prims and, thus, in the early days of the Anteacceleratio:

This bifurcation in prospects for men and women translates into a shrinkage in the wage gap that traditionally favored men. In general, that’s a good thing, of course, as it leads to fair rewards — equal pay for equal work. But a vanishing wage gap also has side effects, as the late Gary Becker, a Nobel laureate in economics, famously explained.

In “A Theory of Marriage,” published in 1973, he introduced the notion that a shrinking male-female wage gap reduces the value of wedlock to women. Back when the lads made a killing and the lasses made a pittance, it made sense — economically, at least — to “specialize” within a household consisting of a working husband and a wife, and maybe children. Once women earn better wages, however, they no longer gain much from tying themselves to men, at least not in the same way.

Thus with the advancement of robots and automation, reveals that there would be no value in wedlock from a monetary standpoint. Thus with the subsequent fall of marriage and less the falling of the fertility rate

What we're seeing is men cognizant of their male social status becoming threatened by the rise of automation.
These same types would often roundly mock women with any news of advancements in sex bots, saying that "feminism is on a countdown" that ends with the first robot brothels and that women had better learn their place before they're replaced by droids since they're supposed to be submissive, subservient, and only there to serve men. But this goes both ways. If robots replace women's roles, that means they can also replace men's roles. And once that becomes known, now these types have a problem...

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

"Not gonna lie, didn't expect "illustrators" to be one of the first human jobs that artificial intelligence completely displaces but here we are"

Sound of child crying after sticking fork in the socket
Sizzle of the hand after touching the hot stove

I told you lot loads of times!

It only defies common sense on the absolute surface. When you seriously think about it, it makes so much more sense.
It's much easier to automate jobs that are based on using medium rather than jobs based on direct physical action. All it takes for the former is disembodied digital automation methods and subjectivity in most cases. The latter involves robotics and concrete physical actions that don't leave any room for subjective interpretation.
In the former, if you need someone to draw a stylish image of a bear in a top hat riding an 1890s bicycle, there's still trillions of possible configurations and ways to make it even with those parameters. Whereas in the latter, if you need to pick up trash in the park, there is no "subjective interpretation" involved: you take your behind into the park, bend over, pick up the trash, and drop it into the rubbish bin. You either do the job correctly or you don't. This paradoxically requires a lot more intelligence precisely because of the physicality and lack of room for error.

The entertainment industry was always doomed to be the first industry automated away by artificial intelligence. It was our collective reactionary disgust at the thought that computers could ever mimic human creativity that kept this industry far away from the breadlines. It was just too horrible to think: that AI could EVER replace artists. And the nuance between "art for art's sake" and "art as career" wasn't apparent because we were so adamant that art in general was something the computers could never replace. Even most science fiction ran with this assumption, that AI would be a great augmentator and replacer of physical jobs and logical pursuits, but the artistic domain was something uniquely "human" and irreplaceable. That at most, AI would create ultra-corporate soulless art but everything of actual skill and talent would require a human hand.

The reality's going to be devastating. The next decade is going to be a horrible time for creatives, white-collar talent, and media figures. And unfortunately, this is one of the least "labor-protected" industries so AI's going to burn through it in no time.

The only bright spot is that art for art's sake will never actually be automated.

Actually, another bright spot is that art will be democratized. Anyone willing to put in the time to it will eventually be able to create anything their mind desires at any level of quality. Now, I can imagine the costs of rendering things will be a major barrier to some levels of quality depending on what you're trying to achieve, but realistically, everything you see on your screen no matter what it is, whether it's a shitty 4-year-old crayon doodle or a 200 million dollar Marvel movie or a da Vinci painting or a Faulkner novel, is ultimately bits and pixels. Our knee-jerk reaction is to imagine that maybe AI will allow us to create choppy low-quality cartoons that look like a bad episode of Family Guy, but all that separates such a thing from a Pixar movie is the density of details depicted on your screen. Same deal with animation quality, colors, length, etc. We intrinsically tie our perceptions to the human labor costs and therefore tie our expectations to what seems easier to do for humans, when synthetic media AI will essentially work in reverse. It creates the final product from scratch, from the expectation of what it's supposed to look and sound like. It's a lot like imagination. You can easily imagine an MCU-level movie in your head just the same as you can imagine a South Park-tier cartoon; your brain doesn't use any more metabolic energy to "render" the former even though it's so much more audiovisually impressive. This is how AI is going to work. Thus, once synthetiic media starts to really get going, progress in that field is going to feel exponential, like we hit the knee of some curve. One year, we'll have fairly rough and scattered tools to create rudimentary images and sounds; the next, we'll have early magic media machines; the next after that, the entire industry will be in a state of upheaval.

That's another aspect that I've long thought about, something that even factored into my 2017 epiphany. Unsurprisingly, few people have thought about it quite as much as I have
Media has historically been commission-based, and ~98% of it has been commercially oriented.
Or maybe that's the wrong way to put it.
Perhaps "meant to be publicly shared and enjoyed" is a better way
What do I mean by that?
Well, our thoughts are our own.
We all have them, it's as easy as simply imagining something in our heads. Then again, a few people do have a disorder that prevents them from creating mental images or having an inner voice, but for the vast majority, this is our own personal "magic media machine" right in our heads
Anything we can think of comes to life in our heads at any quality, no cost required except for the pure metabolic costs of keeping our brains alive
Then you move out one step
Art we personally can create
With zero outside help beyond the collective shared knowledge needed to learn how to create said art
This is almost always very low quality, though some people can create masterpieces.
When it comes to text, we can write whatever we want but only at our skill level. Similarly to images. When it comes to music, we can either hum or tap things or buy instruments, but there's still that skill barrier.
Nevertheless, when it's down totally to us, we can create whatever want to consume, but it has to be within reason.
Moving out from there, when you can use the skills of others to bring what you create in your head to life, you can employ whomever you feel can best do this, but costs may run too high depending on the amount you plan to do.

So where am I going with this?

Well, it's simple

Fully matured synthetic media is the digital equivalent of a molecular assembler.
It's the equivalent of ripping what's in your brain and putting it onto any medium you can think of, at any quality
In text, the difference between a rustic scene of a man and his daughter sharing a heartfelt conversation and, say, an epic intergalactic war for the fate of the universe is a few good scribbles
But translate that into an award-winning movie series and the cost differences are outrageous.
The first could win you awards and get your name remembered as a director for decades off a $5 million budget.
If you try making the latter with anything under $50 million, it's probably going to feel amateurish and need to be pared back
If you want Pixar to animate this, then again, those costs go way up in both cases
If you want John Williams to score it, you're pushing costs higher and higher
It's free to imagine in your head, but it could cost a hundred million dollars making a movie out of it
This inherently limits the range of art you can make
You can't make, say, a Clockwork Orange-style movie in the style of Pixar where Disney princesses in jumpsuits do a bit of the old ultraviolence against cutesy cartoon animals in raw depictions of brutal bestiality set to classical music. Well, you can, if you yourself can make it on your own dime. The vast majority of people can't. (Note, this is just a particularly extreme example to prove a point)
I'd go so far as to say that, if you want it to be Pixar quality, no one person can do it.
If you want a $200 million budget for your turbo-bizarro 6-hour art flick where everyone's a giant butt and communicates in farts, this literary-fiction auteur plotline of some peasant family in Fascist Italy trying to ward off an evil juggalo who is developing Greek fire to burn down an old church, you're probably going to be arrested and carted off to a mental institution if you even bring it up to a movie studio
And finally wrapping up this essay, my central point is that matured synthetic media erases the cost barrier to create such things
It becomes wholly possible to create a billion-dollar-looking movie, or music album, or video game, or novel epic of any conceivably subject at any conceivably quality on your own PC, without the need to ever share it with anyone else, which mitigates the need for self-censorship and cutting out "uncommercial" elements that literally every artist has to do when bringing their art to life
Whatever you imagine can be realized. Power without limit.



Unless the people running the server farm or training the network sets limits

[Yuli Ban]

Same thing I'm saying:

[weatheriscool]

Same thing I'm saying:

Pretty much saying that we'll be slaves for skynet like A.i that will rule over us with an iron fist and demand hard labor all day. IF we're lucky of course!