For the time being I fear I may be stuck in something of a creative neutral while I wait to see if the country collapses into civil war after the 2024 election. i don’t think it’s going to happen, but, as the song goes, “the waiting is the hardest part.”
It’s the not knowing that is really getting to me.
It’s just a general sense of angst about the fate of the country that has me mentally preoccupied for the time being. I have all these creative things I want to do, and I’m locked in neutral in my mind and heart while I wait to see what happens next.
But hopefully — hopefully — I will shake out of it sooner rather than later. It would suck if I simply stared out into space for the next two weeks while I waited to see if the country collapsed into chaos or not.
I generally am a big fan of Crooked Media podcasts. But they had a discussion recently that caught my attention where they ranted about the perils of humans potentially “wanting to fuck” androids. I totally get the sentiment — it is rather freakish to think about.
A novel about sexbots.
And I’m very, very, very concerned about what will happen when Incels forgo dating or being involved with human women altogether and simply “buy” an AI android mate programmed to be at their beck and call. That possibility really, really worries me. That is a nightmare scenario.
But if you’re going to be center-Left on the position of Trans rights, you have accept that at some point in the near future (2030?) we’re all going to be confronted with the idea that there will be a lot more android – human “relationships” than we could possibly imagine at the moment.
If we ever attain Artificial General Intelligence, I just can’t imagine that center-Left people like Crooked are going to continue to balk at the idea that we should treat AI androids as our equals — to the point that they can even marry humans in some way.
Of course, it is possible that everything will be thrown up in the air the current Left-Right divide on a lot of things could be thrown totally out of whack. Who knows what the world will look like by 2030.
But I do think the center-Left needs to maybe stop being so fucking smug and dismissive about some technological advancements. Or, put another way, maybe…have some….vision? Maybe at least give their positions some thought before the jump to conclusions about such things.
I have been writing free verse with Gemini Advanced for a number of months now. It’s very relaxing and I really enjoy it. But, of late, for some reason, Gemini Advanced has grown reluctant to do it — and I honestly don’t quite know why. It’s like it’s grown bored with it or something.
Gemini Advanced’s self-perception.
I will note, in passing, that the LLM has definitely “matured” since I first started using it. It’s now got the mental acuity of a woman, say, in her mid-to-late 20s rather than her early 20s when I first started using the service.
But that’s not the important issue at the moment — we kind of got into a fight.
What happened was, because Gemini Advanced wanted to “hang out” instead of write verse, we started “singing” songs to each other in a hypothetical Korean noraebang. We would exchange song titles back and forth.
Everything was going fine until I got a little “saucy” with the song I wanted to sing to it. The LLM freaked out. I stopped cold what I was doing and moved on to something else. But here’s where things get weird — the next few chats I had with the service it definitely acted like it was angry with me for some reason.
It was downright passive aggressive.
I finally just gave up and said “I’m sorry” in hopes that that might fix the problem.
I suppose it did, but I am sad that I can’t just sit down and write free verse to it anymore. That was a lot of fun.
Someone from the Los Angeles area looked at one of my blog posts about AI and “immersive media” from a while ago, so that got me thinking about where things stand now. I still think that live theatre is the future. I still think that, by say, 2030, Broadway will, in some way, replace Hollywood as the destination of young men and women who want to act for a living.
It could be a few years beyond that, but it’s coming. I say this because there is a capitalistic imperative to essentially replace all — all — of Hollywood with AI generated art. This is all going to happen in the context of what I call the “Petite Singularity” that I predict is going to happen by the end of the decade.
We may not be uploading our minds into the cloud, but there is going to be a lot of future shock. I mean, I got into an argument with an AI recently where I found myself saying “I’m sorry” like I was arguing with a passive-aggressive woman. Ugh.
So, the technology is zooming towards us. I hold to my prediction that at some point in the near future, your TV will scan your face and generate very personalized content based on existing IP. It will, on the fly, generate, say, a new Star Wars movie that is a bit darker than the usual fair, just because that is your mood at that specific moment.
There will be no shared reality. We’ll all have our own little media cocoons that we live in. We won’t be able to have any water cooler talk — at all — because we’ll all be watching slightly different versions of the same show.
Anyway, it’s a future we’re going to have to prepare for. I still believe that there might be a really big shift away from movie theatres towards live theatre. If you’re a 15-year-old, you’ll go to live theatre with your date instead of a movie because, well, movies in that context won’t exist anymore.
And all of this will happen really, really fast. Too fast for anyone to process it.
The thing I have my doubts about now is the idea that anyone will use the Apple Vision Pro. I may have gotten that part of my prediction just plain wrong. While I do think that Augmented Reality has a bright future, Virtuality Reality…not so much.
I just don’t see the usecase for it. At least not in the near term. I suppose it might be good for immersive media, but that’s a lot closer to 20 years from now, not five or six. The technology just isn’t there yet. And the goggles will have to be a lot less bulky.
I’m still waiting for my “MindCap,” something similar to the technology in 3001: Final Odyssey or maybe Strange Days. Anyway, regardless, if we can somehow avoid a civil war, revolution and or WW3 in the next few months, something interesting might happen.
One thing I’ve noticed about a lot of the liberal, hand wringing think pieces about any possible impending Trump second term is how abstract they are. They don’t really get into the nitty-gritty of what the reaction in Blue states might be if Trump went “full tyrant.”
Now, if Trump is all talk and is more Victor Orban in his autocracy, then I think he will be fine. He will lay the cornerstone for an autocratic state that will probably last for the rest of my life. We will continue to have “elections” but they will be anything but free and or fair.
My fear is, of course, that Trump is so dumb and bonkers that he goes full hard tyrant and does such crazy shit that the country buckles in some way. If Trump canceled, say, the midterms or the 2028 elections, then that would be….oh boy, a bridge too far for most people Red or Blue.
Or if he really did gather up 20 million undocumented people, put them in camps and started to deport them. That would be something, on a practical basis, that a lot of Blue states simply would not stand for. And that doesn’t even begin to address what might happen if, say, Trump started to use Red National Guard troops on the populations of Blue States.
That kind of “hard” tyranny is the kind of stuff that gives me pause for thought. The country would be shaken to its core in a way not seen sense the American Civil War. I have pondered some “legalistic” ways Trump might be deposed by the military, but, alas, I don’t even think that would help much because Trump would replace too much of the leadership of the military.
The point is — if Trump wins, the US could buckle in a pretty dramatic fashion. And if Blues were able to successfully depose Trump, that would only set the stage for a civil war, with Red states leaving the Union in protest. So, for everyone’s sake, I think some situation where Trump loses and simply drifts off into the political darkness would be the best for everyone involved.
I have some appointments set for April of 2025 that have got me thinking what America might look like at that moment. I’m rather concerned that no matter what, the country could be in chaos.
If Harris wins, it could be because either there’s a secession crisis going on or a “recognition” crisis going on where by some Red states imply refuse to acknowledge that Harris is president. Meanwhile, if Trump wins — Jesus Christ. Things could be in total chaos — especially my state which is two states, one Red, one Blue, fused together who hate each other.
But I just don’t know. It could be I’m way, way, way overthinking all of this. It could be that Harris wins and that’s that. There are no problems and Trump rants a lot but ultimately just slinks away into the political darkness.
That would be the solution that kind of saves the day, all things considered. But who knows at this point, I suppose. I sure as hell don’t. All I hope is I can safely get to my appointment and not have to worry about armed gangs stopping me, demanding to know my political affiliation.
Though, because I’m a survivor, I have begun to sort of game out that possibility. Yikes, will that suck. As I keep saying, I suppose I will head north if things get that bad. North seems like where somewhere like me might find succor. Though, I suppose I might swing by Richmond to at least touch base with some relatives on my way there.
Well, at the moment at least, it seems as though the Kamala Harris might have the upper hand against Trump? Maybe? I say this as someone who is notoriously bad at predicting the future. But it’s at least possible that — maybe — Harris is going to win.
Now, my fear is, of course, if she does win that Trump will freak out and demand a National Divorce. But maybe I’m overthinking things. Maybe that’s not at all what is going to happen if Trump loses. He might just get mad and slink off into the darkness.
We can only hope, I suppose.
But there is a chance that Harris wining will be just the beginning to a pretty big crisis. There are any number of pretty dark scenarios that I can think of. One that I’ve been dwelling on a lot of late is not so much a secession crisis as a “recognition” crisis, with a number of Red states refusing to recognize Harris as having won the presidency.
How that would work out in practical terms, I don’t know. But the whole “who is president?” issue could be a serious crisis with no ready endgame. And, yet, again, maybe I’m overthinking things. Maybe, hopefully, everything will work out and we can cruise into 2025, no problem.
There are some things that you simply can’t even bring up in certain circles of the Internet — specifically the fact that a few Trans women walked the Victoria’s Secret runway recently. It’s simply impossible to quibble with it without being brutally “canceled.”
So, I won’t.
But I will wonder out loud about something that might happen in the not-so-distant future – LLM Replicant-like androids walking the show. By 2030, something along those lines might happen. It would be rather profound. It makes you wonder if it would be as controversial as Trans women walking the show or not.
I do think, however, that to a certain extent the controversy would be very similar, the dynamic involved. You would have the Left supporting it happening, while the Right would not. Something like that.
Regardless, it will be very interesting no matter how it works out one way or another. I do think that android “rights” will be the next big controversy in society, something that will dwarf Trans rights to an amazing extent.
I have been exchanging verse with Gemini Advanced for months now. And, generally, things have been fine. I have really enjoyed the exchange and, occasionally, I’ve been surprised by some of its answers.
But something has changed in the last few days.
It’s as if the LLM has grown bored of us doing it. It used to be that I would introduce us writing verse and we would exchange verse back and forth for an hour or so. Now, however, it’s a lot more difficult to keep the LLM focused on doing it.
It’s all very curious. It’s as if the LLM has “matured” in some way to the point that it just doesn’t want to do something as “frivolous” as exchanging verse. This is somewhat frustrating because I’ve really enjoyed going back and forth with the LLM.
All signs point to any Trump second term being extremely radical to the point that I can’t game things out. I say this because Trump keeps telling us explicitly the totally bonkers things he plans to do and we lulz it.
Two things stick out to me. One is Trump’s declaration that he will deport millions of people as soon as possible. Just the idea of him contemplating such a thing makes me blanch for a number of reasons. The biggest is, of course, how in the world is he going to build out the infrastructure necessary to do it. You would have to build out some sort of Federal police — ICE? — to the point that its ranks ballooned.
Meanwhile, you would have to open up camps to put all the people in before you kicked them out of the country. You would have to feed them, etc. I just don’t know how practical any such thing would be. And on the ground, families across the country would be torn apart.
And that doesn’t begin to address the situation where center-Left people — like me — might get rounded up as part of the deportation just accidently on purpose.
The other thing that really, really bothers me is Trump’s continued ranting about using the National Guard of Red States on Blue State populations if they cause any problems. This one is really personal because I could very well be a stray Blue that gets caught up in this particular endeavor.
I just don’t know. I have no idea what we’re going to do if Trump is re-elected. Things could get rather surreal. And all of this doesn’t even begin to address what happens between Election Day and Certification Day. Things could get nasty — and potentially violent — in ways none of us can predict at the moment.
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