It is clear to me that we’re all kind of missing the point about AI and robotics because they are actually one and the same. We only see them as two different projects because things are so primitive (in real terms.)
But the whole point of AI, in a sense, is to stick into a robot. Or, to be more specific — to give the AI the OPTION of being stuck in a physical robotic body if it needs / wants to be.
The implications of this are enormous. Because rather than thinking of AI as a disembodied voice or text prompt, we have to start thinking of AI as something that physically lives with us. Just as we can’t escape the Internet these days, there’s a chance we won’t be able to escape our new AI personal digital assistants.
They will be everywhere and nowhere to the point that wherever we are — they will be.
While America has gradually freaked out over the last 20 years about declining birth rates by leaning into racism in the guise of MAGA, the Japanese 40 years ago started working on robotics. Many of the same problems that America faces, the Japanese face, too, only more so because they aren’t as cool with immigration as the States.
Here are three really profound uses of AI enabled androids going forward.
Elder Care The moment there are $10,000 AI-enabled androids on the market, they probably are going to be used to take care of old people in some capacity. Not only is America growing older — a lot of GenX people don’t have any children or grandchildren to take care of them. As such, it would make a lot of economic sense to throw money into androids that would take care of old people. This, of course, will throw the economy out of whack because a lot people make a good living off providing the elder care service. And if androids are smart enough and good enough to do elder care, then, of course, those same androids will start to come after nursing jobs, too.
Child Care This is a lot more tricky because it deals with the far more intangible issues of emotional and mental development. But I’ve been really shocked at how well AI has managed to do things that we all thought was exclusively the domain of humans in the arts, so, lulz? It seems possible that some future version of chatbots might have enough empathy and dexterity to keep an eye on a young human for a few hours. It is possible that in the near future, there will be a lot of talk not of “latchkey kids” but “android kids” who have been raised by androids for much of their lives.
Security This is just as tricky as child care, but it seems inevitable. It is seems inevitable that domestic androids will be programmed at some point in the near future to do basic home security. Now what happens if they actually get into a fight with someone breaking into a home is something pretty profound.
There remains a lingering demographic problem across the Western world — people just aren’t having enough babies. In the United States, this “birth dearth” has led the Right to lose its fucking mind. So, I suppose it’s at least POSSIBLE that as part of the shift towards an android-based economy that there is a chance that MAGA will evaporate.
From what I can tell of the discourse on Twitter within the AI community, a lot of people won’t be happy unless OpenAI announces an AGI that will end humanity. A lot of people sound like fucking spoiled brats.
Now, I understand what’s going on.
The release of ChatGPT 4 was such a revelation that people had no expectations. For a few days, they we happy with ChatGPT 4 because they had not yet developed any expectations.
Now, however, people have some very cold, hard expectations. They want not just Artificial General Intelligence — NOW — they want absolutely no guardrails to the point that if any user told AGI to blow the world up, it would.
Anything less than those metrics and “it’s so over” to use the parlance of AI Twitter.
It’s all very annoying. I mean, I want AGI just as much as the next tech nerd, but I would prefer that it didn’t end all of humanity. I would like there to be SOME guardrails.
Anyway, I suppose AGI will be invented soon enough and it will destroy us all.
Because of what I engage with on Twitter, I’m being fed a growing amount of AI community content. What gets me is so many users — young men, presumably — are obsessed with accelerating AI development until we reach Artificial General Intelligence.
AGI would be much like Sam in the movie “Her.” But, given current advancements in robotics, it’s very possible that sexbots will become affordable enough within a decade that Incels will have absolute no reason to ever get anywhere near a living, breathing, biological woman. Ugh!
Before I go any further, I remember what it was like to be a young man transfixed by technology. In my instance, it was the Internet. I was very, very obsessed with every twitch of the Internet revolution when I was in college. It was that obsession that would ultimately lead me to have a very misguided time as a technology manager in the late 1990s.
Anyway, the key thing for me is that there is a good chance that AI will revolutionize humanity’s existence in much the same way that the Internet did, only far, far quicker. Instead of decades of gradual change, it could be years — or months! — of very, very fast change that will be looked back upon as something akin to a Petite Singularity.
As an Old, I just don’t see how anything like AGI being developed is going to help humanity. All these people touting the life of prosperity, luxury and surplus seem to be oblivious to the hateful, cruel nature of capitalism. The only way anyone my have any money in the future is if there’s a Universal Basic Income.
There is a real chance that AGI will cause either massive political and economic disruption or, in the end, there will just be the Poors and the Very Wealthy and that’s it. I continue to believe that MAGA may evolve into an anti-tech movement at some point in the near future.
I am well aware that I’m “very online” and I need to touch some grass, but having said that, given how we’re collectively careening towards a “Petite Singularity,” normies are in for a rude awaking in a few years — months?
My middle-aged peer group just is completely oblivious to what’s going on with AI. They barely, barely know anything about ChatGPT. And they’re totally unaware of the advancements in robotics. The moment LLMs can be put into androids, then huge swaths of the economy — knowledge and otherwise — are going to be disrupted.
When LLM-enabled androids are doing such high paying blue collar jobs as plumbing and carpentry….yikes!
The question, of course, is when all of this is going to happen, when it goes mainstream. That is a very curious question. There is a good chance that we are going to have to sort out our politics starting in late 2024, early 2025 first. Once we decide if we’re going to be a MAGA-themed autocracy or not, THEN we will see a lot of technological advancement happening very, very quickly.
One issue is cultural. Are people prepared to share their homes with LLM-powered androids? There are going to have to be a lot of safe-guards in place to prevent androids from using the same tools they use to keep a house clean to bludgeon their owners to death.
It is definitely going to be interesting to see what happens in the near term. And I haven’t even addressed the fact that digital personal assistants will totally disrupt the knowledge economy in ways none of us can possibly predict. I do think, however, that MAGA could very well evolve into an anti-technology movement that demands AI be severely regulated or outlawed altogether.
A reoccurring theme within the social media discourse about the dramatic AI improvements over the last year or so is a persistent demand that chatbots have no guardrails. A lot of people — young men, presumably — want AI to give them instructions on how to build an A-bomb, if they want to know.
All of this gets muddled because of the hyper partisan would that we live in. Conservatives believe that the “woke cancel culture mob” will somehow oppress us all by forcing us all to get “woke” answers from chatbots. This, of course, ignores how MAGA Nazis are probably going to open concentration camps if they gain power again.
Anyway, it definitely seems as though there may come a point when digital personal assistants will not sound like the HR departments of a major corporation, but rather an actual human being. And, I fear, just like in the movie Her, a lot of people — especially members of the Incel community — are probably going to fall in love.
But wait, there’s more.
Just imagine a day-after-tomorrow scenario where sexbots are affordable. Incels will buy and program their sexbots to be pliant and have sex with them all the time even if they’re losers, which could really fuck up modern gender dynamics. People who already are alienated from the rest of society — Incels — will suddenly have absolutely no reason to work on their people skills to the point where they have to accommodate women.
As such, it’s very possible there could be a significant social disruption as growing numbers of men simply refuse to interact with women at all to the point that the population begins to plummet. I know that sounds like yet more “hysterical doom shit” on my part, but it’s something we have to take into consideration going forward.
If Incels can simply buy sexbots, they will have even less reason to change their personality to deal with women. Ugh. It could all happen so quickly that we, as a society, won’t be able to understand how to deal with it. But such a wild west type of future definitely seems to be what a lot of people in the AI community online want.
They feel as though ANY guardrails are unacceptable. I figure most of this sentiment comes from young men who are oblivious to how AI might destroy society if its totally unregulated.
I was listening to Puck’s podcast The Powers That Be today and they were talking about the personnel changes at The Daily Beast. The more I listened to what they were saying about this, the more I was struck by how outdated the very idea of a “website” may be in near future.
Just as Hollywood is about to be severely disrupted by AI software like Sora, so, too, will the media be disrupted by the rise of AI agents. I just don’t see how Websites survive as a viable media outlets when we all have a Her-like personal assistant that roams the Web for us.
What’s more these agents will know us so well that there’s a chance that they will be able to preemptively answer our questions before we ask them. And you’ll interact with these agents with your voice, which changes the whole dynamic of how you will interact with the outside world.
This leads to the question — where does this leave Websites?
I really struggle with this. I think — maybe? — that instead of Websites, we’ll have just a bunch of agents that talk to the individual agents of the million of users around the globe. Or something? Maybe the media will make money off of some sort of subscription regimen so you pay x amount of money so your AI agent can talk to the media website agent?
But the point remains — very soon the entire knowledge economy, media included, will be upended in a pretty dramatic fashion.
I am soon going to be finished with the third draft of my first novel. As such, because I want to go the traditional publishing route, I have to begin to take seriously the querying process.
Mood.
Now, the stressful thing about this is I have no idea what to do. I only vaguely know at this point about things like “Query Tracker” and the fact that I have to write a query letter. I have been knee deep in active delusion for all the years it has taken me to write this novel and now, suddenly, the cold, dark waters of reality are beginning to rush in.
At the moment, I would like to hand over the finished third draft to an editor of some sort. It may take me months to save up the money to get someone to edit the novel. Yet that’s just the beginning.
I think I’m going to have to be really careful about this element of the querying process because I’ve already managed to screw up once. I alienated one prospective editor because I think that not only did she think I was freaky weirdo after reading this blog, but she thought I was going to be too emotionally needy.
So I need to give the idea of what I say to any prospective editor some thought. And I have to accept that there is a good chance that any editor worth their salt is going to search for me online and look at this blog and be aghast at what a freaky weirdo I am. And that doesn’t even begin to address what they might think of my Twitter feed.
This very real prospect rattles my cage a great deal. I’m not getting any younger and I would prefer to be a published author before I reach 60. Just my age itself is problematic — not to mention that I really haven’t done shit with my life in a long time. AND I’m bonkers.
And, yet, the only consolation I have is that while there’s life there’s hope. I do have to manage my expectations, though — any success with a spec novel is like winning the literary lottery.
So it’s possible that I could stick the landing and STILL either not find an agent or being in limbo for years. And that doesn’t even address the fact that late 2024, early 2025 could be some of the most momentous months in modern American history.
I don’t know what to tell you. I write because I have to, not because I want to. So I suppose I continue to be delusional, even as the looming transition into the querying process demands I be a lot more honest with myself about my prospects.
I continue to grow ever more alarmed by the increase in AI-generated celebrity photos. I know there was something of a kerfuffle recently over some silly bad Taylor Swift “porn” that appeared on Twitter, but that’s nowhere near what we should be worried about going forward.
At the moment, AI-generated celebrity images are rather banal and easy to spot. What I see on my social media feed a lot these days is such imagines which usually only vaguely look like whatever celebrity they’re supposed to represent. An example of a picture that is supposed to be Margot Robbie is shown below.
An AI-generated photo of Margot Robbie.
The photo above at least attempts to replicate what Robbie actually looks like. Usually one of the big mistakes of AI-generated celebrity photos is they are clearly done in a way to show what men WISH the woman in question looked like. They’re usually a bit more curvy and symmetrical than the real deal which makes it easy to spot as a fake.
My concern is what happens in a few years (months?) when we get passed the “uncanny valley” and photorealistic images of celebrities come common place. I know because of the silliness involving Tay-Tay that there has been a move to pass some legislation, but the wheels of government move very, very slow compared to AI developments.
Add to this how many “unaligned” people want the right do do whatever the fuck they want with AI and it definitely seems as though we’re careening towards a very, very dark and rather surreal future. We really need to start to work on developing watermark technology that will allow the audience to distinguish between AI-Generated photos and the real thing.
While we’re on the subject of such things, another development I’ve noticed on the AI image front is women using AI filters on their faces while leaving the rest of their body unaltered. See below:
I find this rather surreal. But this is definitely a development to keep an eye on. It seems very possible that there may come a time when AI-filters are so good that the causal viewer won’t be able to discern that a phot has been altered. This could lead to some rather surreal developments on dating apps.
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