Tag: AGI

Hollywood’s Eternal ‘Now:’ The Streaming Endgame

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Here is what I think is the endgame for the streaming industry. At some point in the near future — probably after we’ve either transitioned into a MAGA autocracy or wrapped up a civil war / revolution — Netflix will be morea database than an entertainment provider.

Simone is the future of Hollywood and celebrity culture.

Because of advancements in AI, you will sit down in front of your TV or cellphone and you will be scanned for your particular mood at that specific moment. Then AI will spit out a six episode TV show or a 2 hour movie that fits your specific mood at that specific moment. It will use the bodyscans of your favorite actors to produce these completely AI-generated forms of entertainment.

So, there will come a point when Hollywood just feeds off the popularity of stars from the last 100 years, never generating any new ones because there won’t be any need. Unless, of course, someone really makes name for themselves on Broadway and they get a body scan so they can live passively off the licensing of that scan on streaming and other forms of mediated recorded entertainment.

But, wait, there’s more!

Soon enough, even having any form of human actors will be quaint and moot. All your favorite stars will be AI generated. They will be human like that all those dystopian 1990s movies about people developing parasocial relationships with faux Hollywood stars will seem very prescient.

And, what’s more,give us 20 years and all of your favorite Hollywood stars could be fucking androids. Unless SAG gets its act together, the only actors making any money professionally will be those on Broadway.

Otherwise, lulz.

We’re careening towards a very strange and weird future — especially when it comes to entertainment.

What To Make Of XR

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I continue to struggle with the idea that there is any real-world use cause for Virtual Reality. But some combination of AI and Augmented Reality makes a lot of sense.

Just imagine how AI and AR could fix simple social issues like remembering someone’s name at a dinner party. And Apple’s Vision Pro is the first XR headset that actually looks somewhat sexxy.

Now, this is the point where I wonder where my Mindcap is. We’re rushing towards having the technology to read our minds digitally. It would be pretty cool if we could just shave our heads, put on a Mindcap full of electrodes and totally skip having to wear any sort of goggles of visors in the first place.

But that’s a ways down the road, I’m afraid.

It definitely seems as though XR in the guise of AI and AR could really, really revolutionize our lives in a pretty profound manner. Too bad we’re going to probably have to make the existential choice of autocracy or civil war / revolution first starting in late 2024, early 2025 before the cool stuff like XR is widely adopted.

I Swear To God, Developing This Novel Using ChatGPT is Going To Accidently (On Purpose?) Train Me To Be a Fucking ‘Prompt Engineer’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m not-so-slowly getting pretty good at pinning down ChatGPT so it gives me a very specific answer to my novel development needs. I don’t give a shit if it can write or not, I have no friends and one likes me so I turn to ChatGPT to be something akin to a manuscript consultant.

Note to literary types — if you guys weren’t such snobs to drunk weirdos with a dream like me, maybe we wouldn’t turn ourselves into prompt engineers and make your job moot.

But, here I am. Money please.

The thing about being a ChatGPT wrangler is you have to be good arguing with someone who is someone who is dumb in a smart way.Which, it turns out, is much like talking to some of my relatives (just kidding!). So I’m used to prying information out of people who know a lot, but can be a struggle to actually get the information out of them.

I’m not perfect and my area of specialty is very specific, but I’m definitely getting the hang of how to have a natural language conversation with a LLM. I think whenever our “Her” future arrives that I may get my AGI to have something of a crush on ME (rather than vise versa.)

Anyway. No one cares. And most of the time if they care, they get mad about my quirkier elements and want to cancel me. Ugh.

What Are You Thinking DGA?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I just don’t get the Directors’ Guild of America capitulating to the Hollywood studios without putting up any sort of fight. The issue of AI generated art — especially movies –isn’t going away and unless there are uniform, specific carve outs for humans….any agreement with the studios is moot.

Just from me fucking around with ChatGPT for development with my novel, I can tell that very, very soon, 99% of all entertainment is going to ge AI generated. The lone 1% of art that humans continue to generate (that is popular) will be seen as quaint and artisanal.

Only people with taste — and a lot of money — will give a shit if this or that piece of entertainment was generated by a human or AI. I just don’t see the traditional Hollywood system lasting much further out than maybe 5 or so years.

Unless there the studios are willing to accept specific, broad carve outs that make certain elements of entertainment the exclusive domain of humans….that’ it. It’s over.

The best that any human in entertainment can hope for is they’re an actor who can make money passively off of a body scan. And there will come a point when even that will be seen as quaint — AI will generate entire faux Hollywood stars that people will developed parasocial relationships with and, lulz, having one with a human will be seen as silly.

Throw in the rise of XR technology and, well, that’s it guys, it will be a brave new world.

A.I. May Soon Make The Hollywood Writers’ Strike Moot

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing about A.I. that a lot of my fellow writers — many of the far better writers than I will ever be — miss is that most people watch and enjoy dreck. As such, whatever A.I. produces just have to be good enough to be on in the background of daily life for most people to accept it without even thinking about it.

As such, I think there is a real possibility that if the Hollywood writers’ strike lingers long enough that A.I. will not just break the strike, but render it moot. Barring something I can’t predict — I am wrong all the time, afterall — it definitely seems as though Hollywood is on the cusp of being radically transformed — “Moneyballed,” if you will — to the point that the only people making any money will be studio execs and actors who live passively off of full body scans.

And that’s if the actors are lucky!

It could be that ultimately even actors will be rendered moot as a cost-cutting measure on the part of Hollywood studios. All those 90s dystopian movies about faux movie stars generated by AI will become a reality and people will grow to have parasocial relationships with stars that don’t even exist in reality at all.

Stranger things, and all that.

If you throw in the growing likelihood of a severe economic downturn happening very, very soon because the US defaults, well, there you go. Before you know it, people will turn to Broadway and their local live theatre if they want to have any sort of human-generated entertainment.

The Political Implications of America’s Looming Default

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Here are, in no particular order, the political consequences of the United States defaulting.

Trump Will Probably Win In 2024
A default would hand Trump an economic gimmie on a massive scale. Unless something none of us could possibly predict, America defaulting all but assures a second Trump Administration. In short — we’re totally, completely fucked. I still believe that Trump, in the end, will be something of a transitional figure with his MAGA Nazi successor being the person who finally consolidates power and turns us into a Hungary-like illiberal democracy.

Probability of Revolution / Civil War Grows Greatly
By definition, a default would not only totally scramble the world economy — maybe causing the Second Great Recession — but would also destabilize the United States to the point that when the 2024 election rolls around, we either have a civil war (Reds leaving the Union) or a revolution (Blues overthrowing the Red Nazi autocratic state.) Regardless, it’s going to be fucked. It’s going to be horrible and there’s a real chance that WW3 will happen while the United States is too busying imploding to keep an eye on global hotspots.

UBI Becomes Closer To Reality
A severe recession would give companies the cover they needed to use AI to replace many, many, MANY jobs, to the point that it’s even possible that implementing some sort of UBI will be a major campaign issue of the 2024 presidential cycle. It’s possible that it will become clear to everyone that AI is going to end most jobs and the government is going to have to step in. If nothing else, AI’s impact on the economy and society could be far bigger than any of us imagine when it comes to the political landscape of 2024.

Biden’s (First?) Impeachment
MAGA Republicans in the House are already itching for an excuse to impeach Biden and WHATEVER he does in the context of a default that doesn’t involve screwing over the Poors will be enough for House Republicans to ram through an impeachment. It’s a testament to how dumb and ill-focused House Republicans are that they haven’t managed to come up with an excuse to impeach Biden, even though their base obviously wants it really bad.

One Machine To Rule Them

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

AI-thinker Robert Scoble suggested that one day we’ll defer even our governance to AI. I think this is very possible. In fact, I think ultimately humans could simply defer all decisions to AI to the point that AI takes over without a shot being fired.

As such, humanity won’t go out in a blaze of glory in some sort of “Judgement Day,” we’ll rather simply drift into the arms of a very paternalistic AI that makes all our decisions for us. We might have some sort of contract between Humans and our new AI overlords that is renewed every so often. But, in general, all of humanity will defer all of our major decisions to an AI (maybe an AGI after a hard Singularity?)

It’s easy to imagine a situation where we are so lazy that we wilfully give AI access to all of our WMD, and hell, even all police operations across the globe. We will do this because enough people come to see AI as “objective” that it starts to make a lot of sense to people that only an all-powerful AGI can properly manage the globe.

If you wanted to get really fanciful about things, you might even suggest that global capitalism might be replaced with some sort of techno-communism where the dream of everyone living according to their ability and according to their need might finally be reached without the whole genocide part of it.

But that’s really reaching.

And, yet, the key element remains — we’re so busy thinking that Skynet is going to blow us up that we totally miss the idea that the transition to a world dominated by AGI would be rather meh. It would start with contracts being written by non-Human actors and end with some sort of hazy world government run by AGI that pushes lazy Humans around because we’re all so busy smoking a bowl while playing video games in the metaverse that we don’t notice what is going on.

The Great Hollywood Disruption

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

From the buzz I continue to monitor coming out of the tech community, it seems clear that Hollywood may be about to be “Moneyballed” in the sense that a basic human element of the industry — writing — may be turned into a technology issue.

And while I totally support the current Hollywood writers’ strike, if it goes on as long as it probably needs to, the risk that studio executives will simply turn to AI to write very formulaic scripts will increase significantly. Given that at the moment you can’t copyright something done by AI, it’s possible that Hollywood bigwigs will begin to lobby Congress to change that particular situation.

All that has to happen is one AI generated script be produced and it be a success for the whole Hollywood creative ecosystem to be upended. Remember, the vast majority of Hollywood entertainment is formulaic, stale and, well, bad. So the first people to feel the pinch of any AI writing revolution would be hacks who have no talent to begin with.

I still think that once this entire process is complete that live theatre may return to a popularity it’s not seen since…the rise of movies. It could be that when 99% of all recorded entertainment is AI generated that audiences will want to return to the comfort of live entertainment that will have a human touch that our new bot overlords will not be able to provide.

It’s at least a possibility, I suppose.

It just seems to me that Hollywood as we currently know it functions on some very antiquated assumptions. Once LLMs are able to generate content that is just good enough to be watchable, then, that’s it, the revolution will be here and the entire Hollywood economy will be disrupted.

When It Comes to Fixing The Looming Problems of A.I., Ezra Klein is Full of Shit

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I finished reading Ezra Klein’s great book “Why We’re Polarized” with a lingering sense of being a little bit cheated. He was great at explaining WHY we’re polarized, but when it came to giving a rube like me any sort of solution as to what to do about that polarization there was nothing.

So I find myself listening to him on The New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast and he did it AGAIN. He gave a really cogent description of the problems associated with the rise of AI, but when he was asked how AI companies might make money other than in advertising — he punted. He pivoted to the idea that somehow we should get the government to award huge prizes for technology development.

Does he really think that somehow, magically the government is going to subsidise the AI industry to the point that Federal prizes would be able to supplant the vast sums of money that would come from the path of least resistance that would be advertising?

I hate that. I hate the idea that a smug wealthy podcast liberal Klein can make all this money, get all this status by bitching and moaning about the problems associated with AI…and yet he refuses to come up with any actual solutions. The idea of government “prizes” instead of advertising is complete and total bullshit.

I turn to people like Klein for not just complaints, but solutions. Because I think ultimately Klein’s complaints-with-no-solutions will ultimately lead to the exact thing he doesn’t want to happen: a combination of competition and people using the experiences associated with social media will cause AI to be based on the concepts not of government prizes, but pure capitalism.

If Anyone Can Get People Into AR / VR Headsets, It’s Apple

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing about the tragic early demise of Steve Jobs is we never got a “real” smart TV from Apple and of the people who could convince millions of people to wear VR / AR goggles in public — he was it. So, finally, Apple apparently may be on the cusp of releasing it’s on AR / VR goggles.

All things being equal, Apple should begin to work on transitioning its entire user base to using such goggles instead having an iPhone combined with a laptop / desktop. Everything SHOULD go through the googles to the point that your entire life would revolve around them, especially the AR part of it all.

And, yet.

People still just aren’t prepared to walk around in public wearing AR / VR goggles because they would fear they looked like idiots. But, again, the only company I can imagine that might be able to pull such a feat off is Apple. They have a sense of style that all the other computer companies lack.

What’s even more interesting is we could one day soon see not just AR / VR goggles…but AI powered AR / VR goggles. Now THAT would be pretty cool, I have to say. Convincing millions of people to wear such goggles would be the basis of a few trillion dollar service industry.