So. I have a window of opportunity before either The Fourth Turning destroys the country and / or AI makes all human generated entertainment moot. So, I have to hurry. At this point, finishing this novel is now existential and, to some extent, irrational.
I should just give up and stare at my ceiling all day until I die of boredom. I suppose that’s what a “normal” person would do — just give up.
But fuck that. I’m not normal. Never have been. So, once more into the breach. Now that I’m sober, I feel in a better position to sprint. All I want to do is to express my humanity by telling a great story that one — one! — person who isn’t related to me or who doesn’t know me personally finishes and really likes and wants to read more.
That, in my mind, will prove that I don’t suck as a writer.
It may take a little while — 18 months? — but there is going to come a moment in the not-so-distant future when we have a Her movie future where our digital personal assistant will, on the fly, churn on VR narrative immersive media for our Apple Vision Pros.
The beautiful Zendaya.
I don’t see how “human” Hollywood has much of a long term future unless Congress passes some sort of carveout whereby a certain amount of entertainment HAS to be created by the hand of man, rather than an AI. And if we’ve gotten to that point, I could see maybe neo-Luddism being the natural evolution of MAGA.
I mean, if 3 million high paying blue collar transportation jobs go poof overnight, that is going to have a severe economic impact. At this point, my only question is if “The Fourth Turning” is going to somehow pause development of all this cool shit while we bomb ourselves into oblivion because of “vibes.”
I continue to feel very uneasy about America’s political future. Shit is going to get really complicated really soon and it could be that all this cool stuff we keep expecting to happen in the next few years simply will be punted down the road until we decide if we’re going to be an autocracy or not.
I don’t know if this is the cultural equivalent of The Fourth Turning or not, but it seems like we need some sort of cultural reset. It we need to lurch into a new, more exciting future. We exist in some sort of luminal state whereby a bunch of old people control culture.
I honestly don’t know how to fix this problem.
But I suppose if there was some sort of Fourth Turning then once it was over and we came out the other side, we would have a new, vibrant culture again. But it definitely seems as though we’re stuck in a cultural malaise for the foreseeable future.
I also think that people aren’t thinking through how bad things suck at the moment in general. I suppose there is a possibility that technology will fix the problem. Some combination of AI and the Apple Vision Pro going mainstream might be the thing that prompts some sort of cultural reset or vibe shift.
I often think that the only way I’ll ever teach English in Asia again is if the DPRK somehow collapses and there’s another bubble for ESL by desperate Koreans, this time from former North Koreans.
Me with my students about 2004.
I have noticed something curious on the “easy job for broke writers” front, however — training LLMs. It definitely seems that there MIGHT be a little bit of a bubble now when it comes to doing such shit to the point that otherwise useless — but creative — people like myself might be able to make good money doing it.
But I have a pretty good setup at the moment. I’m in a very idyllic situation for writing a novel and I don’t really have any reason to change it. I’m bonkers and I have a lot of time to write. Don’t know if I need to unset that apple cart by introducing training LLMs into the equation.
And, yet, I also know that all good things must come to an end. It definitely seems as though it’s possible that this very specific situation that I’ve been grateful for the last few years may come to an end in roughly a year. It’s going to s u c k and I need to start thinking about what I’m going to do.
But, who knows, it could be that by that point the training LLMs bubble will have popped and I’ll just have to be miserable like everyone else and use what little free time I have to write and read when I get a chance.
Any discussion of what I’m about to talk about must address the huge MAGA elephant in the room — it’s very possible that we may have to go through something along the lines of WW3 before we reach any sort of Singularity, petite or otherwise.
But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Trump somehow doesn’t manage to kill about 1 billion people when he is re-elected and in an effort to remake the global order in his image causes WW3 to break out. Let’s say we continue to have relative peace and prosperity.
It definitely seems as though by about 2030 that some combination AI and android technology make totally upend and disrupt the currently human-dominated service industry. There would likely to be an number of unexpected side effects.
The most obvious is, of course, a real push for some sort of Universal Basic Income. I could see this being paid for by some combination of a 30% vat and the taxation of the economic activity of non-human actors. (Though I know some Objectivists who think ANY taxation is theft, even if the “thing” being taxed isn’t even human. Ugh.)
The other, less obvious side-effect of the wide spread use of AI and androids would be that there would be no DDD jobs for undocumented immigrants to fill. Now, apparently some conservatives are soooooo racist that they somehow think that undocumented people will still come to America even if they’re going to starve to death because there are no jobs for them.
But, I think any reasonable person can assume that if all service jobs and all DDD jobs are done by AI androids that, well, that might single-handedly solve a few macro problems in the American body politic. There’s a reason why Japan has been obsessed androids for decades — they knew they would need them because of a lack of new babies.
So, if there was a snap, massive rollout of AI androids in the US it’s possible that the weird bending of in America’s political system that has caused MAGA to warp everything might subside and we might go back to “normal.” Or not, maybe things will just get worse because the plutocrat oligarchs who would control the AI androids would use those very same androids to control the everyone.
I really hate the modern Web sometimes. I hate how boring it is. I hate that I have to use a browser — or an app. What I want is to have the Web replaced by a bunch of LLM that talk to each other.
Or, I don’t know, it would be cool if I had a LLM that knew every quirk of my personality to the point that it could “pre-emptively” answer my questions before I even asked them. Or something like that.
Of course, the dark side to this is everyone would fall in love with their LLM, like in the movie Her. But ignoring that problem, I want to information to come to me via LLM, rather than me have to search it out.
It makes you think about how maybe the major national newspapers might need to invest in LLM. Because it definitely seems as though everything on the Web is about to change in a rather abrupt manner. Almost overnight, it could be that the very notion of using a “browser” will seem quaint.
This will only accelerate as LLMs become a commodity. That seems to be inevitable.
If you believe — as I do — that they’re rushing towards a future that is very similar to that imagined in the movie “Her,” then, well, it definitely seems as though Apple would be the company to make it happen.
They don’t have a profitable search engine business to protect and they have gobs and gobs and gobs of money to throw at creating a top-tier LLM. And, what’s more, they are at the forefront of XR technology with their Vision Pro.
But, as I always say, I can’t predict the future. I have no idea what is going to happen. And, yet, I would suggest you keep an eye on what Apple does in the next 18 months with XR and LLM.
I think it’s at least possible that were about to have a thunderclap of innovation around the fusion of XR and LLM technologies to such an extent that it might cause a severe recession and the loss of millions of jobs. But, we’ll see, I guess.
Here are some basic existing things that I’m using to game out the ultimate demise of the “passive Web” by, say, the end of the decade. (Excluding a pause to get the outcome of The Fourth Turning sorted out, of course.)
The first is the growing power and popularity of Large Language Models. Another is the growing power of computing hardware in general. Another is the fact that there is some techno-cultural determinism in LLMs solving some pretty basic problems with the Web as we know it. And last would be improving XR technology.
Ok, with all that in mind, it’s pretty easy to imagine that we literally could live in a Her movie-like future pretty soon. Everyone will wear a earpiece that allows them to have real-time conversations with a LLM digital assistant. The LLM’s dataset will be the entirety of the Web. The LLM will be finely tuned to your specific personality to the point that all of today’s bitching and moaning by conservatives about chatbot “bias” will seem quaint and silly.
Instead of searching Google, we will have casual, personal conversations throughout the day about whatever it is we need to know. Websites will no longer exist — or will no longer get the (human) traffic that they get today. And here is where XR technology fits in.
Instead of the passive use of a “browser” to read a New York Times article, you will actively be presented the contents you’re interested in by your LLM — probably displayed as a multimedia AR experience at your demand. The connection between AI and XR is not as obvious as maybe it should be. It seems to me that the two will feed on each other so that both are trillion dollar industries by 2030. (Again, baring the United States collapsing into civil war / revolution because of fucking ding-dong Trump.)
The thing about it is, all of this could happen really, really fast. Within just a few months, content on the Web could collapse into a Singularity with little or no direct human interaction with it. An entire genre of media will no longer be relevant at all.
Even all the microblogging services that have popped up might no longer needed because the real-time news element of the services will be replaced with you having a really interesting, personal conversation with your digital personal assistant.
Or, at the very least, what you might previously get via Twitter or Bluesky, you will see via a XR display that you wear most of the time.
Besides the obvious historical and political obstacles to this happening, there might be some human resistance to what seems to make total sense today. As such, maybe it’s not 2030 that no one reads The New York Times website anymore, but, say, 2033 or later.
But it’s coming. I just don’t see how the Web continues to exist in its present form.
The crux of much of the money made in the Internet era has been slapping ads on solving the problem of there being a deluge of information on the Web. But it is growing more and more apparent to me that it’s at least possible that as we careen towards a “Her” movie type future, that the Web could collapse into something akin to a technological Singularity.
The entire modern Web paradigm will evaporate into into simply interacting with a hyper-personalized LLM. So, rather than a Google-style one to many situation we have now where we all go to Google to ask a question, we will each have a LLM specifically tweaked to our personal proclivities.
What’s more, the Web itself will no longer exist.
There are elements of this potential future that I can’t quite game out yet. What about video or music? How does any one make any money off of content if all content is simply fed directly into a LLM that then, in turn, tells end users about that content?
I think we have to contemplate the idea that the next trillion dollars in tech will be made from whomever can scale Her-like software. So, rather than a smart phone, you’ll have some sort of device that interfaces with a LLM. The end product will be much like what is seen in Her or even the Apple prototype commercial from way back when where a dude talks to a high end digital personal assistant.
As such, it seems Apple would be the most obvious company to benefit from this because they don’t have a profitable search business to protect AND they have a unified software and hardware ecosystem.
The issue of online content, however, is a much more difficult thing to process. But it is easy to imagine that LLM hooked up to a real-time feed of the Internet could market the final death of all media online. If your LLM uses the ENTIRE INTERNET (including the Dark Web) as its dataset, the fact that at the moment you only can get “suggestions” about a portion of the Internet’s vast content becomes quite moot and quaint.
The LLM will simply digest all of human knowledge and give you a specific answer specifically tailored to your personality and needs. It will know everything about you and so there will be something akin to “preemptive search” that takes place.
But, again, how will some future interation of The New York Times make any money? I honestly don’t know at this point. Maybe they will be paid to feed their content directly into the LLM? But I do know that the Web as we currently conceive of it is lurching towards its doom.
Apparently, Google is coming out with a next-generation LLM called Gemini later this year, in December. It’s allegedly going to be four times as powerful as OpenAI’s ChatGTP4.
The thing I’m interested in is the implications for Hollywood. It’s well within the realm of possible that the two strikes that Hollywood is experiencing at the moment will still be going on. If Gemini turns out to be as powerful as Google claims, I wonder if it’s possible that Hollywood suits might begin to turn to Gemini to make the strikes…moot.
Or, put another way, it could be that all my “hysterical doom shit” about the future of Hollywood could happen a lot sooner than we might think. It could be that the Hollywood suits will simply sit on their hands until Gemini is up and running. Then, this spring, they will start to spit out the first AI-generated movies.
Or not. I don’t know enough about what’s possible. But the point remains — things are moving very quickly with LLMs and I think we have to begin to understand that Hollywood is about to go through a massive technological shift in ways that we can barely begin to understand.
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