Tag: LLMs

‘Conversation Economy’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

One reason why I doubt “prompt engineer” will last very long as a job is soon enough YOU will be prompted by an AI. Think of this as the “Her” future in the sense that you’ll have a human-like digital assistant you will have casual conversation with.

Which this leads to the idea that potentially instead of a knowledge economy, we’ll have a conversation economy. What’s more, if you hook up AI to all these Terminators that companies like Boston Dynamics are building the looming prospect of almost all economic activity being a function of non-human actors becomes very real.

I’m talking about macro trends that seem to be all headed towards the same endgame. So, knowledge workers will be replaced by natural-language conversations and blue collar workers will be replaced by what are essentially androids.

And all of this could happen a lot sooner than you might realize. It’s kind of astonishing that all of this is happening in broad daylight and none of us are thinking about all the Hollywood movies that talk about the down side of this very future.

This, of course, raises the prospect of the need for a Universal Basic Income. The only way I can think such a thing might actually happen is to “bribe” elites by replacing all taxes with a 30% VAT. So, plutocrats will get away scot free when it comes to taxes, but we Poors will get one thing we need — a UBI — in exchange for significantly higher consumption prices.

I just don’t think we’re ready for the Conversation Economy. If AI is good enough that we not only can banter with it, develop an emotional connection with, then the very nature of work as we currently imagine it will be transformed.

So, instead of 12,000 professional writers in Hollywood, you will have a fraction of that — if any. People will shrug when they can talk to their digital assistant that will create a movie or TV show out of whole cloth on the fly. Your phone or TV will scan your face to see what mood you’re in and in a split second will generate you entertainment that is specifically designed to not just you, but your specific mood at that specific moment.

Mass media, a shared reality, will no longer exist.

Now, it seems to me that the end game of that specific situation is live theatre will see a real resurgence. That will be the delineator in pop culture — most run-of-the-mill recorded entertainment will be completely AI generated but if you want a “human touch” to your entertainment you will go to the theatre or a live music show.

Regardless, we’re just not ready for what’s about to happen. It will be interesting to see if we’re going to see the rise of a neo-Luddite movement, probably in the context of the next generation of MAGA.

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.