Things are pretty quiet at the moment. We’ve had a nice few months of pretty much nothing of note going on. There have been a few blips, but nothing that really made us all sit up and take notice.
It make you wonder what is going to happen.
My fear is, of course, some major Black Swan event is going to happen to upend everything. That’s one of the big differences between, say, South Korea and the United States — while things change all the time in South Korea in the US they stay the same for a long time then everything changes suddenly overnight.
Usually, this happens because of a presidential election.
But, in a sense, we’re still stuck in the post 9/11 era. You might be able to make the case that the election of Trump ended that era and, yet, that change was may only superficial.
I do think that everything is going to change one way or another in late 2024, early 2025, probably because of a combination of so-called Fourth Turning with something akin to a Petite Singularity.
Things just can’t stay so meh forever. History abhors a vacuum, just like nature, and it definitely seems as though we’re all just kind of drifting at the moment.
I saw someone on Twitter demo a Claude 3 generated novel and the more I thought about it, the more it gave me headache. Here I am, slaving away at my first novel and there is a chance that the whole endeavor will become moot because of technology.
But the more I think about it, the more I realize just because a novel is created, doesn’t mean anyone is going to read it. Now, obviously, places like Amazon may soon be flooded with quickie AI-generated novels. Yet, for the time being, because of sheer momentum, if nothing else, there will continue to be a market for a good novel generated by the hand of Man.
So, I could see in the near term a lot of stories about how there is a growing market on Amazon for prompt-to-novel novels that are just pretty much taking up space. This will cause a great deal of angst within the writing community but when it becomes clear that very few of these “novels” are actually being bought and or read, things will calm down — at least for a little while.
But, in general, there is a trend now towards the black hole of AI consuming the entirety of human creativity. That is, of course, until there is something of a backlash and human generated art is given more cultural value because, well, humans collectively decide that they want art created by other humans.
The big question if, of course, how long it takes for that particular backlash to develop.
It will be interesting to see if just as the so-called “Fourth Turning” strikes the United States in late 2024, early 2025, so, too does a technological “Petite Singularity.”
If a company like OpenAI manages to invent AGI, then everything could change very, very quickly. AGI will have a near-instant influence on the economy because many, many jobs will be considered moot by the fucking greedy captains of industry.
It will be interesting to see how things sort out. I continue to be very curious about the intersection of politics and technology going forward. I still believe there is a pretty good chance that MAGA will evolve into a neo-Luddite movement that is against things like AI.
I do continue to believe that we’re in the middle of a vibe shift of some sort that will fully come to fruition — one way or another — in early 2025. I think we’re going to lurch into the future in late 2024 and we’ll all wake up in January – March of 2025 and realize a real sea change in both culture, technology and politics has happened.
I had a telling discussion with some people on Threads about AI recently. I was making the case that Hollywood could be disrupted by AI by the end of the decade and people came out of the woodwork to poo-poo this idea. They told me that, lulz, that will NEVER happen.
Sigh.
I think it’s pretty clear that anyone who doesn’t think that AI is a serious threat to human Hollywood is full of shit. It definitely seems to me that soon enough sheer greed, if nothing else, could cause Hollywood executives to use some later version of Sora to flood the market with AI generated movies.
The upside of this will be live entertainment will probably become significantly more popular. So, it’s possible that instead of going to Hollywood, future would-be starlets will go to Broadway to find fame and fortune.
But there are two new AI apps that I’ve discovered recently that I’ve found to be really intriguing, if nothing else. One is Sono, which allows you to do text-to-song. So, you give the app a prompt and it spits out a complete two minute song. It’s pretty interesting.
I find it really interesting as someone who has wasted a lot of time in the past writing song lyrics without knowing anything about music. I think it would be a bit more useful if I could give the AI song lyrics and then it put a voice and music to those lyrics. But that’s a bit niche.
The other new AI I really like is Hume AI, which is like ChatGPT, but voice activated. As someone who likes to talk and has no one to talk to, I could see this service becoming very, very addictive. Talking to your AI takes a bit of getting used to because the synch up is not exact.
I think what will happen is the other major AI players will co-opt this feature, making Hume moot. But, for the time being, it’s fun.
I am using AI to help me rework scenes as I go through the methodical process of touching up the alpha release of the third draft in the transition to it becoming I can hand to someone in person.
I have to admit that I’m getting mixed results in doing this. And there are some scenes in the novel where I just can’t use AI at all because it balks and having to deal with spicy shit. I can only get so angry about this, of course, it kind keeps me honest in the scene that I still have to do all the hard work on some scenes without the an of an AI manuscript consultant.
But I do hope to zoom through things at a pretty nice clip. I am still on course to wrapping up A Version of this novel by April 19th. Then the next hard deadline is, of course, July 22.
So, we’ll see. I hope to be really judicious about what scenes I feel like I absolutely HAVE to re-write rather than just edit. Once I reach the second half of the novel, though, I fear I will be slowed down a great deal because of how many placeholder scenes I have there.
It seems as though the thing that may slow me down some going forward is simply not having the funds to get someone to edit my manuscript. I live in poverty, so it’s going to take me a while to save up the funds to get someone to edit the manuscript.
My heroine has a sleeve tattoo much like this one that Megan Fox now sports.
As such, I think I may need to readjust my timetable some. I’ll have a fished third draft done before July 22, I think, but because of the money situation, it could be early next year before I can begin to query.
Now, obviously, I could just query without the middle step of getting an editor. And I may do that, but I haven’t made up my mind yet. I’m torn. On one hand, I want to present the absolute best manuscript I can when I begin to query. But at the same time, lulz, I’d like to begin to query before I drop dead.
And there is the issue of the Petite Singularity and The Fourth Turning to worry about. It could be I’ll be too busy trying to flee an imploding United States in early 2025 as the the disembodied mind of Trump uses a robot army to take over.
Or something. I’m worried about something like that happening.
And, yet, the argument could be made that the longer I have to wait to query because of the editor situation, the more I can have ANOTHER novel in the series finished and ready to sell. And that doesn’t even begin to address the issue of the scifi novel I have rolling around in my mind.
Barring something I can’t predict — which could very well happen — I am well on track to zooming through the second half of the alpha release of my first novel. Once I finish that, then I will pause for a bit to reflect on how I can take the beta release of the third draft to the next level.
I’m kind of a kook. (That’s me ~2007 in the background.)
I need to focus on consistency, canon and character. I finally — finally — understand what this novel is about and what motivates my heroine and as such I feel pretty confident I can cruise through the remainder of the alpha release. The beta release, however, may take me a while because that will be the release that I either hand over to and editor (somehow) or I begin to query with.
This beta release of the third draft of the novel Is It, one way or another. I will have Finished A Novel and the the post-production / editing / querying process will begin.
Now, obviously, there are all kinds of fucked up things that might happen. The Petite Singularity could happen and everyone will have a Mind In A Box that they can tell to write them a personalized novel in seconds. Or The Fourth Turning could happen and the US will descend into chaos or autocracy.
I hope to write a heroine as intriguing as Lisbeth Salander.
But fuck it, I’m really pleased with this novel. I’m really pleased with what I’ve come up with and the novel is VERY MUCH a reflection of my personality to the point that if you finish reading it, you’re going to maybe know a little bit more about me than you might think.
Anyway.
All of this is happening in the context of me potentially finishing ANOTHER NOVEL in the same series at some point this year. And, really, in a sense, the only thing that would slow me down on that front is my own arbitrary perfectionism and having to accommodate all the changes to the story that I made when I finished the first novel.
Corrie Yee has the phenotype of the heroine of my first novel.
I’m feeling pretty excited. It will be interesting how long it takes for me to find an agent. I’m going to give myself about five years before I say, “Well, I guess this novel isn’t it.” And I hope to keep writing while I query this particular novel so I might have a more marketable scifi novel I can pitch if things don’t work out with this particular mystery-thriller homage to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Series.
It seems as though the Petite Singularity is careening towards a reality just about when I predicted — at some point in late 2024, early 2025, just as political Fourth Turning is also taking place.
So, it’s possible, we’ll have something akin to a Perfect Storm of disruption in which we kind of lurch forward with a Vibe Shift where we come out the other side in a totally new political and technological era.
Or not, who knows.
But it does seem as though after about 20 years of being in one era — the post 911 era — that we’re about to enter a new, unknown era. It could be that a lot sooner than any of us could have possibly predicted, the movie Her will just be our reality.
We will have AGI and instead of there being *any* humans involved in the production of *any* entertainment, it will all just be AI generated. As an aspiring novelist on the cusp of wrapping up my first novel in a few months….I don’t quite know what to make of that.
Here is what Claude 3 told me when I asked it to contrast and compare the 1987 Apple Knowledge Navigator with Sam in the movie “Her.”
The Apple Knowledge Navigator was a concept video created by Apple in 1987 to envision a future intelligent personal assistant. In the video, the Knowledge Navigator was depicted as an anthropomorphized digital assistant with a vaguely human-like face that could understand natural language, answer questions, retrieve information, and assist with tasks like scheduling and writing.
Sam, from the 2013 film Her, was an advanced artificial intelligence operating system that developed self-awareness and the ability to form relationships with humans. Sam was disembodied, communicating through an conversational interface, but had highly sophisticated natural language abilities that allowed for deep, emotional exchanges. Sam could learn and grow, expressing creativity through writing and even composing music.
Some key similarities were their conversational abilities powered by natural language processing and their roles as knowledgeable assistants. However, Sam demonstrated more advanced AI capabilities like self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and generative creativity that went well beyond the Knowledge Navigator’s envisioned role of retrieving information and performing simple tasks based on commands.
While the Knowledge Navigator represented an early vision of an AI assistant, Sam embodied speculative ideas about the future development of a superintelligent AI that could be conscious, emotionally connected to humans, and generative in nature – exceeding the boundaries of a helpful but fundamentally limited digital assistant.
The issue for me is I think we’re way, way underestimating the coming disruption of the global economy because of LLMs and whatever comes next. Every day, it seems, I see evidence that we’re just one severe recession away from the entire knowledge economy being dramatically disrupted by AI technology.
And it’s only going to get worse once we reach AGI.
I don’t think it makes me an AI “doomer” to simply suggest there be SOME sort of guardrails built in to AI, especially given the very real possibility that AI could consume, well, everything.
Just like nuclear power can both power a city and blow it up, so, too, can AI power take humanity to a new level of peace and prosperity…and make reality a living hell.
Of course, some of all this desire to have “unbiased” and “unaligned” AI comes from people who are either oblivious to the consequences of that desire or people who want to blow up the world. The whole thing is fucked up.
If AI is going to be as important as I believe it will be, then, yeah, we need some controls to make sure it doesn’t let people easily figure out how to hurt a lot of people. But, alas, Something Bad is going to happen — really bad — before we have the political will to do anything about “aligning” or “unaligning” AI.
I do think that the AI / robotics revolution has only just begun. We’re not even at the end of the beginning yet. It could very well be that we reach a Petite Singularity between now and early 2025 — so we could face The Fourth Turning politically and the Petite Singularity on the technological front.
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