Tag: Petite Singularity

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Came To Love Tik-Tok Potentially Reading Minds

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I don’t REALLY believe Tik-Tok (and Big Tech in general) can read my mind, but sometimes…eerie things happen. Take, for instance something I noticed today.

I spent a few hours right next to my elderly, wheelchair bound father. It was only when I came home and started to use Tik-Tok that I noticed something….weird. I was being pushed a number of Band of Brothers videos all of a sudden. Now, that really isn’t as big a deal as it might seen because, lulz, that happens to me all the time.

It was something else that happened with Tik-Tok that made me sit up and take notice — I was also pushed a number of Kelly’s Hero’s clips that featured Donald Sutherland as “Oddball.” I struggled to think of why this was the case, then I thought how I sat right next to my dad earlier in the day and started to wonder — did Tik-Tok read my dad’s mind? Does my dad think I’m an Oddball type character?

There are two reasons this kind of spooks me. One, if that’s what’s happening, then I have some insight into my cypher of a father that I’ve never had before. And, what’s more, if you could prove Tik-Tok (and Big Tech) and read our minds, wouldn’t they have a responsibility to, say, notify the police if some crazed would-be mass shooter’s mind was being monitored by Tik-Tok and they knew what he was thinking about doing?

But I don’t believe Tik-Tik, or anyone else, can read our minds. Yet….it is curious. All very curious.

Imagining The Reality Of Our ‘Her’ Movie Future

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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 End Of The Web

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

Of MAGA, Incels & Sexbots

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It definitely seems as though we’re rushing towards a moment where at least two macro issues will fuse — sexbots and Incels. So, in the future, it’s possible that Incels will simply have relationships with pliant sexbots rather than have any relationships with women at all.

Ugh.

What’s worse, it’s possible that once MAGA succeeds into banning all birth control, they will go after this alliance. MAGA’s “moralistic state” will regulate the use of sexbots to the point that they can’t be used as…sexbots.

And all of this definitely seems to possible a precursor to MAGA finding a moralistic reason for regulating AI out of existence. I think this is part of a broader move on MAGA’s part to see AI as a threat to “traditional values,” be they economic or moral.

Anyway. No one listens to me.

The Future Of Search

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It definitely seems as though our relationship to Web search is about to be totally upended. The advent of AI indicates that there may come a time soon when we all have a Her-like digital assistant who searches the Web for us using vocal commands. What’s more, it’s also possible that the “practical obscurity” of the Dark Web will come to an end.

In the near future, a Her-like digital assistant may be able to search the entire Web — Dark Web, too — and give us information that maybe we don’t want to know or weren’t expecting.

The question is, of course, what does this sea change mean for Google?

I think it could be that Google will be one of several companies that SELLS you the Her-like AGI that helps you during the course of the day with voice commands. Or, put another way, it could be all the jobs we expect to happen because of a fusion of AGI and robotics could be from humans still having control over the back end.

Or maybe not.

AGI is a very powerful concept. Once AI comes anywhere close to being “more human than human,” I struggle to discern why any humans would have a job at all. That combination is so potent that a Universal Basic Income seems to be the inevitable conclusion.

But, who knows. I’m, as always, being very speculative and I can’t predict the future.

Pondering The Potential Impact of Google’s Coming Gemini AI

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It definitely seems as though the next 18 months may be pretty fucking historic on both a technological and political basis. On the tech side, Google is set to release a new AI called Gemini. Given how impressive today’s first generation AI is, I’m a bit unnerved by what Gemini may bring.

It definitely seems as though 2024 will be the year when AI reaches the “just good enough” stage. This means we’ll be one severe recession away from the entire knowledge economy being upended and transformed. It could be that the 2024 presidential cycle will be the first time we start to take the notion of Universal Basic Income seriously.

I’m coming to believe that UBI is inevitable — a lot sooner than anyone might think. But I also think it will come at a price — probably all taxes will be replaced by a 30% VAT. Also, I think we’ll pay for a UBI by taxing the economic output of non-human actors.

If Gemini is anywhere near as powerful as is suggested, then we are probably in for some severe economic and social upheaval just as we careen towards the “Fourth Turning” of late 2024, early 2025.

I continue to believe that it’s at least possible that neo-Ludditism is the next logical evolution of MAGA. It makes a lot of sense if even blue collar jobs are not spared by AI. I suspect that soon enough something akin to androids will begin to take all the service jobs that aren’t knowledge economy jobs being taken by LLMs.

Regardless, things are very much up the air.

My Potential Future & A Third Party Interpretation Problem

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve always been…different. I just have never quite known what I was supposed to do to fit the conventional wisdom. As such, as I continue to work on my Hail Mary Pass of trying to write a breakout hit novel, I find myself contemplating how people who don’t know me might interpret my life to date.

My fear is, of course, that the moment I make it big should I somehow manage to write a popular first novel that I’ll be “canceled” for some drunken thing I did at some point in my life — probably while in South Korea.

On a macro scale, I’ve been pretty innocuous even at my drunken worse, but I also know that everyone on social media has a hair trigger when it comes to destroying people, so, lulz? I’m not perfect. And, what’s more, I’ve pretty much been a drunk nobody loser for way too many years.

If I do manage to do some sort of hattrick and sell a novel that pulls me out of oblivion, I have a hunch that things just aren’t going to work out the way I want them to. Over and above my fears about being “canceled,” I have to contend with the cold, hard reality of ageism.

If I become as successful as I believe I should be, the first thing any interviewer is going to ask me is, “What’s it like being a such a success later in life?” Even though that is an extremely speculative fear on my part, just the prospect of having to deal with that type of questioning requires me to manage my expectations for the consequences of writing a novel that is anywhere near as successful as what Stieg Larsson wrote.

I just have to accept that even if I get what I want, I won’t get what I want. Even if I stick the landing with this novel, I’m probably going to be in my mid-50s before the novel is actually on bookshelves. And that doesn’t even begin to factor in the potential for some sort of political “Fourth Turning” happening just as some sort of technological Singularity makes a human-written novel seem quite quaint.

The Potential Implications Of Google’s Gemini LLM For Hollywood

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

Yet Another Eerie Tik-Tok ‘Coincidence’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

A few days ago, I was talking to someone about the “old way” one would get information about a movie. You would flip open the local newspaper, find the ad for the newspaper you might be interested in and go from there.

Well, this conversation crossed my mind again recently and lo and behold, that very same day I was pushed a video on Tik-Tok that detailed that exact process. It was so specific to what I had talked about that I was taken aback.

Now, obviously, there are three possible explanations for this odd situation.

One, it’s just a coincidence. I’m reading into all of this a lot more than I should and let’s move on to something else.

Meanwhile, there is also the idea that Tik-Tok is actively listening to our conversations using our phone’s mic. If this was happening, it would be alarming for a number of reasons, least of which would be the national security implications of a Chinese company with ties to the CCP listening to the conversations of millions of Americans. (Not that I don’t think American Big Tech isn’t doing the same thing as well.)

The THIRD, most bonkers idea, is digital telepathy — Tik-Tok is reading our minds. I don’t believe this is happening — don’t believe it’s even possible to do — but these weird “coincidences” involving Tik-Tok seemingly knowing my inner monologue happen again and again to a surreal degree.

Anyway. Something unusual is going on, I just don’t know what.

The Hollywood Strikes May Last So Long They’re Moot

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

As I keep saying, I can’t predict the future. So, it’s possible that as many people have predicted, the current creative strikes taking place in Hollywood will wrap up sometime in mid-September.

That definitely seems to be a viable possibility.

And, yet, I worry. I worry that Hollywood suits know that if they just wait long enough that the whole thing will be moot. AI will advance just enough that they can realistically produce the usual formulaic drek they always do and they can go about their merry business without any regard to the either writers or actors.

I could totally see suits looking at it this way — all they have to do is endure some pain upfront long enough that, say, 18 months from now, they can atomize things to the point that there are only two types of survivors in the new age of AI: suits and programmers.

Because that definitely seems to be the future we’re careening towards. The vast majority of recorded entertainment will be AI generated and it will be just good enough that the average person won’t even notice. Nearly all of what Hollywood currently generates is extremely bland and forumlatic. It follows a well-worn, well-established beat structure to the point that AI could easily follow it once technology is up to it.

There might be .1% of recorded entertainment that will be grandfathered in that will be human-generated, but, in the end, if you want your entertainment manmade, you’re going to have to go to live theatre.

Again, I am wrong all the time. So, it’s very possible that this will be yet another instance of that. Everything will be wrapped up in mid-September and we’ll punt all my concerns down the road a few more years.

But I worry. I worry a lot.