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Yeah I think you’ve veered into sci-fi story territory here and far from a realistic vision of the future. Which is really the issue with all of these absurd AI

Yeah I think you’ve veered into sci-fi story territory here and far from a realistic vision of the future. Which is really the issue with all of these absurd AI predictions. Here’s what I think is more likely: phone and camera manufacturers implement a way to track if a photo is taken from a camera in real life or not. Social media platforms do the same thing. AI content continues to exist but is not implicitly trusted, similar to the way we perceive photos today (but didn’t 50 years ago), in that they can be Photoshopped. Life continues on mostly as normal.

ben_w 2y ago
> Yeah I think you’ve veered into sci-fi story territory here and far from a realistic vision of the future. Which is really the issue with all of these absurd AI predictions. Much as I would agree that quoting a Marvel film is not a useful thing… the same quote exists for real-world examples like playing Go, or the game of Diplomacy. > Life continues on mostly as normal. The one single thing I'm confident of, is that "normal" will mean something completely different. I have only the vaguest beliefs about what that difference might look like, but the status quo absolutely isn't stable. Even the mere existence of the web upon which social media runs, is a thing which I lived through, a thing where I remember the before times; a time with film stars sure, but no online influencers. It wasn't a magic time without issues (there were, and remain, many problems with everything), but today would be considered a wild sci-fi fantasy compared to when I left secondary school, what with us all carrying GPS trackers because they were too cheap to not include in the phones we use to make too-cheap-to-meter video calls, which we use to share clips of cats being silly or how nice our lunch seems. There was no single moment in my life where I thought "this changes everything", but all those small changes added up and we don't live in the 1990s (or 80s) any more. The home computer went from a Commodore 64 playing Jet Set Willy to a Performa 5200 playing Marathon 2 and giving me a dial-up modem, but the games were still just games and the 56k modem struggled with everything and only connected at 8-10 kbit/s; I went to university and got a direct ethernet connection to the UK academic backbone and VOIP reached the consumer market but I had nobody to call; I eventually got a mobile, first a Nokia 6210 then some random colour screen feature phone then a Nexus 5 etc., but none of the individual transitions or upgrades really felt worthwhile, they were forced by the hardware breaking, and yet my iPhone SE 3 is clearly more capable and can enable things that were simply not possible on the 6210.

ben_w 2y ago

> Yeah I think you’ve veered into sci-fi story territory here and far from a realistic vision of the future. Which is really the issue with all of these absurd AI predictions. Much as I would agree that quoting a Marvel film is not a useful thing… the same quote exists for real-world examples like playing Go, or the game of Diplomacy. > Life continues on mostly as normal. The one single thing I'm confident of, is that "normal" will mean something completely different. I have only the vaguest beliefs about what that difference might look like, but the status quo absolutely isn't stable. Even the mere existence of the web upon which social media runs, is a thing which I lived through, a thing where I remember the before times; a time with film stars sure, but no online influencers. It wasn't a magic time without issues (there were, and remain, many problems with everything), but today would be considered a wild sci-fi fantasy compared to when I left secondary school, what with us all carrying GPS trackers because they were too cheap to not include in the phones we use to make too-cheap-to-meter video calls, which we use to share clips of cats being silly or how nice our lunch seems. There was no single moment in my life where I thought "this changes everything", but all those small changes added up and we don't live in the 1990s (or 80s) any more. The home computer went from a Commodore 64 playing Jet Set Willy to a Performa 5200 playing Marathon 2 and giving me a dial-up modem, but the games were still just games and the 56k modem struggled with everything and only connected at 8-10 kbit/s; I went to university and got a direct ethernet connection to the UK academic backbone and VOIP reached the consumer market but I had nobody to call; I eventually got a mobile, first a Nokia 6210 then some random colour screen feature phone then a Nexus 5 etc., but none of the individual transitions or upgrades really felt worthwhile, they were forced by the hardware breaking, and yet my iPhone SE 3 is clearly more capable and can enable things that were simply not possible on the 6210.