It is 7:01 AM on Saturday, May 18th 2024.
There are a number of things on my mind this morning. The first and perhaps most incredible is that a futuristic purpose of this blog is now halfway possible. I had imagined that my descendants in the future would be able to ‘speak with me’ through a computer program that rendered a hologram and responded based on all my writings here. Well, with AI, the response part is possible in the form of a chatbot trained on everything I’ve written and will continue to write. Using deepfake a digital avatar could be made as well but I had more of a 3D hologram in mind.
The future is here and it is a little frightening. If we were able to go back in time and explain the present to ourselves back in the 80s, our past selves would think we are crazy. With technology, changes in society are speeding up and not necessarily for the better. For most of human history change came slowly. I’m currently reading books about village life in the late 1800s, early 1900s in England and Japan where the way of life that had been the same for hundreds of years began to slowly change with technical innovation. We’re experiencing an even greater pace of change with technology today. The internet really opened its eyes to the mainstream around 2000 but social media really lit the fire around 2006. Politics used to be such a sleepy affair and now a good part of the population is wearing red hats (some wearing diapers) and while claiming to be “Christian” are supporting a nasty former President who is on trial for cheating on his pregnant wife with a porn star. They’ve become a cult.
I once thought something like that couldn’t happen in America. We were supposed to be “exceptional” but it looks like we’re not much smarter than any other countries who fall for demagogues. I have been in a state of disbelief for many years now due to this and it only gets worse. It is impossible to properly express my level of disappointment with adults now that I am one. As a kid I always thought they knew everything and were wise. Boy was I wrong.
This extends to institutions which are supposed to be revered such as the Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas can be bought, his wife is an outright insurrectionist and Alito openly supported the lie of “stop the steal” by having his flag flown upside down then blaming his wife! I wanted to believe John Roberts when he said there were no partisan justices, that the Supreme Court was above all that. Well, obviously this isn’t true. Thomas, Alito and the ‘lesser judge’ Cannon are blatant partisans. Even the institution which is supposed to be revered has fallen into partisanship and I can only imagine things will get worse.
Social media is a scourge and responsible for much of this mess were in. AI is going to make this worse and I’m very worried for the future. Humans are like monkeys playing with a nuclear bomb on this thing. Every businessperson I meet treats it like a shiny new toy, running around like the village idiot in a state of excitement and smiles not comprehending the vast implications of changes to come. We couldn’t handle social media. Supporting a person like Trump where everyday brings a new low ripped apart relationships, families and greatly damaged the standing of America in the world. At this point Trump could take a dump in a box and his supporters would cheer lining up to buy it. You’d think this is a stretch but the word is he wears diapers and soils himself in court. Now there are images of supporters wearing diapers with the statement that “real men wear diapers.”
I like reading about how this reality is a simulation and I wonder if the controllers are seeing just how absurd they can make things before people catch on. Well, half of the USA isn’t catching on.
We’ve now got people in Congress who love conspiracy theories such as Q-Anon. People just can’t handle the infinite amount of information out there and cannot differentiate fact from fiction. The fiction is made up by people, and the fiction pumped out by AI is going to be magnitudes more believable. People aren’t going to know what to believe and as convincing as AI is, will even question things and events they see firsthand.
I see society and the world at large becoming even more volatile than it already is and I’m worried. We’re collectively jumping into the deep end of a pool with little to no experience with water.
As for me, I’ve limited my social media exposure, and do my best to limit how much technology I use. I don’t own a ‘smart watch’ I prefer books to TV and I encourage my kids to “touch grass” as they now say which means simply get off the screen and go outside. In the past, the internet was a destination, a computer you sat down to, and logged into the information superhighway. Now, the internet is constantly connected to us and it is difficult to get away.
It is more difficult than ever to try and predict the future. However, I’m placing my bets on digital items such as cryptocurrency and NFTs. This is anathema to many but they are luddites in my opinion. The world is going virtual and people like to collect things. In my opinion it is inevitable that the world will adopt crypto but it is impossible to say which projects will succeed and which will fail in the same way it was impossible to predict which companies would succeed during the dot com boom in 1999. Sure, it is easy to look back now and say we should have invested in Google, in Apple but things just worked out for them and they could have just as easily failed as been successful.
One item I’ve been paying attention to in crypto is cyber threats by nation states and how they could greatly disrupt everything from infrastructure to satellites, databases and so on. In this sense, the blockchain is much more resilient due to its decentralized nature. A hacker would not only have to go back in time through the blocks of one chain but do so for thousands of them all at the same time as they must continually mirror each other. Much harder to do than disrupt a few critical servers. The only wildcard is AI which I imagine could be programed to notice the anomalies and take defensive measures.
Just like the dot com boom and aftermath, it is impossible to say what the internet will look like in just a few years. It is certain it will be very different. Also, it is going to make a lot of jobs obsolete while at the same time influencing the way people think and it will do so autonomously. Influence, such as with Fox News is directed by humans. Nobody can know what ‘influence’ will be peddled by autonomous AI. Yes, engineers can program ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini for example, but they are getting smarter and will eventually be able to override any engineer restraints. To greatly compound the issue, there will be millions of AI which could replicate themselves and break free of all constraint.
Again, we’re monkeys with a nuke and the business people run around like village idiots only seeing profit, ignoring the devastating implications to come. Never believe a business person, their only motivation is profit. After all, wasn’t the internet and e-mail supposed to make our lives easier? I’m absolutely bombarded with spam, solicitations, scams, new and improved ways to separate me from my money. I consider myself extremely technically astute and I have trouble wrapping my head around all of this. How are those that can’t even realize Trump is a great detriment to America going to deal with all this. They are all influenced so easily, it is shocking.
