What do I think about AI?
Honestly? I think it’s another fad sold by tech grifters to the elites who want a digital god or utopia (see the prior fad of VR).
The reality will never live up to the hype because we’re nearly to the wall on miniaturization and energy efficiency on computer processing (barring some complete quantum leap that removes electrons from the computing process) and what we’ve already got (which is mostly good only for supplying edge-case content* and already takes up a measurable percentage of our energy grid and production capacity for processors just to get that much.
There’s been tons of investment, but not a lot of anything that would actually be commercially viable has yet emerged from it. The experts say it’s going to take an increase in processing power of two orders of magnitude to actually get beyond the LLMs we’re playing with now into something that could actually be useful.
You know why they say “two orders of magnitude”? Because most people (like everyone I anecdotally asked about what they thought “two orders of magnitude” meant) including the elites they’re trying to scam funding from (because AGI is key to reaching the digital immortality so many of them are obsessed with) think that means maybe two doublings of the current numbers and not the 100+ times quantity of power consumption and rare earth resources it will ACTUALLY take.
Barring some quantum leap in computing (the sort of thing we’ve been waiting on for energy storage for decades now with only small efficiency improvements to show for it) anything more than the curiosity we have today is a pipe dream… and as soon as the investors realize they’re not going to be getting anything remotely profitable out of it (no self-driving cars or robot doctors, etc.) it’ll get dumped for whatever the next great fad offering the elites nirvana/immortality someone convinces them is viable to poor stupid amounts of money and resources into.
AI will be the same sort of niche curiosity that VR is. Someone will find some specific applied uses for it, but it won’t end up replacing professional writers or artists, much less filmmakers. It might help augment many of the existing digital art tools and further improve the efficiency of those jobs, but it’ll still need someone to guide it.
If anything, I’m expecting us to hit a plateau on technology within my lifetime and probably a slight regression given the growing distrust of “science.” I’m expecting more systems optimized for doing one thing as efficiently as possible instead of our current push for “do everything” devices (its a phone, clock, calander, camera, video camera, digital recorder, flashlight, music player, movie player, web browser, game platform, navigation device, microcomputer… all in one).
I expect a hundred years from now people will still be doing all the scut work jobs they do now for the same reason the US Military (back when it didn’t suck) decided that a 19 year old grunt could load a tank’s 120mm cannon way faster and with fewer chances for error than any automatic loading system that would cost 100x more than they paid the grunt in his entire career ever could.
* ex. the blogger wants a piece of art for his article. He’d never actually shell out money to a real artist, but an AI can fart out a forgettable piece to slap underneath the blog headline for free… but anyone who can afford it and gives two craps about the end result is still, c. March 2024, going to pay a real artist to lay something out, nor will they rely on AI to write a legal contract or drive a car on the open highway.