We're coming for your doctors, your therapists, your programmers, your artists, your actors. Every creative, empathetic touch can be done better by software agents: the last app you'll ever need. All in service of you, the customer.
But what will the customer do to earn enough to afford these agents, and put food on the table?
Seriously. It legit gives Ready Player One vibes where irl living standards are subpar for the majority and live in a virtual world to escape that reality/make life bearable.
His rhetorical questions are valid, but he really doesn't dig into the obvious questions everyday people want answers to, whether now or when shit hits the fan.
Personally, I'm quite pessimistic in terms of the government addressing the issues people will face in the near future, in a meaningful way.
I actually don’t know what I should do. How I should prepare, what the future holds for me or us. I worked really hard to get where I am and it feels like it’s going to all crumble soon, and people who are more positive about things tell me either UBI will somehow fix things, and humans will persuade what they want or that we will all be in pain together so I won’t be alone. That doesn’t help. It’s given me actual nightmares.
Humans will not tolerate the condition I describe. Inequality can only get so bad before it becomes intolerable. Learn to do something with your hands, it may well be valued in our lifetime -- and if the future is brighter than my dour prediction, the hobby will have been a salve which still has its own value.
From the article: "software is still pretty dumb". I would prefer my software remain dumb. Every time technology is made to be "smart", it seems to get much worse.
There has to be a vision for the future where 1) LLMs aren’t the down fall of humanity, ushering in the end of all creative output and 2) the panacea that releases us from the chains of all the mundane parts of life, allowing anyone to do anything their heart desires.
I’m just tired of reading about either future. Both visions are just exhausting. It’ll be somewhere in between that eventually becomes immensely boring and mundane.
Life will be better, probably. Daily life will be different, slightly. You’ll still have a device with a screen, but now the user interaction is a little different. Will things people fully generated have a softened corporate-safe vibe? Yeah, probably. Will we look back at the past and think it’s archaic? Yes. Will things involve less human misery hours to organize and set up? Yes, by a bit. Will people still make art, definitely, but maybe they can make the boring parts with AI faster now. Seems boring, but optimistic to me.
So in a good case scenario say AI continues on it's current exponential pace, most information workers are replaced by an agent, and a UBI comes about. What then? For people the life's journey is often more important than the destination, but now we are essentially playing on a God mode and everything comes too easy. This is something i've been dealing with, It will be hard trying to find a purpose when your contributions dont mean much. Your family and some hobbies is alls left to contribute to. We will be like spoilt children who have everything given to them on a silver platter, will it make us miserable?
The entire idea of agents being connected to every "good" network the stake holders have connections to (ex. streaming services) rubs me the wrong way. People ought to talk about the upcoming future of software agents by emphasizing that you can choose which networks they hook up to. I can't imagine a more dismal future than having to try and jailbreak a software agent to get it to hook up to irc or the BitTorrent network, or not being able to use an alias and having mandatory realnaming to interact with these things. Where's the GNUagent people?
But what will the customer do to earn enough to afford these agents, and put food on the table?