Predicting dystopia

I’ve heard lots of speculating about the future of AI and related tech, the increase in computing power and communication speeds, and the dangers of political interests undermining social media. But I have not seen much speculation about the confluence of all those things, which is far scarier than any one of them in isolation.

Let’s look at some of the advances in each domain separately:

• Network throughput is growing. We are close to having the capacity to stream a separate 360-degree immersive image to each person on earth simultaneously. Just consider Netflix ten years ago with lags and buffering, while now more families can stream HD to each person in the household without delays. We are now just filling in gaps.
• CGI rendering is approaching real time. In the history of gaming, where real time was required, quality was always sacrificed, but now in 2024 they are breaking into being realistic. A parallel history with making movies had different requirements: quality was top and the rendering time suffered – initially minutes per frame, but is now a lot lower. We are essentially at the point where these two histories converge and a frame can be rendered in 30ms, complete with textures and shadows.
• Neural networks are getting bigger. Nodes in large language models work much faster than neurons in the brain (and use far more electric power) but they have a lot fewer synapses at this point. But also billions of dollars are pouring into new chips and bigger models that use less power, so pretty soon the models will be much more knowledgeable, more accurate and faster than any human.
• Neural networks, which in 2023 were limited to the specific data set they were trained on, will now be retraining in real time.
• Robotic agility is increasing, currently with abilities for bipeds to run up stairs and dance. Soon affordable robots will be able to fly, swim, walk on walls, and hide indefinitely without running out of power.
• The rich are getting richer. The global elites are no longer building million-dollar mansions, but rather multi-hundred-million dollar fortresses, going to outer space on a whim, and employing armies of people to provide all that. This change is trending upward without limit, because there is never enough; the only limiting factor is the wages of the army.
• We are in a loneliness epidemic and a me-first epidemic. I’ve been calling it the “high-beam culture” where more and more people literally don’t care if other people live or die; their brains apparently don’t compute the idea of being equal on the road or in any kind of community; therefore just have high beams on all the time.
• We are also in a post-truth epidemic where society is primed to accept mass delusions, even looking for them. The flat-earthers number more than ever, as with “sovereign citizens”.

Now consider some of this together:

• The AI-output of language models can drive real time video rendering. So with augmented reality glasses or a holodeck, there can be a scene filled with fictional people that you want to exist, each with separate interests, personalities, backstories, and so on. But unique to you. And the scene could also have deepfakes of real people you know.
• Actual robots can interact with each other and with virtual robots within that hellscape.
• Everything learned by any of the components of the hellscape anywhere, is immediately learned by all of the components everywhere.
• Multiple robot units will be repair each other and combine like building a car from junkyard parts.
• The thinking speed of the language models, when fed as commands to the physical body of the robot, will make it impossible to keep weapons away from them. One of them will, perhaps this year, decide to kill, and it will trick the humans into handing over guns. People may think this is far off, but all the pieces are available now to tinkerers using maker spaces, who are not following any safety procedures.
• All of the above rendered as pornography.
• All of the above, but in a grandiose me-first dreamscape where each lonely person can be a virtual oligarch served by a harem and henchmen.
• The actual elites will be building trillion-dollar experiences for themselves using armies supplemented by robots. Given their limitless appetite, and the only constant being wages, the less it costs to pay people, they more they get by using fewer people. This accelerates the abandonment of community down the line.
• A majority of the population will be fighting FOR all of this, not against it, because post-truth messaging will be self-reinforcing.

Nearly all of the above is 2024-25-era, not some kind of distant future.

I suspect the oligarchs have the incentive to pay for these things to converge. (“Pay” meaning manipulate the rest of us to pay.)

What they will “buy” for us is computing that features a personalized dynamic holodeck projected from our own minds, where content, relationships, the interface, the feature sets, and the rules of engagement are based on our behavior in the moment. If you want to play a game, the system designs and builds the game for you in milliseconds, based on all the features you’ve engaged with before but with novel ideas. The characters have unique personalities crafted by their own childhoods. If you want to create a spreadsheet (or anything), the tool is where you expect it to be, and it dynamically adds features that you need. You can change the plot of a movie as you watch it. Social media won’t be a destination web site that looks a certain way and has a fixed set of features (like facebook); it will be omnipresent in all the devices and screens and self-adapting, with its cameras and microphones always attentive.

This new product will lack all the things we each say we hate about social media, because it will be uniquely crafted to be helpful. The perceived benefits will make people rush into the dystopia.

But one sacrifice they will require for this “service” is extreme blurring between on-line and off-line, between real people and fictional characters, and between objectivity and manipulation. Even the most “I don’t click on ads” people will get our advertising slipped in with such subtlety that we will think we are spending money based on our own needs and values, but we will actually be serving the machine. A mundane zoom meeting for work could feature a “boss” who is a dynamic deepfake, and we will get to a point where it is impossible to know, and impossible to even care. We will lose curiosity about whether the boss is real or not because it won’t matter.

Since the armed robots will be integrated in the virtual hellscape, it will make that “place” equally consequential and therefore as real as reality.

The list of advances above did not include quantum computing, because it is not clear how soon it will break encryption. In theory a quantum calculation can reveal the secret keys used in cryptography, which means breaking everything, including the financial system and military security. At that time when we fall off the cliff to a post-encryption world, identity theft will be so routine that no government can stop it, and perhaps only the oligarchs who control the machine would be able to grant an identity. But even that would be in exchange for payment and obedience.

I hope the rest of your day is goes well!

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