My prediction: The Rich will continue to get richer and corporate profits will continue to skyrocket while the poor continue to get screwed over because the global economy is in recession while in fact the global elite continue to profit at the expense of the common man.
Ok, not much insight there (aka ‘same as it ever was’) but I am always fascinated about how easily human behaviour can be moulded, moderated and distracted simply by reducing the amount of crumbs left on the table to create infighting and disharmony instead of focusing attention on where the money is going and to who.
I mean, I get it - When the choice is between paying the bills and keeping a roof over your head or fighting for social justice and equality then the choice (on an individual level) is an easy one but I'm always disappointed that the populace are so easily distracted and divided by the creation of artificial scarcity and that they/we/us continue to fall for it every single time.
I don't know. When I was younger and worked menial jobs and lived in crappy places it was pretty easy for me to surf through two recessions by just adapting to where I was (true, I did live in a car for two months in 2008). Now I have more wealth, but also more bills. If my wife loses her job or I lose too many clients we will have a problem. I'm still better off than those guys in suits flinging themselves from the top of an office building.
And of the twice (now thrice) that it happened to yourself? Who profited? Was it yourself?
To quote your reply "If my wife loses her job or I lose too many clients we will have a problem." Ask yourself this - Cui bono? ("to whom is it a benefit?")
(I presume the 'guys flinging themselves from buildings’ refers to the Black Friday 1869 Stock Market crash?) [From Wikipedia] The crash was a consequence of an attempt by financier Jay Gould and railway magnate James Fisk to corner the gold market and drive up the price.
Perhaps it was a reference to the 1929 Wall Street Crash? If so perhaps a quote would help - "How can a very serious Stock Exchange collapse produce a serious setback to industry when industrial production is for the most part in a healthy and balanced condition?"
Consider both points and wonder whether or not the people like yourself are being played as pawns.
[Edit to update]: When I refer to the global elite I don't mean any particular race or religion because at the end of the day the only true global religion at this point in human history is who has the biggest bank balance. Consider this - Elon Musk's top position has now been displaced by the CEO of LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton). In every single recession the profits from luxury goods has increased. Ask yourself why.
From my laymen's perspective it seems most people lose out during a recession, across the socioeconomic spectrum. I think those who do manage to profit, despite what some of them may tell you, simply got lucky.
For what it's worth, I don't think this repeated boom/bust cycle is a good way to run the economy, but I am not convinced it's intentionally malicious. Nor am I convinced that concentrated wealth at rest really has much of an impact on anything at all (what really matters is the flow of cash, and this is where recessions can retard the arc of progress).
For all of its faults the economic system we find ourselves in actually has delivered on its promise of "growing the pie" which I suspect is why we continue to choose it. Even while living in a car I was able to obtain extremely cheap access to warm showers and a refrigerator--amenities that would be far out of reach of the homeless just 100 years ago.
It makes sense that Arnault has eclipsed Musk, luxury goods have a ridiculous profit margin and Elon has been wasting his wealth as of late.
There have always been powerful elites, but anyone who believes the elites possess more power over the proletariat now than in the past has not studied much history.
Furthermore the pool of elites, themselves, are more diversified and more likely to change from generation to generation than at any other time recorded.
So is it true that some with concentrated wealth may find it easier to weather a downturn than others without? Absolutely. Is it true that redistributing this wealth arbitrarily would systemically improve our society? Perhaps, but of this I am less sure.
We are still just scratching the surface of the potential global coordination modern communications technology can allow, I hope with time we can escape this local optimum we find ourselves in. Until then I see no point breathlessly railing against a system that while flawed is not without some merits and is assuredly keeping us at least pointed in the correct direction.
But I hadn't until that documentary. Summary of what I got out of it: once TV arrived, it was inevitable that someone figured out the best ways to influence people's opinions with that medium.
i.e. everything people are complaining about with social media is not new. Once TV was invented, there was way to influence elections more effectively, etc.
It was very interesting to see who were the analogs of "Elon/Trump/Kanye" in the 50's. i.e. how politicians, businessmen, and entertainers all vied for attention and control over ideas. And paid for it handsomely!
I guess the main idea is how money can be converted directly and deterministically into the opinions of the masses.
I'm sure this is all old hat to people who study media, but ironically the current reflection about social media seems mostly ignorant of this, i.e. ahistorical. I had to learn this from a 20-year-old documentary!
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(2) This is kind of dark, but it was clear through watching some of Kanye's unhinged interviews that he thinks of population influence as sort of an engineering feat. He admires objective metrics, aligned interests, power, etc.
He is amoral about it -- if trolling works, it works. It doesn't matter what it means.
He would love Bernays, or he probably knows 1000x more about him and his methods than any of us do.
He constantly talks about Elon and Trump because he admires how they control populations -- he says this explicitly. And Kanye is successful at it himself, so this is not an empty opinion. It's an interesting case of the mentally ill being more in touch with reality along one specific dimension than "normal people".
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(3) "It's not greed that drives the world, but envy" -- Charlie Munger
So to me those are all basically the same idea, and a bit depressing ...
And it works on me too. Because even if you don't have social media accounts or "keep up with the news" (I've been failing at this lately), I still think you're the "average of the 5 or 10 people closest to you". And those 5 or 10 people are influenced by these memes / media, etc. It does feel like a trap
It is not an accident that someone paid $44 B for Twitter ... Control over the zeitgeist is simply valuable.
I had a great middle school teacher who would always get us to talk about politics, around the Bush 92 era. She told us about this election being the one where the better looking guy won, because TV existed.
But it sounds like it was mostly an "accident" on both sides, or at least Nixon's, due to not understanding the new medium.
What Bernays did was more sophisticated IMO -- it was intentional "hacking" of public opinion, fueled by money. This includes helping to overthrow a democratically elected government in Guatemala (which BTW people told me about decades ago, but I failed to pay enough attention to)
Models like ChatGPT and Stable diffusion will go the way of self-driving tech as everyone realizes they are not good enough to replace any actual human work.
Self driving can't be compared to generative AI/ChatGPT. Self drivings single mistake can be fatal but if ChatGPT is accurate for 99% of cased that would be good enough.
Good enough for who? Random internet comments and memes, sure. I have serious doubts any business will be ok paying for a tool that outputs nonsense (or worse) 1% of the time when they are already paying people who do it well.
As depressing as it is, most business is treated as seriously as life-or-death.
> I have serious doubts any business will be ok paying for a tool that outputs nonsense (or worse) 1% of the time ... As depressing as it is, most business is treated as seriously as life-or-death.
I did not thought about it, but it's true that if a company employs a truck driver or a surgeon, and if someone dies because of a mistake of this employee, the company is not endangered.
Yet if it uses an AI tool the company may be forced to abandon it, with serious consequences in terms of business.
Maybe that really unfair. In USA on average a driver will be involved in two accidents in their life [0].
In France, my wife had a stroke one year ago, so she was forbidden to drive cars until the next exam.
A few days ago was the time for the dreaded exam, but happily she was reauthorized to drive. The doctor told her "if you know the state of many old drivers, many have undetected visual impairments or Alzheimer disease, yet they still drive".
You clearly don't like art then. Stable Diffusion is the greatest artist ever and it isn't even close. We are at the art singularity.
I made a logo for the first time with it the other day and not only was it better than anything a human would come up with but I had 10 different super human logos in a few seconds.
I started going to art galleries 30 years ago but I have seen more great art on my screen in the last few months than in my entire life. Most of the stuff you see people post is shit. Darth Vader playing video games. Anyone with even the slightest bit of art knowledge can make things beyond their wildest dreams.
Of course you can't make new digital realistic Roberto Matta paintings if you have no idea who Matta is to start with to put them in as part of the prompt.
either in H2 militarily or in H1 by an (unconditional) settlement with "the west" - read the USA - in which case russia more or less will be able to dictate the terms of the agreement.
GPT3, Stable Diffusion etc. will really kick off. People will start accepting these blackbox Big Data sequence prediction models as a new norm, a powerful assistance for all sorts of domains. There will be some resistance but the argument that one doesn’t need to understand digestion in order to eat food and survive will eventually settle and the path of these models becoming a natural extension of our minds will be laid out. We will see different interfaces (speech recognition, OCR) and pipelines being created to fit these models into real problem solving pipelines and address their inaccuracies, i.e., with additional fact/spec checking and computation logic. some successful startups and products will emerge mostly from folks who already started their ventures into this space.
Posts complaining about how decentralized and federated networks have become ruined now that the normies have discovered them will become commonplace, and techies will create ever more obscure custom protocols like Gemini to hide out in.
Related, a centralized ActivityPub-as-a-service app will surpass Mastodon in adoption.
We'll see the first fully AI generated movie, album or game. It won't be great, but it will be better than you'd expect, and it will make money.
Continued collapse of the top-end rech jobs. More layoffs at FAANG type companies as people realise the hoarding of talent and million dollar bonuses are just a waste of company resources. This will have a drastic effect on the tech jobmarket, globally, for years to come, as "second tier" companies become competitive with the top players in terms of comp. and people start shedding the golden handcuffs.
Well I guess that this year's tech crash and layoffs that the 'four horse men' told me about finally happened. [0] Perhaps there is more to come; but either way, no-one is safe.
Along side the other predictions at the start of the decade I made [1][2] with the majority of the predictions being accurate so far, I am still predicting that startups that don't turn a profit will be struggling to raise further capital by VCs as it will get harder to seek more capital for them to stay afloat in 2023.
'Amazing' enough for it to win Game of the Year (GOTY) for 2023. As correctly predicted for Elden Ring for 2022 unsurprisingly [0], despite that being overhyped by its fans.
I meant HN and Reddit will be filled with stories about GPT4, not by GPT4.
Its us that are gonna talk about it a lot. If GPT4 will continue the same kind of progress then unfortunately for us I anticipate angst/anxiety levels to hit the roof. Many people won't know what to do with their careers/studies.
It will also get talked about in traditional media much more, it won't be mainly geeks that know what GPT is. People from the mainstream like Joe Rogan will start talking about it, maybe even (finally) politicians.
GPT4 stories might be a huge feature. Usually when I read a story about something I know quite well the reporter gets things wrong or at the least you can tell they are a journalist and don't really know the subject well.
AI just has a very low bar to cross to put most journalist out of business.
The war in Ukraine ends. Not sure who 'wins', but it feels like resources are low enough on the Russian side that an end to the conflict will be a priority.
Putin might not make it through 2023. If he keeps pushing for the war and the rest of the elites/political sphere in Russia want it to end, I can see him being taken out by them.
Twitter crashes and burns. Musk is already doing everything in his power to achieve that, and it feels like the site/company is on thin ice right now, in pretty much every sense.
The Mario movie comes out, does well. Nintendo announces the Donkey Kong movie that's suppposedly in production, plus a few other adaptations.
The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom comes out, does well. Some people feel it doesn't do enough that's new, but the general design is good enough to get high review scores nonetheless.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe gets character DLC
At least one long running show finally ends. Maybe this is the time The Simpsons finally comes to a close? Or could it be Family Guy, South Park, Spongebob, etc? Eh, if the Pokemon anime can be rebooted without Ash, this seems viable too.
Crypto continues to struggle, as people realise there aren't many use cases for things like Bitcoin outside of questionable activity and countries with broken economic systems.
The cracks show for Meta... Horizon Worlds isn't catching on, and Facebook is dying. Eventually it'll hurt the company financially too.
Discord tries to monetise its services more, users get annoyed.
Either the UK PM steps down, or another election is called.
The cat leaves the bag, and AI tech becomes usable outside of hosted services. All kinds of ethical questions get raised.
1. A cyberattack, possibly by a state actor, causes enough damage and loss of life that this ceases to be something only wonks and nerds care about. The threat becomes real.
2. Farisa’s Crossing (Michael O. Church’s book) is released in September or October and is actually good enough to win awards.
3. Major recession. Housing market becomes dysfunctional and illiquid. This puts the Fed in a tough spot because the only way to solve housing market illiquidity is inflation (people get anchored to the nominal prices they paid, so inflation is the only way to get them to accept losing money instead of hoarding) but inflation is something most people despise, even when it’s the good kind.
4. An act of violence against a private equity fund occurs and draws public support. Jury nullification becomes a dinner table topic.
5. Black hat uses of large language models become enough of a problem that regulators get involved.
6. Donald Trump is proven culpable enough of criminal activity that it would be fatal to a normal political candidate. Not sure it will be for him.
7. Vladimir Putin’s health worsens. What happens here is hard to predict. The people around him, on one hand, will be frantically trying to prevent a desperate old man from destroying the world. But they will also be jockeying for their own individual positions, which makes things unpredictable. They might be more dangerous than Putin, who is evil but is not stupid or irrational.
8. Elon Musk. I wish there was a verb. There isn’t. I would prefer the sentence be “Elon Musk retires to get to know his family.” But it won’t be. Just, Elon Musk.
All of these predictions are trenchant and exciting, but #2, I can't imagine happening. It's just too much to hope for. You might as well predict that The Author Himself will make a triumphant return to HN. Which, as we both know, would never happen: he's foresworn it forevermore.
Most of the hyper growth companies are going to fail spectacularly… from Bird to Carvana to most SPACs to even some of the more “real” startups like Uber. But of course we’re seeing that already so it’s not much of a prediction.
Ok, not much insight there (aka ‘same as it ever was’) but I am always fascinated about how easily human behaviour can be moulded, moderated and distracted simply by reducing the amount of crumbs left on the table to create infighting and disharmony instead of focusing attention on where the money is going and to who.
I mean, I get it - When the choice is between paying the bills and keeping a roof over your head or fighting for social justice and equality then the choice (on an individual level) is an easy one but I'm always disappointed that the populace are so easily distracted and divided by the creation of artificial scarcity and that they/we/us continue to fall for it every single time.