Technology just magnifies what's already happening in society (occasionally it disrupts it). What are some good things in our modern society?
I'm not a biologist but probably mRNA stuff or medicine that works with your genetic code to give you true immunity, cure chronic diseases, etc.
Automation creating a post-scarcity environment where people focus more on expanding their freedoms and quality of life instead of working more and more (unlikely if the last half-century is anything to go by).
Social media fostering a sense of "global citizenship" making wars based on nationality less likely (or at least harder to drum up support for). Imagine trying to justify the Iraq war to US citizens in 2023. There would be Iraqi Youtubers making videos humanizing their struggle. You might have Iraqi online friends in your Discord servers etc who make you question if the US Military is actually a "force for good". We can see this happening in Ukraine as we speak, granted nobody was really a fan of Russia to begin with, but I think most of us can point to a Ukrainian influencer or someone in our social circle that is directly affected by the invasion.
I really love that last point. Being able to be closer to our fellow citizens of Earth really helps bring things down a notch. Being able to see the movement in HK and what is happening in Ukraine first hand has really affected how we process global events
In a distant sense, I find the Culture series of novels to be an inspiring vision of the future. People develop AI and technology to master nature on a planetary scale, and largely live peaceful, happy lives.
In a nearby sense, I am inspired every time I do random household chores, by thinking that maybe AI and robots will be able to do this soon. Folding clothes, picking up toys, putting things away where they go, cooking dinner, putting the dirty dishes into the dishwasher, putting the clean dishes away on the shelves, taking out the trash, driving to the corner store to pick up a fresh baguette.
I second this, AI in the Culture series is the most positive example I've read. It's notable that AI co-exist with humans everywhere in Banks' novels—unlike say Star Trek, where Data is a rare outlier.
Star Trek is good too. Particularly once you get into the ship computer and holodeck concepts. But Banks writes so specifically about about what it would be like for a civilization to thrive working together with strong ai.
The books together form a loose philosophy that is like Seinfeld for AI conversations.
Routine letters will be auto-generated, including letters to politicians. This will level the playing field for immigrants.
Customer service will improve radically: chatbots will actually understand what you're trying to do, and be better able to do it. Fingers crossed, voice phone tree IVR systems will finally go away.
Screensavers (including TV backgrounds) will be generative visual content and be inspiring, dynamic, any kind of content and it'll match the user and setting.
Project management tools (e.g. Jira) will capture requirements (plain English) and warn if a project is diverging or failing to meet the requirements. Obviously, this will start with the easy stuff and move to the complex stuff.
From circuits to architecture to the labels of products to logos, we'll create much more complex, interesting and varied designs with the aid of AI to both generate the designs and check that they meet requirements, including aesthetic judgments. In many cases, AI will simply issue warnings that something maybe wrong and for a human to check. Today, we use symmetry as a way to "scale up" a design - in the future, we'll use AI to generate non-repeating patterns that are nonetheless "beautiful."
The dark stuff will happen SO quickly, that governments will be forced to react, where today we pay lip service. For example, AI capital allocation will wildly reinforce the Pareto distribution (google it) requiring new and more aggressive capital reallocation structures (including taxation).
analytics reports and spreadsheets will be created by voice - you say what you want, then make adjustments. At the same time, external data sources will be able to be "pulled in" and ETL'd, also by voice.
Maps directions, travel planning, etc will finally account for "happiness" and not just fastest/cheapest/shortest/etc path. You'll give it feedback about why you preferred a given route and then it'll learn. Food, wine etc recommendations will similarly improve, as they match words found in descriptions and reviews, with your feedback.
I think AI-assisted healthcare is inevitable and will probably offer the biggest improvement in the general population's health for decades, it will focus on disease prevention and flagging up those early warning signs that most people don't usually notice
Why do you believe the solution needs to come from tax collected revenue? If you had a way to make people live healthier, don't you think people would pay you for it?
Sure, the wealthy would have means to pay for cures, life-extension, organ-regeneration while the poor would not. Imagine the dystopia that creates.
Let's say there was a 100% effective treatment for cancer/MLS but cost $20,000 per month. We'd all be "willing to pay" for that for a loved one but "willing" isn't "able." That's the problem with US-style for-profit healthcare. Economics breaks down because there's no ceiling to what the "consumer" is willing to pay, only a profit-based decision by companies of how many people it wants to divide into people deserving of health and those not.
Seriously, as a society, if we don't grapple with economic ethics of "miracle cures", corporate greed plus technological advances will lead to endless class wars over who's grandma/child gets to live or who's withers and dies unnecessarily.
This would suggest some alternative "shortcuts" to good health for a broader population. Instead of the time-consuming approach which includes physical activity, fasting, good nutrition, etc and corresponding things for good mental health.
AI babysitter for infants to supplement – not replace – parents. Captures audio / biometrics and responds to the baby with targeted music, positive affirmations, cooing, etc, to promote positive emotional state. Also notifies parents of states that require their intervention, like hunger, soiled diaper, abnormal vitals, inconsolability. Parents can take a break, watch a movie, entertain friends, etc, with the comfort of knowing their baby is being intelligently monitored. Existing baby monitors are way more noise than signal.
There's some point where the robot is realistic enough that it's functionally no different than a nanny. I agree it would be dystopian as hell if the kid was just raised by the robot, but giving the parents a bit more sleep and an opportunity to have a date night once a week would help them be way better parents.
As an extreme case, some parents get so stressed and chronically sleep deprived that they get frustrated at their babies for continually crying and shake them, leading to permanent brain damage and even death.[0] To be clear, these parents don't mean to hurt their child but they're not operating coherently anymore. A robot that can give parents a breather here and there would significantly improve quality of care for soooo many babies.
The effectiveness comes from exploiting the baby's primal recognition of the mother, which is why it's dystopian. Additionally, by "effective" you mean "the baby spends less time crying," which means that the parents are spending less time with their baby. So parental time is being replaced by an AI. I think it's fair to call that "being raised by AI."
Batteries die and the parents are left without a clue how their child actually operates. They've been playing real life tamagotchi while their newborn evolves into an alien.
Funny, babies are also way more noise than signal >.<
I think most new parents have semi-wished for, like, a life-size cutout of themselves attached to a Roomba that could roll into their nursery at 3am when the baby randomly wakes and make vaguely reassuring noises to soothe them back to sleep. I know I have. But I'm not sure it's wise to enable or encourage this level of parental disengagement.
While that's decent, I would wish for something more like, "A boy and his dog" type AI. Having an "invisible friend" that you can speak with and see, who knows everything, is a perfect confidant, who grows with you through life until you are ready to set them down, possibly as a rite of passage into adulthood.
And even then, you could keep in in your computer or phone, be able to talk to it and discuss problems with an intelligence that knows your life almost as closely as you do, but not carrying it with you all of the time.
IDK, I think that would be pretty cool even if the idea of robot nanny scares the pants off of some people.
AI diagnosing disease better than any one doctor can. If we could build a model with a normalized dataset of everyone's medical history, we could catch a lot of diseases early. Especially if we encourage people to report even minor symptoms when they have it.
Imagine for example that everyone who gets diagnosed with pancreatic cancer reported repeated congestion of the left nostril three years before diagnosis. It's unlikely any doctor would ever make that connection, but an AI could, and then suggest regular pancreatic cancer screening to people reporting frequent left nostril congestion.
There are many problems with the plan, and lots of guardrails would need to be added, but this was supposed to be a hopeful post of a future in which those problems are solved. :)
But you bring up a generally good point. Since AI magnifies what is already happening, at least in the short term we should expect it to increase marginalization of those outside the mainstream.
Lots of comments think health could be transformed for the better.
I wish AI would help detect, eradicate and replace toxic artificial materials around us. It only impacts health in the second-order or more. And they would need to be significantly incorporated down the supply-chain. But it is necessary.
Self driving cars, or at least semi automatic cars will be very big.
If the car can truly self drive, it can be rebuild to be a kind of a "hotel" car - with much more space.
So you can do makeup en route to work. Or you can rest en route to work.
The car self drive at night so you sleep inside (like in those sleeper trains) - you might not need a hotel.
The car can also take a grandparent to take care of grandchildren, so useful for old people.
In theory traffic could be optimized too; taking a random car - instead of your own, or commutting in a group, but I doubt it will happen. People prefer to ride in their own car.
Not having to steer the car can free like 1-2 hours per day (depending on commute time), what is big.
Also work-from-home is quite inspiring future vision. People were talking about it for years and it finally happens, at least a bit. WFH sighnificantly improves quality if life.
Also what happened to drones that can bring parcels to people? When will this happen? On a side note, people from USA seem to dislike / not know "parcel lockers" ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parcel_locker ) which are very convenient. I think Poland has 20 000 of them already. I dont understand the idea that the courier drops a parcel on your pouch that someone can steal.
If you worked from home and a drone brought it (and notified you) then sure. But why no parcel lockers now?
The one where we stop wishing AI or whatever other toy du jour will solve all our problems. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I don't buy your utopia, no matter the label.
I guess my utopia is where people stop making utopias and start behaving pragmatically.
I think generative AI is going to created a modding and fanwork renaissance.
Mega game mods are seemingly bottlenecked by art, textures, voice acting and such, and fanworks outside of gaming have similar constraints. And the legal issues surrounding these models arent an issue for them.
I do this by hand a lot right now where I would draft a message with what I really want to say in plain english, then I have to go back and rewrite the whole thing to edit it for tone or subtext.
It would save me a lot of time if there are options like: "rewrite this in business speak", "optimize for nonviolent communication" (or w/e other bullshit is trendy that year), "pick how angry you want to sound", "throw this guy under the bus in a more subtle way"
It'd have to be something like AI both solves climate problems while making it profitable to do so. I'm not talking about greenwashing, but using machine learning to solve hard science problems and tying them to economic benefit. Dear AI overlord, I'm trying to start a new business and this is my idea… Dear valued chat user, your business can be 125% more profitable if you can address this climate problem as these 3 VCs are ready to unload dump trucks of cash into the space.
Something that could be very cool would be AI driven monitoring analysis and troubleshooting pre-work to support operative staff. Trying to figure out what's exactly going wrong in a complex, distributed system requires the system and the user to ingest a lot of information at times in order to make a guess what's going on. This is something an AI could really help with - ingest all of the information over some time period, and output a number of guesses or possible problems with probabilities and possible root causes assigned to them.
Think of an operator logging into the system at 3am with a C&C EVA voice calling and greeting them, "Hello Operator. We have 24 customer-facing systems offline. Preliminary analysis indicates that these are caused by 3 internal services and 2 postgres clusters being offline. With a confidence of 83%, the internal services are also offline due to the postgres clusters. I will now send you what I have found out about the postgres clusters with a probability of the scenarios and monitoring indicators for the different scenarios. It looks like the clusters are failing to elect a leader after several network-caused timeline switches with a confidence of 72%. Highly matching runbooks exist for 4 out of 7 highest probability scenarios"
Well, maybe I'd prefer that in text on a website, but no need to be that serious right now.
It is possible to get monitoring of this quality even with existing tools and maybe some internal extensions of these tools, sure. But that's a barrel you can pour effort into and it has no bottom at all. And it gets harder and harder the more complex and the more dynamic your environment is. It'd be great to dump all of that into a black box, even if that black box just establishes a global timeline of events.
Star Trek seems to be a good starting point, but the most obvious parts - space travel, phasers, teleporters - might actually be the least interesting in this context. Here are the parts that stand out to me.
* Energy so abundant it might as well be infinite.
* Instant availability (via replicator) of any food, with infinitesimal environmental or ethical concerns about its production.
* Universal translation.
* Instant diagnosis of injury or disease, and often instant treatment to go with it.
It's noteworthy that none of these involve robots, or necessarily even AI (though that might definitely help with the last two). To be honest, I'm not convinced those technologies will lead to more good outcomes than bad ones. Certainly not with the people currently driving and hyping it. I'll take the boring old physical-world improvements over that dystopia incubator any day.
I anticipate AI will slowly start to be realized to reveal the nature of not only human language, but also human cognition, which may lead to us starting to become more self-aware as individuals and a species......like, if we happened to somehow have accurate historical statistics on the matter, we'd see major jumps on the chart representing significant events in history (invention of the printing press, the first enlightenment and rise of science / retreat of religion, etc), and this event will (possibly) turn out to be another instance of the relatively rare phenomenon.
The gist of most optimistic future visions (more than 1-2 years out) is massively increased wealth. For example that's the root of why Star Trek TNG is optimistic, so it's useful to ponder what it means in practice.
One of the biggest ways wealth gets deployed today is on old age and healthcare. We live longer but the retirement age doesn't move, and pension deficits build up. With radical productivity improvements from better AI and medical treatments we can outrun this and even consider lowering the retirement age. In the distant future we could consider an optional retirement age of 40, although "retirement" in such a world would obviously be blurry concept. It would be more like the point at which you get a lot more freedom in what you choose to do rather than the end-point of work.
Another way wealth was deployed in the 20th century was driving down the cost of air travel, but there's plenty more that can be done there. With more automation (pilots, aircrew, ATC) we can radically increase the number of flights taking place, flooding the market with supply. In the future we'll all fly business class whenever and wherever we like, and it'll cost nearly nothing.
One of the most profound ways generative AI will impact us is through entertainment. In the same way web video like YouTube made content creation available to the masses, creating vast wealth in the process, generative AI combined with technologies like Unreal 5+ will let people tell sophisticated stories in 3D using AI generated assets. Stories that the big studios and TV firms would never sign off on will get told, and we'll be able to spend far more of our time enjoying, creating and earning money from novel entertainment.
Finding true love is tough, and many never quite manage it. Dating could be revolutionized by AI. Chat to your lovable assistant and it'll get to know what you're like and what kind of person would like you. The human-like nature of its skills will prompt you to reflect upon your own wishes, and NNs trained on huge databases of successful matches will help you search for your soul mate. There'll be more happy families, fewer divorces and more quality time spent with people who are just right for you.
These are just a few random ideas, not very good ones based on only a few minutes of extrapolation. You can probably do better.
Understanding Generative Art end to end. Current AIs are "static" in nature. I would love if AIs could be able to understand generative art processes from the written code to the unfolding of distinct outputs based on the parameters.
My AI vision of the future involves using bots for research, study and cognitive enhancement. I want my bot to scour the literature and find the things I need, ideas and hints I couldn't stumble upon. I want the model to teach me at my own pace and in my own style, to adapt the lessons to my needs, and remember what I need to review. I want it to be multi-modal, to generate diagrams and visual models of our task, to synthesise the right UI for each situation.
Maybe this sounds a bit sad, but I'm personally super excited for when something like copilot turns into a full-on coversational code friend / assistant.
I see it being super productive to always be pair programming with an AI, and not have to type every command out... or better yet, that it provides suggestions without me needing to prompt it to do so, thereby giving this feeling that I'm just hanging out with someone and doing a more traditional pairing session
Perhaps a bit too distant, but the Culture series by Iain M. Banks takes place in a utopia built and managed by hyper intelligent benevolent artificial intelligences.
Distant, like when we start getting desperate and have to send off individually-piloted space pods to hopeful exoplanets:
AI would pretty much be the only way we can preprogram enough entertainment for an interstellar journey that works for every pioneer.
By feeding back their individual preferences and unique quirks onto tried-and-true scaffolding like Seinfeld or the Marvel franchise, we can probably more easily endure really long stretches of boring space travel.
Bad Mirror: AI tools scrape entire universe of art to generate on-demand clipart for Canva.com, now a $40bn company
Good Mirror: Someone sells a tool for AI-assisted drawing; something that actually helps people learn something, instead of doing the job for them, mostly by creating a bad photocopy
Anything that prevents us from fucking up this planet and its native inhabitants for good would be nice (and that doesn't involve reducing civilization to ashes).
Something along the lines of a hyperintelligent/-wise and eternally benevolent super ruler AI perhaps.
AI Financial management assistance, Healthcare price comparisons, Insurance, and cost saving systems - AI will be much better at navigating the complicated world of finance than the average person, will probably be a great improvement for most people
AI will allow humanity to produce more intelligence with less (less labour) thus more spare-time for humankind. Like industrial revolution and mechanism did during the 19th century. Probably grey mirrorish though.
AI will bring a nice transition to more eco-friendly, health-friendly and budget-friendly materials incorporated into everyday life. We have way too many toxic materials around us because they are cheap, etc.
The US and increasingly other places around the world use too much nylon, polyester and plastics in general for clothes, garments, carpets, mattresses, furniture and everyday objects.
very distant: The Culture series by Ian Banks
Somewhat distant: I Robot by Asimov (specifically the ending)
I will not comment on the realism of either of these novels, but will say that both present optimistic visions of futures where super intelligent AGIs are commonplace and both have interesting ideas to consider regardless of exactly the extent to which they are grounded in reality.
It's not "black" because it's bad. It's black because it's a turned-off screen, which has a black colors. Black Mirror stories are bad because the Mirror reflects bad/broken people, not because the mirror is is bad. A White Mirror would be a screen that is turned on, but also reflects images.
You're getting downvoted but I literally just got a memo at work last week reminding people to stop using the terms blacklist and whitelist and switch to block-list and allow-list.
Such a waste of energy and time to get upset at people using these words. Its not like using the word block-list and allow-list was the problem in the first place and using different words wont change anything.
There's a big difference between picking fights about traditional forms in language (wasteful) and pointing out that this person jumped to the wrong conclusion that black mirror = bad mirror, when it's just a poetic way of saying tv. Downvote, call me keyboard sjw be upsed I don't care. Big yikes from me OP, rethink things.
I'm not a biologist but probably mRNA stuff or medicine that works with your genetic code to give you true immunity, cure chronic diseases, etc.
Automation creating a post-scarcity environment where people focus more on expanding their freedoms and quality of life instead of working more and more (unlikely if the last half-century is anything to go by).
Social media fostering a sense of "global citizenship" making wars based on nationality less likely (or at least harder to drum up support for). Imagine trying to justify the Iraq war to US citizens in 2023. There would be Iraqi Youtubers making videos humanizing their struggle. You might have Iraqi online friends in your Discord servers etc who make you question if the US Military is actually a "force for good". We can see this happening in Ukraine as we speak, granted nobody was really a fan of Russia to begin with, but I think most of us can point to a Ukrainian influencer or someone in our social circle that is directly affected by the invasion.