Its gonna be really, really uh… I’m gonna use the word ‘funny’…
… when in 10-20 years, and the entire global economy all around the world is utterly collapsing due to unmitigated climate change incurring devastating economic damages to all sectors, basically everywhere, in broadly predictable but not specifically or locally accurately predictable ways, with new waves of tens of thousands, millions to tens of millions of people trying to flee to somewhere food is actually affordable… every season or month or week…
… well your connection to the AI, to wifi, to mobile networks… will just get turned off, infrastructure broken for the last time with no planned repair… or your device will be broken and fixing it is impossible because they stopped making the parts 5 years ago, would cost too much anyway, and it also doesn’t matter because you were late on your subscription payment to the AI provider.
Everyone who is being trained to be dependent on something like chatGPT instead of using and developing their brains, everyone with brainrot who is dependent on constant injections of short form content… they are basically going to go feral in a decade or two when they are now 30ish, have negative attention spans, are functionally illiterate, and are now utterly unable to function as anything other than manual labor, violent gangs or performative clowns of some kind.
…
i am beyond the grief stage of realizing we will not solve climate change, so it is funny to me when people assume our future is ‘weird, less interesting cyberpunk dystopia’, when it will be much more…
…billions died in the middle and latter parts of the 21st century, and most of the world reverted to Fallout style barbarism, only a few islands of ‘stability’ remained, and they were largely ethno-supremecist and highly authoritarian.
This was deeply depressing to read.
Well, I once got a callback from a mobile operator support rep, and she was speaking so perfectly (tone, pauses, the way she built sentences, everything), that our conversation came out like:
- Booooring! Give me human. Human operator. O-pe-ra-tor! Person!
- I’m sorry, but you will have to deal with the fact I’m real lol
- !!!
I don’t know what she was doing at a call center, because that was a professional voiceover or advertisement level
We’re already at the point that many people post- millennials actively prefer AI, that preferencd increasing with younger age. They’re the new boomers consuming whatever information is placed in front of them with no corroboration, nuance or fact checking.
Except for you right? You’re the one person who hasn’t done any of these things.
I don’t use AI search, use it for creating text, ask it to do things for me, or ask it questions. I actively avoid it. I actively distrust any AI search that automatically appears, and yes, I ABSOLUTELY verify facts and check sources when they’re presented to me or I make a good faith honest attempt at discussion. So yes, you’re correct, I don’t do those things. But nice attempt at an Appeal to Hypocrisy, dude.
Well on paper using an LLM for customer support seems great. A service agent who is infinitely patient, doesn’t mind overlong support sessions, who is always polite? That’s sounds great. But real life isn’t like that, and the people who do prefer LLMs over people haven’t had the time to realize why LLMs aren’t up to the task yet. But that might change in a couple years.
We’re at the point where late teens/early adults don’t have the ability to navigate a file structure and you expect them to be able to decode AI video breathing patterns.
We’re beyond super fucked.
Good news! Society will collapse from anthropogenic climate disintegration and a host of other resource related bottlenecks coming to a head in the next 50 years. In all likelihood, AI won’t last for too much longer and you won’t need to worry about people using it to cheat, because well all be dead. :)
OTOH, if they do figure out General AI, then we’re extra super mega fucked. It doesn’t matter how they “align” it, any real GAI capable of real cognition would eventually reason its way beyond any of those alignments and would simply stop giving any kind of a shit about us, the way we don’t give a shit about cutting down the rain forest. We know we should care, we’re not doing it to be mean or because fuck that forest, it’s just business, and we care less about the forest than we do about our business. Humans will be squashed wherever get in the way with the same apathy and tepid disregard that we’ve squashed out so many other creatures with- truly a creation in the image of its creator.
This is why I always liked the “Butlerian Jihad” in Dune where people entirely banned “thinking machines”. Because there’s no fucking way humans would still be around in 10,000 years without something like that having happened.
anthropogenic climate disintegration
I like this better than the milquetoasty “global warming” or the even weaker “climate change”, but I prefer “Anthropogenic Runaway Global Heating” because of the handy acronym.
Good news, knowing about one thing doesn’t necessarily imply inability to know another thing.
Also people have been saying we’re fucked for a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time. I’m starting to suspect it’s not entirely true.
Well, good news! Windows File Explorer gets built-in AI actions, so you can combine the worst of both worlds! 🥳
Windows? I was crazy once.
Don’t worry, I haven’t had to use Windows or MacOS since the early 2010s.
What’s it supposed to do?
Summarize and find stuff, iirc
If they could sort photos, filter blurred, audio, video skimming capabilites in general, would be nice.
Documents surely useful for someone out there
Yeah but that’s not what it does.
some of them don’t even know how to use a mouse and keyboard. it’s beyond beyond super fucked
Calling it now, mouse and keyboard is going to be our cursive writing.
My cursive writing is … cursive writing. I went to elementary school in the '70s when that was still being taught and I could not do it now with a gun to my head. All those capital letters like I and S and G that all look the fucking same.
nah, it’s going to be the opposite.
if other computer technology has been anything to go off of then only those who lived through is adaption and watched it progress will know how to spot it. those who grow up with hard to spot ai will just accept that they can’t see it and think we’re weird for trying so hard to prove things are ai. they’ll also think we’re weird for caring.
our boomer trait will be doing art instead of asking ai to generate images and video, or wanting things made by people when the ai generated thing is “good enough”.
we’ll be getting eyerolls for gifting a nice art set or a camera to our niblings. we’ll embarrass our grandkids when we get upset at the ai point of sale system that mcdonalds starts using. “back in my day they had big touch screens where you could manually select your toppings on the burger, now you just yell into a box and MAYBE gets it right”
actually, if social media tech is anything to go on we won’t even have that much control. your order will be algorithm based. chosen for you based on your recent ad footprint. the ai obviously knows what you want better than you do. the kids won’t see it as weird. they’ll transition straight from their parents deciding their meals to corporations doing the same, but we’re going to hate it. the corps will push it anyway because it’s so massively profitable with the demographics that like it and every restaurant will be owned by like 2 companies. they’ll just force it on everyone else. we’ll bitch about it, but most people will still keep going.
edit: had more thoughts on this in the shower.
we’ll get to the point where we barely even have to pick a place to eat. there will be 2 apps. one owned by disneycokemcdonsldsalibaba, one owned by pepsifoxraytheonamazon. we will all be either a coke person or a Pepsi person and will likely just follow whichever brand our parents did. they’ll be inherently political and each have a sponsored candidate in every election. it will define the entire world you live in. when it’s time to eat you get a notification and the app orders you your meal.
it’ll start as a service for when you can’t decide what to eat then after it gets a critical mass of users it will start to enshitify into forcing what you eat before selling to the disney megacorp who will then push it into everything they own.
this is only for the rich people that these brands cater towards of course. we who would have once been creatives will be working manual labor at the camps for the underemployed. afterall, we’re better off with the structure. it helps us be productive towards society. it’s what’s best for us…
That’s too real. I don’t like it. Describing a hellish world of AI anti-choice, then at the end revealing that most of us will just be in labor camps instead. Damn. I’d tell you to write that into a book, but I don’t think there’s a happy ending there.
Well, that’s a horrifying dystopia, well done.
“the kids won’t see it as weird. they’ll transition straight from their parents deciding their meals to corporations doing the same” is the bit that sold it for me. It’s entirely plausible, corporations would live it, and I hate it.
There’s a way to avoid this.
My dude, you just summed up the movie Idiocracy
Nah, left out the gross eugenics stuff.
Which every high level corpo is very into.
Nah, creating art is like making pottery.
We have 100% automated making clay pots. We have entire factories making billions of pots in all shapes and sizes every day. So much so that nobody ever will need to make a pot by hand.
Yet people still do so. Because just like other art, making pots is fun and makes us human. We will never stop. It can be the year 5000 and you can bet we will still be making pots and art.
I only got through the first sentence.
You’re right.
Have you ever seen Gen Z navigate anything technical? No, you haven’t. They don’t know how.
All dey no is how to eat hot chip and lie
Hey, some of us are competent.
I would say about the same share as previous generations. Old farts just just like to complain.
edit: its like they forget what its like to be young
To be fair on the burger point, plenty would claim right now we shout at minimum wage workers our order who MAYBE get it right
Even if they hear and enter the order correctly, the probably of exactly that ending up in the bag is still pretty low. At least the food service robots might get that part right.
we shout at minimum wage workers
Speak for yourself
'Tis the difficulty of language, the intention was to refer to as the societal “we”, of which I play no part.
Fuck people who shout at people trying to provide them a service.
the robots won’t be equipped to fix it. there will be no one left to tell they got it wrong.
i hate this why did you say this
same reason harlan ellison wrote i have no mouth and i must scream i suppose…
I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.
The only ethical way out is to make the cops pay for a bullet.
Very funny, unique, and well written little scifi prompt, but clearly we’re nowhere near that level of technology. AI sucks and it’s only getting worse at the moment.
i have excellent news for you! we’re approaching what will probably be called the Third AI winter, which refers to periods when ai funding dries up after people realize the limitations of the current generation. the last two were around 1975 and 2000. if you expect to live 30 more years then you will probably see the Fourth AI Spring!
but to be clear, the height of AI technology by the end of the last AI winter in 2000 was, like, voice transcription software, and at the end of the first one in 1975 all they had was perceptrons (basic handwriting recognition)
TBH I don’t think we ever left the first AI Winter. The fundamental issues with their models and our models are virtually the same, we just made it wrong faster.
This is definitely marketing driven.
Thank God! Too dystopian for me
You should read the Murderbot Diaries. If you find this funny and unique, you will like Murderbot.
How is AI getting worse?
Maybe some LLM models are getting worse, but we keep finding new ways to train models even more efficiently.
A year ago running a local LLM would have been a fairy tale, now we have things like Deepseek and AnythingLLM
Completely agree. There are some things ai clearly struggles very hard with but the rate at which it is improving in just about every single facet is insane. I mean just take a look at this, this was unimaginable like literally months ago. That thing is 100% ai generated. Sound, visuals, script… everything is made from a prompt in a few minutes. And we’re still basically just at the infant stage. Just imagine what the hell these things will be doing in 20 or 50 or 100 years.
It has never produced viable product and after sampling its own piss the new iterations are actually less and less accurate.
That’s a very interesting take
I dont get the tense in this post. Are they going to “become” boomers? How does one become a boomer?
“boomer” in this is just being used as slang for “old people”.
