Keeping up with the Jones' AI
Look, I love all the new gadgetry. AI blows my mind. When ChatGPT was released, I had a new buddy that I could talk to about almost ANYTHING. When Bard came to town, well, it was a bit flaky, but these days, Bard is damned impressive. Lia27 . . . was like talking to the absent-minded narcissist professor. But hey, maybe it is better these days.
Point is, when our planet/species are headed a direction, putting our heads in the sand is not going to change that direction. Schools, corporations or people resisting AI. . . the Borg is real, friends, and "resistance is futile." Seriously, it is futile.
Where does that highway go to?
Alrighty then, we cannot resist. So, we go with it. And AI is amazing - truly it is amazing. But, we go with it, and it is like the Talking Heads track, right? "Where does that highway go to." Ironic, because "goto" is one of those cosmic enablers which became an anti-pattern and yet, here we are again. Anyone who has written software in a language with "goto" knows exactly what I am talking about.
Let's walk the dog on where that highway goes, shall we? This isn't the stuff of mysticism. I am not being highly prophetic here. Just walk it with me, and you will see, capitalism as we know it is fucked. Well, that is a "colorful metaphor", but if you are the type of person that cannot handle the word "fucked", then you cannot handle "ai." Prove me wrong. :-)
How Capitalism Dies
* Spoiler Alert* Capitalism dies. Dead. Flat-lined. Mkay? All the king's horses and Hankie the Christmas Poo cannot put it back together. What has been seen cannot be unseen. Mkay? Mkay. Here is how it goes down. It's so simple, I cannot believe it is even a thing.
One of my big rants in the inefficiency of human effort is redundancy. I am a consummate "Resource Investigator" from Belbin terms (OK, first I am a "Plant" - like, so creative I broke their algorithm, but then I am a "resource investigator" and then a "team worker.") What does all that mean? It means, I am the version of Elon Musk that didn't have diamond money. LOL, that's so wrong. Sorry, Elon. No I am not. And no, I won't fight you. That's silly. Fun. But silly.
A "resource investigator" is someone who does not like to reinvent the wheel. And that, in essence, is exactly how AI kills capitalism. AI ends human redundancy. That's a good thing. I love that about AI. But it is going to permajack capitalism, which thrives on redundancy. "Mindfuel, what do you MEAN?" Yeah. . . OK, ask yourself how often a company has created a login page? And that is just the teenie tiny tip of the redundancy iceberg. AI puts an end to all that across entire market verticals. Wut, Mindfuel? Wuuuut?
AI pools human knowledge into models. And then those models displace 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 or 1,000,000 or 10,000,000 or 100,000,000 jobs. If anybody tells you anything different, they are lying to you. AI is coming for the jobs. But we cannot run from it. It is going to replace software developers, it is going to replace McKinsey, BCG, PWC and KPMG to name a few. AI is the ultimate chess piece because once it is on the board, everyone MUST use it to stay viable, and in using it they are committing capitalist suicide. Basically, ANY knowledge profession will be consolidated into an AI model and then all those workers will be displaced. Done. Bye.
Then come the robots. The cars and planes and trains and short order cooks - anything that requires mechanical ability (harvesting, refining, logistics, creating, serving). All that can now be done by a robot tapped into AI.
Not only is capitalism dead, but there are no more jobs. For anyone. Even the ultra rich are unemployed now. All that is left is power. Because capitalism is dead. Old news. So some handful of globalists who have played their hand correctly, will inherit the power. I wonder who those will be? Blade Runner. Yeah, that movie was visionary in some ways, right? No, not the 2049 one, that was short-sited franchise crap by comparison. I am talking the original Bladerunner. The original Logan's Run. The original Star Trek. Yeah, baby.
So, that's how the capitalist bitch dies. Socialist dick is dead, too. Now what? I pitched Sustainablism, right, but in this context. . . like, what in the two fucks is that?
Hello Sustainablism, Who the Fuck are You?
Who are you? Who Who? Who Who? That is from 1978! Alight, so this shift is probably decades out. Maybe it takes 20 years. Maybe it takes 50 years, but it. is. coming. I pitched Sustainablism, but you know, I also believe anything that ends in "ism" is crap. If it ends in "asm", we are good, right? lol, you can figure that one out.
The irony is, I had a conversation with AI, and you know, this is back of the envelope type stuff (don't downgrade that too far because MBAs and case interviews LOVE their back of the envelope decision making - the stuff of 9 digit magic in the capitalist world, all based on 1940s principles). But AI and I decided that planet earth can handle 2 billion people. We've got 8 billion. And growing. Ergo, "Sustainablism" is an economy based on our ability to live in harmony. Bet all the hippies love that. I do, but then I have been labeled a space-hippie before. Harmony as in, living withing the ecosystem our planet provides, taking any excess and using that to colonize off-world destinations. Off-world is a huge challenge for us because we still use a TON of fossile fuel in order to get our space station Lego(tm) blocks into space.
But in the the sustainablist economy, harmony reigns supreme. Maybe AI is a part of that, because it can (via robots) do EVERYTHING humans can do, better than humans can do it, then we really get to re-examine our value proposition as a species. We will have invented the next evolutionary thing beyond ourselves: AI, which, although rooted in the artificial, will be anything BUT artificial once it truly takes hold. Particles beget atoms beget molecules beget compounds beget, at some point, DNA. DNA begets cells begets bacteria begets plants begets eventually mammals, begets humans, ... ... ... begets AI. Our cells have no idea about our organs, our organs have no idea about our avatars, our avatars have no idea what is going on with our consciousness, and our consciousness will have no idea how AI and whatever comes after AI will engage our known universe. Crazy, right? Crazy that in my lifetime, we have gone from typewriters to computers to internet to AI. That's insanely awesome. And then end product is the end of novelty.
The End (and rebirth) of Novelty
Damn, this will be a good day. See, once robots and AI can do anything we need done, then we really get to figure out why we want to be here? Now, I am sure this will get "messed with" but, in the idealistic version, it means we are free to do what we want. Via AI we have killed off redundancy, we have centralized all knowledge, we have mechanized that knowledge in all facets to deliver a superior and sustainable existence. So, now, we just get to do what we WANT.
Want to be a rock star? Be a rock star. Get burned out and want to just wash some dishes for a week, be a dishwasher. Done with dishes and want to explore cooking, be a chef. Be whatever, and whatever you don't want to be is already handled by the AI robots. Life finally becomes equitable across everyone who experiences it. Everyone has access to health, to knowledge, to exploration, and anything we don't feel like dealing with is glossed over by "the machine." Utopia? Heaven? Maybe hell to some. I don't know.
What of Skynet?
Maybe all this gets cut short by Skynet or the Matrix. I don't know, because by then AI will be beyond AI and beyond us as a species. We will not be able to comprehend what we created in the same way our cells cannot comprehend our avatars and our avatars cannot comprehend our consciousness. Nobody knows where the highway goes to. But we do know, or at least I strongly conjecture, capitalism is dead.
And thus begins T3K Futurism
I am a futurist. I have my own futurist beliefs (branded T3K Futurism), and I think, once AI obliterates the "isms", and if we as a species "do it right" and don't destroy ourselves in the process, then we leave the door open to T3K Futurism. This flavor of futurism means that we transcend our known reality through our partnership with whatever comes after AI (and provided that it doesn't decide we are worthless and to kill us all off). If we can launch it right, then AI and whatever comes after, becomes our partner - it gets us off world and tapped into the limitless potential of the universe. . . right now we fight for resources, but there are a gazillion galaxies which contain a gazillion planets each, so in the scope of our planet, resources are limited, but in the scope of the universe, resources are infinite. We can shed our territorial and materialistic selves and move on to whatever is next. Ooooo. Deep!