On the other hand, retro computing and nostalgia for the era has never been stronger or more accessible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3NQQ7bPf6U
I've been thinking about this a bit lately, albeit from a slightly different angle. I think people will begin looking for a different "reality" due to the homogenization of everything due to AI. That is to say, it's not "inauthenticity" as such that I think people will react to, but lack of originality and creativity.
I mean, when ChatGPT is writing all new books, screenplays, whitepapers, business plans, etc., etc., it seems to me that everything is going to collapse to one boring, homogeneous, "everything is the same as everything else" state. If my theory is right, the currency of the future might simply be "novelty" and human creativity.
This is, of course, all based on the idea that (current) AI's are, as Emily Bender put it, "stochastic parrots"[1]. All they can really do is spew up a somewhat randomized pastiche of human reality circa 2021 or so. So far they don't really have any innate creativity as such. That said, I don't see any reason in principle to think that AI won't also eventually be able to be creative is the same sense that we are today. What happens then is a whole other question.
ChatGPT needs humans to learn from though. It's very good at combining human knowledge and existing ideas. That's totally its thing.
Creative thought and new inventions? Not so much.
> everything is going to collapse to one boring, homogeneous, "everything is the same as everything else" state.
That's probably true. Like the circles you get in now when you try to Google something. Try to tweak your query and you keep getting the same shit back like it's the only few sites in the world. Really creepy, and probably the result of some overbearing algorithm or too many paid results.
It reminds me of this ST:TNG episode where one character is In a collapsing bubble where everything keeps disappearing.
As for the next generation - They won't go back to what we had but move forwards onto something completely different and new. Hopefully we will understand it, or just be the old folks yelling at clouds and children about how the world has changed!
50 million views, 100k advertising dollars.
Of course, after that you'll have a synthesis of the two ideas emerging. That's too many steps ahead for me to predict, but there are passages from Iain M. Banks' Culture books which might be on the money.