When you put it that way it reminds me of the Severn/Keats character in the Hyperion Cantos. Far-future AIs reconstruct historical figures from their writings in an attempt to gain philosophical insights.
Without saying anything specific to spoil plot poonts, I will say that I ended-up having a kidney stone while I was reading the last two books of the series. It was fucking eerie.
If I started a list with the things that were comically sci Fi when I was a kid, and are a reality today, I'd be here until next Tuesday.
Still can't believe people buy their stock, given that they are the closest thing to a James Bond villain, just because it goes up.
I mean, they are literally called "the stuff Sauron uses to control his evil forces". It's so on the nose it reads like an anime plot.
Future is inevitable, but only ignorants of self predictive ability are thinking that what's going to populate future is inevitable.
But yeah lots of people don't really buy into the idea of their small contribution to a large problem being a problem.
As an abstract idea I think there is a reasonable argument to be made that the size of any contribution to a problem should be measured as a relative proportion of total influence.
The carbon footprint is a good example, if each individual focuses on reducing their small individual contribution then they could neglect systemic changes that would reduce everyone's contribution to a greater extent.
Any scientist working on a method to remove a problem shouldn't abstain from contributing to the problem while they work.
Or to put it as a catchy phrase. Someone working on a cleaner light source shouldn't have to work in the dark.
Right, I think you have responsibility for your 1/<global population>th (arguably considerably more though, for first-worlders) of the problem. What I see is something like refusal to consider swapping out a two-stroke-engine-powered tungsten lightbulb with an LED of equivalent brightness, CRI, and color temperature, because it won't unilaterally solve the problem.
I proudly owned zero shares of Microsoft stock, in the 1980s and 1990s. :)
I own no Palantir today.
It's a Pyrrhic victory, but sometimes that's all you can do.
I've been tempted to. "Everything will be terrible if these guys succeed, but at least I'll be rich. If they fail I'll lose money, but since that's the outcome I prefer anyway, the loss won't bother me."
Trouble is, that ship has arguably already sailed. No matter how rapidly things go to hell, it will take many years before PLTR is profitable enough to justify its half-trillion dollar market cap.
So "panopticon that if it had been used properly, would have prevented the destruction of two towers" while ignoring the obvious "are we the baddies?"
Elon Musk has actual children (lots, in fact). If we want to know what he "would" do, we can just look. We don't have to use our imaginations (or entertain the fanciful claims of prognosticators and soothsayers).
As an example, portable phones have been predicted. Portable smartphones that are more like chat and payment terminals with a voice function no one uses any more ... not so much.
I mean, all Kindle does for me is save me space. I don't have to store all those books now.
Who predicted the humble internet forum though? Or usenet before it?
They're convenient but if they went away tomorrow, my life wouldn't really change in any material way. That's not really the case with smartphones much less the internet more broadly.
Funny, I had "The collected stories of Frank Herbert" as my next read on my tablet. Here's a juicy quote from like the third screen of the first story:
"The bedside newstape offered a long selection of stories [...]. He punched code letters for eight items, flipped the machine to audio and listened to the news while dressing."
Anything qualitative there? Or all of it quantitative?
Story is "Operation Syndrome", first published in 1954.
Hey, where are our glowglobes and chairdogs btw?
Went further in Herbert's shorts volume and I just ran into a scene where people are preparing to leave Earth on a colony ship to seed some distant world...
... and they still have human operator assisted phone calls.
I'd take smartphones vanishing rather than books any day.
I didn't believe you meant that of course, but we've already seen it can happen.
The Shockwave Rider was also remarkable prescient.
It's the most prescient thing I've ever read, and it's pretty short and a genuinely good story, I recommend everyone read it.
Edit: Just skimmed it again and realized there's an LLM-like prediction as well. Access to the Earth's surface is banned and some people complain, until "even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject."
-people a depicted as grey aliens (no teeth, large eyes, no hair). Lesson the Greys are a future version of us.
The air is poisoned and ruined cities. People live in underground bunkers...1909...nuclear war was unimaginable then. This was still the age of steam ships and coal power trains. Even respirators would have been low on the public imagination.
The air ships with metal blinds sound more like UFOs than blimps.
The white worms.
People are the blood cells of the machine which runs on their thoughts social media data harvesting of ai.
China invaded Australia. This story was 8 years or so after the Boxer Rebellion so that would have sounded like say Iraq invading the USA in the context of its time.
The story suggests this is a cyclical process of a bifurcated human race.
The blimp crashing into the steel evokes 9/11, 91+1 years later...
The constellation orion.
Etc etc.
There is a central commitee
It’s interesting - Forster wrote like the Huxley of his day, Zamyatin like the Orwell - but both felt they were carrying Wells’ baton - and they were, just from differing perspectives.
That's just the Victorian London.
I assume the CIA is lying about simulating world leaders. These are narcissistic personalities and it’s jarring to hear that they can be replaced, either by a body double or an indistinguishable chatbot. Also, it’s still cheaper to have humans do this.
More likely, the CIA is modeling its own experts. Not as useful a press release and not as impressive to the fractious executive branch. But consider having downtime as a CIA expert on submarine cables. You might be predicting what kind of available data is capable of predicting the cause and/or effect of cuts. Ten years ago, an ensemble of such models was state of the art, but its sensory libraries were based on maybe traceroute and marine shipping. With an LLM, you can generate a whole lot of training data that an expert can refine during his/her downtime. Maybe there’s a potent new data source that an expensive operation could unlock. That ensemble of ML models from ten years ago can still be refined.
And then there’s modeling things that don’t exist. Maybe it’s important to optimize a statement for its disinfo potency. Try it harmlessly on LLMs fed event data. What happens if some oligarch retires unexpectedly? Who rises? That kind of stuff.
To your last point, with this executive branch, I expect their very first question to CIA wasn’t about aliens or which nations have a copy of a particular tape of Trump, but can you make us money. So the approaches above all have some way of producing business intelligence. Whereas a Kim Jong Un bobblehead does not.
[1] AI learns one year's worth of CEO Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group's president's statements [WBS] https://youtu.be/iG0eRF89dsk
I remember Reid Hoffman creating a digital avatar to pitch himself netflix
https://www.amazon.com/Man-Presidents-Mind-Ted-Allbeury/dp/0...