In twenty years, we'll think we used to live in the stone age.
Movies and games and software will be made with AI. They'll look and be better than ever before, and be driven by strong individuals with more diverse tastes that cater to the long tail of human interests.
The forms of entertainment will change. Games will be more immersive: VR, mutable, Hollywood photorealistic, easy for anyone to edit or join in together. Game loops that form as a form of improv.
We're going to have robotics. They're going to live in your home. You'll have a Michelin star chef in your kitchen who gives you new things to eat every night. They'll shop for your groceries and stock your fridge. You'll fall asleep in your car and wake up at your vacation destination. You'll be able to do remote work while road tripping America.
Skyscrapers and public infra will cost next to nothing to build. Manufactured goods will be assembled and delivered on demand. You can design your own car rather than have a mass-produced one.
We're going to modify our biology. We're going to cure our diseases. No more antibiotic resistance because we're faster than evolution. We're going to kill all the bacteria and viruses and parasites that ail us. We'll make inroads on cancer and Alzheimer's.
We're going to scan our brains and memories to share. We'll decode whale language and talk with them. We'll image distant worlds and solve the great problems in astrophysics.
And that's not even the crazy stuff I can't imagine.
Pessimists be damned, this is finally the innovation era once more.
Personally I think that the world needs more of your optimism. But what does your crystal ball say about energy costs and political stability?
It’s one thing to say that AI will help everyone create immersive games, but skyscrapers won’t be free unless energy is free. Do you also assume that AI will solve fusion?
What happens to the individuals who are not “strong” and how do they hold onto their remote work jobs? Why will the biomedical research technology you’re positing not be used to create biological weapons, or do you assume that AI also creates universal peace and harmony? If so, how does it do that while also preserving our ability to have our own ideas and disagree with each other?
If we want the great future you’re imagining, I think history teaches that we need to give at least as much attention to these questions as we do to making the technology work.
I enjoyed this post, echelon. It's trendy to be negative on social media such as HN and I greatly appreciate your optimism. Some of the items you mentioned are already happening to various degrees of success.
It's optimism that has flowed over into delusional territory. We won't have 90% of what he states in 20 years, and the remaining 10% will not be evenly distributed.
I think they're mostly right, it'll cost next to nothing to build new skyscrapers. Just a few thousand human lives which will be tokenized and easily available for 5 Muskcoin apiece on the decentralized markets.
I'm a simple man. Promises of utopia are well and good, but it would appear the way we get there is by corporations hoovering up all the new means of production, at which point they somehow decide to share it all with the rest of us for some inexplicable reason - turning their trillions in investment into charity.
I don't believe any of it, I just want hardware to be cheap and accessible again because that means all the compute won't solely be in the hands of the few.
The issue is, you can’t solve social problems with technology alone. The most challenging problems for our species (inequality, starvation, homelessness, etc) are social, after all. And we don’t have the incentives nor political will to solve them.
On your points: You won’t wake up in your vacation destination until you swap the cars out for rail. Infrastructure won’t be cheap until the social problems making it expensive (land, middle-men, quid-pro-quo, endless subcontracting) are solved.
That's not optimism, that's a dystopia - a world where most humans simply exist, with no meaning. Doing remote work on the road seems pointless as there's no work to be done anymore (also rest of the world has trains already to allow that).
This is something only comfortable first-world inhabitants tell themselves; as if the coffee they drink that some poor plantation worker toiled away in the heat for while some fat cat extracted the surplus value of their labour was part of a benevolent system designed to bring "meaning" to the less fortunate.
In twenty years, we'll think we used to live in the stone age.
Movies and games and software will be made with AI. They'll look and be better than ever before, and be driven by strong individuals with more diverse tastes that cater to the long tail of human interests.
The forms of entertainment will change. Games will be more immersive: VR, mutable, Hollywood photorealistic, easy for anyone to edit or join in together. Game loops that form as a form of improv.
We're going to have robotics. They're going to live in your home. You'll have a Michelin star chef in your kitchen who gives you new things to eat every night. They'll shop for your groceries and stock your fridge. You'll fall asleep in your car and wake up at your vacation destination. You'll be able to do remote work while road tripping America.
Skyscrapers and public infra will cost next to nothing to build. Manufactured goods will be assembled and delivered on demand. You can design your own car rather than have a mass-produced one.
We're going to modify our biology. We're going to cure our diseases. No more antibiotic resistance because we're faster than evolution. We're going to kill all the bacteria and viruses and parasites that ail us. We'll make inroads on cancer and Alzheimer's.
We're going to scan our brains and memories to share. We'll decode whale language and talk with them. We'll image distant worlds and solve the great problems in astrophysics.
And that's not even the crazy stuff I can't imagine.
Pessimists be damned, this is finally the innovation era once more.
chuckles We have a saying in Portugal: "If my grandma had wheels, she would be a truck."
I leave it up to you to figure it out.
Personally I think that the world needs more of your optimism. But what does your crystal ball say about energy costs and political stability?
It’s one thing to say that AI will help everyone create immersive games, but skyscrapers won’t be free unless energy is free. Do you also assume that AI will solve fusion?
What happens to the individuals who are not “strong” and how do they hold onto their remote work jobs? Why will the biomedical research technology you’re positing not be used to create biological weapons, or do you assume that AI also creates universal peace and harmony? If so, how does it do that while also preserving our ability to have our own ideas and disagree with each other?
If we want the great future you’re imagining, I think history teaches that we need to give at least as much attention to these questions as we do to making the technology work.
I enjoyed this post, echelon. It's trendy to be negative on social media such as HN and I greatly appreciate your optimism. Some of the items you mentioned are already happening to various degrees of success.
>I greatly appreciate your optimism
It's optimism that has flowed over into delusional territory. We won't have 90% of what he states in 20 years, and the remaining 10% will not be evenly distributed.
I think they're mostly right, it'll cost next to nothing to build new skyscrapers. Just a few thousand human lives which will be tokenized and easily available for 5 Muskcoin apiece on the decentralized markets.
In your future, when does it stop costing $500 to buy 32GB of DDR5? Or are the companies still leasing us the compute?
That’s what you object to? I’d be surprised if RAM weren’t cheap again in 2-4 years. It takes time to build factories, but it’s not that bad.
On the other hand, construction getting cheaper seems very unlikely.
I'm a simple man. Promises of utopia are well and good, but it would appear the way we get there is by corporations hoovering up all the new means of production, at which point they somehow decide to share it all with the rest of us for some inexplicable reason - turning their trillions in investment into charity.
I don't believe any of it, I just want hardware to be cheap and accessible again because that means all the compute won't solely be in the hands of the few.
The issue is, you can’t solve social problems with technology alone. The most challenging problems for our species (inequality, starvation, homelessness, etc) are social, after all. And we don’t have the incentives nor political will to solve them.
On your points: You won’t wake up in your vacation destination until you swap the cars out for rail. Infrastructure won’t be cheap until the social problems making it expensive (land, middle-men, quid-pro-quo, endless subcontracting) are solved.
That's not optimism, that's a dystopia - a world where most humans simply exist, with no meaning. Doing remote work on the road seems pointless as there's no work to be done anymore (also rest of the world has trains already to allow that).
Why would there be no meaning?
This is something only comfortable first-world inhabitants tell themselves; as if the coffee they drink that some poor plantation worker toiled away in the heat for while some fat cat extracted the surplus value of their labour was part of a benevolent system designed to bring "meaning" to the less fortunate.
ah yes, compared to the current day where most humans are full of meaning at their bullshit jobs
Also, what you described here is the plot for most B-grade dystopia movies.
In twenty years, humans need not apply.
No we won't or no it won't. Pretty much to all of this.
This is not optimism, it's delusional.
The naïveté in posts like this is actually astonishing (assuming it's not satire).