When people look back to the 2010s in a few decades, they will be horrified by the naivete of the West. Just because authoritarian regimes do something, doesn't mean that that thing should not be done at all. Leaving the cyberspace completely unregulated in the hands of the private sector is a mistake, and people in the future would gasp in disgust when they see videos of our kids being exposed to social media unobstructed, the same way we are disturbed by juvenile access to tobacco and alcohol decades ago.
The phrase I keep hearing is "flaccid cyberpunk dystopia".
We got cyberpunk, but only the lame parts. We got the megacorps, but not the machinegun arms. We got corporate AIs, but they draw hands with six fingers instead of sending hackers to exfiltrate paydirt from cyberspace. We got unbelievably rich villains who control all the money and power, but they're short, fat and pathetic losers who wear lift heels and spray tan, rather than steeple-handed masterminds. We got the magic internet money the cypherpunks thought would break the state, and it's nearly useless except for crime. We got robots, but they're unreliable tools not new friends. We got violence in the streets, but it was the same violence we always had where the powerful stomp on the weak, not the rebellion against the system of street samurai or shadowrunners.
We got the fictional future, but it was covered in the gross goop of reality, and that made it lame.
Edit: We even got nanomachines, but they were just enzymes in our laundry powder, because that turned out to be what nanomachines actually were.
Well, all the stories of street samurai (really ronin) or shadowrunners seem to ultimately be about social mobility in a feudal world. Yes, there's massive inequality with the hereditary corporate lords and their corpo servants on top, but at least there's a chance of moving up or making good for someone with the right skills and enough hustle. And maybe, even crashing the system and changing the world if you get the right gig. That's not the feel of the present day.
Anyway, I'm just communicating the vibe of "flaccid cyberpunk dystopia", which is a common phrase in the online spaces I haunt.
I think people are overestimating how much they'd actually enjoy living in the nihilistic materialistic worlds depicted in cyberpunk fiction. Naturally the real world will seem flaccid if you think you'd enjoy doing crimes and slicing people up! But I doubt many of the people in the internet forums are out there trying to be John McAfee... 😉
Right, many things like this are technically obtainable for most but people don't want the associated consequences. You don't need THAT much money to get bottle service in a ritzy club and live it up, and yet people don't despite that sort of image getting plastered as valuable all over advertisements and entertainment.
I think you are partially correct but so miss a lot of cool stuff. People can retool their careers, first with MOOCs and videos, hopefully soon with AI tutors, we have medicines like ozempic that are liberating a lot of people from the issues caused by the 20th century lifestyle, we have good, if difficult jobs that pay well for those who are willing to work hard (think police, nursing, electricians, etc.) and live in a society affluent enough that people can quiet quit.
We are in a mildly dystopian time with the potential to go horribly wrong if we are not responsible (think authoritarian or even global warfare). That said, I’ll take this over the early Industrial Revolution period portrayed by Dickens. Or the generation the lived through WW1 and 2, the Great Depression, the Spanish Flu etc. This beats those by a long shot
To some extent we may be like them in that the technology changing our world may worsen our lives. This kind of sucks but at the same time, if we can live up to the challenges of the times we can help create a better world. And even the current suck if better then the suck most past generations had to deal with.
As a science fiction writer myself I feel pressure to have something clever to say on the subject, but I'm mostly just enjoying the tech roundup and taking notes on the stuff I hadn't seen before :D
I think though, that to some extent you've got causality inverted: It's not so much that science fiction writers are consciously and correctly predicting the future, it's that American techies are increasingly themselves science fiction fans who read about cool stuff without entirely realizing how full of shit we sometimes are! It's like the old story of the math student who comes late to class and writes down the equation on the board and goes off to solve it as homework without knowing that the professor gave it as an example of an unsolved problem. Having a clear vision of how cool it would be to have this tech, is a big motivator to give it a try.
Conversely, the science fiction fans in policy and government usually (hopefully...) take what's in books as a cautionary lesson. I'd like to think that we've avoided the worst cyberpunk visions of the future because people in power read those books and realized how much that would suck. On the other hand, there's a reason for that whole "Torment Nexus" joke that's been going around.
So is all this fancy tech going to boost GDP growth?
It's always hard to tell "how much" technological progress is going on. The mere impressiveness of new inventions is very subjective. And by the time technology translates into sustained increases in GDP per capita, it's already old tech. Technologies generally don't achieve mass adoption until they're fairly mature.
The challenge that I think no one has quite tackled is to forecast which technologies will be quantitatively important to GDP growth. I can't see how autonomous vehicles can fail to be transformative. I'm skeptical about whether humanoid robots will matter much.
What I think might be transformative, that nobody has written about yet, is that all sorts of tools and gadgets and appliances will come equipped with AI agents which can either make them respond to voice commands, or tell you how to use them. If you combine that with augmented reality headsets that can mark up your field of vision, that could turn everyone in into a kind of "bionic handyman," equipped with human dexterity and reasoning but also lots of specialist knowledge about tools, houses, land and so forth.
Also, I could imagine that AI might eliminate language barriers. What if everyone's smartphone will detect then translate from any language? Suddenly, international travel becomes very easy!
Tyler Cowen said (I don't remember when/where, but recently, since COVID anyway), that many of the technologies are not directly boosting GDP, for example having more QALY allows you to spend more, but that's it. (But might reduce healthcare spending ... but also gives more healthcare interventions to be spent on. And allows more time to accumulate money to spend on healthcare, and so on.)
...
International travel was already very easy ~10 years ago, thanks to "old school" machine learning - I mean Google Translate. But nowadays LLM-powered voice-to-voice translation will make it even more of a non-issue. (And of course LLMs not just translate word-for-word. Which might help in some cases. And in other cases we get amazing Monty Python reenactments! -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6D1YI-41ao )
Good point. Abundance when it comes to production means little if people, other than capital owners, have no way to pay for consumption. Perhaps we see implicit deflation, everything becomes so cheap that money is worthless (a la Star Trek). Who, then, makes the decision to invest in a new technology (how are raw materials paid for, how is risk rewarded) or plant another row of crops without financial incentive? Perhaps AI makes planting or production decisions based on benefit to society or societal need rather than profit? I wouldn’t want to be a farmer in a developing country, then, or a producer of anything.
Seems as though there would be a lot of scope for government to try to commandeer production, pricing and redistribution (though that is no different than today, I suppose).
If people can't afford something then by definition it isn't abundant. Abundance means that people can afford it.
If everything you currently consume become free, you would just spend your money on new things. Money wouldn't become worthless. There will always be comparative advantages.
Compared to what? If a small increase in marginal earnings amidst a comfortable existence was a big driver then everyone would have three jobs and be starting new businesses. If the comfort level increases and the value of money devalues in the future, of course risk taking decreases.
Comfort level is relative though, not absolute. If in the future not working would give you whatever you currently consider to be a high standard of living, but would be the lowest 10% of the new society, or you could work your 40 hours and live a middle class life in the new society. All of my experiences and observations tell me people will work so they are not *relatively poor.
Human central planning will always be incompetent. What happens, though, if the profit incentive becomes less valuable? Does capitalism remain the worst of all systems….except all the others (ie the best that we have). AI driven resource allocation will definitely be tried. He who controls the permitted inputs and the weighting of the goals controls the future. More like blade runner than Star Trek, maybe
I am still looking for scientific future that foretold the dominance of snapchat. Robots, yes. Flying vehicles, yes. Leaders vying for world domination, yes. But social media and influencers that demonstrate how to put on eye liner and drink egg whites to live to 200? No.
It's sort of a chicken and egg problem. People need to work because we don't have robots. Therefore they are against robots, because then they won't have a job...which they currently need because we don't have robots.
I am an active 70-year-old who read sci-fi as a teen. Remember, I was promised flying cars and fully automated homes. Robots for sure. While they are closer, I suspect my generation will pass before full adoption of any of this technology, which is likely financially out of reach.
That said, that world envisioned by the sci-fi greats is threatened by an asteroid, nuclear winter, a dying planet so hot humans must live underground and can only come out at night. Technology is wonderful, but nature and humans cannot be tamed; we see the signs of our destruction almost daily.
Hackers, freezing electricity would stop 90% of this tech, or shortly do so within days. That would bring us back to the pre-1900s. How many of us could survive? I don’t know how to farm, hunt or dress field meat. Without a YouTube video, what would I do? Trial and error, I suppose, if I lived long enough.
We are living on the edge, one day it could all go dark, the next some miracle chip that leaves paraplegics walking.
Nature can clearly be tamed. We can turn atoms into unimaginable power. We turn sunlight and wind into power. We can raise the earth's temperature. Soon we will be able to lower earth's temperature.
Where are my nanomachines, Hideo
Coming soon!
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/06/24/rise-of-the-nanomachines
When people look back to the 2010s in a few decades, they will be horrified by the naivete of the West. Just because authoritarian regimes do something, doesn't mean that that thing should not be done at all. Leaving the cyberspace completely unregulated in the hands of the private sector is a mistake, and people in the future would gasp in disgust when they see videos of our kids being exposed to social media unobstructed, the same way we are disturbed by juvenile access to tobacco and alcohol decades ago.
Those robots shooting the cybertruck are CGI…
The phrase I keep hearing is "flaccid cyberpunk dystopia".
We got cyberpunk, but only the lame parts. We got the megacorps, but not the machinegun arms. We got corporate AIs, but they draw hands with six fingers instead of sending hackers to exfiltrate paydirt from cyberspace. We got unbelievably rich villains who control all the money and power, but they're short, fat and pathetic losers who wear lift heels and spray tan, rather than steeple-handed masterminds. We got the magic internet money the cypherpunks thought would break the state, and it's nearly useless except for crime. We got robots, but they're unreliable tools not new friends. We got violence in the streets, but it was the same violence we always had where the powerful stomp on the weak, not the rebellion against the system of street samurai or shadowrunners.
We got the fictional future, but it was covered in the gross goop of reality, and that made it lame.
Edit: We even got nanomachines, but they were just enzymes in our laundry powder, because that turned out to be what nanomachines actually were.
I dunno, I kind of don't want machine gun arms and cyber criminal mastermind AIs. Those sound like things I wouldn't actually like. 😅
Also, street samurai and shadowrunners are mostly just in it for the money, are they not?
Well, all the stories of street samurai (really ronin) or shadowrunners seem to ultimately be about social mobility in a feudal world. Yes, there's massive inequality with the hereditary corporate lords and their corpo servants on top, but at least there's a chance of moving up or making good for someone with the right skills and enough hustle. And maybe, even crashing the system and changing the world if you get the right gig. That's not the feel of the present day.
Anyway, I'm just communicating the vibe of "flaccid cyberpunk dystopia", which is a common phrase in the online spaces I haunt.
I think people are overestimating how much they'd actually enjoy living in the nihilistic materialistic worlds depicted in cyberpunk fiction. Naturally the real world will seem flaccid if you think you'd enjoy doing crimes and slicing people up! But I doubt many of the people in the internet forums are out there trying to be John McAfee... 😉
Right, many things like this are technically obtainable for most but people don't want the associated consequences. You don't need THAT much money to get bottle service in a ritzy club and live it up, and yet people don't despite that sort of image getting plastered as valuable all over advertisements and entertainment.
It *is* a bummer that fiction had Motoko and Harrison Ford but we’re dealing with literal egg heads.
Some part of me wants digital eyeballs but then I remember Laughing Man.
Don't confuse the imperfections of an early transition with what the technologies will be like once they've matured.
Oh, a.k.a., "we are still early"
I think you are partially correct but so miss a lot of cool stuff. People can retool their careers, first with MOOCs and videos, hopefully soon with AI tutors, we have medicines like ozempic that are liberating a lot of people from the issues caused by the 20th century lifestyle, we have good, if difficult jobs that pay well for those who are willing to work hard (think police, nursing, electricians, etc.) and live in a society affluent enough that people can quiet quit.
We are in a mildly dystopian time with the potential to go horribly wrong if we are not responsible (think authoritarian or even global warfare). That said, I’ll take this over the early Industrial Revolution period portrayed by Dickens. Or the generation the lived through WW1 and 2, the Great Depression, the Spanish Flu etc. This beats those by a long shot
To some extent we may be like them in that the technology changing our world may worsen our lives. This kind of sucks but at the same time, if we can live up to the challenges of the times we can help create a better world. And even the current suck if better then the suck most past generations had to deal with.
Would love to see you write a piece on quantum computing sometime. Seems interesting and curious of the potential economic implications.
As a science fiction writer myself I feel pressure to have something clever to say on the subject, but I'm mostly just enjoying the tech roundup and taking notes on the stuff I hadn't seen before :D
I think though, that to some extent you've got causality inverted: It's not so much that science fiction writers are consciously and correctly predicting the future, it's that American techies are increasingly themselves science fiction fans who read about cool stuff without entirely realizing how full of shit we sometimes are! It's like the old story of the math student who comes late to class and writes down the equation on the board and goes off to solve it as homework without knowing that the professor gave it as an example of an unsolved problem. Having a clear vision of how cool it would be to have this tech, is a big motivator to give it a try.
Conversely, the science fiction fans in policy and government usually (hopefully...) take what's in books as a cautionary lesson. I'd like to think that we've avoided the worst cyberpunk visions of the future because people in power read those books and realized how much that would suck. On the other hand, there's a reason for that whole "Torment Nexus" joke that's been going around.
So is all this fancy tech going to boost GDP growth?
It's always hard to tell "how much" technological progress is going on. The mere impressiveness of new inventions is very subjective. And by the time technology translates into sustained increases in GDP per capita, it's already old tech. Technologies generally don't achieve mass adoption until they're fairly mature.
The challenge that I think no one has quite tackled is to forecast which technologies will be quantitatively important to GDP growth. I can't see how autonomous vehicles can fail to be transformative. I'm skeptical about whether humanoid robots will matter much.
What I think might be transformative, that nobody has written about yet, is that all sorts of tools and gadgets and appliances will come equipped with AI agents which can either make them respond to voice commands, or tell you how to use them. If you combine that with augmented reality headsets that can mark up your field of vision, that could turn everyone in into a kind of "bionic handyman," equipped with human dexterity and reasoning but also lots of specialist knowledge about tools, houses, land and so forth.
Also, I could imagine that AI might eliminate language barriers. What if everyone's smartphone will detect then translate from any language? Suddenly, international travel becomes very easy!
assuming AI development keep the pace it has, then yes
https://ai-2027.com/
Tyler Cowen said (I don't remember when/where, but recently, since COVID anyway), that many of the technologies are not directly boosting GDP, for example having more QALY allows you to spend more, but that's it. (But might reduce healthcare spending ... but also gives more healthcare interventions to be spent on. And allows more time to accumulate money to spend on healthcare, and so on.)
...
International travel was already very easy ~10 years ago, thanks to "old school" machine learning - I mean Google Translate. But nowadays LLM-powered voice-to-voice translation will make it even more of a non-issue. (And of course LLMs not just translate word-for-word. Which might help in some cases. And in other cases we get amazing Monty Python reenactments! -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6D1YI-41ao )
Good point. Abundance when it comes to production means little if people, other than capital owners, have no way to pay for consumption. Perhaps we see implicit deflation, everything becomes so cheap that money is worthless (a la Star Trek). Who, then, makes the decision to invest in a new technology (how are raw materials paid for, how is risk rewarded) or plant another row of crops without financial incentive? Perhaps AI makes planting or production decisions based on benefit to society or societal need rather than profit? I wouldn’t want to be a farmer in a developing country, then, or a producer of anything.
Seems as though there would be a lot of scope for government to try to commandeer production, pricing and redistribution (though that is no different than today, I suppose).
If people can't afford something then by definition it isn't abundant. Abundance means that people can afford it.
If everything you currently consume become free, you would just spend your money on new things. Money wouldn't become worthless. There will always be comparative advantages.
Compared to what? If a small increase in marginal earnings amidst a comfortable existence was a big driver then everyone would have three jobs and be starting new businesses. If the comfort level increases and the value of money devalues in the future, of course risk taking decreases.
Comfort level is relative though, not absolute. If in the future not working would give you whatever you currently consider to be a high standard of living, but would be the lowest 10% of the new society, or you could work your 40 hours and live a middle class life in the new society. All of my experiences and observations tell me people will work so they are not *relatively poor.
Central planning that is competent!?
Human central planning will always be incompetent. What happens, though, if the profit incentive becomes less valuable? Does capitalism remain the worst of all systems….except all the others (ie the best that we have). AI driven resource allocation will definitely be tried. He who controls the permitted inputs and the weighting of the goals controls the future. More like blade runner than Star Trek, maybe
I am still looking for scientific future that foretold the dominance of snapchat. Robots, yes. Flying vehicles, yes. Leaders vying for world domination, yes. But social media and influencers that demonstrate how to put on eye liner and drink egg whites to live to 200? No.
Where are the robots? I distinctly recall being promised robots. So I wouldn't have to work. Too late now, of course.
It's sort of a chicken and egg problem. People need to work because we don't have robots. Therefore they are against robots, because then they won't have a job...which they currently need because we don't have robots.
I am an active 70-year-old who read sci-fi as a teen. Remember, I was promised flying cars and fully automated homes. Robots for sure. While they are closer, I suspect my generation will pass before full adoption of any of this technology, which is likely financially out of reach.
That said, that world envisioned by the sci-fi greats is threatened by an asteroid, nuclear winter, a dying planet so hot humans must live underground and can only come out at night. Technology is wonderful, but nature and humans cannot be tamed; we see the signs of our destruction almost daily.
Hackers, freezing electricity would stop 90% of this tech, or shortly do so within days. That would bring us back to the pre-1900s. How many of us could survive? I don’t know how to farm, hunt or dress field meat. Without a YouTube video, what would I do? Trial and error, I suppose, if I lived long enough.
We are living on the edge, one day it could all go dark, the next some miracle chip that leaves paraplegics walking.
Nature can clearly be tamed. We can turn atoms into unimaginable power. We turn sunlight and wind into power. We can raise the earth's temperature. Soon we will be able to lower earth's temperature.