Good morning, this is Tools of AI, and today we’re staring into the crystal ball. Gather ‘round, let us tell you how AI will change our lives by 2040.
As a society, with the advent of modern life and technology, we’ve become less social.
The trend from joint families to nuclear families is well documented in Asian cultures, where this shift has happened in the last 30 years or so.
With the technological advances we’re making as well – society is moving towards the atomization of the human experience, and this inherently means we are becoming less social.
Take this for example:
In the 1950s, companies would take out ads in newspapers, magazines to appeal to buyers.
Soon that moved to telemarketing- enabled marketers to establish direct contact for the first time.
Later, email marketing- allowed people to engage with others over time.
Then social media marketing- allowed companies to use peoples’ data or pixel (the technical term for when FB follows you around the internet, looking at your browsing history) to make hyper customized ads with hyper specific targeting.
As we move into the AI realm, especially with generative AI and modelling of our data, we’ll start getting virtual experiences that are made just for us. Why would anyone need people if all the friends you need can be custom made for you in Virtual Reality (VR)?
This means the same companies that want to sell to you, can create hyper targeted ads, generated using AI specifically for you, at hardly any cost!
Imagine:
A movie made just for you, starring your favorite actors, in the kind of genre or mix of genres you respond to the most, in the most creative, imaginative way possible, made by AI.
Now imagine this being repeated for all 7.8 billion people on earth.
Now imagine this feat being achieved for everyone on earth, across all of life’s experiences.
Things like:
- Ads just for you that will make you click ‘buy’ ~99% of the time.
- Entertainment just for you.
- Education customized for you.
- Virtual friends (and romantic partners) that gel with you 100% of the time.
- Holidays in the virtual world, customized for your tastes.
More and more of us will start living in the virtual world. In the ‘matrix’.
This seems scary to me. I’m sure you, the reader might feel so too.
I still think it’s going to happen. Because it’s addictive.
As we move towards more and more sophisticated AI systems, it won’t be hard for them to build content tailored to spiking each person’s dopamine throughout the day. Virtual reality enabled with generative AI means that ANYTHING is possible in the virtual world.
Soon, life outside of the virtual world will seem bland, and hence, more and more people choose to live more and more of their life in it.
Is that good or bad? I don’t know. There’s actually a theory that states all civilizations, once they become advanced enough, turn inwards and live in the virtual world.
Perhaps that’s why we haven’t seen any other life in the universe yet.
If you were to tell your grandparents back in the 50s and 60s that people in 2023 would mostly spend their time indoors staring at a screen for 8-10 hours and call that work- they’d probably say that sounds like a hellish life.
But it’s normal for us.
We get used to stuff very easily. And become mentally inflexible very easily. Why should we comment on what the future generations should be like?
The puck, as I see it is moving towards society becoming more digital, less social, perhaps getting to a point where we merge with AI in some way. Whether that is through the use of a Brain-Computer-Interface (Elon Musk’s Neuralink is an example of that) or some other technology.
That’s all for today. Taking my divination professor hat off now.
Slightly different sort of newsletter today. Let me know what you think.
Talk soon, Shubhankar