I agree that many people focus on “superhuman intelligence, sooner or later or never” and ignore the possibility of how a human-level or even below-human-level intelligence can change the world if it becomes cheap enough.
I heard a rumor about someone who made lots of money by telling an AI to generate thousands of e-books and selling them on Amazon. Previously people did a similar thing by scraping Wikipedia pages and selling them as books, but this is different—the books are not obviously scam, they are probably just mediocre; and as the AIs get better, the new books will get better, until enough people realize they do not need to buy them, because they can ask an AI directly.
I imagine similar “shovelware” everywhere. There are probably already many people accepting programming or artistic tasks online, giving them to an AI, and getting paid for the result. If you want to make money this way, do it quickly, because at some moment people will realize they can ask an AI directly.
This may be a convenient time to establish fake artistic credentials. Create a page on Patreon, and ask an AI to make deliberately bad pictures… gradually improving, so that people can see your artistic progress. Later, when the backlash against AI art comes, people will stop trusting art from random strangers online, but you will have established credentials as an actual human artist, so you can charge extra for “hand made” art.
At some moment, software development will become “put an AI into a box, and tell it what to do”. For example, to program a new Tetris game, you will simply take a generic AI and tell it “do Tetris”; and that’s all. To create an entirely new game, you will provide a verbal explanations, a few example screenshots (generated by another AI), and tell the AI “do this”.
There will be many “experts” online who will basically be an interface between you and an AI. You will call a human doctor or a financial advisor or a motivational coach, and the person will listen to you, while silently typing questions to an AI, and then will tell you the results, and charge you $100 per hour.
If many cheap appliances get an AI component, I expect most things to be commanded by voice. An AI with a camera will be a powerful combination, the appliance will be able to see what is there, and make some logical conclusion. Your gas stove will tell you “I think the food might be ready, would you like to check it?”, your fridge will remind you that you are out of butter, and by the way the box of milk is already open for a week you might want to check it. Toys will talk to children, and accept verbal instructions.
...and this all will be used for surveillance, because of course an intelligent device can provide much better information about you. Not just what you do, but whether you smile or frown when you do it; whether you also use devices made by competition; whether it seems like you have extra money to buy an upgrade; what other devices are missing at your home.
...also, advertising everywhere. The toys will tell your kids to buy merchandise. The kitchen appliances will recommend you to buy food from specific distributors. The computer games will model their villains based on politicians who propose to regulate advertising and surveillance.
Online, it will be possible to create a cheap “Matrix” for people. Imagine being on a web forum where everyone else is a bot, and you are the only human there. But you will never know, because the bots will post interesting things, debate with you, flirt with you, invite you to read other websites… and occasionally do the thing they were made for, like try to make you buy some products or vote for a certain party. You will be a follower of a conspiracy theory that was tailor-made for you; thousands bots coming with random ideas, and whatever you upvote, there will be more of that, and whatever you write, will be incorporated in the theory, as long as it can be made compatible with the main goal. People online will never feel alone again. At the beginning, this will be an operation targeted at specific people (they may be met by actual humans who introduce them to a web forum where they receive a warm approval from bots, and then everything will be handled by the bots), but as it gets cheaper, they will try to catch everyone in their own separate “Matrix”.
Even the real people you meet will often be working for similar companies—their role will be to sometimes meet you offline, to provide evidence that they are actual humans, but as soon as you return to the screen, you will only interact with a bot that simulates them. So once in a year your private “Matrix” can have an offline meetup, where you meet dozen people from a specialized agency who will role-play members of your web forum. (Their job is to go to a different meetup every week with a different identity.)
Or to turn it around, people will use AIs to pretend to be them, and outsource the tasks such as calling your parents, or maintaining contacts with your former classmates and colleagues. Hey, it costs nothing to let an AI handle a personal relationship you don’t really care about, and you never know when you can get some useful service from “an old friend”. The future of seduction is to have a bot seduce someone and arrange a date, and you just go there to have sex with them. The future of prostitution is the same, only you also let the bot find out some pretext why the other person should send you money. The girlfriend you once met at a party, and since then you call each other every day and talk a lot about various topics and she is really smart and nice, but she is too busy with her work and she is living in another city, and how she has a financial problem, but if you send her some money she will be able to quit her current job and move closer to you… I am sorry, but she is not real. She is just a girl who goes to parties, collects phone numbers from guys and enters them in a computer; that’s all, everything that happened afterwards was fake.
I agree that many people focus on “superhuman intelligence, sooner or later or never” and ignore the possibility of how a human-level or even below-human-level intelligence can change the world if it becomes cheap enough.
I heard a rumor about someone who made lots of money by telling an AI to generate thousands of e-books and selling them on Amazon. Previously people did a similar thing by scraping Wikipedia pages and selling them as books, but this is different—the books are not obviously scam, they are probably just mediocre; and as the AIs get better, the new books will get better, until enough people realize they do not need to buy them, because they can ask an AI directly.
I imagine similar “shovelware” everywhere. There are probably already many people accepting programming or artistic tasks online, giving them to an AI, and getting paid for the result. If you want to make money this way, do it quickly, because at some moment people will realize they can ask an AI directly.
This may be a convenient time to establish fake artistic credentials. Create a page on Patreon, and ask an AI to make deliberately bad pictures… gradually improving, so that people can see your artistic progress. Later, when the backlash against AI art comes, people will stop trusting art from random strangers online, but you will have established credentials as an actual human artist, so you can charge extra for “hand made” art.
At some moment, software development will become “put an AI into a box, and tell it what to do”. For example, to program a new Tetris game, you will simply take a generic AI and tell it “do Tetris”; and that’s all. To create an entirely new game, you will provide a verbal explanations, a few example screenshots (generated by another AI), and tell the AI “do this”.
There will be many “experts” online who will basically be an interface between you and an AI. You will call a human doctor or a financial advisor or a motivational coach, and the person will listen to you, while silently typing questions to an AI, and then will tell you the results, and charge you $100 per hour.
If many cheap appliances get an AI component, I expect most things to be commanded by voice. An AI with a camera will be a powerful combination, the appliance will be able to see what is there, and make some logical conclusion. Your gas stove will tell you “I think the food might be ready, would you like to check it?”, your fridge will remind you that you are out of butter, and by the way the box of milk is already open for a week you might want to check it. Toys will talk to children, and accept verbal instructions.
...and this all will be used for surveillance, because of course an intelligent device can provide much better information about you. Not just what you do, but whether you smile or frown when you do it; whether you also use devices made by competition; whether it seems like you have extra money to buy an upgrade; what other devices are missing at your home.
...also, advertising everywhere. The toys will tell your kids to buy merchandise. The kitchen appliances will recommend you to buy food from specific distributors. The computer games will model their villains based on politicians who propose to regulate advertising and surveillance.
Online, it will be possible to create a cheap “Matrix” for people. Imagine being on a web forum where everyone else is a bot, and you are the only human there. But you will never know, because the bots will post interesting things, debate with you, flirt with you, invite you to read other websites… and occasionally do the thing they were made for, like try to make you buy some products or vote for a certain party. You will be a follower of a conspiracy theory that was tailor-made for you; thousands bots coming with random ideas, and whatever you upvote, there will be more of that, and whatever you write, will be incorporated in the theory, as long as it can be made compatible with the main goal. People online will never feel alone again. At the beginning, this will be an operation targeted at specific people (they may be met by actual humans who introduce them to a web forum where they receive a warm approval from bots, and then everything will be handled by the bots), but as it gets cheaper, they will try to catch everyone in their own separate “Matrix”.
Even the real people you meet will often be working for similar companies—their role will be to sometimes meet you offline, to provide evidence that they are actual humans, but as soon as you return to the screen, you will only interact with a bot that simulates them. So once in a year your private “Matrix” can have an offline meetup, where you meet dozen people from a specialized agency who will role-play members of your web forum. (Their job is to go to a different meetup every week with a different identity.)
Or to turn it around, people will use AIs to pretend to be them, and outsource the tasks such as calling your parents, or maintaining contacts with your former classmates and colleagues. Hey, it costs nothing to let an AI handle a personal relationship you don’t really care about, and you never know when you can get some useful service from “an old friend”. The future of seduction is to have a bot seduce someone and arrange a date, and you just go there to have sex with them. The future of prostitution is the same, only you also let the bot find out some pretext why the other person should send you money. The girlfriend you once met at a party, and since then you call each other every day and talk a lot about various topics and she is really smart and nice, but she is too busy with her work and she is living in another city, and how she has a financial problem, but if you send her some money she will be able to quit her current job and move closer to you… I am sorry, but she is not real. She is just a girl who goes to parties, collects phone numbers from guys and enters them in a computer; that’s all, everything that happened afterwards was fake.