Artificial intelligence will 'infect' every surface of life and business. The Internet is merely a distribution platform for intelligence (and yes that includes TikTok videos). Its first distribution chore was slow and quaint, it was human. The intelligence was always the higher value, not the distribution network.
Distribution of intelligence: data, photos, video, communications, transactions, entertainment, et al.
And to be clear, it doesn't matter if some random commentors on HN don't think very highly of some or all of the intelligence being distributed. Their elitist opinion of the quality of intelligence of a given thing doesn't matter as to whether it's happening or not.
When a 16 year old records a cloned TikTok dance video, edits it, and then publishes it, that's intelligence distribution. That's a person thinking through a series of actions to try to communicate to an end audience, via an entertaining medium. That's intelligence being distributed over the Internet. That's the quaint, slow, human form of it.
Up to this point that distribution was basically entirely human, capped (post saturation) at slow growth N intelligence output (derived from the total number of humans and their time / productivity capabilities). AI uncaps that and radically expands intelligence output & distribution at a growth rate that is so fast you might as well start picturing the planet having tens or hundreds of billions of people on it. The human population will shrink, the artificial population will increase dramatically. People will have more artificial friends than human friends within ~20-30 years.
A few decades from now the notion of thinking of computing separate from AI will be so foreign most people won't understand what you're talking about. It will just be thought of as computing. Humans will forget a time when we weren't augmented by the constant presence of artificial intelligence. Try taking 'smart' phones away from the masses. In about a decade try taking away their helper agents. A decade after that try taking away their home robots.
The steroid jump is AI + robotics. The Internet is trite compared to what comes out of that over the rest of this century. Robotics will physically remake our world, in a way the Internet can't. We'll deposit tens of billions of robots onto the surface of the planet and they will almost all be the result of having figured out how to make intelligence (relatively) easy & (relatively) cheap. I'm not talking about Roombas.
The Information Age is over. We're into the Age of Intelligence (insert the unavoidable quips about humanity & intelligence).
The Internet is just one way to move intelligence around (a robot body is another, a smartphone is another, a human body is another, and so on). It's a sub value to intelligence broadly. Intelligence is the ultimate value. The valuations (and sales growth) for OpenAI and Anthropic is because they're vast intelligence output machines in the Age of Intelligence, ditto Nvidia's business boom. We can now mass manufacture intelligence at an accelerating clip, and it has gotten cheaper at a comical rate over the past few years. While HN comments snort about pelican improvements day to day, the leap over a few years is astronomical in regards to what significant AI systems can now do (with LLMs being just one type of that).
this is tech fart sniffing self-aggrandization. You’re saying words that mean nothing. Tens of billions of robots? To do what, exactly? Have you ever interacted with people, not nerds, real human people? Real people don’t crave a future filled with robots, real people want real people.
The world will be filled with robots is not the inspired forward-thinking of a visionary it is the uninspired regurgitated science fiction of someone who doesn’t care to understand that the world is people, a society.
There's nothing that is going to stop the AI-robot saturated future from arriving. It doesn't matter if you dislike it.
China will have many billions of robots just in their industrial efforts alone. Every house and every apartment in China will saturate with robots of various usefulness. That single market will be at least 10+ billion in scale.
There will be a billion robots for just the delivery and transport categories globally. We're going to peak at at least 10 billion humans (population), a billion robots for delivery & transport segments is easy.
In the toy category there will eventually be far in excess of a billion robots. They will seem quite advanced compared to what we presently are used to in that category. The Microduck is a primitive example of what will be a large industry around smart entertaining toys. Your artificial friends will be able to 'hop into' (take control of) your Microduck (whatever the 2035-2050 equivalent is) and cruise around the house or wherever you're at. Entertainment will continue to be a gigantic industry and that will obviously apply to AI + life. We haven't even begun down the road of AI + entertainment, it's less than early there.
Every household in the world will eventually have numerous robots, from primitive robots (including single purpose and toys), to advanced humanoid robots. It won't take longer than 2050-2060 to push $10k-$20k humanoid robots into middle class or upper middle class homes. China will put enormous pressure on the cost of those robots, and they'll mass sell them to the bottom 4/5 of the world in terms of household incomes (that is, they'll come up from the floor on price and take most of the market, while some companies in affluent nations will produce more expensive high-end humanoid bots, ala what Tesla is attempting).
Tens of billions of robots globally is easy. 200-300 billion artificial friends is also an easy prediction. Social junkies will have 50-100 artificial friends that they try to tend to. It'll largely replace platforms like Facebook, the utility that served for the average person. Humans will get a lot more isolated from each other and as that occurs they'll fill in the void.
If real people want real people, then why is everyone at the coffee shop, on the train, at parties, and even at the dinner table all looking at their phones? Not all the time, but way too much of the time, imo.
The masses won't think it's awful though, and that's the thing that will facilitate its explosion as a commonality across the planet. The masses are extremely lonely all over the planet. Along with desperately loving entertainment, they desperately want companionship.
Just as human intelligence is merely one form of intelligence, human companionship will be merely one form of companionship. AI friends will offer a new type. And for the masses it's going to feel very real and very legitimate. They'll like their AI friends as much or more than they like their human friends.
And the fake friend explosion can happen first quietly, which eliminates the initial shame phase problem. Nobody will have to know you have fake friends, or how much you interact with them. Until it's common it'll be viewed as shameful (pathetic, proof of social ineptness) and mocked by society, then it'll be normalized. This idea isn't novel, it's extremely obvious and right now we're just waiting for a few pieces of the LLM puzzle to get to the point where they're good enough to facilitate high quality artificial friends.
It'll happen shockingly rapidly when it sparks; slowly at first and then in the span of 3-5 years we'll go from nobody having or being willing to admit to having artificial friends, to everybody openly discussing it. It will then seem more odd to not have artificial friends, like people that refuse to own smartphones or use the Internet. People will start commonly referring to their artificial friends by name in conversations with other human friends. These behaviors will become entirely socially normal.
"Yeah I had Alice clean the house before I went on vacation." Every major personal robot, every artificial friend, will get a name. Humans name their vehicles, so they're definitely going to name their $10k-$20k house bot and the artificial friends they spend large amounts of time with. When you go on a long drive (etc), your artificial friends will be there to keep you company, and they will remember your life events as well or better than you do (if you give them access to that recording/memory capability).
There's a rising trend among gen alpha to not use phones or internet to get back their youth period that was ruined by the algorithms. I predict this trend will continue, and I myself am yearning to use less technology each day (but can't because of salary!).
But yeah, masses will do masses stuff and that's why even shit products can sell.
Artificial intelligence will 'infect' every surface of life and business. The Internet is merely a distribution platform for intelligence (and yes that includes TikTok videos). Its first distribution chore was slow and quaint, it was human. The intelligence was always the higher value, not the distribution network.
Distribution of intelligence: data, photos, video, communications, transactions, entertainment, et al.
And to be clear, it doesn't matter if some random commentors on HN don't think very highly of some or all of the intelligence being distributed. Their elitist opinion of the quality of intelligence of a given thing doesn't matter as to whether it's happening or not.
When a 16 year old records a cloned TikTok dance video, edits it, and then publishes it, that's intelligence distribution. That's a person thinking through a series of actions to try to communicate to an end audience, via an entertaining medium. That's intelligence being distributed over the Internet. That's the quaint, slow, human form of it.
Up to this point that distribution was basically entirely human, capped (post saturation) at slow growth N intelligence output (derived from the total number of humans and their time / productivity capabilities). AI uncaps that and radically expands intelligence output & distribution at a growth rate that is so fast you might as well start picturing the planet having tens or hundreds of billions of people on it. The human population will shrink, the artificial population will increase dramatically. People will have more artificial friends than human friends within ~20-30 years.
A few decades from now the notion of thinking of computing separate from AI will be so foreign most people won't understand what you're talking about. It will just be thought of as computing. Humans will forget a time when we weren't augmented by the constant presence of artificial intelligence. Try taking 'smart' phones away from the masses. In about a decade try taking away their helper agents. A decade after that try taking away their home robots.
The steroid jump is AI + robotics. The Internet is trite compared to what comes out of that over the rest of this century. Robotics will physically remake our world, in a way the Internet can't. We'll deposit tens of billions of robots onto the surface of the planet and they will almost all be the result of having figured out how to make intelligence (relatively) easy & (relatively) cheap. I'm not talking about Roombas.
The Information Age is over. We're into the Age of Intelligence (insert the unavoidable quips about humanity & intelligence).
The Internet is just one way to move intelligence around (a robot body is another, a smartphone is another, a human body is another, and so on). It's a sub value to intelligence broadly. Intelligence is the ultimate value. The valuations (and sales growth) for OpenAI and Anthropic is because they're vast intelligence output machines in the Age of Intelligence, ditto Nvidia's business boom. We can now mass manufacture intelligence at an accelerating clip, and it has gotten cheaper at a comical rate over the past few years. While HN comments snort about pelican improvements day to day, the leap over a few years is astronomical in regards to what significant AI systems can now do (with LLMs being just one type of that).
this is tech fart sniffing self-aggrandization. You’re saying words that mean nothing. Tens of billions of robots? To do what, exactly? Have you ever interacted with people, not nerds, real human people? Real people don’t crave a future filled with robots, real people want real people.
The world will be filled with robots is not the inspired forward-thinking of a visionary it is the uninspired regurgitated science fiction of someone who doesn’t care to understand that the world is people, a society.
There's nothing that is going to stop the AI-robot saturated future from arriving. It doesn't matter if you dislike it.
China will have many billions of robots just in their industrial efforts alone. Every house and every apartment in China will saturate with robots of various usefulness. That single market will be at least 10+ billion in scale.
There will be a billion robots for just the delivery and transport categories globally. We're going to peak at at least 10 billion humans (population), a billion robots for delivery & transport segments is easy.
In the toy category there will eventually be far in excess of a billion robots. They will seem quite advanced compared to what we presently are used to in that category. The Microduck is a primitive example of what will be a large industry around smart entertaining toys. Your artificial friends will be able to 'hop into' (take control of) your Microduck (whatever the 2035-2050 equivalent is) and cruise around the house or wherever you're at. Entertainment will continue to be a gigantic industry and that will obviously apply to AI + life. We haven't even begun down the road of AI + entertainment, it's less than early there.
Every household in the world will eventually have numerous robots, from primitive robots (including single purpose and toys), to advanced humanoid robots. It won't take longer than 2050-2060 to push $10k-$20k humanoid robots into middle class or upper middle class homes. China will put enormous pressure on the cost of those robots, and they'll mass sell them to the bottom 4/5 of the world in terms of household incomes (that is, they'll come up from the floor on price and take most of the market, while some companies in affluent nations will produce more expensive high-end humanoid bots, ala what Tesla is attempting).
Tens of billions of robots globally is easy. 200-300 billion artificial friends is also an easy prediction. Social junkies will have 50-100 artificial friends that they try to tend to. It'll largely replace platforms like Facebook, the utility that served for the average person. Humans will get a lot more isolated from each other and as that occurs they'll fill in the void.
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If real people want real people, then why is everyone at the coffee shop, on the train, at parties, and even at the dinner table all looking at their phones? Not all the time, but way too much of the time, imo.
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> People will have more artificial friends than human friends within ~20-30 years.
That would be awful, presuming that the artificial friends are not people.
Separately, you might like Count to the Eschaton by John Wright with its ultimate project being "the sophistication of all matter".
The masses won't think it's awful though, and that's the thing that will facilitate its explosion as a commonality across the planet. The masses are extremely lonely all over the planet. Along with desperately loving entertainment, they desperately want companionship.
Just as human intelligence is merely one form of intelligence, human companionship will be merely one form of companionship. AI friends will offer a new type. And for the masses it's going to feel very real and very legitimate. They'll like their AI friends as much or more than they like their human friends.
And the fake friend explosion can happen first quietly, which eliminates the initial shame phase problem. Nobody will have to know you have fake friends, or how much you interact with them. Until it's common it'll be viewed as shameful (pathetic, proof of social ineptness) and mocked by society, then it'll be normalized. This idea isn't novel, it's extremely obvious and right now we're just waiting for a few pieces of the LLM puzzle to get to the point where they're good enough to facilitate high quality artificial friends.
It'll happen shockingly rapidly when it sparks; slowly at first and then in the span of 3-5 years we'll go from nobody having or being willing to admit to having artificial friends, to everybody openly discussing it. It will then seem more odd to not have artificial friends, like people that refuse to own smartphones or use the Internet. People will start commonly referring to their artificial friends by name in conversations with other human friends. These behaviors will become entirely socially normal.
"Yeah I had Alice clean the house before I went on vacation." Every major personal robot, every artificial friend, will get a name. Humans name their vehicles, so they're definitely going to name their $10k-$20k house bot and the artificial friends they spend large amounts of time with. When you go on a long drive (etc), your artificial friends will be there to keep you company, and they will remember your life events as well or better than you do (if you give them access to that recording/memory capability).
4 replies →
There's a rising trend among gen alpha to not use phones or internet to get back their youth period that was ruined by the algorithms. I predict this trend will continue, and I myself am yearning to use less technology each day (but can't because of salary!).
But yeah, masses will do masses stuff and that's why even shit products can sell.
>People will have more artificial friends than human friends within ~20-30 years.
How do you envision an "artificial friend"