State of tech and what beholds us
Techno Feudalism is no longer a theory, it is our future. Big tech has been getting increasingly powerful. While I still believe the government would try it’s best to break down the monopolies and give more power to the end consumer, they strictly cannot govern consumer behaviour which for the most part does not care about a Duck Duck Go when they have Google.
Deep Learning algorithms will govern a lot of what the future has to offer. Earth will be de and reconstructed using efficient data structures which will enable faster and more efficient commerce between worlds.
“Software will eat the world”
This is already being implemented in places you would not even imagine. Disney has had a long history of park worker rights protests about their pay, work hours etc but Disney has been rather mute about the issues. Let’s take a look at Disney Research Studios, it’s not about the next generation of animations and making Pixar more life like. Disney Research Studios is an Artificial Intelligence / Robotics lab, specialising in robotics research which is years ahead of anyone in the field. Why is that?
End goal is: A robot theme park.
If you think about it, there is not that much of a difference between a robot in a darth vader costume than a real human. With good enough machine learning, we can make them perform any task that a human would do. Want vader to say happy birthday? Just implement multi-modality. Any new show, any cool stunts never thought of before are just an instruction away.
The best part? these robot workers do not require to be paid, get sick, or take maternal leaves. And this is not unique to just Disney, this will be replicated across industries, do you really think Ford and GM are gonna wait for some other vehicle manufacturer to build robots and make cars faster and cheaper than them. the age of blue collar jobs is heading towards an end. Machines, a thousand times faster and a million times more efficient than men are here to replace them.
China is already leagues ahead of the US in this aspect. Simple example, almost every toll booth in china has a robotic arm which takes the ticket, gives it to the driver and collects the cash. Okay from a logistic perspective it is not an efficient system. This can easily be solved with a dispenser machine for example but look at the amount of data being collected. One billion people live in china, the us has one third of that which means the states will take 3 times the number of years to generate the same quantity of data. And as you know
Data is the new oil
As cringe as the statement has gotten in twitter circles, it is true. And southeast asia is the new middle east.
With that being established, as of 2024, the “iPhone moment” of AI has still not come, people credit ChatGPT and OpenAI for being the pioneers in this but looking at the history of the tech industry, the pioneers almost never make it big (example: Xerox invented the personal computer, the mouse and the worlds first GUI a decade before anyone else). Anthropic as of writing of this blog is killing it with the 3.5 Sonnet. Hope the trend continues with the 3.5 Opus teased to be released later this year.
There are definitely crazy things which are about to come during the next few years, the only question is, are you with the mythics or the epics.
Happy star wars day btw. May the 4th be with you!