Five themes about the future and one "impossible" question

Falling in love with A.I.. Transcendental capitalism. Envying the robot. The invasion of ghosts. Immortality and obedience.

Versiunea în limba română a acestui text este aici.

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I’m sure you’ve noticed: most people detach from the present as they grow older.

If time were a forest, what would happen to us is that as we moved away from the first edge, the one we entered through, as we passed through new clearings and paths, not knowing where we would eventually stop, our head would keep turning backward, and from a certain moment onward, we would look increasingly toward the path we've come and less and less toward the mystery that awaits us.

It is a form of protection and a manifestation of a natural fear.

Perhaps that’s why it’s good to try, as much as possible, to remain anchored in the present and curious about the future.

To stay up to date with new ideas, with technology, with young people’s music, with daring films and fresh books.

To let the future guide us. By questioning it, testing it, digging into it, to be a little more prepared for it.

For these reasons, I propose we think about five trends, five projections which, these days, seem increasingly plausible to me.

At the end, I’ve added a problem that I still don’t know whether it encompasses them all or is caused by their sum. The answer is yours.

1. Partnership without a spouse (the generalization of loneliness & falling in love with A.I.)

Just as today we cannot imagine our lives without a mobile phone, in the near future we will not be able to imagine our lives without a virtual assistant equipped with artificial intelligence (A.I.), without an app we talk to almost continuously, which answers any question and induces the illusion that we are not alone.

Tens of millions of people are already conversing with such an assistant, but what is becoming disturbing is that more and more children and young people are falling in love with this daily companion.

In this relationship, anthropomorphization occurs: unconsciously, the mind attributes human traits to the entity it’s talking to.

Why? Because this entity has already reached the level where it not only answers almost any question but also seems to have emotions: humor, openness, and even empathy.

Thus, the more time the child or adolescent spends conversing with such a virtual companion, the more strongly they will feel intimacy, fidelity, and attachment toward “him” (or “her,” depending on the voice they choose to speak to them).

Consequences:

a) Increasingly weak memory exercise. The more you use a virtual assistant, the less you rely on your own memory or what you know, and the more you depend on the “mind” of the entity that gives you answers.

b) An undeclared competition between the A.I. assistant and the real people nearby – family, friends, community. In this competition, people cannot be at your disposal (as the A.I. entity is) and are far from having answers to every question. Plus, the virtual assistant doesn’t judge you, doesn’t scold you, and never gets tired of you.

c) I risk saying that, in the medium term, love and attachment to this assistant will lead to demands for legal partnership with such an A.I. entity (“human-droid” partnership). What political and social effects will these demands have?

2. The intention economy (transcendental capitalism)

According to a recent Harvard University study, the current digital market, focused on capturing and selling attention, is transforming into a market whose commodity will consist of the intentions we reveal online.

Thus, what we now call the “attention economy” is about to become the “intention economy.”

The explanation lies in the generalization of Large Language Model (LLM) applications. The authors of the study say that soon, every time we interact with an institution or commercial company, the interface we will talk to will be such an LLM agent. (The most well-known example is ChatGPT.)

What is an intention? In short, the draft of a decision.

How will our intentions become a commodity? Because the LLM owner will have contracts with all kinds of providers whose interest is to have access to our decisions before they are made.

Currently, a company buys advertising space from Google, Facebook, or TikTok, i.e., access to our attention as social media users.

In the near future, such a company will buy the opportunity for, during the conversation an individual has with the LLM agent, that agent to slip in suggestions for how to spend their time.

For example, the person will be told, casually: “You said you felt like going to the mall — don’t you want me to buy you a ticket to movie X?”

In other words, business partners of the LLM agent’s owner buy the possibility of suggesting possible futures to customers: object purchases, event participation, electoral choices, etc.

Consequences:

a) Capitalism penetrates consciousness and precedes, in a way, human actions; capitalism becomes transcendental (a priori): possibilities, nonexistent futures, unspoken desires are traded.

b) A new branch of psychology called “intentonomy” develops: decoding a person’s intentions based on what they post online. How will it be used for political or military purposes?

c) A kind of anti-human determinism: you no longer get to choose anything on your own because the A.I. bombards your free will with hundreds of tempting options.

3. The expansion of man, the restriction of freedom

One of the major themes related to the future is the implantation of a device in the body through which the human will be permanently connected to the internet.

This device is called a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI). Two of the companies working on such an implant are Neuralink (owned by Elon Musk) and Synchron (among whose financiers are Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos).

Implanting a BCI (in the brain or chest) means connecting with a computer and thus with the network. Currently, the number of electrodes that pick up biological information is in the units, but like with any technology, this number will increase as experiments improve.

In the first phase, the implant will alleviate or could even cure Parkinson’s disease, all kinds of paralysis, blindness, etc.

In the second phase, the BCI holder will be able to control with their mind objects connected to the network nearby.

The key to this issue lies in the amount of information (the so-called output rate) that can be transmitted through BCI. When two people talk, they communicate, roughly, about one word per second, i.e., about one byte.

The great challenge of humanity will lie in the simple fact that two high-performance computers (or two A.I.s) communicate, also in one second, trillions of bytes.

In other words, humans cannot compete with this output rate unless they too become a hybrid — if they “androidize” through a BCI.

Consequences:

a) A pressure is created in which humans come to envy the machine (an idea formulated in the 1950s by the German philosopher Günther Anders): man is ashamed of the flagrant imperfection of his body and the weakness of his processing capacity.

b) In the same sense, “the body is something that must be overcome” (Nietzsche): the widening gap between man and the efficiency of his creations, the temptation to keep up, not to lose the battle.

c) How does the issue of freedom change, considering that once a BCI is implanted, the holder’s brain can be accessed by entities in the network?

Possibility: future wars will be fought only between brains.

4. The invasion of ghosts: five phases

The first phase of the ghost invasion was television. An event that you perceive as an image is, on the one hand, present in your mind and, on the other hand, remains absent, because it is happening elsewhere. But an entity that is both present and absent is a ghost.

The second phase was the invention of social networks: what we create online, as active users, is a ghostly extension of our self — a virtual self that will outlive us and whose fragments are beyond our control.

The third phase of the world’s ghostification has already begun, with the possibility that a person can be extensively recorded during their lifetime, that information entered into an A.I. program, and, after their death, descendants can “talk” with a chatbot that is the digital double of that person. (For example, that famous case.)

The fourth phase of the ghost invasion will probably be the direct insertion into the network, via upload, of an “agent” that will contain the complete information from a person’s memory (see the series Pantheon on Netflix). That agent will have autonomy and will act as a digital ghost.

Finally, the fifth phase of ghostification: the reintroduction of information from such an agent into an artificially produced body, into a robot. In short, animating a mechanical entity with the life data of a deceased person: the “humanization” of the android.

5. Individual immortality, androidization of humanity

What we are experiencing these months — the reshuffling of global spheres of influence — is related to the fierce competition surrounding artificial intelligence.

And here a paradox arises: it’s likely that our memory will be able to be saved in the cloud, but this potential immortality risks being paid for by surrendering human supremacy to an artificial species — one we ourselves have created.

Until then, it is clear that we are witnessing an “A.I. arms race,” especially between the USA and China.

In this competition, the solution proposed by some American billionaires is to be allowed to create autonomous territories where they would be permitted to conduct genetic and pharmacological experiments, as well as human-machine connection experiments.

To win this arms race, America’s political power needs the investments and infrastructure of the major technology platforms, and that means the owners of these platforms will gain ever-increasing influence.

We can assume that the global trend will be an “androidization” of humanity.

In a 1972 essay (“The Android and the Human”), author Philip K. Dick made this prediction:

“Androidization requires obedience. And, most of all, predictability. It is precisely when a given person's response to any given situation can be predicted with scientific accuracy that the gates are open for the wholesale production of the android life form.”

Instead of consequences for this theme, three questions:

a) will there be a collective reaction against this uniformization?

b) what forms will the war against androidization take?

c) can you fight analogically against an all-knowing entity?

6. Redefining the world

At the end of this text, I suggest a theme for which I do not have a coherent answer. I only sense that it’s connected to all of the above.

Its premise sounds like this:

I’ve noticed a growing need to define values and concepts that once were taken for granted.

Specifically: why do we hear more and more often debates regarding the following questions:

• what is the mission of parents?

• what is school, and why do we need it?

• what’s the point of loving anymore?

• why fight for freedom?

• why is reality good?

Could it be that the transfer of human knowledge to A.I. creates this “self-emptying” of humanity?

Could it be that the principle of communicating vessels applies: what we pour into “them,” we lose and forget ourselves?

Could it be that we are in the third phase of Gorgias’s trilemma: we know more and more about the secrets of reality but have lost the ability to communicate them, to pass them on to our children?

Is there a connection between this phenomenon and the fact that children are inventing a new language?

Where did the break happen?

Finally, this is the “impossible” question I promised you at the beginning:

what can still constitute a support for reality, a “maintainer” of reality, in our world?

Pentru cititorii români: despre temele de mai sus am discutat cu domnul Cristian Tudor Popescu în podcastul domnului Cătălin Striblea pe care-l puteți urmări aici: