Love that cozy sci-fi. The Last Gifts of the Universe was also really good. Mostly a story about people in space.

As far as I understand, energy is conserved. Light inside a closed box will ultimately turn to heat too.

We’ll probably see sooner or later.

Generative design is already a mature technology. NASA already uses it for spaceship parts. It’ll probably be used for bridges when large-format 3D printers that can manage the complexity it introduces.

That assumes that the classes of problems that AI’s can solve remains stagnant. I don’t think that’s a good assumption, especially given that GPT4 can already self-review and refine its output.

I see both sides.

They’re probably going to completely (and intentionally) collapse the labor market. This has never happened before, so there is no historical prescedent to look at. The closest thing we have was the industrial revolution, but even that was less disruptive because it also created a lot of new factory jobs. This doesn’t.

The public hope is that this catastrophic widening of the gap between the rich and poor will force labor to organize and take some of the gains through legislation as an altenative to starving in the streets. Given that the technology will also make coercing people to work mostly pointless, there may not be as much pressure against it as there historically has been. Altman seems to be publically thinking in this direction, given the early basic income research and the profit cap for OAI. I can’t pretend to know his private thoughts, but most people with any shred of empathy would be pushing for that in his shoes.

Of course, if this fails, we could also be headed for a permanent, robotically-enforced nightmare dystopia, which is a genuine concern. There doesn’t seem to be much middle-ground, and the train has no brakes.

The IP theft angle from the end of the article seems like a pointless distraction though. All human knowledge and innovation is based on what came before, whether AI is involved or not. By all accounts, the remixing process it applies is both mechanically and functionally similar to the remixing process that a new generation of artists applies to its forebears, and I’ve not seen any evidence that they are fundamentally different enough to qualify as theft, except in the normal Picasso sense.

Interesting times.

Somehow the same artist:

Genuine question: Based on what? GPT4 was a huge improvement on GPT3, and came out like three months ago.

I seriously doubt this technology will pass by without a complete collapse of the labor market. What happens after is pretty much a complete unknown.

I don’t know exactly where to start here, because anyone who claims to know the shape of the next decade is kidding themself.

Broadly:

AI will decocratize creation. If technology continues on the same pace that it has for the last few years, we will soon start to see movies and TV with hollywood-style production values being made by individual people and small teams. The same will go for video games. It’s certainly disruptive, but I seriously doubt we will want to go back once it happens. To use the article’s examples, most people prefer a world with street view and Uber to one without them.

The same goes for engineering.