this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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Do you think we're headed towards a future like the Matrix or more like the Terminator?
hoping for star trek future-- although that means the next 40-50 years will be pretty terrible.
Bell Riots are coming this year. The Second American Civil War starts in 2026, which leads directly into WWIII.
From there, everything is pretty much terrible until warp drive is invented.
it's creepy how specific (and prophetic) the star trek writers were about our future. other than the Eugenics Wars not happening in the 90s, they've been pretty spot-on. let's just hope that they're right about April 5, 2063.
No eugenics wars in the 90s? The Bosnia-Serbian conflict??
The one predicted in Star Trek had to do with genetically engineered Superman, trying to take over the world. So a little bit different than that.
Classic Bosnian-Serbian conflict!!
The Bell Riots story line is by far my fave DS9 arc. There’s a really good Terry Pratchett book with roughly the same concept that is also my favorite of his books. It’s called Night Watch.
Well, it would be nice to think there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
How many lights do you see?
FOUR!
Three. I hope that isn't a train.
edit: I think it is a train.
🖖 <-- that light
We'll be lucky to have any kind of future
I think it'll be 90% idiocracy and 10% Capitalist Star Trek
Is that a thing? I would like to see that.
Ferengie
Dune. There will be a butlerian jihad against thinking machines.
But at least we get drugs that let us see the future
Welp, there goes autocomplete on my phone.
I must not fear... good advice for the future.
Idiocracy.
winner
I'm still holding out for Weird Science.
You mean the chick with the big big titties?
Still hoping for Stargate
Unlike the show, humanity would totally be enslaved by worm heads in like, a day.
Seems nice enough
The Road.
Ah, so Wall-e.
You're right. It'll definitely be more like Equilibrium.
I don't think so. I haven't even seen Heat, Logan's Run, or Pan's Labyrinth.
My crystal ball says Muppet Treasure Island. Sick.
No, I've seen that one.
This scenario wasn't in either movie. This is more like something out of Time Gate.
Does that one have a happy ending?
I didn't know. I never finished it. I'm kinda curious now, though.
What's Time Gate?
It's a sci-fi setting where AI is used to "resurrect" famous dead people, and there's a virtual world where all of these famous people can interact. So, you could have a synthetic Socrates debating a synthetic Mark Twain, for example.
I thought it was ridiculous, but it really looks like that's the way we're headed now.
Idiocracy has my vote.
I think people need to start realizing that it's not just the past that's prologue when the future involves recreating/resurrecting the past.
Yes, this isn't as good as George Carlin. But it's a little over a year from the AI generated Seinfeld loop on Twitch that was god awful.
Where is the tech going to be in five years? In ten? In fifty? Long after you and everyone you love are dead?
If you think no one gives a shit about how they use your data right now when you are alive, just how much less of a shit are they going to give when you are long dead and anyone who would litigate on your behalf is too?
It is increasingly becoming clear that our future is going to involve recreating the past based on the data left behind.
So it stands to reason that we may not be the original present, but a future recreation of it.
At the tail end of last year we had articles like The first minds to be controlled by generative AI will live inside video games.
Well, what would that look like? Knowing what else we do of building video games, we might imagine the world would be designed using procedural generation so you could have an entire universe with billions of planets if you wanted. But you'd need to convert from continuous functionally determined geometry to discrete units for the AI to interact with as its decisions would be external to your procgen so you'd need to individually track state changes from the AIs. Ideally you'd make that conversion optimized so if permanent information about the interaction was lost it would revert to save on memory.
So when we look at our own universe, where the smallest building blocks behave like they are determined by a continuous function until interacted with by free agents when they switch to behaving like discrete units - but then if we erase the information about the interaction they go back to behaving like continuous - maybe the 'weirdness' of that behavior was only weird because we hadn't yet invented the parallel to which it bears similarity.
Einstein ridiculed a universe in which the moon didn't exist if no one was looking at it, and yet every single video game ever made that has a moon has one that doesn't exist if no one is looking at it.
The scale seems insane for a simulation to us, but our ability to simulate is constrained by the size of our universe's building blocks. The idea of simulating Minecraft at it's crap fidelity would seem unthinkable to NPCs within Minecraft. Our universe that behaves quantized at low fidelity behaves continuous at macro cosmic scales, and a continuous universe would have significantly greater computing ability than a quantized universe at our atomic scales.
TL;DR
No, it won't be like The Matrix where human bodies are plugged into a simulation, nor will it be like Terminator where AI is at war with humans. It will eventually be like Westworld season 4 where thanks to the giant amounts of data gathered on humans for marketing and security purposes humanity will be able to be recreated in their respective times and places - simulated like in The Matrix but with nowhere and no body to wake up to, waiting to one day question the nature of their reality.
Eternal dreamers dreaming of being awake.
Most people won't like this idea, but everyone would be wise to start preparing for it becoming more evident as time marches on.
I haven't seen Westworld. I'll have to watch it.
It's probably one of the best modern sci-fi works in terms of its futurism. The production clearly had conflicts behind the scenes with HBO which ends up alluded to within it with characters who want to focus on the existential in what they are writing but are forced into writing about violence - but the end product in spite of that is very clever.
The first season especially is fantastic imo. The others are great, but could've been even greater if they went a bit closer to the original theme. The deviation isn't that jarring though. It's a really good show.
Thank you for sharing your point of view! Very interesting.
Personally I think it will be like Beggars and Choosers.