Technology

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.