AI “white mirror” – what are some inspiring future visions you've seen?

Technology just magnifies what's already happening in society (occasionally it disrupts it). What are some good things in our modern society?

I'm not a biologist but probably mRNA stuff or medicine that works with your genetic code to give you true immunity, cure chronic diseases, etc.

Automation creating a post-scarcity environment where people focus more on expanding their freedoms and quality of life instead of working more and more (unlikely if the last half-century is anything to go by).

Social media fostering a sense of "global citizenship" making wars based on nationality less likely (or at least harder to drum up support for). Imagine trying to justify the Iraq war to US citizens in 2023. There would be Iraqi Youtubers making videos humanizing their struggle. You might have Iraqi online friends in your Discord servers etc who make you question if the US Military is actually a "force for good". We can see this happening in Ukraine as we speak, granted nobody was really a fan of Russia to begin with, but I think most of us can point to a Ukrainian influencer or someone in our social circle that is directly affected by the invasion.

In a distant sense, I find the Culture series of novels to be an inspiring vision of the future. People develop AI and technology to master nature on a planetary scale, and largely live peaceful, happy lives.

In a nearby sense, I am inspired every time I do random household chores, by thinking that maybe AI and robots will be able to do this soon. Folding clothes, picking up toys, putting things away where they go, cooking dinner, putting the dirty dishes into the dishwasher, putting the clean dishes away on the shelves, taking out the trash, driving to the corner store to pick up a fresh baguette.

Online help for all apps will be pro-active.

Routine letters will be auto-generated, including letters to politicians. This will level the playing field for immigrants.

Customer service will improve radically: chatbots will actually understand what you're trying to do, and be better able to do it. Fingers crossed, voice phone tree IVR systems will finally go away.

Screensavers (including TV backgrounds) will be generative visual content and be inspiring, dynamic, any kind of content and it'll match the user and setting.

Project management tools (e.g. Jira) will capture requirements (plain English) and warn if a project is diverging or failing to meet the requirements. Obviously, this will start with the easy stuff and move to the complex stuff.

From circuits to architecture to the labels of products to logos, we'll create much more complex, interesting and varied designs with the aid of AI to both generate the designs and check that they meet requirements, including aesthetic judgments. In many cases, AI will simply issue warnings that something maybe wrong and for a human to check. Today, we use symmetry as a way to "scale up" a design - in the future, we'll use AI to generate non-repeating patterns that are nonetheless "beautiful."

The dark stuff will happen SO quickly, that governments will be forced to react, where today we pay lip service. For example, AI capital allocation will wildly reinforce the Pareto distribution (google it) requiring new and more aggressive capital reallocation structures (including taxation).

analytics reports and spreadsheets will be created by voice - you say what you want, then make adjustments. At the same time, external data sources will be able to be "pulled in" and ETL'd, also by voice.

I think AI-assisted healthcare is inevitable and will probably offer the biggest improvement in the general population's health for decades, it will focus on disease prevention and flagging up those early warning signs that most people don't usually notice

This story features part of the world going Black Mirror at the same time as another part goes (arguably) White Mirror:

Manna – Two Views of Humanity's Future by Marshall Brain https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

AI service or feature that find common ground and rephrase concerns to help people find agreement.

In this contentious world we live in, I feel like all we really need is a little more love for our common earthbound inhabitants.

This could work for neighborly disagreements or even bigger stuff.

AI babysitter for infants to supplement – not replace – parents. Captures audio / biometrics and responds to the baby with targeted music, positive affirmations, cooing, etc, to promote positive emotional state. Also notifies parents of states that require their intervention, like hunger, soiled diaper, abnormal vitals, inconsolability. Parents can take a break, watch a movie, entertain friends, etc, with the comfort of knowing their baby is being intelligently monitored. Existing baby monitors are way more noise than signal.

"All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", by Richard Brautigan (1967)

I like to think (and

the sooner the better!)

of a cybernetic meadow

where mammals and computers

live together in mutually

programming harmony

like pure water

touching clear sky.

I like to think

     (right now please!)

of a cybernetic forest

filled with pines and electronics

where deer stroll peacefully

past computers

as if they were flowers

with spinning blossoms.

I like to think

     (it has to be!)

of a cybernetic ecology

where we are free of our labors

and joined back to nature,

returned to our mammal

brothers and sisters,

and all watched over

by machines of loving grace.

AI diagnosing disease better than any one doctor can. If we could build a model with a normalized dataset of everyone's medical history, we could catch a lot of diseases early. Especially if we encourage people to report even minor symptoms when they have it.

Imagine for example that everyone who gets diagnosed with pancreatic cancer reported repeated congestion of the left nostril three years before diagnosis. It's unlikely any doctor would ever make that connection, but an AI could, and then suggest regular pancreatic cancer screening to people reporting frequent left nostril congestion.

The most beautiful one I've read is from 'The Gentle Seduction' by Marc Stiegler [0] It's a wonderful short read.

[0]http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html

Self driving cars, or at least semi automatic cars will be very big. If the car can truly self drive, it can be rebuild to be a kind of a "hotel" car - with much more space.

So you can do makeup en route to work. Or you can rest en route to work. The car self drive at night so you sleep inside (like in those sleeper trains) - you might not need a hotel.

The car can also take a grandparent to take care of grandchildren, so useful for old people.

In theory traffic could be optimized too; taking a random car - instead of your own, or commutting in a group, but I doubt it will happen. People prefer to ride in their own car.

Not having to steer the car can free like 1-2 hours per day (depending on commute time), what is big.

Also work-from-home is quite inspiring future vision. People were talking about it for years and it finally happens, at least a bit. WFH sighnificantly improves quality if life.

Also what happened to drones that can bring parcels to people? When will this happen? On a side note, people from USA seem to dislike / not know "parcel lockers" ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parcel_locker ) which are very convenient. I think Poland has 20 000 of them already. I dont understand the idea that the courier drops a parcel on your pouch that someone can steal. If you worked from home and a drone brought it (and notified you) then sure. But why no parcel lockers now?

The one where we stop wishing AI or whatever other toy du jour will solve all our problems. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I don't buy your utopia, no matter the label.

I guess my utopia is where people stop making utopias and start behaving pragmatically.

I think generative AI is going to created a modding and fanwork renaissance.

Mega game mods are seemingly bottlenecked by art, textures, voice acting and such, and fanworks outside of gaming have similar constraints. And the legal issues surrounding these models arent an issue for them.

A message "optimizer".

I do this by hand a lot right now where I would draft a message with what I really want to say in plain english, then I have to go back and rewrite the whole thing to edit it for tone or subtext.

It would save me a lot of time if there are options like: "rewrite this in business speak", "optimize for nonviolent communication" (or w/e other bullshit is trendy that year), "pick how angry you want to sound", "throw this guy under the bus in a more subtle way"

It'd have to be something like AI both solves climate problems while making it profitable to do so. I'm not talking about greenwashing, but using machine learning to solve hard science problems and tying them to economic benefit. Dear AI overlord, I'm trying to start a new business and this is my idea… Dear valued chat user, your business can be 125% more profitable if you can address this climate problem as these 3 VCs are ready to unload dump trucks of cash into the space.

Something that could be very cool would be AI driven monitoring analysis and troubleshooting pre-work to support operative staff. Trying to figure out what's exactly going wrong in a complex, distributed system requires the system and the user to ingest a lot of information at times in order to make a guess what's going on. This is something an AI could really help with - ingest all of the information over some time period, and output a number of guesses or possible problems with probabilities and possible root causes assigned to them.

Think of an operator logging into the system at 3am with a C&C EVA voice calling and greeting them, "Hello Operator. We have 24 customer-facing systems offline. Preliminary analysis indicates that these are caused by 3 internal services and 2 postgres clusters being offline. With a confidence of 83%, the internal services are also offline due to the postgres clusters. I will now send you what I have found out about the postgres clusters with a probability of the scenarios and monitoring indicators for the different scenarios. It looks like the clusters are failing to elect a leader after several network-caused timeline switches with a confidence of 72%. Highly matching runbooks exist for 4 out of 7 highest probability scenarios"

Well, maybe I'd prefer that in text on a website, but no need to be that serious right now.

It is possible to get monitoring of this quality even with existing tools and maybe some internal extensions of these tools, sure. But that's a barrel you can pour effort into and it has no bottom at all. And it gets harder and harder the more complex and the more dynamic your environment is. It'd be great to dump all of that into a black box, even if that black box just establishes a global timeline of events.

Star Trek seems to be a good starting point, but the most obvious parts - space travel, phasers, teleporters - might actually be the least interesting in this context. Here are the parts that stand out to me.

* Energy so abundant it might as well be infinite.

* Instant availability (via replicator) of any food, with infinitesimal environmental or ethical concerns about its production.

* Universal translation.

* Instant diagnosis of injury or disease, and often instant treatment to go with it.

It's noteworthy that none of these involve robots, or necessarily even AI (though that might definitely help with the last two). To be honest, I'm not convinced those technologies will lead to more good outcomes than bad ones. Certainly not with the people currently driving and hyping it. I'll take the boring old physical-world improvements over that dystopia incubator any day.

I anticipate AI will slowly start to be realized to reveal the nature of not only human language, but also human cognition, which may lead to us starting to become more self-aware as individuals and a species......like, if we happened to somehow have accurate historical statistics on the matter, we'd see major jumps on the chart representing significant events in history (invention of the printing press, the first enlightenment and rise of science / retreat of religion, etc), and this event will (possibly) turn out to be another instance of the relatively rare phenomenon.

(More robotics, but if you'll accept it)

Workers of the dirtiest, least desirable jobs ( sewage, septic cleanup?) get paired with a robot that handles the dirty work.

No job loss, critical infrastructure remains, just less toil for the human.

The gist of most optimistic future visions (more than 1-2 years out) is massively increased wealth. For example that's the root of why Star Trek TNG is optimistic, so it's useful to ponder what it means in practice.

One of the biggest ways wealth gets deployed today is on old age and healthcare. We live longer but the retirement age doesn't move, and pension deficits build up. With radical productivity improvements from better AI and medical treatments we can outrun this and even consider lowering the retirement age. In the distant future we could consider an optional retirement age of 40, although "retirement" in such a world would obviously be blurry concept. It would be more like the point at which you get a lot more freedom in what you choose to do rather than the end-point of work.

Another way wealth was deployed in the 20th century was driving down the cost of air travel, but there's plenty more that can be done there. With more automation (pilots, aircrew, ATC) we can radically increase the number of flights taking place, flooding the market with supply. In the future we'll all fly business class whenever and wherever we like, and it'll cost nearly nothing.

One of the most profound ways generative AI will impact us is through entertainment. In the same way web video like YouTube made content creation available to the masses, creating vast wealth in the process, generative AI combined with technologies like Unreal 5+ will let people tell sophisticated stories in 3D using AI generated assets. Stories that the big studios and TV firms would never sign off on will get told, and we'll be able to spend far more of our time enjoying, creating and earning money from novel entertainment.

Finding true love is tough, and many never quite manage it. Dating could be revolutionized by AI. Chat to your lovable assistant and it'll get to know what you're like and what kind of person would like you. The human-like nature of its skills will prompt you to reflect upon your own wishes, and NNs trained on huge databases of successful matches will help you search for your soul mate. There'll be more happy families, fewer divorces and more quality time spent with people who are just right for you.

These are just a few random ideas, not very good ones based on only a few minutes of extrapolation. You can probably do better.

Understanding Generative Art end to end. Current AIs are "static" in nature. I would love if AIs could be able to understand generative art processes from the written code to the unfolding of distinct outputs based on the parameters.

e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIr1tvQb-wM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8DMEHxOLQE

My AI vision of the future involves using bots for research, study and cognitive enhancement. I want my bot to scour the literature and find the things I need, ideas and hints I couldn't stumble upon. I want the model to teach me at my own pace and in my own style, to adapt the lessons to my needs, and remember what I need to review. I want it to be multi-modal, to generate diagrams and visual models of our task, to synthesise the right UI for each situation.

Maybe this sounds a bit sad, but I'm personally super excited for when something like copilot turns into a full-on coversational code friend / assistant.

I see it being super productive to always be pair programming with an AI, and not have to type every command out... or better yet, that it provides suggestions without me needing to prompt it to do so, thereby giving this feeling that I'm just hanging out with someone and doing a more traditional pairing session

Perhaps a bit too distant, but the Culture series by Iain M. Banks takes place in a utopia built and managed by hyper intelligent benevolent artificial intelligences.

Distant, like when we start getting desperate and have to send off individually-piloted space pods to hopeful exoplanets:

AI would pretty much be the only way we can preprogram enough entertainment for an interstellar journey that works for every pioneer.

By feeding back their individual preferences and unique quirks onto tried-and-true scaffolding like Seinfeld or the Marvel franchise, we can probably more easily endure really long stretches of boring space travel.

Next 50-100 years:

Fully Homomorphic encryption if improved could allow for private cloud computing or really neat p2p networks.

Many diseases will become curable and some may be eradicated from the developed world or entirely

Next 100+ years:

Quantum key distribution could allow for the best possible encryption

Neutrino based communication could allow for wireless communication through the earth

Ongoing: Extreme poverty is falling world wide

Bad Mirror: AI tools scrape entire universe of art to generate on-demand clipart for Canva.com, now a $40bn company

Good Mirror: Someone sells a tool for AI-assisted drawing; something that actually helps people learn something, instead of doing the job for them, mostly by creating a bad photocopy

Anything that prevents us from fucking up this planet and its native inhabitants for good would be nice (and that doesn't involve reducing civilization to ashes).

Something along the lines of a hyperintelligent/-wise and eternally benevolent super ruler AI perhaps.

AI Financial management assistance, Healthcare price comparisons, Insurance, and cost saving systems - AI will be much better at navigating the complicated world of finance than the average person, will probably be a great improvement for most people

AI will allow humanity to produce more intelligence with less (less labour) thus more spare-time for humankind. Like industrial revolution and mechanism did during the 19th century. Probably grey mirrorish though.

AI will bring a nice transition to more eco-friendly, health-friendly and budget-friendly materials incorporated into everyday life. We have way too many toxic materials around us because they are cheap, etc.

A way to mass manufacture eco-friendly fast-decomposing plastics of all types. Would our landfills essentially become trivial to manage at that point?

To start with, technology in this White Mirror future shouldn't be dominated by corporations that abuse their monopolies to quash competition.

very distant: The Culture series by Ian Banks Somewhat distant: I Robot by Asimov (specifically the ending)

I will not comment on the realism of either of these novels, but will say that both present optimistic visions of futures where super intelligent AGIs are commonplace and both have interesting ideas to consider regardless of exactly the extent to which they are grounded in reality.

It's not "black" because it's bad. It's black because it's a turned-off screen, which has a black colors. Black Mirror stories are bad because the Mirror reflects bad/broken people, not because the mirror is is bad. A White Mirror would be a screen that is turned on, but also reflects images.