From talking to plugged-in friends in California about what products will be in demand as a consequence of the AI revolution (bubble?).
Our heavily regulated telephone system, already essentially useless due to lack of authentication and, therefore, overwhelming spam, will become completely useless due to sophisticated AI robots that we’ll have to talk to for 20 minutes or more before we can figure out that we’re talking to a cash-seeking machine. “The only solution is to have your own robot answer the phone and talk to the spammer’s robot for 20 minutes,” said a friend in San Francisco.
For those who enjoy classic cars, a humanoid robot that can drive a “dumb car”. “Why bother paying for a self-driving car,” noted a guy who has worked on software for self-driving cars, “when you can just have your general-purpose household robot drive your existing car?” Here’s Grok’s response to “create me a picture of an Optimus robot driving a Honda Odyssey minivan” followed by “show it from the other side so that we can see the robot in the driver’s seat”.
When I sent the same request to ChatGPT, it treated me like a Deplorable/garbage: “I’m unable to create the image you requested due to content policy restrictions. Let me know if you’d like help with another type of image or concept!” I was able to get ChatGPT to do a generic image, but it put the driver on the right side (UK or Japanese programmer got into the AI woodpile?).
More prosaically, how about a third party vendor of self-driving technology so that small companies such as Lucid can stay in business and not be wiped out by companies like Tesla that can spread the cost of their self-driving software across a high volume of cars produced?
Techy Californians seem to be very excited about sex robots (most of these guys are in long-term marriages so they’re about 50 percent likely, statistically, to have become incels). But do people want the kids, relatives, and friends to see their, um, personal robots? How about closets inside closets where the sex robots can live? I asked ChatGPT to generate this and it threatened me with “This content may violate our usage policies,” but went ahead and made something that is the opposite of the privacy idea:
More migrants come across the border every day and, despite progressive academics’ assurances to the contrary, some of them seem to have criminal backgrounds as well as criminal intentions. What if Laken Riley had been followed by a personal drone? Either the mostly peaceful José Antonio Ibarra wouldn’t have attacked her or the police would have been called when the drone’s AI software recognized that José Antonio Ibarra’s interest in Laken Riley wasn’t benign. Here’s ChatGPT’s first attempt:
It’s already here to some extent via Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and Amazon Q, but much easier and cheaper ways to hook up private data to the wonderful world of LLMs. Maybe Apple Intelligence will do that for us and it will be time to abandon the dream of Intel Arrow Lake in favor of an M4-powered Apple desktop computer?
Circling back to the trivial… why can’t the phone, now bristling with AI, figure out that the owner has fallen asleep and either turn off the audiobook or mark the time when the owner fell asleep and, the next day, offer to return to that spot?
Readers: What are your ideas for new products that will be possible and/or required as a result of AI? Separately, I hope that everyone gives thanks tomorrow to our future AI overlords. They’ll probably be listening…
Doubt most silicon valley workers are in long term marriages outside of expert witness territory. Only 30% of men ever have relationships. A sex robot indistinguishable from real flesh is the billion trillion dollar prize & worth a few nobel prizes. Still impressive that a computer can generate realistic if bland artwork from natural language, it’s good enough to convey novel meanings & we now do it every day without thinking. 5 years ago, there was no way besides drawing it manually or rotoscoping manually.
> From talking to plugged-in friends in California about what products will be in demand as a consequence of the AI revolution (bubble?)
Yes, AI is a bubble. The only truly “cool” aspect of AI is how it integrates various existing technologies — like search, drawing, grammar correction, translation, and math to name some, into a single prompt. You type what you need, and it pulls from these tools to generate a response that wows those those who don’t know better.
Does it make life easier? Absolutely. Is it a revolution? Not quite. Will it save humanity? Hardly — unless you believe in masking and vaccination!
I don’t think it will make *life* easier except for those who are already wealthy. Those who need to earn income from labor will see like become more difficult: the question is how much more difficult?
I can’t find the tweet, but someone on X said “The purpose of AI is to give capital access to skills without giving the skilled access to capital.”