Wild Speculation: How Will Life Change in 20 Years?

Ranging across topics from AI girlfriends to wealth inequality, we engage in wild speculation about how day-to-day life may transform over the next 20 years. We predict the rise of "toyish" helper robots, AI generated media dominating entertainment, fortress communities for the rich, and more human irrelevance as automation advances. While optimistic about technology, we remain concerned over declining birth rates and human-computer relations.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] If you want to found the company. That makes you a butt ton of money within our generation.

It is simple, large scale, replicable technology that allows AI to interact with physical reality as we understand it. So what a lot of people are doing in this space, which is why they're failing, is they're basing this on old models of robotics. These are the robotics that we were using in factories.

Simone Collins: I could imagine like early founders co opting toys. Like literally just co opting toys. Cause they are

Malcolm Collins: based on toy manufacturing. And these will be the things that are watching our kids that are making our meals at home and stuff like that.

Right. And I think that right now when people are looking at doing stuff like this, they are basing them off of these basically hard coded models in terms of how they walk, how they interact with things, instead of taking advantage of the leaps that AI has given us in terms of, opportunity.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: [00:01:00] Are you looking at memes on Facebook? Yeah, you know

Malcolm Collins: me. You know me, I love my memes. I love my memes. man. There's, there's men out there who have various skills. I'm not one of those. But I do know a number of memes. If I was transported into the past. I may not be able to speed up the speed of invention, but I'd be able to trade them some sick memes.

Simone Collins: My

Malcolm Collins: brain is a library of memes.

Simone Collins: Oh, and I was just about to make fun of you for being on Facebook and therefore being old, but then I recently looked up the demographics of Facebook and The majority of users are below 36 years old, which blows my mind. Yeah. Huh. What's going on there? Huh? No, that's a lie.

Malcolm Collins: Mirror world nonsense. I

Simone Collins: guess I, I really cannot understand how that could be the case, but that's [00:02:00] what the internet told me, but the internet is full of lies. So what can I say? So speaking of which, actually we are going to do some just wild speculation as to the future of humanity, five, 10, 50, 100 years, et cetera.

And I do think that we are going to have. More than ever, a crisis of reality online as more and more AI comes online, more and more AI content is created. And also I do think that as much as let's start with that go, okay. As much as we've had recent mishaps with. Google's Gemini, for example show that trying to throttle or otherwise control AI to make it more politically correct or to feed, have it feed into ideas of more aspirational world can backfire.

I don't think that's going to stop people. I don't think that's going to stop businesses. I don't think that, I mean, ultimately the urban monoculture is the urban monoculture and it runs because of that. It's going to create an internet that has a crisis of reality, meaning that our friends who are creating banks of like pre 2020 Wikipedia articles are actually spot on in [00:03:00] doing this because I just can't know what will be true and what will not be true on the internet.

It's

Malcolm Collins: interesting that you put this up. You know, one of the things I've heard is that, you know, In 20 years or so, a lot of people, like right now, Gemini, we look at it and we laugh. Ha ha ha. Thinks that Washington was a black guy. And that in 20 years, there might actually be genuine crises about this.

So people, I

Simone Collins: think people are going to be like, wait, no, but he was black. I don't think you understand.

Malcolm Collins: The AI tells me he's black. It's told me that he was black since kindergarten.

Simone Collins: I've seen the pictures. Yeah. Yeah, I've

Malcolm Collins: seen the pictures. I've seen all the historic photos, you know, actually the idea of not having historic photos of something might, might become weird to people.

People might sort of blur the lines when we started getting historic photos because they can so easily be generated from AI. Okay. So I agree that this is one thing that is definitely going to change as a crisis of information where a lot of information that starts being generated from now on is going to be tainted by AI and also in terms of [00:04:00] Draining data because when you train AI on training data that comes from other AI at least the models we've had now it creates Problems and it generally degrades over time.

Yeah And so you're, you're, you're, you're, it's almost like, so people who know when they're building Geiger counters and stuff like that they need to use metal from I think it's lead or something from submarines or wrecked ships. Because that's never been above the surface of the water since we started testing nuclear bombs, because all metal above the water since that period has this level of radioactive contamination, which makes it not useful for certain activities.

And so what you're basically saying is it makes a lot of sense. Just start sort of banking internet stuff right now. This might even make sense as a company, like trying to bank as much of the pre internet stuff as you can right now. Oh, cause then you can

Simone Collins: sell it, sell access. Oh s**t.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Even beyond what you see with something like the internet archive, like really good banking pure human created [00:05:00] information.

Okay. Cool. Which might have some level of value to people who are ironically, probably the primary value is people who are training a eyes and stuff like that.

Simone Collins: But then I think related to this issue is we're also going to see what we've referred to and other podcasts and all over the place is techno feudalism where you're going to get, a sort of a massive acceleration and expansion of what we're beginning to see on sub stack. So as people are now having a crisis of of quote unquote fake news and not being able to trust mainstream news media as much as they used to before what we're seeing a lot of people Especially including like very smart people, but all sorts of people of pretty much every Walk of life and income starting to turn to or continuing to turn to specific people for specific pieces of advice.

And they aren't necessarily as engaged with the news for their primary source of information as they are with this fiefdom of information. So I think we're going to see that a little bit more accelerated, like we might actually just see people break off into [00:06:00] communities around certain realities that are built around certain people or certain collections of people

Malcolm Collins: almost like this is really interesting that you mentioned this because you know, now that we live in a world where you can build communities around any group that you share a similar culture.

Culture or ideology too. It's much more easy to create these tech features, but this is, sorry, continue with what you were saying. I don't want to.

Simone Collins: Well, imagine like the YouTuber houses that's, that spread it u