This is not some woo-woo post talking about manifestation and bringing the universe into alignment with what you want.
It is, however, a discussion about the path of technology and how we do have the capability to engineer our future. This is something that EVERYONE needs to pay attention to.
The problem with most people is they believe they are powerless. They feel nothing they does has an impact. The challenge with this is that, as we are learning with AI, everyone has input. Whatever any individual does is tracked, captures, and fed into a larger pool of data.
EVERYTHING.
This means that we have a direct impact in what is unfolding.
Source
Engineering the Future
How did we arrive at the point we are at?
Let us look at this question through the lens of AI models since they are all the rage. We see Big Tech rolling out their updated LLMs. How did they come into being?
While there are many level, one of the basic components was data. Where did this come from? A significant percentage was derived from what everyone did online over the past couple decades. This was especially true for social media.
Every post, tweet, Instagram upload, and comment has an impact. It all was captured and fed through many different systems.
Back in 2017, I mentioned that people need to pay attention to what they are posting since it was all going to feed AI. While I did not understand the specifics at that time, the inclination was correct. Data scarping became a way of life for Big Tech. For years, they were amassing whatever they could from online.
We are now seeing the result. Much of the output is directly correlated to what was input. The biases that are inherent in these models are due to what we, ourselves, posted. Here is where the individual, blended with the collective, generated the results we see.
Knowing Where Things Are Going
One of the topics that I often write about is where I see things going. To me, this is the most crucial area of focus that one can have.
The world is changing and rapidly. Technological change is no longer measured in decades. Instead, we are looking at years and, soon, months.
AI is moving quicker than anything we ever saw before. This means that predicting, as best we can, to where things are headed is paramount.
We are an era where labor is vastly affected. In economics, this is summarized in the Solow Growth Model. This focused upon how economic growth is achieved using the components of capital, labor, and technology.
This stems from the basic economics idea of labor and capital being drivers of the output. The challenge is that capital is replacing labor. Even using Solow's model, technology is rapidly becoming a product of capital.
In other words, the future is one based upon capital.
The question is, with this knowledge, what are you going to do about it? Here is where engineering the future enters.
We know there is a huge opportunity with blockchain, cryptocurrency, and AI. We are only beginning to scratch the surface of what is possible. The digital world is run on things such as network effects, something that is inherent in the system. Since we see most things becoming digital, this is a clue as to what the future holds.
Even when it comes to money, that operates in a digital form. Why the masses haven't linked the two together is beyond me. The reality is that we have the ability to "print" our own money simply by instigating the network effects.
A World of Exponentials
One final point we need to stress is the fact that the digital world is one of exponentials.
This means that everything we do have outsized impact compared to what normally happens. It is something that humans have difficulty with since our brains tend to be wired for linear thought. When we look at the digital realm, things change enormously.
Let us take the simple example of a blog post. How many AI models was that run through? If you posted something in 2018, it is likely that it was scraped by, well, everyone. That same article was fed into half a dozen (at least) neural networks and became part of AI models. Each had different weighting causing the information to be processed in a slightly different way.
This is just one way that things expand. Of course, the article might have been cited, commented upon, emailed, and who knows what else.
In other words, 750 words on a screen can end up as a lot more.
This is something to keep in mind as we go through our days. Everything we are doing is being captured. That data will be used for something else.
Who and what is using it? Well that is a topic for another article. That said, perhaps it is best to be conscious about where we are posting stuff, at least to the degree which we can control.
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I saw a movie called Subservience where there are human like robots replacing the jobs of human workers; maybe technology can make this a possibility in the near future.
The bigger challenge is that once the known information is all in AI models and human beings begin to lean on AI knowledge more and more, where do original ideas come from then?
What baffle me about the future is all that theory that if you travel in the past one wrong step can create a whole new timeline, and yet nobody get that one small step right now in the right direction can dramatically alter your own future creating a fulfilling timeline for you.