alt Hacker NewsNot only is it improbable, it's a complete fantasy. It's not going to happen. And personally, I'm of the opinion that having AI be a constant presence in your life and relying on it to assist you with every minor detail or major decision is dystopian in the extreme, and that's not even factoring in the inevitable Facebook-esque monetisation.
>when the world is so gloomy, seek something nice, even if a fantasy
I don't need fantasy to do that. My something nice is being in nature. Walking in the forest. Looking at and listening to the ocean by a small campfire. An absence of stimulation. Letting your mind wander. In peace, away from technology. Which is a long winded way to say "touch grass", but - and I say this sincerely without any snark - try actually doing it. You realise the alleged gloom isn't even that bad. It's healing.
> I'm of the opinion that having AI be a constant presence in your life and relying on it to assist you with every minor detail or major decision is dystopian in the extreme
Could that be because you're putting some extra substance in what you call an "AI"? Giving it some properties that it doesn't necessarily have?
Because when I'm thinking about "AI" all I'm giving to it is "a machine doing math at scale that allows us to have meaningful relation with human concepts as expressed in a natural language". I don't put anything extra in it, which allows me to say "AI can do good things while avoiding bad things". Surely, a machine can be made to crunch numbers and put words together in a way that helps me rather than harms me.
Oh, and if anything - I don't want "AI" to save me thinking. It cannot do that for me anyway, in principle. I want it to help me do things it machines finally start to do acceptably well: remember and relate things together. This said, yea, I guess I was generous with just a single requirement - now I can see that a personal "AI" also needs its classifications (interpretations) to match with the individual user's expectations as close as possible at all times.
> It's not going to happen.
I can wholeheartedly agree as far as "it is extremely unlikely to happen", but... to say "it is not going to happen", after last five years of "that wasn't on my bingo list"? How can you be so sure? How do we know there won't be some more weird twists of history? Call me naive but I rather want to imagine something nice would happen for a change. And it's not beyond fathomable that something crashes and the resulting waves, would possibly bring us towards a somewhat better world.
Touching grass is important, and it helps a lot, but as soon as you're back - nothing goes anywhere in the meanwhile. The society with all the mess doesn't disappear while we stop looking. So seeking an optimistic possibility is also important, even if it may seem utterly unrealistic. I guess one just have to have something to believe in?