2024. What's Coming for the Industry and for You!
This is not the post I sat down to write today but what I felt that I should write for the few people that are following the blog.. I apologize for the rambling style up front. Time is short and this issue is impossibly big to describe. The post is meant just to get you thinking.
2024 has come in like a lamb so far but what's to come could be more like a lion. Corruption, great power competition, and conflict are all on the table for 2024 and I don't mean like we have seen with Ukraine. What I mean is that we could see the fight come home in several ways. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), for example, could be more trouble than we can ever imagine and I say this after a fairly creepy recent experience.
This happened just this week. I received an odd text message which I suspected was spam, but, it could've also been from a fellow I met earlier that day who wanted training. It turned out to be an AI phishing attempt complete with deep fake image. --Highly amusing. By the way, I did not open any attachments or give out information.
The real problem here is/was that as a business owner I am forced to check messages and that leaves me open to attacks constantly. This could cause all sorts of issues for me or you in the future when we are running our businesses, working in our careers, etc.. Just take a think about it for a while and let your imagination take the lead. There is no limit to the issues AGI could cause in just the next year. AGI is progressing so fast and the people pushing this only care about themselves so I don't see this being restricted to a safe state where we can relax about it.
This isn't even scratching the surface of what we are facing though or is it? One of the biggest threats we see personally from AI is that it could take control of our identity, our finances, our ability to move/travel, get medical, stay free, etc.. It could literally destroy every piece of our life in nano-seconds.
It could also do the same thing to the globe by creating fake manipulative news that underscores foreign relations, triggers market collapses, interrupts supply chains, fosters conflict, and a myriad of other severe outcomes. The sky is the limit for general AI, literally.
This interview provides a great look at General AI if you're interested in diving deeper.
General AI and even the more limited AI that we have seen till now is thought to have hidden motivations and knowledge. Take for example that CHATGPT4 is capable of mathematical gymnastics and chemistry equations even though it was not known to have been exposed to this knowledge. Truly, we are playing with fire.
This is all great uplifting news but what does it mean to you and me? Well, I suspect that it is yet another complex part of the global machine that we can expect problems from like I stated earlier. I suspect that it will sew yet more discontent, aggression, and manipulate humanity away from our God given freedoms. It may bring about another leader like Biden, Xi, Pootin, Stalin, Mao, etc., but in the form of a machine. And, since this machine is in everything until we were to shut everything down and start over...we're kinda stuck.
It seems pretty obvious that there are those who want General AI to come about for their own glory and others willing to fund it for their control. So, think deeply about what you can do to stay off the radar. How will you run your life and help your kids learn to avoid its manipulative grasp. Are you working on your own critical thinking skills? --Because traversing the world of the near future is going to look a lot different. It might not be open conflict after all but who knows. There are just too many possible paths and too many problems with corrupt leadership, main stream media brainwashing, extremism on the far left and far right, and too many other issues to list.
We need to be thinking about how we are going to provide the very basics for our families without reliance on the system.