Hi everyone, I am developing a project to help people engage in constructive conversations about certain aspects of society 100 years in the future. I woud be very grateful if you could let me know which one of the 8 prompt on this website (https://www.22ndcenturyhub.com/) I have develop you find more interesting (you can also engage in a conversation with the AI, as I built in a GPT API). That would help me in further developing more prompts, I have about 60 at the moment. Thanks a lot in advance!
What I personally always think when it comes to the future is that we as humans are bad at predicting how hard a certain imagined technology actually is to realise. For example at the beginning of the century we could easily image wireless headphones and smart watches, but nobody expected them to be accessories to a portable phone because we didn’t know these two technologies would match into one (wireless phone calls and small computers were definitely two different things back then). Another example is flying cars, and more recently self-driving cars. Developing software for this turned out way harder then expected, while ‘self-thinking machines’ are much easier. I always think of this scene in I, Robot where the robot draws an image, back then this seemed much harder than a computer which arms and legs. In practice both have become possible over the last 20 years, but while generative AI is available to everyone, robots are only available to agencies that can also afford warships and fighter jets.
My main point it is extremely hard to predict where we will be in 100 years, but it might help to do this in a few steps. Not saying you have to publish those steps, but if you’re gonna use AI anyway you could try and set up a bunch of agents that work together:
Agent 1: analyse the past, let agent 2 know about how this tech came to be A2: based on this, imagine where this tech will be in 10 years, let agent 3 know your prediction A3: analyse the financial part of this development, tell A4 A4 - based on this, explore possibilities in 25 years, tell a5 A5 - analyse these possibilities, tell what is likely and what is not A6 - extrapolate the likely path to the following 25 years A7 - analyse if the likelihood of this 50 year prediction Etc etc
By setting up agents with different point of views you might have a better chance of avoiding the blind spots a single ai will have (since it doesn’t have knowledge itself, it just puts words together)
Also I’d make the difference between technological advancement (flying cars) and societal developments (equal rights), since these progressions don’t behave in the same way.
Thanks a lot for this very valuable input. The intent of my project is not to work in the space of predicting the future, but more in giving agency to people from different areas of expertise to engage in the practice of imagining the future, which sets in motion very interesting conversations about people’s value, how they see society today and of course also (sometimes) valuable inputs on what the future might hold.
People having conversation with each other of people having a conversation with ai?
The website is for now a way to start engaging in a conversation with AI, but what I am focussing on is to let people engage in conversation with each other IRL.
Like you would use conversation cards? Or would those people not use the website during their conversation?
Yes conversations cards, where what you read it’s pretty much what you read in one of the 8 prompts you can see on the website. So far I have about 50-60. But not all of them are high quality or interesting or somehow the right ones
Cool, wasn’t immediately clear to me when I opened the website but I did again just now and seems like fun questions to talk about!
Ok nice to hear! Which one of the 8 picks your interest the most?
You should read more about what people think the future might have in reserve. Your “prompts”(what do you actually nean by that?) are very juvenile IMO.
Extreme lingevity, Superintelligence, Merginal cost society are three that might cone to fruition for example.
Thanks for the comment. Which book or other sources do you recommend? So far I have read Life 3.0, The Coming Wave, Superintellingence, The Singulariy is nearer. And about prompts I refer to the ones I have elaborated further on this website I made https://www.22ndcenturyhub.com/. Extreme longevity it’s what I meant with Amortality, superintellingence is probably the defyining theme of the next era but I find it a difficult topic to let people engage with intellectually, since our cognitive abilities are literally too underdeveloped to be able to discuss about it in a way that really leads somewhere (love the paradox of it and also I agree this is a very bad reason to not engage in the conversation, a conversation we must continuously have).
Well this makes you sound like an incel:
Female leadership Women lead in 2124. What skills should kids learn for this empathetic new world
“Females” aren’t empatic and “males” intelligent or some bs.
That said, I would recommend you read Snowcrash. Still a probable future IMO.
Also, the 100 years is really way too far away, you won’t get “Amortals” and “Mortals” living like in something similar to our society, that’s just stupid (IMO). If you want to figure out how life can be in 100 years, you need to figure out how it’s going to be in 10 years first! Can you do that? Or else you’re just messing around, which is fine too.
So geopolitics and macro economy is what I’d recommend. And traveling.
BTW you forgot Atomically Precise Manufacturing or APM (simplistic star trek replicators basically), potentially on schedule for 2035…
Fair enough about the incel comment. The idea is more about letting people “mess around”m as I don’t believe in anybody having much ability to predict the future more than couple of months ahead. But I see the value of letting people engage in this kind of conversation, and people I have been doing this so far found it a very interesting way to discover more about their opionions and values, the one of others and also about what the future might bring, and this sometimes help shift perspective on the present. Thanks for the book recommendation and for the Atomically Precise Manufacturing, also explored nicely in Life 3.0 btw.
