In the late 90s Damien Broderick had a book, 'The Spike' which was his description of the ever uprising graph of technology which he reckoned, around 2025, would go straight up, and, well, everything would be everywhere (or another way of saying the Technological Singularity). I was a little skeptical, but I saw a thread on Reddit/Futrurology, and it had some interesting stuff. I'll just put the main post here: See /r/MediaSynthesis for much, much, much more on the capabilities of this technology. As a hint... Remember deepfakes? AI can do more than just faces— they can transfer whole bodies. Deepfake technology can even transfer species and time of day. Generative networks can generate music. It can do this the easy way— listening to music and playing around with a music-creating program— and it can do it the right way— listening to music and "imagining" what instruments and voices are supposed to sound like and generating new music entirely from scratch from its imagination. With the aforementioned technology, you can almost perfectly synthesize speech. We've come a long way from Microsoft Bob! Style transfer can turn ten-second Microsoft Paint doodles into art masterpieces, or detailed designs far beyond your own capabilities Generative AI can design assets for video games. More (in)famously, it's capable of procedural generation. AI can animate a still image, predicting what's supposed to happen next Generative networks can create photorealistic images. It's only a matter of time before they translate this to video and, potentially, video games! Generative networks can take a text description and turn it into an image Style transfer can create psychedelic dreamscapes and nightmares Generative networks can smooth out animation, turning even low-budget anime into something coming close to movie quality AI can even bring 'Enhance!' out of CSI! OpenAI’s co-founder Greg Brockman thinks in 2018— yes, this year— we will see “perfect“ video synthesis from scratch and speech synthesis. I don't think it'll be perfect, but definitely near perfect. We already see Nicholas Cage spammed into every movie ever made, and you can edit certain parts of movies in action. Not to mention that you can put words into a world leader's mouth and use their faces while you're at it. The future's gonna be wild, but the wildest part is that when I say "future", I mean the 2020s. Anyone who thinks this technology is twenty or thirty years off or that it'll only be available to the government and wealthy with its initial release, just click away now to spare your brain because I'm about to blow it apart. Most of these examples were accomplished using algorithms available for free right now on GitHub, which is open source. They'll remain free and open source indefinitely. So have your fun. Be Big Brother, or do what I did when I was a kid and try to imagine editing in various effects and new content into shows and games you like, because these are both going to happen. All this technology will be more refined as time goes on, but like I said, think in terms of "months and years", not "decades and centuries." Edit: Tangentially related to this, I created /r/MachinesPlay because I realized that we'll be watching robots and AI play video games far better than we ever could dream of doing ourselves. So not only will be droids be making the games, they'll also be playing them. It's quite interesting to think about— imagine a video game designed by an AI, made in such a way that only an AI could ever possibly play it. Humans watching would be baffled and dazzled by all the chaotic, non-Euclidean insanity going on. There's a bunch of links in the original post too. https://np.reddit.com/r/Futurology/...oice_cloning_ai_can_swap_genders_and/duwk843/ So, what do you think? Overly optimistic? Scary? How are you preparing for the future. I'm getting old, I won't have to confront a lot of this, but the learning curve, to me, is getting as steep as the Spike.
^Those technologies could certainly shake up the movie and TV industries I guess. Quantum computation, DNA editing and graphene haven't had much impact - yet... The problem with exponential curves is that their derivative (that is, their gradient or slope) is also exponential. You can be well up the spike but it always seems to be ahead of you.
The art of Zelig https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/...deo-voice-and-picture-evidence-is-coming.html Why stories of the holocaust have to be preserved.
Thanks for sharing that. The entire time I was reading that article, I kept thinking of Vreenak saying "It's a faaaaakkkkeeee!". Imagine my surprise when they included in the article, a YouTube video of the end of "In The Pale Moonlight" noting that Sisko tried to use a fake holographic evidence to bring the Romulans in the war.
I'm looking forward to playing tabletop games with AI DMs that can react to anything you choose to do. Or just in general, RPGs where your choices are not limited to the ones imagined by the developers, with AI story evaluators who can react to unconventional strategies the way 'Those characters would react if you did that'.