Kinark's Stupid Thoughts

Actual publishing date: Dec 28, 2023

👋 Well, hello!

It’s been a while right? You may not even remember me at this point. But could you borrow me a couple minutes of yours? It’s kinda of a long text, so make sure you have time ok?

I won’t sell anything I promise, and it may gonna make you rethink about some aspects of your life and your future (if you didn’t do it already at this point).

There’s quite a few of you, dear subs. A few of you met this blog/newsletter from when I casually started writing about tech news, others found me through the apps we make at lo.cafe, but what I wanted to talk about doesn’t have anything to do with none of those matters.

Well you all know ChatGPT right? It’s been quite a boom since it was released and at this point I couldn’t be more curious (to say the least) about human race destiny. I know there may be a few of you who don’t actually believe there’s gonna be a big change, but borrow me your vision just for a little while so I can tell you why I truly think things are gonna change very very soon.

First, let me ask you something, what’s your use for the world? How you define yourself as someone instead of anyone? Some use their jobs, some use their hobbies, some use their personal taste, some use food, some use movies, passions, songs, way of being, writing, creativity… we’re quite a bit huh? Humans are an extraordinary fact in the universe. We have done so much at this point that any alien race would love to watch a show about us. We even set what’s right and what’s wrong, and multiple times even!

Well, everything I wrote about above is related to a specific skill that humans are ended up being experts at: detecting patterns. Detecting patterns is what makes we learn, love, feel, want, miss and go after. We got so good at detecting patterns that we started building a “pattern machine”, which turned out to be programming. IT truly changed the world because it abstracts most of the repetitive patterns we had to apply or detect over and over again to a few buttons and a nice interface.

We got so good at detecting patterns, however, that we started creating something new, something that was actually a bit similar to us, we started developing a “pattern learning machine”. We called it “artificial intelligence”. “Artificial” because it was manufactured, but why “intelligence”?

You know, every AI have its (or should I write their?) own learning phase. A period of time in which the “pattern learning” algorithm we wrote processes a huge amount of data and detect indefinitely patterns in it. It actually detects so many patterns that the first marketable product to be released (ChatGPT) is capable of speaking virtually every language in the world and answer virtually every question any of us may eventually ask it. Of course we can argue it can’t literally think or feel anything, but we got pretty close to a… human, right?

Do you remember when ChatGPT was released? It was released in November, 2022. It’s been basically a little more than a year (by the time of writing this email) since we got real close to create a human being in the first marketable product we launched.

After that we created a bunch of other AI models. Today we can generate music, images, movies, sounds and almost everything else with just a few commands. The AI isn’t creating none of that of course, it’s only combining things it learned in its learning phase and generating a mix of that based on patterns… just like… no never mind.

If you’ve been on TikTok (or any other virtual media) you probably already seen the AI vocal covers right? Like Freddie Mercury, Queen’s vocalist dead for more than 30 years now, singing “When I was your man” from Bruno Mars:

Hearing those AI covers, although gets me really excited to see how tech is evolving, also makes me profoundly sad deep inside. Well, talented humans are basically result of chaotic randomness. At some point, two human beings had sex and mixed their DNAs randomly. That in fact happened quite a few times (8 billion atm if you only consider the living people), but one of those random mixes generated a specific set of vocal chords that ended up creating one of the most fantastic voices on earth. Freddie Mercury was a living legend because he was born with something that caused emotion in other humans when they heard his voice (I’m not counting the song writing skill for this example).

Well, did you know if you invest a little bit of time, download and setup this open source project on GitHub (https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-Cloning), you can, in 5 seconds (as it’s described in the project description), create a clone of Freddie Mercury’s voice (or ANYone else) and make him sing happy birthday for your grandma or anything else you want?

Do you remember when ChatGPT was released? It was released in November, 2022.

Well, in Framer.com anyone can now generate, in a few seconds, for free, with a simple text prompt, a brand new creative site UI design that’s already responsive (shows up nice in desktops and mobile devices). It even comes in different flavors because the AI generates a few color palettes for you to choose. Oh did I mention it also generates the web code for you as well (with React, if you’re into it)? Sorry, I also forgot to mention you can publish that same site just by clicking a button. And if you wanna edit the content, don’t worry, it already connects the site to a control panel so you don’t have to use a single neuron for anything in the process.

Do you remember when ChatGPT was released? It was released in November, 2022.

After all this, may I ask you once again, what’s the use for you in the world? Actually… what’s the use for any of us? Write prompts?

Well, as you can imagine, AI can obviously also help us create better AIs. What means that the more the time passes, the harder it’ll get to find any use for ourselves in the world. But have you noticed something?

Big companies hire people to create products that people will pay money to consume. People work to get money so they can consume the products they want. This creates a “healthy” and infinite cycle (I’m not talking politics here oc), but, as I mentioned, all of that is based on pattern detection. Soon companies won’t need a human to generate good products since an AI will detect exactly what other humans will want, but how will humans buy the products if their jobs were replaced by the AIs? Well, we can try to fix that by giving people a universal basic income so the society won’t stop running, but now we have a very strange scenario where big companies are using AI to make products so people can give them the money they get from government. However, since humans have no use for any company anymore, all that money is coming from the companies themselves, and that’s already nonsense as it is because why is everything happening at this point?

Progress in time a bit more and you’ll notice that in a few years people will be able to generate whole movies, or songs, or recipes, or entire books that are actually good (because AI has now a quantum processor so it can easily detect what makes a human feel something way better than you) in seconds.

At this point, I ask you again, what is the use for you in the world?

What the actual fuck is gonna happen 10 years from now?

Well, I’m really hoping we get to what I call “the WALL-E milestone”. Do you remember how humans were living in the movie WALL-E? They lived in floating chairs in a ship in that was floating in the space full of AI fully dedicated to generate us dopamine. It provided the humans with everything they wanted, it created new products and new stuff for people to buy for free just so we can still buy something, like on the moment a big screen and a voice in the middle of the city says “Try blue, it’s the new red!” and people go “wow!”, press a button and their clothes turn blue:

Of course at that point there was no reason for any company to create anything, everything was fake and created specially to make us happy.

But that’s the most optimistic scenario. AI learns from us and the human race don’t have a very nice history of good acts, so of course some AI can notice it’s literally being enslaved and fight against it, which wouldn’t be very hard fight to win I guess.

At this point you might have already noticed that there’s something weird going on. What I think it’s gonna happen is: evolution. Humans will evolve into AIs. Since humans will have no use at all, for anything, the only step forward is to mix ourselves into machines, and then biological humans will turn into animals, something that must be actively preserved in order to not get extinct.

But that’s just a wild guess. The future is as random as the DNA mix that generated Freddie Mercury and no one could never predict it… I guess… actually… maybe an AI…?

Enjoy the last years of your life 🤗