The Cult of AI. How one writer's trip to an annual tech conference left him with a sinking feeling about the future - eviltoast
  • kromem@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    I was a professional tech futurist and while I normally made more like ~5yr forecasts, around fifteen years ago I wrote a story for fun that was a further out prediction structured around a narrative taking place in the early 2030s.

    In it, in addition to there being AR computing interfaces and self driving cars, the key tech advance was AI having been developed around a decade earlier - outside of these three things most of the world was the same.

    By this time the AI was shoved into everything from toasters to musical instruments, and the story followed a new class of job that was solely focused on getting AI to do what people wanted by using natural language (what we’d now call a “prompt engineer”).

    The main antagonists were a modern resurgence of the Luddite movement which had grown in popularity as AI had grown.

    The story even had an AI powered dildo.

    It’s been a pretty fucking surreal past few years watching what’s been taking place.