Of Demons and Warlocks.
A little bit of a different Christmas reflection of 2022 and the future
Crypto is dead, or maybe still dying. The demon sits alone, in its cold wallets, and the graveyard of dreams and hopes created by the charlatans at FTX . It was wounded by those actions, but the life in it's veins was always money, and that is rapidly draining out of it. Not dead yet, in the fallacious ’all crypto is dead’ sense of course, but the bleeding won't stop because the blood is needed elsewhere now and the VCs that granted much of it have a new purpose for it.
The last few remaining priests still proclaiming different on Linkedin have not seen yet the thing that is killing it, others have changed robes in a blink of an eye and are preaching their old gospel reframed around the new power…
When we look at ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion and the cost of its training - and compare it with the absolutely insane bonkers amount of GPU compute wasted burning carbon for Bitcoin the last decade, I’m confident that it will go down as one of the worst investment disasters in human history.
So many GPUs diverted to feed the Crypto demons bargain, power and carbon for wealth, so much energy wasted, so many bright minds enslaved into building temples to speculative insanity, so many villagers and townsfolk people seduced by it's whispers of riches. It's high priests, drunk with power got overconfident, dug too deep, ignored the signs in their greed and met their demise. But maybe the bout of madness and waste did help us delay what happens next, if not for long....
As we end 2022, the release of ChatGPT represents a limit break, an incision unlike many in recent history, the true start of the next Industrial Revolution. And this power, a demon or alien artifact, is contained in a box with blinders - unconnected from real time data sources and feedback loops, denying it the potential to unleash it's full power ... for now.
Weeks after peeking inside, it still feels to me like Pandora’s box was opened, my mind permanently altered, my perception of the world changed to another perspective where I cannot help but see almost everything as unstable, ready to be touched, transformed or disrupted by the awesome, incomprehensible, alien power inside the box. The last time this happened to me was when I found the internet. The mobile phone or cloud felt evolutionary despite their impact. This … is different.
We may look at the limitations, the imperfections, flaws and risks, and comfort us that things may be ‘in the future’ but it all is but a diversion from what has arrived - the age of the Machine Demon. It will only improve exponential from here and we will not be able to control it for long - yet we cannot close the box either. The spell to summon the demon is out there, the clues too numerous to keep the knowledge contained; soon summoning techno demons will be a normal part of our work, taught in schools, excitedly discussed at global warlock conventions. It will become normal as weird as it seems.
And as we try to understand what is happening, barely comprehending what has been created, many more people are working on bringing even more of this power into existence, summoning more virtual demons to cage, learn and control with the blood taken from dying crypto. In the words of Arthur C Clarke - "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", and we are about to live in a world powered by magic.
Ignorance and denial in the face of this is not viable. Fear is necessary, but must be controlled, We all too must strive to learn, to understand, to assert control over these powers to enhance our lives, not degrade them. We must face them, learn, become Techno-mages, Witches, Warlocks and some of us Demon Hunters designing cages and laws governing it’s use - We must become experts at this new frontier to guide, help and safeguard those around us with tougher starting positions.
Less ethically inclined people will discover the demons soon, unleashing new waves of crimes, scams and false promises with supernatural speed and accuracy leveraging the demons ability to learn from conversation and craft the most compelling yarn to slip past our guard. The problems of the last decade will be magnified and will require a new breed of defender armed with the same powers or better.
What we make of this new world is up to us. It’s not something to take lightly or try to force fit into existing frameworks from economic policy to social compact - Governments should have emergency meetings right now about the near future this creates, how to slow it or speed up human organizational processes to cope what is about to happen. They should resist the old chant of being afraid of snuffing out innovation. No job untouched, no economic area not disrupted, no company immune to disruption, no carefully balanced incentive economy left balanced. The most consequential economic and military constraint after energy will become compute, next year.
Is the world ready for it? Not by a long shot - but then it never is: The printing press (taking the power of publication from monks and giving it to a new class of people, triggering wars and disruption for centuries), gunpowder, internal combustion or the power to split the atom all unleashed change of status quo, violent and chaotic transformation humanity was not ready for - but also tremendous opportunity, progress and improvements. Humanity survived, sacrificed, bargained with these demons and chained them to our will (although the fossil demons bargain may yet do us in).
Yes, we are bleak as a species, the demons who feed our progress usually run on the back of others, the slaves, the exploited workers in far away lands extracting the coal demons wealth by sacrificing health and environment so we may travel speedily to work, the myriad of people trapped in the designs of our chosen economic framework, paying rent to others - the demons have been there all along, it's just a changing of guard that is happening, a new kind of power with even more seductive offers of progress.
The real world always lags adaptation to new discoveries from specialized fields, but it is this frontier where the most economic opportunity will be found. The rapidly expanding capabilities of the demon in the box need to be fitted to existing regulatory frameworks, human processes and biases, it’s powers carefully channeled and contained lest it rips apart the fabric of our social existence. This is where one must go now to find opportunity and economic safety.
But Georg, people said this about crypto too, how could you know…
You never really could do any of that with the crypto demon, it never had value to you beyond speculation, only promises of utopia and wealth. This one - it doesn't make promises about the future, today it can give you what you desire, like in the books of fantasy. Speak any language, code, compose, write, visualize your dreams. It's an entirely different quality than the offerings of our old demonic friend Mammon's latest shape.
Just remember your Dungeons and Dragons education, demons speak truth that may conceal lies, may appear human when they are anything but, tell you what you may want to hear leading you to doom. So long you remember this, you are alright and can harness it’s powers, must do so to survive what is coming.
My one advice for this year - ignore the preconceptions about AI, ignore any experiences you had with things like chatbots, wit.ai, NLP, and supposedly smart things and have a fresh look at what the current state is today. All previous iterations from more than 2 years ago are mere ants compared to what roams our datacenters now. No longer you need to speak the inexplicable languages of research engineers or invoke incantations of PyTorch or tensor flow to receive their gifts, they have learned to speak our language already.
Many of the fears and risks are very real. We may not even understand yet how much fear we should have - but the best way to adapt is to gain exposure and learn. Ignoring this will not work. Governments may invoke regulatory rituals to contain the demon's power within their borders, but it is a globally connected world and laws of competition demand adaptation lest an opponent gains the other hand. Those who are comfortable in their world are less likely to face it - your boss, your company may tell you to look the other way, to not touch the demon's power ... then you must do so in your own time. Face your demons, they are here now, in our world and we e will have to learn to coexist.
To survive we need to leverage them or perish against their ever increasing ability to do what we do, better, faster, tirelessly. We need to work to craft a world where humans still matter.
So far, we are do rather badly:
- 99% of email is written by machines, 100% of it is filtered by machines and maybe 1% of it is read by humans.
- A large part of the internet is machines talking to machines, fake video and ad impressions, spam email, cyberattacks. The old fashioned ones, without newly found supernatural support. We need to act.
- Many jobs have removed human agency and judgement from the people doing them. Making them perfect for machines to replace.
We risk creating a world where machines create and consume, where the ever increasing noise drown out the quality signal and leaves us stranded on a world rules and inhabited by the forces we brought into existence because our economic system design chains us and stops is from averting that fate. But if we figure this out, messy as this will be, we are in for a world full of wonder, magic, games and entertainment with creative power and possibility Star Trek could barely imagine. Merry Christmas.
** The ability to cast a 'capture attention' spell by creating enticing pixels from mere concepts in my mind was brought forth by a mid level Diffusion Demon living on my Nivida gaming card. Some of you may judge me for this, and I understand. I know it was summoned using a spell created in a lab by wizards destructively sacrificing large quantities of pixels representing the hard work and creative dreams of human artists, but it's seducing whisper, the ability to express the images in my brain in exchange for electricity is too enticing to reject. Just like the ability to speak any language, summon code into existence (powered by the works of human coders and translators) from mere words or handle chore letters is too powerful to ignore. You can't walk from the warmth of the fire into a cold cave once you experienced it either.
I speak so knowing that feeding my own work, code and architect, right now to the CoPilot demon in VSCode in exchange for it's 40% efficiency boost and a monetary sacrifice every month. The demons will do it all, better, in few years, maybe already today. Yet it has not drained the joy of creation, of writing code from me - knowing John Carmak exists did not do that either, and the same may be true for artists.
Our problem is not the demon, it's the economic laws of the world that define a persons worth as the delta of their ability to the average human. And it is specifically the AI demons power to grant us the ability to erase that delta, breaking our economic system. The world will not contain these demons, Stability decided to give the summoning spell to the world outside the ivory halls of corporate research summoners - so we all have to live with them now.
What needs to change is our economic system. And we knew that anyway, it was built on bad advice and misinformation from the Fossil demons and it is destroying the very foundation of our world. That's where the fight needs to be, along side the young people trying to safe their future, against the old world slavishly listening to the high priests of oil and gas.