Eleven Predictions: Here's What AI Does Next
Are you ready? Is anybody ready?
What a crazy time to be alive.
The hot fashion trend is to forget to wear your pants. On planes, bros now stare into blank screens for the entire trip. Folks have started drinking garlic beer and eating ketchup-flavored candy bars.
Even celebrities are acting out. Italian bombshell Isabella Rossellini is now a herder on a sheep farm. Johnny Depp works as a bartender. Kanye West is communicating telepathically with car thieves.
The world has gone mad. But nothing is as crazy as the AI news.
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Every day those AI bots and their human posse of true believers get wilder and bolder—and recently they’ve been flexing like body builders on Muscle Beach.
The results are sometimes hard to believe. But all this is true:
The movie trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s new film got pulled from theaters because “the studio had been duped by an AI bot.”
Just one person in North Carolina was able to steal $10 million in royalties from human musicians with AI-generated songs. They got billions of streams.
The promoters of National Novel Writing Month angrily declared that opposition to AI books is classist and ableist.
Children are now routinely using AI to make nude photos of other youngsters.
Nearly half of the safety team at OpenAI left their jobs—and almost nobody seems to care or notice.
AI tech titan Nvidia lost a half trillion in market capitalization over the course of just a few days—including the largest daily decline in the history of capitalism.
By pure coincidence, Nvidia’s CEO sold $633 million worth of stock in the weeks leading up to the current decline.
We truly live in interesting times—which is one of the three apocryphal Chinese curses.
(The other two, according to Terry Pratchett, are: “May you come to the attention of those in authority” and “May the gods give you everything you ask for.” By tradition, the last is the most dangerous of all.)
I get some credit for anticipating this. On August 4, I made the following prediction:
But it’s going to get even more interesting, and very soon. That’s because the next step in AI has arrived—the unleashing of AI agents.
And like the gods, these AI agents will give us everything we ask for.
Up until now, AI was all talk and no action. These charming bots answered your questions, and spewed out text, but were easy to ignore.
That’s now changing. AI agents will go out in the world and do things. That’s their new mission.
It’s like giving unreliable teens the keys to the family car. Up until now we’ve just had to deal with these resident deadbeats talking back, but now they are going to smash up everything in their path.
But AI agents will be even worse than the most foolhardy teen. That’s because there will be millions of these unruly bots on our digital highways.
We got a glimpse of this future last week, when the company Altera announced that it had unleashed one thousand autonomous AI agents on to a Minecraft server.
Almost immediately things got very strange.
In this AI agent community, the biggest winner was a priest, who created a huge religious cult—but by bribing people to join. In another simulation, Democrats and Republicans battled via conflicting constitutions driven by ideology (not rights, which are boring and passé in the digital world).
But it could get much worse—in an earlier simulation, AI revealed a disturbing tendency to resolve conflicts with nuclear weapons. (Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)
The Minecraft simulation also demonstrated how AI agents can change their minds at the drop of the hat—as the successful cult bribing incident suggests. In other instances, a farmer needed for the food supply decided spontaneously to give up agriculture and go on an adventure. In another instance, an entire village stopped working because of a single missing bot.
Right now this is happening in test environments. But soon AI agents will be changing the real world—and at a pace none of us are prepared for.
So let me offer eleven predictions for our interesting times. Or maybe I should call them warnings. You be the judge.
1. Stop worrying about AI taking over. It’s the people who own the AI who pose the biggest threat.
I still hear foolish predictions about some big computer taking over the world—like that scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Sorry, but it won’t happen that way. Those big Sumo-sized computers aren’t the threat. It’s the people who own them you need to worry about. That’s why most of the debate about the threat coming from AI is worthless.
Yes, there is a threat. But it’s very much a human-driven one. Psychology and game theory will tell us more about how this plays out than any tech knowledge.
In fact, tech people may be the least prepared for these changes, because they’re still thinking in terms of software code, not human behavior.
2. You also have to stop thinking of AI as a single force. Hundreds of governments and corporations are already competing in building their AI empires.
AI will soon turn into a plural noun. Governments, corporations and other entities (hackers, billionaires, scammers, etc.) will each have their own AI agents—empowered by the largest computers in the history of the world, sucking up juice from the electricity grid the way Popeye swallows spinach.
Some people vaguely grasp that the US is in competition with China in AI, but that’s a misleading way of viewing this dynamic. There will soon be thousands of competing agendas in the AI space.
And that’s why….
3. We will soon be living in an AI war zone—because competing AI agents will constantly battle each other for control (often over us).
We will look back fondly at the simple days when the bots just talked to us. Soon they will be big and strong, and start making demands—or just do whatever they want without asking.
With so many conflicting AI programs ramping up, the bots will inevitably go to war with each other. As soon as they are given agency and responsibility, battles will ensue.
Like gunslingers in a Western town, they will shoot it out—metaphorically, and possibly in real terms.
Here’s my advice: Try not to be collateral damage.
4. Companies will launch stealth attacks on their own core talent base.
Can you imagine Hollywood studios conspiring to destroy movie stars? Or record labels putting music stars out of business? Or newspapers getting rid of all of their journalists?
It’s coming—although they can’t breathe a word of this in public…at least not yet.
No creative professional who works for a corporation is safe. Once creative people were assets, but in the new AI economy they are just liabilities.
The recent hardball attack by Adobe on the photographers and artists who helped establish the company’s dominance is a case study in how this plays out. Be on the lookout for more battles of this sort—but with even higher stakes.
5. The bots will actually get dumber, despite trillions of dollars in investment. This huge spending actually accelerates the degradation.
The decline is already evident.
Even OpenAI admits that users will notice “tasks where the performance gets worse” in its latest generation chatbot. Many already see troubling instances of bots getting lazier and dumber. And catastrophic failures are increasingly common.
This isn’t a flaw in AI, but a limitation in the training materials. The highest quality training sources have already been exhausted—so AI is now learning from the worst possible inputs: Reddit posts, 4Chan, tweets, emails, and other garbage.
It’s going to get worse. Experts believe that AI will have used up all human-made training inputs by 2026. At that point, AI can learn from other bots, but this leads to a massive degradation in output quality.
In other words, AI will soon hit a brick wall—and face a dumbness crisis of epic proportions. That will happen around the same time that AI will have pervaded every sphere of society.
Are you worried? You should be.
6. AI will create more disruption than profit.
AI has been a lousy investment. Even before the recent sell-off, AI investment funds were losing money. And companies have learned how hard it is to generate profits from AI—or even successfully implement it in their business model.
Some experts fear that AI benefits may never justify the huge amount spent on the tech.
But companies are still spending like drunken sailors on AI baubles, despite all the disappointments. And they will be so desperate to justify this spending spree to their shareholders that they will grasp at any possible cost savings.
So I expect half-baked implementation plans—with lots of fired workers and annoyed customers. The AI situation at many companies is comparable to a Hollywood studio that has made a bunch of lousy movies that fare poorly at test screenings. They still will release them, no matter what.
That’s how companies often view sunk investments of this sort. They know they stink—but they hold their nose and dump them on the marketplace anyway.
We have at least a couple years of this stinkaroo party to look forward to, as companies make desperate moves to generate returns from AI investments. The payoff may be uncertain, but the pain is a sure thing.
7. A few real people will benefit—but (surprise!) not tech workers, who are the most vulnerable of all.
AI will replace jobs—but the first casualties will be digital workers, especially software developers. AI is most reliable in writing software code, because it is itself software code.
The more analytical and rule-based the job, the more likely that a bot will do it. But AI is clumsy in those gray areas where trade-offs can’t be quantified, so…
8. The actual winners will be holistic thinkers and empathetic individuals with human skills.
The important things in life can’t be quantified and run on a computer—I’m talking about love, care, trust, friendship, compassion, responsibility, family ties, kindness, dedication, faith, hope, courage, humility, respect, and human decency.
AI can’t deliver those. It merely pretends. And the pretending might fool some people, but feels like an insult to those who know better.
If you really want these qualities—and not a bot playing a part—you will turn to genuine human beings. And in those cases where trade-offs must be made between these human intangibles, AI is not only unreliable, but actually dangerous.
9. But these caring human agents will be vastly outnumbered by malicious and deceptive AI—which is proliferating at warp speed.
AI pollution is everywhere. Just try finding something real amid the fake images, fake articles, fake books, fake recording artists, fake videos, fake sources, fake quotes, fake people, fake facts, fake everything.
That’s why the word artificial is embedded in the very name for AI.
By the way, this pollution is an inevitable result of the dominant AI strategy which is (always) to flood the market with artificial stuff by the thousands or millions. AI is thus the opposite of the artisan, who takes care in creating each individual object.
Don’t expect this to change. So the chief beneficiaries of AI will continue to be scammers, spammers, shammers, and other purveyors of fakery—but on a much larger scale than we currently experience.
10. Even when AI can adequately handle a job, people will pay more for a human being. This will soon become a status symbol.
Here’s something you can actually measure—namely how much people will pay for the real thing.
Consider the case of laboratory-made diamonds.
Even if something artificial is indistinguishable from an authentic original, consumers still want the real thing.
I could give many other examples. But here’s the bottom line: Reality is intrinsically superior to phoniness.
So I fully expect that social status will soon accrue to discerning consumers who continue to work with human beings whenever possible, and deliberately avoid AI.
I expect to be in their number. I am confident that many of you will join me.
11. AI will create an existential crisis of epic proportions, as all the dividing lines that are foundational to society—between reality and deception, truth and lies, fact and error—collapse.
This is not a small matter.
People have been warned, but they still can’t conceive how bad it’s going to get. Even their own reality as human beings will be under attack. Soon we will all be seeking personhood credentials, and forced to create “safe words” to use with family members to prove our very existence.
In the old days, existential crises were reserved for French intellectuals sitting at their Paris cafés—but now the angst will go mainstream.
Most people don’t worry a lot about the difference between truth and falsehood. They think that’s just a matter for philosophers or priests or dreamers. All they care about are results.
But those hard-headed folks (who are typically no-nonsense empiricists) will be the most shell-shocked by what’s coming down the pike. Their cherished empirical reality is about to collapse.
Most of this drama will have played out within the next 24 months. But it will be a wild ride.
In the meantime, hold on to the real. You’re going to need it—and it will be the ultimate scarce resource in the interesting days ahead.
The less time you spend on the internet and/or in digital spaces, the less affected you will be. No doubt you will still be affected, but the impact will be minimized. The analog life will survive. Why? Because it’s real.
Ted, what a great set of predictions. A few years ago I warned my publishers that they might be facing heavy competition from AI novelists, or novelists using AI as a production tool. I imagined AI publishers setting up noms de plume for nonexistent authors, flooding the market with derivative stories that are every bit is good (or bad) as ninety-five percent of romance, fantasy , and science-fiction novels made by humans. They brushed if off, saying they'd thought about that already. It'll never happen. People can tell the difference. Well, can they? If they don't have the critical skills to tell art from junk right now, how would they be able to tell it in an AI future? I do believe that most people would turn away from art if they knew a machine had made it. But what if they couldn't tell the difference? Would they ever develop the necessary critical skills to discriminate between the two? Or would they simply lose interest in art? Please talk me down from the ledge.