what's your vision for the future?

Honestly, I consider those two pretty different questions. At the very least, I'd approach them very differently in terms of time-scale. What's "top of mind" for me is more about the short-term threats I perceive to our way of life, whereas my "vision for the future" is - to my way of thinking - more about how I'd like things to be in some indeterminate future (that might never arrive, or might arrive long after my passing).

To the first question then: what's on my mind?

1. The rise of authoritarianism and right-wing populism, both in the US and across the world.

2. The increasing capabilities of artificial intelligence systems, and the specter of continued advances exacerbating existing problems of unequal wealth / power imbalances / injustice / etc.

Combine (1) and (2) and you have quite a toxic stew on your hands in the worst case. Now I'm not necessarily predicting the worst case, but I wouldn't bet money that I couldn't afford to lose against it either. So worst case, we wind up in a prototypical cyberpunk dystopia, or something close to it. Only probably less pleasant than the dystopias we are familiar with from fiction.

And even if we don't wind up in a straight up "cyberpunk dystopia", one has to wonder what's going to happen if fears of AI replacing large numbers of white-collar jobs come true. And note that that doesn't have to happen tomorrow, or next year, or 5 years from now or whatever. If it happens 15 years, or 25 year, or 50 years, or whatever, from now, the impact could still be profound. So even for those of you who are dismissive of the capabilities of current AI systems, I encourage you to think about the big picture and play some mental simulations with different rates of change and different time scales.

Edit/Append: I've had this idea [1] forever (since the 1990s, possibly earlier... don't have notes going that far back). Imagine the simplest possible compute element, the look up table... arranged in a grid. Architectural optimizations I've pondered over time lead me to a 4 bits in, 4 bits out look up table, with latches on all outputs and a clock signal. This prevents race conditions by slowing things down. The gain is that you can now just clock a vast 2d array of these cells with a 2 phase clock (like the colors on a chessboard) and it's a universal computer, Turing complete, but you can actually think about it without your brain melting down.

The problem (for me) has always been programming it and getting a chip made. Thanks to the latest "vibe coding" stuff, I've gotten out of analysis paralysis, and have some things cooking on the software front. The other part is addressed by TinyTapeout, so I'll be able to get a very small chip made for a few hundred dollars.

Because the cells are only connected to neighbors, the runs are all short, low capacitance, and thus you can really, REALLY crank up the clock rates, or save a lot of power. Because the grid is uniform, you wont have the hours or days long "routing" problems that you have with FPGAs.

If my estimates are right, it will cut the power requirements for LLM computing by 95%.

[1] Every mention of BitGrid here on HN - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

If you care about the future, what people say on the Internet is not worth your time. Just make it happen.

End of the day, I see it as repeat of the 1920s, good and bad. Technology will drive discontent until we figure out how to tame it.

The hopeful version:

  People get their head out of a phone only to realize
  life is more than the next dopamine hit.

  The logical conclusion of what is detailed in the
  paragraphs above.

  Where being addicted to a handheld device is not
  only normal, but expected.

  Where "what it is that we actually want" is not an
  individual choice, but a corporate one.

  Where the idea of technofascism is introduced as
  "silly to suggest" and then normalized as "but we
  all know that that's where things should be headed
  in many cases." (see above)

The "Metaverse" is going to be a more interactive, immersive extension of that device. I also believe that Meta's superintelligence team isn't necessarily about achieving AGI, but rather, creating personable, empathetic LLMs. People are so lonely and seeking friendship that this will be a very big reason to purchase their devices and get tapped into this world.

We say "good music gives you goosebumps". Very reductively, you could argue the whole point of a musician's entire career is literally just to get good at making your skin hair wiggle. What if we're overlooking the possibility that the presence of a physically-sensed reaction would make us value something more?

I think the future of communication could involve something kind of like that, for better or for worse. Optimizing communications for physical reactions. The value prop may just be too high, if the causal direction of this effect (on salience) is actually real.

I read a news article about Trump's re-election in Nov 2024, where they interviewed one of his supporters - they said something to the effect of "when I heard the news, my whole nervous system just suddenly relaxed." I wouldn't be surprised if forms of communication get more and more optimized, whether via RLHF or recsys likes or some other means, for their ability to target, for lack of a better term, "embodiment goals"

That would protect more than just the careers of creatives. It would also protect that relationship -- between performers and audiences -- confirming that it's a human-to-human connection, with all of its special validation and honoring of what it is to be human.

2. AI will begin to peter out. Investment has far outpaced results and many people will be left holding over valued assets in a super saturated market like the housing market in 2007. It’s great until it’s not.

3. Software employment will continue to reduce headcount as demand for software continues to increase. Automation and skill diversification are the names of the game. Many employers were hoping AI would solve this problem and will look for alternate solutions to make up the lost time and burnt investment spent on AI. As developers continue to become more expensive without equivalent value delivery marketplace competition will determine if employers can assume those expenses or pass them back to their customers.

4. API design will become an emerging employment option for developers. It’s what I currently do, it’s in high demand, and I don’t see a lot of people talking about it.