The Future Belongs to the Weird

To me that sounds like a very post-romantic interpretation of the past, where everything that happened before now, the enlightened times, was savage,cruel and retrograde. It's my understanding that things were a lot more subtle than that and that's a very simplistic approximation. I don't think Da Vinci, Vauban Euclid or Grosseteste were burnt to the stake, not even Galileo was.

> Obviously, there is nuance. You can take this argument to the limit and say that ultimately the world is made of only two things: Chaos (a.k.a. the vast seas of Wolfram's computational irreducibility, a.k.a. pure noise, a.k.a. quantum randomness) and Logos (the small islands of compressible patterns).

Within computational irreducibility, there's pure noise as well as universal computation, which is neither meaningfully predictable nor random. Since you mentioned Wolfram, in terms of elementary cellular automata, it's the difference between rule 30 and rule 110. The latter seems to me to be on the boundary between Chaos and Logos, and where I would expect to find the human intellect. (I think this is also largely the same distinction I made above where unpredictability can be useful or not.)

Since you also mentioned the economy and the possibility of UBI...I also don't know the answer, but I think it's worth thinking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which to me is pretty tightly coupled to weirdness. Moreover, I think societies similarly have their own hierarchy of needs, but that's something I don't understand very well. In any case, weirdness seems to be coupled to both of these, in that it best flourishes at the higher levels, when the more fundamental needs are mostly taken care of. At the lower levels, there's too much pressure to reduce social friction to cooperate with others for the sake of survival, and you just can't really afford to be too weird. I don't know if UBI is the answer, but there may be some benefit to just solving the lower levels of the needs hierarchy so we can move past this.

Guarantee it's almost (but not quite) universally no.

Maybe we will need humans to experience entirely new things instead. No one knows the taste of a new, bioengineered animal. No one knows what it's like to stimulate specific cell types in their brain. And so on. There are things that are and will remain uniquely human, forever.

The problem with weird is that not everyone can be weird, almost by definition. Moreover, people get things done collectively, and for that to work, the group (at whatever size) has to push in the same direction. Pushing in the wrong direction just to be weird will cause the group to fail.

Instead, I think, the future belongs to those who help change the present.

At the limit, any existing process can be done by AI, given a goal. What AI cannot do (and must not do) is come up with new goals. Coming up with new goals must always remain a human prerogative.

We don't need humans to work the assembly line--we need humans to make the assembly line better. AI can't do that alone because it cannot define "better". Humans must decide what "better" means. Do we want the assembly line to be faster or use fewer resources? Should it continue to produce this product or work on a new one? Should we build a bigger assembly line or turn the whole thing into a park?

As long as the world keeps changing, we will need humans to direct that change. People who fear change, who want everything to stay the same will have the hardest time in the future. Those are the people who will be replaced by AI.

The future belongs to those who change the present.

This is such a great way to summarise the issue facing rank-and-file employees. If your job is predictable, repeatable, systematizable then you're "competing against the price of electricity [and GPUs]"

Lady Gaga, its already here.

Still only a limited number of slots for weird to be successful.

good luck with that.

I suspect this is a very Eurocentric view. Take India for a counter-example, it has always been full of weirdoes starting their own cults.

The reality is that everything that was considered weird has been co-opted by the tech industry already. LGBTQ and Burning man are boring, commercialized and institutionalized now.

The tech industry did this, because tech people are relentless online advertisers for the industry and they had to placate them. It stopped when Trump was elected, which shows that the people holding the power are normie CEOs and not weirdos.

If you say Amodei is a weirdo: Only to a certain extent and he will be removed one day just like the Google founders. Some Eric Schmidt figure will take over.

Really, this is just AI generated or assisted fiction that improves morale for the tech influencers.

Change that and the weirdos will create a society that will die out.

See: modern liberal society and feminisim which leads to population collapse and destruction of the civilizations that embrace it.