cg on 2024

It's been awhile since I've written anything but I think that's for the best. 

The energy around everything is just off for me this year and I've been doing everything in slow motion. It feels like the world, down to a micro-level, is caught up in tension and waiting to go somewhere, but it won't.

Mostly I've just been watching anime and listening to Star Wars books on audible, both of which I highly recommend you start doing right away. A big part of life for me is just observing content and extracting out a greater meaning from it. I think that's a big part of what keeps me sane and decently motivated. 

I've said before that creating things is the purpose of life, but I also think just learning about and enjoying things in general is a big part of that.

If you haven't seen it already, Frieren is an anime about an immortal elf girl trying to travel to heaven to see her friends that died 80 years ago. Flashbacks appear frequently, showing how detached she was from everyone around her, and frankly it's quite sad. Missing out on people because you allow your connection with them to decay is one of the many great mistakes in life. I imagine it's common for people, even within families, to just stop talking because they got out of the habit. I can think of a few examples personally, though I'm trying to address this.

Staying connected with people takes a lot more effort than it seems.

So here's my thoughts on this year:

I don't have many thoughts on the election to be honest. 

There's a theory I've heard a few times that they'll install Trump.

Personally, that's just too many layers of 4D chess for me. If the government is equally likely to install either one of them then I don't see any reason to analyze it seriously. I still haven't made up my mind on what happened in 2020. Plus, we don't really know who we'll have on the ballot to vote for, Trump will probably be in prison, and Brandon is ancient.

The energy around the election just feels dead to me. Feels like no one cares, which I think is for the best. I hate when people get worked up over politics and argue over it. 

Obviously, you should vote for Trump for the cheaper gas prices alone, he'd also likely slow down the Ukraine war quite a bit. I doubt I'll be voting, but that has more to do with me not caring enough to go out of my way to do it than anything else. 

I think regardless of who gets in, Israel will do some tricks to gracefully lose the war so they can continue to have enemies in Gaza. 

The messaging surrounding the Gazans all being evil is marketed really well, so much so that all the war-crime stuff Israel is doing is mostly seen as justified. Personally, I don't really care that much. My brain shuts off when I start hearing the genocide rhetoric.

I think the Palestinians should've surrendered a long time ago, it's extremely clear by now that their allies don't care about them and will never step in to defend them. They're just dying for no logical reason, and a big part of the blame for the casualties is on them, that is assuming that Hamas is a legit group and not an Israeli op.

You can only care about so many things in life, and I've never been about pretending to care for people across the world. 

The Ukraine war will likely drag on into 2026-2028. I doubt Europe will provide any soldiers, but even if they do, it would need to be a few hundred thousand to make a difference. France sending 10,000 soldiers there wouldn't change anything, aside from providing Russia with compelling PR material to keep the war from becoming unpopular domestically. Ukraine can't launch any massive operations due to the lack of soldiers, and Russia doesn't have much of a reason to simply capture Kiev and subjugate the remaining population. 

With the huge amount of women refugees that have fled, Russia would have to manage a huge population of incels with many reasons to hate them. America could just throw a few trillion dollars into the now Russian-controlled Ukraine and start a rebellion if enough of these guys are left alive by the end of the war.

Another alternative is that Russia gets outspent and has to take a huge L while going home with the bit of land they've captured. I say huge L because in 2022, four regions of Ukraine voted to join Russia, and the Russian government agreed to the results, so not following through on securing the territories would look really bad.

I don't think any of these wars will blow up, and I predict the election will be peaceful due to Trump being much less culturally relevant than he was in 2016 and 2020. The people that even know what he got charged for are all old, and his refusal to get on Twitter has really hurt his brand in my opinion.

Overall, I'm pretty whitepilled for 2024. 

2025 will be another big AI year and we'll be even closer to the dream of full-functional ai gfs and I'm looking forward to that.

ai videos

 

About a day ago, OpenAI revealed their new ai video generation software called Sora that can create realistic videos from text that are easily on par with stock footage. Of course, there are still a few bugs, most notably hands look weird and can’t move around properly yet, but as we’ve seen over the past few months, ai hand generation is nearing perfection when it comes to still images. Videos that don’t include hands are pretty accurate and have improved drastically from the stuff we saw a year ago where humans couldn’t even be properly rendered. 

Assuming we all live to 50, I think it’s safe to predict we’ll see AI generating full on movies, commercials, and youtube channels. AI voice replication tools have already been used for over a year to create a ton of youtube content, most notably AI president videos, but more recently it’s been used in music to create some real bangers like this, and writers have began to adopt it to put out work faster. 

As a somewhat creative person, I can look forward to any creative thing I want to get into becoming easier and easier to access over time. I already use AI to generate photos and a singing voice for my music hobby, and I could see myself using it to do something like help me write a book in the future.

My biggest concern with this technology is that censorship will stifle its growth to the point where huge advances take substantially longer and longer. Fake video and audio are nothing new, ai voice technology has long since been at a point where audio recordings shouldn’t be considered real at face value. There will likely be a lot of concern from governments as this stuff becomes more available to the public. Right now people are just using Joe Biden’s voice (best ai president btw) to make 5hr tier-list videos, but it’s not unlikely that in a few years you’ll be able to fabricate videos of him giving speeches / interviews from your phone with zero technical knowledge. More likely than not, It will be the government themselves putting out these videos. I’m sure we’ll also have a set of laws in the next few years regulating AI development and use that will make it less fun to use.

Ultimately, ai’s continued improvement has been a big white pill for me personally. Smaller projects like gab.ai show there is a future for less censored AI on some level. The point of technology has always been to liberate us from menial tasks, and AI is already doing that and more. Just a few years ago, if you needed a specific photo for a thumbnail or whatever, your only options were to pay an artist like $50, spend years learning how to create digital art, or hope that one of your online friends will get around to doing it for free at some point. The AI singing voice I mentioned using earlier is an also relatively new invention, having only been out for around a year, and its capabilities are really impressive.

My view of an ideal future society is one where ai can fill in the gaps left by technological advancement. Today, we can afford to do less tedious tasks than ever before, but this has inadvertently led to a scenario where at once there is much personal wealth and freedom, but isolation is the fate for a growing part of the population. I’ve already written about ai wives before so I won’t go through that whole thing again. I believe the concept of ai companions (literally just a friend you can talk to) will be another huge industry in the future. Having deep conversations with people isn’t easy in my experience at least. I don’t like to open up to anyone and I’m definitely not alone in that regard. 

But even greater than that, I think ai will greatly improve people’s work-lives. It’s no secret that a lot of people hate their jobs, and I can’t blame them for that as much as I’m pro-working. Interacting with people in today’s America can be a total nightmare, and there aren’t a ton of jobs that allow you to escape from it all. We’ve all seen a boomer obnoxiously lecturing or yelling at some incel zoomer worker, and just dealing with the overall mental illness of the population doesn’t sound appealing on any level. AI could easily automate fast-food, retail, driving, and customer service jobs in a decade or two. I don’t doubt that there are a ton of smart people stuck in these jobs whose talents should be utilized elsewhere, so totally removing these as employment options would allow them to use their intelligence to work on improving AI. 

I don’t see us getting out of this birthrate dip anytime soon so there’s really no societal benefit to keeping these low-skill jobs around to keep average people occupied. Of course, there will still be a decent amount of low IQ people by then, but I don’t see why they can’t be housed in shipping containers and enjoy the rest of their lives watching ai generated movies while robots tend to their basic needs. 

High-skilled people could spend their lives creating content to train AI, thus fulfilling their innate desire to work while also doing something useful for humanity. If you already live online, this is just a straight up improvement to your life. 

If I had access to billions of dollars, I’d have thousands of artists and writers making content to train AI on, and I’m sure they’d find this infinitely more fulfilling than whatever it is their wasting their time doing right now.