Splinter Groups
Speculating on a social inflection point
How many of the top ten singles of 2023 would you recognize if you heard them? I’ll bet you could recognize more out of any random set of ten singles from the top 100 of 1965.
Pop music has splintered. This is true of culture in general. A much larger share of households tuned their TV sets to “Bonanza” than to whatever is the most popular streaming show today. Everybody went to the movies to see “Love Story” or “Star Wars” or “Titanic.” Many saw them multiple times. There is no equivalent today.
I can imagine that we are headed in this direction in general:
In the future, there will be no durable forms of collective mass identity.
I think that we near an inflection point, where social relations are drastically changed. Some types of people lose status, while other types gain. The nature of the “glue” holding societies together changes.
Two types of technological change produce inflection points. One type of change concerns the technology of communication. The invention of writing, the invention of the printing press, the invention of electronic communication, the invention of digital communication.
The other type concerns the technology of warfare. The invention of the stirrup, the invention of gunpowder, the invention of the machine gun, the invention of the tank.
I am not saying that all inflection points come from technology. The Industrial Revolution qualifies as an inflection point. I believe that the 1960s can be considered an inflection point. I would not say that those changes were brought about entirely by technology.
Today’s key innovations
The new communication tool that we have is the Large Language Model, which enables direct, rapid communication with computers. This means that computer capability will eventually be embedded everywhere, not just in special devices like smart phones or PCs. The special devices will fade in importance. Instead, we will be able to state a query or request a service any place, any time.
Another innovation is small-machine warfare. This will neutralize the advantage that large industrialized states had until recently.
Ever since the Axial Age, people have had durable collective identities. We had religious identities. We had national identities. I speculate that these will fade away. People will feel loyal to smaller groups, and they will be willing to switch loyalties often.
Governments will be much weaker than they are today. We will not need them as much for dispute resolution. Instead, the standard way to develop contracts will be to. “have my AI negotiate with your AI.” The importance of reputation management will be sufficient to deter people from breaking contracts.
Large armed forces will be vulnerable to small groups of determined militants. Political leaders will become timid and eager to please, like college presidents today. They will strongly desire to censor speech, but their efforts to do so will prove clumsy and ineffective.
People will regard governments as stationary bandits, and try to interact with them as little as possible. For protection from criminals, people will turn to the equivalent of spam filters. We will subscribe to services that use AI to identify and block criminals.
Celebrities will be famous only in narrow realms, for short periods of time. Many cults will emerge around all sorts of bizarre beliefs. The most durable social forms will be extended families and tribes.
I suppose that an alternative forecast is that the future will look like today, but with more embedded intelligence and with more small machines as military weapons. I would bet against this particular alternative, even though my own speculations could be way off.
Behold! You are (unusually) quite incorrect about small machine warfare. Large industrialized states (specifically China) will darken the skies with their ability to produce drones at scale in volumes far beyond everyone else. This in turn will allow them to conquer at scales far beyond everyone else. AI will allow them to then monitor and suppress dissent at scales far beyond today. The AI-powered drone panopticon will then allow them to establish Chinese Fasci-Communism as a universal ideology within the conquered areas and allow them to intrude on every aspect of everyone's lives except perhaps their internal monologue.
You are probably right that celebrities will be famous only in narrow realms.
I think the big corporations are building AI with the entire design built around being the ones to control it and bill it out to anyone who wants to use it.
AI requires both a lot of processing speed and energy, and powerful AI will need that at a scale beyond what an individual can afford.
Sure, they’ll allow us to have our own mini AI assistants, but they will actually not represent us and will represent the corporate interests that create them and will instead constantly be spying on us and also subtly trying to convince us of whatever narrative the people who control the AI want us to believe.
Try asking any of the current LLMs about anything medical and you’ll see that they are tuned to be completely pro big pharma. That’s just one example.
I was using an LLM to go over some recent paper that says regional banks are in much bigger trouble than seems obvious right now because of higher interest rates and CRE problems.
I asked the LLM about some ways to make a financial bet against regional banks (aside from obviously shorting strategies) and Claude flat out refused and said it was wrong to short banks.
When I pointed out that shorting stocks is a legal, reasonable, established and respected part of investing, it said oh yes, good point. But it still refused to budge on making even non shorting tactics to bet against banks.
Imagine carrying around a machine that can listen to every word you say and see everything you read and write and report back to the authorities efficiently about what it sees.
That is our current trajectory, in my opinion.
I hope we end up with real AI assistants that actually represent us as individuals, but I don’t see any of the big corporate or government interests allowing that to happen.