Hi everyone, I am developing a project to help people engage in constructive conversations about certain aspects of society 100 years in the future. I woud be very grateful if you could let me know which one of the 8 prompt on this website (https://www.22ndcenturyhub.com/) I have develop you find more interesting (you can also engage in a conversation with the AI, as I built in a GPT API). That would help me in further developing more prompts, I have about 60 at the moment. Thanks a lot in advance!
What I personally always think when it comes to the future is that we as humans are bad at predicting how hard a certain imagined technology actually is to realise. For example at the beginning of the century we could easily image wireless headphones and smart watches, but nobody expected them to be accessories to a portable phone because we didn’t know these two technologies would match into one (wireless phone calls and small computers were definitely two different things back then). Another example is flying cars, and more recently self-driving cars. Developing software for this turned out way harder then expected, while ‘self-thinking machines’ are much easier. I always think of this scene in I, Robot where the robot draws an image, back then this seemed much harder than a computer which arms and legs. In practice both have become possible over the last 20 years, but while generative AI is available to everyone, robots are only available to agencies that can also afford warships and fighter jets.
My main point it is extremely hard to predict where we will be in 100 years, but it might help to do this in a few steps. Not saying you have to publish those steps, but if you’re gonna use AI anyway you could try and set up a bunch of agents that work together:
Agent 1: analyse the past, let agent 2 know about how this tech came to be A2: based on this, imagine where this tech will be in 10 years, let agent 3 know your prediction A3: analyse the financial part of this development, tell A4 A4 - based on this, explore possibilities in 25 years, tell a5 A5 - analyse these possibilities, tell what is likely and what is not A6 - extrapolate the likely path to the following 25 years A7 - analyse if the likelihood of this 50 year prediction Etc etc
By setting up agents with different point of views you might have a better chance of avoiding the blind spots a single ai will have (since it doesn’t have knowledge itself, it just puts words together)
Also I’d make the difference between technological advancement (flying cars) and societal developments (equal rights), since these progressions don’t behave in the same way.
Thanks a lot for this very valuable input. The intent of my project is not to work in the space of predicting the future, but more in giving agency to people from different areas of expertise to engage in the practice of imagining the future, which sets in motion very interesting conversations about people’s value, how they see society today and of course also (sometimes) valuable inputs on what the future might hold.
People having conversation with each other of people having a conversation with ai?
The website is for now a way to start engaging in a conversation with AI, but what I am focussing on is to let people engage in conversation with each other IRL.
Like you would use conversation cards? Or would those people not use the website during their conversation?
Yes conversations cards, where what you read it’s pretty much what you read in one of the 8 prompts you can see on the website. So far I have about 50-60. But not all of them are high quality or interesting or somehow the right ones
Cool, wasn’t immediately clear to me when I opened the website but I did again just now and seems like fun questions to talk about!
Ok nice to hear! Which one of the 8 picks your interest the most?
One that triggers me is the one about post work society, because it reminds me of the work of a Dutch artist who died 20 years ago, he believed that one day humans no longer would have to work and he made models and drawings of what he called New Babylon. https://stichtingconstant.nl/constant/periods/new-babylon-1956-1974
I find looking at the future also very interesting if you look not from here but from a place in the past. Just like 2001: A Space Odyssey, of this man (Kubrick) who envisioned the time we live in now very differently as to what it actually turned out to be.
But to me honest, I would probably end up talking about the steps that lay before us now (the next 5-25 years) than actually imagine myself if I lived a 100 years from now; don’t know why that is.