There's an old story. You put two rabbits on the continent of Australia, and they double in population each day. Ignore population constraints. When the continent is half covered in rabbits, how long do you have to react?
The answer: one day. That's the power of exponential growth. Do you know a thing in real life that experiences exponential growth, and has reliably experienced it for almost a century? Computers. A la Moore's Law.
Here's the thing. Computer generated text and stories are already about halfway to becoming actually viable as a form of entertainment. If you want a taste of that right now, google AiDungeon. It's a text-based interface where a neural network sends you on a D&D-esque adventure. It can be pretty convincing at times. I'd say it's about fifty percent of the way to an actual human's writing. And computers have reliably doubled in power every two years since their beginning. What does this mean for the author?
It means an end to human-written stories and the birth of personal canon. Imagine. Computers can do superhuman things. It's literally impossible for a meatbag to beat the top computers in chess, and that's been true for a decade. In 2016 Google showed that even Go, a game full of choice and strategy that traditionalists said wouldn't be cracked for centuries, was cracked. Google won all but one game during a watershed moment against the best Go player in Korea, and therefore probably the world.
I believe that the day where a computer can produce a Dostoyevsky-level novel is coming. Then, a year after that, it will create a novel so good, so seminal, and so amazing that it will blow every other written work of fiction in human history out of the water. And the great part about it? That the novel will cost pennies to produce. I'm talking an entire Wheel of Time-long, James-Joyce-meaningful, and Harry Potter-fun novel series for the personal enjoyment of you and you alone, possibly on a Netflix-level subscription service. It is inevitable. We're already halfway there. The books that AI will produce--and after that, the video games and movies--will be so good and so quickly produced that humanity will experience a total shift in its culture the likes of which hasn't happened since the invention of language. It means that you can choose an impossibly narrow set of things you want to see in a book and have the most mind-blowing and enjoyable book series you've ever seen delivered to you at the cost of a hamburger. Then they'll take over movies and video games, and then after that they'll elevate human art and entertainment to the point where it will phase shift into a form that is as addictive as a drug. The computers will get so good at targeting the human psyche and causing it to feel various emotions that there will be movies that are comprised of targeted shapes and colors with no real world correlation that will be so mesmerizing that, once looked upon, will entrap the looker until either they die or the movie ends. This is the end game that I believe will happen within my lifetime.
And I'm happy to have it that way. There's already a software called GPT-3 that is about seventy-five percent of the way to what I'm talking about. Be careful. All the robots have to do to take over the human race is show them a really good book.
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