The Future's not what it once was...💾

Sorry for the radio silence over the last two weeks, something has happened recently which has made me completely stop dead in my tracks.

I consider myself a futurist.

I love looking at what’s just over the horizon. It excites me.

There I was humming along the technology highway at 200mph, then suddenly this giant metal slab dropped from the sky and smashed into that highway. Backing up traffic as far as the eye can see.

I swerved and stopped just in time.

But now I’m looking up at this giant monolith which reaches up to the sky and I cannot literally see any way around it from any angle. I approach it cautiosuly and it seems to tingle and hum as I move my hand up towards it.

It is terrifying and exciting all at once.

Of course that monolith is AI. 

The inspiration for this weeks newsletter came about after watching this...

It’s titled the AI dilemma and is well worth your time.

Everything we know or think we know is about to change forever.

I couldn't have predicted when I got into film making and video over 20 years ago that the very mechanisms by which those had been established for over 100 years are about to change entirely. 

You script something, you film it, you edit it and then you distribute it.

Imagine being able to create entire worlds at the push of a prompt.

Imagine not needing cameras to film yourself anymore because you can 3d scan yourself and realistically position yourself into any environment?

Imagine being able to ASK AI to create entire worlds and scripts at whim for your AI persona to inhabit.

Things like Adobe firefly are changing the way in which entire industries are working.

Being able to type in prompts for creating video from scratch, creating scenes and have the edit already know which music to source to suit the mood blows my tiny mind.

The new wave of creators in this brave new world will be the ones who completely understand how to interface with the machine and understand the nuances of how to pull who they are through it with prompts.

BUT also understand how to tap into the poetry of what it means to be human.

I also believe that story and creativity will be the last of our assets to be stripmined.

I predict that we we will also get pushback from creators and we might even see a move to creators embracing forms that AI cant tackle like pottery, woodwork things that require human handiwork because this creates imperfection and nuance.

And will that spill over into a new aesthetic movement and things like architecture?

It’s not just me saying this a Wired article recently pulled this study up.

A full 15 years ago, a team of researchers from University College London and the University of Copenhagen put people into an fMRI machine and showed them a series of abstract images. They told them the images were either made by a human or by a computer. A clear winner emerged. People not only claimed to prefer the (identical) human-made pictures, their brains' pleasure centers actually lit up more brightly. What the researchers didn't anticipate, but which is likely to happen, is that this visceral preference for human over robot makers might grow stronger with time, just as technology closes the gap between them. Think of it as humanity's collective defense mechanism.

What will it mean for copyright a new and emerging creators are remixing existing art like music and creating entirely new works.

Check out this new track from Q Tip and Jay Z.

Except it isn't them at all! It's AI.

Will forms of Digital watermarking (blockchain and NFT's) and artists voices become areas of copyright? Will new jobs be created such as AI agencies that source and takedown this type of content?

And if all labour becomes essentially free (the baseline by which our economy is measured) what happens to our economy?

Will basic living wage become a thing?

This is also why I predict the personal brand is dead, it’s the personal philosophy that will replace it. I’m going to write a newsletter on that too, don't worry!

Philosophy is made up of 

1 part mythology and 

1 part science 

Mythology tries to answer the fundamental aspects of tradition and beliefs. Philosophy tries to answer the fundamental nature of knowledge and reality. And all the best people that we refer to as having brands don't really, they have a philosophy. Elon Musk being a prime example.

"My driving philosophy is to expand the scope and scale of consciousness that we may better understand the nature of the universe," Musk said. "I have a sort of proposal for a worldview or motivating philosophy which is to understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe”. Elon Musk.

And in the age of AI it's our philosophy and the way we interpret the world which will stand the test of time.

It is the rock by which the new creator economy will build their churches.

This probably reads more like word vomit but I felt compelled to get this stuff out of my head...

It’s part excitement, part fear, but the world we know is about to irreversibly change forever. 

And as a creator that excites me...

The question is, are you ready for what’s to come?