VineCraft
Hi All.
Sorry for the missed post last week. Lots going on in my world. Twitter has been taking big swings at Substack the past several months, ultimately culminating in blocking the ability to link to posts, which just happened to be my number one source of subscriber growth. Debating another pivot in strategy as this was all just experimental anyways. And for those inquiring, yes the app is launching soon. It is in fact up and running, there is just a certain level of quality that must be espoused in order to feel comfortable sharing it with the greater public.
On that tangent, I want to continue down the path of AI predictions, and take a little detour into what I think the future is going to look like.
VineCraft
I think everyone knows what Vine and Minecraft are. One was the popular video sharing app that predated TikTok, eventually purchased and inexplicably shelved by Twitter over a decade ago. The other is the currently mega-popular “sandbox” video game platform that allows for an infinite amount of freedom to create worlds and play in them, often with no objective whatsoever.
The combination of the two is where I see AI development heading. Not in the literal sense, although that could be one of many outputs, but more in a thematic sense. Let me explain:
AI Gives Modern Leverage
As stated ad nauseum within my articles, the two forms of modern leverage are media and code. Through our newfound ability to query AI models that have more knowledge that we could ever hope to acquire, we can all personally uplevel ourselves to heights that would have taken years to accomplish previously.
My last weekend was actually spent in front of two screens, ChatGPT on one and a VS Code terminal on the other. Just like I can’t imagine being an analyst before Excel, or remembering what navigating around town was like before GPS, it’s going to be hard for future generations to imagine what coding was like before ChatGPT and CoPilot. Crazy, crazy leveling of the playing field when it comes to programming.
Like with code, the visual medium continues to accelerate with finer and finer visuals as prompting becomes an artform in itself. Soon, super hi-res images will be able to be created at scale, slowly leading into the ability to prompt short form video into existence. With the same ease that you can create a digital character in Minecraft, you can spin up a digital Vine from your imagination, or an App via voice-prompting.
Infinite Combinatorial Effects
With such powerful tools at our disposal, the possibilities are endless. Everything in digital existence is just media and code. Since the advent of the GUI, we’ve been looking at, and interacting with visuals on a screen that mimic real-world environments, despite them being nothing but a bunch of pixels controlled by a bunch of 0s and 1s. Whether someone wants to create a Metaverse that unfolds before the user’s eyes like the dream training scene in Inception, or simply train a mundane application to drag unused files into your recycle bin, the potential becomes reality. The event horizon is that our individual needs become so hyper-specific that we are the only ones who can actually create that reality.
Platform Localization
This has large ramifications for enterprise software. SaaS has been one of the largest economic drivers of the past few decades. Platforms like Slack and Sales Force provide tremendous value to organizations because they are both one-size-fits-all, and modular and customizable. No two organizations have the same workflow, which is why these enterprise software companies are so valuable. Providing a platform that enables consumer customization is extremely helpful. But with open source code, and tools that enable the end user to proliferate as the upstream creator, “platforms” get fragmented into bits and pieces that organizations can pick and choose from. Why pay $250k to set up Sales Force plus a $300 per seat per month when the smart kid in Accounting can spin up something comparable in between breaks from watching TikTok videos?
AI + Open Source means that all software becomes essentially free. The only cost is the human capital, the energy it takes to run the code, and the almighty Vig that you have to pay to your AI provider. Most small to medium sized businesses already take advantage of these kinds of tactics because they are huge cost savers, and the incremental performance gained by enterprise software is not always material. Moving forward, the ability to create something as good as an enterprise platform, but tailored perfectly to meet your own needs (whether for business or pleasure), at a fraction of the cost of the incumbent, will absolutely be destructive. This is the deflationary nature of technology. Sure, jobs get automated away, but like we see time and time and time again, new (better) jobs emerge to replace them.
All of this is to say that the value of AI is in enhancing human ability to adapt and build. In fact, AI is increasing human intelligence so much that we ought to come up with a new name for this symbiosis we are on the cusp of. As we merge with the 0s and 1s through Natural Language Processing, we realize that the intelligence isn’t artificial at all, it’s additive.
Now, are you going to embrace your transhumanism? Or, are you going to go off-grid and flee to a villa in Portugal? The enduring struggle of technology vs nature is emerging once again but the lines might not be as clear as they once were. Maybe this newfound dichotomy delivers some extra introspection into what it really means to be human. Or maybe we all get converted into batteries..