Imagineering

On Lex Fridman, Ray Kurzweil laid out a process for inventing & predicting the future. 1. Write a speech about the world you want to exist. 2. Reverse engineer the steps to get there. 3. Execute those steps. Imagining is half the battle, and AI might help shrink the other half. Here's the text of the conversation between @lexfridman and Ray Kurzweil -- which I transcribed by hand like an idiot before seeing @jeffistyping's Youtube Whisperer -- and the link to the full episode. https://t.co/Viv7RG4171 Kurzweil's process is reminiscent of Amazon's Future Press Release, which former exec John Rossman broke down into four rules: Kurzweil's process, and optimism about the pace of AI, got me wondering how long it will be before we can just write the future speech and run it through some future @OpenAI model to fill in the required details. @amasad's tweet is relevant here: https://t.co/8yiLN7QxGb We're in an AI Hype Cycle, as @alexandr_wang pointed out. https://t.co/zizJUA6PHb @mhdempsey calls it the Curiosity Phase. https://t.co/6RYIiryS9F So caveats here that going from futuristic speech to instruction set is probably a while out. But Kurzweil has a great quote that helps explain hype cycles in his 2001 essay The Law of Accelerating Returns: https://t.co/4IifGL2VTQ And it feels like we're on a steeper part of the curve right now. Last Monday, I wrote, "We’re one small leap – some enterprising young coder hooking Stable Diffusion up to a voice input – from being able to speak words to conjure magic, incantation brought to reality.” On Wednesday, @OpenAI released and open sourced Whisper, bringing incantation one step closer. I know that I didn’t write it into reality, but it certainly felt like it.  https://t.co/qZW0wini8l Whether the Enchanted Notebook -- make something real by writing it -- is two months away or two decades, a good proximate next step on any timeline is for more people to paint rich, detailed visions of the future that they want to see come true. I'm having a lot of fun dreaming up possibilities. I wrote about Kurzweil, his process, exponential curves, hype cycles, imagination, and how AI might shrink the gap between dreams and reality by filling in the steps in this week's Not Boring: https://t.co/uawAbcxg3P

Walt Disney drew the media empire was trying to build. In 1957. It's amazing. Drawing out the connections of systems is a powerful clear thinking exercise. (H/T @web) https://t.co/nMwVjXXF3W

I really like the idea that Sci-Fi writers are basically the anti-patent-trolls. They basically generate and open-source the prior art that prevents people from patenting ideas and extracting rents later.