Use Your Crystal Ball Part Deux (Not Music Specific!)

[john]

 

Hi Gang

 

Following on from @VoiceEx's comment, I thought I'd post a more general crystal ball topic.

 

I'm not expecting expertise, just looking for thought out opinions... about TRENDS within entertainment, society, fashion, technology.... anything. Please create predictions for 1 year, 5 years, and 10 years.

 

This is your opportunity to share your soothsayer powers, your depth of perception your ability to part the mists of time and present your predictions, along with an explanation of what leads you to that opinion. Be sensible, be silly, be adventurous, or be conservative... it is up to you oh sage.

 

Potential subjects to include:

• fashion trends
• pastimes
• technology
• entertainment
• celebrities
• politics (please keep it light peeps)
• culture
• subcultures
• food
• transport
• cyber enhancements

 

Try to include:

• what will be trending up
• what will be trending down
• what will be recovering
• what is past its peak
• what will be dominating
• what will be disappearing

 

If reality is too boring, feel free to be inventive!

 

Cheers

 

John

[VoiceEx]

Thanks for making this change! 👍 However, you do realize that now I must copy paste my soothsaying! 🤣

[VoiceEx]

I suppose its time to unleash my inner Nostradamus and make a prediction about the future of music! Or, a version of it anyway 😅

 

For you see, my crystal ball is telling me, that,

 

1 year from now, due to the advances in technology, most trend/clout chasing musicians will practically abandon generating music, in favor of generating videos. This will also apply to other forms of art. Generated videos will be the new kid on the block for quite some time. It will be a paradigm shift that will cause ripples within all artistic avenues, as well as the entertainment industry.

 

This will also be a time where big business and labels will begin picking up even more draconian practices, hoping that technology will provide them with ways to strengthen their hold on the music market. Ultimately reaching a conclusion, in true supervillain fashion:

 

"..The human population will always prefer human content. Unfortunately for us. But therein lies the solution to our problem. For if you can't sway them or buy them, than you could simply.. swarm them. Until there is nothing left. Give them what they want. Indefinitely.."

 

And 5 years from now, they will begin holding artists accountable, not only through amassing debt, but also through binding the artist to a contract that gives the label permission to process and manufacture an unlimited amount of virtual versions of the artist.

 

This means that, by signing the contract, you will be relinquishing ownership over your: Physical likeness, your identity, your personality, and your voice (etc). Entirely. In addition, you will also be providing them with unlimited access to your online data, medical records (of all kinds), along with legal permission to sell/use/distribute all the different versions of you, as many times as they want, whenever they want, to whoever they want, and hoever they see fit.

 

In other words:

Not owning your masters will be the least of your concerns. To put that in perspective, while your busy paying off the debt you have accumulated from the production of your album, your clones could assigned to work different products or different places entirely.

 

For example, one clone of you could be streaming. Another could be making rounds on social media. Some clones might even have entire sub 'branches' of themselves, all working within the adult entertainment industry.

 

You will be everywhere, all at once. They sky is the limit! And while this would indeed be a dystopia like no other, at least big business will be booming, am I right?! 😅

 

10 years from now, most, if not all independent artists, as a way to combat the clone infestation, will have shifted their attention to operating through virtual hubs exclusively. For those would be the only free spaces left where running an independent operation would be cost effective.

 

And at this point, they would be relying on technology for practically all the heavy lifting. And instead of promoting live concerts and real merch, they would promote virtual concerts and digital merch. All the while, relying heavily on turning a profit from their own Web Series. Which, at this point in time, everyone will have one of their own.

 

".. the day that music died" indeed 😷👍

[GregB]

Very "Prescient" topic  ... as I watched "Idiocracy" (2006)  last night. Previosuly unseen, perhaps because of the title, it was on a list of obscure but good SF films. I REALLY enjoyed it.   Made before Trump, Brexit, social media, game/reality shows, etc., it is a solid, funny, and clever take on society's steady dumbing-down.  It can be applied to all facets of modern society, including the arts ... and this was way BEFORE the emergence of AI.

The film also predated the vision of a hedonistic and self-indulgence humanity portrayed in Wall-E.  

 

When this old world starts getting me down
And people are just too much for me to face
I climb way up to the top of the stairs
And all my cares just drift right into space
On the roof, it's peaceful as can be
And there the world below can't bother me 

... and I listen to the many great albums (from start to finish!) I've been fortunate enough to hear through my life.

 

*** sigh ***

 

Greg

[john]

2 hours ago, GregB said:

and this was way BEFORE the emergence of AI

 

I hate to tell you, and it was far from the first AI in the public sphere, but Microsoft Word introduced their paperclip assistant in 97. That was an AI helper that, among other things, optimised the interface to Word functionality by adapting the interface to the specific user to stop users being overwhelmed by too many interface options. So my Word interface would be different to yours because the functions i used and the way I used them would be different to the functions you used and the way you used them.

 

When I was at Uni (92 - 97) studying electronics with music we were learning and experimenting with genetic algorithms, neural networks and other learning paradigms, working through parallel processing and DSP networks for adaptive synthesis engines and learning interfaces. That was around 96-97. Some were certainly experimenting with “AI” chat engines and art engines much earlier than that and songwriting and poetry was also beginning to be experimented with. I’m not so sure we used the umbrella term AI so heavily in those days. They were machine learning, learning algorithms, genetic algorithms, evolutionary programming and neural networks.

 

I was offered a chance to do a PhD in learning algorithms and music. I had a proposal for using learning algorithms in conjunction with FPGA networks (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) to create evolving re-programmable hardware with an evolving software interface for media applications. So, for example, if when using an FPGA & DSP array, combining FPGA & Sharc processors, implementing a unique signal chain built by you for synthesis, effects, or a mixing console, you might encounter latency issues, digital distortion, audio glitches etc. Tasks would be scheduled to run on the DSP and FPGA network. A hybrid dynamic task scheduling algorithm would run on the DSP network to optimise task scheduling for maximum performance and minimise errors during run time. That was a learning algorithm. The system would monitor and log performance data for live learning and adaption of scheduling and other features, and for use “offline” in conjunction with adaptive hardware and software models to predict and learn better performance in order to minimise latency and errors. Even the performance monitoring and logging mechanism would be optimised and improved. This way, your software and hardware would evolve to be better according to the way you used it. Much of the coding was in Parallel C, a C variant for parallel processing.

 

I also wondered if the same system could be used to host a sophisticated and high performance neural network. Awesome. Way ahead of its time. That was in 97.

 

Sorry, I completely got my geek on there. Lol I know you have a software background, so it’s sorta ok!

 

Oh that reminds me, I was also interested in looking at using CSound in conjunction with this. It was a version of C/C++ that has a load of specialty audio and synthesis libraries. It was brilliant for building sophisticated synthesis engines, including the fairly new granular synthesis. the sounds were lush!

 

A long time ago. All that was possible or being researched back then and learning algorithms implementing things like the hill climbing technique had been around a long time at that time.

 

I think the key thing is that people were unaware that such early AI systems were being deployed by Microsoft, Apple and others. They often knew the software features, just not that the underlying code was adaptive and learning in nature.

 

AI was around and investigated as early as the 1950s to 1970s time period. The “AI Winter” was a period of little hope for AI. It couldn’t cope with the large volumes of data or the slow computation rate.

 

Of course it resurged. One of my old lecturers invented the first electronic nose, used for detecting cancers, but originally developed for detecting the optimum milking time for cattle! Professor Barker. in the late 60s and 70s his work in machine vision (pattern detection) was used for detecting and counting missiles and missile launchers during the Cold War. It could do this based upon partial or obscured missile images. That same pattern recognition technology was later used for detecting pheromones in cattle and cancer cells in the electronic nose in the late 80s and early 90s.

 

I digress! Oops! Another book!

[john]

He looks into the crystal ball. It seems smokey and turbulent. I shake my hands slowly above it and the smoke calms, grows thin and fades…. What can I see?

 

In 1 Year, woke leftist snowflake commies and fascist right wing Christian conservatives (I have to be balanced, terminology sourced from mutual name-calling on the internet) will coalesce into a writhing mass, a singularity of gigantic proportions somewhere in the Nevada desert. About 15:30 on 16th September 2025 they will implode creating a single point of light so intense that for a period of 23 days 9 hours the brilliance of that reaction will light the southern states, day and night. By the time it has cooled enough to let people get to location of that implosion to investigate the intense heat will have melted a mass of sand, creating the largest glass ornament the world has ever seen. It is 1.1 miles high and has a base the size of 47 American football pitches.

 

In 5 years the United States government gives up on traditional methods of breaking the glass ornament into manageable sizes (a scheme to monetise the block by selling off the glass to the relatives of the victims of the mass singularity implosion, cut into 1 inch cubes and marked as “remembrance totems”, available for $1,299 from all good stockists). The US government in it’s wisdom and with the enthusiasm of the righteous on a mission, decides to use a laser to cut the glass.

 

10 years from now, they will finally manage to douse the last of the fires started by the laser 5 years before, fragmenting the beam into a billion laser streams, starting fires all over the Americas. Additionally so many spinning lasers drove cats mad, chasing the beams and going temporarily cross-eyed crazy. In a bid to correct this, the Bill Gates Foundation (I knew we couldn’t trust him!) will place AI chips in 10,000 cats as an experiment.

 

20 years from now, it’s a changed landscape. Cats have risen up and become our overlords. There are no mice and no spiders. Meanwhile, 10,000 well-fed cats have grown to near human size and inexplicably many fields of catnip crops have been started. Cats have replaced handshakes with showing their buttholes. Humans are scared supplicants, blind and driven mad by the sight of so many cat butts burned into their retinas.

 

Allegedly.

[GregB]

22 hours ago, john said:

... AI ... Microsoft Word introduced their paperclip assistant in 97

 

Hard to tell without seeing your facial expression but, if serious, you'd be the first person to put 'Clippy' in the same sentence, let alone ballpark, or even galaxy, as AI. 😲  

 

[john]

56 minutes ago, GregB said:

 

Hard to tell without seeing your facial expression but, if serious, you'd be the first person to put 'Clippy' in the same sentence, let alone ballpark, or even galaxy, as AI. 😲  

 

 

Yeah, that was part of their marketing. It had more latitude to be smart in early versions, but it made so many mistakes that they dumbed it down it down to just “A”, with it simply choosing from a small pool of responses from set input. However, it was all part of that same stumbling fall from procedural programs towards the AI we see today…. Which still has marketers making claims of intelligence that largely overreach the stable version of what is on release.

 

Clippy was shockingly bad…. But if you remember there were a whole load of people trying to be the first AI with a working commercial application. There were so many awful chat bots, all trying for the fooling a human test. None was even close. At that point there was a lot of research going on. Commercially the marketers were using and abusing the term, meanwhile the really serious research was defence, maybe a few other sectors had a shoe in the door too.

 

This was true up to 2020. there were a number of promising models but the output was still largely regurgitated internet spew.