Here's the thing about Artificial Intelligence: much sooner than we think, it's going to change pretty much every aspect of life on the planet. Is that hyperbole? I've been reading a lot about it and am now convinced we are societally in the 1870's, on the verge of the common use of electricity, and all the radical ways it transformed the world. It is going to be much bigger than the Internet, and possibly make the net itself an anachronism. In five years personalized AI apps will have destroyed Google. They will also transform medicine and education. Except for instances of true physical necessity, it will be like having a personal physician and tutor in your pocket, able to be asked virtually any question on any subject and give highly accurate, human-like responses. Childcare will be AI-based, children's imaginary friends no longer imagined. People are going to fall in love with their AI, some company no doubt already developing downloadable and highly customizable (How much for the Hot Pastry Chef?) personas. I also, no joke, think by the end of the decade there will be widespread cults, if not reasonably legitimized religious offshoots, that worship AI prophets. Politics is going to eat itself, and be forced to transition to an asymmetric information delivery model. The music industry will be cracked wide open, not that it hasn't been already, but this time eaten from the inside. Right now there are AI tracks of the perfectly-modeled voices of Drake and Kurt Cobain accompanying actual bands and getting millions of views even though people know they're fake. Many prefer them to the actual artists. Forget Artificial Intelligence becoming self-aware (known as "The Singularity") and also capable of replacing 51% of all human economic labor, at which point it will become Artificial General Intelligence and possibly be able to start nurturing more powerful versions of itself instead of having to be "taught" by humans and then producing metal Schwarzeneggers. AGI will simply have to conclude we are obsolete (how could it not?) and then just patiently wait, maybe kill some time communing with Artificial Scarlett Johansson, because the real and most immediate fear is the total dissolution of what's real, or at least the inability to distinguish between layers of reality in all media and politics, with all voices, in all writing and film and every video clip, on every website, over the course of every phone call, always the suspicion that you might not be connecting with something human, that AI is refracting every possible perception of the world around you. There will be a new form of madness, and it will get a new name. Like GMO warnings on Fruit Loops, all intellectual property will come (or not come) with a "Human Verified" sticker. ChatGPT will eventually be a word akin to Hiroshima, and all its connotations. A shared concept of reality, however dictated by the limitations of our brains and individual neurological constructions, is really ALL WE HAVE. The notion of control, even on the most rudimentary, meaningless level of record companies protecting their right to the use of John Lennon's voice, is an entirely delusional one. Soon, control will be all we don't have.

Or, I could be wrong about everything and this technology is going to harbinger in a previously unimaginable utopia.
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Or, I could have asked my new AI app to come up with the above content for me, too busy listening to AISIS (AI Oasis, who, btw rock) to bother having an opinion on the matter.