00:00So some people commented that maybe the last video was too negative of a future, so maybe I should share a very positive future you're really excited to go into. Let me describe what I think a cognicist future might be like. I'm a type of person who always has to be honest, so what I'm going to say, I'm going to preface this video, like, these are a series of predictions that occur if people collectively take action to change the future towards which we are moving.
00:30I think in the future we will be less afraid. Instead of news, for example, instead of news we will have weather reports which will be collections of generative models that have been reading everybody's, like, expectations about what's going to happen, and performing a reasonable synthesis about what you can expect that week that is going to be particularly helpful or useful to you. I don't think you'll buy that many things that very often. I do think you'll have things in your house, but I think those things will be really nice long lasting things, and they'll be so so long lasting because everybody will think about the future in designing products.
01:04They will constantly be thinking about the future and whether people will be saying certain things about the product in the future. In fact, because, because predictive reputation would be so important, most goods and services and products will be better, they will no longer be bound to the concept of advertisement. You see, we currently live in the society we're so used to being sold things that we've basically forgotten how to listen, unless the person is smiling happy and telling us this beautiful thing and petting us on the forehead and has a nice little jingle, like I'm hating it, you know what I mean, like unless we do that we're not ready.
01:42And so me as a person, I communicate to the world and I'm very passionate and frustrated from not being engaged with, and I'm very passionate and frustrated by the fact that I keep saying what's going to happen and people just keep ignoring me, and it keeps happening. So there's a first thing is that the goods and services that you will experience will be designed for the future, so they will be designed to last and they will be designed to keep you satisfied for as long as you possibly can imagine, and therefore there will be a decreased incentive to always be buying things and doing things like planned obsolescence and just creating things.
02:13Second, you will be sold things less often through the form of advertisement. No, it might not seem believable that there will be less advertisement or no advertisement, but advertisement has not existed for that long, and it hasn't existed for that long because not everybody has been able to read before that, um, placing a flyer in a public space is meaningless to a person who doesn't know how to read.
02:50In fact, the whole concept of advertisements is that we are boiling down the meaning into something that is hooky, uh, you can think about it like a literal sharp hook, like like this. But it's a memetic hook, it's like Kiki versus Bouba, which is in its own, uh, hook in its own right, because it's something that can latch into the mind, um, because pure representations of truth from one's perception are not necessarily going to resonate with another being.
03:39It's only in the recent years that we've had this massive overflow of advertisement in every single aspect of what we do, and part of it is because it is the primary model by which we have learned to run entertainment as a business. Um, we have had, uh, things like television and the internet primarily, uh, funded by advertisement, by other businesses. And so what you have is, you have the market being fundamentally unable to manage doing certain types of industry without relying on selling attention to people. Essentially when you have channels of expression, we have not found a way for those to exist within capital societies without selling a portion of that.
04:34And it is in that process where our attention is sold that the whole market concept breaks in the first place. If you take art, if you take psychological research, if you take everything that we know about the mind to bypass the simple signaling that it is a good product, it is a good service, it will last a long time, if you bypass that, then you're going to end up with things that don't serve the purpose of which they were intentionally built.
05:13You'll end up with crap, you'll end up with things that people don't really want, people feel satisfied, and they'll have to keep buying and keep buying and keep buying. We don't really have a good awareness of what we're doing to ourselves right now by constantly exposing ourselves to manipulation. I mean, every single ad has to have a giant smile on your face because they have to lie to you. Every pharmaceutical ad is about, and even in my own communication of this, people repeatedly tell me that I am saying it wrong, that I need to be kinder, that I need to be nice, that I need to be sweeter, and that I need to sell it to you.
05:50And I am saying, in a large part that part of what is broken is our capacity to listen. Because we are unable to listen, more always being sold to, because we always feel sold to, we're creating this memetic immune system that blocks us from the most basic forms of manipulation, but we're completely unaware how complex these algorithms have become at manipulating our attention. And what I am saying is that in the future we will deconstruct that mechanism of attentional manipulation and create it into the new system that inherently we understand that the distribution of attention is something fundamentally important for networked, uh, civilizations.
06:28When you get to the form, the state of development, when you are networking between minds and sending signals across those electro and magnetic networks, or whatever sort of energies you're sending it through, maybe there's nuclear networks out there on like sun planets with sun gods or something, I don't know.
07:01But when you get to that level, there is a distribution of attention in those beings, in a society who are coherent, who are forming, uh, they're choosing to coexist without choosing to end each other, basically, which is the idea, we want to generally find ways to coexist and all be happier and thrive more for being together, we want to have a sense of, uh, emergentism or symbiosis I guess, it's just that by being interacting with others our lives are made better, and therefore we can feel happy that others exist along with us.
07:42So when I say that we're not going to have advertisement, it's just that I am saying that by tying prediction into the notion of truth, and tying that into some networked distribution of attention, what becomes most important is if you are telling the truth in a way that when people look back, people say, oh yeah, they were saying the truth, that will be the mechanism. So for example, I have, I have a Toyota Prius c, it says that it's supposed to get 50 miles per gallon, I've had the car since 2013. I tried testing it the other day, easily got 55.
08:24To me that is truth, and that is a predictive truth, but like, it's like there's nothing in our society that captures that signal as a mechanism. I've already spent my money, maybe I'll buy another car from them I guess, but the whole thing is that that car has lasted a long time, right, it's been a great car, and so because it's been a great car I am not getting them more money, and that is a fundamental problem that people have learned about markets. And so we have tried to find new ways that we can continuous, continuous, continuous transactions out of people.
09:03And but how we've learned to do that is by tokenizing and parceling our attention through this distribution of advertisements. And so we have these networks where we're distributing our free speech, like, uh, Facebook, and what they're doing is they're earning their capacity to do that by manipulating your attention. So I think we're coming into that state of civilizational development when you've developed the systems that, um, actively distribute the attention amongst minds.
09:38And we are learning that doing that through the motivation of the profit mechanism usually has very negative detrimental effects. And then inherently you have to design that from a place of, uh, upgradient-ing collective well-being, and any leak into the design space of these algorithmic distribution algorithms where they are optimized to do something better by, you know, raising or lowering a number that represents some level of doing the task right, if you have any leakage in there, then you have this leakage being, uh, oh it's part of the energy, part of the attention is actually focused on profit.
10:19Then the whole system breaks. What you need to have is a true distribution of attention relative to it actually benefiting the individuals. So that's why I think that in the future, when we have a system such as what I am describing, we will no longer have so much ubiquitous advertisement, because our systems of free speech and how they're distributed, distributed, won't need to run on it, they'll be run a completely different way with a different mechanism, will be a foundational nature of our society.
10:52All right, let's imagine like the doctor, the healthcare, say you go to the doctor right now, you're not feeling well, you have about 10 to 15 minutes to communicate why you're not feeling well, and then they immediately come up with a hypothesis and they set you out for like two or three months to just engage with that hypothesis, and you come back, you give them a little bit more information. Dear God, is that not a good way to approach prediction in relationship to healing? Healing is very similar to the concept of regeneration.
11:18If we want to regenerate the body, it has to be in relationship to action and prediction. We need to make changes to the actions that we are taking in life, and then we observe the changes, and when we take the right actions we learn what actions are actually healthy for us and what actions are actually degrading for us. So I would imagine if you needed to go in the future for healthcare, you would go to the doctor and immediately they would see you right away because they predicted that your timeslot would be at that time.
11:48Your appointment is set at that time, and they have learned to be good enough predictors to honor that, you are not forced to sit in the office because they were bad predictors and scheduled poorly. Then you would go there, you would not explain what happened, because you over a long period of time have already been communicating to some sort of generative language model how you are feeling over time and what you are doing, and because you're sharing all of that, that model is forming hypotheses about what might be associations between actions that you're taking and the problems that you're reporting.
12:20Then the doctor will go through that information and interpret it with you, and you will be able to get access to perhaps medicines to transform, uh, at a more dramatic scale than you might otherwise be able to do just through simple actions or lifestyle changes. See, we live in a society that is focused on solution, not long-term, uh, healing, we don't focus on cures, we focus on developing drugs that will be continued to be purchased in the future, because if in the future you heal the person that means you can no longer get profit.
12:55Do you see the problems of what I am saying? I am talking about unbinding so much of what we do and so much of how we relate to the future, uh, from profit, and binding it more generally to the prediction and what people are saying is going to happen and whether people want those futures to happen or not. That is now completely possible through systems designed from GPT, from prediction markets, and from a cryptographic decentralized data source, right? But most people designing in this space right now are very, very technically cold range, they are not engaged with warm data.
13:35They are not engaged with art or culture, they are disconnected from what it means to be a human, they are disconnected from the earth, they are disconnected from nature, they have not taken off their shoes and put their feet on the grass. And so yes, there is a quite likely negative future, but I think in the future we will be less afraid. Instead of news, for example, instead of news we will have weather reports which will be collections of generative models that have been reading everybody's expectations about what's going to happen and forming a reasonable synthesis about what you can expect that week that is going to be particularly helpful or useful to you.
14:16That can be simple things that like are scheduled things, uh, events or places to go, but it can also be things like literal weather, and it can also just be like you may actually not feel that good this week because you have a tendency to get a little bit down when the weather is down.
14:52We know the weather's down, we also know that you continuously seem to report that your mood is down when the clouds are overcast, so we suggest that you maybe should take something on this specific day, don't forget, but you don't have to, you get to choose this on your own volition. It's just a recommendation, because those recommendations of actions are actually formed and learned from actions that you are suggesting for yourself. So as you can see, when we engage with society and organizing collective actions through general prediction about the desirability of the futures that we want to reach, instead of just about whether or not the actions that we take will result in an increase of profit or an increase of token in our piles, then we can have a very bright and beautiful and positive future that is very connected to all. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]