Over the last four decades I've written several food logging apps for my own use. They've never been good enough to release, because I've always wanted more from them. But last week I made one in about a half hour that is by far the best I've ever written or used.

I added a GrokBot, told it that it is my food logger, and to create a Google spreadsheet with the columns and sheets I need. After a couple of short iterations it was ready to go. Now to log anything I just prompt the bot with a little voice, text, or a photo of a meal, and it makes a (usually accurate) guess about what exactly I mean, looks up the nutrient stats, and logs it to the spreadsheet. To change any feature or refactor the spreadsheet I just describe the change and boom.

Before LLMs this would have been magic for a sophisticated developer, now it's table stakes for the frontier AI vendors available to any muggle. This was Eunice slapping me in the face and shouting Wake Up!

Indeed.

Another one that comes to mind constantly is 'The Peripheral'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(novel)

I'm pretty sure Gibson has a wormhole with a lens attached stashed away somewhere.

I don't know about this guys, we used to have phones and as soon as we had the chance to use text messages instead we went all in on them. I personally, and many of the people I know avoid voice calls as much as possible.

So if I can't really be bothered to speak with other humans, why would I want to speak out loud with an AI? I may be wrong and soon we'll all have Jarvises, HALs and Samanthas but not sure the adoption will be as fast and broad as these companies want to makes us believe.

I guess each generation discovers a different William Gibson trilogy? I would have assumed this was more about Wintermute and the HF hack. Remember the Zurich Orbital AI registry?

Gibson published Agency nearly three years before ChatGPT's release, and six years before the emergence of today's increasingly autononomous AI agents.

...and fifteen years after Stross' Accelerando opened with a man who spent every waking hour doing what his autonomous AI agents told him to do via his smartglasses...

...and twenty-seven years after AT&T's "You Will" ad campaign sold a future including agents, teleconferences, gps navigation, video on demand, and many more things, pretty much none of which were actually brought into daily life by AT&T...

Or, more worryingly, Celery Man is almost here

I also feel like Wintermute is almost here. Who’s gonna arrive first?

I was just looking at https://claudia.gallery and the MCP specs there (which reminded me instantly of Idoru) when I chanced upon this, and the Gibson quotes.

Yep. He _has_ to come from the future.

cant recommend this book enough. Gibson continues to amaze me. I read it when it just came out, gave me the chills. 2021 and super current (talking about the time after pandemics etc.)

If anyone is enjoying the Jackpot series, I highly recommend 'Daemon' by Daniel Suarez (2006). He completely nails the technological capability / potential of an autonomous ChatGPT. I'm surprised it's not mentioned more.

I like Jane from Speaker for the Dead, etc.. by Orson Scott Card

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_(Ender%27s_Game)

It's been here all year, agentic AI is over a year old even in the mainstream. Real time TTS-SST can be better than Dessa, and with an actual brain and custom voice. this article is just a marketing copy for openAI right?

Also it leaves out all the parts that are not publicly releasable from these mainstream companies that will finish the job,

Limbic system, dream and reflection pipelines, brainstem, Self improvement and learning, continuity of state, stable memory vectors across time and the ability to tell dreams from memory,

I could go on. I wish people would explore what's already out there to play with instead of gushing at the crumbs openAI throws the plebs.

Although, when there are a million Eunices running around trying to proactively help their users, they may have a harder time accessing that kind of data...

These days, I constantly find myself filled with a kind of techno-dysphoria, where not only do I not want to use the tech in the way it’s being packaged/sold, but I’m filled with dread and disgust by the idea of people who do so breathlessly anticipate and proselytize its arrival.

The idea that anyone ever read a Gibson novel and thought, “can’t wait,” truly boggles my mind.

Nevermind that. Looking at Ukraine, we're getting close to Philip K Dick's Second Variety.

I'm always amazed at the handwringing over whether language models are "aligned" properly when we are actively developing devices that can - as autonomously as possible - seek out and kill.

And I don't even think we have a choice - we can't stop the Putins of the world from developing this technology.

So, I think it's important to bear in mind that the prophecy is to some degree self-fulfilling.

People in technology read science fiction. That reading in part informs and inspires the kinds of things they work on and explore. This is illustrated pretty directly with the new Tesla vehicle and various deferred dreams of flying cars—this is not an innovation influenced by practicality, it is influenced by regressive adolescent fantasy.

I think there's some degree of that in a lot of technical innovation. Yes, it's still uncanny how well Gibson tracked developments (or perhaps equally, how much his fiction has influenced the kinds of things people pursue, consciously or otherwise).

[flagged]

As long as we can't run these models at home I will refuse to believe they don't use humans behind the scenes.