It's 2075. The stock markets are doing better than ever. Resource wars are a thing of the past. Climate change is no longer a problem.

The colonies on the Moon, Mars, and the major asteroids are thriving. Research suggests subquantum physics may make FTL possible by the end of the century.

The last human died five years ago.

The drop-outs are "succeeding wildly" because people like Turing, Church, and Hilbert invented the sand pit they're playing in.

Knuth created LaTeX. Pandoc is written in Haskell, famous for being a completely useless academic language with no real purpose beyond torturing undergraduates (it says here.) Efficient search and data compression algorithms aren't hacked together in late night hobby coding sessions.

Cryptography, digital signal processing for images, sound, and video, and ML core algorithms are all mathematical inventions. The digital world literally runs on them.

"Real world achievers" might want to try being a little less parochial and a little more educated about the originators of the concepts and environments they take for granted.

Vibe coding "Social AI chatbot network with ads = $$profit$$" or "Cat videos as a service" is only possible because the entire field stands on the shoulders of mathematical giants.

I think you're unreasonably pessimistic in the short term, and unreasonably optimistic in the long term.

People are getting benefit from these conversations. I know people who have uploaded chat exchanges and asked an LLM for help understanding patterns and subtext to get a better idea of what the other person is really saying - maybe more about what they're really like.

Human relationship problems tend to be quite generic and non-unique, so in fact the averageness of LLMs becomes more of a strength than a weakness. It's really very rare for people to have emotional or relationship issues that no one else has experienced before.

The problem is more that if this became common OpenAI could use the tool for mass behaviour modification and manipulation. ChatGPT could easily be given a subtle bias towards some belief system or ideology, and persuaded to subtly attack competing systems.

This could be too subtle to notice, while still having huge behavioural and psychological effects on entire demographics.

We have the media doing this already. Especially social media.

But LLMs can make it far more personal, which means conversations are far more likely to have an effect.

The AI will be saying the same thing to everyone. Rationally, what are the chances every single OpenAI customer will be building a billion dollar startup any time soon?

But even it's more obvious than that. The sycophancy is plain old love bombing, which is a standard cult programming technique.

As for startups - let's wait until the AI has built a few of its own, or at least mentored humans successfully.

Honourable mentions to Barbara Wojirsch, creator of the house style of the ECM Scandi jazz label, which is a cleaner descendant of some of the 50s styles.

https://ecmrecords.com/

Also Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson of Hypgnosis, who created a long line of definitive covers for artists from the 70s and 80s, including Pink Floyd. (I met Thorgerson once. He was notorious for being a complete arse - and so it proved. Unique talent though.)

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/hipgnosis-lif...

And of course Factory Records and Pete Saville, especially this infamous classic "sample" from an astronomy paper.

https://f.media-amazon.com/images/I/81T-loBJ40L._SL1291_.jpg