I saw it mentioned recently that all of the people still not using AI for most things are sort of living in slow-motion; a before-time era where things still moved at a human pace.
On the other hand, the folks using AI for everything are like Neo in the matrix dodging bullets. Everything else is moving slowly around them, but they can manipulate reality like ninjas.
In a sense, this is what good technology should gift us: An expansion of our time. Not just more time, but an expansion of the quality of our time.
The lived experience of our time should feel like it is literally slowing down in such a sense that we feel like we are experiencing much more of life within a given timeframe.
For folks following AI, this effect is self-evident. People look at all the progress that has been made in the past year and their response isn't "wow, I can't believe a whole year has flown by". Instead, the typical response is "Wow, it's only been a year!"
For these AI users, the lived experience is that time is actually expanding for them. This is a rare phenomenon, since for most people the years usually feel shorter as you age. In AI, things feel more like time is expanding; like decades are being crammed into years, like a time machine has brought them into the future where the impossible is now reality.
There's a pronounced effect here when considering the past decades of technology. For years, things barely moved. Developments felt incremental, even when they were on exponential timelines.
Today's AI advancements are happening at warp speed. It's as if we could have built these AI models easily 80 years ago but were missing a few key secrets. We have those secrets now, and we're feeling the effects of the past slingshotting itself back into the future to catch up to where it should have been.
The net effect of all of this is it feels like we're entering a time warp. I suspect that this warp will only grow. While the past year may have felt like 5 years, the next year may feel like 10. The year after that may feel like 20 years. We may be experiencing lifetimes in minutes.
How could that even be? The most obvious response is that AI will free up our time to do more things we enjoy. But I think the real answer is far more nuanced than that.
More likely than not, we will find infinitely more complex and incredible ways to both free up and experience our time, in ways that are totally unfathomable to us today.
There is likely to be a wide host of unbelievable technologies coming to us soon that will totally alter how we experience reality that I think you should be aware of and try to leverage when the opportunity comes.
The realm of Dreamfluencers
One of my favorite examples at the moment is Prophetic AI - a company building a headband to induce lucid dreams. I think the wonder in that goes far beyond just "lucid dreaming", however.
It's looking highly likely that if we can induce lucid dreams, we will soon also be able to record dreams. On top of that, we'll likely be able to induce specific dreams, replay dreams, and broadcast dreams to others.
Think about the type of future that enables. We may soon have a world where people can record their lucid dreams to go back and reflect on everything they processed and experienced.
Even more interestingly, we may soon find ourselves in a world where people are live-streaming their dreams to other dreamers wearing the dream headband, letting many people experience the same dream as their favorite "dreamfluencer" in real-time.
All of that stuff is almost beside the point though. We spend an entire third of our lives sleeping and dreaming. On top of that, lucid dreaming in itself is something very few people experience often.
Now consider that within dreams, entire worlds and even lifetimes can sometimes be experienced in minutes.
Having easy access to lucid dreams multiplies the amount of time each of us has on Earth. If it became a common thing, most people would effectively be experiencing several more lifetimes in this lifetime.
It's not just about having more lifetimes though. Access to lucid dreams allows us to tap into our subconsciousness in a way that's rarely accessible. Giving people the power to deeply reflect within their subconscious, see patterns, and change their behaviors also massively improves the quality of their life.
Idealistically, this will speed up the rate of personal maturation and growth by several orders of magnitude beyond what an individual ever experiences in their lives. It probably will do this for high-agency people.
For most folks, I suspect there'll be a Netflix for the dreamworld that beams nice paradise resort experiences into people's heads. Most will opt for that; but you will still have a choice to not take this blue pill.
The Personal Humanoid
This will sound wild to you today, but you should expect that within a few years you will be able to buy an intelligent humanoid robot to take care of your home for roughly the cost of a new American sedan.
Maybe the cost will seem steep, but the value is unbelievably obvious. Most people spend at least 5 hours cleaning and organizing their homes per week. These are wakeful, energetic hours wasted on repetitive tasks for maintenance.
Over a month, that's at least 20 waking hours spent cleaning. Over a year, that's 260 hours!
If people are only awake 16 hours a day on average, then over the course of a year they will spend over 16 days worth of their waking life just cleaning and organizing.
If a humanoid robot can just come in and do your dishes, cleaning, and organizing, you essentially get 16 waking days of your life returned to you each year. Those aren't just any days you're getting back either; these are wakeful, productive days!
Digital Teleportation
For years now, virtual reality and augmented reality have largely underdelivered. We are just now hitting the point where that's starting to change.
Headsets are reaching a point where they can portray reality in perfect resolution, imperceptible in difference from actual reality. This opens up a lot of things for us, especially as comfort improves.
The most obvious use is transforming how we work. Many employers these days are trying to force remote workers back into the office. The excuse is that workers will be "more collaborative". The underlying reality is that it's about control, but that's beside the point.
Poor collaboration is a cultural issue rather than a remote issue. But the experience of talking to team members through Zoom is so underwhelming that the case can be easily made that everyone has to come back into the office.
With newer mixed reality headsets, people will be able to work together as if they are in the room with their coworkers, sharing screens, and looking at 3D models and designs all in a 360 virtual space with all the dynamism of being in-person.
With this, the fidelity of working in-person is restored in a digital medium. As this proliferates, the one excuse employers had around mandating a return to office evaporates. The end result is that people can essentially teleport around the world to work with and see different people.
Sure, this was promised with computers, with the internet, with video chat, with Google Docs, and it has failed to fully manifest every single time. But when the mixed reality headsets are better for working individually due to the unlimited screens and interactivity they provide, and everyone is in them anyway, returning to an office looks silly.
So obviously people will save a lot of time on work alone, but I think the headsets are going to make a lot of people's lives enhanced and more efficient in general.
Imagine if you're doing something for the first time like learning guitar or making a complex origami figure. The handtracking software of the headsets, combined with AI watching your hand movements, could guide you in real-time to teach you how to do these new things in a much quicker feedback look than figuring things out from a YouTube video through mimicry.
You could effectively pick up new skills at a manual pace. To most people, you'd seem like a complete wizard. It's possible that in 10 years, this will be the standard for everyone.
Time Fractals
As time opens up, we make room for more self-discovery and avenues of creation to explore. Novelty itself begets more novelty, as we discover more surface area to branch ever further out on. This in turn creates a fractal of novelty in every area we can explore, with no limit to its depth.
This incredible novelty and complexity is hard to fathom right now, but as it becomes reality, what we will start to gain is a biblical luxury of experiencing many lifetimes within a single lifetime.
Ultimately my only real recommendation here is to explore these tools as soon as they become available. They open new frontiers in what it means to be human, not unlike the frontier of space exploration. Making the effort to use and explore these tools early on is a rare opportunity that should be honored.
After all, it's not every day that you get a chance to be Neil Armstrong.