Generative A.I, - A.I. systems intended to generate things on the basis of large learning models, are said to be a disruptive technology. I am not sure that people realize how much so. I took a look at a street in a small town; the cars parked the electrical fixtures, the homes and commercial buildings etc. and in a way it was like viewing a scene from an old movie. I had the feeling that everything would change in not such a great amount of time.
Of course being an optimist over time I was disappointed at the rate of change of the nation. There were a lot of changes since the 1970s yet they were generally logical anticipated rather than things that were improved through public design of public lands and resources or federal programs. Generative A.I. may become a large factor in finding optimal or most efficient designs of things in physics, transportation etc. Given sufficient learning should generative A.I. be able to invent the most efficient electric car design with awareness of the costs of available natural resources? Shouldn't it be able to design materials for repaving streets so they can absorb and convert solar photons to electrons and provide free public electricity for electric automobiles.
Black generative AI- those covert systems with governors or censors built in, may be able to design biological and chemical weapons for everyone or even improved explosive designs. Apparently generative A.I. is a two-edged razor that society must use carefully lest it cut itself.
Göbekli Tepe was in a way the first permanent settlement of humanity that remains in existence. Built around the year 11,000 B.C... It was a religious center and development of grain for agriculture advanced in the area. Religion drew humanity together and they built fine structures to support that. A city that was more secular started in Jericho just a little later, although it too dates to nearly 11,000 B.C. Technology advanced slowly.
Compared to the great length of time before the creation of permanent human cities when hunting tools were the main tech for hunter-gatherers the time of the Neolithic and its development of modest building methods (such as one of the first towers at Jericho) was fast. When the age of Neolithic B ended around 6000 B.C. there followed a period of nearly 2500 years of decline and waste at Jericho. It is not impossible in human history for civilization or settlements to experience decline or destruction.
Many citizens don't believe that caution or good judgment is necessary for political choices to be made. Many today are fatalists, reflect on joss or various eschatological scenarios in places of pessimism, or worship centers and in reading fiction. It is possible to wonder who is minding the store. Even more people are global warming deniers or would take up the cross again as soon as they are done fighting for water rights. Atheists believing in nothing would have visions of a utopia for homosexuals and democrats of all varieties under kosher scientific supervision, loosely defined, as an application of Magna Carta with political power given unto parliament without need for a written constitution binding leaders to the past as if they were Gullivers ensnared.
Generative AI may change that criterion. Hayek believed that public lands and investment was a socialist-communist kind of things in support of totalitarianism. He wanted to let private enterprise own and run about everything with the belief that it would find the optimal configuration of business and perhaps even political configurations. During the Cold War version 1 people tended to go overboard and fail to understand that the empirical world; the environment, is the common heritage of mankind and it cannot readily be privatized without peril to the future of human life on this planet so far from anywhere else livable.
Perhaps generative A.I. applied to inventing, physics, chemistry and biological technology will be insinuated into the midst of a recovering ecosphere. A.I. might even help find environmental solutions, sustainable development paradigms or optimal scenarios for desalinating seawater with evaporation canals covered for condensation collection A next-gen political economy should provide the basic physical sustenance needs of every soul alive while yet creating a renaissance of spiritual and intellectual values and creativity on this world and beyond.
