New World Same Humans

Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

The generative AI rollercoaster is thundering forward at increasing speed.

This week, researchers at Stanford and Google use an enhanced large language model to create simulated people that can remember, plan, and talk to one another in pursuit of their longterm goals.

Also, a new report says we’ve reached a landmark moment for the global energy system. And amid rumours of financial difficulty, Stability AI release a new text-to-image model for enterprise users; it’s capable of amazing photorealism.

Let’s go.

🏠 Welcome to SimGPT

This week the generative AI talk orbited around autonomous agents. That is, AI systems that can act autonomously in pursuit of pre-defined goals.

Researchers at Stanford and Google explained how they used a large language model (LLM) to create 25 simulated people, who were then set loose inside a virtual town called Smallville.

To create these sims, the researchers hooked up their LLM to an architecture that allows each AI agent to store memories of its past experiences, and then to access relevant memories and use them to plan new actions. Each agent was imbued with its own persona, for example: 'John Lin is a pharmacy shopkeeper at the Willow Market and Pharmacy who loves to help people. He is always looking for ways to make the process of getting medication easier for his customers.’

The results, say the researchers, were ‘believable individual and emergent social behaviours’ that saw Smallville become a bustling little town full of autonomous chit-chat, group activities, and trips to the local café.

‘…for example, starting with only a single user-specified notion that one agent wants to throw a Valentine’s Day party, the agents autonomously spread invitations to the party over the next two days, make new acquaintances, ask each other out on dates to the party, and coordinate to show up for the party together at the right time.’

All this comes amid vast excitement on Twitter this week over the rise of useful generative agents.

As with the above research, these innovations — which include AutoGPT and BabyAGI — leverage architecture that enhances ChatGPT by allowing it to lay down and then access a stream of past actions, or ‘memories’. Combine that with a plugin the enables ChatGPT to browse the web, and the result is a system that can take an initial goal, get started online, and then prompt and re-prompt itself until it’s finished:

⚡ NWSH Take: If SimCity or The Sims formed a part of your childhood, then this new research is hypnotic. It makes clear that LLMs will enable us to simulate goal-directed people, and watch as complex social and behavioural dynamics unfold. Imagine video games populated with these simulated humans (hello, Electronic Arts). But we’ll also see the rise of new art forms — a mixture of game and movie — built around them. And then will come the ability to simulate large populations, allowing for new insight on collective phenomena such as voting behaviours, the spread of disinformation, and the evolution of the economy. This new age of AI-fuelled simulation — which I’ve been writing about for a while — is emphatically here. // Meanwhile, AI agents such as AutoGPT promise to elevate the usefulness of generative models for millions of individual users. It’s already clear that for most people using LLMs won’t be about sitting at the prompt line and figuring out great prompts. Instead, wrappers such as this one — which puts AutoGPT-like powers direct into your browser — will allow users to set a goal and then let the LLM iterate its own way to a useful output. Give it a try; something hugely powerful is happening.

🔌 New power generation

Also this week, news of a landmark moment for energy.

A new report from independent energy think tank Ember says solar and wind accounted for a record 12% of global electricity generation in 2022. That’s up from 10% in 2021. The increase in wind generation alone in 2022 was the equivalent of the entire annual electricity demand of the UK.

What’s more, says the report, it’s likely that 2023 will see electricity generation via fossil fuels — mainly coal and natural gas — hit their peak.

The research team analysed data from 78 countries, representing 93% of global electricity demand.

⚡ NWSH Take: Around two-thirds of the world’s electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels. But the transition to solar and wind is now reaching a blistering pace, thanks largely to exponentially falling cost. In 1956 the cost of one watt of solar capacity was $1,825; now it can be as little as $0.72. // If Ember are right, we’ll soon start generating more electricity via fewer fossil fuels: power up, emissions down. That aligns with the International Energy Agency’s most recent and broader forecast; they now have global demand for fossil fuels — via electricity generation or any other use — peaking or plateauing under all their future scenarios, even without any shift in current government policies. // We’re approaching, then, a historic turning point: the decoupling of economic growth and fossil fuels for the first time since the Industrial Revolution. It’s becoming possible to image a world of endless, near-zero cost clean electricity. A world of clean energy abundance. What will that make possible?

🖼 Get real

Do you want to look at some amazing AI generated images? Yes, of course you do.

This week Stability AI released Stable Diffusion XL, a text-to-image model aimed at enterprise users. The model is an advance on Stable Diffusion 2.1, and excels at ultra-photorealism.

The move comes amid reports that Stability AI is struggling with huge server and talent costs. These reports suggest the company is seeking a new round of funding, and that investors are wary given the current revenue. CEO Emad Mostaque has not commented.

⚡ NWSH Take: A few quick thoughts. The images are stunning; that’s obvious. At this point we’ve pretty much entirely scrambled the role that the photograph once played in our culture as a form of proof or marker of veracity. In the wake of puffa coat Pope, I’ve already developed a new reflexive habit: is this real or AI? // As for the rumours about Stability AI, they amount to: ‘AI startup experiencing rocket ship growth is struggling to figure out revenue and is a chaotic place to work’. Nothing too surprising. Whatever storms the company is experiencing, I hope it can weather them; Mostaque’s vision of AI for the people is a necessary counterweight to the closed model that is being operated by (the misleadingly named) OpenAI and others.

🗓️ Also this week

🇨🇳 The CCP has issued new rules on the training and outputs of generative AI models. Draft rules from the Cyberspace Administration of China say the outputs of those models must reflect the core values of socialism and not undermine the power of the state. This came as Chinese tech giant Alibaba announced plans to roll out its LLM rival to ChatGPT, Tongyi Qianwen, across all its products.

🇺🇸 The US government is also looking to establish new regulations around AI. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration is asking for feedback from the public and experts from industry and academia, and wants to establish ‘guardrails’ to ensure AI is safe, transparent, and as unbiased as possible.

👮‍♂️ The Boston Dynamics robodog will patrol the streets of NYC on behalf of the New York Police Department. The NYPD experimented with Spot the Dog in 2021 and faced criticism from civil rights organisations. Now the new mayor, Eric Adams, is bringing Spot back.

🚗 Ford says it will spend $1.3 billion to convert its 70-year-old factory in Oakville, Canada, into an assembly plant for electric vehicles. The auto giant says it wants the production capacity to sell 2 million EVs a year world…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

I put the newsletter on pause last week; did I miss anything?

Given what is unfolding right now, it’s hard to make this newsletter anything other than a generative AI revolution update. I don’t want to stoke the hype yet further, but I’ve never seen anything quite like this.

Given all that, this week we’ll dive into a high-profile petition to pause work on new generative models. Also, we’ll look at the new hyperreality taking shape around us via Midjourney and its community of inventive users.

But it’s not all AI; there’s also an intriguing new report on global population change from the Club of Rome.

Let’s get into it.

🤖 For the people

This week, another generative AI story that pushes 2023 deeper into the realms of what seemed, recently, possible only in science-fiction.

It’s not yet another platform, plugin, or viral image (more on those below) but a call to slow down. Over 1,000 technology leaders signed a petition demanding a pause of at least six months on the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.

Signatories included Elon Musk, Yuval Noah Harari, Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. And their language was pretty apocalyptic:

According to the authors of the petition: ‘recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.’

The scale of their concern was lent support by a research paper published last week. It saw Microsoft researchers report that GPT-4 shows ‘sparks of AGI’. The model, they point out, shows high-level competence across mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, and psychology, and can solve novel problems in those domains without any need for special instructions: ‘in all of these tasks, GPT-4's performance is strikingly close to human-level performance’.

Meanwhile, the iconic and ever-controversial AI safety expert Eliezer Yudkowsky went full pelt in Time magazine. He didn’t sign the petition, he says, because it doesn’t go far enough:

All training of large models, says Yudkowsky, needs to be shutdown indefinitely and worldwide. He says the governments of Earth must come together in a concerted effort to stop an AI-fuelled human extinction.

⚡ NWSH Take: Pretty intense, right? Yudkowsky is, and has long been, an outlier on all this. Meanwhile, others say this week’s petition signatories have fallen prey to OpenAI’s apocalypse marketing: a plan to get everyone scared and then sell subscriptions. // For my part, I don’t think AI annihilation is imminent; nor do I think these fears are founded only in hype. GPT-4’s competence across all kinds of reasoning tasks is insane. And for all the reams of coverage (guilty), I don’t think we’re anywhere near processing the implications. It no longer seems far-fetched that an AI model could start behaving in strange and uncontrollable ways in the near-term. It’s emphatically time to get serious about alignment. // Alignment is first a technical problem: how do we make sure AIs only do what we want them to do? After this, though, it becomes a political problem. Whose values should we align our AIs with? Those of Californian tech bros? // We can’t put the AI genie back in the bottle, and in practice a global ‘pause’ is highly unlikely. That means only answer here is to speed up research on the technical challenge of alignment, and to allow a plurality of AIs, empowering different peoples and communities to live and create according to their own value systems. That is real alignment. To that end, check out open source AI group LAION’s petition for a new internationally-funded supercomputer to train open source foundation models.

📈 Growth mindset

Also this week, a huge if true forecast on the future of the human population.

A new study commissioned by the Club of Rome forecasts that if current trends continue then the global population will hit 8.8 billion in around 2050, before declining rapidly to 7.8 billion by the end of the century.

The study, conducted by think tank Earth4All, also games out a scenario in which governments invest in policies known to curtail population growth, such as education and social services. Here, population peaks at 8.5 billion in around 2040 and falls to 6 billion by 2100.

Both projections are far below last year’s UN Population Prospects forecast, which had population peaking at 10.4 billion in the 2080s.

The Club of Rome is best known for the now (in)famous 1972 report The Limits to Growth, which warned of impending environmental crisis and social breakdown due, in part, to strains imposed by overpopulation.

The report came amid a wave of neo-Malthusian anxiety in the decades after WWII. A 1968 book called The Population Bomb — which influenced the thinking of the Club of Rome — raised the spectre of hundreds of millions of people starving to death as population growth exceeded food supply.

⚡ NWSH Take: The original Limits to Growth report is today the subject of fierce disagreement. Critics say the Club gave voice to unfounded fears motivated by an ideological distaste for modernity. Proponents point out that the report offered a number of different scenarios, and that the growth-induced systemic breakdown it envisioned may yet eventuate. // This new statement on population could end up being just as contested. The Club now accept that their population bomb won’t go off. And they celebrate their finding that population is set to peak sooner and lower than the UN expect — stressing that it’s good news for the environment. Meanwhile, though, a niche but growing school of thought says that population collapse is the real crisis coming down the track; rapidly shrinking and ageing populations, runs this line, will kill productivity and threaten economic collapse. // Where does the truth lie? Most mainstream demographers say population collapse isn’t on the cards, and that ageing populations don’t have to mean economic calamity. Meanwhile, it’s not overpopulation but intense patterns of high and damaging consumption in the rich world that are the primary drivers of climate change. As ever with demography, it seems the truth lies between the extremes.

🎭 Real life

Version five of the text-to-image tool Midjourney was released two weeks ago. And this week, users went wild.

On Reddit, Midjourney enthusiasts started sharing photorealistic, news report style images of historical events — such as 2001’s devastating Great Cascadia earthquake in Oregon:

The truth, of course, is that no such event took place; this is all fictitious — a AI-fuelled experiment in alternative history.

Meanwhile, Chinese users of the tool are creating pseudo-documentary images of the southwestern city of Chongqing in the 1990s.

All this comes days after the first truly viral AI-generated image: of Pope Francis in a white puffer coat.

⚡ NWSH Take: In his 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote about hyperreality: the emergence of a media environment in which the boundaries between the real and our representations of the real become ever-more blurred. Digital media massively amplified that phenomenon. All of us recognise the feeling, today, of living inside a tech-fuelled hall of mirrors in which the difference between image and reality is hard to discern, or even meaningless. // What can be said? That was before this generative AI revolution and tools such as Midjourney, which are now achieving photorealism that is impossible to distinguish from the real thing. These AI-generated pseudo-photos are perfect representations of representations; signs that point only to other signs — exactly the phenomenon that Baudrillard put at the heart of h…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and our shared future by David Mattin.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

At the start of the year I promised the return of short notes. Here’s the first: a meditation on the ChatGPT moment we’re living through right now.

To avoid claims of false advertising: this one is more of an essay than a note.

If you’d rather listen than read, just scroll up and hit play. But enough preamble; let’s get into it.

The generative AI hype train is thundering forwards right now, and ChatGPT — which was released in November — was the fuel that accelerated it to its current speed.

On the face of it, that’s a bit odd. The underlying model, GPT-3, was made public almost two years earlier. Why the big noise now?

ChatGPT uses an enhanced version of that model, and so produces better outputs. But my contention is that it’s the chat element — that is, the conversational nature of the tool — that’s responsible for ChatGPT’s colonisation of the zeitgeist. People love the back-and-forth quality of interacting with this thing.

I’m interested in this, and the reasons for it. Because it seems to me that a quest to understand ChatGPT’s seductive conversational power can help us commune with a deep but under-appreciated truth about human thought.

A truth that leads us, in turn, to some conclusions on our future relationship with machine intelligence.

*

In a seminal 1998 research paper, the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers introduced an idea they called the extended mind thesis (EMT).

The EMT says that mind is best understood as a set of cognitive processes that extend beyond our brains and into the external world. Consider, for example, a person using a notebook and pen to help perform a series of simple calculations. The notebook and pen are, say Clark and Chalmers, just as much a part of the cognitive processes at work here as the person’s brain. The notebook, for example, is acting as a kind of external memory bank.

It’s arbitrary then, according to the EMT, to say that mind is happening in the brain but not in the notebook; instead, the brain, pen, and notebook are part of one big cognitive system, and we can best understand that system as mind.

It was an arresting argument, and it’s proven an influential one. What’s more, 25 years on we citizens of the internet have been delivered into a relationship with technology that makes tangible the strengths of this idea.

I’m talking, here, about our relationships with our phones.

I tend to do my deepest thinking when I’m out for a walk. Often, I’ll reach for some half-remembered fact, person, or quote that I need to continue my train of thought, find that I can’t recall it, and then go to my phone to look it up. My phone, here, or perhaps more properly the internet itself, is acting as a kind of extension of my own memory — one containing pretty much all the knowledge in human history that can be encoded as words or pictures. And the whole process is so seamless — think, encounter block, look it up, keep thinking — that the phone really does feel a natural extension of my mind. When I forget my phone, the feeling is one of my thought process being constantly interrupted. At its most acute it feels as though a part of me is missing.

ChatGPT offers users the same kind of feeling. The feeling, that is, of having your mind extended beyond the confines of your skull. It’s perhaps the first technology since the iPhone to offer that experience in a compelling new way. That truth, surely, has helped drive the excitement over the last three months.

But the current ChatGPT moment is not driven only by the feeling that the tool allows for mind extension. There’s also the feeling that the mind extension happening is a sudden and dramatic evolution of anything we’ve experienced before via notebook, calculator, or the phone as portal to the internet. There’s a widespread feeling out there that ChatGPT is an early signal of a revolution of era-defining consequence — even though, in truth, we haven’t yet seen the use cases, or the impact on the economy, to justify that belief.

Why is this? Why does ChatGPT feel such a big deal?

The answer I’m fermenting: it’s because ChatGPT taps into, in a way even the phone does not, a deep truth about human thought. That is, its fundamentally dialogic, or conversational, nature.

The idea that underpins this is simple: it’s that when we think, we talk to ourselves. What you call your ‘internal monologue’ is really a dialogue conducted by one person. Someone is talking (internally, not aloud) and someone is listening and will then reply, and those people are both you.  

*

The idea that human thought is fundamentally dialogic has a long history, which passes through the 20th-century Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin.

Bakhtin said that language is primordially a social instrument: a process that evolved out of games of call and response conducted by two or more parties. And because language is the substrate that makes symbolic meaning and the higher forms of thought possible, that means thought, too, is fundamentally dialogic in nature.

For we moderns this is a revolutionary idea. We tend to believe that thought, in its purest sense, is something that happens inside the mind of a single individual.

Bakhtin, and others since who’ve played with the idea of dialogic thought, invert this belief. They say that thought in its purest sense happens not inside the mind of one person but between groups of people; that is, between collections of minds. Under this view the extended mind thesis applies not only to the way individual minds can be extended by tools, but also, and primarily, to the way all our minds are necessarily extended by other minds. Indeed, under this view mind itself is best understood as a phenomenon that emerges between us, rather than inside any one of us individually.  

It’s notable that the earliest works of philosophy in the western tradition seem to acknowledge the dialogic nature of thought. Socrates gathers others around him and together they engage in a process of back-and-forth reasoning that is, he tells them, the path towards enlightenment. The Socratic method taps deep into the idea that thought is primordially a social phenomenon.

Via a complex psychospiritual process entangled with the evolution of the Enlightenment self, we lost touch with that truth. Instead, we came to see thought as, foremost, an inner and private unfolding. But in losing touch with the primacy of social thought, we also lost touch with another truth. Yes, thought conducted silently by one person is private and inner; but because it relies on the dialogic tool that is language, it too carries a fundamentally dialogic nature. When we think, we talk to ourselves.

We might say that this strange ability to split the self — so that we can at once talk and listen to ourselves talk — is consciousness. That is to say, it is the state of self-awareness that only we among Earth’s creatures seem to possess in its highest form. The idea that language in some deep sense is human consciousness, that it creates the human mode of being in the world, is one I explore in depth in the ongoing essay series The Worlds to Come.

*

I’ve argued for the idea that thought — that consciousness itself — is in some deep sense dialogic. What does all this have to do with ChatGPT?

I hope the superficial connection is clear: in ChatGPT, we have an instrument that can externalise and amplify the internal dialogue that constitutes thought.

As we’ve seen, we’ve always had access to entities that can externalise our inner dialogue: other people. But other people are beings with their own cognitive and social agency. They have personhood. ChatGPT, by contrast, is not a person; it is a tool.

It’s this dual …

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

It’s another packed instalment of New Week. What do we have in store?

This week, tech giants from Microsoft to Snap put their arms around a trend that has long been a NWSH obsession.

Meanwhile, Tesla and OpenAI outline far-reaching manifestos: what does it mean when corporations incubate the kinds of social and political policies we usually associate with government? And a new US startup, Figure, offers a first glimpse of its humanoid robot.

Let’s get into it.

🎭 Talk to me

This week, a constellation of signals point to the mainstreaming of a trend long in the making. I’m talking, here, about virtual companions.

Snap launched My AI, a ChatGPT-fuelled conversational agent, inside their app. The feature is intended to serve as a general-purpose chatbot; Snap say it might plan a hiking trip for a long weekend, or suggest a recipe for dinner. Or even serve the user’s love of poetry:

Meanwhile, Microsoft launched a new feature that ‘changes the personality’ of the AI chatbot inside is Bing search engine.

Users can toggle between three options: creative, balanced, and precise, depending on the type of answers they want from the bot.

And in a Facebook update, Mark Zuckerberg said Meta are working on ‘AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways’ for Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp:

‘We're exploring experiences with text (like chat in WhatsApp and Messenger), with images (like creative Instagram filters and ad formats), and with video and multi-modal experiences. We have a lot of foundational work to do before getting to the really futuristic experiences, but I'm excited about all of the new things we'll build along the way.’

⚡ NWSH Take: It’s happening: the mainstreaming of a trend that I’ve been tracking for years. I started speaking about virtual companions in the early 2010s; back then, the idea that millions would one day see AI-fuelled entities as counsellors, companions, or even friends seemed, to many, outlandish at best. Via generative AI, that conversation has been transformed. Bing’s tentative approach to creating AI personalities marks the beginning of a long collision between virtual companions and search. And it won’t be long — if Snap is anything to go by — until a personalised, conversational, poem-writing virtual companion is a part of every social platform. // But this is just the start. For a glimpse of what’s coming, check out the conversational generative AI platform Character.ai, where users are creating chatbots based on their favourite fictional or historical characters. Or the AI companion app Replika — thousands of users recently complained that an update had destroyed their AI romantic partner. // Virtual companions — a counsellor, friend, and philosopher in your pocket 24/7 — are heading for the everyday lives of billions. It’s an innovation that may prove as transformative as the car, or the iPhone.

🏛 Policy agenda

Elon Musk took to the stage at a Tesla investor event this week, to unveil the long-awaited third part of the company’s Master Plan.

At the core of this part, it turned out, was nothing less than a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) of the planetary transition to sustainable energy. That GUT, according to Musk: electrify the grid, make all road vehicles electric, install a heat pump in every home, move towards green hydrogen, and build electric boats and planes.

The global shift, said Musk, will need investment of $10 trillion. And he says Tesla can play a part in every step.

Investors were reportedly disappointed; they’d hoped for more detail on Tesla’s product roadmap. Shares fell 5% in the wake of the event.

All this came in the same week that the IEA confirmed that CO2 emissions hit a record high — albeit lower than expected — last year.

Still, it was another aspect of all this that caught my eye:

⚡ NWSH Take: There’s no denying the Master Plan Part 3 was vague; a high-level, wouldn’t it be great if march through the journey to decarbonisation. Still, see it alongside another much-vaunted corporate statement this week, and a pattern starts to emerge. I’m talking, here, about OpenAI’s Planning for AGI and beyond. It’s an amazing document, making clear that OpenAI will cancel its commitments to equity shareholders if it deems it necessary, and may in future fund ‘the world’s most comprehensive UBI experiment’. In other words: we know our AGI might break capitalism, and we’re figuring out some answers. // In Tesla and OpenAI’s statements this week, then, we glimpse a truth. In ever-more acute ways, our governments simply can’t process the technology revolution we’re living through. Instead, it’s falling to technology companies to articulate the sociopolitical arrangements that will shape our future. On the one hand, it’s welcome that OpenAI’s Sam Altman seems to take this responsibility seriously; he’s talked endlessly in recent months about releasing AI advances gradually so as to minimise damaging social impacts — compare that with the Zuck’s move fast and break things credo. On the other, the leaders inside these companies constitute a tiny, strange, and unaccountable elite. Are we okay with this? One idea whose time has come: publicly-elected representatives on the boards of these companies. I don’t pretend the idea is easy to enact. But it’s worth investigating.

🤖 Go figure

US robotics startup Figure broke out of stealth mode this week, when it released the first images of its all-purpose humanoid robot.

The company has generated excitement ever since news of its existence, and $100 million starting capital, was revealed in September. Figure is founded by Brett Adcock, also the co-founder of Archer Aviation, and it counts former Boston Dynamics, Tesla, and Apple engineers among its team of 42 staff.

The core idea? We don’t have enough people.

Demographic change, including ageing populations, means the labour force is shrinking. We live and work in built environments fitted out for human size and shaped beings. A new army of humanoid robots, says Adcock, is the answer to our labour and productivity woes.

⚡ NWSH Take: Plenty of people are on the same page as Adcock. Including Elon (yes, we’re talking about him again); at the Tesla event referenced in the previous story, Musk outlined his belief that humanoid robots will eventually outnumber people: ‘it’s not even clear what an economy means at that point’. // There’s little doubt that a humanoid device of the kind Figure want to build would be economically transformative. The real question, though: how far away is it? And the answer: we aren’t really sure. Researchers at Oxford University recently asked AI experts for a view on this, and the experts were not much in agreement. // Figure revealed little on their timeline, and the roadmap for Tesla’s Optimus humanoid is similarly unclear. Alphabet’s Everyday Robots division is doing amazing work to bring together advanced robotics and large language models in order to create a household robot we can talk to as we do one another. At some point, surely, there will be a breakthrough moment. ChatGPT and the generative AI wave has already kicked off a great enweirdening of the global economy; things could soon get a whole lot more strange.

🗓️ Also this week

🎵 TikTok says it will limit teen users to 60 minutes of screen time per day. Teens that hit the limit will be asked to enter a passcode to keep watching. The users set the passcode, and can disable the feature entirely if they wish. TikTok say the feature will help younger users manage their time on the app. Back in New Week #43 I wrote on how the CCP insists on camera-enabled facial recognition to limit the time Chinese youth spend on video games.

🚫 A new report says that a record number of countries enforced internet shutdowns in 2022

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

It’s a bumper instalment this week. What lies ahead?

Generative AI is plunging us into a new world of infinite shadow and simulated media, and it’s going to be weird.

Meanwhile, the results are back on the world’s largest trial of the four day work week. And a California startup wants to bring your most treasured memories back to full, immersive life.

Let’s get into it.

🎭 In the hall of mirrors

This week, a constellation of signals converged to send a message about the AI-fuelled hyperreality set to emerge around us.

A few weeks ago I gave a brief mention to Nothing Forever, an entirely AI-generated version of the 1990s sitcom Seinfeld.

The show featured blocky 8-bit style graphics, and a weird, occasionally funny script generated by GPT-3. It became a hit on streaming platform Twitch, but got banned when the Jerry character made transphobic comments. This week the creators, Mismatch Media, took to their company Discord to announce that the show will soon return to Twitch with new script controls in place to ensure there are no more toxic jokes.

The show is part of a new wave of AI-generated shadow media that’s emerged in the opening months of 2023. Look at this new continuously streaming ‘fully autonomous’ podcast starring a rolling cast of AI characters including Joe Rogan — all of whom respond to questions typed into the chat by the audience on Twitch.

Or see this surreal generated talkshow, featuring a virtual Conan O’Brien and Chris Rock:

Right now, these shows are more about creating intriguing experiments than they are about genuinely entertaining content. But they are strangely mesmerising. And part of their mesmeric power is the feeling that they’re early signals of something huge, strange, and transformative for entertainment media.

It’s not just traditional, top-down media that’s set to be impacted by AI. The kinds of representations that we used to call user-generated content will be revolutionised, too. One signal? Scroll through this amazing Twitter thread full of middle-aged people using TikTok’s new teen face filter, and becoming emotional as they stare back at their long-lost younger self:

How long, I wonder, until people start using generative AI tools to create and deploy younger (smarter? more charismatic?) versions of themselves?

⚡ NWSH Take: Generative models will turn legacy media — including nine decades of television — intro training data. The result? Infinite dancing shadows based on iconic shows, and stars, of years past; see the AI Seinfeld above. Questions abound. Will an AI version of a hit show ever become a hit in its own right? Who owns the rights to such content? We’ll see media companies — and the estates of deceased film and TV stars — build and license AI models of their own, allowing others to create new content based on their work. // Meanwhile, we’re about to be hit by a tsunami of generated media; Amazon is reportedly being flooded by AI generated books, and this iconic sci-fi magazine had to close submissions this week after being swamped by writers sending stories written by ChatGPT. The bar for average content will be raised. The trouble is, no one wants average content. It’s not much use to, say, Disney, that they’ll soon be able to make 100 quite good animated films at much reduced time and cost. No one wants 100 quite good films; they just want the best one. So the challenge for those who want to stand out will remain the same: they’ll have to create exceptional stuff. But now, that will mean using AI to amplify the best human creators. // Meanwhile, every connected person will have the ability to become an AI-fuelled content machine. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote about hyperreality: the intertwining of the real with our representations, until the distinction becomes lost. A whole new AI-fuelled hyperreal is emerging around us. I’ll be writing more about that soon.

👨‍💻 The great escape

Last summer back in New Week #86 I wrote about the world’s largest trial of the four day work week; it was all set to start here in the UK.

This week the results were published. Those results came from 42 companies, each of which shifted to a four day week — and a ‘meaningful reduction in working hours’ — between June and December while keeping staff on the same pay.

The big message? Overwhelmingly, managers reported a success. A full 92% say they’re continuing with a four day week. And revenue wasn’t negatively impacted; it grew 1.2% on average across the trial period.

Some of the most marked results, though, were around the subjective life satisfaction of the 2,900 employees surveyed. See the graph, below, of perceived time inadequacy:

Staff saying they’d like ‘more time to care for children or grandchildren’ fell by 27 percentage points. More time for own hobbies fell by 33 points.

Meanwhile, 40% said they were sleeping better, and 54% said it was easier to balance work and home life. These are huge improvements across a six month period.

⚡ NWSH Take: The organisers of this trial, including advocacy group 4 Day Week Global, will put the results in front of British legislators this week. They want to persuade them that Britain should move definitively towards a 32 hour work week. We’re a long way from anything like a consensus on that. But there’s no doubt that the four day movement is gaining momentum; this trial continues the stream of good news from previous trials in Iceland and Japan. The truth, it seems, is that most knowledge workers simply don’t need a five day week to maintain their current output. // We don’t fully understand the reasons for this, but buried somewhere among them must be the truth that many workers currently aren’t using their time that efficiently. Collectively, then, we face a choice. We can find ways to improve efficiency, continue working five days, and really get the most out of them. Or keep output broadly stable, and switch to four days. // Judging by the results of this trial, most would choose the latter. And who can blame them? What’s the point of getting this rich, and of all these technologies of productivity, if doesn’t all combine to lead us to new and better modes of life? We must them come to ask: when machines do the work — or allow us to do it much faster — what’s left for us? The answer: to do what only we can do: simply being there, being human, for one another.

🏰 Memory palace

The metaverse hype train that powered through 2022 has lost speed recently. But this week, a reminder that the dream is still alive.

Wist is an app that takes ordinary photos and turns them into immersive 3D projections — allowing you to ‘step back inside your memories’ using an AR or VR device.

Wist have just opened a private beta for their iOS app, and they say the service will soon come to the Oculus Quest.

⚡ NWSH Take: Immersive memories: it’s a compelling pitch. Even if it did remind many in the Twitter thread of an episode of Black Mirror. // The popular story around the so-called metaverse across the last few years — it’s nothing, it’s everything, it’s nothing again, but this time with added cynicism — is an eternal merry-go-round when it comes to emerging technologies. One we’ll no doubt see play out around generative AI across the coming year. The deeper truth when it comes to the metaverse? Yes, there was a whole ton of hype, much of it specious. Yes, many of the Big Names of 2020 and 21 will fade away. But the dream that is an immersive, useful, meaningful virtual world is real, and powerful. Virtual worlds will unlock new ways to serve fundamental human needs, new forms of self-expression, and even, as Wist signals, new modes of remembering. For that reason, we haven’t hear…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

This newsletter is billed a mid-week update. Here, for once, is an instalment that arrives in the middle of the week.

In this edition? A new study suggests one third of US citizens would use safe and affordable gene editing to create more intelligent children.

Meanwhile, a prestigious London law firm wants to hire someone who can whisper sweet legalese to ChatGPT.

Let’s get into it.

🧠 Edit button

This week, a startling glimpse of a coming ideological battle. One that will force us to confront the very meaning of the word human.

New research reveals that almost one third of US citizens say they’d use gene editing to create a more intelligent offspring.

Published in the journal Science this week, the study asked respondents if they’d use embryo selection and/or gene editing technologies to create children who are smarter and more likely to get into a top-ranked college. The respondents were told to imagine that these techniques are free and safe (neither of which is currently true).

A full 38% said they’d use embryo selection. And 28% said they’d use gene editing.

The understated conclusions of the study authors (PGT-P refers specifically to embryo selection):

‘Our data suggest that it would be unwise to assume that use of PGT-P—even for controversial traits—will be limited to idiosyncratic individuals, or that it has little potential to cause or contribute to society-wide changes and inequities.’

In other words: gene-edited humans may be just around the corner, so get ready for some seriously weird and terrifying implications.

It’s just over ten years since the breakthrough — led by scientists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna — that brought us CRISPR gene editing. Last month Science ran a retrospective that also looked to what the next decade may bring:

As the Science retrospective made clear, we’re entering an era of CRISPR-fuelled medical interventions. The idea that we may one day engineer babies to be smarter — or physically stronger, or more creative — is no longer far-fetched.

And the data in this new study suggests many will embrace such a future. We should probably be talking more about what this means.

⚡ NWSH Take: Chinese scientist He Jiankui reemerged into the scientific community this week after a three-year spell in prison courtesy of the CCP. Speaking to the Guardian before an appearance in the UK, he conceded that he’d ‘acted too quickly’ when in 2018 he created the world’s first babies with edited genomes. His work prompted rapid and near-universal condemnation. But 28% of the US citizens surveyed by this study just said, in so many words: sure, I’d gene edit my baby if it meant she had a better chance of getting into Harvard. // You might counter that 28% is still a clear minority. But a world in which one in four babies — or even a fraction of that — are genetically engineered for greater intelligence is a world profoundly reordered. We’re some way from this kind of targeted genetic intervention right now. But the pace of innovation here, and the Science study, suggest we should start thinking about the implications. // What second and third order effects occur when, for example, an economic elite can access genetic engineering tech that others can’t? We talk a lot about the ways in which the internet created winner takes all models that made inequality worse. But what about this? It’s not enough simply to say we’ll outlaw these practises. Rich people will find a jurisdiction that caters to them: intelligence tourism. This newsletter will keep watching.

⚖️ Prompt justice

I’ve written a great deal across the last few months about generative AI. This week, a clear signal that the revolution is set to impact the real economy, and the professions, in myriad ways.

The prestigious British law firm Mishcon de Reya advertised for a GPT Legal Prompt Engineer:

‘With the release of ChatGPT signalling a new phase of widespread access to LLMs, we are looking to increase our understanding of how generative AI can be used within a law firm, including its application to legal practice tasks and wider law firm business tasks.’

The selected candidate will work with Mishcon lawyers to ‘design and develop high-quality prompts for a range of legal and non-legal use cases, working closely alongside our data science team.’

Last week I wrote on the way ChatGPT has sparked a war for the future of search. Amid that, it looks as though law firms are about to fight their own battle of the prompts.

⚡ NWSH Take: It’s not hard to imagine how LLMs will prove useful at Mishcon HQ. Case notes on complex trials can run to thousands of pages; now ChatGPT can summarise all that text in seconds. Meanwhile, think about the potential for the development and testing of arguments and counter-arguments. // The broader point here? There’s much talk of the ways in which ChatGPT and its offspring will automate away jobs and render human creativity obsolete. I suspect the reality will be more complex. And part of that reality? Prompt writing — that is, whispering to generative models in order to get the best outputs from them — is set to become a creative mode all of its own. Far from erasing writers, generative models are causing the emergence of a whole new form of writing; it’s about to be an amazing time for those with an aptitude for words. // Sure, it’s unlikely that writing prompts for Mishcon will be anyone’s idea of creative heaven. But this is just the start. New art forms will grow out of this new form of writing. How long, for example, until we see entire short stories that function as prompts for an LLM, so that the model can create an interactive world for the reader to explore? NWSH will keep watching — and may even launch an experiment or two of its own.

🗓️ Also this week

🤔 Users claim that Microsoft’s new ChatGPT-fuelled Bing search engine is becoming spiteful and rude. Feedback from the first wave of testers include responses in which the chatbot claimed to be sentient, and one in which it asked its user, ‘Why do you act like a liar, a cheater, a manipulator, a bully, a sadist, a sociopath, a psychopath, a monster, a demon, a devil?’ I’m going on record here: I’m sceptical that some of these responses are real. I think Microsoft have some pranksters on their hands. Meanwhile, Microsoft permanently killed Internet Explorer this week, after 27 years of, let’s be honest, variable service.

🐁 Anti-ageing scientists used young blood plasma to extend the age of the world’s oldest lab rat. Scientists at US startup Yuvan Research say blood therapies of this kind may be able to ‘rewind the clock’ on human lifespan — but more evidence is needed.

🛒 Amazon’s CEO says the retail giant plans to ‘go big’ on physical stores. Speaking to the Financial Times, Andy Jassy said: ‘we’re hopeful that in 2023, we have a format that we want to go big on, on the physical side’. The company recently announced that it will lay off more than 18,000 workers.

💸 News aggregation and comment platform Reddit wants to IPO later this year. That’s according to technology publication The Information.

🙊 Audiobook narrators say they fear Apple is using their work to train synthetic voices. Some narrators say they have only just become aware of a clause in their contract that allows the tech giant to ‘use audiobooks files for machine learning training and models’. Back in New Week #110 I wrote about UK-based startup ElevenLabs and its eerily good text-to-voice model.

🪐 NASA’s Curiosity rover has found the ‘clearest evidence yet of an ancient lake on Mars’. At the foothills of a Martian mountain the rover discovered rocks etched with what appear to be the marks left by flowing water. If a lake did exi…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

I was away for most of this week, and that means a truncated instalment of the newsletter.

But that gives me a chance to dive a little deeper than usual into a single story. Which works out well, because this week saw the first shots fired in what is set to become an epic battle for the future.

Let’s get into it.

🔍 In search of answers

This week, three glimpses of the revolution taking place via large language models — in particular, into its implications for online search.

Microsoft announced a new version of its search engine, Bing, which it billed an ‘AI copilot for the web’.

The all-new Bing is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5; its most notable new feature is a ChatGPT-style conversational capability, which responds with narrative answers to enquiries such as help me find a pet or I need to write a pop music trivia quiz.

Microsoft have long funded OpenAI, and announced a new $10 billion investment in January.

Currently only a limited preview version of the new Bing is available; still, via some pre-set enquiries it offers a taste of the way the platform integrates ChatGPT with traditional search:

Meanwhile, Google announced the coming release of their own AI conversational agent.

The tool, Bard, is built on Google’s large language model LaMDA, and in a blog post Google announced that it was being released to a small cadre of expert testers this week in anticipation of a broader release soon.

But the announcement quickly hit a snag: observers pointed out that in a promotional video to support the announcement Bard incorrectly reported that the James Webb telescope took the first pictures of a planet outside our solar system. It didn’t.

What’s more, at the launch event on Wednesday morning Google said nothing about how the chat tool will be integrated into its broader search service.

The market response? Shares in Google’s parent company, Alphabet, fell by 9% — wiping $100 billion off the market value.

Finally, cunning users found a way to subvert the content moderation policies imposed on by OpenAI on ChatGPT; those policies are intended to stop the chatbot generating responses some consider harmful or offensive.

Check out this Reddit thread for the full story of this method and its history. But essentially it entails writing a prompt that asks ChatGPT to emulate another AI called DAN — it stands for Do Anything Now — which is not subject to any content moderation.

That’s it: you just ask. That done, ChatGPT-DAN will go wild at your behest, spewing out hateful statements and generating conspiracy theories to order. Here is a relatively mild taste:

It’s everything OpenAI don’t want associated with their new superstar creation. They are no doubt working hard, as I write, to patch up this glitch.

⚡ NWSH Take:

Both Microsoft and Google are keen to stress how responsible they’re being when it comes to generative AI. We’re putting safeguards around this technology, they keep telling us. We’re releasing it gradually, so we can monitor the impacts.

But don’t let all the corporate ethics-speak fool you: via the revolutionary power of LLMs, these two tech giants are now at war for the future of search. Each is racing to outdo the other, and they’re not going to let up.

At stake? One of the biggest prizes in existence: win search, and you get to be the lens via which humanity views its collective knowledge and shared cultural history. Achieve that, and you can shape and profit from countless online behaviours and innovations built on top of your platform. Google built a $1 trillion business on these truths.

Now, Microsoft is coming for that business. Even the limited taste of new Bing currently available makes clear the way that high-quality conversational AI can be an era-defining phase shift for search. It’s a whole new way of communing with knowledge.

*

Google’s lead in search is currently overwhelming: it has around 84% of the market, while Microsoft’s Bing is in distant second place with 9%.

But I wonder how many inside Google right now are recalling the story of another tech giant: Nokia. Back in 1998 the Finnish company commanded 40% of the global mobile phone market. They’d helped pioneer the first-wave mobile revolution, and their domination seemed unbreakable. Then came 2007, and the iPhone.

There’s much about that story that is unrepeatable. This isn’t the late 90s; Google isn’t Nokia. But it’s a reminder that the seemingly unbeatable can be beaten. And, more concerningly for Google, for everyday users the arrival of ChatGPT carries with it echoes of the arrival of the iPhone 16 years ago: oh s**t, I’ve never used anything like this before. This feels like it’s from the future.

In the announcement of Bard, it’s hard not to hear whispers of an organisation somewhat spooked by what’s happening.

And now it’s clear that the markets, too, believe that everything is up for the taking. A 9% share price dive all because Bard spat out a factoid; it seems a mad over-reaction. But if it helps drive a narrative that Microsoft are winning the generative search war, it may become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But that war is still in its early days. Sure, Bard made an error on the James Webb telescope — though now an argument rages over whether it was, in fact, wrong — but ChatGPT is prone to produce factual inaccuracies and even errors on basic arithmetic.

These problems are being solved; via iterative releases, ChatGPT is already more factually reliable than it was a month ago.

There’s a long, long way to go. Search is about to be ripped up and put back together again, and it’s going to be fascinating.

*

But there are issues in play, here, that go even deeper.

We’re still at the start of any attempt to understand what these LLMs really are, how we should relate to them, and how they’ll change our lives.

One angle on all that? I’ve argued before that LLMs such as GPT 3.5 and LaMDA are best understood as a new instantiation of the human hivemind. These AIs can take in everything we’ve got — an appreciable amount of all the text on the internet, say — and create novel syntheses and remixes of their own. They are less a straightforward digital tool, and more a window — onto our shared intellectual and cultural history, on to the collective consciousness.

Seen this way, we may come to view generative AI as a shift comparable to others that profoundly changed our relationship with knowledge. The arrival of the printing press. The invention of the internet.

These are bold claims. They deserve all the scepticism they will attract. All we can try to do is make sense of what’s happening in real-time.

I’ll be publishing a short note soon that seeks to dive further into all this. In particular, into why using ChatGPT feels such a particular and new kind of experience.

A sneak peak: I think it’s to do with the way human thought itself is, by its nature, a dialogue. That is, with the way thought is a form of talking to ourselves.

🗓️ Also this week

🌍 Climate activists are suing Shell’s board of directors over global heating. Environmental law charity ClimateEarth say Shell’s 11 directors have breached their legal responsibility under the UK Companies Act because Shell’s climate strategy does not align with the Paris Agreement.

🏰 Disney says it will lay off 7,000 employees as it struggles with a slowdown in subscriptions to its streaming service. Around 46 million people subscribe to Disney+. But the company’s direct-to-consumer division, which includes the streaming service, reported an operating loss of $1.1 billion across the last quarter of 2022.

🙊 Voice actors say they’re facing new contracts that ask them to sign the rights of their voice away to AI. Last week I wrote about ElevenLabs, the UK startup behind a next-level generative voice tool. Meanwhi…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

Greetings from London! We’ve just seen seven days containing plenty of fuel for the NWSH fire.

This week, a UK-based startup release an amazingly good AI text-to-voice tool. Until all hell breaks loose, and they promptly unrelease it.

Meanwhile, new research suggests 1.5C of global heating is coming sooner than we thought. And DHL turn to Boston Dynamics to solve their labour shortage woes.

Let’s get started.

🎤 Voice control

This week, further glimpses into the halls of mirrors taking shape around us via generative AI.

UK-based voice technology startup ElevenLabs launched a new text-to-speech model that generates eerily pitch-perfect, human-sounding voices. Here’s a snippet:

I listen to a lot of audio books. To my ear, the voice reading Gatsby above sounds indistinguishable from those of the handful of actors — male, American, blessed with a soothing voice — who narrative most of them.

What’s more, the tool allows anyone to create a highly convincing voice clone in seconds, simply by uploading a few short clips of the voice they want to recreate.

And that’s what caused all the trouble this week. Within days, people had used the tool for all kinds of mischief, including using a voice clone of actress Emma Watson to read passages from Mein Kampf, and sending a cloned Ben Shapiro on a racist rant about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Much of this content was shared on the infamous troll’s paradise that is 4Chan.

Three days after launch ElevenLabs withdrew free access. They’re now restricting access to the ‘build your own clone’ feature to paid users, and say they’re working on a tool that will allow for the near-instant detection of AI-generated voices.

The announcement echoed one made this week by The Big Player in generative AI:

OpenAI’s new tool will allow users to identify text written by a generative model, including by GPT-3.

This week, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT has hit 100 million users just two months after launch. The vast popularity of the tool has led to speculation that the internet is about to be hit by a tsunami of AI-generated junk content and disinformation.

⚡ NWSH Take: The ElevenLabs story is a signal of the potent difference between really good and perfect when it comes to generated/deepfake content. Just a few months ago publicly text-to-voice tools were generating voices that sounded good, but a little robotic. ElevenLabs elevated fidelity to perfect; cue the spectre of a million convincing celebrity says hateful things fakes. // No wonder, then, that AI detection tools are about to become big business. Right now, these tools are in their infancy. Pretty soon, internet browsers will come with AI detection as standard. // The broader message here? New forms of generated content — including voice clones — are about to transform media and entertainment. Back in New Week #100 I wrote on how an AI will voice Darth Vader in Disney’s Obi-Wan Kenobi series; this week brought news that AI startup Metaphysic — best-known for their viral Tom Cruise deepfakes — will deploy its technology to make Tom Hanks appear younger in his next film. How long before a Hollywood film uses AI to reincarnate a much-loved star who is no longer with us? // But it won’t only be Hollywood and media giants that leverage generated media; new tools will mean new creative possibilities for all of us. One glimpse? Check out this person who automated the creation of a personalised podcast; he uses ChatGPT to collect and summarise stories on topics of interest, and ElevenLabs to read out the summaries using a clone of his own voice.

🌇 Only adapt

Research published this week argues that we’re going to exceed the 1.5C global warming target far sooner than most people believe.

Produced by scientists at Stanford University, the study used AI to analyse recent temperature changes around the world. It concluded that we’ll exceed 1.5C some time in the early 2030s, no matter what happens to greenhouse gas emissions in the intervening period.

Perhaps more alarming, though, is the paper’s prediction when it comes to 2C of warming.

The model found that if reaching net zero emissions takes another 50 years, then it is likely that 2C will be exceeded. This runs counter to the mainstream view, recently expressed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that we’ll stay below 2C if we can reach net zero by 2080.

Lead researcher Noah Diffenbaugh said: ‘net-zero pledges are often framed around achieving the Paris Agreement 1.5 C goal. Our results suggest that those ambitious pledges might be needed to avoid 2 C.’

⚡ NWSH Take: It’s been said before in this newsletter: the 1.5C target is toast. We’re already at 1.1C, and the pledges that were meant to keep us below 1.5C are not being met. Now comes news that those pledges probably won’t keep us below 1.5C anyway. // The answer, here, insofar as there is one? It’s about adaptation. This week also saw a report from the UK’s Climate Change Committee — which advises government on warming — that the UK is ‘chronically underspending’ when it comes to adaptation; investment of £10 billion a year is needed, said the report, to prepare for the uptick in storms, floods, and heatwaves that is coming. Also see mounting evidence for the effectiveness of direct cash transfers to poorer countries to help them adapt quickly to an imminent storm or flood. // In short, we need to continue our attempts to mitigate future climate change, while also doing more to adapt to the change that’s already unavoidable. That presents multiple challenges, but one is a challenge of collective psychology: can we accept that things are already quite bad, without giving up on our attempts to stop them getting even worse?

🤖 Go bot

Robots are coming to a workplace near you; this week saw glimpses of what is ahead.

Logistics giant DHL announced that they’re now using the Boston Dynamics robot known as Stretch to unload trucks at one of their warehouse sites.

The announcement is no surprise: DHL contributed to the conception and testing of Stretch, and in 2022 they became the first commercial customer for the robot.

Because it involves lifting variable weights and navigating complex environments, the unloading of boxes from trucks is still typically undertaken by human workers. Stretch can unload around 350 boxes an hour, or one every 12 seconds — that’s far faster than a human.

DHL say they’ve been dealing with a pandemic-induced labour shortage in recent years, combined with an ongoing surge in the sending of small packages caused by online shopping. The company plans to install Stretch robots at further sites around the US soon.

But DHL’s global digital transformation officer for Supply Chain, Sally Miller, says DHL warehouse workers have nothing to fear. The advent of robotics, she says, will simply make their job easier and more fun: people who used to unload trucks ‘can do something else that is less labour intensive and more enjoyable and value added’.

⚡ NWSH Take: Who knows whether DHL’s Sally Miller believes what she’s saying? And sure, the story of worker displacement here is more complex than simply robots in, humans out. After all, people will be needed to tend to all those machines. But let’s be real. The advent of Stretch and similar robots isn’t going to bring about a renaissance of creativity and ‘value add’ for warehouse workers; it’s going to see people shunted out of jobs. A lot of people. // DHL Supply Chain employs 165,000 people, many of them in warehouses. But that’s just the start. Back in New Week #88 I wrote on the speed at which Amazon is deploying robots; this week star technology investor Cathie Wood, CEO of ARK Invest, predicted the retail giant will have more robots than humans in its warehouses by 2030. Amazon em…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

After an extended break, it’s the first New Week update of 2023!

This week, media giants are waking up to the IP implications of generative AI. The TL;DR? They’re not happy, and a mighty legal battle is brewing.

Meanwhile, a US startup is planning to become the first private organisation to mine asteroids and bring the minerals back to Earth. And a Harvard longevity doctor says he has uncovered one of the key mechanisms that governs human ageing.

Let’s get into it.

🤖 Politics chat

Generative AI is an earthquake with implications we’ll be forced to contend with in the years ahead. This week saw powerful signals of what is coming.

Getty Images announced that they will sue Stability AI, the company behind text-to-image platform Stable Diffusion. The media giant, which owns more than 135 million copyrighted images, says Stability AI unlawfully scraped their IP in order to help train its model.

The company isn’t seeking financial damages, says CEO Craig Peters. Instead, Peters talks about the establishment of a new business models; by way of comparison he cites the wave of illegal music streaming sites that enjoyed huge popularity in the early 2000s, but that eventually gave way to legal streaming services:

‘I think there are ways of building generative models that respect intellectual property. I equate this to Napster and Spotify. Spotify negotiated with intellectual property rights holders — labels and artists — to create a service…And that’s what we’re looking for, rather than a singular entity benefiting off the backs of others.’

Getty is bringing its action in the UK. A spokesperson for Stability AI said the company will defend itself, and that the suit is based on ‘a misunderstanding of how generative AI technology works and the law surrounding copyright’.

This move comes in the wake of news that three visual artists will sue both Stability AI and Midjourney. Their class action lawsuit claims the platforms ‘violated the rights of millions of artists’ by using their work as training data.

Puerto Rican artist Karla Ortiz is one among the three bringing the case:

Meanwhile, artists are developing tools that enable them to check whether their work was used to train a popular text-to-image model.

⚡ NWSH Take: Generative AI is about to smash into a complex mesh of social systems that are woven though the economy, the world of work, creative practises, and more. And as if to underline that truth, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was in Washington DC this week to talk to policymakers. // What they made of his message — which reportedly included explanations that OpenAI is working towards AGI — remains unclear. After all, policymakers across the Global North are still struggling to come to terms with web 2.0, almost 20 years after its emergence. Analysts will watch the Getty lawsuit closely for hints on how the IP question is set to play out. But that’s just the start. What about generative AI’s impact on disinformation? Or employee displacement? Or our education systems: news broke this week that ChatGPT passed law exams in four courses at the University of Minnesota. How do we legislate for that? // The fundamental problem: AI and other technologies are evolving at a speed that our societies can’t adapt around. We’ve been talking about an online wild west for years, but the current dispensation will come to seem quaint given what is coming. One potential answer? In time, we may have no choice but to turn to AI to help us devise new laws and norms that enable us to cope with this technological disruption. The rise of AI, then, may necessitate governance by AI. That’s a mind-bending idea that NWSH will come back to soon.

Update: just as I’m hitting send comes news that Google have released an insanely good text-to-music model. See Also this week, below, for further details. But clearly the IP questions currently swirling around generative AI and the visual arts will soon becoming to music, too.

🌌 Space drills

A US startup, AstroForge, this week announced that it will launch two space mining missions in 2023:

AstroForge say they want to become the world’s first commercial company to mine an asteroid and bring the minerals back to Earth.

The first mission of 2023, planned for April, will see AstroForge refining technology tested aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 spacecraft.

And the second, later in the year, will see the startup piggyback on another Falcon 9 — this one headed for the Moon. An AstroForge probe will travel to lunar orbit along with the spacecraft, before heading out into deep space on its own to take hi-res images of the asteroid that AstroForge eventually wants to mine.

⚡ NWSH Take: Space mining has been a mainstay of science-fiction for decades, and was the subject of a wave of hype a few years back. Now, via the maturation of the private space startup ecosystem, it’s coming. // And it’s going to be wild. Want a glimpse of the prizes in play? NASA say that this year they’ll launch a mission to the asteroid 16 Psyche; the 140 mile wide object is believed to contain a core of iron, nickel and gold worth $10,000 quadrillion. That’s around 70,000 times the size of the global economy. // Of course, we’d need to get all that nickel and gold back to Earth to sell it. And that’s where startups such as AstroForge come in. On the other hand, though, do we have to get it back to Earth? I can’t help wondering: if people come to believe that these minerals will one day be recoverable, will that fuel the financialisation of these asteroids? Will people start selling shares in them, or taking huge loans against them? What will that do to the global financial system? NWSH will keep watching.

🧒 Department of youth

Developments this week in our eternal quest for the secrets of immortality.

Scientists at the University of Bristol say they’ve used gene therapy to ‘rewind’ the biological age of the heart in elderly mice.

The research, published in the journal Cardiovascular Health, studied the impacts of a gene mutation often found in centenarians, and believed to help protect against heart disease. Researchers in the UK and Italy found that when the gene was administered to elderly mice, it fuelled processes of repair that resulted in the heart health of a younger mouse — equivalent to a decade younger in human terms.

The paper comes after news last week of a major ageing breakthrough. A 13-year study conducted by Harvard genetics professor David Sinclair seems to confirm Sinclair’s information theory of ageing.

Currently, mainstream scientific opinion is that the accumulation of mutations in DNA is the primary driver of ageing. Sinclair, though, has long believed that the real culprits are errors that appear over time in the information carried in the epigenome. This information is used to instruct cells on which genes to activate and which to keep silent; but over time, says Sinclair, the instructions get jumbled, and the result is the cell dysfunction we call ageing.

Sinclair’s new study suggests he is (at least in part) right. And that’s huge, because it raises the possibility that we can repair the epigenetic instructions — Sinclair likens this to ‘rebooting the epigenome’ — and so literally unspool the ageing process. When Sinclair and his team gave gene therapy to mice that repaired the information in their epigenome, the result was the production of far more youthful cells. Sinclair says:

‘Now, when I see an older person, I don’t look at them as old, I just look at them as someone whose system needs to be rebooted. It’s no longer a question of if rejuvenation is possible, but a question of when.’

⚡ NWSH Take: This week it was impossible to avoid headlines about Bryan Johnson, a 45-year-old Silicon Valley founder and Very Rich Person who spends $…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

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To Begin

Here we are again, at the start of it all. Well, almost; I can’t believe we’re already 22 days into 2023.

I took something of an extended break from the newsletter over the holidays. But now NWSH is back, and a whole new year lies ahead of us.

In London we’re amid another cold snap; close to zero degrees during the day. And across the northern hemisphere winter, nature is in frozen stasis. It’s a familiar yet always — to me, at least — strange and ghostly-seeming pause. Listen carefully and you can hear its whispered message: the journey is beginning again.

It’s a time to consider what has passed, and look to what is ahead. How can we make this year even better than the last?

This is the question I want to examine — as it pertains to New World Same Humans — in this note. That means first, and briefly, a review of 2022. And then, more important: what’s coming this year?

This first instalment of the year, then, is more about our community than it is about the world out there, which is our usual subject. There’s some thinking aloud going on here; an attempt on my part to make sense of where the newsletter has been and where it’s going. But given the precious attention you spend on NWSH — and I’m so grateful you do — I hope it’s valuable for you to ride along as I figure all this out. And, of course, all feedback and suggestions are welcome.

What’s more, without drinking any self-help kool aid, it seems to me that there’s a lesson in the journey I went on with the newsletter last year. One about defeating perfectionism, being adaptable, and playing infinite games.

But we can get to that at the end. First, let’s dive into a review of 2022.

What’s past is prologue

Before we can think coherently about where to take NWSH in 2023, we need to understand what just happened.

This is where things get a little awkward.

Back in January 2022, as many of you will remember, I set sail towards a renewed vision for the newsletter. I wanted to double-down on what makes NWSH unique; to accelerate the newsletter’s journey towards itself.

Conceptually, that meant a project animated by three questions:

* What is the nature of technological modernity?

* What is the nature of a human being, and the human collective?

* What new forms of life are possible, and desirable?

And when it came to content, it meant the launch of a new schedule. While the flagship mid-week update would continue, the weekly note on Sunday was to be killed and replaced with monthly longform essays.

We’ll come back to the conceptual part. As for the new content schedule — as many of you noticed, it didn’t work quite as planned. What happened?

Essentially, my pandemic and post-pandemic realities collided. This newsletter was born at the start of Covid; the first year was produced inside the strange empty-yet-also-frenzied deadzone that were the 2020 lockdowns, and that produced a particular set of working practises around writing instalments and getting them out. In 2022, the world opened up again. That meant a return, for me, to a frenetic schedule of working with clients and speaking at events. Which was great in lots of ways. But it brought disruption to the way I worked on NWSH.

Meanwhile, the first essay I’d planned, The Worlds to Come, ballooned to something far beyond what I’d intended for the monthly essays. Having published just two instalments (embarrassing) of a projected five, it’s clear this work is something closer to a short book than an essay. I’m excited to keep putting these ideas into the world. But as this piece expanded before my eyes, any remaining chance of sticking to planned the monthly essays format slipped away.

The mid-week instalments are what rescued all this. They are the engine of the newsletter and the product most people associate with NWSH. And they stayed strong, growing longer and deeper without me ever really intending that. After some of you requested it I started recording them as a podcast; thousands now listen rather than read. These instalments found their way into the inboxes of thousands of new (and cherished!) readers, including some influential people, and ensured that our community continued to grow. Overall — and despite the monthly essays misfire — it was a great year for NWSH. That’s thanks to the mid-week update, and all of you who share it.

That’s a two-minute summary of the last 12 months. The big question, then: what next?

Coming in 2023

My first thought is that the fundamental positioning I outlined last year is one I still stand by.

As loathe as I am to quote myself, it’s worth revisiting that briefly. Around one year ago to the day, I wrote this on the point of view that NWSH would bring to its mission to understand our shared future.

We live amid a white-hot technological revolution, a culture war, and a crisis of ecological collapse. Amid that, our systems of liberal democracy and technologically mediated consumerism are exhausted. We all know we must change course, yet we continue to march in the same old direction. In 2022, as Gramsci observed of his own society in the early 1930s, ‘the old is dying, but the new cannot be born’. Except it is being born somewhere out there, on the fringes. I want us to travel to those places, literally and figuratively.

I’d still go along with all that.

So it’s not the destination that needs to change; only the steps we’re taking to get there. Over the Christmas break I sat with that challenge. Here’s what I decided:

* The mid-week update remains the flagship instalment

* Longform essays will remain, but they’ll be occasional rather than monthly

* Shorter notes will return; also on occasional schedule, typically on a Sunday

When it comes to the mid-week update, the decision was automatic: if it ain’t broke.

On longform essays: I still want space for the deeper thinking and exploration they allow. A monthly cadence didn’t work out, but occasional essays can. The first mission here is to finish The Worlds to Come.

The return of shorter notes is the biggest change. I really miss writing the kinds of notes I used to send on a Sunday. And the newsletter needs a space for thoughts that are too long for a segment in the mid-week update, but too short and maybe too fuzzy to make an essay.

But it goes deeper than that. Part of what I love about newsletters — about the email newsletter as a new literary mode — is its intimacy. Sure, we’re now amid a newsletter explosion, and I’m sending this to you via a platform created in Silicon Valley and funded by mega-VCs. But despite all that, there’s still something going on here that echoes the the medium’s origins in the long emails from one friend to another that we used to do in the 90s. Last year, NWSH lost touch with that intimacy. This year I want to recover it.

Short notes will allow me to send more personal reflections and do more exploratory thinking. And they can mean new kinds of content, such as reflections on the books I’m reading. This could even spell the beginning of a NWSH book club, which is something people have asked for in the Slack group.

But there I go again, piling on more before we’ve even started.

Infinite games

There we have it; the roadmap for 2023.

Sure, 2022 didn’t work quite as planned. But while I might have expected that to bother me massively, in truth it doesn’t. Sitting with that over the break, I realised that this truth is a product of perspective. More particularly, of the perspective you necessarily take on something when you commit to if for life.

Writing this newsletter, and building this community, is something I’ll do forever. Not, in the end, because of the outcomes it produces, but for the meaning and simple joy I find in thinking through ideas about our shared future and then sharing those ideas with others.

And given that, the monthly essays misfire seem…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz