Ask HN: AI “white mirror” – what are some inspiring future visions you've seen?

AI babysitter for infants to supplement – not replace – parents. Captures audio / biometrics and responds to the baby with targeted music, positive affirmations, cooing, etc, to promote positive emotional state. Also notifies parents of states that require their intervention, like hunger, soiled diaper, abnormal vitals, inconsolability. Parents can take a break, watch a movie, entertain friends, etc, with the comfort of knowing their baby is being intelligently monitored. Existing baby monitors are way more noise than signal.

I anticipate AI will slowly start to be realized to reveal the nature of not only human language, but also human cognition, which may lead to us starting to become more self-aware as individuals and a species......like, if we happened to somehow have accurate historical statistics on the matter, we'd see major jumps on the chart representing significant events in history (invention of the printing press, the first enlightenment and rise of science / retreat of religion, etc), and this event will (possibly) turn out to be another instance of the relatively rare phenomenon.

I think AI-assisted healthcare is inevitable and will probably offer the biggest improvement in the general population's health for decades, it will focus on disease prevention and flagging up those early warning signs that most people don't usually notice

I think generative AI is going to created a modding and fanwork renaissance.

Mega game mods are seemingly bottlenecked by art, textures, voice acting and such, and fanworks outside of gaming have similar constraints. And the legal issues surrounding these models arent an issue for them.

AI service or feature that find common ground and rephrase concerns to help people find agreement.

In this contentious world we live in, I feel like all we really need is a little more love for our common earthbound inhabitants.

This could work for neighborly disagreements or even bigger stuff.

(More robotics, but if you'll accept it)

Workers of the dirtiest, least desirable jobs ( sewage, septic cleanup?) get paired with a robot that handles the dirty work.

No job loss, critical infrastructure remains, just less toil for the human.

It's not "black" because it's bad. It's black because it's a turned-off screen, which has a black colors. Black Mirror stories are bad because the Mirror reflects bad/broken people, not because the mirror is is bad. A White Mirror would be a screen that is turned on, but also reflects images.

The one where we stop wishing AI or whatever other toy du jour will solve all our problems. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I don't buy your utopia, no matter the label.

I guess my utopia is where people stop making utopias and start behaving pragmatically.

Maybe this sounds a bit sad, but I'm personally super excited for when something like copilot turns into a full-on coversational code friend / assistant.

I see it being super productive to always be pair programming with an AI, and not have to type every command out... or better yet, that it provides suggestions without me needing to prompt it to do so, thereby giving this feeling that I'm just hanging out with someone and doing a more traditional pairing session

Perhaps a bit too distant, but the Culture series by Iain M. Banks takes place in a utopia built and managed by hyper intelligent benevolent artificial intelligences.

AI Financial management assistance, Healthcare price comparisons, Insurance, and cost saving systems - AI will be much better at navigating the complicated world of finance than the average person, will probably be a great improvement for most people

It'd have to be something like AI both solves climate problems while making it profitable to do so. I'm not talking about greenwashing, but using machine learning to solve hard science problems and tying them to economic benefit. Dear AI overlord, I'm trying to start a new business and this is my idea… Dear valued chat user, your business can be 125% more profitable if you can address this climate problem as these 3 VCs are ready to unload dump trucks of cash into the space.

In a distant sense, I find the Culture series of novels to be an inspiring vision of the future. People develop AI and technology to master nature on a planetary scale, and largely live peaceful, happy lives.

In a nearby sense, I am inspired every time I do random household chores, by thinking that maybe AI and robots will be able to do this soon. Folding clothes, picking up toys, putting things away where they go, cooking dinner, putting the dirty dishes into the dishwasher, putting the clean dishes away on the shelves, taking out the trash, driving to the corner store to pick up a fresh baguette.

Understanding Generative Art end to end. Current AIs are "static" in nature. I would love if AIs could be able to understand generative art processes from the written code to the unfolding of distinct outputs based on the parameters.

e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIr1tvQb-wM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8DMEHxOLQE

very distant: The Culture series by Ian Banks Somewhat distant: I Robot by Asimov (specifically the ending)

I will not comment on the realism of either of these novels, but will say that both present optimistic visions of futures where super intelligent AGIs are commonplace and both have interesting ideas to consider regardless of exactly the extent to which they are grounded in reality.

The most beautiful one I've read is from 'The Gentle Seduction' by Marc Stiegler [0] It's a wonderful short read.

[0]http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html

Technology just magnifies what's already happening in society (occasionally it disrupts it). What are some good things in our modern society?

I'm not a biologist but probably mRNA stuff or medicine that works with your genetic code to give you true immunity, cure chronic diseases, etc.

Automation creating a post-scarcity environment where people focus more on expanding their freedoms and quality of life instead of working more and more (unlikely if the last half-century is anything to go by).

Social media fostering a sense of "global citizenship" making wars based on nationality less likely (or at least harder to drum up support for). Imagine trying to justify the Iraq war to US citizens in 2023. There would be Iraqi Youtubers making videos humanizing their struggle. You might have Iraqi online friends in your Discord servers etc who make you question if the US Military is actually a "force for good". We can see this happening in Ukraine as we speak, granted nobody was really a fan of Russia to begin with, but I think most of us can point to a Ukrainian influencer or someone in our social circle that is directly affected by the invasion.

Bad Mirror: AI tools scrape entire universe of art to generate on-demand clipart for Canva.com, now a $40bn company

Good Mirror: Someone sells a tool for AI-assisted drawing; something that actually helps people learn something, instead of doing the job for them, mostly by creating a bad photocopy

AI diagnosing disease better than any one doctor can. If we could build a model with a normalized dataset of everyone's medical history, we could catch a lot of diseases early. Especially if we encourage people to report even minor symptoms when they have it.

Imagine for example that everyone who gets diagnosed with pancreatic cancer reported repeated congestion of the left nostril three years before diagnosis. It's unlikely any doctor would ever make that connection, but an AI could, and then suggest regular pancreatic cancer screening to people reporting frequent left nostril congestion.

Next 50-100 years:

Fully Homomorphic encryption if improved could allow for private cloud computing or really neat p2p networks.

Many diseases will become curable and some may be eradicated from the developed world or entirely

Next 100+ years:

Quantum key distribution could allow for the best possible encryption

Neutrino based communication could allow for wireless communication through the earth

Ongoing: Extreme poverty is falling world wide

AI will allow humanity to produce more intelligence with less (less labour) thus more spare-time for humankind. Like industrial revolution and mechanism did during the 19th century. Probably grey mirrorish though.

Something that could be very cool would be AI driven monitoring analysis and troubleshooting pre-work to support operative staff. Trying to figure out what's exactly going wrong in a complex, distributed system requires the system and the user to ingest a lot of information at times in order to make a guess what's going on. This is something an AI could really help with - ingest all of the information over some time period, and output a number of guesses or possible problems with probabilities and possible root causes assigned to them.

Think of an operator logging into the system at 3am with a C&C EVA voice calling and greeting them, "Hello Operator. We have 24 customer-facing systems offline. Preliminary analysis indicates that these are caused by 3 internal services and 2 postgres clusters being offline. With a confidence of 83%, the internal services are also offline due to the postgres clusters. I will now send you what I have found out about the postgres clusters with a probability of the scenarios and monitoring indicators for the different scenarios. It looks like the clusters are failing to elect a leader after several network-caused timeline switches with a confidence of 72%. Highly matching runbooks exist for 4 out of 7 highest probability scenarios"

Well, maybe I'd prefer that in text on a website, but no need to be that serious right now.

It is possible to get monitoring of this quality even with existing tools and maybe some internal extensions of these tools, sure. But that's a barrel you can pour effort into and it has no bottom at all. And it gets harder and harder the more complex and the more dynamic your environment is. It'd be great to dump all of that into a black box, even if that black box just establishes a global timeline of events.