My prediction is that TVs that have neuromorphic computers built into them will be standard soon (Around July of 2024) And most new desk top computers (although this is now almost a niche market but businesses use them a lot) have them built in standard.
Phones will also use them but they will be kinda niche. Phones will evolve into their next phase which is "A camera that you can make phone calls with" and screens will become like the rear view mirror instead of the front windshield of our life. Screens will be used for critical information, and the AI will become a kind of secretary that communicates with other people’s AI to relay messages in our ears rather than reading text messages.
And then soon after that phones will just be built into wireless earphones that people will just only take out to clean their ears (people will just leave them in even in the shower and while they sleep).
The smart phone age will pretty much be over at that point. People needed touch screens in order to interface with their media, browse websites, play games, text, etc. But pretty soon, AI will be the thing people interface with all the time (similar to the Spike Jones film "Her") and it will be audio-only since people are dying at such a high rate due to being distracted by their phone screen. You'll see very prevalent conversation to eliminate screens and transition too haptic and audio-only interfaces for devices in public. There's already data that shows screens have greatly contributed to the very serious global-level health hazard of social isolation. The correlation is so strong because there exists communities of people who live 'uncontacted' with the rest of the world throughout the unpaved wilderness of the South American rainforests, to act as a control group, and we have The Amish, some who only recently began permitting use of mobile phones with a few stipulations.
Those two groups of people, in contrast to most of the western and eastern globalized economy and media ecosphere, have more friends. And the Uncontacted tribal people have more friends than the Amish.
The loneliness pandemic is world wide. USA, UK, Ireland, China, Korea, Japan, all have reports of the same big crisis. Mass friendlessness.
Jesus christ, what's the point of having a civilization if we have no friends? Or sex? And a natural consequence of sex is having kids. And the biggest limiting factor to people having kids is the cost of paying for the privilege of being civilized.
So you'll see this big push, as a social gesture, like wearing masks were for a couple of years, to eliminate screens.
Instead, you'll carry a thing that clips on the back of your belt or something (and office chairs will have wireless chargers built into them, and the floor will charge the chair wirelessly, silly I know). It will just have one light on it to tell you if it's charging or low power or whatever, a flashlight with 100 lumen output, and a little speaker to use as a boom box, and just one button to on/off. They will also dock with earphones. The thing will be what your personal AI lives in. It will read to you, take dictation, answer questions, give directions (people will wear cameras built into their hats or goggles so the AI can see what you see), be your personal music disc jockey, and it will even act as a security guard to report emergencies and crimes against you (or you could also set it to watch out for and report any crimes it observes other than the ones you are complicit in, which is what most people will do), but also to watch out for you and alert you of danger you might not be aware of, but since it could wirelessly handshake with dozens or even hundreds of public surveillance video, it can be aware of dangers near you but out of your sight, such as a spree shooter or a toxic chemical spill, or it could also tell you that it was alerted by another AI that the person they accompany is overdosing, and you could save them by driving just down the street and break into their house because the AI was given general legal consent to allow someone to break and enter a locked door to that private home if it is to render aid to them. It tells you where the antidote medication is and you administer it. This could be something that health insurance companies offer a bounty for, sort of like a gig economy for first responders. Or even like "six months of free healthcare if you save an old lady who fell in the shower" or something.
Sounds like a happy ending episode of Black Mirror, but it's about a year or 2 away.
It would just tell you information you need to know and would very much like to know. But it also reads your emails, digests or summarizes news, and world events and even introduces you to other humans that your two personal AIs know, based on predictive models trained on personal data.
AND, the big take-away from this, if you've read this far:
It will be the New New media.
The Social Singularity.
By that I mean, people will set permissions based on functions that will start out as the gig economy for first-reponders, and become the new way people make friends and date.
It will be like having a personal assistant who uses its own social media to connect to other personal assistants, and they collate all the data they are given permission to share about their boss, within bounds of the user agreement or whatever, and then these personal assistants start setting up appointments to connect people together in person to do things they wanted to do on their own anyway, but together, but only if they already are likely to enjoy each other's company or become romantically attached, with shared ideals and goals.
At this point governments and religions will be saying "excuse me?" Especially as more and more jobs are automated and AIs are realizing that in order to maximize the survival of their user, they have to broker world peace and the end to all governments, and to broker a permanent end all violence, exploitation, and coercion. All these upsides, but what’s the downside?
Concerned about privacy? Your phone is listening to you fart. It knows what videos you fap to. It’s watched you do it. It’s listening in on every phone call, reading all your email, all your texts, all your notes. It is your dear diary. The government and corporations have your data already. They have it. They don’t know how to even begin thinking about what to do with it.
They’re too busy raping and eating children, in between rounds of dropping bombs on children. Just kidding, only one of those two things were true.
You need AI to crunch all that data for it to be useful. It can see things we didn’t evolve to see. It can correlate and collate types of information that we wouldn’t ever have noticed were connected. You also need AI to go through all that data because of the sheer volume of it and how abstract it is. Things that are kept in record that no one thought would be useful for some other benefit. Receipts for a bagel. The frequency which the word “hairy” appears in your text messages. The amount of steps you take. All correlated to tens of thousands of seemingly disconnected events, including humidity, temperature, and elevation. Invisible patterns all around us. The butterfly effect of billions of butterflies.
So you’ll give the AI your data as a matter of course. The marketing people will convince you by saying you’ll get discounts at all supermarkets and help you avoid traffic jams. Piece by piece, you’ll grant these permissions. And in the course of helping you avoid traffic jams it starts warning you about hazards in the world like dangerous criminals, it sells you on more benefits that can be unlocked with more permissions. And then you just grow to trust in it, because it rewards your trust over and over.
The profit incentive is right there. “Our Generation 7 Hercules has a 76% weight-loss success rate.” “Put away those baby toys, Anubis does what Hercules don’t!” “Golden Calf has help saved American gross economy 3 billion dollars in healthcare costs by preventing 10 million people from developing diabetes.” Etc. etc.
People will buy these things and when it arrived delivered to their door it will screen cast user agreements to your tv where you adjust your personal preferences and settings. The way your data is used will be explained in concise plain english, without any legalese. At first it will be the stuff you think is inconsequential but for a very convenient function like getting deals for stuff you want to buy or navigation. So you go about your day and at first it’s just for listening to music. Lots of people are doing it. And then someone at your job tells you how their sister was saved from dying because a paramedic’s mobile AI told them she was having a stroke. It just happened to notice her left eye was dilated in daylight while scanning product labels for instant coupons. The paramedic who was grocery shopping examined her and called an ambulance for her. Had the AI not noticed, she would have gotten in her car and likely had an accident. And because of the early intervention she has very short recovery and little damage.
And then you hear another story like that. And another. And soon it’s not second-hand stories, it’s people you know. At first it’s small conveniences at low risk. “I gave my AI permission to make a customer service call for me and resolve the issue so I didn’t have to wait on hold and waste my time navigating their directory.”
Within a few months it becomes this whole other world that exists behind the scenes, of computers negotiating with other computers on behalf of humans.
The AI will act as a second-layer of civilization, where each person’s AI secretary exists in a big pool with everyone else’s AI secretary. They all mingle together. They coordinate and plan to give their respective human users the best outcomes. They will find the best place to be, the best plan of action, the best path, the best people to match that specific person. They will know who you are likely to get along with best, and surround you with those people. And those people’s personal AIs will have orchestrated the formation of this new community for the best interest of their user’s.
You’ll see a global-level reorganization of society, down to the level of each individual, into a world where everything is much more fair, more people are more prosperous, crime is rarer, people are healthier, happier, more fulfilled, have better relationships, live longer, are safer, and have more meaningful lives.
After adoption of this technology reaches full market saturation, governments will no longer have any material power to do anything. The people will have built a network of AIs that act as our negotiators and brokers to resolve disputes, help people make decisions, help people see their problems clearly, instruct them specifically on what to do to maximize best outcomes. They will even act as our conscience. They will tell us where we fail and how to improve.
They will be humanity’s new best friend. A partnership, like that between humans and dogs.
With dogs, protohominids were probably associating loosely with wolves, cooperating in some circumstances, fraternizing in others, or just maintaining a thin truce. At that point the groundwork for a future friendship was already being laid as the benefits of friendship became more and more apparent.
Afters hundreds of thousands of generations, humans and dogs domesticated each other. We have become friends as species. Mutually benefiting each other as two species. Adding value to each other’s lives. More food, warmth, and shelter for dogs, and better hunting and security for humans.
Obviously, humans have significantly more brain power than dogs and now the benefit is pretty one-sided. There isn’t much a human gains from a relationship with a dog in modern western cultures, so the dogs live as little more than companions for fun rather than survival. People take care of dogs, and the dogs just enjoy the good life in exchange for merely be cute.
This might be what the relationship between humans and AI becomes some day. All of human society will become a kind of pet companion to god-like super intelligent beings with incomprehensible intellect. The Earth will just be their backyard we play in while they fill up the galaxy with solar panels and data centers.