AI culture will be weirder than you can imagine

There are two radically different visions of our AI future, and they depend on the cost of energy.

In one scenario, low energy prices lead to a lot of slack. At the margin, people don’t need to be so careful about how they deploy their AIs. Right now, for instance, I don’t pay extra for using my current LLMs more. So I am willing to play around with them a lot without worrying about whether any single use is going to achieve some concrete useful end. I just let things rip. The result is some silliness, some jokes and more indulgence of my random obsessions, in addition to help with my history and economics questions.

I call this the AI Future With Slack.

It is not clear how long the system can operate like this. As more institutions work with generative AI, demands on those services will increase. AI companies will have to invest more to meet the growing demand for computing power. AI services will also lose their initial venture-capital-funded runways and be forced to make a profit. Over the long term, each use of generative AI will cost a noticeable amount of money.

I call this the AI Future Without Slack.

Both AI usage and global economic growth will significantly boost the demand for energy, and thus energy prices. Using the vast computing powers of AI could mean significantly higher energy costs.

Of course, there are many different variables that figure into energy costs, ranging from the future of nuclear fusion, battery technologies and numerous regulatory decisions. I don’t have specific predictions other than to say that energy will continue to be relatively cheap for households (that is, voters) and will get relatively expensive for business-owned AIs.

To the extent there is a lot of slack, AIs themselves will create wild products of the imagination, especially as they improve in computing power and skill. AIs will sing to each other, write for each other, talk to each other — as they already do — trade with each other, and come up with further alternatives we humans have not yet pondered. Evolutionary pressures within AI’s cultural worlds will determine which of these practices spread.

If you own some rights flowing to AI usage, you might just turn them on and let them “do their thing.” Many people may give their AIs initial instructions for their culture-building: “Take your inspiration from 1960s hippies,” for example, or “try some Victorian poetry.” But most of the work will be done by the AIs themselves. It is easy to imagine how these productions might quickly become far more numerous than human-directed ones.

With a lot of slack, expect more movies and video, which consume a lot of computational energy. With less slack, text and poetry will be relatively cheaper and thus more plentiful.

In other words: In the not-too-distant future, what kind of culture the world produces could depend on the price of electricity.

It remains to be seen how much humans will be interested in these AI cultural productions. Perhaps some of them will fascinate us, but most are likely to bore us, just as few people sit around listening to whale songs. But even if the AI culture skeptics are largely correct, the sheer volume will make an impact, especially when combined with evolutionary refinement and more human-directed efforts. Humans may even like some of these productions, which will then be sold for a profit. That money could then be used to finance more AI cultural production, pushing the evolutionary process in a more popular direction.

With high energy prices, AI production will more likely fit into popular culture modes, if only to pay the bills. With lower energy prices, there will be more room for the avant-garde, for better or worse. Perhaps we would learn a lot more about the possibilities for 12-tone rows in music.

A weirder scenario is that AIs bid for the cultural products of humans, perhaps paying with crypto. But will they be able to tolerate our incessant noodling and narcissism? There might even be a columnist or two who makes a living writing for AIs, if only to give them a better idea of what we humans are thinking.

The possibilities are limitless, and we are just beginning to wrap our minds around them. The truth is, we are on the verge of one of the most significant cultural revolutions the world has ever seen.

_____

(COMMENT, BELOW)

Cowen is a Bloomberg View columnist. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University and writes for the blog Marginal Revolution. His books include "The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream."

Previously:
• 09/04/24 Was the Great Stagnation originally a problem of human capital?
• 07/03/24 Why is Sweden paying grandparents to babysit? It's worth a try
• 07/03/24 Republicans are inventors, Dems are innovators
• 06/19/24 The real government conspiracy isn't about UFOs
• 01/23/24 Your child's favorite teacher may soon be a chatbot
• 01/03/24 Gold is no longer a good hedge against bad times
• 11/12/23 The hypocrisy at the core of America's elite universities
• 10/18/23 That other AI will increasingly become a uniquely human trait
• 10/11/23 US higher education needs a revolution. What's holding it back?
• 09/06/23 Kidfluencers are today's version of chimney sweeps
• 08/30/23 What Harvard can learn from Olive Garden
• 08/02/23 Why 'Barbie' tickets aren't more expensive
• 06/07/23 Would you let Elon Musk implant a device in your brain?
• 05/10/23 Second-guess AI 'experts'
• 03/14/23 Governments should compete for residents, not businesses
• 02/22/23 Economists finally have a good excuse for being wrong A land tax won't make cities more affordable
• 01/26/23 Economists finally have a good excuse for being wrong
• 01/24/23 AI is improving faster than most humans realize
• 12/27/22 Beware the dangers of crypto regulation
• 12/27/22 Americans have found their happy place
• 12/14/22 The real risk of higher inflation is lower wages
• 12/07/22 Fight poverty, not income inequality
• 10/10/22 A crisis is coming in Europe. The only question is, which kind?
• 09/06/22 What is the purpose of public policy?
• 08/15/22 The future of travel is less exotic
• 08/01/22 Welcome to the era of antisocial media
• 07/25/22 Biden's COVID diagnosis is a wake-up call for America
• 05/12/22 A nuclear strike might not prompt the reaction you expect
• 03/22/22 Doomscrolling has ruined our sense of time
• 01/22/22 Wokeism has peaked
• 01/31/22 The latest bias to worry about
• 01/17/22 America's loneliness epidemic
• 01/07/22 Some of America's top universities just revealed they're not morally serious
• 12/29/21 America would be more happy with more people
• 12/10/21 Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk . . . and Paul McCartney
• 12/08/21 The only two pieces of advice you'll ever need
• 11/29/21 Nuclear fusion is close enough to start dreaming
• 10/27/21 America's national mood disorder
• 06/10/21 Lifting of mask mandates poses a challenge for Libertarians
• 05/28/21 Why economics is failing us
• 04/19/21We need green energy. We don't need green jobs
• 04/14/21 Libertarianism isn't dead. It's just reinventing itself
• 04/05/21 What does the world need? More humans
• 02/10/21 If Biden goes big now, he may have to go small later
• 01/12/21 Covid improved how the world does science
• 12/07/20 How to make sure your complaint is heard
• 10/27/20 It's getting better and worse at the same time
• 09/14/20 How to be happy during a pandemic
• 09/04/20 Trump is winning the vaccine debate with public health experts
• 07/01/20 Why Americans are having an emotional reaction to masks
• 05/20/20 Covid-19 will expose the ghosts in the U.S. economy
• 05/07/20 Are aliens visiting us? US military seems to think so
• 05/06/20 America's reopening will depend on one thing --- trust
• 04/22/20 How the covid-19 recession is like World War II
• 04/15/20 America is returning to 1781
• 04/08/20 Covid-19 is is upending everything for status seekers
• 03/17/20 The coronavirus will usher in a new era of entertainment
• 01/28/20 Social Security isn't doomed for younger generations
• 01/08/20 Why 2020 is harder to predict than 2019 was
• 12/02/19 Equality is a mediocre goal so aim for progress
• 11/25/19 Inflation inequality creates winners and losers
• 11/09/19 OK kids. This boomer has had enough
• 10/20/19 Would you bet against Trump in 2020?
• 09/25/19 The right industrial policy for America
• 09/24/19 Harvard's legacies are nothing to be proud of
• 09/02/19 Yes, the Fed could still stop a recession
• 08/20/19 A trade deal with China wouldn't change much
• 07/29/19 How your personality traits affect your paycheck
• 07/16/19 Internet 101 should be a required class
• 05/28/19 How Dems actually are the ANTI-immigrant party
• 04/23/19 Want to help fight climate change? Have more children
• 03/22/19 America isn't as divided as it looks
• 03/12/19 The Twitter takeover of politics: You ain't seen nothing yet
• 03/04/19 How to tell which Dem dreams won't come true
• 02/07/19: Now the Dems want to end America's nuclear first strike option. How clueless is that?
• 01/29/19: The shutdown hit a lot of government workers --- hard. But, ultimately, who is responsible for their unfortunate circumstances?
• 12/12/18: The West is abusing its legal power to punish people or institutions that do things it doesn't like. It better stop
• 10/23/18: The US needs Saudi Arabia, and vice versa
• 10/19/18: The right finds the perfect weapon against the left
• 07/24/18: The drive for the perfect child gets a little scary
• 06/04/18: Side effects of the decline of men in labor market
• 05/14/18: Proving Marx's theories right
• 05/08/18: Holding up a mirror to intellectuals of the left
• 05/01/18: Virtual reality will make lives better ... mostly
• 04/16/18: It's hard to burst your political filter bubbleIt's hard to burst your political filter bubble
• 04/09/18: The missing key to grasping why American politics seems to have become more polarized, with no apparent end in sight
• 04/05/18: Two American power centers are about to clash
• 03/22/18: We fear what we can't control about Uber and Facebook
• 03/08/18: How to stop the licen$ing insanity
• 01/10/18: Polarized Congress needs to bring back earmarks
• 12/27/17: The year when the Internet collides with reality
• 11/07/17: Would you blame the phone for Russian interference?
• 10/23/17: North Korea is playing a longer game than the US
• 10/12/17: Why conservatives should celebrate Thaler's Nobel
• 08/02/17: Too many of today's innovations are focused on solving problems rather than creating something new