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AI

Futurist Predicts AI-Powered 'Digital Superpowers' by 2030 (bigthink.com) 35

Posted by EditorDavid from the brain-computer-interface dept.
Unanimous AI's founder Louis Rosenberg predicts a "wave" of new superhuman abilities is coming soon that we experience profoundly "as self-embodied skills that we carry around with us throughout our lives"...

"[B]y 2030, a majority of us will live our lives with context-aware AI agents bringing digital superpowers into our daily experiences." They will be unleashed by context-aware AI agents that are loaded into body-worn devices that see what we see, hear what we hear, experience what we experience, and provide us with enhanced abilities to perceive and interpret our world... The majority of these superpowers will be delivered through AI-powered glasses with cameras and microphones that act as their eyes and ears, but there will be other form factors for people who just don't like eyewear... [For example, earbuds with built in cameras] We will whisper to these intelligent devices, and they will whisper back, giving us recommendations, guidance, spatial reminders, directional cues, haptic nudges, and other verbal and perceptual content that will coach us through our days like an omniscient alter ego... When you spot that store across the street, you simply whisper to yourself, "I wonder when it opens?" and a voice will instantly ring back into your ears, "10:30 a.m...."

By 2030, we will not need to whisper to the AI agents traveling with us through our lives. Instead, you will be able to simply mouth the words, and the AI will know what you are saying by reading your lips and detecting activation signals from your muscles. I am confident that "mouthing" will be deployed because it's more private, more resilient to noisy spaces, and most importantly, it will feel more personal, internal, and self-embodied. By 2035, you may not even need to mouth the words. That's because the AI will learn to interpret the signals in our muscles with such subtlety and precision — we will simply need to think about mouthing the words to convey our intent... When you grab a box of cereal in a store and are curious about the carbs, or wonder whether it's cheaper at Walmart, the answers will just ring in your ears or appear visually. It will even give you superhuman abilities to assess the emotions on other people's faces, predict their moods, goals, or intentions, coaching you during real-time conversations to make you more compelling, appealing, or persuasive...

I don't make these claims lightly. I have been focused on technologies that augment our reality and expand human abilities for over 30 years and I can say without question that the mobile computing market is about to run in this direction in a very big way.
Instead of Augmented Reality, how about Augmented Mentality? The article notes Meta has already added context-aware AI to its Ray-Ban glasses and suggests that within five years Meta might try "selling us superpowers we can't resist". And Google's new AI-powered operating system Android XR hopes to augment our world with seamless context-aware content. But think about where this is going. "[E]ach of us could find ourselves in a new reality where technologies controlled by third parties can selectively alter what we see and hear, while AI-powered voices whisper in our ears with targeted advice and guidance."

And yet " by 2030 the superpowers that these devices give us won't feel optional. After all, not having them could put us at a social and cognitive disadvantage."

Thanks to Slashdot reader ZipNada for sharing the news.

Futurist Predicts AI-Powered 'Digital Superpowers' by 2030 More | Reply

Futurist Predicts AI-Powered 'Digital Superpowers' by 2030

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    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. And that will remain the state of things for a long time, because LLMs will not be AGI and cannot be AGI. The mathematics used does not allow it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 2TecTom ( 311314 )

      our future is to be owned by those who own the AIs and everything else, after all ownership is control

      you didn't really think this was a democracy, did you?

    • you simply whisper to yourself, "I wonder when it opens?" and the ai will tell you...

      Or you could look at the store where they almost always display opening hours prominently or take a few seconds to look at your phone. Is cutting down a few seconds worth all of this investment from society and the bother of buying, registering and wearing one of these Ai devices? For me that's a hard no.

      Also if I have firends/employees who use AI to coach them to be more compelling and persusive while they interact with m

  • Since this AI that can read humans so perfectly has to be trained, that means the training data has to have plenty of footage human faces, plus it will need t actual thoughts and emotions of those humans. I'm not going to provide that data, so where's it coming from?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      They will steal anything they can get their hands on to get that training data. Again.

  • Gonna shoot people on social media with my AI laser eyes, pewpew!

  • Not by 2030, no way. (Score:3)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Sunday January 12, 2025 @01:39AM (#65082237)

    2045, maybe. And that too a big IF.

    People don't want it, it's not even worth the cognitive load to remember to wear it. Plus, and this is sad .. they may face social rejection.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      No. It is completely unpredictable, because LLMs cannot do it and no other known AI approach can do it. May be 20 years (the bare minimum for something fundamental new, no, LLMs are not new), may be 100 years, maybe "never". Nobody honest and smart can make a prediction here. I guess this "futurist" (a.k.a. "hallucinator") lacks both these qualities.

    • It depends on the superpowers they are thinking about. Nowadays some people seem to regard the ability to do basic mental arithmetic, read maps, recall basic geography and general knowedlge etc. as superhuman powers and current AI systems could easily provide a verbal interface to do all of those giving you all the superpowers of the generation X-men (and women).
  • Just an AI systems owner. Buy this machine from me, in future everyone will need such. This is not a story or news, just an advertisement.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed.

    • Hey there, I'm some random guy, let me invent some predictions for you: Space elevators, monorails, electricity too cheap to meter, AI-power quantum blockchain thingies, and dogs and cats living together.

      Do I get my front-page story too?

  • By 2036 the enshitification will have set in. You will be bombarded by all sorts of information you didn't want in the first place, not to mention ads, so many ads.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      It already has. Remember that a lot of the training data is already enshittified and that will only get worse. Sure, at this time there are no "additional" ads on top, but too many results are not much better it their connection to the actual truth.

  • Once we learn to not only read signals from human brains but to also write neural signals, we will become a new species. This is far in the future, if we ever achieve it, but consider: We will write info directly to the visual cortex, and be looking to augment rather than replace reality. One possible choice will be to present a four-dimensional image to the visual cortex as if we had three eyes instead of two. Once you get the hang of it you can put lots of info on real objects at angles that 3-d us can't
    • Damn. Why did I bother to post? While I was writing it, there were five more posts: every one was a sour, cynical rejection of any possibly positive aspect to this story. Folks like that are why slashdot is a has-been. Assholes with nothing to say dragging down the discussions because of course their (lack of) opinion is so important. Idiots.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Au contraire. Bright-eyed nil wits like you are the problem and the reason it has gotten hard to have a sane exchange here.

        • Another example of what I was complaining about: All you did was insult me. No attempt at a "sane exchange" addressing my original post, just a personal attack with no salient points. No wonder I regularly mod you down for what you say, not because I personally dislike you. Still won't block you (am loath to do that to anyone), but also still think your posts are often shrill "I'm so important, my judgement is so important!!" empty statements.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ukoda ( 537183 )
        The reason is so many great potentials of technology have been simply converted into a marketing tools controlled by a tiny handful of companies. Your ideals reflect an era when individuals had control over their own life. A time before we used the Internet to handed off control of information, and now thinking, to someone else.

        What you talk about would be great if you could buy it in the knowledge it had been created by teams with no profit motivation and agenda to push and then use it without it prov

    • Once you can kill the sensory inputs of a person and feed him whatever hallucination your degenerative "AI" has come up with, it is game over for that person, it is, to use a known trope, the first Matrix, and not anything "superhuman".

      If you believe that Elona's chip will feed you an enhanced version of the world and not a bunch of sensory lies that make you a slave of Shpace Yikes, you're deluded.

  • We are trending back to the '70s it seems. What's next, bell bottom jeans and corduroy slacks?

    • ... I haven't heard in a long time

      Really? A few years ago, online shops would ensure your email received weekly news from The Futurist, that you didn't ask for. Today's prediction is a sex dream, that AR will enable him to tell you what to know and what to do.

    • I prefer the old traditional name for them: soothsayer, though for some reason using it tends to really annoy them.

  • yeah but (Score:2)

    by v1 ( 525388 )

    where's my hoverboard?

    The percentage of people that have correctly predicted the future is so low that I think it actually defies statistics for how BAD it tends to be.

    It's like looking at nostrodomos and oh my god look he predicted it! while ignoring the other 20,000 predictions he made that never happened.

  • I carry around an iPhone. That's enough AI for me.

    Do I want to wear and have to plug in all of the extra AI gizmos that he suggests? No. And do I wish to share all of my personal thoughts and words and actions with an AI that is going to send those back to the mothership/database somewhere. Like hell, no. And can I trust that AI? Who is vetting it's algorithm? I mean it wouldn't be steering me wrong; influencing my purchasing decisions, my partner preferences, my viewing habits, my voting choices.

  • Futurist Predicts AI-Powered 'Digital Superpowers' by 2030

    Even a short review of what 'futurists' have predicted over the last century or should be enough for anbody to conclude that these people are completely full of shit and when they get it right it's usually by nothing but dumb luck. There is little real difference between this guy and Nostradamus.

  • What else is new? These people have no skills except to trigger hallucination in not very smart people. This is just another example.

  • "Unanimous AI's founder ..." another marketer makes the case for spending more. But hey, if gimmicks for counting one's steps is selling then I guess anything can be sold with the right spin attached.

  • In the words of Marvin, the paranoid android"

    "Sounds dreadful"

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