AI Infiltrating Your Brain, House & Roads

Welcome to the “No Longer A Nincompoop with Nofil” newsletter.

Here’s the tea 🍵

• AI Generated Worlds 🌍️ 

• Neuralink’s Progress 🧠 

• Waymo’s Success is a Sign 🚗

• A New Robot Unveiled 🤖 

I have to say this again.

The future we’re heading towards is completely simulated.

Millions will live in simulated realities. They will, for hours on end, live in an imaginary world, similar to the dreamers in Inception.

I truly believe this.

Let me explain.

World Simulations are Coming

Google has released a new research paper showcasing an AI model that can “dream” game worlds.

See this clip of the game DOOM?

It’s not really DOOM.

This is an AI that is creating the game world in real time. Each frame is being generated, rather than being rendered from an underlying 3D structure.

There is no game engine telling it how to build the structures or what they should look like.

The AI saw DOOM, and then it recreated it.

You might think that this isn’t that impressive considering it’s just a recreation.

The really impressive thing here is the techniques they used to keep the generations coherent across longer time spans.

This is a text to world simulator.

The only bottleneck here is how we can serve this simulation.

This won’t be a bottleneck for long.

Mind you, this is running on a single AI chip.

Check out more fake DOOM clips and read the research paper here.

The Human x AI Connection

Midjourney is now openly working on hardware. In case you don’t know, Midjourney is the best AI image generation model on the planet.

Without taking a cent of venture capital money, they’re generating over $200 Million in revenue with only 40 employees. VCs are practically begging them to take their money.

It will be interesting to see what they come up with, and no, it is not a wearable… Thank god.

Now, on to the main part.

Elon Musk’s Neuralink is getting better.

Neuralink’s second participant has been using the link to play Counter Strike, as well as use a 3D design software.

This person is doing this with their brain, simply by thinking.

Is this not absolutely bonkers?

I mean, I don’t have the words to describe how amazing and exciting this is.

What’s even crazier is understanding that these softwares, this game and this design tool, aren’t designed to be used this way.

Point being, once native apps are designed to take brain signals as input, the usability is going to be 100X.

Future applications aren’t going to be built with mouse and keyboard in mind.

They will be built for the brain.

And never forget, this is the worst this will ever be. I’ve played with worse Counter Strike players before (stig 😉).

Do you see the connection?

Imagine a world where you can think of a world you’d like to explore, and the Neuralink can translate those thoughts into machine readable format, pass this to an AI world simulator, and generate entire worlds from your imagination.

This is the kind of future that is being built right now.

It sounds absolutely ridiculous, like something straight out of Blade Runner.

I’ve previously written about virtual worlds and how I can see them becoming a massive addiction for people in the future.

Last April, I wrote about a research paper from Stanford and Google researchers where they created a simulated game world full of AI powered NPCs.

The findings of the paper showed that AI NPCs were more than capable of acting human and creating a world that is completely unique.

For example.

Combine these AI NPCs with simulated worlds and Neuralink, and, I’ll be playing games in my mind during meetings.

You won’t even need a controller to play a game anymore.

Plug and play, with your brain.

Side Note

If you’re wondering, won’t people get bored of playing with AIs? Doesn’t the fun come from playing with other humans?

Don’t worry, humans can’t tell the difference between an AI and a human anyway.

A new research paper tested the ability of AIs and humans to distinguish the two from a conversation.

The funny part was that both humans and AIs judged the best GPT-4 model to be human, more often than actual humans.

And, if you’re wondering, yes, AI can learn to play our games too.

This is a clip of someone playing Counter Strike against two AI bots. The bots have been trained to move just like humans.

Like humans, the bots synchronise their movements so that they both attack the human player at the same time.

The bots also use cover just like human players.

You can read the research paper here, and if you can replicate it, you can probably make a lot of money selling these bots (not that you should).

Taking over the Roads too???

AI isn’t only taking over software either.

Do you know how many trips Google’s robotaxis are doing in SF?

100,000… A week.

Gradually, then suddenly.

According to the data, it’s also much safer than humans.

We’re going to eventually need to have a conversation about the impact this is going to have on Taxi, Uber and transport in general.

Millions around the world are employed to do these jobs.

You know what makes this crazier?

What happens when Tesla’s can be used as robotaxis?

Google achieved these numbers with a tiny fleet of 700 cars.

Tesla has over 5,000,000 cars around the road.

People will be renting out their cars as taxis the way they rent out properties on Airbnb. If they're allowed to, of course.

This is the future we’re heading towards.

Seems like people have even been using them as… Offices???

Yes, Your Home too

You might not believe it now, but, one day, you’ll have one in your home too.

What am I referring to?

A robot, of course.

Believe it or not, that’s not a human in a suit (apparently).

Here it is unloading a dishwasher. The cable is to prevent falling.

Built by 1X, NEO is 5’5, weighs 30kg and has a carry capacity of 20kg. It can walk at 1.12 m/s and run at 3.35 m/s.

Its hands have 20 degrees of freedom and its grip strength can allow it to deadlift 70kg. It has a run time of 2-4 hours.

There are at least 10 other companies building robots like this, many from China.

I would imagine many of the immediate usecases would be in places like aged care homes, or, simply helping elderly people live independently at home.

Consider a country like Japan.

With an ageing population, it is reported that 37,000 people passed away alone in their homes during the first half of this year. Almost 4,000 were discovered over a month after they had passed away.

Robots can help with this.

Our world is going to be so different once these robots start selling en masse.

Pair the robots with AI and you’ve got I, Robot.

Oh, and don’t worry too much about the lack of “face”.

For better or worse, among many others, Disney’s already working on this.

This robot is designed to imitate human movements, specifically breathing, blinking and subtle head movements.

The head bob at the end is killing me.

When these robots become perfect imitations of human beings, and they will, don’t be surprised when birth rates plummet.

I mean, people are becoming romantically attached to chat bots, lord knows what’ll happen when physical intimacy is involved.

I hope you enjoyed reading this newsletter as much as I liked writing it.

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As always, Thanks for reading ❤️

^{Written by a human named Nofil}