AI, Humanity, and the Future: Career Reflections and Societal Shifts in an Automated World

Current Tech Challenges and Blog Improvements

I'm currently dealing with some frustrations in maintaining and updating my blog, particularly with Vercel deployments. The platform isn't reliably picking up new articles in the post index, forcing me to sort by modified dates of Markdown files, which is unreliable due to deployment timestamps. This has stalled my posting schedule, impacting SEO rankings and growth.

Potential Solutions

• Hardcode Post Index: Instead of dynamic loading, embed a hardcoded post index object in the React code to ensure changes are detected during builds.
• Direct Linking: Test if direct links to articles work, potentially bypassing index issues.
• Social Sharing Enhancements: Improve metadata previews for social shares, such as forcing a black background on the company logo to better match the green theme.
• Backend Addition: Consider adding a backend for better management, including a social dashboard.
• AWS Migration: Explore self-hosting with AWS S3 and CloudFront for static assets, as costs are low until scaling, especially for media like images and potential videos (though videos may be embedded from social platforms for SEO considerations).

These issues have halted progress after a period of steady growth, but I've balanced this with client work. The goal is to resume regular posting to boost visibility.

Transitioning from Employee to Creator

For years, I've focused on client projects, trading hours for dollars without equity or ownership. Now, it's time to build my own assets, starting with this blog as a repository of ideas.

Identifying Core Value

• Skills in Building: While I have expertise in development, AI is rapidly advancing, potentially reducing the long-term uniqueness of these skills.
• Experience and Wisdom: My real value lies in accumulated knowledge from hands-on experiences, allowing me to provide insightful stories and perspectives.
• Humanity: In an AI-dominated world, proof of humanity—novelty, creativity, and unique perspectives—will be paramount.

The Role of Humanity in an AI-Driven Future

As AI improves at building and automating tasks, human value shifts to irreplaceable traits like experience, wisdom, and innate humanity.

Squandered Potential

• Most people underutilize their potential for novelty due to societal pressures toward conformity and consumption.
• Education and social norms train us to be predictable and fungible, like commodities.

AI Simulation of Humanity

• Using techniques like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), we can train models on character archetypes, universes, or mythological figures to generate perspectives.
• Authors invoke characters to write stories; similarly, AI can simulate personalities, but only if trained with human feedback on what feels authentic.
• Thought experiment: Train models on historical data up to a point (e.g., pre-Einstein physics or pre-jazz music) and see if they innovate like humans.

Optimistic Outlook

• Society may shift to celebrate novelty and individuality, turning humanity into a "species of misfits" harnessing AI for mundane tasks.
• This could lead to abundance, population growth, and cosmic exploration, as visionaries like Elon Musk emphasize.
• Existential crisis flips: From feeling too different to not different enough.
• Human purpose: Create new knowledge, intuit weird solutions, and maintain optimism amid transitions.

Despite sleep deprivation and distractions, these ideas highlight an exciting era, urging awareness to avoid sleepwalking through changes.

How This Content Might Be Useful to Others

• Tech Developers and Bloggers: Insights into troubleshooting Vercel deployment issues, alternatives like AWS for static hosting, and SEO considerations for media embeds can help others optimize their personal sites.
• Career Changers: Those transitioning from traditional jobs to independent creation can draw motivation from the emphasis on building personal assets and identifying unique value beyond replaceable skills.
• AI Enthusiasts and Philosophers: The discussion on AI's impact on human purpose, the value of novelty, and thought experiments on simulating humanity offers fresh perspectives for debates on future societal shifts.
• Content Creators: Ideas on training AI models for storytelling universes provide inspiration for world-building in writing, gaming, or media production.
• General Readers Seeking Optimism: The optimistic spin on abundance and cosmic exploration amid AI disruptions can provide hope and strategic thinking for navigating technological changes.

Validating Perspectives as an Authoritative Voice

As a seasoned developer with years of experience in building applications, from music production tools to location-based AR experiences, I bring practical insights into tech challenges like deployments and scaling media storage. My background includes hands-on work in robotics, IoT, and megalithic architecture concepts tied to sustainable, long-lasting structures—contrasting modern fast-build economies. In the AI community, my reflections align with leading thinkers: Elon Musk's focus on space exploration echoes my views on post-AI abundance driving cosmic expansion. Concepts like proof of humanity and RAG for character simulation draw from real advancements in models like ChatGPT, where I've observed AI's strengths and limitations firsthand. My thought experiments on innovation tests (e.g., relativity or jazz) mirror discussions in AI research from experts like those at OpenAI, positioning me as a bridge between technical execution and philosophical implications. This authority stems from direct experience, not theory, making these ideas grounded and actionable for the tech and futurist communities.

Cleaned-Up Transcript

I got a few things potentially I want to talk about. I'm not sure which one will end up being the rabbit hole. So I'm just going to list off a few things. First, probably related to the Drum Node application, how now all different kinds of things I could talk about. I could talk about some of the things that I wanted to do related to the Drum Node application with music production. Particularly, what was it? I already forgot that one, so it probably won't be it. Another is megalithic architecture, which is actually, when I talk about location-based experiences, where I've got the Revenant Hollow, the cemetery management, and then the augmented reality sports complex. Well, that actually ends up tying in with an initiative for, as that continues to scale, there is an even farther next level, which is basically megalithic architecture. I would like to see a return to that anyways. I think that it's kind of a shame that we're not building structures that are going to be here for thousands of years. And I get why, because of the nature of technology, the nature of our economy, our whole civilization is one of like mass-producing things, building them fast and unplanned for the most part. So there's that, and then there's some struggles that I've been having with the deployment, the Vercel deployments. I'm really tempted to launch my own AWS infrastructure, especially since it'll just be an S3 bucket and a CloudFront distribution, and these don't really incur charges until you scale. So it's unlikely to ever be a massive storage requirement, and that actually could tie in with some things that I've been trying to address in terms of planning and design because there will be an increase in storage usage as I add more media, as I add more images, like image uploads, like images in posts in particular. And as I add video, I'm on the fence about whether or not I even need video because most of the video is probably going to be, rather than actually recording videos and hosting them myself, they'll probably be posted on social and linked to. That's probably ideal anyways. I don't know, from an SEO standpoint, there's a video embed count in terms of SEO as highly as if the source, the origin of the video, is coming from your domain. I don't know if it matters or not. Something to look into. Then, like, hands-on, more hands-on initiatives, more physical things, like mechanic work, robotics, Internet of Things. I don't know. I'm not sure. I think, yeah, I guess the most important thing for me to talk about right now is frustrations that I'm having with my blog and with Vercel. I don't know what is going on, but when I post new articles, Vercel just does not pick it up in the post index. So I keep having to sort my blog post index by the modified date of the Markdown files, which is terrible. It's unreliable. And if I'm not mistaken, what it's essentially doing is arranging them in alphabetical order because the modified dates on the files end up being the same when it deploys to the Vercel environment. It has no concept of that. So that sucks. That really sucks. Maybe what I can do is, instead of having a post index JSON, I could have, on the post index page, I could just have a hardcoded post index object in the React code. I wonder if it would pick up the changes then because it's, you know, one thing that I haven't tested, which is kind of silly, is, what? So, is it picking up the tags? No, most importantly is going to be, can I link directly to these articles? And if so, maybe it would make more sense just to hardcode the post index JSON. That's what I'm going to try next. I need to hurry up and get my blog posting again, because I haven't posted anything in like a week, and my rankings are really suffering for it. And I need to get social going. I need to get more. What I'm holding back on there, because I do have social share buttons, what I'm holding back on there is I don't like the way the background on my company logo looks on the, you know, posts have metadata that like when you post on social, there's metadata that you can set for the image that shows up kind of in the preview thumbnail. So I need to get that improved because it's got a white background, and it looks terrible with the green. So I would like to force it to have a black background, at least behind the icon. But yeah, I got to fix my social link images, and then I'll start posting more on social. But yeah, still, I got to get more out there more often, more regularly. So I got to hurry up and fix this. This is garbage. This is a disaster. And then another option is real tempting to go ahead and throw up the backend because I really need a social dashboard too. Yeah, just need to hurry up. I stayed up really, really late last night. There's not really much to say right now other than, and I'm also really, really distracted by the fact that my blog was showing steady growth, and now it's really stagnating because I'm not posting anything, and I had all these ideas for improvements, and yeah, I'm at a standstill until I can fix those stupid posts. To be fair, though, I did get a lot of client work done yesterday, but yeah, I've really got to keep moving forward with my own stuff. The thing is, I've spent all these years, maybe this should have been the meat of the topic. I've spent all these years working on other people's stuff, you know, like I spent all these years working on projects where I was pretty much just selling my hours for dollars. And I didn't own anything. I've been just an employee, and money is my only compensation, no equity, you know, so it's time to build my own stuff. And even if that's just in the beginning, just a blog full of ideas, my. So I've also been trying to identify what my strengths are, what my value is, what my greatest values are, what I'm most valuable for as a resource, and it comes down to pretty much my, I mean, obviously I've got skills, the skills of building things. But you got to kind of set that aside these days because AI is getting better and better at, while it's getting better at helping you build things, it's simultaneously getting better at replacing the need for you, or eliminating the need for you, replacing you. So when it comes to building things, it's like, oh, that's not necessarily a long-term value that I have as a resource. So then I kind of ask myself, what else? And one obvious is my experience, my knowledge, wisdom, experience. And even my knowledge and wisdom is important that how much of it is through wisdom, it's through experience. So my experience has value. And then my humanity has value. So I have, I know that I have a lot of experience, and I have a lot of knowledge and wisdom that is directly tied to those experiences. So I can tell stories here about things that I've done to give me insight into things that you might read about. So that's really valuable. And then also my humanity. I like to think that I'm, you know, less robotic than your average human in some ways. I mean, I am like a total machine in some ways, but you know, hopefully I've got a sufficient degree of humanity, and that the information that I'm hearing from different experts and influencers in technology is that proof of humanity is going to be extremely valuable. To be able to convince people that you're human, I think that, and this is going to seem scary and cynical and almost nihilistic, but everything in me is like, my, oh man. Yeah, I only got like two hours of sleep last night, but okay, I got some good things cooking, and I'm going to try to like divine them out of the ether. I believe that every human being has the potential to be a novel, interesting, unique person who can add perspective to humanity. Now, I'm afraid that most of us squander that. We don't value it, or we don't have faith in it. We've been trained to believe, we've been trained to be cynical. We've been trained to be. Our whole education system and our society, the way we kind of enforce social comparison and taboos, and we just kind of guide people along into being mechanical and machine-like, into being like fungible, for lack of a better term. Actually, that's a pretty appropriate term. We are commodities. We're merely consumers. And so it's very, it's actually relatively few of us pushing back. It's a lot, it ends up being a lot of people, but there simply are a lot of people. What I'm saying here is that like, okay, I need to break down a few caveats here. I believe that everyone has that potential. I believe that it is a fundamental part of being human, that you have the ability to be novel. I believe that most people squander most of that. Our society does not consider it to be a superpower, really. And I also believe that when we're trying to simulate humanity through artificial intelligence, when we're trying to automate what would be the human perspective, what would be the human influence, what would be the human, whatever we were going to get from humans, what can we automate kind of thing? I think we're going to find that so many people squander so much of that humanity that most of us will give less interesting contributions than AI. I actually had a thought experiment one time. Man, I wish that I'd had this blog technologically speaking years ago, because I know that I've recorded so much of this stuff, and it's just gone. Who knows where? It's probably saved somewhere, but I don't know where, probably on BandLab or maybe some old voice memos or whatever. But I was thinking about as AI was starting to blow up in the mainstream, pretty much after ChatGPT. I started thinking about how you could use this writing. And so I started thinking about how if you could, you know, a lot of times what authors will do is they'll come up with recurring characters, and then they will get an intuition, get a sense of what that character's perspective is, and they'll write stories from that character's perspective, right? So they kind of invoke that character and say, like, what would this person do? What would that person do? And so it's almost like the author is not the one writing it. The author becomes another personality, and that's the personality that writes it, you know, like if you're reading Anne Rice, you may not be reading Anne Rice. You may be, it may be more accurate that you're reading Lestat. And Anne Rice has so well developed the character of Lestat that she could invoke the personality of Lestat almost like call him over for a cup of coffee. And that's not all, but we, okay, not to get off the rails here, trying to make a lewd vampire joke. Yeah, it's almost like invite him over and interview him. Or I guess the more appropriate example now, I'm telling you, I got two hours of sleep. My cognitive performance is shit. I'm going to try to get some exercise and drink some creatine and see if I can get my mind back in order. I may just need to take a nap today. But man, I got so much done last night. Right. So you get what I'm saying. The author becomes the character, and the character writes the book. So you can see where I'm going with this. If I could train models, right? So like, and you could probably do a lot of this with retrieval-augmented generation. So if I could, if I could write enough rules, prompts, and index enough just right data, vector space, and just kind of come up with the recipe for like, who is this personality? Who is that personality? Then what I can do is I help create the universe that the characters live in. Like I build the sandbox, and then I give these different. God, I wish I could remember what all I said previously, but I think I'm going to be able to recall the core of it. So you train all these different models, and each one of them has, and it doesn't even have to be like the character is writing from a character's perspective is just a simple example. Like you might actually find that it's more like Tolkien, where you have all these essentially gods and angels and demons and devils, and you take it all the way down to like the mythological creation level, and have these models in your universe that are like, or you could take Greek gods and goddesses. You know, you could take all these polytheistic religions. And wow, okay, we're getting into some pretty deep territory now. But yeah, let's just stick with the character example. So like, yeah, because the whole thesis that I'm tying this into is how many people have a humanity that is well developed enough to outrace the capabilities of the AI. And I think that it's actually going to be like, I think it's going to be by default not that difficult to outrace most people. And when you think of all the different ways that you can simulate humanity, it actually seems like we could outrace a lot of people. And it may just end up being the ultra weirdos who are able to divine insane creativity and inspiration out of the ether, you know, that are able to outrace AI, because I can already imagine universes that I would build. Like I have three distinct, well-outlined universes that I'm just eager to explore and develop and tell stories in. And that's just what naturally came about from years of imagining what kind of worlds I would build and what kind of stories I would tell if I did this full time. Would it ever end the universes, or would it turn out that like three universes is about right, and I just have infinite room for storytelling and character development because these universes are so different that three is like a magic number, sort of. Or will I find that that number is more like five, or is it 100? Or is it never-ending? Do I just keep building universes? Or do I just keep going deeper into a limited number of universes? But the idea here is that like, I would actually train, like in building the universes, just like authors build these personalities and they can go back and imagine what that character's point of view would be. I can work to train characters and have stories generated from those characters that are more. Okay, yeah, I haven't tied this in together. So here's where it is. Here's the most important part. Okay, the whole point of all this is that if I'm just simply trying to simulate a consumer, if that's all you are is a consumer, if you don't really produce anything other than data related to your experience as a consumer, then I feel like that I could generate, I could easily automate the generation of that level of novelty. And so, just like the author develops the character that they can invoke to help write the story, I can build universes that have characters that I've trained. Like, I would train, it's basically reinforcement learning from human feedback. I would be saying like, yes, he would do this. No, he wouldn't do that. Yes, he would say this. No, he wouldn't say that. And then I can tell you, like, I know this person. Like, I can, through faith and imagination, I can pretend like this person is real so convincingly that I can tell you with a high degree of confidence what they would and wouldn't say, what they would and wouldn't do. And in so doing, I can help you train a model that can generate perspective. And I guess what I'm saying here is I'm confident that my characters could be more interesting than a lot of the people that I've met. And like, I'm, I think I'm being generous there. I think I'm holding back because it sounds like a cynical, shitty thing to say, or it also sounds like hubris that I would be cocky enough to say. But here's the thing: how much of our time do we spend, or how often do we meet someone and without even knowing it, we screen them for whether or not they're interesting enough to keep talking to? And how many of them just don't come on your radar because they're not even interesting enough to get your attention? And I think we're going to be devastatingly shocked. But here's the good news. The good news is, well, let's talk about how bad this could get briefly. As AI is automating so many jobs away, and then there's going to be another wave of robotics that comes many years down the road when we're able to ramp up the production of robots, because that's going to be a huge constraining factor is we can't build robots fast enough, so we're going to need people in manual labor for a long time. But not permanently. The robots will, robot production will reach scale eventually. And so, and we'll already have lost our whole middle class, which is mostly cognitive work, it's mostly knowledge work. That's real easy to automate away. And so this takes our society to a really dark place where what does a human purpose? How do we keep people from being starving and getting violent? Unrest, you know, and then how do we deal with people without being like dystopian, like tyrannical Orwellian nightmare. So once we figure out, that is not within the scope of this topic to drill down into that. So let's just say, let's just assume that we're headed for that period. We go through that period, and we get past it. Whatever's on the other side. Like, the good news is once we sort out how we're going to take care of people and how people are going to take care of themselves, what their, once we figure out what the lifeline is going to be, once we figure out, once we've moved into like more of a question of meaning and purpose phase in humanity. So we have to transition from, and I've said this before, I always say we're reaching a point in the history of humanity where we're transitioning from the existential crisis being, I'm novel, I'm different, and how do I fit into the machine of society? Because everybody else just seems to be so standard and so predictable and integrated so well. So the existential crisis is often one of creativity and novelty and being isolated from the group because you say weird things or you may question norms. The existential crisis is going to shift and pretty much flip, where if you're not novel, if you're not interesting, if you're not able to like create new knowledge and come up with the weird ideas, then there's not going to be much of a purpose for you. So the existential crisis becomes, I am, I'm not different enough. I'm not unique enough. I'm not novel enough. And that becomes scary because the value of humans is going to be our ability to create new knowledge, to intuit weird solutions. Like one explanation that I heard, one scenario that I heard described is like, if you were one test of whether we're approaching AGI would be if you were to give an AI all of the science data throughout human history up until Einstein, but cut off right before Einstein. Can it come up with relativity? And that's one test. Another example that I heard a long time ago was like, if you give it all of the history of music up until jazz, does it ever create jazz? You know, or is that like just a distinctly human thing, the ability to create new knowledge, the ability to come up, to put different things together in just the right way that like we level up our perspective on physics and we just have this style of music that you that a machine can't possibly imagine on its own. So I feel like I didn't quite make the point. Oh, yeah, I was talking about like the optimistic spin on all this. As our society shifts and embraces novelty, embraces creativity, and that becomes like we could see a world where every single human rather than being like cut from a cloth, like a brick in the wall, like a good American consumer being normal just like you. Once our society evolves in such a way where we celebrate novelty and individuality as a standard human. I know there's a bit of irony here that being different is what we all have in common. It's not, that idea is not so weird for some of us. Some of us, anyone who's ever been an outcast that found a community of outcasts, it's actually a very familiar concept. So what if that is mainstream humanity is just one great big species of misfits, and we are all harnessing artificial intelligence agents to do what was historically a human job. And it really makes sense why people who are so deep into AI are people like Elon are just obsessed with going to space and exploring the cosmos. It's like, we're going to explode, and okay, I'm not talking about nuclear holocaust doomsday, which is a possibility we need to be concerned that we're going to explode. But what I'm talking about is in a figurative sense, we're going to explode. Like, if we play our cards right and we make wise choices and we're tough and we overcome some really dark and hard times that may be ahead of us, they're almost certainly ahead of us. Once we hit that groove of alignment, and we figure out our purpose, like, we're going to explode in terms of like prosperity. There's going to be so much abundance. There's going to be so many possibilities that we're just going to have to go out into the cosmos. And we're going to have to, because our, there's going to be so much optimism that we are going to end up having population spikes, and we are going to end up having technological velocity advances that become exponential, you know? So it's a real exciting time. Again, we've got to be realistic here. There's a lot of people who are sleepwalking through all this, and I'm really concerned for those people because you can't explain it to them. If you're not looking, you won't see it. Ironically, it's biblical, you know? If you're not seeking, you won't find it. But it is happening right now. And I choose to, at the end of the day, focus on the optimistic perspective. Okay, I did end up pulling something meaningful out of all that. There it is.