Our coming AI superpowers
3 sci-fi dreams are about to become reality.
In the space of a few months, everyone on Earth (with an internet connection) can now create and manipulate photo-realistic images and ‘write’ exam-grade essays in seconds. This radical democratisation of creative skill will change how we work and society in countless ways. It deserves all the attention it is attracting.
But we are living in a bigger sci-fi movie. As well as art and text, we are also about to get a whole series of superpowers that writers and directors have long-dreamed of: perfect memory, real-time translation, and, most incredibly, telepathy.
That’s not to say these are fully functioning, or widely available right now. But they are here – today! – in a recognisable form. And given the pace of innovation, we can predict where they are headed.
Humans are about to get a major upgrade. What skills and behaviours are about to become irrelevant? And what new possibilities will these unlock?
As Stuart Brand said, “we are as gods and might as well get good at it.”
Perfect memory: Rewind.ai
💥 Future Now // Rewind’s founding story is almost as curious as its ambition. In his 20s, serial entrepreneur Dan Siroker lost his hearing. In his own words, “[using] a hearing aid changed my life. To lose a sense and gain it back again felt like gaining a superpower. Ever since that moment, I’ve been on a hunt for ways technology can augment human capabilities and give us superpowers.”
His new venture, Rewind AI, records everything you see, say, or hear on your computer and makes it searchable. For privacy reasons, it stores all the data locally, and compresses user data up to 3,750x to reduce the volume of storage required. The service uses GPT-4 to enable users to search their lives with natural language.
🔮 Future Normal // Today, Rewind is unashamedly targeted at rich knowledge workers – the service doesn’t even run on anything other than the latest Apple computers! However we now have the technology to make this work – and GPT-4 makes it work well.
What would a future normal where we all have perfect memory look like? The obvious impact is that it will increase people’s productivity, by allowing them to ‘outsource’ their memory. Note taking may become as obsolete as map reading.
What new social norms will this create? Smartphones have become accepted (if not always fully welcomed) appendages, because we crave the superpowers they grant us. Smart glasses never made that leap forward – their wearers mocked as ‘Glassholes’. In the future, will the benefits of perfect memory mean that people accept ubiquitous recording of their daily lives?
Less obviously, could this help support ageing populations? It’s not a stretch to imagine Rewind helping elderly people alleviate issues with their failing memories, and enable ageing populations to remain active members of society for longer.
However, it’s also important to question what Rewind and similar services could do to inequality. What if they act like professional performance-enhancing drugs for those who can afford them? Or what if they enable elderly white collar populations to remain employed for longer, while older blue collar workers are forced into early retirement?
No language barriers: Byrdhouse
💥 Future Now // Byrdhouse’s founding story is not dissimilar to Rewind’s. Snow (Xue) Huo was ostracised at school for her less-than-perfect English. Now, she’s the co-founder and CEO of Byrdhouse, a videoconferencing app which provides AI-powered, real-time translation for 70+ languages during calls, from Mandarin to Brazilian Portuguese and many more. Aimed at remote global teams, the platform can be used out of the box, or customized for enterprise clients with industry- or company-specific terminology. And Byrdhouse is not the only one in this space. Google is also working on its Universal Translator, while Meta has released its Massively Multilingual Speech AI research models.
🔮 Future Normal // Just like Douglas Adams (with his mythical Babel fish), I’ve long been obsessed with real-time translation. Because despite the so-called globalisation of our digital lives, how much of your time online is spent reading or watching foreign language content? How often do you directly interact with individuals who aren’t speaking the same language as you? Not often, I’d bet.
While I’m not going to suggest that real-time translation will cure all the world’s ills (social media proved how naively utopian that dream was), but its impact will be profound, and deeply practical. As Byrdhouse recognises, global workforces have a real and urgent need for real-time translation. Enabling remote workers who don’t speak English to compete on more of a level playing field could redraw the global talent map.
One second order implication that I find fascinating is what widely available real-time translation will do to what it means to learn languages. When learning another language becomes redundant its signalling value will increase, just as being able to ride a horse (a wholly ‘unnecessary’ skill) today is a status symbol. In the future, you will learn a language not because you have to, but because you want to. You will learn a language to show respect – to a lover (or their family), to a boss, or to a culture.
Telepathy: Mind-Video
💥 Future Now // At the start of May, reports that AI could read people’s mind hit the media, after a paper in Nature Neuroscience detailing the results of an experiment where subjects’ thoughts were able to be decoded into intelligible text with a non-invasive brain monitoring device. By the end of the month, researchers released Mind-Video, a model which can replicate videos shown to subjects from their brain activity – in other words, when someone was shown a video of horses in a field, the AI reads their brain activity and recreate identifiably horse-shaped animals (see above).
🔮 Future Normal // Thinking about how telepathy might reshape our world is almost as mind-blowing as seeing it in action. On a very practical note, might this be the era of ever more ambient computing? Smartphones won because we can – and do! – use them everywhere. As discussed above, smart glasses haven’t taken off, in part because of their limited functionality. But imagine if public transport was no longer filled with people hunched over glowing rectangles?
What if you could share your thoughts with (trusted) others? Imagine how much advertisers would pay to be able to read your mind as you watched their ads, or went shopping? How could the customer experience be improved in, say, hospitals, if doctors could read patients' minds? Imagine if your therapist could read your mind, even temporarily, during a session?
Could this unlock marital or professional harmony (or be a recipe for disharmony!)? Just as we've become more performative thanks to the constant presence of smartphone cameras, might we 'train' our brains to think differently if we knew we could broadcast our previously-innermost thoughts to those around us?
What Is The Future Normal For Your Business?
My new book, The Future Normal: How We Will Live, Work & Thrive In The Next Decade, explores 30 trends, from continuous glucose monitoring to job sharing.
I also give inspiring, actionable presentations that help your team spot and seize emerging opportunities.
Get in touch if you'd like to discuss an upcoming event or project.
Or, sit back and enjoy the keynote that myself & Rohit Bhargava gave at SXSW to launch the book:
Thanks for reading,