(Part 1 here.)
About a month ago, I was searching for something using Duck Duck Go. I wasn’t finding it (unsurprisingly), but there was something in a grey box at the top of the page – an AI interpretation of my query, offering additional information. At first I ignored it, annoyed at yet another intrusive “feature” added to “enhance my search experience” or whatever, but not sufficiently annoyed to add it to my browser’s page element blocking filters with YouTube shorts rows and everything on the Amazon front page minus the search field and account-related links.
I was gradually tempted to pay attention to it, though. And then play around with it. Soon, I found myself using it to do searches instead of the DDG search field, because it was (to my great amusement) doing exactly what I pictured the early form of simulacrum intelligence envisioned for the old fictional universe doing: wading through terabytes of internet trash and the uselessness of the regular search engine to find relevant information.
When I was asked two weeks ago to sign certain business documents, I was tempted to sign up for Grok or ChatGPT to try out their review capabilities (a lawyer friend having raved for the past 2-3 years about doing this in his practice). I didn’t though, thinking that I didn’t have enough time to set up an account and figure out how it worked. It turned out to be easier to use than I expected, but by that time I was already done with said documents.
But that got me to play around with Grok.com a bit more for story research purposes. I was working over this same period on a spreadsheet for estimating the chances of the protagonist of “Beneath a Silent Sky” for making it back to base given the limited supplies he has on hand. I’d already worked out much of it based on research conducted the usual way, plus some reference to college textbooks, but I was struggling with how to not have him have to carry a wheelbarrow full of batteries with him. So, I tried Grok…
…and it took less than an hour to figure out an energy storage method based on near-term technology compact enough to work for this purpose. I then repeated the process on oxygen storage, with similar results. Rather than a wheelbarrow for the batteries alone, the protagonist merely needs a backpack the same size as the one I use for hiking to carry all of the energy and oxygen he requires. (The fact that he has drama-enhancing problems with his consumables along the way is an artistic choice and the result of circumstances, not inherent in either fictional technology.)
Even with an effective search engine (which I doubt exist anymore), I could not have done this. It would have taken me hours of research to find the necessary leads to near-term technology, then more hours of work to figure out how to apply it to the specific instance here, and hours more of calculations and analyses to understand if I could make it work and how to do so. I know this, because that’s how it went with the ~80% of this simulation that was built before I used Grok.
AI (LLM) is doing exactly what I predicted SI would do: replace, then supplement search engines for finding, authenticating, and condensing information found on the internet. And at roughly the point in time where I predicted in the old fictional universe it would do it. The difference being that the “revolution” is happening much faster in the real world than I anticipated: I foresaw it taking about fifteen years to evolve from initial availability around 2020 to something approximating the form and ubiquity of the technology encountered in the stories set around 2050.