Everything’s Going to Change

Seven years ago I wrote a post about why negative catalysts are a million times easier to identify than positive ones:

“Bad news smashes your face against an amplifier, while good news just plays quietly in the background.”

Artificial intelligence, is one of the rare cases, like the internet before it, that opens up doors that where there were only walls, to quote Joseph Campbell. (H/t Tom Morgan)

I saw something today that blew my mind. Before I show you what this technology has the potential to do, I want to return to something I wrote about a few weeks ago. I’ve been playing with Midjourney, a text-to-image program. I showed this toy to my kids, and here’s what we came up with.

We typed in “Godzilla playing basketball against King Kong” and four different pictures popped onto the screen in twenty seconds or less.

Here’s Godzilla fighting a giant Spiderman. You can guess what movie we saw last weekend.

Next, we made Darth Vader playing chess with a Ninja Turtle

And finally, we created a Stormtrooper fighting Iron Man

While this sort of stuff is a lot of fun to play around with, it’s not going to move GDP.

But there’s no doubt that advancements made possible by this technology are going to lead to increased economic output. It’s also going to save who knows how many lives over the next couple of decades. My mind was blown reading the great Michael Cembalest:

I don’t know anything about science or medicine, but this is wild stuff. The world is going to look very different very soon.