I think my moment was the realisation that we're one, maybe two years away from building a real-life C3PO - like, not a movie lookalike or marchandize, but a working Protocol Druid.
Or more generally that Star Wars of all things now looks like a more accurate predictor of our tech development than The Martian - the franchise that is so far on the "soft" side of the "hard/soft SciFi" spectrum that it's commonly not seen as "Science Fiction" at all but mostly as Fantasy with space ships. And yet here we are:
- For Protocol Druids, there are still some building blocks missing, mostly persistent memory and the ability to understand real-life events and interact with the real world. However, those are now mostly technical problems which are already being tackled, as opposed to the obvious Fantasy tropes they were until a few years ago. Even the way that current LLMs often sound more confident and knowledgeable than they really are would match the impression of protocol druids we get from the movies pretty well.
- Star Wars has lots of machines which seem to have some degree of sentience even though it makes little practical sense - battle droids, space ships, etc - and it used to be just an obvious application of the rule of cool/rule of funny. Yet suddenly you could imagine pretty well that manufactures will be tempted by hype to stuff an LLM into all kinds of devices, so we indeed might be surrounded by seemingly "sentient" machines in a few years.
- Machines communicating with each other using human language (or a bitstream that has a 1-1 mapping to human language) likewise used to be a cute space opera idea. Suddenly it became a feasible (if inefficient and insecure) way to design an API. People are already writing OpenAPI documentations whete the intended audience are not human developers but ChatGPT.
Or more generally that Star Wars of all things now looks like a more accurate predictor of our tech development than The Martian - the franchise that is so far on the "soft" side of the "hard/soft SciFi" spectrum that it's commonly not seen as "Science Fiction" at all but mostly as Fantasy with space ships. And yet here we are:
- For Protocol Druids, there are still some building blocks missing, mostly persistent memory and the ability to understand real-life events and interact with the real world. However, those are now mostly technical problems which are already being tackled, as opposed to the obvious Fantasy tropes they were until a few years ago. Even the way that current LLMs often sound more confident and knowledgeable than they really are would match the impression of protocol druids we get from the movies pretty well.
- Star Wars has lots of machines which seem to have some degree of sentience even though it makes little practical sense - battle droids, space ships, etc - and it used to be just an obvious application of the rule of cool/rule of funny. Yet suddenly you could imagine pretty well that manufactures will be tempted by hype to stuff an LLM into all kinds of devices, so we indeed might be surrounded by seemingly "sentient" machines in a few years.
- Machines communicating with each other using human language (or a bitstream that has a 1-1 mapping to human language) likewise used to be a cute space opera idea. Suddenly it became a feasible (if inefficient and insecure) way to design an API. People are already writing OpenAPI documentations whete the intended audience are not human developers but ChatGPT.