There is a joke about future expectations, and how they change within a society over time, and it goes like this:
Baby Boomers often seem disappointed because they were promised a future with flying cars and cities on the Moon, and got neither.
Gen Xers often seem unsurprised, because they were promised a cyberpunk dystopia, and here we are.
As new aspects of that dystopia congeal into reality, many Americans my age can’t even manage a raised eyebrow. Case in point: I was only mildly surprised to learn that a tech company CEO had managed to convert 200,000 of his own stem cells into neurons and link them with a computer. The journalists who reported the story were equally unsurprised, because they buried the lede. They knew what would actually draw readers’ interest: Sean Cole, the son of one of the CEO’s friends, then taught the brain-on-a-slide to play Doom, the successor to chess and Space Invaders as our era’s archetypal computer game.
I suspect Hon Weng Chong’s investors will eventually want him to turn his attention to something more profitable, but I think he’s already done humanity a great service: he has determined that you can theoretically distract a disembodied brain, generative AI program, or other potentially self-aware and angry mechanical intelligence with computer games. Would that humans had tried this strategy in the Terminator universe.
