I want a personal assistant that actually works. Like Siri or Alexa, but it can actually do secretarial tasks.

“Find and schedule a roofing company to come fix the roof”

“See if you can get me dinner reservations for a nice Italian restaurant tomorrow night at 630”

“Write an email to bob apologizing for running over his dog”

“Find an image on the internet of a person being mauled by a bear, edit the picture so that it’s James being mauled, and send picture to him”

“Find a new show for me to watch and torrent the first episode, re-dub it in Japanese with Spanish subtitles”

I am very excited to see which areas of medicine will make progress through AI in the next few years.

My best friend has extreme back pain and there doesn’t seem to be anyone who can really help him.

My wife has multiple sclerosis, which I don’t need to say more about.

Medicine has made enormous progress in the last few decades. I pray this gets a turbo boost from AI. (And that even though I don’t believe in God.)

Shorter queue times accessing services like suicide hotlines

AI that designs a room-temp superconductor,quantum CPU,some new chemical that allows cheap/easy solar panel construction, water desalination method/materials,new drugs/compounds,etc. The most important areas are fundamental physics/chemistry/material inventions, if those could be brute-forced by AI search/filtering.

The next area where i think we could replace dangerous jobs with finer robotics: Currently the robot AI is too primitive for fine movement and precise grasping, but imagine automating everything from chemical experiments to nuclear reactor repair with micron-level precision.

A third area: AI could reinvent software testing/debugging, instead of “debugging” some AI module could trace every error and provide clues as to what happening, no more chasing stack traces and adding print to every single line. I can envision 99% of manual debugging drudgery can be automated, even crash analysis. AI doesn’t have to understand code or to write it, just understand the control flow and what is currently executing. AI-generated fuzzing, unit tests and automated cross-platform testing, instead of arcane scripts that break every second release and have to be fixed for each new features, it could be unified into some AI service that recognizes unique requirements and run automatic tests/analysis tailor-made for the target code.

On the creative side, i hope the content generation will stop being so energy-wasteful and slow, i don’t want to buy graphics cards for this but it seems every neural network/image generator even simple upscaling apps and voice generators require a NVIDIA card(AMD seem to have problems).

I can’t help but feel like if we didn’t live in a capitalist hellscape, the increasing democratization of art would be unambiguously a good thing. I’d be more than happy to see “art as decoration” (as opposed to “art as a human means of expression”) opened to being something shunted off to machines, if it weren’t for the fact that this is a method that people currently use to make sure they have enough money to not starve to death in the cold. Advertising art of polar bears drinking Coke is nicer to look at than big block text saying “consume”, but it’s hardly a soulful expression of the human condition. Or maybe it is, which is even more depressing, but the ultimate apotheosis of this is pushing that sort of messaging to robots to make anyway.

Meanwhile, giving people who aren’t necessarily “artistic” a vehicle to create art as a means of expressing themselves is also really neat, and in the hands of people who are artistic, it gives them a low-impact tool for pre-visualization, inspiration, and a new medium to experiment with. It also reduces barriers for people with disabilities to make art. I’d love to see artists training LLM systems on their own work as a way of sharing their “style” with the world — something which is difficult to justify in a world where your style is something that needs to be jealously protected against copyright infringement, which again comes down to needing to monetize your expression as a matter of survival.

The social media campaigns for regular people and our normal problems that can be waged. You don’t have to hire an artist anymore to generate compelling drawings or photographer to take heartwrenching photos. You don’t need a copywriter or a social media strategist to help you craft your story.

It’s all here now, ready to be exploited in favor of higher taxes on the rich, climate change policy with teeth and the will to rip a motherfucker’s ass open, and to thwart and gaslight moneyed interests exploiting the ignorance of people just trying to get through the day.

Honestly…I’ll sign up to Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok…all of 'em, just to spread that message when it comes along…

Chip design. I briefly worked in a VLSI lab, and making custom chips for tasks can improve performance by 10x to 100x, but it’s hard and expensive. If you can design chips fast and cheaply, then you can flash FPGAs with custom circuits at runtime, dynamically reconfiguring your CPU/GPU as needed to be ultra performant at any task.

I’ve dreamt of this for years, and now RL has shown some promise in similar domains (AlphaTensor) so this dream may some day be a reality.

Sometimes I look at a food menu and get overwhelmed. Would be cool if I could just ask an AI what I would like from this place and it gave me like 3 choices it thought I’d like.

If I don’t like those 3 give me another 3 to choose from.

Besides the overwhelm issue, my dad had really bad eyesight. This would have been great for him to quickly somehow get a giant-print (if we put this in a tablet) version of the top 3 things he’d like from the menu. I had hoped Google Glass would have been able to do something like this for him, maybe by just reading it into his ear. I always felt bad that we’d have to try to figure out what he’d like. I mean we could read the menu to him, but he didn’t want to be a bother and would kind of just go with the flow (and pick one of the earlier things we’d list off). It’s tough to say if he would have liked one of the 50 other items. Miss ya dad.

I want AI to help make people’s lives better.

Making movies from a single prompt.

once we have gotten past the ethical quandaries and doing it the right way. It would be cool to just synthesize voices for npcs and PC from a list of “character types” and maybe add accents for the main PC. So all games can have voiced audio (could be cool if it can also work in a retroactive way, like play a classic CRPG but have fully voiced characters would be pretty neat), which can be a mixed bag in modern day since realistically there is a budget and voice acting can take a ton of money if done right. So it means we as gamer if we can mod in new quests, we can use such system to truly expand thee game. Like I love real VA performances so I can see this as a “stopgap” so you can get the main questline done and many of the “good” side quests done but you can use this AI trained voice for the more smaller tasks that may not get as much love or as I said use it for modding.

LLM/AI tools can massively decrease the cost of dubbing media into smaller languages, including the cost of creating audio descriptions for the visually impaired. I don’t know the extent to which these uses are actually being implemented at the moment, but yeah. It’s by all means possible, and in my eyes pretty cool. These uses would not replace real people, would not require unethical practices, but would still reduce the workload.

I’m kind of disappointed by the ways in which AI is being presented as a “terk er jerbs” thing in fields where it has no rightful place, the ways in which AI is presented as a “procedurally generated Netflix and chill with my robot girlfriend” hyperreal horrorshow, the ways in which AI is being used for scams. AI absolutely has its places in society, and helping with accessibility and localization is one of them.

Edit: Yes, and also writing closed captions, and arguably even using deepfakes to “dub” shows and movies into sign languages could be potential uses.

There’s also how chatbots can be used as language study buddies for those without the ability to talk to actual native speakers, although I haven’t had much success with this, personally.

I don’t really trust AI for important tasks but I do want to see them used in video games. There already is some level of AI in many games but how much better can it be?