My prediction on popular culture, AI, & fun, for the near future, after the dust settles. After the peak of inflated expectations and the trough of disillusionment. My optimistic attempt to synthesize the opposing forces this century, and explain why they're in alignment: I think the forces of Ashby's Law and Occam's Razor show us how it plays out. Split this into-- - things you can ONLY do with AI -vs- - things humans are already amazing at = ASHBY's LAW = There's a saying in cybernetics that goes "Only variety can destroy variety". It means that to control, manage, or solve a complex problem, your system must have at least as many possible states or solutions as the problem itself. The kinds of fun people have will become increasingly complex. To participate you need have increasingly complex capabilities yourself. For example, wiring the simulation of a fly brain to do funny shit. No one's tweaking 266,000 neurons individually to play beat saber by hand. The ONLY way to play with a ton of neurons is with a ton of neurons. Variety vs variety. This is only going to get more ridiculous. By 2099, we'll have Neo's "I know kung fu". No one's modifying their own brain, manually, to such specificity, in a Dune world, without machine learning. That is strictly an AI activity. For that reason, the culture // things you can ONLY do with AI // will establish itself as a dominant behavior in pop culture. = HUMANS ALREADY AMAZING = Ashby's law feels like it has some Occam-ish corollary like "Match the variety of the problem, but no further" or "Use no more variety than the situation requires". And the reason being supporting the anti-fragility of the human system. For many cultural practices, the "true skill" is something deeper and hidden. Something that's not the end result. For example, how learning to code teaches you a resilience to frustration. Or how learning to sing teaches you to be vulnerable. Here the introduction of additional complexity (using AI to make the output) is not only NOT required, it risks making the original system (the person) more fragile, by removing the friction. Removing the disorder. The takeaway from Taleb's antifragility is right in the title: Things That Gain from Disorder. I think the culture of practices humans already do amazingly will remain popularly human & the AI version of it will stay niche (or unpopular). Singing, writing, dancing-- will stay celebrated & respected. Not because of the end result, but because they support a present way of being. We know the value of this intuitively, even when we can't articulate it yet or point at it exactly, because the complexity of the human is not yet fully understood. Until then, we try to defend its value with straw man beliefs, but the real value is there. The irony of ASHBY's LAW is how sufficiently complex technology will help us clearly understand when we are better off NOT relying on technology. Yes in the first phrase of introducing AI, the temptation is great to give away human cognition to the machine. However, ultimately the "human layer", will anneal into a state of retaining its own strengths. Not simply because the alternative proves disastrous (an idiocracy-level existence), but because that's what this self-optimizing self-learning human system does by its nature. I think this is how the dust settles, after a long cooking-cooling process. = WHERE MY THEORY IS INCOMPLETE++ = - Coding vs Vibecoding? I actually feel like vibecoding wins out, but this theory doesn't explain why yet. The trend has always been that lower-level programming gets mostly abandoned for higher-level programming. I think it's because the problems always get bigger. Vibecoding increases your Ashbyian variety. - "I know kung fu" instantly downloading the ability to our brains vs studying kung-fu for decade. It's too early to speculate how that even works or what the risks are. It challenges the Calvinist work ethic of the individual and resolves it with the work ethic of the hive mind. = CONCLUSION = I could be wrong about my interpretations, but I feel like looking at humanity as a hive mind cybernetic system, with its own group forces, in relationship to AI, is a lens that that makes predictions at century-scale time