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I already encounter this in my daily life. There are people in the world who can do anything and everything I can do better. When I think of something interesting, I google it and usually find out that not only has someone already done it, they've done it better than I was thinking of doing it.

But then I go and try anyway. I'm not even really sure why, but I like doing it.

It's the drive for personal growth, known as "self-actualization". It's an interesting topic to think about, assuming an AI order of magnitudes more evolved than a human brain, what would its drives and motivations look like.

I think something that gives life meaning is to discover and live up to one's potential, even with the full knowledge that our potential is almost certainly less than someone else's.

I will probably never write code as well as John Carmack or compose music as well as John Williams, but that doesn't stop me from trying. And it is fulfilling.

> Meaning isn't something physical in the universe. Meaning is an emotion. It's what you feel when you're working towards something that you believe has some greater importance. With all opportunity to work towards anything taken away, life will become meaningless by definition, unless humans are left with some pseudo-artificial challenges to push against.

Although some minority of people derive "meaning" from work per se (work = something that you get paid to do), I would say that the vast majority of people can derive meaning from other things. For the vast majority, work is for getting money.

Therefore, there are still lots of things that you can use to derive meaning, such as: raising a family, caring of others, playing music, study different subjects for fun (philosophy, etc.), be part of your local community, do sports, do competition sports (if that fits your style), etc. etc. etc. etc.

Bottom line: do not mix work with quest for meaning...

> Although some minority of people derive "meaning" from work per se (work = something that you get paid to do), I would say that the vast majority of people can derive meaning from other things. For the vast majority, work is for getting money.

I think it may be possible that you could be conflating two subtly different things here. Where people currently derive meaning in their lives might not be quite the same as where people have the potential to derive meaning in their lives.

I know a number of people who are, for instance, psychologists, teachers, or social workers. They have chosen to derive meaning in their lives through work. Some of them have also gone on to raise families and care for others, turning sources of potential meaning into sources of active meaning. Thus people can incorporate both current and potential sources of meaning into their lives. Some people opt to dedicate their lives entirely to their current sources of meaning!

Yet, it's perhaps less than maximally wise to conflate someone seeking meaning through their work today with their future in which they might seek meaning through raising children. Meaning does not always operate with expected values.

When I wrote "work" I didn't mean in the limited sense of "employment".

Every example you gave is a form of work in the general sense of effortful goal-directed activity.

Meaning isn't an emotion. Meaning is a story. A story we tell ourselves, over and over again, until we forget it is a lie.

Only in the fairly reductionist view that every human thought is a "lie" [1]. There is some meaning in this idea, but it clearly bulldozes over lots of useful distinctions that can be made when considering all human thought.

[1] This brings to mind the famous quote: "The map is not the territory"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map–territory_relation#.22Th...

I think you're misrepresenting the situation.

There's a difference between working to survive and working because it's enjoyable.

For example, I can work on my mountain bike skills, or I can sit in an office and work on code. One I do because I enjoy it, and one I do to pay my bills.

Computers, automation, and AI will take over the second type, but they won't take over the first type.

I'd actually go so far as to say your definition of work, meaning, and purpose is insulting and harmful to a large number of people. Does anybody really derive meaning and purpose by cleaning toilets, bringing people food, or stocking shelves? Should they? I don't think so.

I feel like many people are missing a crucial distinction. Work != a job. The goal is to kill off the need for the latter.

As long as humans are humans, we'll always want to do something. We'll set ourselves personally meaningful goals and strive to achieve them. That is still work. But that's totally different than organizing your life around involuntarily spending most of it doing things you don't care about so that you can put bread on the table, and so that you have that table in the first place.

Art has meaning which is why humans find it interesting. Are you therefore saying that machines can create meaning that is interesting to humans?

It's absolutely possible for machines to point out things no human had thought about before.

Is that all meaning is to you? Especially the kind of meaning embodied by art?

Reductive definitions don't seem to contribute much to these kinds of discussion.

I've heard people speak about how they find meaning in nature. If a random process can manage, why not a computer?

You are calling people a random process?

Nature is the random process.

Ok, but the commenter said that people are making the meaning.

Natural selection isn't random. Fitness is selected for. Find meaning is probably a fitness ability for humans.

> Natural selection isn't random.

Yes, it is; specifically it's a biased filter over a lower-level set of random change processes (which has its own biases) produces a biased-but-random (non-deterministic) changes over time.

It totally is a random process. It's just not drawing from an uniform distribution. In fact, the process strongly influences the distribution it's drawing from.

Mountains aren't formed by natural selection.

This man found a lot of meaning in mountains, rivers, skies and trees [0] and passed it to others. At least the first 3 of those are not made by natural selection.

[0] http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/2014/09/2...

That's a painfully stupid question. Machines have already created lots of meaning that's interesting to me, including stuff that couldn't be done without them and unexpected behavior due to some patterns we hadn't previously recognised. There are really too many examples to even get into it.

Your reply would be much better without the first sentence. There is no need to demean or engage in such speech.

If there are too many examples to get into, please share a few.

The meaning only exists because humans attribute meaning to the input, output and code that creates the output.

There's nothing in principle that stops a machine from creating art. Even, better art than any person could do. So once that happens, where are we left?

We don't have to wonder -- it has already happened: http://the-best-art.computer

You read your own link? There is not much art there which the computer is doing.

I think this is a funny project.. but the description is totally exaggerated:

> The computer queries the universe and uses an algorithm to objectively calculate the best art for any given moment in time. The human executes the commands.

How is this objectively at all? The artist creates an algo and picks some stuff to query. All the artist does is adding another (subjectively formed) layer to the process.

> The computer's creative process is computational, and therefore unbiased.

:-/

> How do you know it actually produces the "best" art? Good art pulls meaning from the chaos of the universe, and also reflects the artist's unique point of view. The computer rigorously combines these two factors in its programming, optimizing them to produce the best art.

I find this very arrogant to say...

> There's nothing in principle that stops a machine from creating art. Even, better art than any person could do.

I don't think this project would be an example.

I think it was a joke...

>Even, better art than any person could do.

The quality of art depends not only on the end result but also on the process. Robot art won't be better unless we like robot artist more than human artists.

Who says life has any intrinsic meaning by definition now or ever?

It certainly wins on tiebreaks

It's the derived meaning that matters, and the question is whether humans will be able to derive meaning in the absence of work.

It's not really work. Work is something you cannot avoid and don't desire. People happy to do a thing, don't describe it as work, just what they enjoy doing. The kind of things that wakes you up happy. Unlike 'working' dread imposed by the chaos reincarnation on social structures.

Can a computer give us first-person insight on the human condition? That would be one working definition of "art."

By definition, it can't be first person. But if you can't tell the difference does it matter?

And since some things are easier understood from the outside, perhaps an intelligent second-person view on the human condition could be useful?