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Comment by devfromanatolia | Hacker News Reader

'Li said back then, he was already worried that future technology would allow US filmmakers to digitally reproduce his moving body and superimpose the face of any actor onto it.

“I was thinking: I’ve been training my entire life. And we martial artists could only grow older. Yet they could own [my moves] as an intellectual property forever. So I said I couldn’t do that,” Li said.'

It is fascinating to see that at some point of any expertise, you start to respect the art itself more than any hard work you invest in it.

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And we're hitting a point where tech is making this irrelevant. I'm somehow scared about the implications.. it kills a lot of deep human emotions (desire, ambition, skill, transmission).

Some people are already feeling this in music slightly.

That's the reason the Go champion Lee Sedol gave for quitting

skynet won't even need a war, it will defeat our mindpower beforehand.

Not with a bang, but with a whimper, huh?

Rage against the dying of the light, my friend.

Unless... we were already defeated and live in a simulation. There was a movie about it not so long ago... :)

My employees weren’t born when Matrix was in theaters…

skynet never needed a war. Why wouldn't a superhuman AI be capable of outsmarting and manipulating humans?

Making what irrelevant?

The 'implications' for 'human emotions' is vague enough to be analogous to simply 'fear of change'.

Focusing on the process and not the outcome has been common advice since the Tao Te Ching. It's not easy, but that's not due to tech.

> Making what irrelevant?

why try to make your body into a super-efficient machine if robots are out of your league, can one exist if he's doomed to be beaten ? maybe it will cause a healthy shift in focus and appreciation about what we try to do (people may still try to reach their full potential even if it will stop being best absolute performance, but only best 'human' performance').

Computers beat humans at chess, but players are still trying to become good at chess.

Cars can travel faster than humans and horses, yet we still have running competitions and horse races.

> Cars can travel faster than humans and horses, yet we still have running competitions and horse races.

I don't know why we still have (or broadcast) running competitions.

how do toi build a robot that executes Kung fu if you have no data points about how the body should move and behave? You'd still need to record an actual human performing them if you want to build a robot that could emulate that.

That's not a great joy and is what jet mi complained about, you're used to be beaten and replaced. It's a poor prognosis.

> why try to make your body into a super-efficient machine if robots are out of your league, can one exist if he's doomed to be beaten ?

Any couch potato can shoot even the best martial art master dead with widely available cheap tools and a few weeks worth of training. And this is not even a new phenomenay. All practicioners alive today were born into this. Doesn’t seem to have stopped them from practicing.

Practicing martial arts leads to much more than being able to perform cool moves. I practice tai chi and I can tell you that my teacher do things you can hardly believe without moving his body much. Using a combination of breathing, accurate movements, he can push you meters away. Really cool. Takes at least dozens of years of intensive training to reach that level. He compares that to training playing piano for international level competitions (such as Concours Reine Elizabeth).

> Any couch potato can shoot even the best martial art master dead with widely available cheap tools

Gun, it's zero effort maximum damage

I second this but it's not even about being the best of humans. At least 90% of amateur cyclists are out of my league and yet I insist to go cycling, because I like it.

Cycling is a very interesting example. Cycling was crazy huge for a while when it was the fastest form of individual travel (only trains were faster) and many people moved on when the internal combustion engine became practical. But the subset of the appeal that remained despite engines has been rather stable ever since.

I think the lack of a stable is part of the appeal, most people don't have anywhere to put a horse.

Many apartment dwellers find even storing a bicycle to be at best a hassle, at worst almost impossible.

Horses must be fed even when you don't ride them. Cars and bicycles stay where you left them and don't ask for anything. But I won't leave a bicycle parked on a street for a week.

Horses outrun moderately trained cyclists only for a very short distance, on longer distances they fall behind runners. The main benefit of a horse is that you can carry more stuff with you.

In some places it's faster than a car, due to 1) the sheer volume of cars meaning that any driver will be stuck in traffic and 2) it being way easier to find parking for a bicycle than a car. I live in a city where this is often true.

That said, maybe the appeal that's remained since has been relatively stable overall, but locally it varies a lot depending on the cycling infrastructure that's available. More people ride when they feel safe doing so.

When I used to ride my bike to work, I literally turned a 45-minute drive into a 10-minute ride. Unfortunately, the weather in Illinois sucks so I couldn't do it year-round.

That's not what made people love bikes in that one short time window in the 19th century. It was the fastest thing, period. Bugatti Veyron fastest if you like. Hence the collapse when that ceased to be true. Even horses will outrun a trained cyclist only for very short distances (on longer distances it's roughly a tie even for runners)

>It was the fastest thing, period

A steam locomotive was claimed to go 112 mph in 1893, during the craze for "safety bicycles".

Even as early as 1829, a steam locomotive went almost 30 mph.

That's why I wrote "individual travel" in my original post. The core of what I was getting at is that for many of those fascinated with the bicycle at that time the human powered aspect simply wasn't part of why they loved it. They moved on to e.g. motorcycles as if it was just the next stage of the same thing. Or directly to aviation, as a certain pair of brothers who ran a bike shop did, not before contributing a design tweak to bicycle technology that's still present, unchanged, in almost every bike available today including for example those that were used to win this year's Tour de France (and most likely every iteration before).

The bearings as described in the UPGRADES section at https://wright-brothers.org/Information_Desk/Just_the_Facts/... ?

Actually I was referring to the pedal thread thing that's an amazing improvement over the hassle pedals would be if they were both right-handed. And those pedal threads are still in use with far less change than their bearing innovations. There have been competing thread standards since then (all using that improvement), but much less than in any other place on the bike. Chances are that you could install the latest clipless carbon powermeter pedals (featuring 64MHz Cortex-M4s) on many pre-war bikes, from back when world wars didn't have an episode number. And they'd just work.

why run when you can drive… you’ll never outrun a car

unless you run into a forest, a beach, a building, between buildings, jump down from a bridge onto an embankment...

Now that walking robots are a reality, I'm anticipating when someone produces a set of bolt on legs for a Jeep, for real all terrain capability.

It might be true for anyone measuring success by how much money they make.

But I don't think people get into any form of art, and I count programming as a form of art, expecting huge sums of money. We all do it for the sake of doing it, because it feels good to do it, to learn, to overcome, to achieve.

Just think about the fact we are never indeed satisfied. I, for instance, am much more skilled as a programmer than I was 5 years ago. In a sense I made it, I have a job that pays well and I can do my work without much issue. Programming feels natural. However I am nowhere near being satisfied. I want to learn more, see and try new things. Explore different paradigms, languages and techniques. But not because it could render me a better paycheck, but because it feels amazing to learn and solve new problems.

This seems to be true for any endeavor worth putting time into. I like that programming has a big built-in filter; if you don't get enjoyment from solving hard problems, the frustration and technical difficulty of it will force you out pretty quickly. So most of the people that have been doing it for a few years really love it and are always looking to improve their craft.

Some people do get into programming for the money, but you can spot them a mile away.

I respect that you didn't get into programming for money, but many of us do, including myself. Programming for me was a way to escape growing up in poverty, it was a way to gain financial independence and start a business of my own in an area that has almost no barriers to entry. I started an HFT firm and in order to compete I have to hire some of the most technically sophisticated people I can find. I am fairly confident that many of them are highly motivated by money just as I am and that being able to put to use their skill to provide for themselves an incredibly high standard of living motivates them a lot more than if their skill had little to no means of providing them with a great paycheck.

Certainly there are interesting aspects to programming, but there are interesting aspects to a variety of different subjects and I don't know that programming is intrinsically more fascinating than music, or psychology, or history. What makes programming stand out at this particular moment is the massive amount of economic potential it has.

I think what makes programming stand out and have economic potential is how much of an amplifying effect it can have on all the other fields you listed.

I wanted to use programming as an example because it is what I am familiar with. I am not trying to say that if you are in for the money you will have a bad time, that money is evil and all of that. What I am trying to illustrate is that monetary gain in itself is not enough to sustain any sort of artistic expression, and this is why pure artificial emulation of the activity is not enough to kill it, in my opinion.

This is not to say that art has no value in escaping reality, poverty being one facet of reality. In a sense, art is the only valid escape from reality, the only form of expression that can truly shape and transform what we know.

For whatever reason other than money we got into programming, it's likely not the reason we are still in the field. Jobs suck the joy out of it. The money hasn't been very good for me either.

> But I don't think people get into any form of art, and I count programming as a form of art, expecting huge sums of money. We all do it for the sake of doing it, because it feels good to do it, to learn, to overcome, to achieve.

No offense: but spoken like someone who has made enough money from something they enjoy to imply they'd do it without money. If you were working 12 hours a day in multiple minimum wage jobs I think you'd find your desire to program in your spare time quickly vanishing.

> No offense: but spoken like someone who has made enough money from something they enjoy to imply they'd do it without money.

You'd have a point if he said he loved working minimum wage jobs that weren't programming, but he didn't - so you don't.

This is very relevant. I believe we have to evolve as society and start talking about universal minimum income before we can move to talk about true dedication to art.

If I had to grind away for hours maybe I wouldn't have the energy to evolve in creative areas. This speaks more against big capital and normalized poverty than my comment though.

Edit: I wanted to go and say that I am aware of my privileges. I had time in my childhood to study, did minimal work with my parents, went to a military school and then, with the better education, I got to go to college, which in Brazil is free if you pass the tests. I have some merit in this, but mostly it was due to circumstance. I have to believe, however, that true art transcends all these social barriers.

So someone else has to sacrifice their hard work to provide you with a means to indulge your creativity without monetary concerns. This apparently is an 'evolution' of society, and not just another variation of an economic model thats existed for centuries.

Firstly, exercising creativity is not an indulgement, it is a necessity. Just like you are not indulging yourself by drinking water or going to the toilet.

Secondly, lower class already sacrifices their hard work to indulge big corporations without societal concerns. Just like those workers in Fritto Lays that work for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.

I am not talking about taking an even larger cut from their labor and give it to someone else to sit idly. I am talking about creating the means so that people can improve themselves if they want to without worrying about not eating or feeding their families the next day.

Or you think it is ok to lock people into those inhumane conditions? If people had the possibility to leave work and seek better conditions, big corps would think twice before overworking and underpaying their employees.

See the problem with your entire argument is you have bolted on socialism to the current capitalist environment. It doesn't work like that, socialism doesn't afford the opportunity for big corps to exist and the money you wish to take for merely performing a creative task will be from your fellow workers. Likewise, there is no incentive to nurture creativity in an environment that does not reward it.

Could you please refer to where I talk about socialism? I don't seem to recall ever referencing it. On a similar note, do you need socialism to begin talking about tending to the wellbeing of the population?

> We all do it for the sake of doing it, because it feels good to do it, to learn, to overcome, to achieve.

Speak for yourself - but I do it because I’m on the spectrum and nothing else interests or motivates me.

> it kills a lot of deep human emotions (desire, ambition, skill, transmission).

Of course it doesn't. It just changes parts of what we care about.

Auto tune didn't kill music, it just made evident what we already knew: a live performance might be the more authentic experience of a particular artist. Other, new breed artists, might never even perform live.

AI playing chess did not make chess players obsolete. It just shone a new light on the game from a different angle.

I can see AI becoming talking heads type of hosts, but they will still need human insights and skills (or "guidance") to function appropriately. This is what we'll use to assess the performance, then.

Just be patient, another decade and the tech will be at a point where his moves can be reverse-engineered back to 3D directly from his films.

We're already there.

Pose Estimation from a 2D source is one of the default examples provided by TensorFlow: https://www.tensorflow.org/lite/examples/pose_estimation/ove...

Not only are we already there, it's now a trivial exercise used to instruct new users on the technology.

The 6th grade robotic team I coach built from that example this year.

Note that this just comes up with coordinates in the 2D image for body parts. And that there's a lot of error and noise, so it's a long way from those list of points to a 3D kinematics model. But a tracking filter and linear algebra would get you a fair bit of the way there.

> Not only are we already there

We're not.

There are basic experiment that demonstrate it's feasible, but there isn't such a system in production today.

That being said, you are probably correct in that it's likely around the corner and my estimate was overly generous.

I'm not sure I'd count that as "respecting the art" more than "ensuring I have continued employment".

Why would Jet Li worry about something like “continued employment”, when he is already worth $250 million?

Because he might be one of those people where life didn’t hand him shit. In other words, he fought against competition at every step of the game, so he seriously considers the nature of competition and the implications.

It’s like a rich person that grew up poor, they are constantly saving money. Of course they don’t really have to at this point, but that was their experience. All Jet Li might know is competition (just off the top of my head, he is under the shadow of Bruce Lee, similar to Jackie Chan, and the whole Hong Kong scene is second to America).

He respects his experience.

> It’s like a rich person that grew up poor, they are constantly saving money. Of course they don’t really have to at this point, but that was their experience.

Is the implication that people don't learn new things from new situations/environments and are forever stuck modeling the world the way they did when they were young teenagers/adults?

People certainly learn new things, but habits are a real thing. It's a natural tendency to keep doing what you are already doing, sometimes even if there are terrible consequences. See cigarette addicts for an example.

> but habits are a real thing

I wouldn’t disagree, but I would question how widely applicable this is across cultures and socio-economic strata.

In particular it would be interesting to compare the commonly accepted folk wisdom (e.g. “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”) with a more objective analysis (if such a thing exists).

Depends on how strong the systemic models were from the past. Thorough experience dealing with, say, people and how they interact competitively, will have a outsized reverberation later in life. You never ever want to be wrong about people.

A soda drinking habit you can’t kick? You’ll mostly kick it once you get serious. The other stuff is probably going to take life changing events to alter.

There are a ton of stories about incredibly successful people in the entertainment industry who end up bankrupt. Sure, that comes along with stories of wasting money. But it seems like the ones who make the most money are both lucky and really care about IP. I don't think Jet Li should ignore concerns about IP just because he's rich.

The day will come where movie actors and celebs become CGI intellectual property, without unions, dressing rooms, personal problems off-set, etc. He's right to have this concern, it's happening now.

I don't see how that is a problem. If a computer can do an equal or better job then it makes little sense to keep such a heap of actors around. "real" actors in movies should then just become a curiosity just like still see horse carriages around as curiosity.

It's a problem if you are an actor.

Then they have to find something else to do. Just like the myriad of other jobs that are redundant because of innovation.

horse carriages are seldom the protagonist of any movie, you realize...

I don't understand what you are getting at. If you mean horse carriages are not people. You are right. But the "drivers" of horse carriages were.

It the computer can do a better job, but can only do that by exploiting your work as training data, then it’s not the same thing.

Why? The actors were paid for that training data.

I would negotiate a different contract, depending on how my work would be used. Being paid is only half the story. Like software licenses: you can use this for free if you release your own code as GPL, but we’ll come to a different agreement if you want to use it differently. Different terms for different use cases.

I agree. But afaik most contracts in the acting industry make the footage of the actor completely owned by the employer.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see that change at some point. There was no reason to exclude impossible uses in the contracts, but as those uses become possible, people will probably want to have provisions that they share in the fruits of their own labor.

Since a lot of these new uses seem to be ‘fair use,’ it might require changes to IP law.

You need physical actors because you need someone relatable for the audience. Despite experiments like Tamagoshi, showing that computers can provide occupation of mind, I believe love can still only be provided by humans, no matter how faulty they are.

Pixar doesn’t show physical actors.

Whether they show their faces or not is by the by. The parts are played by actors (and animators).

Do you know the animator or animators of, say, Frozen? Would you even notice if they switched that to another animator?

Compare this to an actor. People often decide to view or not view a movie based on the actors on it.

Sofia and Hatsune Miku have shown that you can have a relatable, non-human persona. Combined with the K-pop model/marketing machinery and performance capture by replaceable gig-work session actors/contractors, I can easily see a host of virtual performers who are celebrities in their own right, but with Jet Li's martial art prowess as part of their library, and fully owned by corporations.

What's not to like, no ever-increasing salary demands, multiple scenes with the same "actors" can be filmed simultaneously, the celebrity never ages, and the non-celebrity human performers behind the scenes are easily replaceable cogs: there will be huge cost savings.

Recreating Wushu using low-detail-ragdoll CGI is an offense against Wushu.

I think "respecting the art" is a fine way to describe his decision.

And yet, now Jet Li is essentially irrelevant but if his moves had been digitized and licensed for use in media he could have lived on forever.

This is the technological dystopian that the Matrix was depicting. What an irony.

The movie depicted an entirely different technological dystopia. Intellectual property was the least of their worries.

"Intellectual property" means corporations owning the products of human minds, often to the detriment of the humans themselves. That's actually a perfect analogy for the plot of The Matrix.

Neo learns martial arts in seconds from digitalized records. Not discussing intellectual property, but introducing a scenario that justifies Li’s worries.

I bet that they told him: you’re a computer freak on the movie, but once you left the Matrix you became a martial artist by… and then Li though: WOW! An all my training??

For all we know he is learning public domain material that is freely available to anyone.

In the first movie we see very little of how real world society works but in the sequels other than the threat of the Machines things don't look particularly dystopian. In reality we'd probably end up with something much more oppressive under those circumstances.

Jet Li isn’t in the movie, I’m not discussing Matrix Universe. Just guessing how Li’s reaction might sprout from the movie plot.

But, even though, can’t see how we can relate Neo’s learning to public domain material. Recordings of public activities it’s not necessarily public domain stuff.

As it turns out; he lacked imagination. They can digitally create new moves that are even physically impossible; for say - superhero movies, and utterly surpass anything from traditional martial arts, even in the mythology.

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