Comment by gen220 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gen220 | Hacker News Reader

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In life, the existential personal questions are, roughly, "what matters (to me)?" and "what should I do about it?".

Our society currently affords ample opportunity to "productively" avoid those questions. You can pour everything into work, watch TV, numb your brain with drugs, or whatever.

Automation does not remove the existential questions, it just removes some of the noise that allows us to ignore them, and elevates them to the forefront.

Some people already have answers to those questions, and stand to gain from that toil being removed. Others have been avoiding the question their entire life, and removing the toil that excuses their avoidance is removing a cornerstone of their identity.

To that extent, I agree that automation is a disintegrative force, because so many people have yet to integrate a personality and identity around answering these foundational questions.

Still, it's long-term-better for our society if automation allows people to access higher forms of self-actualization. In the medium-term, a depressing number of people are content with passing time in their current rung on that ladder, and will be upset with the change.

> Our society currently affords ample opportunity to "productively" avoid those questions.

I fully agree.

> Some people already have answers to those questions, and stand to gain from that toil being removed.

I used to believe that but with the recent improvements in AI, I think it's only true to an extent. Not all personalities are equal. As AI's power in the creative fields increase those fields will more and more become a question of who has the most money to throw at AI processing. Superficially it might seem the same as two-three centuries ago when rich people had famous artists paint them but it's not.

I fear where we're at with AI is the beginning of the end for human creativity. Of course I hope I'm wrong. I hoped I was wrong about my skepticism when I first learned of Facebook in 2007, but as it turned out it has and continues to be a net negative force in our world much bigger than I could imagine.

> As AI's power in the creative fields increase those fields will more and more become a question of who has the most money to throw at AI processing.

I think the relevant question that might allay your fear is: why do people make art?

The industry that produces commercial art is absolutely on the chopping block, because in commercial art it's the result that's important, not the process. Such art is effectively a commodity, and barriers to the effective synthesis thereof have already been in the process of whittling away for centuries. I think you may be over-indexing on this category, but please correct me if I'm mis-assuming.

"True" (for lack of a better word) Art is the expression of self. It's an action or process that's captured in some sensory medium. That doesn't go away.

Imagine an artisan who forges handmade sculptures from horseshoes, which were obtained from the farm that she grew up in, themselves forged by her grandfather and worn by the horses in her mother's stable. There is something of herself , her family, and the loved they shared that's in the sculpture. It isn't the most hedonistically-perfect visual sculpture imaginable, but it brings you joy to see it because there's a narrative behind it.

AI does not make stuff like this go away. It actually frees more people to become these imbue-ers of meaning, if they are so inclined.

AI could describe the sculpture, AI could produce a digital facsimile, and maybe even eventually reforge the metal itself. But it can't imbue it with meaning like a human does. Unless you believe the AI itself is authentically capable of such a thing on equal footing to a human, which I think is still a "victory" for art, albeit a distinct one.

The concern is that the reasons people _want_ to make art are not the same as the reasons people choose to make art their profession. Specifically, they want to make art for the sort of reasons you mention. And most of those people have to choose to make commercial art if they want to have a decent living while also having the time to make some sort of art.

It is glossing over so much of the important detail to say "[AI] actually frees more people..." We live in a capitalist system. It frees the holders of capital. Anyone reasonably likely to profit from AI is likely to already be immensely privileged, given the costs of training and attendant centralization and barriers to entry. If they wanted to make horseshoes they would already FIRE and forget it.

> AI does not make stuff like this go away. It actually frees more people to become these imbue-ers of meaning, if they are so inclined.

Yeah, but in that very example I feel the value and narrative behind it is in the memory of the grandfather's toil. When we no longer toil, there will be no horse shoes for our grandchildren to make sculptures of.

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