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Comment by frankfrankfrank | Hacker News Reader

In another 50 years the condition of Venice will be a footnote in the ledger of systemic problems that bring everything to a halt.

The system, the organism or ecosystem of European civilization world wide is rotting and collapsing right before our very eyes. We are witness to the Technology Age Collapse, whether people can or want to see it or not. That will have consequences for everything and everyone, including Venice.

AI cannot create any of the things that formed the European civilization that produced and maintained everything we all have, like computers, electricity, communications, transportation, flight, etc. AI can copy, emulate, and automate; it cannot create harmonious and finely humanly tuned things. It would never have created the works of art and architecture, let alone the technologies to produce everything in order to solve specific human problems.

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> AI can copy, emulate, and automate; it cannot create harmonious and finely humanly tuned things. It would never have created the works of art and architecture

I have yet to see evidence that this kind of assertion will age any better than the famous 64kB quote. True, AI can't create masterpieces today, but claiming it will never match humans feels more like emotional wishful thinking.

You meant Bill Gates’ 640KB, or is this related to the Commodore 64?

a ‘masterpiece’ is a very subjective term. Most are viewed as such not because of some objectively measurable quality but because of their uniqueness/originality (at the time) and context. In that regard it’s hard to imagine AI could achieve that until it became very good at imitating humans.

claiming it will match humans feels more like emotional wishful thinking

It's basically a religious argument that realistically can only hold if there is something in the brain which violates known physics and allows for a category of computation that isn't just different, but different enough to be impossible to emulate within known physics.

Otherwise the brain can't compute anything a computer can't (eventually) emulate.

Maybe it's possible - as an atheist I find that near impossible to imagine, but I won't entirely dismiss the possibility, but I doubt it.

Does anyone else miss the days where we could browse HN comments without some tangent about AI on every fucking story?

Uhm, all of the technologies you mention were developed by a web of humans far larger and more diverse than "European civilization." This reads very poorly.

> let alone the technologies to produce everything in order to solve specific human problems

not just technologies, but policies, education, mindsets. The goal is to make people switch from a high environmental impact to a low one. You don't need much technologies to get a bicycle rather than a heavy hence polluting vehicle. The situation we are now is just the result of many many smaller ones

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