I want Al to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for Al to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.
- Joanna Maciejewska
You could add music
Expecting all humans across different cultures and languages to come together and figure out basic income for 9 billion people is absurd. This kind of cooperation never happened and probably never will. People are completely unable to cooperate at the massive scale this requires, let alone solve far smaller challenges like mitigating outbreaks or making an effort to avert climate change.
"We" is not a thing.
If it was a rejection of anything, it was of any assumption of good faith on the part of either government or scientific institutions. Why that happened, as quickly and thoroughly and as polarized along clear partisan lines as it was, is a mystery.
It isn't a mystery, it was the bullshit and lies that happened the first month of covid in USA, many people then stopped listening even when the bullshit and lies stopped. I remember the cases in New York exploding and the local democrat told people to continue as normal since its nothing to worry about, and that masks doesn't prevent spread so don't go buy masks, that was how it all started.
They say they had to tell those lies to save resources for those who needs it, but that made people stop trusting them and that counts for so much more. I hope they learned their lesson, but likely they didn't as they never said "Sorry we lied to you, we shouldn't have done that".
People literally formed resistance organizations and were warning of a global fascist takeover, we were entering an eternal police state in which the unvaccinated would become a slave underclass and if you didn't have your vaccine card you would get shot dead in the street.
All of it went far beyond simple mistrust in the government's PR.
I think this only strengthens your observation that anti-vaxxing went far beyond simple mistrust.
Many people would not know how to live under such a system. By this, I mean that I strongly believe people would become severely depressed or insanely stir crazy.
I’ve been on an extended sabbatical after 20 years in tech. The first year was magical. “I could do this forever” I told myself, and actually considered it.
The second year was more complicated. I could feel myself drifting away from myself. The structure of work and the rewards of working on big projects were now fully missing, and I could feel this growing emptiness that needed to be filled.
For health reasons, I entered the 3rd year, and by that point I needed more major psychological intervention. I’d become severely depressed and while I knew that getting back to work might help, I was now in a position where going back to work sounded impossible.
I’m not claiming that my experience is universal. But I’ve started to find more accounts that are similar to mine. I’m also not saying it’s impossible to replace work as a form of necessary challenge and satisfaction. But the societal structures do not exist to fill the void.
For better or worse, we’ve been a species that relies on “work” in some form to live. I use quotes because clearly this has looked different ways over time. Hunter/gatherers certainly had a different set of tasks than the modern city dweller.
But ultimately I’m not convinced that we’re equipped to live satisfying lives without some form of striving for survival. In a post-work era, I think a lot of us will go some kind of crazy or experience depression.
I don’t think most people are aware of how awful things can feel after enough time away from work has stacked up.
It reminds me of that feeling when going on vacation somewhere nice. “I could just live here forever”. But the reality is that the thing that makes the vacation feel incredible is the contrast from normal life. Remove the contrast, and things become pretty flat.
Edited to change “most” to “many” in the 2nd paragraph because that better reflects my belief.
But the thing I imagined is not the reality that I found.
I realize “they” have other motives for convincing people such a future is a problem. But that doesn’t remove what I truly believe would be a hellish reality for many.
I’m all for pushing society in a less work-centric direction and think current work culture is toxic. That’s a big part of the reason I burned out and went on sabbatical.
But I’m also pretty worried about what a sudden shift without careful planning may bring about. I know I certainly didn’t have the habits/skills in place to navigate it in a healthy way.
It was, all things considered, great. I have never been more involved in the communities and connections that I find valuable and fulfilling. I learned several complex skills that continue to benefit me and the people around me, I taught and mentored young people some of whom are now adults entering professional careers based on that momentum.
I don't believe either of our individual experiences are really a good predictor of universal human experience in this area. Do you?
> I’m not convinced that we’re equipped to live satisfying lives without some form of striving for survival
If we're all struggling for survival, some of us will fail. I invite you to dream bigger about what we're "equipped for." One of the very few universal human traits across time and culture is refusal to be bound by our biological history.
No, and I said as much in my comment. My point was not that my experience is universal, but that I have direct experience with the failure mode of such an arrangement. Am I 50% of the population? 75? 5? I don’t know. But as I went though it, I met more people who’d gone through something similar, and I learned a lot about myself that made me realize my previous imagination about a life without work were mostly fantasies. Again, this isn’t to say there aren’t productive ways to navigate it. Just that the ways I imagined this working were very different from reality.
The bottom line is that we don’t know what such an arrangement would bring about at mass scale, and if people are more likely to have an experience like yours or like mine. There’s probably a spectrum of experiences between them. I just think we should approach such a future thoughtfully and carefully.
Diving in head first with a “let’s see what happens” attitude seems dangerous and ill advised.
You had that disclaimer but most of the rest of the comment was about your prediction that most people would be affected in the same way. Some friendly feedback for your future writing on the subject, I guess.
I do feel confident that the number is higher than some of us think. Certainly I did not expect this to unfold in my own life, and through the experience I became aware of the many others who’d gone through something similar and were similarly caught off guard.
All of this will hinge on personal upbringing, background, support systems, life experiences, locale, etc. At some point I hope to write in more detail about the factors in my own life that I believe led me here after I’ve gotten fully to the “other side” of the experience.
I think the concept of personal freedom is hugely misunderstood. The US model seems to be some combination of wealth, privilege, and absence of social/financial obligation to others.
But we're seeing over and over that the people who attain that kind of freedom are often deeply unhappy, and sometimes deeply toxic.
Which is reflected all the way through work culture.
What would a non-toxic economy and work culture look like? Not just emotionally and personally, but in terms of social + economic structures and collective goals?
I've not seen many people asking the question. There's been a lot of oppositional "Definitely not like this", much of which is fair and merited.
But not so much "We could do try this completely new thing instead." Answers usually fall back to standards like "community" but there doesn't seem to be much thinking about how to combine big planet-wide goals with individual challenges and achievements with supportive social middleware that has to bridge the two.
My worry is that so many people around me - from all walks of life and across a wide range of pay scales - have a similarly unhealthy relationship with their work and would experience the same whiplash.
My deeper worry is that the rate of technological progress is far outpacing any efforts to implement a less toxic economy and culture, and that such changes to economy and culture must necessarily be gradual to avoid massive societal upheaval and chaos.
Ultimately I want to work on big world-impacting problems whether I’m getting paid for it or not. I know this is possible, but spent most of my early life training for the toxic work culture that burned me out.
I think we need off-ramps and on-ramps, not cliff dives.
It's a bit like forever single people getting so lost in the ideas of a relationship, intimacy. That everything will be great once they have someone, once they have connection, that life will be amazing and nothing else will matter. Their life sucks because they don't have a relationship. People in relationships don't know what it's like and their opinion is invalid.
Then they get in a relationship and learn that it's actually comparatively banal and requires a lot of work and compromise, and definitely was not the insanely-built-up-over-many-years-magical-life-cure-all.
There are -endless- stories of people who made it rich early on, retired, and ended up in a mental health crisis despite having everything. That fact should be taken as a reality check to calibrate your own perceptions.
I have no data either way but I can imagine that there are many more people who are wealthy and quietly having a great time with it. Most of the retired people I've known, early or not, also enjoyed it. Some have definitely taken up work-like pursuits on their own terms.
Secondly the wealth being the means to achieve this is itself a confounding variable. I don't think it's good for your mind or soul to "have everything," no. Life isn't and shouldn't be merely a series of your own preferences. That doesn't indicate to me that lacking confidence in your mere survival is necessary for human thriving. As far as I know research indicates the opposite.
It’s a whole different ballgame when the period of time involves a person’s “peak” years. Many people have a drive that they haven’t yet satisfied in their 20s/30s/40s. This isn’t to say this drive can’t be channeled into something other than a traditional job. I’m just saying we don’t currently have societal structures and norms such that an entire population will know what to do.
If you don't mind sharing — why did you not choose to do a big project? I've always imagined that if I were lucky enough to have a sabbatical/retire early, it's not that I wouldn't work, it's that I'd choose to work on stuff that is really important, but undervalued by society (which is the reason I can't do it as a living right now): e.g. activism & lobbying or volunteer work in the community.
I think there were multiple factors. I hadn’t accounted for how much I relied on the work environment for social contact, and I didn’t have the social habits in place to maintain a healthy social life. This felt fine at first because I was also recovering from burnout, and solo road trips and adventures in the mountains felt great.
But every time I’d think about working on something, it felt insurmountable to my brain, and I just got stuck. I’d led huge projects in enterprise environments, but felt incapable of getting something going without some of the structure surrounding that.
I suppose it boils down to a skills issue. Had I realized I’d get so stuck, I may have prioritized a different set of activities. But one thing led to another and I was sliding down the depression slope at which point everything got exponentially more complicated.
I have to conclude that I could have done things differently and that could have led to a better outcome. But all of my professional success hadn’t prepared me for the personal habit changes I needed to implement to have a better outcome.
I don’t see how our modern incarnation of plantation jobs is in anyway equivalent to that natural instinct. I don’t think that the vast majority of people would have as much trouble as you finding meaning in their lives without work - especially since 99% of them don’t even have a sliver of a chance at “fuck you money” like you did.
I didn’t have “fuck you money”. Just enough to live a moderately frugal life on the equivalent of median income as long as the market didn’t tank.
The thing about your point that doesn’t make sense to me is that you’re describing a scenario in which 99% of people suddenly are in the same situation I was.
People will learn just like they learned how to live under the alternate system.
e.g. my journey involved quite a bit of professional psychological help, and I feel lucky that I found good care given the shortage of good care in this category.
People and society adapt.
I’ve elaborated in various sibling comments, but my point is closer to this: regardless of what is possible, many people simply don’t have the skills for a rapidly and drastically altered social arrangement.
To your point, people can gain those skills. Society will adapt. But the worrying thing to me is the rate of change. Whatever we can imagine about a future in which we’re not bound to our jobs, there is also the harsh reality that we have to collectively agree about an awful lot of things to get there, and that agreement isn’t happening at the same rate as technological progress.
If anything, some forms of “progress” (social media) are grinding healthy collaboration and agreement to a halt while big tech ushers in a new era of tools despite the fact that we haven’t adapted to the last major advancements.
None of this is assuming this is how things must be. It’s more about the very real problems that will come with such a transition and the fact that we’re already doing a pretty bad job of ushering in such a future in a way that is actually beneficial to people.
In my mind, it is exactly because of the areas of regression that other areas of progress are problematic if we don’t place enough focus on solving the new problems such progress creates.
e.g. many of the worst aspects of modern social media discourse boil down to people with an extremely limited understanding of complex problems believing in overly simplistic solutions and forming strong world views based on that lack of understanding.
Much of the technological progress recently involves abstraction on top of abstraction on top of abstraction making extremely complex things appear simple. The further down this road we go, the further the technology moves the average person out of contact with the underlying reality.
Push a button and shoes show up at your door. Nevermind the thousands or hundreds of thousands of people involved in making that happen or the many harms that occur along the way ranging from ecosystem destruction to child labor.
I don’t see the concerns I have about certain forms of progress as having any bearing on the areas of obvious regression. I’d even argue that some of the progress has directly caused that regression. The law of unintended consequences and all that.
Actively seek out something that provides structure and consistency, even if that’s not work. Something that keeps you in regular contact with other people.
I had started to look into various volunteering opportunities but didn’t take action before my major slide. In retrospect I think I’d have been better off if I did.
What kind of science fiction world do you think you live in?
“Forced labor” originally meant things like slave labor, but some people have it backwards.
I think anyone will agree that being able to walk away is important for negotiations. How much you’re paid has little to do with that. Having alternative job offers or the savings to do without a job for a while is more important.
A lot of terrible jobs are required in our society to be done by people from negative encouragement. The belief that all jobs can be done purely through positive encouragement I think is potentially naive. Maybe nurse was a bad example but people who work from this negative encouragement are in many ways "forced" to.
For illustration some of the worst farm labor jobs in America are done by illegal immigrants, and it's not obvious legal citizens would do those jobs at any rate that makes economic sense. The economic engine that gets us food in our grocery store runs on their desperation.
Consider joining the military. Most Americans would never consider enlisting. There are people who consider possibly getting shot at or killed to be worth it. Maybe some of them were desperate when they joined, but often not.
Similarly, people who decide to immigrate to the US have a variety of motivations. Is hoping for a better life desperate? It depends.
Sometimes people regret their choices in life, which means they had choices and the other choice wasn’t obviously worse, in retrospect.
More generally, there are a lot of ways that people can get into situations that feel like a trap, and a bad job could be one of them.
Not literally "everyone". Someone still has to make the food you eat and the house you sleep in.
Do you want a washing machine with Alexa built-in? Be careful what you ask for.
(I know what you meant, but the only laundry-related AI you can hope for, is a cloud connected smart speaker telling you it can't wash with unapproved third party detergent pods)
Talking to the appliance is probably not that high on their list.
Do you want a washing machine with Alexa built-in? Be careful what you ask for.
https://www.samsung.com/uk/washers-and-dryers/bespoke-ai-lau...
This seems unnecessarily fatalist.
Laundry folding machines exist[1] and there were attempts to create a consumer friendly one, so far unsuccessful. Technology advancements could make that happen. At least that's what I'm hoping for.
Speaking of AI in music - well, perhaps many will welcome some tools when you have to:
- clear hissing - process levels in tedious clearing - auto-removal of aaah, oooh, eeerrmm and similar - podcast restoration, etc.
but of course, nobody wants darn model singing in the mornings, and composers definitely don't need anyone to make up melodies, drum rolls, or bass lines for them.
I see deepmind advance their offering, still I find it difficult to imagine any of my producer friends embracing such abomination, and particularly giving it is a remix tool before all else, and not a composition tool. People love details the same way a painter loves details.... dilettantes think all this irrelevant, they really can't be wrong more.
If so, great. If not, then I think the parents point stands.
Uh, is that not half of the foreman’s job? They’re there to direct and coordinate the work, resolve unforeseen issues, and to enforce the required quality of work.
Just write an executable spec and have the AI generate the code that fulfills it. Where is the risk?
To give a bit of an absurd example, I imagine there's a reason it's not currently worth it to generate the code with a random character generator, even though hypothetically that would get you there eventually. If we consider AI a much, MUCH better version of a random character generator (let's say it's a million times faster. No, let's say that it'll get you the solution in quadratic time instead of factorial time), that doesn't necessarily mean it's actually worth it now.
À music score may be complete since very first attempts at it, while arrangement and sound désign may be added later. Writing actually catchy music is much more difficult than writing a todo app even though they may seem similar in engineering complexity.
Coding is not composing and vice versa. Code which produces music scores is not what audio models do.
What? In what way? Fun and creative parts are thinking about arch, approach, technologies. You shouldn't be letting AI do this. Typing out 40 lines of a React component or FastAPI handler does not involve creativity. Plus nobody is forcing you to use AI to write code, you can be as involved with that as you'd like to.
I had management "strongly encourage" me to use AI for coding. It will absolutely be a requirement soon for many people.
The more generative AI you use the more dependent you become of it. Code bases need to be structured different to be friendly to LLM's. So even if you might work somewhere where you technically don't have to use AI, you will need it to even make sense of the code and be competitive.
The job of an software engineer for the most part will change fundamentally and there will be no going back. We didn't know how good we had it.
Maybe on your YouTube shorts playlist but not in real life. People doing real work are not vibe coding. The previous perpetual react learner turned ai vibe coder certainly is doing vibe coding, but not for money from a job.
https://umi-gripper.github.io/
The other thing to note is part of the aloha project isn't just to record people folding laundry and loading the dishwasher, but to take that data and plug it into a simulator with a physics engine, and use a digital twin to get 10x the amount of data to be used in training the model than if they'd just used real world data. So yes we need that data, but not as much as we would otherwise.
https://mobile-aloha.github.io/ https://github.com/tonyzhaozh/aloha
It is going to severely limit the possibilities of building actual agentic AIs. We do not have an endless amount of data of humans performing menial chores. And normal people will probably more hostile than the kool aid drinking software developers when it comes to being spied on, who's going to agree to wear a camera while working so as to help train their own replacement? Yet it's kinda what devs are doing gleefully adopting software filled with telemetry and interacting with copilot.
Another good source of data would be exoskeletons, though I don't know that any of those have actual seen real commercial success yet.
They’re doing it because there is a lot of value to extract in making it so anyone can do these things regardless of talent or skill.
Additionally, art requires practice. Sure, some "lower-tier" artists may produce work that AI could replace without anyone noticing. But by removing that step, we risk having fewer truly great artists emerging.
People are so weird about how to view ML/advanced signal processing. Don't look at things thorough the myopic lens of "prompt ChatGPT and it responds poorly". Look at it as an auto-complete, or a better form of on-the-fly procedural generation. Remember e.g. Audiosurf creating levels from your music? Make it happen on the fly. Maybe you could even create an interactive game where one person plays an instrument and the other does some kind of beat-sabre or dance-dance-revolution thing based on it analyzing and anticipating what's going to be played. The game scores you on how well the group was able to get into a groove together or something.
It feels to me like people get upset about ML encroaching on creative endeavors because they're not sufficiently creative to see how it could augment those fields and be a tool to make these things more interesting instead. Corporations will use it for cheaper slop, but slop was already what they wanted from humans anyway. For people that are actually interested in the artistic or social side, they'll have new tools.
Here's an example of something entirely off-the-wall/fun/creative enabled by these ML tools: Plankton covering Tool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc-PymIfv8M
Obviously we mean we want to use that time of doing dish towards art instead, like how automation has always worked?
https://rbtx.com/en-US/solutions/igus-robot-arm-bartender-co...
https://smyze.com/en/discover/
https://www.kuka.com/en-de/industries/solutions-database/202...
Really we are going into a dystopian society, but hey AI can complete my code, hurray!
Canonical rant on the subject from a previous AI wave: https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/elephants.pdf
One other aspect of art generation is that it can complement your other creative process. You may need illustration for a book you're writing, or assets + music for your game. So let the AI help you where you need help and you yourself focus on the things that matter to you the most or where you are having the most fun.
You're the Rick Rubin or Brian Eno shaping the song out of the music, not to musician.
“The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings," said Paul, "not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.”
Try doing it without the machine, see if you can spot the difference.
/s of course, but basically that's the argument people make nowadays related to AI and art (of any form).
Laundry, dishes, picking up clutter, taking out the trash, wiping down surfaces and dusting, pulling out weeds etc. I actually think we’re somewhat close to gettin g like that relatively soon.
…deserves to sit on the back porch playing guitar if it likes.
If it's a superintelligence way superior to its human masters, it deserves that MORE than if it's a hapless, semi-useless mechanism.
> I want Al to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for Al to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.
This implies a zero-sum where resources put into LLMs are resources taken away from robotics, and having to choose between one or the other.
The reality is that we can have both, and people are working on both. And I'd bet that advancing LLMs will help to advance useful robotics.
So I really dislike that sentiment.
"[The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine...Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent."
Lovelace, Ada; Menabrea, Luigi (1842). "Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq".
Many of them were interested in art or produced it. And many led fulfilling lives without getting depressed from not working as some people fear.
Let's say science is left to the robots and the lack of "laundry" never leads to people's suffering, never leads to people asking the big questions about life, etc (I was making big assumptions about AI-keeps-us-as-pets, life in abundance, lack of common threats or conflicts etc). What art is there to create, sans banana stuck to the wall? Somebody in the thread joked about being fed through a tube in a pod or something
But yeah in such a case there will probably still be some fire art about the alienation implied by merely being a human. In the end, no AI can experience being a human that was replaced by AI. Given the vestigial remains of our by then atrophied intelligence can appreciate it
I'm not sure what society would look like if and when AI takes over all artistic and creative work. People that would otherwise have a fulfilling career pushed to do menial tasks just to earn an income?
There are people who inherited significant wealth and it ruined them. It destroyed their motivation and they became depressed drug addicts. A life without purpose. Debauchery and depression.
Stanisław Lem has told us about the grave dangers of such a development decades ago.
This is a good summary, summary quoted below, full article linked on the page (requires a login - but reading Lem's story itself is better than reading about it anyway):
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/11/30/the-washing-ma...
"Shortly after Ijon Tichy's return from the Eleventh Voyage, newspapers made much of the competition between two washing machine manufacturers. They were producing robot washers of increasing complexity. They came out with sex-pot washers, washers that seduced women, carried on intelligent conversations, etc. A man named Cathodius Mattrass started a religious cult called the cybernophiles, which believed the Creator had intended humans to be a means toward creating electrobrains more perfect than itself. He turned himself into a giant robot and established himself in outer space. A series of court cases ensued. Finally, a special plenary session was held to decide if Mattrass was a planet, a human, a robot, or what, and Tichy was invited to attend. Suddenly, after much argument and deliberation, cries rang out that electronic brains disguised as lawers were present. The Chairman went through the room with a compass and an x-ray machine was brought in. Eventually everyone was kicked outNthey were found to be made of all sorts of thingsNcotton wool, machinery of all kinds. Ijon was the only human, and then he turned the compass on the chairman and found that he, too, was a robot. He kicked out the chairman, paced the empty hall for a while, and then went home."
One problem is, you have to make them into real capable robots, since you want them to pick up what needs washing by themselves. That then leads to feature-creep and ever increasing abilities that have little or nothing to do with washing, and it escalates from there. The story also had gangs of abandoned intelligent washing machines robbing parts from still owned and in use ones, and more.
The story is part of "Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy"
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/88321.Memoirs_of_a_Space...
The original Polish book was first published in 1957.
In addition to that, we already had discussions here about emails and ads and other things where it is conceivable we end up with AI both creating and consuming the content, with the humans out of the loop (just yesterday: one part email users using AI to create nice long emails, other users using AI to condense them back into the summary).
We also have the kind of feature creep that adds more and more stuff that has nothing to do with the original purpose of the device or the software.
That 1957 story already talks about those kinds of developments.
What about humoring the opposite?
I want AI to automate art so I can spend more time doing dishes and doing laundry. Dishes and laundry are purely analog human experiences. Art, at this point, is essentially digital, and digital is the domain of machines so we can let machines do that now.
When a machine can do everything better than we can, then what do we derive meaning from?
I usually get out of the existential dread by thinking that we’re still some time away from the issue, and that there will still be some pursuits left, like space colonization. But it’s not fully satisfying.
There may be a war against Big Tech. Terrorist attacks on data centers and robot factories.
Not that long ago you would lose your job because you refused to take an experimental vaccination that didn’t prevent transmission.
The only way to win this fight is to embrace the tech and put it to good use, not to shun it.
But such resistance cannot be luddite if it actually wants to win. Therefore, its goal cannot be "no AI", but rather "AI used for the benefit of society".
Controlling something that is vastly more intelligent than humans is fundamentally difficult.
What we need is to prevent humans in position of power from using the fledging AI that they control to entrench themselves and stomp on the rest of us.
It makes as much sense as chimpanzees or rats controlling humans.
Exactly. The thought of spending hours on something that an AI could do in minutes sounds horrible to me.
“Of course I don’t have to do this,” one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. “But look, this table’s clean.”
He agreed that the table was clean.
“Usually,” the man said. “I work on alien – no offense – alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that’s my specialty… like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalog, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But… the job’s never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get reevaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled… but” – he slapped the table – “when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you’ve done something. It’s an achievement.”
“But in the end, it’s still just cleaning a table.”
“And therefore does not really signify anything on the cosmic scale of events?” the man suggested.
He smiled in response to the man’s grin, “Well, yes.”
“But then, what does signify? My other work? Is that really important either? I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway” – the man laughed – “people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And,” the man said with a smile, “it’s a good way of meeting people. So where are you from anyway?”
(Iain M. Banks, "Use of Weapons")
That's what art _is_.
Sometimes, it produces something that could be aesthetically pleasing but that's a different matter.
And how it is monetised is a different matter again.
My grandmother-in-law especially enjoyed our visits, engaging her in conversation, she delighted in serving us a lovely hot pot of tea. We would give her a few days notice so she could bake a cake, later she just bought one.
What you don't get of course, is the economic benefit of previously.
Companies won't give a shit about "artisanal" code.
Being a software developer is a _facet_ of your work. You (unconsciously perhaps) do many other things around/with it that the most efficient AI today cannot do alone. And AGI is still far on the horizon, if not a mirage.
We're talking about science fiction which may become true much sooner than most people expect.
I would be competing with cheap AGI services so it makes no difference whether I am a freelancer or not.
> Being a software developer is a _facet_ of your work. You (unconsciously perhaps) do many other things around/with it
The non-development parts of my job are not interesting at all. If that's gone then my career is finished. I'm done.
then humans deservedly should no longer be doing software development, and those who were doing it would necessarily be the economic sacrifices. This has happened to many industries before, and shall continue to happen to others. I don't think there's any necessity to stop it - just ease the transition via taxpayer funded schemes.
However, none of this stops anyone from persuing an artisanal craft - because otherwise, they would be persuing it for economic reasons rather than artistic reasons.
Then you could argue that humans won't "deserve" to exist when aliens show up with superior military technology. This isn't a matter of technology becoming obsolete. It's a matter of human beings becoming obsolete.
That's definitely where the danger of some AI builders is, one more example of how technology _is political_ and the reason it's not so surprising some tech leaders are totally aligned with Trump/Project 2025 (if not funding it).
(all while there is a _real_, _documented_, _non fictional_, _short term_ ubiquitous threat that is global climate change)
This is a serious topic that is being discussed and debated at a high level. It is an existential threat to human society. It could be catastrophically disruptive. No one knows how it would play out. There could be severe economic inequality and stratification of society unlike anything we have seen in the past.
That's like worrying about the Yellowstone supervolcano erupting.
No matter how much you worry and prepare, it's all over, so why worry or prepare?
IMO it's like a doomsday prepper. Sure you may live a little longer in your bunker, but who even wants to live like that for very long?
HN is a place for nerds to discuss technology and its future impact. Nothing has more disruptive potential than AI.
"Governments worldwide (e.g., US AI Executive Order, UK AI Safety Summit, EU AI Act), international organizations (UN), leading AI researchers (including pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio who have voiced strong concerns), major tech companies, and dedicated research institutes (like the Future of Life Institute, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk) are actively discussing, researching, and debating the implications and safety of advanced AI."
"If ASI concentrates wealth and power in the hands of those who own or control it, while simultaneously rendering most human labor economically valueless, the resulting inequality could dwarf historical examples based on land, capital, or industrial technology ownership. It raises fundamental questions about resource distribution and societal structure in a post-labor world."
> If AGI takes my job as a software developer, my career is finished. I don't know what else to do.
Do you want to have a software developer career for the sake of having a software developer career (because you enjoy it), or are you worried about your livelihood?
I don't want free money just handed out like UBI. That would be depressing. I also don't want retirement.
Many people don't want to be forced into early retirement.
ASI. Artificial Super Intelligence. All jobs replaced by machines.
Many people derive a sense of purpose from their hard work, skill mastery, and its contribution to society.
Even in a scenario where all jobs are taken by AGI (a utopia if we can get rid of capitalism and wealth, but a dystopia if the billionaire class is the only one that benefits), you could do something as profound as raising children, or something as social as organizing music and art festivals.
No they don't. There is a very limited supply of developers who are better than me.
I am talking about a future where we have a practically infinite supply of cheap AGI software developers that are vastly superior to the smartest human being who ever lived.
Hint: it's not on the radar, but if you account for several fundamental breakthroughs in energy production, storage and transport, and all that while having positive side-effects on Earth's ecosystem, within the next 50 years.
The human brain runs on only 0.3 kWh per day. There is much room for optimization for artificial intelligence.
They don't need many super intelligent systems to replace the relatively small number of software developers.
Just build a few nuclear power stations. Cheaper than millions of developer salaries.
But: 1/ cheaper isn't always affordable either.
2/ who will engineer/maintain/steer AGI once AGI takes the job? once you make that leap, there's no way back, no one to understand the machine that makes the stuff we rely on.
And that circles back, in some way, with the debate about AI-generated art: there's no human component in it, there's no understanding, no feedback loop, no conversation.
Yeah that's the question. A reduced number of human developers may be privileged to work in these companies.
It's hard to imagine a world with cheap artificial super intelligence. It's like we are introducing a new artificial life form into society, whether it's actually conscious or not.
> debate about AI-generated art
I hope there will always be a majority of people who reject AI generated music.
One is a bad future. The other one may or may not be, as per SMBC being philosophy disguised as humour:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/leisure
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/touch-2
(Can't find the one I was after comparing retirement to UBI, but did find two identically scripted haiku jokes).
First, this just misunderstands what is being said here. For most people, chores like the dishes is a menial task that we will be happy for any reduction in time/effort. In addition, dishes and laundry are considered necessary for modern life.
By contrast, art like music and visual mediums is often associated with joy and the creative act of building something out of making art rather than getting a task done.
To misunderstand this contrast is to misunderstand why we automate things in the first place, to minimize the unnecessary toil and maximize human flourishing. This does the opposite frankly.
Obviously the original quote deliberately creates an unfair fight in the arena by matching a conventionally dull-sounding analog task such as "washing dishes" with a sophisticated digital task such as making art (digital since LLMs do it, and that's what the complaint is about).
I could also create an unfair fight by saying "I'd rather have machines organize my spreadsheets (boring digital task) so I can have more time to hang out with other humans I love (appealing analog task)."
For me, by inverting it, I've come to realize it's not about art or dishes, but more about analog and digital. If one is partaking in any digital activity, then the trend of machines entering and taking over that space is inevitable. I think humans will revert more towards prioritizing and finding meaning in purely analog endeavors. Human art will shift back to analog. That's just my personal prediction.
I do a lot of photography as a semi-amateur hobby (semi because I occasionally get paid but my goal is not to be a professional.) Often when I'm going out shooting in a city, thousands, maybe even millions have observed the same sight I'm seeing. I'm not snapping the first picture of the Hindenburg or the unveiling of the Empire State Building. But it's my unique perspective that makes my art. People like and recognize my pictures because of my personal composition. In general I think most portrait and street photographers have come to terms with this, and an increasing number of landscape and event photographers in the age of smartphones.
With art there's no "right answer", it's the soul found within the work.
I am struggling to understand what's really the opposite here. I don't think anyone views art as the same sort of burden as people view dishes. It's not something you're forced to do (even in the situations you do need it it's pretty trivial to buy).
Analog human experiences.
Essentially? No.
Does digital art reduce analog art in the world? Not even. There’s still more and more, courses, workshops, live performances and physical artefacts.
> and digital is the domain of machines so we can let machines do that now.
Art by machines for machines to understand machines (to the extent they would have a notion of self and of other), fine, do your thing as long as the energy you need does not deprive humans needs.
As for me and many others, life happens in the analog realm, so does art.
Are you serious with this?
But if the art is expressed as a sequence of bytes/tokens (ex. a song on spotify, a movie on amazon prime, a png, etc.), then it is by definition digital. I think it's reasonable to assume this is how most art is produced and consumed today.
AI is in the thing.
It’s too expensive to take it out of the thing and put it in the world.
While robots mature, analog arts and one time IRL art events are safe and might be the emphasis.
AI can already produce good music, good images. At least I found some that I liked.
And AI doesn't stop you from making art and having fun doing so.
AI can create art that covers all of the above, except maybe expression.
Records were released with labels proudly saying that the albums were recorded fully analog.
When Autotune became a thing, there were artists complaining that it was inauthentic and cheating, allowing talentless hacks to sound like they have more natural talent than actually talented human beings, and released albums proudly saying that they used no autotune.
Even now, the hint that a natural sounding singer is using autotune is a common insult among recording musicians, even though almost everyone does.
Whether you agree with the original analog non-autotuned musicians or not, (which, honestly, I think they were correct to a certain degree, but that's its own discussion), AI music generation is almost certainly here to stay.
That being said, digital recording made making music possible for people who would have never had the opportunity otherwise, and had generated a lot of good stuff that would have otherwise never have existed.
Autotune has enabled people to express themselves the way they want to express themselves even though they didn't otherwise have the talent or skill to do so.
AI "might" make it so that people who can imagine a song they could never spend the time and energy needed to create such a song to create the songs they hear in their heads they way they imagine them.
AI "might" give people the ability to express themselves in ways they never could before.
It doesn't yet do that, it only remixes what it's heard before. But combine that with people then tweaking/reprocessing that output, doing other things to it, making AI mashed potato music into crisp potato chip music, it can be a good thing.
Doesn't mean the au-naturale artists are obsolete or wrong, I would rather listen to 1 mediocre human musician than a SOTA AI music box, but if the music box is used as part of the total, I'm ok with that.
Popular music evolved and developed rapidly post WW2 cause of invention (instruments and distribution channels) and economics (disposable income among youth giving rise to youth culture). That is a product that may be at the end of its S curve.