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Comment by Papazsazsa | Hacker News Reader

Curation is the uncrossable moat for AGI/ASI as an inherently human-to-human behavior.

Trends, tastes, and language evolve in real time, driven by social signaling, novelty bias, and the human instinct for signaling to preserve individuality and status within a group and against the algorithm. One need only rabbit hole down various corners of the internet to see this, but its even more pronounced in personal fashion, indie bookstores and art galleries, and even inside people's homes.

It is immensely gratifying to me because it means humans will always need humans, no matter how hard tech tries.

In trying to financialize, map, or otherwise algorithmically diagnose taste, effort impeaches itself.

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The problem is that the economic forces here aren't nearly as interested in discovering human taste/interests as opposed to causing them.

For them, the lack of authenticity is not a bug, but a feature.

You're not wrong, but eventually they'll run out of old ideas or consumers will grow tired of them. See Marvel/superhero burnout. The macrocycle will force the microcycle back into gear.

>immensely gratifying to me because it means humans will always need humans

Just to confirm, this is sarcasm, right? It's hard to tell, and it's terrifying to me that so many people don't comprehend this as a basic fact at least by grade school.

Also, is it still gratifying if humans won't have other humans? Curation is harder to come by than ever before because it's less profitable. What is gratifying about that???

Not sarcasm.

My comment is a reaction to this idea that a ChatGPT-generated image has the same value as one done by a Picasso. It's still art and it still can have artistic value, but it'll never possess the intangibles carried by, say, Guernica.

I think curation, in the age of procedurally-generated content, will be one of the most gratifying or at least profitable jobs to have. It already is, if you think about it; film studio heads, music producers like Rick Rubin, Anna Wintour/Vogue, and the MoMA... all wield curatorial power (for better or for worse).

But about half of the human population objectively does not and will never care about those intangibles.

"about half" "objectively"

Profit and income are two different things. Jobs make income, not profit.

Aggregate profit and income from curation (both) have dropped off a cliff, so I'm not sure what your point is. Of course a select few will always be rewarded by the wealthy for hand-made delicacies, including curation, and the demand will correlate with wealth accumulation but remain scarce. There is nothing new or novel about it either way.

> Curation is the uncrossable moat for AGI/ASI as an inherently human-to-human behavior.

Infinite context models will understand everything about your life. Combined with real-time lookup of all content ever created alongside the ability to generate new content on demand, curation seems destined to be solved.

Please tell me this is sarcasm. I mean, I know people love to extrapolate current LLM capabilities into arbitrary future capabilities via magical thinking, but "infinite context" really takes the cake.

If that's true it would be a sad outcome, I believe people would react against such an artificial world.

In a music DJ context: even if an AI was able to mimic the dopest turntablist moves and factor in layers of depth and groove and create unique mixes, it would still be an artificial mix made by AI, and so not as valuable or worthwhile as a human DJ. That doesn't mean that AI DJs or musicians won't be successful, they just won't be human and can never be human, and that means something.

This will never happen without the destruction of the individual.

Humans will simply opt out and create their own islands of ideology or taste, and have been doing exactly that for millennia.

An extreme minority of irrelevant humans. You're talking about the information-economy equivalent of swearing off money and going to forage berries in the woods.

Quantify that

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