It’s hard to believe this is what you got from my post.
> No matter if AI can draw better pictures, there will still be people drawing pictures because they just enjoy drawing pictures.
I’m really not so sure. Maybe some will, but the overwhelming majority of people will not want to dedicate time and energy to learning a craft that is completely futile in the end.
> I enjoy programming, even when I know there are better programmers out there than me.
Yes, but at least programming now has a point. I’m sure you have experienced the joy of making something that didn’t exist before, that took effort to create, and that helped you or someone else, even if another person could have done it faster. Would you get the same joy simply re-creating something that an AI can do in seconds? I doubt it.
We’ve had photographs for a long time, and people still do representational art of real places and things; we have superior industrial mass production and people do inferior handicrafts, etc.; we’ve tested your theory extensively and its false.
No, economic demands mean many people can’t do as much of these things as they like because they need to do something that will pay the bills, and demand for those types of crafts is lower than it once was. So, distributional economics is a concern. But will people do things even when there’s a “better” higher-tech way? Yes, absolutely.
Their theory is only technically false. Yes, people still do those things. But how common is it that anyone who isn't independently wealthy actually lives a comfortable life doing that for a living? Practically speaking, no one makes a living doing art or being an artisan of one kind or another.
It feels very much lately like the next decade will see huge swaths of knowledge work made obsolete. And it will feel really self-serving when the people at the helm of that trend tell everyone who's been displaced by it that they just need to adapt or start a technology company like they did.
If you reread the post you are responding to you might note that I mentioned how, while people will freely choose to do those type of “obsolete” crafts, economic forces tend to limit their practical freedom to do so, so that the problem to deal with isn’t automation but distributional economics.
Not that any but a small number of people are “comfortable” as artists even in non-obsolete arts; there tends to be an oversupply of people wanting to do them compared to demand, resulting in a narrow slice of success and a lot of people either struggling or only marginally attached to the art field. So, even outside of marginalization due to technical progress, distributional issues are the constraint.
What??
This is the kind of comment happens when we no longer have yellow pages and business cards and bored kids with nothing to do but stare at them.
I assure you that there are in fact many people making a satisfying and secure living taking photographs and making things.
I’m honestly floored by your comment.
I get tremendous amounts of joy speedrunning Celeste, knowing that a TASbot can do it in a way I will never ever be able to replicate.
I do all my hobbies because I enjoy doing them.
I don’t care how much better a machine is or other people are.
Look at all the people who still play chess for example even though counters are much better than us.
I would still want to go see humans perform live music even if computers can “generate” music.
I can think of endless examples.
By your logic, nobody would ever want to take up running as a hobby either, since no human could ever run as fast as a cheetah.
Chess is still popular, despite AI being able to defeat the best humans.
AI, as it stands, has no agency of thought^ All AI works requires instruction, and that instruction is given by a creative human. So artisans could then become instructors with incredible new abilities afforded by AI tools, or they could just create like the old artisans for the love of creation.
^ If an AI agent did, I would actually consider it to be 'conscious' in the same way Martin Pistorius was conscious but completely immobile.
For most people the point of a hobby is not done in anticipation that they will become the best in the world, but rather just because they like doing it.
> > You want to make it illegal because you think it can replace your job? Should we try to outlaw any type of automation then too, as people lose their jobs over automation as well?
> It’s hard to believe this is what you got from my post.
It's literally the words that you posted, verbatim, and wrote at the start of your comment: You want to effectively ban LLMs & AI as a whole, just because your emotions about it made you want to, with no further justifications as to why it should be illegal. You just feel that it is.
I think I have a grasp on where you're coming from, and here's what I'm feeling: better philosophy, and better general education in philosophy, could be a good solution.
One reason I think this is that for some reason you don't already think everything is completely futile. Because... it is, one could argue. So, maybe you already have a culturally defined reason this is not the case (developed by philosophers, and this includes priests if that's the case for you), or you have undergone a rigid philosophical introspection and determined for yourself why think isn't the case, or, maybe you just haven't thought of it, and when you do, a couple thousand years of philosophical insights will be ready for you to choose why, for you, things aren't futile (even if they are!).
I want to think about this in broader scope though, because to me this is the question at the root of industrialization. I keep asking the people in charge whenever I meet them, "what do we do when automation has driven the value of human labor to pennies?" And nobody ever has an answer. It's a somewhat similar question to "what do we do when we don't have to work to stay alive?" At least, I think it's similar, because there's two answers to both questions, both answers are the same, and both answers could apply today if we didn't prop up artificial scarcity: "Nothing, and, whatever we want."
You mention "creating something that didn't exist before." One of the things that depressed me when I was studying writing, and often depresses young writers, is the realization that one way or the other, all stories have already been written, mostly by shakespeare (or at least, written down by him), or by a couple greeks, or a few rare influxes in the modern era as anthropologists finally started writing down what indigenous cultures have been saying for a few millenia. But that can't be true, right? New, interesting stories get written every year. It's true if you break them down into their requisite parts, basically tokenize the tropes. I mean at some level it's always either Comedy or Tragedy. Clearly though, new stories have value, and meaning, because people spend their time reading them and talking about them, voluntarily.
To bring it back to your analogy, building something that's already been built, can still be valuable to someone, depending on your definition of "already been built" (there's already an code editor, why build another? oh wow this one has modal editing, that is cool) and also because even if it's a very similar copy (as avatar is of pocahontas) there's value in the "flavor," the different taste. Even identical copies can have value: an open source version of a closed source tool with identical APIs. And even if it's a uselessly identical copy, it can have value simply in the effort you put in to build it yourself, such as fools like me that deploy our own email servers, or, repair our own watches, whatever. Of course someone can do it better than me. It's actually kinda stupid for me to do it myself, I might break something. But there's value to me in doing it myself.
Circling all the fuckin way back because I don't know how to stay on topic: A world where AI can do everything for us is basically no different than today. With some honestly relatively minor changes, we can automate most things we need to the point that human labor effort required is minimal. We decided we needed same day deliver from amazon, and so we maintain a massively inefficient system (and also artificial scarcity to keep the exploited classes in line) to create systems to cater to this need, but if we let go of "needs" like that the system ceases to be necessary.
But wait, there's more: change nothing, and I can find you plenty of people who don't need to work another millisecond in their life, and still have a highest-in-all-of-human-history quality of life. Why haven't they killed themselves yet? Why haven't they, as you suggest, dismantled the system that made their labors effectively meaningless from a "struggle to survive" standpoint? In fact, it seems almost everyone wants to achieve what these lucky few have achieved. It seems almost nobody finds "because it keeps me alive" to be the desirable driver for their efforts.
"that is completely futile in the end here" is the key thing. Why is it futile to grow tomatoes when you can buy them at the store for dirt cheap? Why is it futile to continue to have sleepless nights and lead teams and try to build businesses when your net worth is already 200 million?
TLDR my thesis: Currency is a shit motivator, "because it keeps me alive" is a shit motivator our system set up to extract labor from people, we don't need "tricks" to get people to be productive, people just like being productive. We don't need artificial scarcity to lend meaning to people's lives: people have spent ten thousand years finding all sorts of ways to make a meaningless existence under any system, meaningful.
Some books I think are relevant:
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl - you are in the worst conditions ever created on earth for a human and will likely be there the rest of your life, why not just kill yourself sooner and get it over with?
Culture Series, by Iain M. Banks - more fun. Post scarcity more than achieved, yet people still do things. Read and find out what they get up to, and see for yourself that it's perfectly believable.
