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There is a tendency among the technocratic-minded to dismiss the creative and social science fields, mostly because they have yet to explore the depths of these

There is a tendency among the technocratic-minded to dismiss the creative and social science fields, mostly because they have yet to explore the depths of these pursuits. To reach even a degree of knowledge in any of them is to understand just how important nuance is necessary to becoming a good musician, social scientist, journalist, writer, author, painter, designer and even politician. Can you program nuance? You could certainly try. And maybe you could create something that supplements these fields. And maybe you could try hiring AIs to do some of their work for them, and believe in some meritocratic pipe dream that you have somehow done society a good deed by hurting the job pool of a bunch of underpaid professionals. They will still be needed. And when they are not, only the social scientists will be able to explain what that will do to the human psyche. Or anyone with an understanding of what high unemployment rates have done to once-powerful states

notahacker 4y ago
The other thing is a lot of the time it's nuance on top of dead simple stuff, and humans actually get something out of seeing humans perform. You don't need advanced AI to compose a blues, a toy script calling RNGs will give you a chord progression and rhythm of the backing track that 'works' and decent DSP will replicate authentic sound with great consistency. In fact, I'm pretty confident the toy script will consistently generate progressions which appeal to enthusiasts more than the neural network with a corpus of all the greatest blues performances in history, in much the same way I'd trust a pocket calculator over GPT-3 to perform basic addition. But the sum of those parts still isn't quite the same as watching a bearded middle aged bloke with a guitar trot out the same basic chord progression over a slightly sloppy drummer, so people rarely pay to watch blues soloists (themselves often playing something which in terms of basic composition is just common variations on a scale) play over a prerecording.
- instagraham 4y ago
  At least in the case of social science, I would argue that it is not dead simple. It is volumes upon volumes of research just to describe what happens in a small district in a small town. But many who opine freely on matters that affect entire societies, miss this fact, in much the same manner that a script kiddie might imagine that they are some form of terrific hacker--only to realise just how shallowly they have scratched the surface.

notahacker 4y ago

The other thing is a lot of the time it's nuance on top of dead simple stuff, and humans actually get something out of seeing humans perform. You don't need advanced AI to compose a blues, a toy script calling RNGs will give you a chord progression and rhythm of the backing track that 'works' and decent DSP will replicate authentic sound with great consistency. In fact, I'm pretty confident the toy script will consistently generate progressions which appeal to enthusiasts more than the neural network with a corpus of all the greatest blues performances in history, in much the same way I'd trust a pocket calculator over GPT-3 to perform basic addition. But the sum of those parts still isn't quite the same as watching a bearded middle aged bloke with a guitar trot out the same basic chord progression over a slightly sloppy drummer, so people rarely pay to watch blues soloists (themselves often playing something which in terms of basic composition is just common variations on a scale) play over a prerecording.

instagraham 4y ago
At least in the case of social science, I would argue that it is not dead simple. It is volumes upon volumes of research just to describe what happens in a small district in a small town. But many who opine freely on matters that affect entire societies, miss this fact, in much the same manner that a script kiddie might imagine that they are some form of terrific hacker--only to realise just how shallowly they have scratched the surface.