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This article’s main point is that AI technology has economic potential. It goes about this by parodying common arguments against whether such AI can develop in

by vages 4y ago

This article’s main point is that AI technology has economic potential. It goes about this by parodying common arguments against whether such AI can develop into goal-driven beings. One example of such criticism is this five year old piece: https://www.wired.com/2017/04/the-myth-of-a-superhuman-ai/ https://www.wired.com/2017/04/the-myth-of-a-superhuman-ai/ Few are skeptical about AI technologies’ economic impact. In that sense, the article misses the ball slightly, but it’s so funny that I don’t mind. To state my point in the vein of the article: The bulldozer did change our economy. It does most, if not all, of its productive work in cooperation with a human. Turning a bulldozer on and letting it run by itself is usually a waste, and may be dangerous.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
> This article’s main point is that AI technology has economic potential. Thanks for a great, entertaining ditty. (I assume you're the author). I paused at the end, thinking it through, without immediately jumping to that conclusion. I'd say I'm a quite careful and sophisticated reader, so I love the way you left interpretation open.
xg15 4y ago
Fully agreed. I first misunderstood the article as mocking AI alarmism, but it really does the opposite: It's parodying articles that underestimate the potential of the tech, because applications are not a 1:1 drop-in replacement to what we have today. Hence references to such future-proof technologies as delivering messages or cargo(!) via carrier pigeon. Doesn't bode well for artists if they are essentially compared with carrier pigeons here...
- notahacker 4y ago
  Of course, if people had questioned the potential of flight because most of the people egging its potential was arguing that within a few years we'd no longer need cities because we'd all live wherever we wanted and whistle for the nearest mechanical bird to give us a lift, they wouldn't have been wrong to question that scenario. Even more so if discussion of powered flight was dominated by speculation about mechanical birds throwing us off cliffs if we didn't solve their alignment problems. Back in the world of AI, a spreadsheet can't even play chess, but it's a remarkably useful thing to have, has given people that used to be employed as clerks more tasks rather than less, and the person that notes how this changed everything but not at all like the futurists said it would isn't necessarily pessimistic about spreadsheets. Powered flight is enormously useful in a lot of domains, and yet for all its obvious superiority in many dimensions it hasn't even made infantry or shipping obsolete. And if I felt like hunting, I'd probably prefer a hawk...
  - ArekDymalski 4y ago
    I'd say that people question the potential of any new technology. "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home" quote attributed to Ken Olsen of DEC is one of my favourite examples. The general aversion to change leads to deprciation/ignoring the adavantages and over-exposing of risks - just like you perfectly captured it in this passage "mechanical birds throwing us off cliffs".
    - bnralt 4y ago
      > I'd say that people question the potential of any new technology. Sure, but exaggerating the potential is much more common. Look at where people in the 50's thought we would be in terms of space or personal flying devices. This stems from both overestimating the technological capabilities, overestimating the usefulness if we were able to succeed, and failing to see the non-technological limitations. Flight is actually a good example of the last one. For instance, the problem with Edisons prediction that people would fly to another city for a couple of hours after breakfast and be back by lunch isn't that technology isn't advanced enough. But the costs are prohibitive, the airports are often far from the city center, and even when you get to the airport it takes a couple of hours to actually get into the air. Planes were hot, so Edison thought travelers "will largely scorn such earth crawling." But earth crawling, even long distance, is still very useful, hence the desire to invest in things like high speed rail. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/thomas-edisons-predictions-spot-on/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/thomas-edisons-predictions-spot...
      - njarboe 4y ago
        It is very hard to predict the path of an S-curve. If you don't estimate when it takes off and when it slows down just right you will be way off on your view of what will happen.
      - mncharity 4y ago
        Crafting arguments of the form "predicting the future is hard, as shown by this past attempt failing" can be challenging. Understanding the past, guessing at the contingency of development paths, etc. I recall such a talk by someone respected which, IIRC, included dissing the Ladies's Home Journal 1901 "What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years"'s[1] prediction "The horse will have become practically extinct." with a dismissive "The aren't!". Seeming underappreciating the time's massive horse footprint and diversity, now vanished and diminished. > But the costs are prohibitive, [...] even when you get to the airport it takes a couple of hours to actually get into the air. I wonder how predictions might deal with the diversity of timelines? And thus include the fork two decades back, where 9/11 didn't happen, the airline industry remained competitive, and I can still do a Boston-to-NYC short sprint from curb, across a narrow terminal, down the ramp, and squeeze through a closing airliner door, with no staff interaction beyond their shouting "run faster!". And everyone pays cash to stewardesses. And no ids (after all, showing papers to travel is an un-American Soviet thing). There's a lot of timeline diversity. > [it] isn't that technology isn't advanced enough [...] the airports are often far from the city center I wonder if there's a timeline where Robert Moses loved rail, smashed a straight network of lines across Long Island, and now NYC-anywhere to JFK is minutes. In contrast, there's the timeline where the massive and competitive subway construction of Edison's life, stalled out shortly after his death, and remained dead for a century. Perhaps the medieval warrens of European cities, persisting but for revolutions until aerial mass bombardment, might have been a hint. But new york was still doing massive "tear down and build new". Perhaps there's a timeline where a cold war nuclear strike on nyc cleared the way for greater development, as with the city fires of old. It does emphasize the contingency of history and thus progress, but it doesn't seem unreasonable that Edison didn't expect the trip from still-existing 1910-ish apartments in Manhattan, out to a "opened a generation after his death" Idlewild airport, to remain largely unchanged for a century. If you travel around Xmass, the train you catch might have a just-after-his-death 1932 vintage car. Current US journalism about China repeatedly reminds me of European writing from warrens about Edison's America. Perhaps we need some expanded conceptual vocabulary for sketching possible futures? [1] https://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/t/w/twa101/whatmayhappen.pdf https://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/t/w/twa101/whatmayhappen.... https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/58851/fact-check-26-ladies-home-journal-predictions-2001-1901 https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/58851/fact-check-26-ladi...
- tuatoru 4y ago
  I don't quite understand the "art" comment. I've seen it several times so this is not aimed at you. The point of art art is that it is created by a human or group of humans. Artists (performance or visual) will be out of a job when runners are all replaced by race-cars, and pro golfers, tennis players, football players, and basketball players by robots.
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    There is a difference between artists who create for their own sake, and commercial or professional artists who make a living off art. The latter is what many people worry about with AI. Of course, it's more an indictment on a lack of UBI than on AI itself; to blame it on AI is a Neo-Luddite-esque argument that confuses the root cause the root cause with the more proximal cause. It's akin to people being mad at immigrants taking their jobs than the forces of globalism.
  - murderfs 4y ago
    The point of art is that it's consumed by humans, not produced by humans.
    - SyzygistSix 4y ago
      Quite the opposite. Art is a form of communication. Illustration however, is not always. Or the message is simple enough that non-human level AI can do it, as is the case with much commercial illustration.
  - matkoniecz 4y ago
    > The point of art art is that it is created by a human or group of humans. Not for me as a consumer of art. If I read a fictional story, or admire a graphic I do not really care about author. Except as something that hints at quality. Maybe in extreme cases I would want to avoid some due to unrelated issues[1]. It is different for nonfiction, but I would read engaging story that was entirely automatically generated. I admired fractals despite that human effort that went into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set#/media/File:Mandelbrot_sequence_new.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set#/media/File:Man... was only part of outcome. If AI would find other interesting parts of fractal - it also would be enjoyable. ---------- Yes, it is different for nonfiction and author can add relevant context that can increase or dimmish the art, but in vast majority of cases of fiction/music/graphics I know nothing about author and I am not really interested in them. ---- [1] I would not hang in my room landscape painted by certain painter who become the leader of Germany. Even if landscape would be pretty.
baxtr 4y ago
If you're open to believing that we are underestimating AI you may also be interested in people who say the same thing about solar and batteries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj96nxtHdTU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj96nxtHdTU
woolion 4y ago
I fully agree with your point on the bulldozer. I made a post [0] about trying to displace myself --not even at professional level but at hobbyist level-- and the results were underwhelming. I would say it could be revolutionary if software did not already revolutionize the 2D-pipeline 20 years ago. For now I think its impact is limited to an assistive role in some subtasks. I've looked at Naoki Saitou's take on the subject [1] and he has a similar POV. [0] https://woolion.art/2022/11/16/SDDB.html https://woolion.art/2022/11/16/SDDB.html [1] Will the AI Take Over the Job of Illustrators? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1Un6D_POk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1Un6D_POk
melling 4y ago
Funny how the obvious needs to be explained to other humans. Is there any doubt that human “intelligence” will soon be surpassed by machines. It doesn’t even need to be super intelligence. We seem to be oblivious to how unintelligent we are. For example, “Science advances one funeral at a time” because of our limitations.
fatneckbeardz 4y ago
the flip side of this is that every airline company has, over the long term, been a net loss for investors. also the airplane manufacturers require huge government contracts to even exist, as well as special treatment (like Boeing getting away with killing 300+ people) and periodic bailouts.

by vages 4y ago

nonrandomstring 4y ago

> This article’s main point is that AI technology has economic potential. Thanks for a great, entertaining ditty. (I assume you're the author). I paused at the end, thinking it through, without immediately jumping to that conclusion. I'd say I'm a quite careful and sophisticated reader, so I love the way you left interpretation open.

xg15 4y ago

Fully agreed. I first misunderstood the article as mocking AI alarmism, but it really does the opposite: It's parodying articles that underestimate the potential of the tech, because applications are not a 1:1 drop-in replacement to what we have today. Hence references to such future-proof technologies as delivering messages or cargo(!) via carrier pigeon. Doesn't bode well for artists if they are essentially compared with carrier pigeons here...

notahacker 4y ago
Of course, if people had questioned the potential of flight because most of the people egging its potential was arguing that within a few years we'd no longer need cities because we'd all live wherever we wanted and whistle for the nearest mechanical bird to give us a lift, they wouldn't have been wrong to question that scenario. Even more so if discussion of powered flight was dominated by speculation about mechanical birds throwing us off cliffs if we didn't solve their alignment problems. Back in the world of AI, a spreadsheet can't even play chess, but it's a remarkably useful thing to have, has given people that used to be employed as clerks more tasks rather than less, and the person that notes how this changed everything but not at all like the futurists said it would isn't necessarily pessimistic about spreadsheets. Powered flight is enormously useful in a lot of domains, and yet for all its obvious superiority in many dimensions it hasn't even made infantry or shipping obsolete. And if I felt like hunting, I'd probably prefer a hawk...
- ArekDymalski 4y ago
  I'd say that people question the potential of any new technology. "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home" quote attributed to Ken Olsen of DEC is one of my favourite examples. The general aversion to change leads to deprciation/ignoring the adavantages and over-exposing of risks - just like you perfectly captured it in this passage "mechanical birds throwing us off cliffs".
  - bnralt 4y ago
    > I'd say that people question the potential of any new technology. Sure, but exaggerating the potential is much more common. Look at where people in the 50's thought we would be in terms of space or personal flying devices. This stems from both overestimating the technological capabilities, overestimating the usefulness if we were able to succeed, and failing to see the non-technological limitations. Flight is actually a good example of the last one. For instance, the problem with Edisons prediction that people would fly to another city for a couple of hours after breakfast and be back by lunch isn't that technology isn't advanced enough. But the costs are prohibitive, the airports are often far from the city center, and even when you get to the airport it takes a couple of hours to actually get into the air. Planes were hot, so Edison thought travelers "will largely scorn such earth crawling." But earth crawling, even long distance, is still very useful, hence the desire to invest in things like high speed rail. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/thomas-edisons-predictions-spot-on/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/thomas-edisons-predictions-spot...
    - njarboe 4y ago
      It is very hard to predict the path of an S-curve. If you don't estimate when it takes off and when it slows down just right you will be way off on your view of what will happen.
    - mncharity 4y ago
      Crafting arguments of the form "predicting the future is hard, as shown by this past attempt failing" can be challenging. Understanding the past, guessing at the contingency of development paths, etc. I recall such a talk by someone respected which, IIRC, included dissing the Ladies's Home Journal 1901 "What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years"'s[1] prediction "The horse will have become practically extinct." with a dismissive "The aren't!". Seeming underappreciating the time's massive horse footprint and diversity, now vanished and diminished. > But the costs are prohibitive, [...] even when you get to the airport it takes a couple of hours to actually get into the air. I wonder how predictions might deal with the diversity of timelines? And thus include the fork two decades back, where 9/11 didn't happen, the airline industry remained competitive, and I can still do a Boston-to-NYC short sprint from curb, across a narrow terminal, down the ramp, and squeeze through a closing airliner door, with no staff interaction beyond their shouting "run faster!". And everyone pays cash to stewardesses. And no ids (after all, showing papers to travel is an un-American Soviet thing). There's a lot of timeline diversity. > [it] isn't that technology isn't advanced enough [...] the airports are often far from the city center I wonder if there's a timeline where Robert Moses loved rail, smashed a straight network of lines across Long Island, and now NYC-anywhere to JFK is minutes. In contrast, there's the timeline where the massive and competitive subway construction of Edison's life, stalled out shortly after his death, and remained dead for a century. Perhaps the medieval warrens of European cities, persisting but for revolutions until aerial mass bombardment, might have been a hint. But new york was still doing massive "tear down and build new". Perhaps there's a timeline where a cold war nuclear strike on nyc cleared the way for greater development, as with the city fires of old. It does emphasize the contingency of history and thus progress, but it doesn't seem unreasonable that Edison didn't expect the trip from still-existing 1910-ish apartments in Manhattan, out to a "opened a generation after his death" Idlewild airport, to remain largely unchanged for a century. If you travel around Xmass, the train you catch might have a just-after-his-death 1932 vintage car. Current US journalism about China repeatedly reminds me of European writing from warrens about Edison's America. Perhaps we need some expanded conceptual vocabulary for sketching possible futures? [1] https://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/t/w/twa101/whatmayhappen.pdf https://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/t/w/twa101/whatmayhappen.... https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/58851/fact-check-26-ladies-home-journal-predictions-2001-1901 https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/58851/fact-check-26-ladi...
tuatoru 4y ago
I don't quite understand the "art" comment. I've seen it several times so this is not aimed at you. The point of art art is that it is created by a human or group of humans. Artists (performance or visual) will be out of a job when runners are all replaced by race-cars, and pro golfers, tennis players, football players, and basketball players by robots.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  There is a difference between artists who create for their own sake, and commercial or professional artists who make a living off art. The latter is what many people worry about with AI. Of course, it's more an indictment on a lack of UBI than on AI itself; to blame it on AI is a Neo-Luddite-esque argument that confuses the root cause the root cause with the more proximal cause. It's akin to people being mad at immigrants taking their jobs than the forces of globalism.
- murderfs 4y ago
  The point of art is that it's consumed by humans, not produced by humans.
  - SyzygistSix 4y ago
    Quite the opposite. Art is a form of communication. Illustration however, is not always. Or the message is simple enough that non-human level AI can do it, as is the case with much commercial illustration.
- matkoniecz 4y ago
  > The point of art art is that it is created by a human or group of humans. Not for me as a consumer of art. If I read a fictional story, or admire a graphic I do not really care about author. Except as something that hints at quality. Maybe in extreme cases I would want to avoid some due to unrelated issues[1]. It is different for nonfiction, but I would read engaging story that was entirely automatically generated. I admired fractals despite that human effort that went into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set#/media/File:Mandelbrot_sequence_new.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set#/media/File:Man... was only part of outcome. If AI would find other interesting parts of fractal - it also would be enjoyable. ---------- Yes, it is different for nonfiction and author can add relevant context that can increase or dimmish the art, but in vast majority of cases of fiction/music/graphics I know nothing about author and I am not really interested in them. ---- [1] I would not hang in my room landscape painted by certain painter who become the leader of Germany. Even if landscape would be pretty.

baxtr 4y ago

If you're open to believing that we are underestimating AI you may also be interested in people who say the same thing about solar and batteries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj96nxtHdTU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj96nxtHdTU

woolion 4y ago

I fully agree with your point on the bulldozer. I made a post [0] about trying to displace myself --not even at professional level but at hobbyist level-- and the results were underwhelming. I would say it could be revolutionary if software did not already revolutionize the 2D-pipeline 20 years ago. For now I think its impact is limited to an assistive role in some subtasks. I've looked at Naoki Saitou's take on the subject [1] and he has a similar POV. [0] https://woolion.art/2022/11/16/SDDB.html https://woolion.art/2022/11/16/SDDB.html [1] Will the AI Take Over the Job of Illustrators? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1Un6D_POk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1Un6D_POk

melling 4y ago

Funny how the obvious needs to be explained to other humans. Is there any doubt that human “intelligence” will soon be surpassed by machines. It doesn’t even need to be super intelligence. We seem to be oblivious to how unintelligent we are. For example, “Science advances one funeral at a time” because of our limitations.

fatneckbeardz 4y ago

the flip side of this is that every airline company has, over the long term, been a net loss for investors. also the airplane manufacturers require huge government contracts to even exist, as well as special treatment (like Boeing getting away with killing 300+ people) and periodic bailouts.