6 ms·

Everyone else's future? I see this as another step toward having a smaller and smaller space in which to find our own meaning or "point" to life, which is the

Everyone else's future? I see this as another step toward having a smaller and smaller space in which to find our own meaning or "point" to life, which is the only option left after the march of secularization. Recording and mass media / reproduction already curtailed that really badly on the "art" side of things. Work is staring at glowing rectangles and tapping clacky plastic boards—almost nobody finds it satisfying or fulfilling or engaging, which is why so many take pills to be able to tolerate it. Work, art... if this tech fulfills its promise and makes major cuts to the role for people in those areas, what's left? The space in which to find human meaning seems to shrink by the day, the circle in which we can provide personal value and joy to others without it becoming a question of cold economics shrinks by the day, et c. I don't think that's great for everyone's future. Though admittedly we've already done so much harm to that, that this may hardly matter in the scheme of things. I'm not sure the direction we're going looks like success, even if it happens to also mean medicine gets really good or whatever. Then again I'm a bit of a technological-determinist and almost nobody agrees with this take anyway, so it's not like there's anything to be done about it. If we don't do [bad but economically-advantageous-on-a-state-level thing], someone else will, then we'll also have to, because fucking Moloch. It'll turn out how it turns out, and no meaningful part in determining that direction is whether it'll put us somewhere good, except "good" as blind-ass Moloch judges it.

lovehashbrowns 4y ago
What role exactly is it going to take? The role we currently have, where the vast majority of people do work not because they particularly enjoy it but because they’re forced to in order to survive? That’s really what we’re protecting here? I’d rather live in the future where automation does practically everything not for the benefit of some billionaire born into wealth but because the automation is supposed to. Similar to the economy in Factorio. Then people can derive meaning from themselves rather that whatever this dystopian nightmare we’re currently living in. It’s absurdly depressing that some people want to stifle this progress only because it’s going to remove this god awful and completely made up idea that work is freedom or work is what life is about.
- exceptione 4y ago
  I am happy to write code for a hobby. Who is going to pay for that? The oligarchs of our time pay their tax to their own 'charities'. Companies with insane profits buy their own shares. AI powered surveillance and the ongoing destruction of public institutions will make it hard to stand up for the collective interest. We are not in hell, but the road to it has not been closed.
  - lovehashbrowns 4y ago
    The ideal situation is that nobody pays for it. Picture a scenario where the vast majority of resource gathering, manufacturing, and production are all automated. Programmers are out of a job, factory workers are out of a job, miners are out of a job, etc. Basically the current argument of artists being out of a job but taken to its extreme. Why would these robots get paid? They wouldn’t. They’d just mine, manufacture, and produce on request. Imagine a world where chatgpt version 3000 is connected to that swarm of robots and you can type “produce a 7 inch phone with an OLED screen, removable battery, 5 physical buttons, a physical shutter, and removable storage” and X days later arrives that phone, delivered by automation, of course. Same would work with food, where automation plants the seeds, waters the crops, removes pests, harvests the food, and delivers it to your home. All of these are simply artists going out of a job, except it’s not artists it’s practically every job humans are forced to do today. There’d be very little need to work for almost every human on earth. Then I could happily spend all day taking shitty photographs that AI can easily replicate today far better than I could photograph in real life but I don’t have to feel like a waste of life because I enjoy doing it for fun and not because I’m forced to in order to survive.
    - exceptione 4y ago
      Look, I like the paradise you created. You only forgot about who we are. > There’d be very little need to work for almost every human on earth. When mankind made a pact with the devil, the burden we got was that we had to earn our bread though sweat and hard labor. This story has survived millennia, there is something to it. Why is the bottom layer in society not automated by robots? No need to if they are cheaper than robots. If you don't care about humans, you can get quite some labor for a little bit of sugar. If you can work one job to pay your rent, you can possibly do two or three even. If you don't have those social hobbies like universal healthcare and public education, people will be competitive for a very long time with robots. If people are less valuable, they will be treated as such. Hell is nearer than paradise.
antonvs 4y ago
> The space in which to find human meaning seems to shrink by the day I don’t understand this. It reminds me of the Go player who announced he was giving up the game after AlphaGo’s success. To me that’s exactly the same as saying you’re going to give up running, hiking, or walking because horses or cars are faster. That has nothing to do with human meaning, and thinking it does is making a really obvious category error.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  A lot of human meaning comes from providing value to others. The more computers and machines and institutions take that over, the fewer opportunities there are to do that, and the more doing that kind of thing feels forced, or even like an indulgence of the person providing the "service" and an imposition on those served. Vonnegut wrote quite a bit about this phenomenon in the arts—how recording, broadcast, and mechanical reproduction vastly diminished the social and even economic value of small-time artistic talent. Uncle Bob's storytelling can't compete with Walt Disney Corporation. Grandma's piano playing stopped mattering much when we began turning on the radio instead of having sing-alongs around the upright. Nobody wants your cousin's quite good (but not excellent) sketches of them, or of any other subject—you're doing him a favor if you sit for him, and when you pretend to give a shit about the results. Aunt Gertrude's quilt-making is still kinda cool and you don't mind receiving a quilt from her, but you always feel kinda bad that she spent dozens of hours making something when you could have had a functional equivalent for perhaps $20. It's a nice gesture, and you may appreciate it, but she needed to give it more than you needed to receive it. Meanwhile, social shifts shrink the set of people for whom any of this might even apply, for most of us. I dunno, maybe online spaces partially replace that, but most of that, especially the creative spaces, seem full of fake-feeling positivity and obligatory engagement, not the same thing at all as meeting another person you know's actual needs or desires. That's the kind of thing I mean. The areas where this isn't true are mostly ones that machines and markets are having trouble automating, so they're still expensive relative to the effort to do it yourself. Cooking's a notable one. The last part of our pre-industrial social animal to go extinct may well be meal-focused major holidays.
  - int_19h 4y ago
dingoegret12 4y ago
I agree and think the same way. The "just make numbers go up" mentality of happiness is a fallacy. If this was the case, plugging everyone up to heroin hibernation machines would be the most optimal path. But anyone with an iota of human sensitivity will see that as horrific, unhappy and a destruction of the human spirit. Happiness needs loss, fulfillment, pain, hunger, boredom, fear and they need to be experiences backed up by both chemical feelings and experiences and memory and they have to be true. But here's the thing, already the damage is done beyond just some art. I don't mean to diminish art, but frankly, look at how hostile, ugly and inhuman the world outside is in any regular city. Literal death worlds in fantasy 40k settings look more homey, comfortable, fulfilling, and human.

lovehashbrowns 4y ago

What role exactly is it going to take? The role we currently have, where the vast majority of people do work not because they particularly enjoy it but because they’re forced to in order to survive? That’s really what we’re protecting here? I’d rather live in the future where automation does practically everything not for the benefit of some billionaire born into wealth but because the automation is supposed to. Similar to the economy in Factorio. Then people can derive meaning from themselves rather that whatever this dystopian nightmare we’re currently living in. It’s absurdly depressing that some people want to stifle this progress only because it’s going to remove this god awful and completely made up idea that work is freedom or work is what life is about.

exceptione 4y ago
I am happy to write code for a hobby. Who is going to pay for that? The oligarchs of our time pay their tax to their own 'charities'. Companies with insane profits buy their own shares. AI powered surveillance and the ongoing destruction of public institutions will make it hard to stand up for the collective interest. We are not in hell, but the road to it has not been closed.
- lovehashbrowns 4y ago
  The ideal situation is that nobody pays for it. Picture a scenario where the vast majority of resource gathering, manufacturing, and production are all automated. Programmers are out of a job, factory workers are out of a job, miners are out of a job, etc. Basically the current argument of artists being out of a job but taken to its extreme. Why would these robots get paid? They wouldn’t. They’d just mine, manufacture, and produce on request. Imagine a world where chatgpt version 3000 is connected to that swarm of robots and you can type “produce a 7 inch phone with an OLED screen, removable battery, 5 physical buttons, a physical shutter, and removable storage” and X days later arrives that phone, delivered by automation, of course. Same would work with food, where automation plants the seeds, waters the crops, removes pests, harvests the food, and delivers it to your home. All of these are simply artists going out of a job, except it’s not artists it’s practically every job humans are forced to do today. There’d be very little need to work for almost every human on earth. Then I could happily spend all day taking shitty photographs that AI can easily replicate today far better than I could photograph in real life but I don’t have to feel like a waste of life because I enjoy doing it for fun and not because I’m forced to in order to survive.
  - exceptione 4y ago
    Look, I like the paradise you created. You only forgot about who we are. > There’d be very little need to work for almost every human on earth. When mankind made a pact with the devil, the burden we got was that we had to earn our bread though sweat and hard labor. This story has survived millennia, there is something to it. Why is the bottom layer in society not automated by robots? No need to if they are cheaper than robots. If you don't care about humans, you can get quite some labor for a little bit of sugar. If you can work one job to pay your rent, you can possibly do two or three even. If you don't have those social hobbies like universal healthcare and public education, people will be competitive for a very long time with robots. If people are less valuable, they will be treated as such. Hell is nearer than paradise.

antonvs 4y ago

> The space in which to find human meaning seems to shrink by the day I don’t understand this. It reminds me of the Go player who announced he was giving up the game after AlphaGo’s success. To me that’s exactly the same as saying you’re going to give up running, hiking, or walking because horses or cars are faster. That has nothing to do with human meaning, and thinking it does is making a really obvious category error.

yamtaddle 4y ago
A lot of human meaning comes from providing value to others. The more computers and machines and institutions take that over, the fewer opportunities there are to do that, and the more doing that kind of thing feels forced, or even like an indulgence of the person providing the "service" and an imposition on those served. Vonnegut wrote quite a bit about this phenomenon in the arts—how recording, broadcast, and mechanical reproduction vastly diminished the social and even economic value of small-time artistic talent. Uncle Bob's storytelling can't compete with Walt Disney Corporation. Grandma's piano playing stopped mattering much when we began turning on the radio instead of having sing-alongs around the upright. Nobody wants your cousin's quite good (but not excellent) sketches of them, or of any other subject—you're doing him a favor if you sit for him, and when you pretend to give a shit about the results. Aunt Gertrude's quilt-making is still kinda cool and you don't mind receiving a quilt from her, but you always feel kinda bad that she spent dozens of hours making something when you could have had a functional equivalent for perhaps $20. It's a nice gesture, and you may appreciate it, but she needed to give it more than you needed to receive it. Meanwhile, social shifts shrink the set of people for whom any of this might even apply, for most of us. I dunno, maybe online spaces partially replace that, but most of that, especially the creative spaces, seem full of fake-feeling positivity and obligatory engagement, not the same thing at all as meeting another person you know's actual needs or desires. That's the kind of thing I mean. The areas where this isn't true are mostly ones that machines and markets are having trouble automating, so they're still expensive relative to the effort to do it yourself. Cooking's a notable one. The last part of our pre-industrial social animal to go extinct may well be meal-focused major holidays.
- int_19h 4y ago

dingoegret12 4y ago

I agree and think the same way. The "just make numbers go up" mentality of happiness is a fallacy. If this was the case, plugging everyone up to heroin hibernation machines would be the most optimal path. But anyone with an iota of human sensitivity will see that as horrific, unhappy and a destruction of the human spirit. Happiness needs loss, fulfillment, pain, hunger, boredom, fear and they need to be experiences backed up by both chemical feelings and experiences and memory and they have to be true. But here's the thing, already the damage is done beyond just some art. I don't mean to diminish art, but frankly, look at how hostile, ugly and inhuman the world outside is in any regular city. Literal death worlds in fantasy 40k settings look more homey, comfortable, fulfilling, and human.