zlacker

>>dredmo+(OP)
I've been finding that the strangest part of discussions around art AI among technical people is the complete lack of identification or empathy: it seems to me that most computer programmers should be just as afraid as artists, in the face of technology like this!!! I am a failed artist (read, I studied painting in school and tried to make a go at being a commercial artist in animation and couldn't make the cut), and so I decided to do something easier and became a computer programmer, working for FAANG and other large companies and making absurd (to me!!) amounts of cash. In my humble estimation, making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done. Art AI is terrifying if you want to make art for a living- and, if AI is able to do these astonishingly difficult things, why shouldn't it, with some finagling, also be able to do the dumb, simple things most programmers do for their jobs?

The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing...

>>meebob+kc
My empathy for artists is fighting with my concern for everyone else's future, and losing.

It would be very easy to make training ML models on publicly available data illegal. I think that would be a very bad thing because it would legally enshrine a difference between human learning and machine learning in a broader sense, and I think machine learning has huge potential to improve everyone's lives.

Artists are in a similar position to grooms and farriers demanding the combustion engine be banned from the roads for spooking horses. They have a good point, but could easily screw everyone else over and halt technological progress for decades. I want to help them, but want to unblock ML progress more.

>>strken+Kx
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.

>>yamtad+Wj1
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.

>>loveha+jv1
I hope this will happen, but don't you think result just no one can get food, rich watch people dying?

>>melago+pB2
Food will be automated. A lot of it is automated even today. Robots that will till the soil, manage nutrients, plant the seeds, water the plants, and pick the crops. It’ll even be done without pesticides, as robots with vision and plant detection can work 24/7 to remove weeds and pests. Or we’ll switch to hydroponics, still fully automated and done on a mass scale. In this world, there’s no purchasing food. You would just request it and that’s it.

Now imagine that automation in food and expand it to everything. A table factory wouldn’t purchase wood from another company. There’s automation to extract wood from trees and the table factory just requests it and automation produces a table. With robots at every step of the process, there are no labor costs. There’s no shift manager, there’s no CEO with a CEO salary, there’s no table factory worker spending 12+ hours a day drilling a table leg to a table for $3 an hour in China.

That former factory worker in China is instead pursuing their passions in life.