6 Comments

The natural can never be inferior to the artificial; art imitates nature, not the reverse.

- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Expand full comment
Jan 4, 2023·edited Jan 4, 2023Liked by Tólma

It's going to be a blip on human history ultimately. Almost every AI art image ever generated will only exist online and a couple of hundred years from now in the next dark age both the art and the technology will be gone and forgotten. I've not seen any AI art that humanity would attempt to preserve during a dark age or decline.

I address the spiritual issue of why AI art is bad recently myself:

"The constraint is artificial. The human feeding the bot is not creating anything in actuality he is engaged in an empty game of novelty that will eventually expire. For all the humans creative prompts sooner or later the output would be indistinguishable from the chat bots. In essence the technology removes the humanity of the participant. Once humanity is removed there is a void, nothingness."

https://arthurpowell.substack.com/p/why-ai-art-is-bad

Expand full comment

I disagree.

"In the same way, AI forces us to reflect on our activities. If some robot can write emails just like I do, then how can I write emails that a robot can’t? If a robot can write your thesis for you, then was your thesis-idea even worth anything to begin with?"

Consider manual labor, and physical strength.

By the same logic:

If a bulldozer, mechanized tower crane, farming tractor, or forklift can lift 5,000x what my biceps can lift, then were my biceps even worth anything to begin with?

Machines make humans obsolete.

Industrial economies are no longer dependent on human labor. Therefore the logic of markets, capitalism, profitability, etc. makes huge numbers of people irrelevant.

This is an example of technological miracles succeeding to such a beautiful, awesome extent that they exceed imagination, and begin to displace traditional social functions. Communities erode.

Emails are of course a waste of time, and corporate culture is suffocating, emasculating. But I think it's quite possible, even highly probable, that AI will displace white collar employment.

Now, there is an element where this is hilarious, and has a certain poetic justice to it, because corporate cubicle culture is corrupted by Woke fake jobs, and the white-collar tech industries have laughed and preened smugly as Silicon Valley offshored the factory jobs of the Rustbelt, and blue-collar men wasted away with opiods.

So this kind of massive incoming technological disruption might be a welcome tsunami to crash against our stagnant, corrupt civilization.

But I see no reason why the miracles of technology should be measured against the basic spiritual needs of humanity... Work is not just about the measurable output, but also about the spiritual and psychological rewards of working hard and struggling in pursuit of a higher goal.

Paulos MythPilot has written well about how societies should be formed around human flourishing, in response to modern upheavals.

"The current hostility of governments and institutions towards their subjects is very strange. For most of human history, it was in the best interest of rulers that their subjects should flourish. More men, women, and children in your kingdom meant more soldiers and laborers. In a world defined by human power, more humans meant more power. Even continuing into the age of mass democracy and industrialization, larger populations could field larger armies. Therefore developed powers had an interest to grow their populations. However, with the advent of nuclear weapons and mass automation, large populations were no longer necessary. Bombs could protect borders, and goods and food could be made by machine. Population growth came to be viewed as a liability...

...For a time these systems worked, even after manufacturing was sent overseas and subjects would no longer be required to even produce, because the inconvenient masses were re-conceptualized as consumers: they could demonstrate their utility to nations and corporations by buying things. As long as the economy continued to expand and there was a constant stream of new things to buy the system could sustain itself.

...

...many government bodies which in previous ages might have been concerned with contributing to population growth and human flourishing are instead committed to policies that are structurally hostile to it, or animated by favoritisms that have the effect of denying support to majority populations. For example, when the stated policy of governments is permissive of mass migration, and the overriding moral motivation for the deployment of new government resources lies only in favor of new populations, the end result is neglect or hostility to the concerns of a country’s core population, a position of de-facto eliminationist policy. The point is, many middle-class Americans are alienated and have no recourses for official support. There are millions of bright people out there who are ripe for someone to help take care of them and bind them together into high-quality groups that can go out into the world and do things."

https://www.mythpilot.com/p/great-house-plan-ii

Expand full comment