Back in college, one of the apartments I lived in had a ‘house rule’ about alcohol: all of it must be finished before another run to the liquor store was made. So, every few weeks there would be a scattered few bottles of mixers and stuff people brought over at one point and time, and we would have a night of making strange concoctions to finish everything off. We’d mix different types of alcohol into strange shots that ranged from somewhat enjoyable to completely undrinkable. It was a dumb college thing with completely forgettable (and, easily forgotten) results.
It was, for the most part, literal slop.
This is sort of what I see AI as in the long-run. Cheap entertainment for a night in college. At high levels of processing, yes, it will be able to solve complex math problems. But for your average consumer, it’ll be somewhere between an assistant and a joke—something the most uninspired kids at university will use as a party trick.
People will always want to discover and create. Nobody who isn’t financially invested in AI wants to see it take over the arts. Company founders talk about a future where people will have to work less—what do they think those people will want to do with their time? Nothing? Being creative is part of human nature, and I don’t just mean painting or making music. Some people want to build houses, some want to tend to a garden, some want to explore caves. All of this comes from curiosity about the human experience, and none of it can be replaced by a computer.
Yet so many resources are being poured into this concept that a financial collapse of the industry would take down the entire economy. The people in charge are sociopaths with no appreciation for human potential; they’re neck-deep in a god complex with only the idea for the evolution of ‘intelligence’ as a north star. People want to go to concerts and museums and visit cool buildings and archeological sites and experience reality—not the mish-mash of stolen art prompted by someone who doesnt’ want to consider anything about what it means to have a heartbeat.
