I've never learned anything from someone who agreed with me.
Beyond that, and perhaps more important. It's entirely possible that the reason the Wright Brothers succeeded in teaching us how to fly. (Oh yes, they developed the first practical airplane, but their real accomplishment was teaching us how to fly).
But back to the point, the reason they succeeded is that they believed in "productive argument". They could argue heatedly about issues, I do mean heated arguments, go to bed wake up friends the next day . In some cases they would wake up the next day and decide the other brother was right - and start the argument again.
Later corrected: I originally misread your message to read “observed” where it says “unobserved.” Oops. If you must overlook one syllable, it is best not to pick one that reverses the meaning of the post.
Only when not observed. When observed, it would have to be one state or the other. But whether at the same time he liked me could not be determined finer than the scale of Planck’s Constant.
I once helped edit a book by a great Israeli economist, Don Patinkin--before the PC/word processor era. His handwriting was a bit messy, and in one chapter, the typesetter had entered "now" in every location where he had written "not." Don was very pleased that I had discovered that error, as it reversed the meaning of practically every point he was making in that chapter. (e.g., "There is not inflation" would become "There is now inflation.")
Having been effectively disenfranchised at the House district level by gerrymandering quite a while back, I can definitely say it's had an impact on how I view politics and politicians.
As a libertarian, I marvel at the animosity that exists in the quadrant of the economic vs civil liberty matrix shared by communists, flanked by socialists and fascists, and the increasing closeness of the progressives (there is nothing any longer "liberal" about them) and conservatives with their overlapping amoeboid tentacles reflecting individual policies. Inter-political marriage is currently twice as opposed in polls as inter-racial marriages. Both major parties have no policies that can bring fiscal sanity nor civil peace to the nation. I agree with your analysis and I enjoyed "Nostalgia" (from an active guitar and Trombone player).
Thinking about yesterday's post on Disney, I can imagine that AI will have major impacts on the business, likely positive for the bottom line but not so much for the art.
I like what you have to say. I recommend clearer writing. I was a bit confused by your first sentence, which is a run-on. I think its latter part means, in part, that what now passes for conservatism heavily overlaps progressivism in policies although they are opposing tribes, which is true, important, and apt: but does not quite say so.
Take heart. I think the impact of generative AI on art qua art has been wildly overestimated. We can think of generative AI as a tireless bevy of competent but uninspired apprentices and disciples, who can churn out endless mash-ups of some master's work -- like a competent painter doing endless variations on Picasso, or a competent musician doing endless variations on Chopin. They are certainly astonishing, viewed on their own, and if you forget a little their provenance[1].
But if these things could ever satisfy the human impulse for artistic invention -- why, they would have, long ago. There would have *been* no more piano composition later than Chopin, because generations of *human* recopiers and remixers interested in a fast buck would've satisfied the world's hunger for new piano music by recycling Chopin ad infinitum. There would be no more art after Leonardo (or some other brilliant artist, we can pick any, any time), because the world would've been satisfied with endless variations on Mona Lisa. ("Look! Now she's wearing a hat! If The Louvre calls, I'll be in the sunroom."[2])
Since this has not happened, I think we can safely conclude it cannot happen, and therefore that generative AI poses no threat at all to the demand for genuinely new and creative art. To be sure, it could easily put out of work some commercial artists, the way the camera put out of work a lot of merely competent portrait artists. But this is just ordinary technological disruption, not artistic Götterdammerung.
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[1] I mean, this is what astonishes me about the people who are astonished that a computer program, with faultless memory, which has been "trained" on the entire corpus of written law, including the text of every Supreme Court opinion from John Marshall on down, can achieve a decent score on the bar exam, say. This is kind of like being amazed that my calculator can multiply two 6-digit faultlessly, in microseconds, far better than I could do. Is it so very much smarter than me? Of course not. It just has special-purpose circuits for that task, in a way I don't. A generative AI trained on petabytes of text written by ordinary human beings can, not surprisingly, produce text that looks like it's been written by ordinary human beings -- because it now has special-purpose circuits for that task. The reason it's amazing *in us* by contrast is because, so far as we know, we *don't* have special-purpose circuits for writing essays on humanism, composing the Ode to Joy, or inventing calculus. We were never "trained" to do those things, and that's why they are remarkable -- and bear no comparison to a computer program.
[2] If someone wants to argue certain forms of modern art could be taken over by AIs, I might not be able to argue, because I am a philistine about that kind of art, and wouldn't know brilliance from an accident with a scared cat, stepladder, and five opened paint cans.
Excellent stuff. You'll notice that I often use AI to produce the art for these articles. And I do so for precisely the reasons you cite. It produces some quite impressive variations on familiar themes. It's eye-catching, fun sometimes, and most importantly, it's "adequate." AI is a threat to the adequate. When you need artwork, not art, AI can be great. (Most often, I do additional work on the texture, colors, intensity, etc., so it doesn't necessarily scream "Bob used Midjourney.") I imagine some great artists will use AI to produce great art. I heard a story long ago, attributed to Ansel Adams. In the story, sometime says to Adams that photography isn't really art, because anyone can use a camera. The response was, "Then why do the same few people win all the photography competitions." Vermeer likely used a contrivance to reproduce scenes--but so what? (There's a fascinating documentary on this called "Tim's Vermeer." I suspect you would enjoy it.) ... All that said, AI might unexpectedly threaten some fields. I recall reading an article in the late 1960s explaining why computers would never be able to defeat truly great chess players. And, of course, Deep Blue defeated Kasparov less than 30 years later. One might argue, though, that this didn't mean the achievement of art by a computer, but more a demonstration that great chess playing is more rote and less art than we had previously believed.
Yes, absolutely. We are both old enough to remember typists, travel agents, reference librarians, typesetters, telephone switchboard operators, et cetera. Technological disruption is a constant. One has to adapt.
In re the use by artists of AI -- I think this is quite interesting, and I expect for some artists AI will be a marvelous new tool, kind of like (as you point out) the camera was a marvelous new tool for genuine artists in its day. Something of the same is already happening in chess and Go, where I understand the best train against machines, like athletes train with machines to build strength faster, and there are even people who have studied the way machines play and discovered weaknesses:
Really, this is just an extension of the principles of comparative advantage. AI will do some things better than humans, but humans will do other things better than AI. Which activities fall into which of these two buckets will likely shift about endlessly--as is true of the comparative advantages of nations or of other agglomerations of humans. And there will always be those caught short when the shifts occur. Mechanized looms were, indeed, a catastrophe for some weavers during the transition period. But today's textile industry offers a great deal more wealth than did the preindustrial profession--directly and indirectly. Master weavers earned a lot of money, but textile industry executives today earn a lot more in real terms. And the mechanized world meant that today's textile workers have antibiotics, whereas the wealthiest master weaver in 1800 did not.
Agreed on all points. I wonder, though, whether there is some very slow version of Luddite truth that does occur. To wit, suppose the average level of drive, energy, intelligence, et cetera that you need to prosper with new technology steadily rises, so that you end up with an economy in which fewer and fewer people are *really* productive and everyone else more or less services their needs, the way the retinue that accumulates around anyone very successful and wealthy does a lot of the stuff that ordinary people do for themselves (e.g. cook, clean, buy clothes, make appointments and ordinary phone calls), because at some point it's cheaper to hire someone to do these things than it is to do them yourself (given the wage opportunity cost).
If you watch the (wonderful) Canadian Science Channel show "How It's Made" you can kind of see this already: in the most advanced factories all the really clever work is done by machines and robots, no doubt designed by clever engineers who we don't see, and most of what the human beings on camera do is feed parts into the robots at the correct orientation, or inspect the result. Stuff at which human beings are naturally good, and which is expensive to program a machine to do -- but which is, nevertheless, not really the heart of the manufacturing process, not what the master craftsman (as opposed to his apprentices) did in the old days.
What would such a world look like? I hazard you'd get a massive rise in service jobs that more or less consisted of glorified butler/maid/secretary/aide-de-camp/commissar work: scheduling, writing stuff down, dotting i's and crossing t's, doing PR work, writing and polishing speeches, reviewing and critiquing, showmanship and entertaining. Furthermore, to keep social stability, there would need to be larger and larger flow of wealth from the most productive to the less so, which suggests a much bigger government apparatus for managing the redistribution, and therefore the significantg growth of jobs related to managing it, debating and deciding on its size and nature.
Which sounds unnervingly like what we actually see having happened around us, from the 17th century to the present. We now hear people complaining that too many people don't actually create, grow, or manufacture anything, that there's too many "bullshit" jobs that don't product, but just record, critique, or manage production. This is often followed by grumbles suggesting this stems from moral weakness or social dysfunction, because we love a good parable. But what if this change is in fact an ineluctable consequence of technology steadily advancing in sophistication while human sophistication necessarily (barring genetic engineering) stands still? It's OK if we can adapt, spiritually, to most of us being servants, but the grumbling suggests it may not come naturally to our nature -- that there is a social psychic pain inherent in that kind of change.
Agree on all. It's a big question. The usual answer is, "Well, we always adapted in the past." But, of course, as your car plunges downward into the chasm, the words, "Well, the bridge never collapsed in the past" offer little comfort."
John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
But he likely underestimated the dangers of creating a society where his fortunate children and grandchildren would be surrounded by an upstairs/downstairs, Eloi/Morlock society. He probably also underestimated the danger of a population of painters, poets, musicians wit time on their hands and the desire to redesign everyone else's lives.
Bob, you and I are similar in age -- I'm about a year younger. I don't recall JFK's campaign, although I do recall him being president, and certainly his assassination was the Pearl Harbor event for our generation.
I also remember the polarization of the 1960's: the Vietnam War, racial unrest, and campus riots. As a kid growing up in the Chicago area, IIRC I watched the 1968 Democrat Convention riot live on TV. So some things never change. Stuff like that goes in waves, as I've observed.
But I believe it's worse now -- thanks to social media. Before the internet we could turn off the TV or radio, close our magazines or newspapers, and set aside political enmity as we went about our day. Not now. With X, Instagram, TikTok, etc. polarization is at a fever pitch, and it continues 24/7, day after day after day. Where is the breaking point for this?
It is a small matter, but it is uncivil to omit the final “ic” in the name of the Democratic Party. Isn’t there enough wrong with them that you have to get their name wrong?
I mention it because it’s not just you. In fact it’s almost entirely not you. It’s commonplace. But it’s childish.
Here is one explanation. From my perspective, it is quite clear that almost all elected Dems either want to burn this country to the ground or know that if they object publicly, their political career would be over in a NY minute.
Most Dems hate this country. Don't believe me? Look at their policies in the Middle East and tell me they want what is best for this country. They are working tirelessly to make sure Iran gets access to the bomb. And while Iran hates Israel, we are after all "The Great Satan", are we not?
Look at their policies at the border. They don't want borders. Well, without borders, you don't have a country.
Obama said he "wanted to fundamentally transform" this country. You don't try to fundamentally transform that which you love.
Another reason that R's like me have such contempt and hatred for the Left is I know that if they could they would imprison folks like me. They already are!!! The J6 political prisoners. The pro-life folks who have been charged and imprisoned for praying and reading bible verses at abortion clinics.
Need I remind you that there are currently four (4!!!) separate active court cases in which the goal is the imprisonment of the current presumed nominee of the opposing party?
Folks like me on the Right understand quite clearly that this country is essentially over and we ain't getting it back. And do I hate those that did this? Yes, in spite of what the bible teaches me about my enemies, my patriotism is at war with my faith in this regard.
But my most bitter hatred is not reserved for the Left. It is for those in the middle who can't be bothered to pay attention to what is going on. All those kids for the last three or four generations who slept thru history class (if they were even taught it?) who now don't have the historical knowledge to realize that what the Left is doing today is the SAME GOD DAMNED PLAYBOOK they have used in every country they have destroyed!
BTW, I think your explanation of where the two parties are on the continuum is spot on. The Dems have moved the Overton Window so far to the left that they have made many of their older members into right wing extremists if they have remained where they were 30 years ago. And the R's have indeed moved to the Left, just not as quickly.
I think you are deducing mental states from behavior incorrectly. You correctly point to policies to which Democrats are wedded which (let us agree) are horribly destructive to America and conclude that Democrats “hate America,” a subjective sentiment I think few of them experience. They may be foolish or in denial, but they honestly believe what they do is good for America, which many of them love.
Does this make a difference? The policies are still destructive. But the people are, in the main, decent but confused, although a minority genuinely are evil. It makes a difference interpersonally.
I concur. I am a Republican. My brother is a Democrat (I think mainly through his wife; he was never political in his younger days.)
Do I confront him about his vote? No. He is the last member of my immediate family and I would never do anything to destroy our relationship. I’ve seen families divided over politics. It’s not worth it.
Another example of salient analysis, this time with a wonderful soundtrack! While I agree with your calculation of lost value listening to polls and pundits, I do think it is worth a reasonable investment of time to study what the candidates are saying, as difficult as that is to do in our soundbite driven media coverage. A few years after your vignette about the 1960 election, I was allowed to read a novel about how elections were being altered by computer aided polls (Fletcher Knebel as author sticks in my mind).The cover of the novel had an IBM machine and a cheering crowd around the candidate. As a result, I have always been wary.
I agree mostly. I nearly lost a good friend who was ranting about Trump before the 2016 election. I pointed out that Trump seemed to hold few, if any, opinions that wouldn't have been shared in 1995 by NY Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (my favorite post-WWII elected official). That sent him ballistic. I was gob-smacked. He angrily denied that ANY Democrat in the past 50 years or so was anything like Trump. I decided I'd rather keep a friend than argue the point, and he eventually simmered down. Now if he starts talking politics I grunt semi-intelligible "answers" until he moves on to sports or books or something.
As for social media, my wife is about as uninterested in "Politics" as it's possible to be and still vote intelligently. She is on a social App called NextDoor that I suppose is something like local gossip. She has been appalled by the "raving loonies" as she calls them who populate about 1/10th of the topics. Social media gives some terrible people the opportunity to meet other terrible people easily. Too bad.
This is looking like it’s going to be the third M.C. Escher Presidential election in a row…the only choice worse than the Republican is the Democrat and the only choice worse than the Democrat is the Republican. We are definitely in a kakistocracy.
On the topic of losing friends over politics, I lost a dear friend even though I agreed with her that Trump was not fit to be President and said I could not conceive of voting for him...BUT I had to admit that some of what happened while he was in office was pretty good: his Supreme Court picks, the Abraham Accords and the tax cuts for example. Click, end of friendship. On the other hand, I have quite a few friends and family members who are either Republicans or Democrats and we all seem to get along pretty well. I guess a lot depends on the strength of the relationship and the maturity of the persons involved.
I have been following the political sene for a long time. I ran for local office three time and lost three times. The last time I ran was because no one in my party wanted to run and I have a thick skin. I would say that I am a classical liberal. I believe everyone should have an equal opportunity and everyone should be personally responsible for themselves. Because my platform was that we were over taxed I did have people interested in what I had to say until they found out I was a Republican. Then some would politely walk away some would yell at me and a few even spit on me and told me I was ruining the country. I have come to believe that the reason we have become so divided and with so much rancor is that the Federal Government has too much to say about local issues. It was amazing to me the first time I explained how some insider deals cost the taxpayers money to be told that I wouldn’t get that persons vote because I was pro -life. How that even came up was a mystery until I realized I was a Republican and so had to be pro-life. Asking how that would affect anyone as all I wanted to do was reduce taxes was lost due to national politics. If DC stayed away from us I think we could find more common ground. But that has as much chance as a Republican being elected to Town Council in my town. BYW the last Republican on town council left in 1993. The latest time there was a Republican majority was before I moved into town in 1978.
The events of the Year 2020, Covid and Summer of Floyd, pretty much shattered my belief that politics is something that doesn't matter that much. When your being told "don't leave your house, don't breath the air, your kids school is closed, and roving mobs and burning your city and the authorities support it because your racist" that's it.
You know, it's not the heat per se about modern political debate, if I can grace it with a word it hardly deserves, that bothers me -- it's more the vacuity.
I mean...if I were a Trump man, I'd want to believe that a vote for The Don means a vote for balancing the budget, avoiding foreign entanglements, a strong national defense, reducing regulation, bringing order and the rule of law to immigration, rolling back the corrupt and corrosive regime of special entitlements based on race, sex, or some other victim status, and a robust defense of individual liberty. You know, the usual conservative kind of stuff, with of course a soupcon of culture war (e.g. abortion opposition) because this is America.
But I don't think that's actually true. I don't really identify any of those ideological passions as governing Mr. Trump's goal in seeking office, or intentions in holding it. I mean, I already have 2017-2021 as a guide, and his efforts along any of these lines were tepid at best. What I seem to be voting for is red hats and little flags, owning the libs with cutting tweets, and a lot of fierce social media debate. Even his (non-rabid) supporters seem to mostly like Mr. Trump for what he is not -- what he will not do. He won't abandon border control, he won't start any new wars, he won't propose huge tax or spending increases, and he won't appoint complete clowns who decline to define "woman" to the bench. The vast Federal colossus will lumber on for the most part, doing what it's been doing for the past umpty years, but at least it will wobble less. All well and good -- but hardly worthy of the kind of fanatical support or opposition that he raises.
Similarly, if I were a Biden woman (one hates to admit the possibility of a Biden man), I would like to think that a vote for Slow Joe is a vote for a trust-busting DoJ, an active EEOC persecuting companies that try to thwart unionization, protective tariffs, generous student loans, old age pensions, and disability provisions from the public till -- all the old lunch bucket Democratic stuff which, indeed, Senator Joe Biden imbibed with his mother's soy milk substitute and which propelled him to his Peter Principle level of political success in the US Senate. But of course, the modern Democratic Party hardly pays any attention to that stuff. They care way more about green energy than union drives. They care more about confused men using the girl's bathroom if they choose than whether granny is going to have to eat cat food in her retirement. When was the last time a Democrat visited a recently-shuttered factory, surrounded by grim men in hard hats, and said "Outrageous! Elect me and there'll be good union jobs for everybody, a chicken in every pot, all the children above average"?
And even then, if I was a Millenial Biden gal, say, I might at least hope I would be cementing a genderfluid social justice for all equitist state by throwing my vote into the Biden hopper. But that is also laughable. Biden had nothing to do with any of the "equitist" trends. They were probably as much a surprise to him as they were to his most committed ideological foes -- more so, even, as Biden has always been a bit slow on the uptake. He surfs those waves to the extent he can, certainly, since they have a home within his political party -- but who seriously believes he controls, or even has any significant influence over them? No, they are clearly the result of vast forces elsewhere in our nation, and Biden is not their leader, champion, or even competent apologist. So voting for Mr. Biden certainly avoids Mr. Trump raining snide Twitter/X remarks on equitist principles for 4 years, but little else. Not a worthless goal, if you're of that ilk, but hardly (you would think) enough to froth at the mouth like re-electing the doddering fool will usher in the millenium.
So the fierce debate centered around these candidates seems wildly overheated for the actual outcomes at stake. A Trump victory will not root out the equitists, even if he were much more interested in that result, and much more disciplined about pursuing it, than he is. A Biden victory will not cement equitism, either, so much as continue to feebly and chaotically enable it at the Federal level, at a level say 15% more than were Trump to win.
I don't really mind fierce argument over ideological direction -- provided the thing about which we are arguing to Do Or Not Do actually will have a significant steering effect on that direction, and one can look forward to an outcome more meaningful than who gets to raise a middle finger to the other guy and say ha!
Bicker, battle, broil and brawl? At first, I thought that was a law firm.
I've never learned anything from someone who agreed with me.
Beyond that, and perhaps more important. It's entirely possible that the reason the Wright Brothers succeeded in teaching us how to fly. (Oh yes, they developed the first practical airplane, but their real accomplishment was teaching us how to fly).
But back to the point, the reason they succeeded is that they believed in "productive argument". They could argue heatedly about issues, I do mean heated arguments, go to bed wake up friends the next day . In some cases they would wake up the next day and decide the other brother was right - and start the argument again.
I learned quantum mechanics from someone who agreed with me.
I’m surprised. I would think that he agreed with you and disagreed with you simultaneously, as long as he was in the box, unobserved.
Later corrected: I originally misread your message to read “observed” where it says “unobserved.” Oops. If you must overlook one syllable, it is best not to pick one that reverses the meaning of the post.
Only when not observed. When observed, it would have to be one state or the other. But whether at the same time he liked me could not be determined finer than the scale of Planck’s Constant.
I once helped edit a book by a great Israeli economist, Don Patinkin--before the PC/word processor era. His handwriting was a bit messy, and in one chapter, the typesetter had entered "now" in every location where he had written "not." Don was very pleased that I had discovered that error, as it reversed the meaning of practically every point he was making in that chapter. (e.g., "There is not inflation" would become "There is now inflation.")
Yikes!
It all depends on whether the agreement operator commutes with the learning operator. One can see arguments either way.
Or both ways simultaneously.
Can you be sure of their agreement? Is it possible you changed it by measuring it? Or if I measured it, would the result be the same?
Thankfully, it's obvious that no one has taught me quantum mechanics...although perhaps by measuring it something has changed. Whew! I'm going to bed.
Having been effectively disenfranchised at the House district level by gerrymandering quite a while back, I can definitely say it's had an impact on how I view politics and politicians.
Not sure that was it for me. You see, I live in California so I was already disenfranchised.
As a libertarian, I marvel at the animosity that exists in the quadrant of the economic vs civil liberty matrix shared by communists, flanked by socialists and fascists, and the increasing closeness of the progressives (there is nothing any longer "liberal" about them) and conservatives with their overlapping amoeboid tentacles reflecting individual policies. Inter-political marriage is currently twice as opposed in polls as inter-racial marriages. Both major parties have no policies that can bring fiscal sanity nor civil peace to the nation. I agree with your analysis and I enjoyed "Nostalgia" (from an active guitar and Trombone player).
Thinking about yesterday's post on Disney, I can imagine that AI will have major impacts on the business, likely positive for the bottom line but not so much for the art.
I like what you have to say. I recommend clearer writing. I was a bit confused by your first sentence, which is a run-on. I think its latter part means, in part, that what now passes for conservatism heavily overlaps progressivism in policies although they are opposing tribes, which is true, important, and apt: but does not quite say so.
Take heart. I think the impact of generative AI on art qua art has been wildly overestimated. We can think of generative AI as a tireless bevy of competent but uninspired apprentices and disciples, who can churn out endless mash-ups of some master's work -- like a competent painter doing endless variations on Picasso, or a competent musician doing endless variations on Chopin. They are certainly astonishing, viewed on their own, and if you forget a little their provenance[1].
But if these things could ever satisfy the human impulse for artistic invention -- why, they would have, long ago. There would have *been* no more piano composition later than Chopin, because generations of *human* recopiers and remixers interested in a fast buck would've satisfied the world's hunger for new piano music by recycling Chopin ad infinitum. There would be no more art after Leonardo (or some other brilliant artist, we can pick any, any time), because the world would've been satisfied with endless variations on Mona Lisa. ("Look! Now she's wearing a hat! If The Louvre calls, I'll be in the sunroom."[2])
Since this has not happened, I think we can safely conclude it cannot happen, and therefore that generative AI poses no threat at all to the demand for genuinely new and creative art. To be sure, it could easily put out of work some commercial artists, the way the camera put out of work a lot of merely competent portrait artists. But this is just ordinary technological disruption, not artistic Götterdammerung.
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[1] I mean, this is what astonishes me about the people who are astonished that a computer program, with faultless memory, which has been "trained" on the entire corpus of written law, including the text of every Supreme Court opinion from John Marshall on down, can achieve a decent score on the bar exam, say. This is kind of like being amazed that my calculator can multiply two 6-digit faultlessly, in microseconds, far better than I could do. Is it so very much smarter than me? Of course not. It just has special-purpose circuits for that task, in a way I don't. A generative AI trained on petabytes of text written by ordinary human beings can, not surprisingly, produce text that looks like it's been written by ordinary human beings -- because it now has special-purpose circuits for that task. The reason it's amazing *in us* by contrast is because, so far as we know, we *don't* have special-purpose circuits for writing essays on humanism, composing the Ode to Joy, or inventing calculus. We were never "trained" to do those things, and that's why they are remarkable -- and bear no comparison to a computer program.
[2] If someone wants to argue certain forms of modern art could be taken over by AIs, I might not be able to argue, because I am a philistine about that kind of art, and wouldn't know brilliance from an accident with a scared cat, stepladder, and five opened paint cans.
Excellent stuff. You'll notice that I often use AI to produce the art for these articles. And I do so for precisely the reasons you cite. It produces some quite impressive variations on familiar themes. It's eye-catching, fun sometimes, and most importantly, it's "adequate." AI is a threat to the adequate. When you need artwork, not art, AI can be great. (Most often, I do additional work on the texture, colors, intensity, etc., so it doesn't necessarily scream "Bob used Midjourney.") I imagine some great artists will use AI to produce great art. I heard a story long ago, attributed to Ansel Adams. In the story, sometime says to Adams that photography isn't really art, because anyone can use a camera. The response was, "Then why do the same few people win all the photography competitions." Vermeer likely used a contrivance to reproduce scenes--but so what? (There's a fascinating documentary on this called "Tim's Vermeer." I suspect you would enjoy it.) ... All that said, AI might unexpectedly threaten some fields. I recall reading an article in the late 1960s explaining why computers would never be able to defeat truly great chess players. And, of course, Deep Blue defeated Kasparov less than 30 years later. One might argue, though, that this didn't mean the achievement of art by a computer, but more a demonstration that great chess playing is more rote and less art than we had previously believed.
Yes, absolutely. We are both old enough to remember typists, travel agents, reference librarians, typesetters, telephone switchboard operators, et cetera. Technological disruption is a constant. One has to adapt.
In re the use by artists of AI -- I think this is quite interesting, and I expect for some artists AI will be a marvelous new tool, kind of like (as you point out) the camera was a marvelous new tool for genuine artists in its day. Something of the same is already happening in chess and Go, where I understand the best train against machines, like athletes train with machines to build strength faster, and there are even people who have studied the way machines play and discovered weaknesses:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/man-beats-machine-at-go-in-human-victory-over-ai/
You never want to bet against human ingenuity, is my general thought. If there were a way to short the prospects of AGI catastrophe, I'd invest.
Really, this is just an extension of the principles of comparative advantage. AI will do some things better than humans, but humans will do other things better than AI. Which activities fall into which of these two buckets will likely shift about endlessly--as is true of the comparative advantages of nations or of other agglomerations of humans. And there will always be those caught short when the shifts occur. Mechanized looms were, indeed, a catastrophe for some weavers during the transition period. But today's textile industry offers a great deal more wealth than did the preindustrial profession--directly and indirectly. Master weavers earned a lot of money, but textile industry executives today earn a lot more in real terms. And the mechanized world meant that today's textile workers have antibiotics, whereas the wealthiest master weaver in 1800 did not.
Agreed on all points. I wonder, though, whether there is some very slow version of Luddite truth that does occur. To wit, suppose the average level of drive, energy, intelligence, et cetera that you need to prosper with new technology steadily rises, so that you end up with an economy in which fewer and fewer people are *really* productive and everyone else more or less services their needs, the way the retinue that accumulates around anyone very successful and wealthy does a lot of the stuff that ordinary people do for themselves (e.g. cook, clean, buy clothes, make appointments and ordinary phone calls), because at some point it's cheaper to hire someone to do these things than it is to do them yourself (given the wage opportunity cost).
If you watch the (wonderful) Canadian Science Channel show "How It's Made" you can kind of see this already: in the most advanced factories all the really clever work is done by machines and robots, no doubt designed by clever engineers who we don't see, and most of what the human beings on camera do is feed parts into the robots at the correct orientation, or inspect the result. Stuff at which human beings are naturally good, and which is expensive to program a machine to do -- but which is, nevertheless, not really the heart of the manufacturing process, not what the master craftsman (as opposed to his apprentices) did in the old days.
What would such a world look like? I hazard you'd get a massive rise in service jobs that more or less consisted of glorified butler/maid/secretary/aide-de-camp/commissar work: scheduling, writing stuff down, dotting i's and crossing t's, doing PR work, writing and polishing speeches, reviewing and critiquing, showmanship and entertaining. Furthermore, to keep social stability, there would need to be larger and larger flow of wealth from the most productive to the less so, which suggests a much bigger government apparatus for managing the redistribution, and therefore the significantg growth of jobs related to managing it, debating and deciding on its size and nature.
Which sounds unnervingly like what we actually see having happened around us, from the 17th century to the present. We now hear people complaining that too many people don't actually create, grow, or manufacture anything, that there's too many "bullshit" jobs that don't product, but just record, critique, or manage production. This is often followed by grumbles suggesting this stems from moral weakness or social dysfunction, because we love a good parable. But what if this change is in fact an ineluctable consequence of technology steadily advancing in sophistication while human sophistication necessarily (barring genetic engineering) stands still? It's OK if we can adapt, spiritually, to most of us being servants, but the grumbling suggests it may not come naturally to our nature -- that there is a social psychic pain inherent in that kind of change.
Agree on all. It's a big question. The usual answer is, "Well, we always adapted in the past." But, of course, as your car plunges downward into the chasm, the words, "Well, the bridge never collapsed in the past" offer little comfort."
John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
But he likely underestimated the dangers of creating a society where his fortunate children and grandchildren would be surrounded by an upstairs/downstairs, Eloi/Morlock society. He probably also underestimated the danger of a population of painters, poets, musicians wit time on their hands and the desire to redesign everyone else's lives.
Bob, you and I are similar in age -- I'm about a year younger. I don't recall JFK's campaign, although I do recall him being president, and certainly his assassination was the Pearl Harbor event for our generation.
I also remember the polarization of the 1960's: the Vietnam War, racial unrest, and campus riots. As a kid growing up in the Chicago area, IIRC I watched the 1968 Democrat Convention riot live on TV. So some things never change. Stuff like that goes in waves, as I've observed.
But I believe it's worse now -- thanks to social media. Before the internet we could turn off the TV or radio, close our magazines or newspapers, and set aside political enmity as we went about our day. Not now. With X, Instagram, TikTok, etc. polarization is at a fever pitch, and it continues 24/7, day after day after day. Where is the breaking point for this?
I don't use X, Instagram or TikTok. I do post things to Facebook and read posts by our family members. Otherwise I don't need these media.
Nobody “needs” these media, or indeed much of anything but food, water, and oxygen. Everything else is something to want. (Even much that is food.)
You like Facebook but don’t need it; others like X but don’t need it.
I say this without prejudice to the argument that one social medium is more destructive than another, which I think very likely.
It is a small matter, but it is uncivil to omit the final “ic” in the name of the Democratic Party. Isn’t there enough wrong with them that you have to get their name wrong?
I mention it because it’s not just you. In fact it’s almost entirely not you. It’s commonplace. But it’s childish.
Are you saying that I was using a slur? Because I wasn’t. For all I know it was a typo.
In your case I do not doubt it was a typo, merely coinciding with a common slur.
I apologize for the mistaken imputation.
No worries at all.
Here is one explanation. From my perspective, it is quite clear that almost all elected Dems either want to burn this country to the ground or know that if they object publicly, their political career would be over in a NY minute.
Most Dems hate this country. Don't believe me? Look at their policies in the Middle East and tell me they want what is best for this country. They are working tirelessly to make sure Iran gets access to the bomb. And while Iran hates Israel, we are after all "The Great Satan", are we not?
Look at their policies at the border. They don't want borders. Well, without borders, you don't have a country.
Obama said he "wanted to fundamentally transform" this country. You don't try to fundamentally transform that which you love.
Another reason that R's like me have such contempt and hatred for the Left is I know that if they could they would imprison folks like me. They already are!!! The J6 political prisoners. The pro-life folks who have been charged and imprisoned for praying and reading bible verses at abortion clinics.
Need I remind you that there are currently four (4!!!) separate active court cases in which the goal is the imprisonment of the current presumed nominee of the opposing party?
Folks like me on the Right understand quite clearly that this country is essentially over and we ain't getting it back. And do I hate those that did this? Yes, in spite of what the bible teaches me about my enemies, my patriotism is at war with my faith in this regard.
But my most bitter hatred is not reserved for the Left. It is for those in the middle who can't be bothered to pay attention to what is going on. All those kids for the last three or four generations who slept thru history class (if they were even taught it?) who now don't have the historical knowledge to realize that what the Left is doing today is the SAME GOD DAMNED PLAYBOOK they have used in every country they have destroyed!
BTW, I think your explanation of where the two parties are on the continuum is spot on. The Dems have moved the Overton Window so far to the left that they have made many of their older members into right wing extremists if they have remained where they were 30 years ago. And the R's have indeed moved to the Left, just not as quickly.
I think you are deducing mental states from behavior incorrectly. You correctly point to policies to which Democrats are wedded which (let us agree) are horribly destructive to America and conclude that Democrats “hate America,” a subjective sentiment I think few of them experience. They may be foolish or in denial, but they honestly believe what they do is good for America, which many of them love.
Does this make a difference? The policies are still destructive. But the people are, in the main, decent but confused, although a minority genuinely are evil. It makes a difference interpersonally.
I concur. I am a Republican. My brother is a Democrat (I think mainly through his wife; he was never political in his younger days.)
Do I confront him about his vote? No. He is the last member of my immediate family and I would never do anything to destroy our relationship. I’ve seen families divided over politics. It’s not worth it.
Another example of salient analysis, this time with a wonderful soundtrack! While I agree with your calculation of lost value listening to polls and pundits, I do think it is worth a reasonable investment of time to study what the candidates are saying, as difficult as that is to do in our soundbite driven media coverage. A few years after your vignette about the 1960 election, I was allowed to read a novel about how elections were being altered by computer aided polls (Fletcher Knebel as author sticks in my mind).The cover of the novel had an IBM machine and a cheering crowd around the candidate. As a result, I have always been wary.
I agree mostly. I nearly lost a good friend who was ranting about Trump before the 2016 election. I pointed out that Trump seemed to hold few, if any, opinions that wouldn't have been shared in 1995 by NY Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (my favorite post-WWII elected official). That sent him ballistic. I was gob-smacked. He angrily denied that ANY Democrat in the past 50 years or so was anything like Trump. I decided I'd rather keep a friend than argue the point, and he eventually simmered down. Now if he starts talking politics I grunt semi-intelligible "answers" until he moves on to sports or books or something.
As for social media, my wife is about as uninterested in "Politics" as it's possible to be and still vote intelligently. She is on a social App called NextDoor that I suppose is something like local gossip. She has been appalled by the "raving loonies" as she calls them who populate about 1/10th of the topics. Social media gives some terrible people the opportunity to meet other terrible people easily. Too bad.
This is looking like it’s going to be the third M.C. Escher Presidential election in a row…the only choice worse than the Republican is the Democrat and the only choice worse than the Democrat is the Republican. We are definitely in a kakistocracy.
On the topic of losing friends over politics, I lost a dear friend even though I agreed with her that Trump was not fit to be President and said I could not conceive of voting for him...BUT I had to admit that some of what happened while he was in office was pretty good: his Supreme Court picks, the Abraham Accords and the tax cuts for example. Click, end of friendship. On the other hand, I have quite a few friends and family members who are either Republicans or Democrats and we all seem to get along pretty well. I guess a lot depends on the strength of the relationship and the maturity of the persons involved.
I'm going to feature your Escher quip in a post. May I credit you by name?
Of course. Thank you.
I have been following the political sene for a long time. I ran for local office three time and lost three times. The last time I ran was because no one in my party wanted to run and I have a thick skin. I would say that I am a classical liberal. I believe everyone should have an equal opportunity and everyone should be personally responsible for themselves. Because my platform was that we were over taxed I did have people interested in what I had to say until they found out I was a Republican. Then some would politely walk away some would yell at me and a few even spit on me and told me I was ruining the country. I have come to believe that the reason we have become so divided and with so much rancor is that the Federal Government has too much to say about local issues. It was amazing to me the first time I explained how some insider deals cost the taxpayers money to be told that I wouldn’t get that persons vote because I was pro -life. How that even came up was a mystery until I realized I was a Republican and so had to be pro-life. Asking how that would affect anyone as all I wanted to do was reduce taxes was lost due to national politics. If DC stayed away from us I think we could find more common ground. But that has as much chance as a Republican being elected to Town Council in my town. BYW the last Republican on town council left in 1993. The latest time there was a Republican majority was before I moved into town in 1978.
The events of the Year 2020, Covid and Summer of Floyd, pretty much shattered my belief that politics is something that doesn't matter that much. When your being told "don't leave your house, don't breath the air, your kids school is closed, and roving mobs and burning your city and the authorities support it because your racist" that's it.
You know, it's not the heat per se about modern political debate, if I can grace it with a word it hardly deserves, that bothers me -- it's more the vacuity.
I mean...if I were a Trump man, I'd want to believe that a vote for The Don means a vote for balancing the budget, avoiding foreign entanglements, a strong national defense, reducing regulation, bringing order and the rule of law to immigration, rolling back the corrupt and corrosive regime of special entitlements based on race, sex, or some other victim status, and a robust defense of individual liberty. You know, the usual conservative kind of stuff, with of course a soupcon of culture war (e.g. abortion opposition) because this is America.
But I don't think that's actually true. I don't really identify any of those ideological passions as governing Mr. Trump's goal in seeking office, or intentions in holding it. I mean, I already have 2017-2021 as a guide, and his efforts along any of these lines were tepid at best. What I seem to be voting for is red hats and little flags, owning the libs with cutting tweets, and a lot of fierce social media debate. Even his (non-rabid) supporters seem to mostly like Mr. Trump for what he is not -- what he will not do. He won't abandon border control, he won't start any new wars, he won't propose huge tax or spending increases, and he won't appoint complete clowns who decline to define "woman" to the bench. The vast Federal colossus will lumber on for the most part, doing what it's been doing for the past umpty years, but at least it will wobble less. All well and good -- but hardly worthy of the kind of fanatical support or opposition that he raises.
Similarly, if I were a Biden woman (one hates to admit the possibility of a Biden man), I would like to think that a vote for Slow Joe is a vote for a trust-busting DoJ, an active EEOC persecuting companies that try to thwart unionization, protective tariffs, generous student loans, old age pensions, and disability provisions from the public till -- all the old lunch bucket Democratic stuff which, indeed, Senator Joe Biden imbibed with his mother's soy milk substitute and which propelled him to his Peter Principle level of political success in the US Senate. But of course, the modern Democratic Party hardly pays any attention to that stuff. They care way more about green energy than union drives. They care more about confused men using the girl's bathroom if they choose than whether granny is going to have to eat cat food in her retirement. When was the last time a Democrat visited a recently-shuttered factory, surrounded by grim men in hard hats, and said "Outrageous! Elect me and there'll be good union jobs for everybody, a chicken in every pot, all the children above average"?
And even then, if I was a Millenial Biden gal, say, I might at least hope I would be cementing a genderfluid social justice for all equitist state by throwing my vote into the Biden hopper. But that is also laughable. Biden had nothing to do with any of the "equitist" trends. They were probably as much a surprise to him as they were to his most committed ideological foes -- more so, even, as Biden has always been a bit slow on the uptake. He surfs those waves to the extent he can, certainly, since they have a home within his political party -- but who seriously believes he controls, or even has any significant influence over them? No, they are clearly the result of vast forces elsewhere in our nation, and Biden is not their leader, champion, or even competent apologist. So voting for Mr. Biden certainly avoids Mr. Trump raining snide Twitter/X remarks on equitist principles for 4 years, but little else. Not a worthless goal, if you're of that ilk, but hardly (you would think) enough to froth at the mouth like re-electing the doddering fool will usher in the millenium.
So the fierce debate centered around these candidates seems wildly overheated for the actual outcomes at stake. A Trump victory will not root out the equitists, even if he were much more interested in that result, and much more disciplined about pursuing it, than he is. A Biden victory will not cement equitism, either, so much as continue to feebly and chaotically enable it at the Federal level, at a level say 15% more than were Trump to win.
I don't really mind fierce argument over ideological direction -- provided the thing about which we are arguing to Do Or Not Do actually will have a significant steering effect on that direction, and one can look forward to an outcome more meaningful than who gets to raise a middle finger to the other guy and say ha!