Tools of the Trade
Using cutting edge technology lowers barriers and forms a rift between people who choose the new way over the old way. Musicians that use instruments looked down on the first electronic musicians and then those analog digital musicians looked down on people who use laptops and software. It’s the same with film and digital cameras. It’s simply newer technology displacing older technology and optimizing for different variables.
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The scale of human society has been built through labor, using people as tools to accomplish things we couldn’t achieve alone. The tools and technology developed over time have been human-operated and optimized towards making it easier for fewer humans to do more work. The current financial systems we live under are optimizing toward capital efficiency which is a seemingly, aligned goal. The next wave of tools being built are to replace people in ways that most never believed would come true. As we face the wave of unemployment that will rise from artificial intelligence and robotics we have to ask ourselves, what quality of human life are we optimizing for?
Good Enough
We just jumped right into the deep end, but let’s take a look back to see how we got here. The free market is the default of human trading (whenever it’s not violence.) Two parties come to terms in a trade or barter, and there is usually no need for a third party. The various financial systems across the globe have mostly optimized for marginal growth. First on the corporate level and then in the form of each nation’s Gross Domestic Product. That thirst for profit margin creates a lack of compassion as it slowly permeates through each layer of society and commerce looking for every nook and cranny to drain for more marginal growth.
According to Merriam-Webster intelligence is defined as the ability to learn, or understand, or to deal with new or trying situations, the skilled use of reason, the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment, or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (such as tests).
I would define intelligence as the ability to solve problems with ingenuity.
Ideas around creativity, quality, and originality are hard subjective discussions, but even more difficult equations to solve. On the other hand, solving for profit margin is easy especially when compassion is not a factor. Thinking about the value of a creative work is placed in the emotional context of where the buyer and seller are in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. All of my present ideas around the creator economy stem from the necessity of creators to make art to survive. Imagine what people would make without the constraint of measuring value on top of the philosophical questions the art was already addressing.
Artificial Intelligence does not require any physiological or psychological considerations in order to achieve results. Of course, at this stage, it requires human input and an artist can easily say that they can do better than AI, but for how long? If the results you need are “good enough” then the bottom just dropped out of the illustrator market with music, copywriting, and a few others following closely behind. AI will likely lead to the creative equivalent of the “just-in-time” market strategy in less than a year.
If global finance is just a large game of Monopoly and capital efficiency is the goal then humans are the weakest link and AI will easily solve the optimization issues. If social consensus can so easily be swayed by social media algorithms then AI can also be easily swayed by the information it is fed and the assumptions and biases we build into it. The art, writing, and ability to fool us will get better, and so will the emotional impact, and influence that art has on us. If the goal is content creation to sell ad space the two will become inseparable and marketing will be irresistibly powerful. Our priorities are what our code will end up optimizing towards and the other things will suffer. The immeasurable things like creativity, quality, originality, understanding, and compassion.
Quality with a Capital Q
Humans requiring jobs for basic survival is a logical fallacy, even more so, in the face of AI and automation. Farms and food prep are becoming automated, robots are becoming more agile every day, and AI will get exponentially smarter making the machines they control better. Go far enough down that path and the only jobs that will exist are developers, prompt writers, and some repair people. A little bit further and even those are gone, quicker than you think. As more and more jobs become obsolete there is no reason you need bureaucratic or physical labor to achieve the next level of human coordination. According to Alan Watts, “The purpose of the machine is to make drudgery unnecessary and if we don’t allow it to achieve its purpose we live in a constant state of self-frustration.” We are all feeling this state of self-frustration as we watch the state of global finance and the institutions we’re supposed to trust erode that visage day by day as the problems stack as high as their profits and debts while the quality of life and environment decreases. When we allow machines to make ALL of human life easier, we will see the originality and ingenuity of human randomness be set free to explode into a renaissance of thoughts not achievable under the current constraints of measuring value.
What will art, film, music, writing, code, architecture, and every other form of creativity evolve into without the need to please producers, benefactors, investors, advertisers, or anonymous crowds for basic survival? What styles and fashions may emerge? What unknown fields of thought and activity might be born from the freedom of humans from mindless labor?
We will still labor but it will be out of love for the media we have unlocked through years of human toil and sacrifice. That is the future we all want to live in. So looking at the present situation and the tools we’re building, if we measure all human value(s) by the ability to survive based on ever-increasing needs for capital efficiency then what quality of life and intelligence are we optimizing for?
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