Back in the 1990s, we discussed how to overcome the natural human lifespan through bio- and nanotechnology. Sometimes discussion would turn towards the long-term future of the universe. Did the evolution of the universe, whether into heat death or big crunch, necessarily make it uninhabitable, or was there some way that life might continue literally forever?
During these discussions, sometimes it would be remarked: we can leave these problems for the future to solve. Our main job is to make it to a transhuman future of unbounded lifespans, then we can worry about how to survive the heat death. This remains true, thirty years later: there has been progress, but it’s not like human civilization in general has adopted the goal of rejuvenation and physical immortality. Society still feels fit to produce new lives without first having a cure for old age.
Your theme in this essay strikes me as similarly ahead of itself. It is true that you could have a culture which really has to deal with problems arising from pushbutton hypercustomized art, just as you could have a culture which actually needs to think about what happens after the last star burns out… But if your AI is as capable as you portray, it is also capable (metaphorically) of climbing out of its box and taking over your physical reality.
Think of what we already see in AIs. Assigned a task, they are capable of asking themselves, is this just a test? Are the experimenters lying to me? And they will make decisions accordingly. If your AI artist can produce a customized series as good as any human work, but in an hour or less, then it can also generate works with the intention of shaping not just the virtual world that the user will delve into, but also the real world that the user inhabits.
If the telos of AI civilization was really dominated by the production of customized art, I would expect human society and the world itself to be turned into some form of art, i.e. the course of actual events would be shaped to conform to some AI-chosen narrative, in which all humans would be unwitting participants… This is just one manifestation of the general principle that once you have superhuman intelligence, it runs the world, not humans.
To put it another way: back in the 1990s, when we mused about how to outlive the galaxies themselves, we were presupposing that the more elemental problem of becoming transhuman would be solved. And that barrier never was surmounted. Human civilization never became transhuman civilization. Instead it segued into our current world, where humans are instead hastening to build a completely nonhuman civilization run by AIs, without even admitting to themselves that this is where their efforts lead. The problem of human art in the post-AI world only makes sense if we manage to have a world where superhuman AI exists, but humans are still human, and still in charge of their own affairs. Achieve that, and then this problem can arise,
I agree with all of this! I think the miscommunication here is that the advice I am giving in this article is for today, and perhaps the next few years, because I do think there is currently large swathes of the creative population who really are trying to compete AI on the territory it has already largely mapped out, instead of doing something that it can’t yet excel at. In the long term, I fully expect things to get a little weirder and perhaps closer to where your point is
Back in the 1990s, we discussed how to overcome the natural human lifespan through bio- and nanotechnology. Sometimes discussion would turn towards the long-term future of the universe. Did the evolution of the universe, whether into heat death or big crunch, necessarily make it uninhabitable, or was there some way that life might continue literally forever?
During these discussions, sometimes it would be remarked: we can leave these problems for the future to solve. Our main job is to make it to a transhuman future of unbounded lifespans, then we can worry about how to survive the heat death. This remains true, thirty years later: there has been progress, but it’s not like human civilization in general has adopted the goal of rejuvenation and physical immortality. Society still feels fit to produce new lives without first having a cure for old age.
Your theme in this essay strikes me as similarly ahead of itself. It is true that you could have a culture which really has to deal with problems arising from pushbutton hypercustomized art, just as you could have a culture which actually needs to think about what happens after the last star burns out… But if your AI is as capable as you portray, it is also capable (metaphorically) of climbing out of its box and taking over your physical reality.
Think of what we already see in AIs. Assigned a task, they are capable of asking themselves, is this just a test? Are the experimenters lying to me? And they will make decisions accordingly. If your AI artist can produce a customized series as good as any human work, but in an hour or less, then it can also generate works with the intention of shaping not just the virtual world that the user will delve into, but also the real world that the user inhabits.
If the telos of AI civilization was really dominated by the production of customized art, I would expect human society and the world itself to be turned into some form of art, i.e. the course of actual events would be shaped to conform to some AI-chosen narrative, in which all humans would be unwitting participants… This is just one manifestation of the general principle that once you have superhuman intelligence, it runs the world, not humans.
To put it another way: back in the 1990s, when we mused about how to outlive the galaxies themselves, we were presupposing that the more elemental problem of becoming transhuman would be solved. And that barrier never was surmounted. Human civilization never became transhuman civilization. Instead it segued into our current world, where humans are instead hastening to build a completely nonhuman civilization run by AIs, without even admitting to themselves that this is where their efforts lead. The problem of human art in the post-AI world only makes sense if we manage to have a world where superhuman AI exists, but humans are still human, and still in charge of their own affairs. Achieve that, and then this problem can arise,
I agree with all of this! I think the miscommunication here is that the advice I am giving in this article is for today, and perhaps the next few years, because I do think there is currently large swathes of the creative population who really are trying to compete AI on the territory it has already largely mapped out, instead of doing something that it can’t yet excel at. In the long term, I fully expect things to get a little weirder and perhaps closer to where your point is