No, I do not welcome our new, tech overlords
In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche tells us that, "He who has a 'why' for which to live can bear almost any 'how'." This is followed by the line: "Humanity does not strive for happiness; only the English do."
Meaning, in other words, is more important than the kind of utilitarian happiness that was, in the nineteenth century, being advocated by English philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and which remains an influential model in the Anglosphere today.
Later, in the twentieth century, Viktor Frankl founded logotherapy, which has come to be called the third school of Viennese psychotherapy, on the principle that Nietzsche's words encapsulate. Frankl illustrates the principle in Man's Search for Meaning, his memoir of Auschwitz and Dachau, where he was a prisoner. His contention was that it is precisely meaning, purpose, which is decisive in surviving such conditions.
Recently, we have seen a spate of AI images in the style of Japan's Studio Ghibli, this supposedly marking some new watershed in AI development. People have been converting photos of themselves, or other images of choice, into the warm, slightly otherworldly style familiar from the animated films of Miyazaki Hayao, and this has been surrounded by a virtual tornado of rhetoric and outrage. There are concerns about copyright issues as well as the devaluing of the original artworks in a more metaphysical, aesthetic or spiritual way. Mention has been made of a "semantic apocalypse". Some of these concerns are subtle but they might, nonetheless, point to phenomena that will have far-reaching consequences. I will, for now, focus on one of the existential questions.
While doomscrolling on the AI theme on X/Twitter, I found mention of Christy Brown, the Irish artist born with such severe cerebral palsy that he only had motor control of his left leg. I can't find the 'tweet' in question now, but here is another one mentioning him in the same context:
https://x.com/MannysMyName/status/190...
It was using his operational left leg that Brown became a painter, thus, through the means given by the struggle to master the art of painting, finding the purpose needed to continue living in the face of the great suffering to which his memoir, My Left Foot , attests.
Now, we may ask, what would have happened if, rather than being encouraged to be a painter, Christy had been told not to bother, because there is an AI that can do it all better and he only needs to feed in a few prompts? This is the situation in which we might now find ourselves as a human species. The question is not whether AI programmes actually make this or that obsolete, though this is a related and important question to which we must return. No, the current live question is whether the tech industry can convince people on a large enough scale that AI makes this or that obsolete. And since, for decades, the value of the humanities has been eroded from both left and right -- from the left, because we are supposed either to have no heritage or to be ashamed of it, and because what remains is devoted to mere left-wing propaganda, and from the right because the arts and humanities are effeminate, decadent and are too often subsidised -- big tech will have a much easier time of persuading people than if people had the benefits of a rounded education, giving full value to the arts and humanities, to those things, in other words, which help us understand ourselves as human beings, morally, culturally, psychologically and existentially.
The voices we hear from big tech and its advocates show that either they do not understand the damage they are doing, or they do not care, or they positively revel in it. Perhaps you, too, revel in the idea of depriving artists of first, their income, and then, any sense of purpose, but do not think for a moment that if the tech companies can do this to artists (I hope they cannot) that they will stop there. All of us need a living of some kind, and all of us need purpose. In our society, with its complex division of social roles and labour, artists, writers, musicians and so on, have the often thankless and usually precarious task of working at the coalface of the Nietzschean 'Why'. We are the purpose-detectors and the purpose-developers for the human race. If you think you will not be demoralised if we are, I put it to you that you are very wrong, and that, if we are allowed actually to be demoralised en masse in this way (further than, frankly, we already are), you will discover in time, and to your great detriment, exactly how wrong you are.
I am keeping this brief for now because I am in the middle of a change of address, made necessary by financial considerations. I can no longer afford the modest flat that I have been living in. What I have written above is not theoretical for me, I am in the very belly of it. However, I intend to expand on this later when I have time, since there is much to say about it. And no, I do not welcome our new, tech overlords.
Meaning, in other words, is more important than the kind of utilitarian happiness that was, in the nineteenth century, being advocated by English philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and which remains an influential model in the Anglosphere today.
Later, in the twentieth century, Viktor Frankl founded logotherapy, which has come to be called the third school of Viennese psychotherapy, on the principle that Nietzsche's words encapsulate. Frankl illustrates the principle in Man's Search for Meaning, his memoir of Auschwitz and Dachau, where he was a prisoner. His contention was that it is precisely meaning, purpose, which is decisive in surviving such conditions.
Recently, we have seen a spate of AI images in the style of Japan's Studio Ghibli, this supposedly marking some new watershed in AI development. People have been converting photos of themselves, or other images of choice, into the warm, slightly otherworldly style familiar from the animated films of Miyazaki Hayao, and this has been surrounded by a virtual tornado of rhetoric and outrage. There are concerns about copyright issues as well as the devaluing of the original artworks in a more metaphysical, aesthetic or spiritual way. Mention has been made of a "semantic apocalypse". Some of these concerns are subtle but they might, nonetheless, point to phenomena that will have far-reaching consequences. I will, for now, focus on one of the existential questions.
While doomscrolling on the AI theme on X/Twitter, I found mention of Christy Brown, the Irish artist born with such severe cerebral palsy that he only had motor control of his left leg. I can't find the 'tweet' in question now, but here is another one mentioning him in the same context:
https://x.com/MannysMyName/status/190...
It was using his operational left leg that Brown became a painter, thus, through the means given by the struggle to master the art of painting, finding the purpose needed to continue living in the face of the great suffering to which his memoir, My Left Foot , attests.
Now, we may ask, what would have happened if, rather than being encouraged to be a painter, Christy had been told not to bother, because there is an AI that can do it all better and he only needs to feed in a few prompts? This is the situation in which we might now find ourselves as a human species. The question is not whether AI programmes actually make this or that obsolete, though this is a related and important question to which we must return. No, the current live question is whether the tech industry can convince people on a large enough scale that AI makes this or that obsolete. And since, for decades, the value of the humanities has been eroded from both left and right -- from the left, because we are supposed either to have no heritage or to be ashamed of it, and because what remains is devoted to mere left-wing propaganda, and from the right because the arts and humanities are effeminate, decadent and are too often subsidised -- big tech will have a much easier time of persuading people than if people had the benefits of a rounded education, giving full value to the arts and humanities, to those things, in other words, which help us understand ourselves as human beings, morally, culturally, psychologically and existentially.
The voices we hear from big tech and its advocates show that either they do not understand the damage they are doing, or they do not care, or they positively revel in it. Perhaps you, too, revel in the idea of depriving artists of first, their income, and then, any sense of purpose, but do not think for a moment that if the tech companies can do this to artists (I hope they cannot) that they will stop there. All of us need a living of some kind, and all of us need purpose. In our society, with its complex division of social roles and labour, artists, writers, musicians and so on, have the often thankless and usually precarious task of working at the coalface of the Nietzschean 'Why'. We are the purpose-detectors and the purpose-developers for the human race. If you think you will not be demoralised if we are, I put it to you that you are very wrong, and that, if we are allowed actually to be demoralised en masse in this way (further than, frankly, we already are), you will discover in time, and to your great detriment, exactly how wrong you are.
I am keeping this brief for now because I am in the middle of a change of address, made necessary by financial considerations. I can no longer afford the modest flat that I have been living in. What I have written above is not theoretical for me, I am in the very belly of it. However, I intend to expand on this later when I have time, since there is much to say about it. And no, I do not welcome our new, tech overlords.
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The inherited wealth analogy from Crichton is a good one. I hadn't seen it that way before.You're right about the importance of the process. I can't help wondering, if someone can't be bothered, for instance, to put the time in to actually writing a book, but wants it at the press of a button, why would someone want to put the time in to read it? Why would someone want to lose themselves in contemplating a painting that involved no contemplation to create? It seems like this is a dog-in-a-manger phenomenon of people wishing to flood the world with a glut of 'art' made by people who despise art for people who are not interested in art.
I think that the tragedy of the self-entitled "AI Artists" is that they don't seem to realize that in regards to the creative act, the actual process of creation is just as important as the end result. Indeed, I would perhaps even argue that it's almost MORE important, in terms at least of the creator's spiritual development. I've written a fair number of books, many of which have typically taken me anywhere from a couple of months to a couple of years to write, and I can't think of any of them where I wasn't a different person to what I had been when I had first started them, because oftentimes the creation of art (be it books, films, music, paintings, or whatever) is a valuable journey of self-discovery and alchemical transformation, where you often find out things about yourself that you might not have known about when you first started it. But so many people these days just care about the end result, and they want it as quickly as they can get it, ideally with as little work involved as possible. But I think they're cheating themselves . . .
Michael Crichton I think summed things up nicely in his novel JURASSIC PARK, and while his focus there was genetic engineering, I think this quote can also be applied to the AI Revolution:
"You know what’s wrong with scientific power? . . . It’s a form of inherited wealth. And you know what assholes congenitally rich people are. It never fails. Most kinds of power require a substantial sacrifice by whoever wants the power. There is an apprenticeship, a discipline lasting many years. Whatever kind of power you want. President of the company. Black belt in karate. Spiritual guru. Whatever it is you seek, you have to put in the time, the practice, the effort. You must give up a lot to get it. It has to be very important to you. And once you have attained it, it is your power. It can’t be given away: it resides in you. It is literally the result of your discipline. Now, what is interesting about this process is that, by the time someone has acquired the ability to kill with his bare hands, he has also matured to the point where he won’t use it unwisely. So that kind of power has a built-in control. The discipline of getting the power changes you so that you won’t abuse it. But scientific power is like inherited wealth: attained without discipline. You read what others have done, and you take the next step. You can do it very young. You can make progress very fast. There is no discipline lasting many decades. There is no mastery: old scientists are ignored. There is no humility before nature. There is only a get-rich-quick, make-a-name-for-yourself-fast philosophy. Cheat, lie, falsify—it doesn’t matter. Not to you, or to your colleagues. No one will criticize you. No one has any standards. They are all trying to do the same thing: to do something big, and do it fast. And because you can stand on the shoulders of giants, you can accomplish something quickly. You don’t even know exactly what you have done, but already you have reported it, patented it, and sold it. And the buyer will have even less discipline than you. The buyer simply purchases the power, like any commodity. The buyer doesn’t even conceive that any discipline might be necessary.”