Humans and our tools are, in my opinion, a singular thing.
We evolved _with_ our tools — they afforded us greater access to food, which led to more intelligence, which led to more advanced tools, and on, and on.
A lot of people take this kind of "other" view. Technology is "bad", when really it comes down to how we choose to use it.
It's like Herbie Hancock said when talking about machines and music in the 1980s: an axe can be used to slaughter your neighbor, or it can be used to build a house. They're tools, and ultimately it comes down to what we choose to do with them.
A pretty important distinction between machines in the 1980s and ChatGPT is the amount of human effort that the output requires. It's unlikely that Herbie Hancock considers people who press "start" on a Casio synthesizer to play a factory programmed demo track real musicians.
If someone incorporates a factory preset into a song - sure, nothing's wrong with that. That's when a machine is used as a tool, not as a substitute for human creativity.
> It's unlikely that Herbie Hancock considers people who press "start" on a Casio synthesizer to play a factory programmed demo track real musicians.
Someone at the factory wrote and programmed that song, so he probably would consider it art.
> If someone incorporates a factory preset into a song - sure, nothing's wrong with that. That's when a machine is used as a tool, not as a substitute for human creativity.
It's all just different levels of the devil's company. What if I use an AI chord generator and decide which chords to use in my song based on what the AI generates? What if I have the AI generate 10,000 songs in totality and I choose the best one? What if I don't use AI but compose a song by mathematically computing all the optimal elements of a pop song based on every song that's come before it? What if I hire the world's best violinist and record 4 minutes and 28 seconds of the violinist not playing, could that not be art?
How we chose to use it and what happens to those in the precariat.
The precariat - meaning here those who get displaced from work when innovation happens.
Why is it reasonable that some people get socially disadvantaged when an innovation happens that makes their work much more efficient? Not saying that that always happens but this disadvantage itself, and not the innovation, I would say is a reasonable reason for being a luddite.
That’s very true in a deep way. We have smaller guts and jaws because we tamed fire. We domesticated animals and plants to our needs. If we had to eat raw meat and the 50k year old wild variety of vegetables we’d be on the brink of starvation.
These are two sides of a rather naive understanding of technology that is yet surprisingly common in "tech".
Technology is neither good, nor bad, nor neutral.
Its value is relative. Technology is a means to an end. If you find the end good, and the technology helps towards that, it's good for you. If you find the end bad, and the technology helps towards that, it's bad for you.
Some amount of additional complexity comes from unpredictable consequences of technologies — while someone develops a technology to reach a certain end they wish for, they might inadvertently lead the world towards a different end they don't want as much or even are actively against.
But technology is just a modality of change, a way change happens. And change is neither "good" nor "bad." Some people in technology endorse a "progress" narrative according to which technology is good. It just means that it goes towards an end they like.
That something can be used to do both good and bad doesn't make it "neutral", either. That would mean it has no valence (and probably no influence). Instead, it's both good and bad at the same time for different groups of people.
The atomic bomb, which can arguably be used for "good" and "bad" isn't "neutral." It creates strong path dependence. Now humanity is in a timeline where atomic bombs exist, which is different from ones where they don't. And we can't ever go back to a different timeline (barring some weird time travel shenanigans).
Is it a better timeline? Maybe, maybe not. It seems like it's a more interesting one, in the same sense that people wish others "may you live in interesting times."
We evolved _with_ our tools — they afforded us greater access to food, which led to more intelligence, which led to more advanced tools, and on, and on.
A lot of people take this kind of "other" view. Technology is "bad", when really it comes down to how we choose to use it.
It's like Herbie Hancock said when talking about machines and music in the 1980s: an axe can be used to slaughter your neighbor, or it can be used to build a house. They're tools, and ultimately it comes down to what we choose to do with them.