I find myself not wanting to agree with you, but deep down I think you're right.
AI greatly reminds me of the Library of Babel thought experiment. If we can imagine a library with every book that can possibly be written in any language, would it contain all human knowledge lost in a sea of noise? Is there merit or value in creating a system that sifts through such a library to attune hidden truths, or are we dooming ourselves to finding meaning in nothingness?
In a certain sense, there's immense value to developing concepts and ideas through intuition and thought. In another sense, a rose by any other name smells just as sweet; if an AI creates a perpetual motion device before a human does, that's not nothing. I don't expect AI to speed past human capability like some people do, but it's certainly displaced a lot of traditional computer-vision and text generation applications.
> If we can imagine a library with every book that can possibly be written in any language, would it contain all human knowledge lost in a sea of noise? Is there merit or value in creating a system that sifts through such a library to attune hidden truths, or are we dooming ourselves to finding meaning in nothingness?
The work that system would be required to find those "hidden truths" is equivalent to re-deriving those truths from scratch.
Similar argument: an image is just a number; if you take e.g. a 800x600 24bpp picture, that's a number 1 440 000 bytes long; you could hypothetically start from 0 and generate every 1 440 000-byte number, thus generating every possible 800x600 24bit image. In that set, you'd find every historical event, photographed at every moment from every angle, and even photos of every fragment of every book from the Library of Babel. But good luck finding anything particular in there.
Similar argument 2: any movie or song is contained somewhere within digital expansion of the number Pi. But again, it's worthless unless you know how to find such works, which basically requires you to have them in the first place.
AI greatly reminds me of the Library of Babel thought experiment. If we can imagine a library with every book that can possibly be written in any language, would it contain all human knowledge lost in a sea of noise? Is there merit or value in creating a system that sifts through such a library to attune hidden truths, or are we dooming ourselves to finding meaning in nothingness?
In a certain sense, there's immense value to developing concepts and ideas through intuition and thought. In another sense, a rose by any other name smells just as sweet; if an AI creates a perpetual motion device before a human does, that's not nothing. I don't expect AI to speed past human capability like some people do, but it's certainly displaced a lot of traditional computer-vision and text generation applications.