And we're hitting a point where tech is making this irrelevant. I'm somehow scared about the implications.. it kills a lot of deep human emotions (desire, ambition, skill, transmission).
Some people are already feeling this in music slightly.
It might be true for anyone measuring success by how much money they make.
But I don't think people get into any form of art, and I count programming as a form of art, expecting huge sums of money. We all do it for the sake of doing it, because it feels good to do it, to learn, to overcome, to achieve.
Just think about the fact we are never indeed satisfied. I, for instance, am much more skilled as a programmer than I was 5 years ago. In a sense I made it, I have a job that pays well and I can do my work without much issue. Programming feels natural. However I am nowhere near being satisfied. I want to learn more, see and try new things. Explore different paradigms, languages and techniques. But not because it could render me a better paycheck, but because it feels amazing to learn and solve new problems.
I respect that you didn't get into programming for money, but many of us do, including myself. Programming for me was a way to escape growing up in poverty, it was a way to gain financial independence and start a business of my own in an area that has almost no barriers to entry. I started an HFT firm and in order to compete I have to hire some of the most technically sophisticated people I can find. I am fairly confident that many of them are highly motivated by money just as I am and that being able to put to use their skill to provide for themselves an incredibly high standard of living motivates them a lot more than if their skill had little to no means of providing them with a great paycheck.
Certainly there are interesting aspects to programming, but there are interesting aspects to a variety of different subjects and I don't know that programming is intrinsically more fascinating than music, or psychology, or history. What makes programming stand out at this particular moment is the massive amount of economic potential it has.
I wanted to use programming as an example because it is what I am familiar with. I am not trying to say that if you are in for the money you will have a bad time, that money is evil and all of that. What I am trying to illustrate is that monetary gain in itself is not enough to sustain any sort of artistic expression, and this is why pure artificial emulation of the activity is not enough to kill it, in my opinion.
This is not to say that art has no value in escaping reality, poverty being one facet of reality. In a sense, art is the only valid escape from reality, the only form of expression that can truly shape and transform what we know.
I think what makes programming stand out and have economic potential is how much of an amplifying effect it can have on all the other fields you listed.
For whatever reason other than money we got into programming, it's likely not the reason we are still in the field. Jobs suck the joy out of it. The money hasn't been very good for me either.
> But I don't think people get into any form of art, and I count programming as a form of art, expecting huge sums of money. We all do it for the sake of doing it, because it feels good to do it, to learn, to overcome, to achieve.
No offense: but spoken like someone who has made enough money from something they enjoy to imply they'd do it without money. If you were working 12 hours a day in multiple minimum wage jobs I think you'd find your desire to program in your spare time quickly vanishing.
This is very relevant. I believe we have to evolve as society and start talking about universal minimum income before we can move to talk about true dedication to art.
If I had to grind away for hours maybe I wouldn't have the energy to evolve in creative areas. This speaks more against big capital and normalized poverty than my comment though.
Edit: I wanted to go and say that I am aware of my privileges. I had time in my childhood to study, did minimal work with my parents, went to a military school and then, with the better education, I got to go to college, which in Brazil is free if you pass the tests. I have some merit in this, but mostly it was due to circumstance. I have to believe, however, that true art transcends all these social barriers.
So someone else has to sacrifice their hard work to provide you with a means to indulge your creativity without monetary concerns. This apparently is an 'evolution' of society, and not just another variation of an economic model thats existed for centuries.
Firstly, exercising creativity is not an indulgement, it is a necessity. Just like you are not indulging yourself by drinking water or going to the toilet.
Secondly, lower class already sacrifices their hard work to indulge big corporations without societal concerns.
Just like those workers in Fritto Lays that work for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.
I am not talking about taking an even larger cut from their labor and give it to someone else to sit idly. I am talking about creating the means so that people can improve themselves if they want to without worrying about not eating or feeding their families the next day.
Or you think it is ok to lock people into those inhumane conditions? If people had the possibility to leave work and seek better conditions, big corps would think twice before overworking and underpaying their employees.
See the problem with your entire argument is you have bolted on socialism to the current capitalist environment. It doesn't work like that, socialism doesn't afford the opportunity for big corps to exist and the money you wish to take for merely performing a creative task will be from your fellow workers. Likewise, there is no incentive to nurture creativity in an environment that does not reward it.
This seems to be true for any endeavor worth putting time into. I like that programming has a big built-in filter; if you don't get enjoyment from solving hard problems, the frustration and technical difficulty of it will force you out pretty quickly. So most of the people that have been doing it for a few years really love it and are always looking to improve their craft.
why try to make your body into a super-efficient machine if robots are out of your league, can one exist if he's doomed to be beaten ? maybe it will cause a healthy shift in focus and appreciation about what we try to do (people may still try to reach their full potential even if it will stop being best absolute performance, but only best 'human' performance').
> why try to make your body into a super-efficient machine if robots are out of your league, can one exist if he's doomed to be beaten ?
Any couch potato can shoot even the best martial art master dead with widely available cheap tools and a few weeks worth of training. And this is not even a new phenomenay. All practicioners alive today were born into this. Doesn’t seem to have stopped them from practicing.
Practicing martial arts leads to much more than being able to perform cool moves. I practice tai chi and I can tell you that my teacher do things you can hardly believe without moving his body much. Using a combination of breathing, accurate movements, he can push you meters away. Really cool. Takes at least dozens of years of intensive training to reach that level. He compares that to training playing piano for international level competitions (such as Concours Reine Elizabeth).
I second this but it's not even about being the best of humans. At least 90% of amateur cyclists are out of my league and yet I insist to go cycling, because I like it.
Cycling is a very interesting example. Cycling was crazy huge for a while when it was the fastest form of individual travel (only trains were faster) and many people moved on when the internal combustion engine became practical. But the subset of the appeal that remained despite engines has been rather stable ever since.
In some places it's faster than a car, due to 1) the sheer volume of cars meaning that any driver will be stuck in traffic and 2) it being way easier to find parking for a bicycle than a car. I live in a city where this is often true.
That said, maybe the appeal that's remained since has been relatively stable overall, but locally it varies a lot depending on the cycling infrastructure that's available. More people ride when they feel safe doing so.
When I used to ride my bike to work, I literally turned a 45-minute drive into a 10-minute ride. Unfortunately, the weather in Illinois sucks so I couldn't do it year-round.
That's not what made people love bikes in that one short time window in the 19th century. It was the fastest thing, period. Bugatti Veyron fastest if you like. Hence the collapse when that ceased to be true. Even horses will outrun a trained cyclist only for very short distances (on longer distances it's roughly a tie even for runners)
Horses outrun moderately trained cyclists only for a very short distance, on longer distances they fall behind runners. The main benefit of a horse is that you can carry more stuff with you.
Horses must be fed even when you don't ride them. Cars and bicycles stay where you left them and don't ask for anything. But I won't leave a bicycle parked on a street for a week.
how do toi build a robot that executes Kung fu if you have no data points about how the body should move and behave? You'd still need to record an actual human performing them if you want to build a robot that could emulate that.
> it kills a lot of deep human emotions (desire, ambition, skill, transmission).
Of course it doesn't. It just changes parts of what we care about.
Auto tune didn't kill music, it just made evident what we already knew: a live performance might be the more authentic experience of a particular artist. Other, new breed artists, might never even perform live.
AI playing chess did not make chess players obsolete. It just shone a new light on the game from a different angle.
I can see AI becoming talking heads type of hosts, but they will still need human insights and skills (or "guidance") to function appropriately. This is what we'll use to assess the performance, then.
But I don't think people get into any form of art, and I count programming as a form of art, expecting huge sums of money. We all do it for the sake of doing it, because it feels good to do it, to learn, to overcome, to achieve.
Just think about the fact we are never indeed satisfied. I, for instance, am much more skilled as a programmer than I was 5 years ago. In a sense I made it, I have a job that pays well and I can do my work without much issue. Programming feels natural. However I am nowhere near being satisfied. I want to learn more, see and try new things. Explore different paradigms, languages and techniques. But not because it could render me a better paycheck, but because it feels amazing to learn and solve new problems.