[dahwolf]

Yep, our AI voice equivalents could maintain friendships with each other in which case the "what is the point?" question applies. Or, you might reach out for real but fail to be sure if you're talking to your real friend or not.

Or how about this interesting second-order effect: email. Soon Office will include advanced AI capabilities to write and reply to email.

What is the point of me reading it? If my AI can generate a satisfactory reply, your AI could have generated the response too. No email needed, nor a reply.

We're now in a phase where anybody can generate spectacular art. What is the point of me looking at your generated art? AI can generate personalized art based on what it knows I like.

If AI works, and it's headed that way, you keep ending up at the same question: what is the point of anything?

As counter force, there's significant room for a new low tech hippie Luddite movement.

[roryisok]

> Soon Office will include advanced AI capabilities to write and reply to email. What is the point of me reading it? If my AI can generate a satisfactory reply, your AI could have generated the response too. No email needed, nor a reply.

You'd be kind of daft not to proof-read the emails your AI sends out on your behalf. who knows what you might unknowingly agree to do?

> We're now in a phase where anybody can generate spectacular art. What is the point of me looking at your generated art? AI can generate personalized art based on what it knows I like. If AI works, and it's headed that way, you keep ending up at the same question: what is the point of anything?

there is no point to anything, there wasn't before AI and there isn't now. anything we do is meaningless, because eventually we all die, and our efforts are ultimately forgotten. once you get over that you can make your peace with whether the pretty thing you look at is made by a human feeding sentences to a computer or a human carefully marking paper with a pencil, or some combo.

but seriously, as a human who has spent all of my life doodling, drawing, illustrating, painting, thousands of hours creating my own art, and even building my own tools to do so, I find AI is just another tool in the box. I can use it to make images, and now someone who has not spent most of their life drawing can use it to make something more visually stunning than I ever could. has it rendered my efforts meaningless? hell no, I enjoyed every second I spent drawing. I still draw. but I don't harbour any illusions that I'm doing it for anyone other than myself.

[dahwolf]

Regarding the email example, you're reasoning from the current state of AI whilst I was looking at its future state where it's close to flawless.

The bigger point was that sending AI content to each other is utterly pointless. The generate->send->read->generate reply->send cycle would simply be: generate.

Example: you send me an email asking about a project's status as well as the contact person for a particular vendor the company deals with. I'll manually reply with the answer, or let AI generate it (fully or partly) and send it back to you. Great. In the future state, your AI will simply give you the answers directly. You won't email me and you don't need me.

My take on the meaning of life is that there isn't any, it's whatever you make of it. But I wasn't being that deep. I believe that our current still human approach has substantially more meaning than AI generating almost anything.

I'm happy that you enjoy the process of art-making itself, that's a robust baseline to fall back on, but joy in process applies to very few interactions. My point is that many if not all digital interactions become pointless.

[roryisok]

> In the future state, your AI will simply give you the answers directly. You won't email me and you don't need me.

that sounds great. you emailing me about a project and waiting for me to write an email to you is an inefficient waste of both of our time, and if AI can give us that time back, it should.

> My point is that many if not all digital interactions become pointless.

but I disagree that it will render all digital interactions pointless - just the day to day drudgery.

20 years ago, if you wanted to find out the opening times of a store you had to call them up or walk to the door. now, you can google it in seconds. we have done away with a lot of the short phone conversations, and our lives are better for it. but we still talk on the phone. the conversations are more meaningful and less redundant.