[thrwayaistartup]

Nick Cave is expressing a personal loss, and I believe that he truly feels that loss. But to me, this letter reads roughly like: "if I were the server or the bouncer instead of the performer or the writer, all of humanity would cease to have meaning". Which is perhaps true, for Nick Cave. But it also betrays something grotesque and profoundly wrong about his view on the relationship between paid labor and the human soul.

It's a wonderful thing to find meaning in one's work, and for the things in which one finds meaning to be well-compensated. But it is no birthright. Contrary to Nick Cave's view, I can absolutely assure you that non-artists in HR departments and nursing stations and factory floors and classrooms often live full happy human inner lives. Those lives are of their own making and do not derive from the artiste class's output.

Manual production of high-quality clothes, tables, and glassware used to be the norm. Generations of people found meaning in these crafts before the industrial revolution changed the economics. People still do these things, only in rare cases as their primary way of making a living. Most art does not sustain developed world middle class existence. Most art is hobby. And that's okay.

The creation of software and AI systems is itself a form of craft-work and soul-work, which many engineers and scientists relate to the same way that Nick Cave relates to music. It is unclear to me why Nick Cave's striving is more important than the striving of engineers and scientists, or why his feeling of what humanity is, is more important than theirs.

[minsight]

Cave was expressing an answer to a question about cutting corners in the process of creating music. ( https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chatgpt-making-things-faster... ) There is certainly value in the work of nurses, bouncers and servers, and my interpretation of Cave's other written works leads me to believe that he is a proponent of finding joy and creative expression, even in tasks which don't have an obvious artistic product. AI lacks insight and lack of insight is what can turn a succulent feast of a life into biweekly deliveries of Soylent.

[thrwayaistartup]

> AI lacks insight and lack of insight is what can turn a succulent feast of a life into biweekly deliveries of Soylent.

Does a picture of a humming bird lack insight? Does collage art lack insight? Do remixes lack insight? Does mass-produced formulaic pop music lack insight?

Maybe. Or maybe some artists enjoy those creative processes and some audiences enjoy the output. Maybe oil painters who critique photography, and photographers who critique collages, and musicians who critique mash-ups, and DJs who critique modern production studios, and, yes, artists who critique the use of AI models in creative processes, are all just being pretentious assholes.

(It is possible I am simply misunderstand Cave. I take most of his writing to be artistic prose. It's possible that these are sincere metaphysics and that Nick Cave does literally believe in some sort of ur-religious "essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence". In which case I think he's got a nutty religion and consider the fact that AI is an existential threat to that religion mostly a net good for humanity.)

[minsight]

The insight I was talking about was required by the producer. Products don't have insight.

[jazzyjackson]

I might assert, with false nostalgia because I wasn't there, that we had a much better connection with what it meant to be human when we were tilling dirt and making clay pots and weaving cloth for each other, and now having been estranged from the physcial meaning-making all we have left is our image making, our personas we create for each other and these arguments we have online, and now we're automating that away too.

[thrwayaistartup]

> we had a much better connection with what it meant to be human when we were tilling dirt and making clay pots and weaving cloth for each other

Actually, I agree. I think Nick Cave is right about this. I do think this sort of alienation has a cost.

But that doesn't mean that there is any remotely moral case for undoing the green revolution and allowing billions to starve. And it does not mean that the machines which feed those billions of people who might otherwise starve are somehow the root cause of a decline of humanity. In fact, quite the opposite.

And this is the paradox: our alienation from agricultural work is precisely what enables our very existence.

My main observation is that there is a way out of this paradox. As it turns out, you can go out grow some food in a garden, or write a song, or paint a picture, even if that work is commodified and there is no paycheck. The commodification and automation of those industries does not prevent one from engaging in them as soul-work.

The teacher who plays in a band in his garage is no different -- from a "soul of humanity" perspective -- than Nick Cave. But Nick Cave's implicit argument argument demands that he is different, and not from an economic perspective, but from a very soul of humanity perspective. It's extraordinarily off-putting to me in that sense.

Of course, engaging in art as hobby instead of for pay does require free time and a share of returns on our societal bargain. On that note: elites like Nick Cave should be spearheading serious conversations about political economics and labor economics, instead of lamenting the loss of their extraordinarily unique status.

[nonbirithm]

> But that doesn't mean that there is any remotely moral case for undoing the green revolution and allowing billions to starve.

A question is, is it possible to advance technology to fulfill the green revolution without changing the value of human creativity due to the creation/advancement of genAI? Or past a certain point, the results of discovering improved health and ecological outcomes will become inextricably linked with discovering new technologies that cause conflict? What actually drives such a process?

I think more people might become interested on why we end up here talking about new possibilities conflicting with stability again and again, similar to how the negative effects of the invention of smartphones are being talked about now.

[thrwayaistartup]

> A question is, is it possible to advance technology to fulfill the green revolution without changing the value of human creativity due to the creation/advancement of genAI?

I have to admit not quite sure what you mean, and I do admit full guilt in starting us down the path of "mixed analogies" :). I'll try my best, though.

> Or past a certain point, the results of discovering improved health and ecological outcomes will become inextricably linked with discovering new technologies that cause conflict? What actually drives such a process?

I do think with respect to life-sustaining things -- medicine, pharma, food, shelter, water, energy -- that a combination of specialization and automation is necessary to increase the collective standard of living, and that labor alienation stems from a combination of specialization and automation.

Where I struggle is coming up with an affirmative argument that an artist should benefit from automation of medicine or farming, but that an alienated lab tech or food factory worker should not benefit from automated art.

Another way to look at this is: the less you pay for art-as-entertainment, the more resources you have to buy free time to produce your soul-work (whatever that may mean to you).

[abathur]

> Where I struggle is coming up with an affirmative argument that an artist should benefit from automation of medicine or farming, but that an alienated lab tech or food factory worker should not benefit from automated art.

> Another way to look at this is: the less you pay for art-as-entertainment, the more resources you have to buy free time to produce your soul-work (whatever that may mean to you).

Ah, yes. The alienated workers of the world will warm their weary souls at the hearth of derivative algorithmic creativity units. The reduced price and efficient delivery of each drone's creativity units will obviously give them more free time.

Perhaps we can even come up with a pill that'll let the drones feel entertained without any content at all. If the side effects are well-tolerated, they can take it before work.

[swayvil]

Many of us never see reality. Air-conditioned home to air-conditioned car to air-conditioned office. Artificial goals and artificial entertainments. All communication with members of your office and echo-chamber social media organs.

The whole population is fugueing out.

[abathur]

I suppose I don't really disagree with you, but a fair fraction of us would be likely to mourn, in fora like this, the end of the ability to sustain a middle-class existence via the craft of making software.

[cnewey]

Well said.