[JadeNB]

> the process of creating something is meaningful, even commercially.

That's true, but why does it mean that the answer to the more or less objective question "will AI actually be better than humans at sequencing these kinds of problems?" (As stated it's not really objective, but one could easily come up with metrics like, say, total time to a correct solution, or time spent observing the route or other climbers, or ….) One can imagine other, related questions that are less objective (like "will it be a good idea to integrate this AI assistance into climbing competitions?"), but, to me, the answer to the (implicit) original question has nothing to do with whether or not the activity is meaningful, or with humans' destiny one way or the other.

[chefandy]

Sure, they may well be quantitatively better. If you were to create metrics to measure the number of mistakes or weird spots or overly annoying things, it's quite possible that the output from the algorithm could score better than human output, and the throughput would obviously be incomparable. But, whether or not something is qualitatively better is far more subjective-- it's influenced by our culture, our experiences, and everything else that creates the lens through which we see the world. Something's origin absolutely affects the way people experience it, be it a physical object, story, experience, etc. Don't get me wrong-- I realize there's real value in affordable quantity with with mediocre quality-- how many restaurants in the world are McDonald's? But then again, how many restaurants in the world aren't McDonald's? If McDonald's could sell you a ribeye comparable to Capital Grille, I'd be astonished if it put a dent in Capital Grille's bottom line. Applebees, however...

[travisjungroth]

I think your arguments against AI being better at creating routes reduce to:

1. You don’t like what that would mean about the destiny for humanity.

2. A human making it makes it inherently better.

3. If it’s lower quality, it’s lower quality.

I get why this would lead to strong beliefs. But these arguments aren’t very convincing.

[chefandy]

I think you probably need to re-read what I wrote. I'm not against AI at all-- I use it all the time. I just don't think it's going to be qualitatively better than human creative output because how something was made matters to people. I also think the tech world thinks they're a lot better at judging creative output than they are.

[JadeNB]

Right, those are important considerations, but I don't think that they're the same consideration. If you ask whether a celebrity chef is better at cooking a certain dish than I am, then the answer (no matter the dish, for I'm not much of a chef) is almost certainly "yes." If I answered instead no, that the provenance of a dish matters, that the celebrity-chef culture is bad for fine dining, and that my wife would rather have the dish made by me, then I think I'd be regarded as missing the point of the question, even if my objections were true on their own.

[chefandy]

Well, I think that celebrity vs husband is not a good analog for human vs generated. I also think that in this case, origin has broader connotations than provenance, in that it includes context. What if the celebrity chef was your wife's brother? What if you had a degenerative neurological disease? What if it was the dish you cooked for her on your second date? Anything can seem very cut and dried if you impose artificial restrictions and examine it in a vacuum. And, because you can't easily define and quantify things like context, the engineering and tech worlds tend disregard them because they don't really factor into the engineering equation... and that's why designers exist.