He smelled like herb.
It was the spring party evening at my daughter's school tonight, where the older kids put on a bit of a play of some kind, and there were a few songs and the like. However, as the parents were shuffling in, a father passed me and there was a very, very strong smell of herb. I would have been fine if it was weed, but it was oregano! It was like he had bathed in it and for the entire hour and a half, I could smell it, even though he was standing some five meters away from me.
Since I was at the back and short, I didn't see much of the show on stage. Not that it mattered, because I didn't understand most of what they were saying anyway, as it was in Finnish. Still, it is always nice to see kids who like to perform, performing. Since the school has a lot of music nerd kids, there are also quite a few future theatre nerds.
It is going to be interesting to see what happens in the future of performance art, because AI is already replacing actors and is getting hundreds of millions of streams on Spotify, because they don't have a filter to filter AI-generated music out - which is pathetic. But it is only going to become more mainstream and since some people are already falling in love with and committing suicide over their AI "companions", it is going to get far worse.
I think that just like how people underestimated the impact of AI on creative pursuits like art and music, they are now underestimating how quickly it will go into the physical areas through robotics. Yes, it is going to take time to crawl under the sink and unclog a drain, but there are going to be heaps of other areas that are currently done by humans and a robot driven by AI with hundreds of sensors, will do it better.
It is going to get weird.
But because of this inevitable continuous encroachment until we are obsolete, I constantly question what we are going to do with ourselves and if there will be anything to "do" at all. I can't think of anything worse than sitting around for a lifetime with nothing to do. A lot of people I talk to think that it means we can do "anything" we want, but I suspect that a lot of the joy we get comes from doing something useful, and when there is no point to do it at all, the desire to continue disappears. Many behavioural studies back this view up also.
And that is of course if we work out the economics of it. As currently, we need to earn in order to be able to consume, and the earning positions will dwindle, so consumers will dwindle. It doesn't matter how efficient a company can produce its product, if there are no consumers able to buy it. The economy is made to continually grow profits, but even now the only way to do that is to pump in inflation. When there aren't enough people earning to make businesses viable, they all collapse.
As I was saying with a client yesterday, the vast majority of the supply chains are used on relatively useless consumer goods and services so we can be entertained. Crap is dug out of the ground, processed, machined, assembled and sold, so we can watch AI-generated TikTok videos. Cut out all of the entertainment related supply, and 80% of the economy disappears. So what happens when we can't even afford food?
The numbers don't add up.
But hey, the laws of economics don't matter. And they don't really, if we are able to change the way we organise ourselves so that money is no longer the driving force required to be a consumer. I don't know what the trade will be, but there is always a cost involved.
Always a trade-off.
We have been heading on this path for decades, but it is clear that the trade-off we are making for convenience, is our humanity. We are losing the ability to interact with each other, or even build our own skillset. Yet, time and again, I hear from people who are adamant that it will all work out for them, because they assume that their job is safe, or they have enough in the bank to ride it out, like an economic recession. But this isn't a wave that will pull back to sea, it isn't going anywhere except forward.
There is no riding it out.
It is either learn to ride it as a species, or be wiped out as a species.
Taraz
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