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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

AI looks like it will commoditise intellectual excellence. It is hard to see how that would end up making the world more mediocre.

It'd be like the ancient Romans speculating that cars will make us less fit and therefore cities will be less impressive because we can't lift as much. That isn't at all how it played out, we just build cities with machines too and need a lot less workers in construction.

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There are… many people who think that cities are worse off because of cars. Maybe not for the same reasons, but still.

I'm one of them. Taxpayers generally subsidise roads and as you might expect that means we have far too many of them.

If you want to say AI have reached intellectual Excellence because we have a few that have peaked in specific topics I would argue that those are so custom and bespoke that they are primarily a reflection on their human creators. Things like Champions and specific games or solutions to specific hard algorithms are not generally repurposable, and all of the general AI we have are a little bit dumb and when they work well they produce results that are generally mid. On occasionally we can get a few things we can sneak by and say they're better but that's hardly a commodity that's people sifting through large piles of mid for gems.

There are a lot of ways if it did reach intellectual excellence that we could argue that it would make Humanity more mediocre, I'm not sure I buy such arguments but there are lots of them and I can't say they're all categorically wrong.

> It'd be like the ancient Romans speculating that cars will make us less fit and therefore cities will be less impressive because we can't lift as much. That isn't at all how it played out

Isn’t this exactly how it played out?

No, obviously not. Modern construction is leagues outside what the Romans could ever hope to achieve. Something like the Burj Khalifa would be the subject of myth and legend to them.

We move orders of magnitude more cargo and material than them because fitness isn't the limiting factor on how much work gets done. They didn't understand that having humans doing all that labour is a mistake and the correct approach is to use machines.

I don't know, Dubai is...bigger, but I'd say it's vastly more mediocre city than Rome. To your original point, making things easier to make probably does exert downward pressure on quality in the aesthetic/artistic sense. Dubai might have taller buildings and better sewage system[0], but it will never have the soul of a place like Rome.

[0] Given the floods I saw recently, I'm not even sure this is even true.

I will take clean water, safe sewage removal, and other modern amenities over the insubstantial vagaries of "soul" any day.

cars have made us much less fit though...

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