monkeynotes

You'd be absolutely nuts to think you'll ever get a rate better than 1.9% average over 30 years. I am deeply envious!

Wait, we are in the aftermath of a recession? From where I am standing we are in the thick of it with a long road ahead of very uncomfortable economic pressures restricting personal upward mobility. What person is looking at a 20% increase in living costs, high interest rates, and houses that were priced for low interest and more money in people's pockets?

Reality is people can't afford the pre-recession prices, so they will rent and ride it out for a while longer which will put downward pressure on people trying to sell and the market will meet the demand that way.

Art isn't about skilfully painting a tree. That's artistry. Art is more than that, it's about feeling, evoking thoughts, and yeah, commenting on society.

> It's always trite, reductive, and utterly unoriginal.

This is simply untrue, modern art is not "always" anything. And who are you to judge what is going on in the mind of an artist?

I don't know what decade you deem to be "modern" art, but there is a huge amount of 20th - 21st century art that is jaw drop. You are the same as generations and generations of people who have been wrong and stuck in the comfort of the status quo. I hate to refer back to Van Gough, but you are a version of the people who missed the point there. And I suppose the social commentary of Pop Art is just trash too?

AI art will hang in a gallery if it evokes a feeling, not because it's a bloody good execution of a painting of a tree. This is how ALL art has been since we moved beyond painting wealthy people. It has to capture an emotion, thought, idea, or whatever else is intangible. Being able to get that intangible feeling across to the viewer is what is special. Not the quality of the craft, that's artistry.

I truly feel sorry for you not having been moved by something more than a beautiful oil painting.

If it were at all possible I'd give Bob a 4 day week, let him work on personal R&D stuff, or promote him to a level where he can use his competence to solve bigger problems. If there are no more challenging problems to work on it's time for Bob to look for a new job as his career will be suffering.

Being that Brave and numerous other browsers are built on Chrome, does that mean they will also have this limitation?

Erm, free movement of goods and services, labour, capital. Access to the world's largest single market with no restrictions which by itself allows more UK businesses to thrive. Huge benefit to being able to choose from numerous places to live and work.

The UKs trade swagger is demonstrably worse without free access to the single market. Numerous academic studies have shown that long-term the UK will be worse off.

Trade is the big one.

Examples? And what about replacing all the good things the EU provided with homegrown initiatives?

When we put in place stuff like this to "think of the children", we tend to neglect what those children will inherit from this legislation. Every year the future for the next generation looks more and more bleak. No wonder depression and anxiety is such a huge problem.

I imagine Netflix gathers a lot of viewing data, and I can see a time when ads make it into the streaming platforms natively. Cable TV started out as an ad-free offering, and now it's almost 50% ads.

To be rolled back when the people elect based on short-term economic change.

The US is so corrupt, so in the pockets of industry I honestly have little confidence in this bill being in good faith toward climate action.

* https://www.xrebellion.nyc/news/statement-on-inflation-reduc... * https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/manchi...

This outlook of apathy is why we are screwed. Let's focus on inflation because the world falling apart is inevitable? Inflation is going to be the least of your worries when you are too hot, too cold, hungry, etc. The impact of climate change is waaay bigger than inflation.

Meanwhile the west's governments are prioritizing short-term inflation curbing rather than addressing climate change in their campaigns. We are all screwed.

I think this is exactly true.

Their research showed that Dall-E had most success with real world stuff it had been trained on. Is this surprising? I mean, if I didn't know much about iguanas I'd also have a hard time representing them.

How is this any different to working with a human artist? If I wanted the real world Salvador Dali to draw me a picture of a kebab being eaten by a badger I'd have to tell him that's what I want. I'd also need to educate baby Dali first, feed him all the art and information he can take so that he has a model of the world he's operating in. I'll need to supply Dali with context of prior art, educate him on styles, literature, language, and all the other things that shape a human mind.

As for the humans that don't use their imagination, maybe they never want to talk to an AI artist, just as many humans don't care about art at all. Millions of humans don't care about social news, and yet FaceBook algos pump out content for people all day long.

You are talking about today. Tomorrow will see comic books written, and illustrated on demand from a natural language conversation, then what?

Suit yourself, but you don't have to be rude. I'd love to hear your take given your confidence to judge my opinions.

Never said "you are going to be unemployed in 5 years". Never said anything about a job apocalypse. I have no idea what role humans will play.

> Your assertions are full of wild assumptions backed by nothing.

I use Copilot, you admitted it currently saves you 2-3% of time. Well, that's just Copilot, you think Microsoft will just sit on that? My assertions are based on what is happening today and extrapolating an exponential increase in that performance for tomorrow.

Digital cameras definitely revolutionized photography and made it much more accessible to regular folks. Not everyone wants to be a pro photographer though, and the number of wedding shoots available has not changed. People still need to be paid to take photos because no one is going to do that for free. However, we can all take pro level photos with much more ease than when all we had was 110 and 35mm film with a really crappy lens.

There are more "photographers" than ever, the same number of pro photographers seems reasonable given the burden of people's time to money ratio. So the net result is billions more family and friends photos which previously were not taken, the same will go for art. I want to create art, but I have little skill, but given the opportunity to make a comic strip just by talking to an AI will allow me to do so. I imagine some people will do this extremely well as a profession until it's no longer useful.

I don't know, I understand why you are being dismissive and playing down my wide eyes, but I think you are also wrong and remaining uninterested because it's too "religious" to speculate wild things in light of wild real world changes is head in sand territory.

Existential threats tend to drive religious sentiment.

To say this revolution is not going to happen is to say humans have hit a hard technological limit, and I don't see any evidence to support that.

If I was less enthused I might make my opinions more philosophical than religious, but I feel overwhelmed by the possibilities of real world changes. This is no longer a philosophical thought experiment, it's happening. We are careering toward surpassing a Turing test for goodness sake. Uncanny valley apex of animation; go look at what cutting edge AI can do in terms of producing lifelike animated avatars, it's so close you have to double take.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-7jbNPQ0TQ

CGI artists have been trying to get to this level of realism for as long as the industry has existed.

Unlike a religious pamphlet, this god is tangible, it's here, and dismissing it because it sounds too spectacular is putting your head in the sand. AI is so out of this world it is a religious moment for humanity.

Civilization has seen people like you sitting comfortably and scoffing at the very idea of an aeroplane being remotely viable, and yet within 50 years of the first powered flight we had international airports.

I am hoping for the Manna situation. Dude on YouTube was talking to GPT3 and it expressed that humans would love, and AI would reason. I fell into a state of peace and hopefulness with that sentiment. AI does the work because it is good at it, we are free to socialize, enjoy hobbies, basically live like pampered pets. Sure we will be castrated to prevent aggression, housed, fed, and controlled by AI, but if you acquiesce and bow to the superior reasoning we will have a life of peace and happiness. Wow, that got dark quick...

> Without artists continually feeding the model we will collectively get bored of its output

I fail to understand how the AI is any more vulnerable to creativity in a vacuum than a fellow human artist.

> Artists are people that sample the probability distribution of human experience

Seems that you are agreeing that human artists need to tap into human experience and the world around them, so yeah, the AI will need to be able to take inputs from the external world too.

I see no reason for an AI not to be continually training on inputs from the outside world. How difficult can it be to hook an AI model up to inputs from the internet, or even putting cameras on drones or robots and letting it explore and get "inspired". I think it's myopic not to see how an AI can learn and evolve using the exact same mechanisms as humans. I mean we are building AI in our own likeness, it will operate using analogous mechanisms. There is also no reason why AIs won't talk to each other and be inspired by other AIs rather than humans.

What will the art of an AIs living together without human input look like? When are humans basically surpassed by AI and no longer have any relevant input? Just like Alpha Go humans will see stuff no one has thought of, stuff so wildly creative that human art will look naïve in comparison. That move Alpha Go gave to the world is waiting to happen in all forms of human endeavours.

When you say something like "if anything it may increase the demand for artists" all I can think of is the dozens of times throughout history that man has seen a revolution on the horizon and thought that the status quo will still be effective. We've always been wrong. Who would have thought selling books online would replace book stores, let alone become one of the world's most successful commerce platform period. Who would have thought that broadcast/cable TV could be replaced by people making their own shows at home and distributing them via personal computers building audience numbers that surpass network TV?

Whatever happens, however this plays out, we are in for a huge shock.

Eventually art for the people will become art for the individual. Our AI partner (I assume we will all have one) will serve up an entirely curated world. Art will be generated on the spot, just for you. Entertainment, just for you. Imagine having a TV show no one else ever sees because it was synthesized from your likes, experiences, interests, just for you, on demand. This will of course start with AI writing short stories, then books, but there is no limit really.

Already AI is being used for comic book backgrounds. It's just a matter of time before all of this becomes commonplace.

When you look at AI and what it does, it is no different to what humans do. We are trained on a model (experiences and other minds), and we make derivative decisions based on the model. If you can do this in software and take advantage of light speed learning then of course all we can do will be done by AI faster and better. In time humans and AI will be the same, AI will design all the tools and tech to make this possible. It's the only natural conclusion to humanities' ultimate goals.

> Mostly it will get in the way.

This is simply not true. I use GitHub Copilot and it's already made me faster and shows me ideas I would not have thought of myself. And that's just Copilot. When you can talk to an interface and say "I want to update the vote count by one when I click this button" I think you'll change your mind. The AI will know the entire codebase inside out, it will know the intention of all the code, all the data models, know how users use the application intimately, be aware of problems instantly, able to run hotfixes without user intervention. Got a slow query? No problem, here is some SQL that follows all the business rules and is 10x more efficient. And that's just a start. Every single aspect of software development from management, engineering, and marketing will all be transformed.

As for photographers I have 99% more friends and family pumping out thousands of high quality photographs than I did in 2000. Go look at all the professional looking shows made by regular folk on YouTube. To deny that camera phones transformed photography seems silly.

Regular folk have access to drones to do wild tracking shots in 4k that were only possible with helicopters and huge cameras 20 years ago.

The future is here, it's happening all around us so rapidly we have a hard time keeping up with how dramatic the changes are.

> has to be a human who decides 'that's the one that looks good'

Assuming the status quo, true. As we evolve our lives around emerging AI tech I think we will at first be the curators and creative directors of AI, but eventually a creative agency will defer to the AI as it knows more about our tastes, market, audience, and the ENTIRE HISTORY of art, design, marketing, tastes, trends, and so on.

Eventually it won't make sense to have a stupid human rubber stamp what the all powerful AI suggests. Just as it does not make sense for Facebook to curate news feeds.

Maybe one day product advertising will look different depending on who looks at it. Pepsi logo "just for you".

Train Dall-E on more logos that you like. I can imagine a creative agency purchasing a Dall-E 2 instance and training it up on a model specific to the work and clients they have ongoing.

If nothing else, inspiration is just a click away. No more searching for ideas, just talk to the AI and it will pump out numerous ideas for you.

When AI reaches the point where we can talk to a system like DALL.E in real time and work with it to solve a problem, it's game over.

Art will become a commodity. Human art and ai art will be indistinguishable, "artists" will become as common as "photographers" since the inception of digital photography and social media.

Movie and TV scripts will be iterative with a creative director and AI working together.

Animation will become a lot easier, less people needed, fewer creatives.

Software will become easier and easier as developers will simply guide AI. This is already beginning to happen, but imagine paired programming with natural language interacting with an AI.

Architecture, civic planning, engineering, medical, law, policy, physics, it's all gonna change, and rapidly. DALL.E 2 shows how a leap in sophistication can revolutionize an industry overnight. Microsoft has exclusively licensed DALL.E 2, I can only imagine the myriad of creative tools it will serve the creative industry with.

The working in real-time will be the biggest leap. Asking DALL.E for an image and refining it as you talk is going to be nuts.

Wait, what? You'd need hundreds of thousands of "small ponds" in the woods to approximate a comparison with a human mega reservoir like Lake Mead and associated reservoirs. I don't really understand the comparison.

Can't you more simply not give the fridge your wifi password? Just keep it off of a network, seems much easier than opening it up and voiding a warranty.

COVID was mindblowing. For the first time in recorded history the entire planet coordinated a response to an existential threat. And we survived.

In a matter of just three years we rethought how we work, live, travel, and socialize. The global community came up with a vaccine in an extraordinarily short amount of time, and then coordinated a roll out.

We've seen how humanity can adapt at scale when we are motivated. I don't know what answer we will have to the ecological ruin we have layed out. Maybe we don't have an answer to it, that will be a truly humbling moment.

Let's not forget COVID is not done yet. We've had two years of restrictions and now it seems like folks are behaving as if it's over. Mutations are propagating and yet most people are out and about without masks and the dialog around vaccines has all but dried up.

The ongoing confusion about what this disease's risk factor is worrisome. First I think people have much more distrust in science and government. There is still a deep divide amongst the population and I am concerned about how we will handle another wave of restrictions whilst the economy buckles and a global war is on the horizon.