This is why it’s essential, now more than ever, to keep these words and notions alive, let the truth be an act of rebellion in itself.

Life is meaningless without diversity, and it is up to each and every one of us to protect it.

Does this apply if I don’t even know what day it is?

Or… maybe we could not do that? Just saying? And instead focus on actually studying true AI and its implications at every level instead of just developing propaganda machines with the consumers’ money?

Ok, so life’s becoming one of those Sharknado movies. Noted.

This would imply that they’re not surrounded by other pots filled with water which is (varying degrees of) boiling. We don’t really have a Socialist Utopia meeting spot, let’s say.

Beyond that, eloping requires a not insignificant amount of money (as a Romanian, I can say that homes/apartments aren’t cheap here, either, and we’re not exactly L.A.)

And at the other end of the line, immigration’s not exactly thought of with fondness, even in Europe. Don’t forget, we’re stewing in our own pot even if the heat’s still relatively tolerable.

Wouldn’t go so far as calling it a work of art, but I remember this one time in 9th or 10th grade when our Plastic Arts (technically a general overview of art history and practical exercises for techniques, practically it was just painting whatever, in various shapes and sizes) teacher had us paint religious iconography on slabs of wood. Saints, to be more specific.

I won’t touch upon how utterly pissed my mother was at having to hunt down an ~A4 sized plank within a week (this was before the prevalence of Hyperstores). The thing just came out looking… wrong… It was supposed to be St. George, I believe, and it came out looking like an emaciated and woefully distraught Gandalf the Grey with a spotlight shining in from behind.

I remember this one being extra-bad because, besides basically having had no real training in painting throughout grade school, the subject matter in itself spoke nothing to me. I wasn’t absolutely horrible, as I used to do a lot of sketching and developed a relatively neat hand by that time, but I was thoroughly within the “exorcise your trauma through drawing biomechanical mutilations” phase of my artistic development, let’s call it.

It was also the first time when being creative felt like a horrid chore.

Edit: there is no evidence of said work, because I threw it away the instant I got home. As an agnostic, I get the feeling both God and St. George would have agreed with me…

Hey, riiight! Remember aliens?! Feels like a lifetime ago!

If you’re talking about AGI, potentially any form of art would be at its grasp, maybe even some which may not necessarily look like art to us.

If you’re talking about the generative models of today, they are incapable of producing art, because they are incapable of emotional intent and expression.

Even Warhol was driven by disdain, and the ironically arty bit was how sort of stripped of art his art was as a result of his disdain.

This was my exact thinking the moment I realised I, yet again, needed a GPU upgrade (thanks, Unreal 5…). Which is why I seared my soul and dished for a 4080 Super, with the hopes that I’ll be covered for a decade at least. The 40s at least seem to still be built mainly for pretty pictures.

Genuinely not worth paying attention to this nonsense. Maybe - MAYBE - AMD will pull a Comrade and will shift full focus on creating genuinely good and progressively better GPUs, meant for friggin’ graphics processing and not this “AI” tumor. But that’s a big-ass “maybe.”

Aaah, they’re doing the scarcity thing… Cool. Coolcoolcool.

I genuinely think that’s a noble sentiment and I share that concern. However, this would entail making a deal with the Devil at this point, and pretty much literally.

Most if not all relevant models nowadays are owned by outwardly unscrupulous people, which means any correct interaction we have with their models only serves to build up the Devil’s throne.

It is a downright tragedy that people will suffer as a result of said models, but that fault is not on us. Besides the fact that they’re essentially stealing labour and data in order to train their models, they’re also using them to dish out propaganda, to replace workers and throwing them in a ditch, to cause yet another financial bubble which’ll flush the toilet when it inevitably pops - again.

We need to let them fail, otherwise we are just encouraging others to use us in the same exact ways.

I don’t know what pisses me off more, that Facebook does this kind of stuff, or that they’re utter snively cowards when called out for their crap moves.

Gotta get that daily lick in!

Yep, NOW it’s a problem, though! Because it’s someone else doing the same thing, someone who isn’t part of the human centipede starting at Trump’s colon.

Capitalism pretty much takes survival out of living. And I don’t think we should go back to “if you want to eat, you’ll have to wrestle and kill that boar” levels, but we need a bit more space to develop our relationship with life. As it is, it’s like one of those helicopter parents who doesn’t let anything external touch you, then you turn into goop once the helicopter stops patrolling.

We don’t treat ourselves like humans anymore, we treat ourselves like the chickens grown at scale in industrial warehouses. And we don’t even treat those chickens like chickens, it’s Product all the way down.

Yep, we’ve most certainly shifted too far in the opposite direction. I mean, all that’s required for most aspects of life nowadays is an internet connection. If one has that, there’s no need to leave the house - I speak from experience, I spent 2020-through-2023 100% locked in my apartment, only needing to leave when seeking medical services. Even the jobs which still require in-person action are slowly being replaced with automation (see delivery bots and drones, self-driving cabs, even LLM-based medical diagnoses).

The only thing I think differs in our views is that I consider hunting and gathering to have been replaced with other activities, like farming, animal rearing, construction, general industry, generation of literature, centralisation of information, basically everything which makes our species persist and advance. It’s still the same basic principle, as in having lost a lot of essential activities and their benefits.

Complexity is an inevitable result of development, and we’ve developed so much that our needs have both expanded and developed with us. I don’t think either hunting or gathering, or both would be enough for us anymore. I most certainly also believe that we don’t need mass production at the scales we’re seeing today, but our complexity demands similar complexity in the palette of professions (not my favourite word to express the concept of “life work,” but there it is…).

I think what we need is to walk back on automation and rethink the whole assembly line bit, give humans some space to specialise should their system need it. Contemporary Society seems better suited to serve people who tend to become Jacks of All Trades, but that’s just one point on a huge spectrum.

I think humanity has grown restless due to the granularisation of work. It is no longer necessary to develop an overall understanding of an entire domain for most jobs, as they’re based on the assembly line principle - learn to screw that bolt on tight enough, and your job is done. Nevermind the rest of the car, not your assignment.

I suspect this leaves a lot of cognitive bandwidth essentially unused, so the brain naturally seeks to fill it up with whatever else is at hand.

In addition, this has also somewhat stolen the satisfaction of understanding the context of our work, of seeing that it’s not just wasted time, essentially. Work/production/creation/generation/transformation used to be far more significant parts of both our lives as well as our overall fulfilment, so we’re now basically overclocked PCs left running Minesweeper at 100%, which yearn for meaning and something to fill up all of that available compute potential. And there’s cognitive junk food a-plenty, but just like junk food, it rarely satisfies long-term.

This, I think, also spreads ripples across other aspects of our lives - I’m thinking here especially about the seeming death of nuance in general discourse as one of the main such repercussions, so it’s yet another existential cascade failure.

I mostly say this and the above solely on an anecdotal basis, but it is a pretty large basis, considering it consists of roughly 80% of all previous coworkers and professional acquaintances in over a decade, both domestic and otherwise.

Oh, most definitely, art has been thoroughly detached from “real life” - actually, I’d go as far as to focus in specifically on “adulthood” as the marker which excises it from us. And, yes, it is leaving us not hollow, but dessicated.

Interesting (well, and deeply saddening) to hear that this phenomenon isn’t relegated just to our nation. I’d suspected it may be something more widespread given the sheer depth of despair everyone seemed to plumb during the lockdowns, but I have no first-hand experience with other cultures.

They’re literally killing our souls, in so… so many ways. We have completely lost touch with what makes us human. Well, not completely, we still have the gaping maw where our humanity used to be. And it causes us to be un-human through the pain of the absence, yet most have no idea what’s actually missing. And I agree with you, I think the system is designed to try to make us fill it up with greed and lust and want, but there’s no matter in existence which could ever replace our connection with that from which art flows.

As a devout Agnostic, we have no idea what spirituality means anymore. And I’m not talking about religion, I’m talking about the fact that we’ve completely disconnected ourselves from the simple state of existing in this Universe. We don’t admire the stars and let our minds be flooded with the vastity of diversity within this black expanse (because we can’t even fucking see them anymore!), nature contains too few stimuli to effectively cover our deformed wide-as-an-ocean-deep-as-a-puddle attention spans, we don’t read, we don’t stare at paintings, we don’t study the music, we don’t play - and I don’t mean video games, I mean just mess around with sticks pretending they’re whatever, we just consume a hundred billion points of colourful data per second, every second, for at least 14 hours every day, then shit out depression and ADHD.

THIS is why the possibility of AGI scares me, as a side note! We are barely fit parents to our flesh-and-blood offsprings, we have no business creating entirely new sentient and sapient species!

The dinosaurs had it easy, I swear… This Great Filter thing sucks, and it sucks expertly because it is a suck entirely of our devising.

Thank you! I’m genuinely happy that my “and I must scream” outburst proved useful!

We’re already well on our way (Romania here, hey-ho!), except we’re going about it the exact way a couple of wise guys predicted back in the 1840s, so it’s all falling apart in what would be a hilarious mess had I not been living through it for the past 30 years.

Edit (and a partial vent, because what the hell): we’ve been trying to emulate America ever since the Revolution. People were so (understandably) riled up against that Totalitarian hellscape wearing Socialist clothing, that they acted impulsively when deciding that Capitalist Democracy was the way. Add to that a bunch of politically active people who saw their easy cash grab, and a bit of American “encouragement,” and it was inevitable.

Problem is, the Romanian people are very specifically themselves and, from what I’ve noticed, it’s non-negotiable. We have a tendency of, while living and playing “the game,” noticing that we’re playing a game and so we sort of… meta-game with who we are - it’s like we understand that society is a social act which we put on daily, that it’s not us, on a very essential level. It’s how we’re taught to interact with the world even before we reach school age.

So while we’ve been trying to emulate other cultures, our own ingrained way of being and perceiving practically nullifies every bit of the external “flesh” which we desperately attempt to slap onto our bones. The wise guys I mentioned were known as Pașoptiști (Forty-Eighters would be the direct translation), a group of Romanian thinkers who had a central role in the political shiftings of the times (around 1848, whence the moniker).

They noticed that we’re very plastic and curious as a culture, so we tend to absorb and incorporate foreign elements very easily - it’s basically how the Romanian people have formed, we’ve been colonised over and over and over by pretty much everyone around, so we’ve developed to be flexible and marginally more open than most. However, they also noticed that we were drifting away from our tendency to comprehend the essence of what we were absorbing, favouring surface-level, purely aesthetic grafts, which they said would lead to a superficial societal culture and an inevitable failure - the Theory of Baseless Forms they called it (Teoria Formelor Fără Fond). I call it the Plastic Society, because it looks and feels like those cheap plastic knock-offs which we occasionally got as presents because they were cheaper and parents had the excuse of “well, how the hell was I supposed to know which is the REAL Spider-Man action figure?!”

And since Romanians are also very inertia-bound when left to our own devices, sadly, we’ve been diligently working at fulfilling that very prophecy. And I’m not complaining about our immense cultural permeability, I love who I’ve become because of it, but I am deeply saddened that people around here are no longer in contact with their essence and have fallen into believing this game is the only real thing around…