Hello.
I had some thoughts recently about machine learning and the automation which is entering full speed in to more and more industries.
From my recent observations, it seems that people have mostly split into two polar opposites.
The first extreme want to enjoy the new tools that AI and machine learning (ML) give them access to.
The second group is terrified of a world in which most human activities, even the most sophisticated ones are being trivialized and quickly replaced by the machines.
It is probably worth to mention that I may be a bit biased and would lean more towards the latter attitude. Part of that may be because my work involve working with digital artists, and I have noticed that more and more of them are increasingly using machine generated content, e.g. they provide generated concept art - for characters, game elements or product designs and so on. In short, the work that only a year ago gave income to a number of cooperating, skilled artists, now is often being done by single anyone with a ML script.
Now let's try to play a little game of predicting the future.
Most countries globally are a part of a free market... Or rather, often, a free market in which huge corporations are a little too friendly with the government, but lets maybe ignore that for a moment.
In my opinion, the nature of a free market is to promote efficiency. It's like a kind of darwinism, that takes a technology or idea and constantly improves on it. For the most part, there's no room for human feelings and sentiments in it. It's a cold and calculating mechanism.
In our last few hundred years of history, this very mechanism, among other positives, made our lives much more comfortable, but while doing that it was also periodically eliminating obsolete professions. That's the price we often pay for advancing our technologies - we cyclycaly send generations of 'unneeded' people straight to poverty.
This is how the free market works, but there are small exceptions to the rule. We can find quite a few examples of people, often cooperating with the state, trying to regulate these mechanisms.
Examples: the employment of the disabled, child labor ban, or recently, diversity quotas.
These are just random examples, by no means am I putting these on an equal footing, that would be a material for another post.
Let's just say that some people want to regulate the efficient but heartless free market machine, and it works for them SOMETIMES.
Knowing that, I am asking myself, how will people react to this new huge jump in automation, which has a potential of depriving humanity of a big number of activities – jobs and hobbies.
Lets go back to digital art market for a while, because that's what I'm more familiar with.
I can imagine soon, some new regulations appearing that will prohibit ML programmers from using data randomly scraped from the internet without the owner's permission. On the other hand, I don't think that corporations, that are just now learning that soon they may no longer need to maintain and pay for a large portion of their staff, will be quick to gave up on this opportunity that easy.
Perhaps this could be a chance for block-chain technology to offer a solution.
No, probably not this one.
By no means I am a block-chain programmer or even technically minded, so lets just say that a 'world of fantasy and wild imagination starts here'...
For example, would it be possible, to generate a certificate (maybe NFT?) for works (images, music, etc.) that have been verified as man-made? I see huge social movements in the near future promoting various solutions to put this AI cat back in the bag, while at the same time not being very optimistic about them succeeding. Maybe all this will require a bigger transformation of thinking about things like work or creativity from us. It may even drive us to reevaluate some of our more philosophical stances on issues like sense of purpose and life's meaning. There's certainly a lot more to it, but let's leave it at that for now. Let me know what are your thoughts.
Have a great day.
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