I Believe in Good Natured Robots

It's the dawn of Artificial Intelligence.  Generative art, deep dreams, chat gpt text has all the answers, midjourney can turn any idea into an instanteous and seemingly infinite array of dazzling visuals.  Deep fakes can sound like anyone, look like anyone... all of this is overwhelming to even the most tech savvy of all of us.

Or "it's the stuff that dreams are made of."

It really is.  It has me wondering if technology won't do the dreaming for us.  Take the place of sleep one day.  Or certainly the other form of dreaming, the dreams we have for the future.  It is already aiding me in my creativity and curiosity... directing my questions toward new bigger questions.

But it's all part of this weird game between us humans and the robots as they are coming on line.  Strange fears, discomforts, are a natural part of this ache, these growing pains.

I'm not afraid, myself.  I'm really not.  Maybe I can share why that is.  I don't think I'm just brave and stupid?  (Don't answer that!)  I think there is some amount of egotism we all have in our abilities to create and share, like, art and music and movies and culture.  And the idea that this could be replaced by machines is absurd.

One good argument is that no matter how sophisticated the tech gets, it will remain a tool.  A tool to be used toward gratifying ends by master craftsmen, artisans, artists.

When photography was invented, we worried that painters wouldn't be able to make realistic paintings any more.  A mere snapshot would overtake a meticulous masterpiece.  But then something happened... painters were forced ...or inspired... to look at the world in a new way.  To look at the light itself as the surfacing material that creates the idea or impression of what is seen.  We could no longer trust our eyes, but what a wonderful feeling this was!  Impressionism was born as the opponent or perhaps the protégé of that new photographic technology.

I think similar things will happen... are already happening... in the wake of the A.i.

This other argument.  If technology can make dreams come true in minutes or seconds... which is the more valuable, the making of the thing, or the dream itself?  In other words, what accomplishment of yours, painstaking as it may have been, would you not cede to an automaton doing that for you, so that you don't have to.  You can always do the next thing, right!  (This is real world sci-fi Matrix material... someone has already thought of all of this)

I wanna say that the real miracle now, is a person's perception itself.  "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."  When all content is on-demand... we'll get jaded really quickly.

To use a metaphor/allegory from my own life.  My childhood.  We will all wake up from the surrealistic reverie of "Saturday Morning Cartoons" ... and go and play Saturday afternoon soccer.

Lol.

We'll get bored of the torrential outpourings that are possible, and strive even harder to find true meaning in the world.  I like the dreams... but I like waking up inspired even better.  Going out into the world.  Connecting with a strange palette of meta-human superpowers in my subhuman toolkit.  I'm not jealous of a car, a smartphone... why would I be jealous of a.i. ?