AI is not sufficient for tasks involving creativity like art and music. It doesn’t capture that human aspect yet (It could in the future).

There’s a dismissive take on AI creating art that “AI can never create a truly great work of art or tell a truly compelling story.” I worry less about that, since those are really subjective stances to take on a given work; one person’s La Dolce Vita is another’s Dude, Where’s My Car? and vice versa.

What I want us to worry about is: What are we going to do to protect human dignity, even if there’s no profit motive in it? Sure, maybe an AI screenwriter could someday write a movie that people would want to see, but why should that mean that human screenwriters should have to starve even more than they currently do? If we can automate a large percentage of all human labor, does that mean that we’re just going to render most humans unemployable and not change anything else, because that’s what the invisible hand demands? Or are we going to have a serious conversation about how human dignity has value, in and of itself, and totally separate from our ability to increase GDP?

Pedagogy of the Oppressed and all that.

The Fountain

Went Trick or Treating in a new hometown with my family, had a great night, came home and put some candy in this uranium glass dish:

California is so goddamn huge that it can’t help but represent a wider range of demographics. I’d be interested to know how it compares against the overall national rate of acceptance.

Edit: If you average all of the numbers on the map together, the national average is 67%. Whether or not that’s a responsible way to work with this data… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Chess?

It’s made a lot easier when the shitty artist is dead. It’s appropriate to talk about H. P. Lovecraft’s racism and xenophobia, hell it even informs understanding of his work a bit better, but buying his work doesn’t fund ongoing bad acts because he’s been dead for almost a century. If you’re going to be a terrible person, the least you can do is also be dead.

That is not dead which can eternal lie

And with strange aeons, even death may die

Reject modernity

That’s a good theory! The development of one could have led to the other. A beam that remotely disassembles something to its subatomic particles without an explosion would have been a necessary part of transporter development, regardless of which was invented first.

But the trays are all wet.

It’s got to be something more exotic than simply dumping energy into the target until it turns to vapor, otherwise there would be horrifying explosions of steam and guts and molten rock, instead of a soft hum and the disappearance of the target.

The Wizard of Oz, because of what the actors, especially Judy Garland, went through.

The Shining, because of how Kubrick treated Shelley Duvall.

Powder and Jeepers Creepers, because of how Victor Salva emphatically put his own predilections into his work.

It gets all three networks, and PBS!

Just do it in the bathtub, that should be fine, right?!

Hell yeah, electric horses!