Not sure if you have noticed but usually the most successful people are those who have some sort of strict routine and rituals ingrained in their everyday life. Sure, there are exceptions but what most top achievers, be it athletes, businessmen or women, or artists, will tell you is that they have a routine. Routine that quite often looks very strict and demanding to others, sometime even impossible to follow over a long term.
Don't believe me? Go ask anyone you consider high-achiever around you. And if you can't ask them yourself, just listen to podcasts like Tim Ferris Show or Lex Friedman's or Huberman's interviews.
I'm not saying this as a major revelation. I'm stating it as a fact in the discussion of whether artificial intelligence can do what we do better and what are the things we can do better than a machine over the long run.
From the routine perspective, it is clear that the answer is yes - machine will always win. Computers always were, are and will be better at routine work—they do it without hesitation, faster, and with as many reps as necessary until electricity lasts. Which leaves us with a question ...
Can humans be better in anything? Better than artificial intelligence?
It's a natural question, right. Because if most successful outcomes are result of a routine and repeating the things that work, just do more of them ... hmm, then I don't know 🤔.
A lot of what's going on in the world, maybe all of it, can be described by math equations and weighted probabilities decently well. This gives machines another advantage. Sure, there are exceptions which we call irrational behavior or people acting based on their gut feeling rather than facts. But even gut feeling is often just hidden herd-following.
If computers can consume more knowledge and use all of it simultaneously, if they can better identify patterns and repeat the actions that bring better results as long as needed or beneficial, then they will inevitably be better at most knowledge and business work.
But is it just that or will that spill over to creative work as well?
By the way, that knowledge and business work includes all of marketing, advertising, sales and influencer work for business and politics because all of these are based on understanding and influencing humans. And since more and more of our lives are moving online, we are moving to a turf where machine again has advantage.
Let's get back to creative work as the last frontier because I feel that it has parameters of randomness, social storytelling, and the artist's story. Artwork is, I feel, the expression of all of these. And if we accept the fact that there are exceptions in all of that routine, math and probabilities, there might be hope for non-conformist unique artists making art in any form - physical as well as digital.
Any other form of art, especially the masses pleasing, visuals - audio - video - and physical forms - will again be done as needed by a machine because it will always know the crowds' taste better, will be better at timing and let's not forget that it will be also much better at the actual craft itself.
What a weekend thought experiment, right. Apparently I've been thinking about it from my limited perspective that may sound utopian, but it can actually be positive - if if if ...let's explore this "if" another time in another essay.
What are your thoughts? I'd like to hear your opinion! Please share it.
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What if… instead of traditional forms of creativity being our advantage over AI, we in fact start to value verifiable forms of raw reality and expression instead. In many ways creativity is in the eye of the beholder. The popularity of the #nofilter hashtag on Instagram was a reaction to the highly filtered and fake reality that grew from the app. Similarly we might see the equivalent response to AI? This is perhaps one of the biggest use-cases for blockchain and tokenization in providing verifiable stamps of authenticity for content creators.
This is a great take Jon! I like it. But what would pass as raw reality apart from unfiltered photo? Can you elaborate with some more examples? I like where it is going :)