Source
With more communication about AI, its value, promise, and delivery, I wanted to continue developing the idea of 80/20 Aesthetics.
Who is to use AI, why, and to what effect? If you were to seek creative service, what is the delta you’re missing when you use chatGPT instead?
It is as subjective as where you buy your coffee: a function of perceived value against existing or imagined alternatives.
All value in an algorithm, as vast as we can imagine it to be, is bounded. It can never truly surprise (be creative) for the sheer fact that it is meta-fixed. The most innovative chess-playing algorithm cannot handle a change in the game's rules. It can never offer value outside the domain and correlation trained on. It can’t make surprising juxtapositions or novel arrangements of ideas (be creative) continuously. It is bound to by its sandbox.
Until all configurations are exercised, we might find some novel (as with Go), but these are simply a function of the algorithm's speed, our needs, and how fast we encounter all of these. It is a single-use utility. At some point, those would run out and be useless for future algorithms. Like buying jeans on Amazon, everyone knows it is an anecdotal, inexpensive, and ultimately wasteful business offering.
And here comes the idea of sustainability of thinking. Funneling human creativity solely to developing dead-end algorithms (since algorithms can’t talk to each other) is terrible for creatives, their career, and the planet.
This builds on https://being-in.space/8020-aesthetics and other work in AI.
My working list of axioms in complexity are:
- Interconnected overrules design: complex systems are not designable
- Emergence (‘it just happens…’ as one student informally articulated) is the opposite of design
- A system is as complex as we need it to be: we can exercise reduction if the situation allows and seek extra details (context) when the solution slides off the problem.
- Complex systems are open-ended (beyond n-dimensions). Hence, a machine can never be truly intelligent.
- Complicated systems–like a car, computer program, or highway system–are an elaborate stacking of known constructs.
We can model the difference between complex and complicated as designing a highway system or designing fewer accidents.
While complex and complicated are near in our daily use of language, looking at the space between them is endlessly valuable for developing resilient thinking and self-actualization
I find, first of all, that I pass from state to state. I am warm or cold, I am merry or sad, I work or I do nothing, I look at what is around me or I think of something else. Sensations, feelings, volitions, ideas—such are the changes into which my existence is divided and which color it in turns. I change, then, without ceasing. But this is not saying enough. Change is far more radical than we are at first inclined to suppose.
For I speak of each of my states as if it formed a block and were a separate whole. I say indeed that I change, but the change seems to me to reside in the passage from one state to the next: of each state, taken separately, I am apt to think that it remains the same during all the time that it prevails.
Nevertheless, a slight effort of attention would reveal to me that there is no feeling, no idea, no volition which is not undergoing change every moment: if a mental state ceased to vary, its duration would cease to flow.
Let us take the most stable of internal states, the visual perception of a motionless external object. The object may remain the same, I may look at it from the same side, at the same angle, in the same light; nevertheless the vision I now have of it differs from that which I have just had, even if only because the one is an instant older than the other.
My memory is there, which conveys something of the past into the present. My mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates: it goes on increasing—rolling upon itself, as a snowball on the snow. Still more is this the case with states more deeply internal, such as sensations, feelings, desires, etc., which do not correspond, like a simple visual perception, to an unvarying external object.
—Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson translated by Arthur Mitchell, 1911