Being forced by circumstance to make hyper-rational decisions all the time is the very kernel of poverty. A kind of poverty like this, financial or emotional or intellectual, may be the spiritual seed of creative genius, which will always expound how “creativity thrives in constraints”.
Do I care about people being more rational? Personally, about some things, sure. For example, I wish for a civilization that optimizes for cheap enough housing that I can be 90s-levels of un-optimal about how I spend the current chapter of my life. That’s from my (maybe unpopular here? dunno how the vibe has shifted in ~10 years) perspective as a nearterm X-risk-skeptic. I think using creativity to bridge the phenomenology and empathy gap between humans and plausible-robot-psychologies is a fertile ground for exploration when it comes to engaging with these questions in a serious way.
Likewise I might care for this in a much broader way so that the upcoming generations can still self-sort into the creative scenes of the coming near future and the technological as well as creative Renaissance, ideally borrowing from the prestige and vibe achieved by existing hubs, which also suffer from being exclusionary.
But then again, I don’t know other people’s lives, their priorities. This is the crux of why I can’t make art that crosses that phenomenological, moral gap, and indeed why I may agree with leftist dreams but am fundamentally a “so how do we actually build and multiply this rather than just redistribute it” perspective. Art may be best when it allows high-bandwidth dialogue between otherwise very different worlds. That’s why I look more to the new season of Rick and Morty than Broadway as it stands or traditional Hollywood, to see the operative system of culture mature.
I see revolutionary art at this point of cultural tension, to do a kind of “trading hostages”. A ritualistic mutual slaughter of sacred cows so that we may see the future without our desire for status stopping us from embracing imaginary positive sum improvements to the types of game we’re even playing as a people, as a politic, etc. I can see an AI achieving this because if you were unbound by Overton windows and Chesterton’s fences, you could truly see the common humanity and resolve with utilitarian beauty a lot of the suffering going on in the world. I ask myself what wacky, explosive voices could I chuck in a blender if I wanted to fast-forward the current rather tedious talking points echoing within the political zietgeist. I wonder if Sondheim did this with his last musical, but I’m sure it needs doing now and soon and it’s very much a Grey Tribe job.
Being forced by circumstance to make hyper-rational decisions all the time is the very kernel of poverty. A kind of poverty like this, financial or emotional or intellectual, may be the spiritual seed of creative genius, which will always expound how “creativity thrives in constraints”.
Do I care about people being more rational? Personally, about some things, sure. For example, I wish for a civilization that optimizes for cheap enough housing that I can be 90s-levels of un-optimal about how I spend the current chapter of my life. That’s from my (maybe unpopular here? dunno how the vibe has shifted in ~10 years) perspective as a nearterm X-risk-skeptic. I think using creativity to bridge the phenomenology and empathy gap between humans and plausible-robot-psychologies is a fertile ground for exploration when it comes to engaging with these questions in a serious way.
Likewise I might care for this in a much broader way so that the upcoming generations can still self-sort into the creative scenes of the coming near future and the technological as well as creative Renaissance, ideally borrowing from the prestige and vibe achieved by existing hubs, which also suffer from being exclusionary.
But then again, I don’t know other people’s lives, their priorities. This is the crux of why I can’t make art that crosses that phenomenological, moral gap, and indeed why I may agree with leftist dreams but am fundamentally a “so how do we actually build and multiply this rather than just redistribute it” perspective. Art may be best when it allows high-bandwidth dialogue between otherwise very different worlds. That’s why I look more to the new season of Rick and Morty than Broadway as it stands or traditional Hollywood, to see the operative system of culture mature.
I see revolutionary art at this point of cultural tension, to do a kind of “trading hostages”. A ritualistic mutual slaughter of sacred cows so that we may see the future without our desire for status stopping us from embracing imaginary positive sum improvements to the types of game we’re even playing as a people, as a politic, etc. I can see an AI achieving this because if you were unbound by Overton windows and Chesterton’s fences, you could truly see the common humanity and resolve with utilitarian beauty a lot of the suffering going on in the world. I ask myself what wacky, explosive voices could I chuck in a blender if I wanted to fast-forward the current rather tedious talking points echoing within the political zietgeist. I wonder if Sondheim did this with his last musical, but I’m sure it needs doing now and soon and it’s very much a Grey Tribe job.