“With UBI, automation wouldn’t be scary anymore.”
I’m a huge proponent of UBI as soon as possible, it’s one of my main issues, but I’m at the same time scared of it and see it as not sustainable. So why am I so for it? Because I see it as a stepping stone to tide us over while we figure out new economics, new ways to handle tasks and give out resources, not as the be-all-end-all.
“It’s capitalism that makes people afraid of AI, not the AI itself.”
“Don’t fight the tech. Fight the owners.”
Yeah, I could get behind that; the horrors of wealth concentration, of concentrated ownership of means-of-production, is the best argument against ML. It’s not the only good argument, runaway resource use is also pretty scary, but it’s the main pillar of “the AI problem”.
If you’ve been around any spaces discussing automation in the last two years, you’ve probably seen some variation of the above arguments. The gist of it is that if we’re not afraid for our livelihood, automation ceases to be a threat.
Whereas with degrowth I’m terrified of my day-to-day survival. I’d die day one in the forest. Yes, for the sake of the Earth’s survival we need to pull the brakes on extractionism (as Sunset writes elsewhere in their post), we can’t have infinite “growth” by just stealing from our own future, we need sustainability.
Fighting extractionism, I’m 100% behind. We must fix climate & sustainability before even looking to the stars.
In an attempt to be reassuring, I’ve seen folks argue that artists could still make art, musicians could still make music, writers could still write, and programmers could still program - for their own fulfilment, not for anyone else.
The way I’ve been doing all my life. I’ve got over a thousand essays and over three hundred paintings here on my web page, CC-BY-SA.
This is downright ghoulish.
What’s ghoulish is the current way art is tangled up with making a living. Most of the widely used forms of monetization are tied up with making the work worse, ad-ridden, copyright-laden, less accessible, less sharable, more controlled, more limited, less available, gunked up with DRM, and placed in an exploitative structure where execs and distributors of course always make sure that their slice of the pie is the biggest (Spotify guy has more than four times the amount of money of the richest musician in history), in a world where the village troubador needs to compete with the world’s biggest stars or starve.
The other two main ways are patronage (a.k.a. begging) and ransom protocols, and I’m for those (as long as we’re in this market capitalist hell, which we need to break away from as soon as we can), but they’re outliers rather than the norm.
Going from our current situation where I’m driven to write/hack/paint/sing for art’s own sake so much that I can’t not do it, but I’m constantly worried about the wolves called Hunger and Thirst, to a situation where I’m still driven to write/hack/paint/sing for art’s own sake but I’m cared for economically, that would be a huge win. That’d be the dream for me.
Outsourcing human expression to machines is a fundamentally silly thing to do.
As I’ve written before, for me personally it felt like a gut punch when machines started being able to do art or at least showing signs that they’d one day be able to do it. It took me longer than most to finally learn how to paint and write and now a click of a button can do that. That feels really bad.
Looking up from my own perspective on my own art, I’m seeing a lot of similarites with earlier inventions like how cameras threatened painters, cinema threatened theater, records and sequencers threatened performers, printing threatened calligraphers, industrialization threatened crafters.
Those changes might’ve been worse in some ways, since they irrevocably disrupted 1-for-1 transactions, leading humanity to trying to come up with a good model of compensation for “original template is hard to make, copies are cheap” situations, which we still haven’t really; since the mid 18th century the world’s been flailing around with “intellectual property” as a way to try to solve this problem, a horrific way since it only further enshrined the production machine ownership as true capital power.
And while new ways for humans to express themselves arose using those tools and levers, making art flourish rather than wither, I’m still counting this as a good argument against ML. Like those tools before it—which I’m not convinced were wholly or maybe not even mostly good—it’s making us question the true nature of art and artists. Art used to be 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration; “spark” vs “craft”. Even with my dumb li’l aesthetics degree I’d be presumtious to speculate too much about that, and I might also wander too far in the field of semantics, which I’ve made a life vow not to argue.
But when I look at those historical threats—camera, printer, record, sequencer—what makes them register as “threats” in my mind is the competition mindset, that we’re in a zero sum scarcity competition and if I need to strum my guitar to live, a cassette is my rival. That zero sum scarcity competition world isn’t sustainable and never was.
It’s interesting that the reaction to cameras, printers, records, ML, VHS etc has been different from other tools, like word processing, layers, undo-buttons, digital typesetting, or if we’re looking a couple of hundred years earlier: horizon lines, vanishing points, perspective lines; some true craftsfolk rail against these kinds of newfangled tools calling them cheating (and hand inkers are competing against digital inkers) but in general this is a class of tools that empower artists without the competition/threat aspect. Maybe that’s why they don’t gnaw as much on the human soul (or maybe their gnawing is less apparent).
It doesn’t solve real problems that exist. Those are things humans enjoy doing, and are fulfilled by doing.
Maybe. But our current society, both present-day and pre-industrial era, is fighting our spending time on these things. Right now, even before ML, every minute I’m spending on a painting instead of cutting down trees or mugging tourists or scamming people online or working on the assembly line in a factory is me bleeding money as the wolves of Hunger and Thirst draw nearer.
They make us more human. Furthermore, they’re inherently social and community activities - things we do to bond with other humans. These are things we should do more of. “Sure, we outsourced all human intellectual and physical activity (except that which is too cheap to automate) to machines, but we cut you a check every month so you can keep consuming” is not a reassuring future.
So there are a couple of different paths here.
One, to go back to how it was before industrialization and machines. Tending the trees, tilling the soil.
Two, to try to figure out a wholly new future where we take care of our planet and each other in a way that’s not based on plundering the Earth, that actively fights the Jevons paradox and extractionism.
(Confusingly, I’ve heard both of those paths referred to as “degrowth” even though they’re not the same. I want the second path. Also tending the trees and tilling the soil but with new societal structures, new ways of organizations, new tools. The word “sustainability” is often co-opted by lying greenwashers, just as “degrowth” is gonna be soon, but I’m still using it since I can understand it better.)
Three, and the least reassuring future of all: our current present day. Asked to consume (or starve) but there’s no check coming and we need to do everything by hand. The human compiler at work. Construction work with a toothpick for a tool.
Or even worse: the road we’re heading, which is looking to be nasty, brutish, and short. Where I and Sunset fundamentally do agree is this: something’s got to give. We need change. We need real green, not painted green.