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Notes -
Here's Udio, a new AI music generator that has emerged as a competitor to Suno. There's less of the audio "artifacting" that exists in a lot of AI music tools, and it can actually do some pretty decent generation from keywords. It's early days and there are limitations and still identifiable signs of AI-ness, but it's quite a large step forward from the previous iterations.
The emergence of all these musical AIs as of late has been quite validating, especially since I've had a good amount of arguments with art people I know about the ability of AI to create music - as someone who makes music as a hobbyist I've come at it from the perspective of "these are all just patterns and systems of rules, and can be imitated easily by an agent familiar enough with those rules". In similar fashion to those who predicted that visual art would be difficult to achieve via AI, those who were predicting that this ability was not generalisable to music were wrong.
To some extent, it's understandable - it must be a pretty big blow to one's ego for the art one prides themselves on to be so easily recreated and automated by the equivalent of a Chinese Room, especially when the field is still in its infancy and hasn't even come close to anything we would consider agentic - but I can't help but see many of the naysayers about the ability of AI to achieve supposedly uniquely "human" tasks as being clearly myopic and wrong.
Ego is one thing, basic self-interest is another, but more importantly, I'm not sure who's being myopic here. Technology was supposed to automate away the drudgery, so we can devote ourselves to higher pursuits like art, philosophy, and science. The way things are going, it looks like we're going to automate away the higher pursuits so we can send more people to the cobalt mines, because handing someone a pickaxe, and feeding them insects might be easier than figuring out and maintaining bipedal robots.
Whether this is good or not is a question of values and not really related to the point, the topic of discussion is more about whether it's possible.
I think your scenario is unrealistic in any case - automation of manual labour tasks is certainly feasible (and has been achieved in many cases) and more such jobs in these domains will eventually become obsolete once technological advances make the cost of doing so lower than employing human labour, but that's besides the point. You can be an AI doomer and still realise that AI has immense potential. Plenty of the people discussed on this forum certainly believe so (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, etc). But there are still a lot of people basically treating AI as a hype-fad pushed by techbro caricatures, who regard automation of all these oh-so-human pursuits as practically impossible and scoff at the mention of AGI, and pretty much every two years their predictions get overturned.
Way back when, before I joined this place but was already keeping an eye on the rat-sphere, one of the AI Apocalypse scenarios thrown around was "technological unemployment", and one of the counter-arguments to it, other than "it's just a hype-fad" was "comparative advantage". Already at that time the Rats have discredited themselves as careful thinkers in my eyes, because they waved it away with the magic of recursive improvement. A careful thinker would look at where the logic of comparative advantage leads, and it's the scenario I outlined. You see it's not enough that we eventually figure out robotic/AI alternatives to manual labor, and it's not even enough that they are strictly superior to human labor in every way, they have to be superior to devoting the same AI resources to something else while having humans dig the fucking hole.
But back to your point, yeah the progress in AI is pretty wild, and people predicting that nothing will come out of it were clearly wrong. At the same time I'm having trouble saying anything meaningful about it, or where it will end up going, which is why I kind of went off topic relative to your original post.
And yet that's not how mining works in any country but the shittiest on earth, so it's not clear to me why the practice would suddenly spread.
Yes it does. People who have talents in more lucrative fields than mining, tend to go those fields, even if they are better than the average miner.
"not how it works" applies to your claims that mining will consist of "handing someone a pickaxe, and feeding them insects".
I took it as a metaphor.
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