A note on AI
Lots of people are saying don’t worry about AI. Let’s think.
Whenever I see an old film with a great orchestral soundtrack, I think about the composers, the musicians, the rooms they hired, the sense of community, the 1000s of hours of practise they put in to learn the instrument.
The rehearsals, the craft of making the instruments, selling them, transporting them, printing the sheet music, making the music stands, making the screws that held the music stands together, the little company somewhere that made conductors’ batons.
All that and lots more.
Now it’s some dude sitting in front of a computer somewhere, but we can’t really tell the difference and don’t really care.
Recently I watched this ep of Jay Leno’s garage. Check out the bit at around 14 mins where he shows the brochure.
An artist painted those illustrations. He or she practised for 1000s of hours to get that good. Learned the craft. How to mix paints and draw to scale.
They bought those paints from a shop and a company somewhere made the paints and some company somewhere made the tubes the paints went into and the little caps on top.
Someone typed the copy and it went to a printing house and there was typesetting and proofs and print runs and companies that sold the paper and the ink, and someone somewhere who folded the brochures and put them into boxes, a company that made the boxes and a guy who drove a truck to deliver the boxes.
All that and lots more.
Now it’s a dude in front of a computer somewhere; we look at a CG image online and can’t really tell the difference and don’t really care.
We’re all dudes sitting in front of computers shuffling zeros and ones for money we never see. Eventually AI will do all that for no money and no one will really notice the difference or care.
There used to be a band: Pop Will Eat Itself; eventually the human race will eat itself, and no one will really notice or care.
Ai image by Jackson Sophat on Unsplash
Martin Sketchley 