“The bottleneck of the digital age is different: The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete.”
“It starts with substitution: The digital age takes embodied things and offers virtual substitutes, moving entire realms of human interaction and engagement from the physical marketplace to the computer screen. For romance, dating apps supplant bars and workplaces and churches. For friendship, texting and DMing replaces hanging out. For entertainment, the small screen replaces moviegoing and live performance. For shopping and selling, the online store supplants the mall. For reading and writing, the short paragraph and the quick reply replace the book, the essay, the letter.”
“So even though people ultimately get less out of the virtual substitutes, they still tend to come back to them and eventually depend on them. Thus under digital conditions social life attenuates, romance declines, institutions lose support, the fine arts fade and the popular arts are overrun with slop, and the basic skills and habits that our civilization took for granted—how to have an extended conversation, how to approach a woman or man with romantic interest, how to sit undistracted with a movie or a book—are transmitted only weakly to the next generation.”
“Technologies, which are often designed to solve particular problems, provide new means to human ends. But they also enable new ends. A good music technology becomes a new source of creativity; it can be hacked and bent in ways that its own designers may not have foreseen. Technologies change our collective sense of what’s possible and, in doing so, they change our sense of how things should be. A drum machine does more than automate a beat. In the right hands, it can change our sense of rhythm.”
“Musicians do not just fear their own redundancy. They also fear the devaluing of their art. All innovation in art has generated new answers to the question of what counts as art. Drummers may be the canaries in the coal mine. We have seen with the development of the drum machine that there is an opportunity to use AI to release a new wave of musical innovation. The risk is that the technology will concentrate power in ways that devalue and homogenise music.”
• An article on AI and writing.
“Left to its own devices, A.I. remains a generator, not a writer.”
“What does an increased reliance on L.L.M.s mean for knowledge production, research institutions, or information ecosystems? Which forms of knowledge are privileged; which are severed? Fears about A.I. are material, but they are also philosophical, even existential. Perhaps the threat is not that computers will become more human, but that humans will, or have, become less so.”
“If you’re excited about some kind of work that’s not considered prestigious and you can explain what everyone else is overlooking about it, then this is not merely a kind of work that’s ok to do, but one to seek out.”
brettworks 
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