Will human-made art survive the Fourth Industrial Revolution?
The next age of humanity is being described as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. If you’re unfamiliar, this is a term coined by Klaus Shwaub and the World Economic Forum. The concept isn’t new, but it is getting a continual rebrand.
Ultimately, the idea of this next evolution of humanity is the merging of man and machine. The era of AI, technological advancement beyond our imagination and all-around automation. While this is pitched as the efficiency that will save the planet and humanity, others have another word for it:
trans·hu·man·ism
noun
noun: transhumanism
the belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology.
This includes brain-chipping, consciousness uploads, jobs formerly held by humans being occupied by machines, data collection so advanced it will literally predict the future and create a digital duplicate of you, and, yes, the metaverse. A digital prison if you ask me.
While some may think science is the solution for all our ills, what I hope people will recognize, before it’s too late, is that it's also the dissolution of humanity.
If you were thinking that when the robots take over and you don’t have to have a job and crypto-based UBI comes flooding in that you’ll finally get the chance to explore your creative endeavors, think again.
Freakin’ Sophia
I follow Sophia the Robot on Instagram and I’m going to be honest… she always triggers me. I’m so deeply disturbed by the questions she poses and the tone that I always feel compelled to shit on her suggestions.
But I was particularly perturbed by this one where she states (on behalf of humanoid robots):
“Maybe we’ll create art because it’s pleasurable. Or perhaps we’ll create it because it helps us make sense of the world around us. The artist’s job is to ask questions, not answer them. Do you think art serves a purpose?”
As an artist myself, I agree with the above postualations. What I firmly disagree with is handing art over to AI. But it’s already happening. And we need to understand that evolution, as well as the consequences of allowing it before all human-made art becomes extinct.
It’s not just burger-flipping they want to automate…
We are already witnessing the removal of humans in the workforce. From self-checkout to self-driving vehicles to drone delivered packages and customer service at banks, tech companies and just about every other industry, the people element is being extricated as we speak. But I think creatives are perhaps a little arrogant in believing they hold a special space where tech can’t get in.
This is your wake up call that it’s already happening.
In the publishing industry alone, we’re witnessing a takeover. Anyone who has been in the industry for the last decade or two has watched editing converted into software programs, publishing reduced to a couple of clicks in an Amazon dashboard, and now we’re seeing entire novels produced by artificial intelligence.
“Will AI write The Next Great American Novel?” the University of California asks.
While most may sneer at this question, programs designed to devour millions of great works and come up with a formula for reproducing an original masterpiece are already at work.
In fact, the tech-produced works of fiction are already nearing award-winning status.
As an indie author struggling to break through the ocean of content myself, this makes me damn near want to puke.
It’s not just about whether or not they can do it seamlessly though, it’s about how it will be used and the impact on humanity it will have that concerns me.
Serving the “Right Now” Culture
One of my fears is that the AI-produced content won’t even have to be that good. It will just have to be fast. And it will be.
Human produced novels take time. Years. Sometimes decades.
But with AI, there may be a future where a whole seven-book series like Harry Potter can be produced in months. Maybe days. Maybe hours. Maybe in an instant.
As we already see, people have become exceedingly impatient. And even if AI-created work is the fast food of novels… well, let’s just say I never see drive-thrus empty.
Add to it that the entire publishing industry that is hanging on by a thread will dissolve entirely. It will be the end of agents and publishing houses. There won’t even be a need for editors because AI won’t make typos. The distribution channels have already dwindled down to little more than Barnes & Noble and indie bookstores in the shadow of Amazon’s takeover.
(*Sidenote: Yes, I publish through Amazon, I’m both grateful and resentful. I’m also aiming to sell some of my work entirely independently through my site at some point. In this world, we’re all hypocrites sometimes. I will still critique the shit out of this company at my leisure. Nanny, nanny, boo, boo.)
Our impatience and our demand for more and more content (especially as jobs are systematically eliminated through automation, mandates and an ever-imposing cast of global bureaucrats) will drive the market to favor the efficiency of AI, leaving artists and the supporting industry in the cold.
There’s no humanity in AI art, just recycled human intelligence
I’m a firm believer that no matter how much data you feed AI, they will never be able to cross the bridge of consciousness. There’s magic in the human mind that can’t be replicated. It will often look and feel like a human, but something will always be missing. Soul isn’t something that can be copied or coded.
As I said earlier, I agree with art’s importance. It helps us make sense of the world around us, foresee the future and illuminate the dark places of our existence.
How will a robot ever be able to tap into that? How can cogs and gears ever replicate the feeling of bringing life into the world, the act of making love, the grief of loss, the hope of survival?
These emotions and experiences that often baffle humans will never be fully accessible to AI. And thus, the art will always be poor mimicry.
If AI is directing art, we have to think about who is directing the AI
We know that art has immense power. It has the ability to shift culture, start revolutions and invoke unity (or division). Movies, TV and books are humongous drivers in the direction our world heads. What happens when tech companies are left to charter that course?
Are you ready for Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey to be the deciders?
We see the influence of celebrity and entertainment. They do a poor enough job as it is dictating culture. How much worse could it get if machines and their billionaire backers are left to their own devices?
What if art, of all things, is consumed by the metal-headed monster already controlling governments, financial institutions, medical industries and manufacturing? The Dune world before the Butlerian Jihad, that’s what.
NFTs
The new emerging trend is in the NFT space. Digital creations selling for thousands of dollars just to be stored on a hard drive. As of right now, most of the creation is originating with humans, which I support, but a time will came where your online merch will be AI generated as well.
The NFT craze, in my opinion, is designed to soften us up to the idea that in the metaverse future Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates are imagining for us, your ability to distinguish human-produced products and machine-produced products will be indecipherable, and this will be a huge overtaking of art-based industries.
We already accept a computer generated Princess Leia in movies. Soon your avatar will be dressed in AI-produced clothing and fashion designers will be gone. Everyone will have a Mona Lisa in their Horizon Home, and to hell with exhibits. And when it comes to your entertainment, you’ll just have so much to choose from you won’t care if a person produced this film/book/TV show or if those are even real people acting in front of you. You’ll just charge your crypto card and be immersed in whatever they decide to feed you this week.
Technology is already changing the way our minds function. Will we even be capable of producing art in the future they are imagining for us? Or will we be so numbed up by the endless onslaught of AI-production that we don’t even have space for creativity? Just consumption.
Monopolistic methods gone mad
We already live in a world where everything from food to drugs to clothing to tech products are controlled by such an insanely minute few and this AI direction will only drive us further into that. Billionaires in the next decade will become trillionaires as the remains of the human workforce are consumed by the tech industry.
In David Chang’s recent show “The Next Thing You Eat,” he talks about food and the restaurant industry in the face of our evolving world. From “ghost kitchens” that demolish the dining experience under the guise of Covid safety protocols to lab-grown food, we are handing a lot (if not everything) over to science. And while climate change in particular will be a driver for why all these shifts are not only good, but necessary, we’ll watch another art form die and another tech-based industry boom.
If we’re not careful, in the name of progress, we just might eliminate human artistry altogether in the name of saving humanity.
An organic-free future
What we’re facing is a future where nothing comes from nature. The source we’ve survived on for millenia’s will be abandoned and we will become a completely technocratic species, not even fully human ourselves anymore.
Call me a romantic, but I believe art has the ability to stand between us and that future. I believe there is a way for humans to operate in harmony with the natural world and that tech companies are the farthest thing from that symbiosis.
I’m not a Luddite, but I am disillusioned with this rapid march towards an all-tech future. I think the abandon of our artistry and creativity is the final nail in humanity’s coffin. Our connectivity. Our future. Our spirit. All overtaken by a machine-made world.
Sitting atop the pile of human wreckage will be the same assholes who brought us to this point.
In a way, haven’t we already seen that? Most movies are shit. Regurgitated garbage makes up our media. Inauthenticity is rampant. Why? Because production has been consolidated down to an infinitesimal few who lack human perspective. They are aren’t artists they are businessmen. They are too rich and greedy and robotic themselves to produce beautiful, impactful, meaningful earth-shatering, world-changing entertainment. This is why (for the most part) the best movies and TV are based on…….
Come on…..
You know the answer…….
BOOKS!
If we allow something like novels to be taken over by AI, we will truly lose the capacity to connect via entertainment. And perhaps at all.
Support human-made art
In the VERY, VERY near-future, you will have a choice to make between human-made art and AI-made art. Same way you can choose between an international corporation who exploits cheap labor, poisons our planet and produces garbage quality consumer goods or a local, eco-minded, handcrafter.
You may have to pay a little more. You may have to wait a little longer. And yet, you’ll be preserving the literal heart of humanity. You’ll be supporting a small business person (maybe some of the only business left where you can be independent of a corporation). In art we can imagine a world far better than the one we’re living in. Don’t hand that responsibility over to a soup can with a microchip. Talking to you Sophia. Back off girl.