Isn’t it a bit silly to say AI is going to eat the entire economy, but you have a contingency plan?
It seems kind of like saying “I’m smarter than all the AIs in this one particular way.” If someone posted that, you would probably jump in to say they’re fooling themselves.
I don’t know how to create a robot-free Internet without accidentally furthering surveillance of humans. Any technique I can think of that would reliably prove I’m not a bot also seems like a technique that would make it easier for commercial or government tracking of me.
> Waymo is paying DoorDash gig workers to close its robotaxi doors
> The Alphabet-owned self-driving car company confirmed on Thursday that it's running a pilot in Atlanta to compensate delivery drivers for closing Waymo doors that are left ajar. DoorDash drivers are notified when a Waymo in the area has an open door so the vehicles can quickly get back on the road, the company said.
You’re making a point mostly about aesthetics. But regardless of aesthetics, to be a working artist, the artist needs to make money.
Sounds like you make money partially by teaching and partially by gallery sales. Which are two of the commercially viable paths that are mentioned in this essay.
> Then over time, if you get paid for the art, cut down on the part-time job, and repeat.
The point of this article is simply that the above will not happen by accident.
Not really, I'm making a point about the category of activity. Whether what this guy does is art practice vs product sales that use a claim of art. The article isn't claiming that making a living from art will not happen by accident, and if it was, it would be wrong because that's fairly common. See Van Gogh, Kahlo, Basquiat, Vermeer, on and on. This is all work that was optimized for innovation, not for some sort of market fit, and in these cases the work became successful either after their death, or in spite of antagonism towards the market. Deliberate commercial strategy is a path, but the historical record suggests it's not the one that produces the most significant work, and that's what most artists are trying to do.
I think the point about aesthetics is particularly useful to rebut here because it conflates aesthetics with taste. One is a personal preference that's subjective and not always interesting to argue about. But aesthetic evaluation is a rigorous discipline with criteria, history, and shared standards developed over thousands of years. This is what I meant when I say the work wouldn't stand up to scrutiny by my undergrads, because this is what they are doing.
To reframe (again) in HN terms: imagine someone who built a successful SaaS product writing an essay called "How to Be a Scientist" and the core advice is to run your lab like a business, find "hypothesis-market fit," and if your research isn't getting cited, just research something else entirely. A working scientist would find this almost incoherent. The business thinking isn't irrelevant to running a lab, however it confuses commercializing the outputs of a discipline with doing the very point of the discipline itself. When scientists do optimize for citations, and in academia they have to sometimes ("publish or perish"), the scientific community generally regards it as a corruption of the process, not good practice.
I think comparisons between Jobs and Cook are trite and cliche by now, and also pointless. Jobs was a generational talent; everyone looked up to him when it came to defining products. Of course Cook is not able to do what Jobs did. No one can.
Apple has already been left behind by many tech shifts: web, search, social, crypto, metaverse, etc. At various times popular opinion had them left behind by netbooks, by tablets, by smart phones, by Windows, by web browsers… until they weren’t.
Apple does not have to lead all categories of tech to be a very successful company.
It seems kind of like saying “I’m smarter than all the AIs in this one particular way.” If someone posted that, you would probably jump in to say they’re fooling themselves.
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