Are others feeling the lack of wonder in life? I mean the visceral, felt experience of when you're watching TV and you're just daydreaming in total awe at the amazing things we're learning and discovering about life and the universe? The kind that sticks with you until the next morning, and the next. That affects the themes of your dreams the coming night? That inspire you to just write or paint or craft something? That you talk about with friends and colleagues and loved ones and they're just as excited about the world around us as you are? I don't know if it's just my depression rearing its ugly head again, or whether this is a diagnosis of a zeitgeist with intellectual anhedonia :( I'm afraid it's not just me. --- I believe that AI is still so early that we as a society are in the stage where we are figuring out what the right metaphors are to use for AI and what to do with it. Is it a stochastic parrot? I’ve heard it being called an assistant. A separate species. Just a tool. A cnc machine (a specific tool even?) The new printing press The new internet I've even heard “just a bunch of matrix multiplications” (reminds you of “feeling are just chemistry”?) And I believe we as a community of compute-native creatives (of the species inventor, visionaries, creatives, generative artists, tinkerers, wonderers) actually have a responsibility to the general public to use what is to become a commodity in a large part of the world in decades to shape it in a way that moves us towards a future worth living in. I am just missing a sense of wonder in the world and I am afraid that how the current media ecology works is the reason why. AI is new, a transformer model is the transistor, not the chip. It is our duty as makers and dreamers to bring these things to the general public and not just keep it in academic and underground art scenes. The zeitgeist in the world is dour right now, and the media is obsessed with AI, death and war but nobody is showing how AI can actually achieve meaningful changes in our lives that enhance it in depth; saliency; perception; awe; wonder. We need people inventing magical pens, magical glasses that can let you see the world in ways that insects perceive the world, we need people figuring out how to utilize these transformer models in circuits and chips that help people extend the range of their expression, compassion, warmth and trust. The age we're in is beyond awful in a felt sense, and the solutions we're hearing are war, death and unconstrained financial incentives   submitted by   /u/Combinatorilliance [link]   [comments]