Wouldn’t go so far as calling it a work of art, but I remember this one time in 9th or 10th grade when our Plastic Arts (technically a general overview of art history and practical exercises for techniques, practically it was just painting whatever, in various shapes and sizes) teacher had us paint religious iconography on slabs of wood. Saints, to be more specific.

I won’t touch upon how utterly pissed my mother was at having to hunt down an ~A4 sized plank within a week (this was before the prevalence of Hyperstores). The thing just came out looking… wrong… It was supposed to be St. George, I believe, and it came out looking like an emaciated and woefully distraught Gandalf the Grey with a spotlight shining in from behind.

I remember this one being extra-bad because, besides basically having had no real training in painting throughout grade school, the subject matter in itself spoke nothing to me. I wasn’t absolutely horrible, as I used to do a lot of sketching and developed a relatively neat hand by that time, but I was thoroughly within the “exorcise your trauma through drawing biomechanical mutilations” phase of my artistic development, let’s call it.

It was also the first time when being creative felt like a horrid chore.

Edit: there is no evidence of said work, because I threw it away the instant I got home. As an agnostic, I get the feeling both God and St. George would have agreed with me…

Hey, riiight! Remember aliens?! Feels like a lifetime ago!

If you’re talking about AGI, potentially any form of art would be at its grasp, maybe even some which may not necessarily look like art to us.

If you’re talking about the generative models of today, they are incapable of producing art, because they are incapable of emotional intent and expression.

Even Warhol was driven by disdain, and the ironically arty bit was how sort of stripped of art his art was as a result of his disdain.

Capitalism pretty much takes survival out of living. And I don’t think we should go back to “if you want to eat, you’ll have to wrestle and kill that boar” levels, but we need a bit more space to develop our relationship with life. As it is, it’s like one of those helicopter parents who doesn’t let anything external touch you, then you turn into goop once the helicopter stops patrolling.

We don’t treat ourselves like humans anymore, we treat ourselves like the chickens grown at scale in industrial warehouses. And we don’t even treat those chickens like chickens, it’s Product all the way down.

Oh, most definitely, art has been thoroughly detached from “real life” - actually, I’d go as far as to focus in specifically on “adulthood” as the marker which excises it from us. And, yes, it is leaving us not hollow, but dessicated.

Interesting (well, and deeply saddening) to hear that this phenomenon isn’t relegated just to our nation. I’d suspected it may be something more widespread given the sheer depth of despair everyone seemed to plumb during the lockdowns, but I have no first-hand experience with other cultures.

They’re literally killing our souls, in so… so many ways. We have completely lost touch with what makes us human. Well, not completely, we still have the gaping maw where our humanity used to be. And it causes us to be un-human through the pain of the absence, yet most have no idea what’s actually missing. And I agree with you, I think the system is designed to try to make us fill it up with greed and lust and want, but there’s no matter in existence which could ever replace our connection with that from which art flows.

As a devout Agnostic, we have no idea what spirituality means anymore. And I’m not talking about religion, I’m talking about the fact that we’ve completely disconnected ourselves from the simple state of existing in this Universe. We don’t admire the stars and let our minds be flooded with the vastity of diversity within this black expanse (because we can’t even fucking see them anymore!), nature contains too few stimuli to effectively cover our deformed wide-as-an-ocean-deep-as-a-puddle attention spans, we don’t read, we don’t stare at paintings, we don’t study the music, we don’t play - and I don’t mean video games, I mean just mess around with sticks pretending they’re whatever, we just consume a hundred billion points of colourful data per second, every second, for at least 14 hours every day, then shit out depression and ADHD.

THIS is why the possibility of AGI scares me, as a side note! We are barely fit parents to our flesh-and-blood offsprings, we have no business creating entirely new sentient and sapient species!

The dinosaurs had it easy, I swear… This Great Filter thing sucks, and it sucks expertly because it is a suck entirely of our devising.

Thank you! I’m genuinely happy that my “and I must scream” outburst proved useful!

We’re already well on our way (Romania here, hey-ho!), except we’re going about it the exact way a couple of wise guys predicted back in the 1840s, so it’s all falling apart in what would be a hilarious mess had I not been living through it for the past 30 years.

Edit (and a partial vent, because what the hell): we’ve been trying to emulate America ever since the Revolution. People were so (understandably) riled up against that Totalitarian hellscape wearing Socialist clothing, that they acted impulsively when deciding that Capitalist Democracy was the way. Add to that a bunch of politically active people who saw their easy cash grab, and a bit of American “encouragement,” and it was inevitable.

Problem is, the Romanian people are very specifically themselves and, from what I’ve noticed, it’s non-negotiable. We have a tendency of, while living and playing “the game,” noticing that we’re playing a game and so we sort of… meta-game with who we are - it’s like we understand that society is a social act which we put on daily, that it’s not us, on a very essential level. It’s how we’re taught to interact with the world even before we reach school age.

So while we’ve been trying to emulate other cultures, our own ingrained way of being and perceiving practically nullifies every bit of the external “flesh” which we desperately attempt to slap onto our bones. The wise guys I mentioned were known as Pașoptiști (Forty-Eighters would be the direct translation), a group of Romanian thinkers who had a central role in the political shiftings of the times (around 1848, whence the moniker).

They noticed that we’re very plastic and curious as a culture, so we tend to absorb and incorporate foreign elements very easily - it’s basically how the Romanian people have formed, we’ve been colonised over and over and over by pretty much everyone around, so we’ve developed to be flexible and marginally more open than most. However, they also noticed that we were drifting away from our tendency to comprehend the essence of what we were absorbing, favouring surface-level, purely aesthetic grafts, which they said would lead to a superficial societal culture and an inevitable failure - the Theory of Baseless Forms they called it (Teoria Formelor Fără Fond). I call it the Plastic Society, because it looks and feels like those cheap plastic knock-offs which we occasionally got as presents because they were cheaper and parents had the excuse of “well, how the hell was I supposed to know which is the REAL Spider-Man action figure?!”

And since Romanians are also very inertia-bound when left to our own devices, sadly, we’ve been diligently working at fulfilling that very prophecy. And I’m not complaining about our immense cultural permeability, I love who I’ve become because of it, but I am deeply saddened that people around here are no longer in contact with their essence and have fallen into believing this game is the only real thing around…

Not downvoted, I just remove the default upvote which comes with posts/comments, it irks me.

To add to that, most of us didn’t have a say in things. Boomers were kinda’ the last generation who still had some controls at their disposal, but the system got completely out of our control from Gen X onward. We’re just along for the ride as it’s crumbling.

Edit: I’ve realised this may sound as though I’m pointing the blame at Boomers - I’m really not, I firmly believe the game was rigged from the start, it’s not down to the average citizen. I was just trying to mark a shifting point.

It’s the looming boiling point. More and more people understand things are going to come to a head Sooner Than Predicted™.

What we’re seeing is grief, but multiplied by billions

Tarantula, because I have arachnophobia - why be anything other than what scares me the most?

Other end…

I sure do! Just last night I woke up from a dream in which my downstairs neighbors were yelling only to discover they were actually yelling.

Well, you can’t really do that when it’s expressed in written form as long as it’s not part of a grander “manifesto” of sorts. Or better put, as long as it’s not grounded in a context.

This can only be solved by slapping as much nuance as you possibly can on everything you write, make it incontrovertible in its clarity.

But if you’re not in the mood for an adjoining essay whenever you want to post a one-liner (seriously not being snarky about this, I completely understand the feeling of utter tedium when having to explain the same damned thing for the twelfth time), you can always monitor the reaction then provide clarification. Once you’ve done that, you really don’t need to engage any further.

And the most important aspect is to never forget that this is the internet. Some people are in it just to stir up shit, and that’s a game you win by not playing.

Well, you’re off to a good start! Just need “uck” to go with that F and you’re golden!

Joke aside, this may be one of those situations where Corpspeak would just serve to make it worse, either by rendering your message inert, or by generating long-term tension. And, believe me, that tension gets really suffocating really fast.

I think your best bet at this point would be to readjust your view and approach with this coworker. My aunt told me a secret which helped me a lot in theatre, but I’ve learnt it also applies in pretty much every other situation: “if they won’t be your partner on stage, then let them be furniture.”

You have the immense advantage of knowing what to expect from them, which is essentially nothing at this point. I’d say the best response is to offer the exact same in return - if they ever need something from you, dodge, postpone and obfuscate. Fuck’em. Not worth wasting your energy on this situation, it only leads to stomach ulcers.

I wholeheartedly believe nothing is lost yet! We’re still around, we’re still full-on “seditious” (from the perspective of Big Bucks McOildrill), we can do this!

But, yes, we do need an Underground Railroad type network for now…

It’s not young-you’s fault, they had us all hooked on that potential. And it 100% had and still has that potential, it’s just that the wrong people are calling the shots.

Tell you what, I’ll go back with you and we can punch the ones who ruined the internet!

If you’re referring to the data models we have now (as in, not AGI), it’s a solid no for a whole host of reasons.

As it is, it is not intelligent. It is capable of structuring immense datasets and identifying patterns throughout said datasets, but it is incapable of comprehending them at a conceptual level. Even if it can mimic the verbal patterns of context, nuance, humour, sarcasm, irony and even coded speech, it is not capable of understanding any of them. It is not an intelligence as we know and understand it, it’s just a really, really complex math equation.

As it is, all AI is still primarily run by a human consciousness. It cannot decide for itself what to do, it has to be pre-programmed. This means that any biases the human programming said AI might have will be transferred to the program itself given the immensity of data it is meant to process, so you’re right back at human fallibility. At best, contemporary AI is to manual moderation what a chainsaw is to chopping down trees with an axe - just an implement to aid humans in doing exactly what they did before, but maybe faster. That’s it.

Duly noted and you are very right! I looked up a couple of simple exercises beforehand as I’m really not keen on getting a herniated disk or something.

From what I’ve seen, as long as it’s nothing fancy like advanced calisthenics and power training, the exercises are straightforward and easy to grasp.

I second this as a non-sporty person. I bought a couple of barbells (15kg apiece) for use at home and 20-30 minutes of just messing around with them daily has solved so many joint aches, it’s almost ridiculous…

First off, I am genuinely happy to hear that you’ve managed to find some stability and that you have loving souls around you! I wish you and everyone you love nothing but the best! 🤗

Second, as related to my hedonistic nihilism… well… not quite:))

I have started to accept a bit of hedonism in my life for mental health reasons in the past years (I’ve been raised as a tool, not as a human being), but I’m not nihilistic. I don’t stress out about how long I have and the magnitude of my actions anymore, sure, but I am passionate about what there is. I love life (maybe even too much at times), I love my passions and interests, I love the wonders of existence, and I believe it’s ultimately awesome that we’re here to see the unfolding of the Universe. I also hate how bad we’ve made things for ourselves and the amount of injustice and inequality makes me sadder and angrier than I’ve ever been. And I will keep trying until I die to contribute whatever I can to shifting humanity back on a reasonable and empathetic trajectory.

I’ve been doing the 9-to-5 ever since I got out of Uni and managed to build a liveable career out of failing upward (I take full advantage of my intuition). I managed to squeeze into the housing market before prices started exploding here as well and own my own hole in the ground (we’re about 20 years behind America in terms of socio-economic trajectory, but we’re starting to speedrun the degradation, it seems), haven’t taken a proper vacation since 2011 (more than a week and actually going somewhere other than my living room), etc., etc.

I used to worry about everything, I used to carry the pressure of being a good little worker ant, of being the best specimen possible, keeping my mouth shut and working my ass off. And all I got for it is high blood pressure, profound loneliness, Meniere’s disease and teeth which I’ve chewed half to shit, and I’m barely in my mid 30s. Had my first (and only, so far) heart attack at 26.

The lockdowns gave me the context I needed to snap out of it. Had the privilege of working from home (QA guy) and spent the entire lockdown pretty much alone in my apartment. And I kept thinking about things, and realised the pain I caused myself for basically no damned reason, just because we’re forced to play this stupid little game of Capitalism since the moment we’re squeezed out into the world. I actually sort of died back then. At least a part of me did, the part which held any and all concern for trying to fit into the system. Then I could finally see my core values again, the things which were important to me. And keeping track of time really wasn’t on that list, to the point where I stopped celebrating or even caring about my birthday, or New Year’s.

Now I just try to live by my principles. I’ll give it my best shot at being myself and following my values, but I won’t have a psychotic break at the end if I don’t manage to be the uber-me, nor do I care that life will kill me sooner or later. Nearly did that myself through trying to live it by the terms set by society. It’s impossible to unsee the Absurd once it smacks you in the face.

Edit: some corrections.