I think you're right unless the person is disabled or almost anyone inside of an extreme religious context, or a context where they are a member of a small minority group.
But these exact arguments were made about book publishing, as they atomized a previously centralized worldview and community.
I feel like you would love the book "Simulacra and Simulation" by Jean Baudrillard. It agrees with you, and there's a sense in which you're right.
I wonder what you think our eyes are doing, though, and what you think magic is.
What makes it not elf-like?
We are creatures of the field and forest. The things that we invent are of the field and forest.
Are you saying that for you, the symbol translation needs to occur within cells and neurons instead of within a machine? Okay, well imagine we find a way to do that instead. Are we then more elf-like to you, because the senses would become part of our body?
Or are you saying that regardless of the path that we take to read wind and water with our eyes, we will never be like elves? That this could never be magic? Do you believe we need an External Being With Authority to grant us magic? Or a random, chaotic External Force like evolution?
It seems to me that regardless of when you "install" a sensory apparatus, before or after birth, your experience of the world will be similar (unless one or the other is more inconvenient for technical/social reasons).
If we can live in better harmony with nature due to enhanced senses that allow us to see the invisible motions of Earth, if we can identify birds and plants by sound and sight, if we can emit and process sonar, scan resources beneath the surface, better utilize and eliminate invasive species, spot predators from thousands of yards away (so they can remain in our ecosystem without being killed)... I mean that's magic to me?
I don't think the intentions of those men matter, though, when it comes to whether or not they are creating new mediums for self expression. It won't be those men who make the art.
Most of Michaelangelo's working artistic life was spent touring and locking down stone quarries, pigments, etc and collaborating with brutal leaders to do so. Those men only cared about land and power, but the artists of the Renaissance manipulated those leaders to accomplish their own ends. This is what artists have always had to do.
And also... why is AR itself not automatically considered a form of creative expression? Art installations and cathedrals and any constructed space are doing the same thing.
Also, I lived through the Second Life and Warcraft eras. Many people hunger for a form that wasn't just given to them by random chance by the universe.
The internet did eventually become homogenous, but it wasn't always this way, and tens of thousands of people spent a majority of their social life in these kinds of spaces.
I think in the future, there will be costume parties and entire communities where it'll be considered vulgar to insist on looking at someone's unfiltered body, in the same way it would be strange to see them without clothing.
Yeah, this is how I feel. "Reality" is already heavily mediated. Why are people so enraged that a person might want to mediate or enhance it further?
Often lately the same people who claim they value "creativity" and "art" seem to believe the the only valid forms of creative and artistic expression are the ones that existed when they were born. Everything else is degenerate art. I guess we've been here historically, though :/
I don't think so. We had genocide and thousand-year periods of enslavement and colonialism and existential despair (and existentialism) and mechanization and atomization that led to the "elevation" and isolation of "nuclear" families from their social and historical contexts. We had racism and murder and sexual assault and lonely unemployed men who had nothing better to do than scapegoat entire populations and subjugate them.
I grew up gay in the American South, and the internet and video games were one of the only places I found connection that wasn't threatening. To me, what you're saying only applies to people who were part of the dominating population. Everyone else was alienated.
I am skeptical video games accelerated or deeply altered the way humans have been interacting with one another for the past 70 thousand years at least. There are a gazillion factors in why we act the way we do today, but when I read the existentialists, or mystics from 1200 AD, or the writings of ancient leaders, or Ecclesiastes, I see the same humans with the same nervous systems and the same kinds of goals. Every generation I've ever read about has lamented that the next generation is uniquely devoid of connection and has abandoned the values they had when they were kids.
This feels like I'm reading a comment written by anti-video game moms in the early 90s talking about the stupid unfashionable nerds and how they were ushering in a frightening new age of fewer values and greater social isolation.
I dunno, I'd love to have elf-like abilities to see systems of energy in the world around me that the human eye can't see, like wind patterns, and be able to zoom in on plants and animals in the garden and woods where I hike. I can't wait to see the skins people create for themselves, just walking around the world on holidays with fun appearances. And I'm excited for all the identity crises coming. Philosophy as physical reality.
But I guess this is as diverse of a human experience as y'all are willing to tolerate. :/
I thought it was saying "a letter to those who fired tech writers because they were caught using AI," not "a letter to those who fired tech writers to replace them with AI."
The whole article felt imprecise with language. To be honest, it made me feel LESS confident in human writers, not more.
I was having flashbacks to all of the confusing docs I've encountered over the years, tightly controlled by teams of bad writers promoted from random positions within the company, or coming from outside but having a poor understanding of our tech or how to write well.
I'm writing this as someone who majored in English Lit and CS, taught writing to PhD candidates for several years, and maintains most of my own company's documentation.
I agree! Especially now that the data analysis tools have been integrated by default. It even writes and executes code to validate most of its mathy answers. I tried for a few months to find a good Physics tutor for my high school-aged daughter and eventually just started photographing her homework with GPT-4. I’d ask it to solve the problems and explain its solution to me, then I’d check the answers and teach her myself. It was correct more than 90% of the time over three months, and I relearned high school physics in the process. Even human tutors aren’t always accurate, and in my experience, they also sound confident when they are wrong. Eventually, I decided to just remove the monkey from the machine and got her an account of her own. Almost every day she tells me about something she “finally understands” that she’s been struggling with in class. Her in-class, no-access-to-GPT test scores (after I got her the account) went from high 50s to high 80s.
But these exact arguments were made about book publishing, as they atomized a previously centralized worldview and community.