But the artists never made any money in the first place. Spotify allowed for the insanely long tail of no-play artists to get a platform to begin with, paying a nominal fee seems like not that big of a deal, considering the same folks would never have gotten any exposure.

Artists had plenty of thriving platforms to get their music out digitally before Spotify came along. The difference is almost every one of them paid better or let you sell your music. Spotify has accounted for artist music revenues dropping by ~90% and has done almost nothing to help smaller artists that they weren’t already getting elsewhere. They grew in popularity due to offering listeners endless playlists. Sadly, Songza was killing it in this area too and could have been a serious Spotify competitor until Google bought it and ruined it almost overnight.

The irony being that it would have massively benefitted from a huge range of ML tools, be it the crusty audio or the atrocious pacing. But I mean... same deal as every day, pop-luddites squeezing their audiences for subscribers (another bout of irony because they accuse "AI" to do the same, somehow). It's still fascinating and good to see that we get some lengthy essays about this, I can't wait for us to discuss how well it's aged in one or two years or so.

sure, but at this point, people are going to just freaking demolish server farms by hand

I'm not sure how we'll handle the income problem, but once the shoe drops, and drop it will, very soon, I have a feeling that core existential needs will "magically" align with policymaking, such that people will at least be happier than they are today. I mean, this is the big one, the biggest unknown in all this. Not some future skynet nonsense, us humans always trying to keep others down because of our fragile, hilarious little egos. If we can overcome ourselves and make sure that we all get to eat and enjoy proper healthcare (uh, only way is up with that one anyway), people will change their minds right quick.

Yeah, my take as well. I think "Her" portrayed it nicely; you can still get your human-written poem or whatever nonsense you want to be made by hand, doesn't mean everyone has to dispatch atrociously meaningless or repetitive tasks. What, do people think VFX grunts love rotoscoping mundane subjects all day long? People hate boilerplate work, and getting rid of it will be a huge boost for enjoyment, too.

There truly is room for doom and terror, but none of those wannabe essayists even remotely scratch the reality of it all; they are almost exclusively trying to dunk on tech that will help disabled, impaired, destitute folks to even remotely catch up to the rest of those who are living a relatively cushy life. Just look at therapy and what the sheer possibilities are, it's so incredibly callous in my mind to pretend like it's all going to be so bad when we have tangible proof that this is going to be positively changing billions of lives in the shortest amount of time imaginable.

There is so, so much good here, and I'm getting kind of tired of the narrow-minded naysayers. I mean, they're kind of few, all things considered, and they'll instantly vanish the moment we get really competent agents doing anything... but it's still exhausting being aware of all this all the time. I guess AI/ML can improve my own personal life by just helping me sidestep all the bickering and all these awful non-arguments I keep stunlocking myself on, which would be pretty funny to me.

I mean, sure, but that's not to be blamed on ML-anything. It's explicitly the human problem, because against all odds, it turns out that we have been the paperclip optimizers all along.

Yeah, it can go awry, but so far I don't see the problem. And while I appreciate that certain people will actually suffer for the fact that they get rationalized away, I'd rather superfluous workers get to live on a hypothetical monthly allowance (huh, wonder if we will get THAT right) and do whatever than not allow, say, quadriplegics and the other many disabled people around us to finally tap into their creativity and churn out art, speech, even experience a motor-sensory immediacy they have long ago lost any appreciation for.

The benefits so massively, so drastically outweigh the negatives, starting with more fulfilling artistic creation (at any granularity you want, people pretend like it's only text-to-picture or nothing at all, which is such a silly misunderstanding of what we will enable ourselves to do), round-the-clock therapy, tutoring, mindfulness instruction and help... you name it. Some foul fields and workplaces (yeah, it's not the AI revolution, it's all of humanity and their history with being pricks towards humanity itself that is "rotten to the core") will have to be demolished and cauterized before it can get better, but it's going to still be an overwhelming net positive. Of course, that is if it/we manage to actually amputate the gangrenous limbs of capitalism and bad incentives, bad workplace culture, atrocious treatment of fellow humans - just name it, chances are we have been doing it so, so very wrong.

I reserve skepticism, it's a huge gamble regardless. But just in case people are wondering, we're already beyond the point where this is just merely handy, at this stage, a Hail Mary is pretty much our only option... and there won't be another one like this here "rotten" ML-revolution.