If the food and housing is in a location like The Matrix (ie. the end goal of the Metaverse effort), then yes, the agenda of the idealists is to essentially have us live full time in a virtual world where we can technically have anything we want while being in any body we want (even that of a different species). AI generated food that you can actually eat will definitely exist.
It won’t exactly turn out as great as you think though, the tech. conglomerates will see to it that once you move into the new world, you will have no rights whatsoever and they will reserve the right to punish you for any reason they see fit. In other words, abject dystopia disguised as utopia, though it is possible the terms of service will be somewhat loose to begin with just to ensure your guard is down.
Making firm prognostications about dates always strikes me as silly based on my experiences; I stay away from it because I know I’m bad at it.
However, downplaying negative possibilities is worse because it leaves us unprepared for a potential upheaval. And it’s not like those never happen – they definitely do; we had some big ones with very negative consequences for many people. It just usually takes longer than the people who prognosticate (even those who do it with some education) expect. That seems to me a very human failing; judging from my own career we’re really bad at estimations of how long something will take. (Computers will probably be better at it, because accessing vast amounts of data and being able to do rapid calculations over complex data is something computers are definitely better at than humans.)
I don’t think human-created art will ever go away entirely; I can’t imagine that – though if we manage to destroy our environment, something at which we’re distressingly capable, nobody will be left to worry about it; that’ll be the end of both human and AI art. Climate change is also real, no matter how much it gets poo-pooed by people who don’t understand the difference between climate and weather.
But even though some human art will survive anything but an apocalypse, that doesn’t mean all human artists will still have a job a few years down the road. Art covers a vast multitude of jobs, and some of those have already gone away, and many more will go. I don’t think that’s hype at all; it’s based on past observations.
Beyond art (which is, for a lot of people, a mere luxury) I’m not at all naive about the utopia of post-scarcity. I agree with @SterlingRoth that it’d require post-capitalism, and if I have learned anything from my own time down on the ropes, it’s that way too many humans are way too stupidly greedy to make that a happy fun transition. But if I don’t consider at least the possibility, the alternatives are all too pessimistic for my mental health – heck, I won’t get there anyway, might as well work a tiny bit towards a more hopeful future.
Even the downsides of capitalism led to something amazing for creators, and that is the increasingly robust alternative to paid software we know today as FOSS. Think about it, if Discrete, Alias, and Softimage were still competing with each other not only in R&D but in generous licensing at good prices, would there have been any hope at all, of Blender going beyond the status of being a hobby tool powered by fundraisers (as opposed to the well-funded powerhouse it is today)?
In short, capitalism like it or not is the reason why we can have a full gamut of decent creation software without spending money.
“Generous licensing at good prices” – we must have very different disposable incomes.
But I am not gonna discuss capitalism here, or even whether we’d have a lively FOSS scene without it; while I would probably enjoy that under the right circumstances, it’s really way off-topic for this thread.
What with copious amounts of poo hitting the fan at present worldwide so kinda like ai, be chillin with a healthy dose of piss taking meme generation - rather than looking forward too dystopia riven near future forecast, anorak wearing types seem to be fond of espousing more frequently on telly, these days…
I think the only value that there is in human craftmanship, is the essence of being human. To have another person as a role model (or a figure you aspire to be) or try to connect in a more experiential level.
As for example, at some point, I was fascinated with molten glass. I would look at “how is made” videos for glass beer bottles. Getting thousands of perfectly engineered bottles massively produced in an hour or so is no joke. We talk about fulfilling a very fundamental need (storage container).
But on the other hand I looked at molten glass art, where people would do all sorts of artistic operations on slabs of molten glass. Either making vases, or sculptures, etc…
This is really the essence of pure art, 100% completely excluding all constraints and forms and restrictions, in order to chace much more advanced concepts. Perhaps the point is the freedom of expression rather than the product output.
However once you take the meaning of pure art, and start putting it inside cube boxes (constrain it). And then find various arbitrary criteria just for the sake of it, you just become a cog in the wheel of the industry in order to produce something that does not resonate within you.
If we talk from that perspective, I would gladly welcome AI to do all meaningless job. While for example allowing the human factor to become much more on-spot in terms of their expression and principle.
Consider that poets or song writers put copyright to their words and are protective of them… Well what happens when you write a poem or song lyrics as the prompt for the AI to turn into art? who owns the art? Computer did not do it by itself…
I would possibly, consider that copyright laws were the thing, in an era such as early 1910 up to 1960. Where you had groundbreaking innovations, one after the other.
In this sense, if you consider that you have nothing, and then right away you get a brand new groundbreaking invention, seems very legit that you would want to have it patented.
(And is no joke that since copyright services bloomed people would go to patent even the most mundane things, such as a picture of a black dot on a white canvas).
In the context of literature, say that you could have thousands of myths and folklore to draw imagination from, but then comes professor Tolkien with the masterpiece LOTR and changes everything. (More or less invents the entire fantasy genre).
Then after Tolkien, you could have thousands of thousands derivative work based on Tolkien. In some sense is unavoidable that you can’t escape this universe, and that you can’t be truly genuine, but rather have yet another take on things already being said or done.
So in this way you can have legally your work copyrighted or patented since you are given the right. But in some other way, you can’t avoid that your work in either way blends away with the rest of the other of thousands or existing works.
So kinda you can say that you can patent only the pixel-by-pixel accuracy of an image. Or word-by-word (up to the last fullstop) the entire book. But is unavoidable to patent derivatives-mutations or the entire idea that everything falls into.
So kinda you can say that all AI does is that it mutates existing work, so is somewhat original and not at the same time.
There is still not a full-fledged system of criteria that defines what is genuine and derivative and how these are categorized. We are always in the process of trying to figure out these.
In my opinion the issue is that we don’t figure them out, but they have to be defined. Unavoidably, it will make more or less sense depending on the situation where those definitions have to be used.
