> I would imagine that in any of those situations some doctors, authors, and musicians alike would be devastated.

You don't even have to compare yourself to AI for this mentality though. There are people who choose not to compete in things because they don't believe they'll ever be as good as other humans.

I assume must composers don't go into music thinking they are going to be as great as Beethoven.

I believe there are many studies that show that if you only do something because you think you're good at it, you're likely to drop off. I imagine it's also why you're supposed to praise children for being hard working and not for being smart or talented.

As a person who likes music, making it, listening to it, breaking it down and hacking it...

Making a classical arrangement that evokes a particular expression in the listener is the job of the musician. If an AI system helps you explore the possibilities there, it's more like a studio musician that's able to improvise. You're still the person, the human, the emotional filter, that picks "This sounds right" or "This doesn't" for a particular situation. It's a judgement call. An emotional one.

An AI might be able to fake it, communicate with it, but it will never replace humans choosing the sounds that please them more than others. Humans communicate through music. It wouldn't surprise me that an AI would be able to as well. I don't think it would necessarily write emotionally strong music, not without human training.

Edit: I guess what I'm trying to say is, sure, computers might be able to make music. Ask any guy who messes with modular synthesizers. But they're a tool. The fact an AI can express itself through music is sure as hell not gonna stop me from also expressing myself. It's like arguing "Since AIs will be able to comment on Hacker News, humans won't."

I think in all these cases, reasonable practitioners would be pleased. If an AI could generate good diagnoses, a doctor would be happy, because they would know that many lives would be saved.

Neither art nor music are competitive activities. Good poetry is a wonderful thing, no matter the source.

I don’t think so. AI is a tool. It doesn’t make any sense to say “a screwdriver can now screw things in better than a person” anymore than saying an “AI can diagnose better than any doctor”. The doctors use AI just like a mechanic uses a screw driver.

Here's something that I think would be exceedingly difficult if not impossible for AI alone to succeed at in the next hundred years.

Take a look at this painting: [1]

It is a comment on war, bravery, death, life, fear, sacrifice. It is drenched in the political and social context of the day.

I really don't see AI coming up with anything even remotely like this independently, and view such an achievement to be much harder than simply diagnosing disease or writing an emotionally moving classical composition. It would be comparable to writing some types of poetry or song lyrics, however, which require reference to context that humans understand but machines don't (yet).

[1] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fd/El...

[2] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_of_May_1808

> An AI that generates text which humans believe more beautiful than any other poetry created - An AI which creates classical arrangements the likes of which we compare to Mozart

Hrm, I do think that AI would be able to create narratives that humans find more enjoyable than the work of other humans, and I agree that AI would be able to create pictures and sound that humans find to be more enjoyable to look at or hear than the raw work of humans. AI can master the technical feats of composition and art.

But what I doubt AI will ever be able to do is create art that speaks to us. It wont ever be able to create a Guernica. It wont be able to create a Crime and Punishment. It wont understand what it is to be human and mortal, what suffering is, and it wont be able to look within itself and find what those things mean to it and then share that with us, because in the end it's just a bunch of code running statistical computations. It wont fear death, it wont have children it cares about or a family history to look on and tell us about. It has nothing of emotive value to share.

It's not intellect, it's the capacity to explore the board. Go can be fun still to practice and exercise the mind, its just not sensible to dedicate your life to find novelty in it. That is what hardest, not the power of Alpha, but its capacity to innovate better than humans.

I am no expert, but at least in chess, players have developed repertoire of styles intended to specifically beat computers, anti-computer tactics, essentially to try to confuse and mislead the AI, may be some such methods can be developed for go as well.

We collectively may be #1, but only one out of the billions of use will be THE #1. But you see more than one doctor, more than one author, and more than one musician. In any matter of intellect, unless you're an blindly egotistical narcissist, you'll probably realize that there's at least one person on the planet unambiguously better at it than you are. When computers become better than the best of us, only that single person (and a large number of narcissists) stops thinking they're #1. For the rest of us, matters are unchanged (job market notwithstanding).

Counter-example: Machines can make perfect music, play an entire orchestra, and know every song I've ever heard of and millions I don't.

But that doesn't detract from people playing Ukelele.

Well there are many people in the world who can compose like Mozart. I recall a college professor remarking that he's one of the top 5 "Mozart composers" in the works.

Of course, for a music academic, copying someone's style like this war pointless and his compositions were more modern/contemporary.

This leads us to a useful distinction between pursuits with one end goal (be the best/strongest/fastest), and those with naturally many endpoints and expressions.

I mean I guess but that's more b/c they haven't got use to the concept of a computer beating them yet. Give it a few years and people will adjust.

Doesn't mean we stop making music or poetry. Because the perfect note or word structure without the backstory takes away from the experience. If someone has a history it becomes part of the poem or song to the listener.

The doctor could be replaced though or used as a secondary verifier.

The song is a funny thing. It could be given to a cool looking group and do well. It could be given to someone older and flop. The song is just part of it.

I think what makes people actually worried about an AGI taking over is the possibility that we end up being treated like shit by a more intelligent being. Just how we use lab rats to perform experiments with and factory farm.

People are afraid of themselves I believe. It’s not really about “job loss”.

I’m not sure if most people realise AI means pretty specific models built to solve rather specific problems. They think SkyNet.

Penguins can outswim even Phelps.

The one physical activity at which humans excel is long-distance running.

Humans are indisputably #1 for general intelligence. We will lose on any one specialized task to computers, but computers still do not (and probably never will) have the ability to do general unsupervised learning like humans can.

> - An AI that diagnoses sickness better than any doctor

About that... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17618308

I think it's about where AI research is seeking to produce an AI that will directly compete with and try to beat humans.

> I would counter with the fact that in physical endeavors it's apparent to us that we are not #1 - our household cats are more agile than us.

Not in the case of our household cat. He isn't called TheBlob for nothing (out of his hearing of course!)

Algorithmic music will never be as universally satisfying as human-created (or human-filtered) music until AI has consciousness/soul, for one reason - music expresses the emotion from the composer.

There's something axiomatic there, if you assume an identical piece of music that was either written by a human or by a computer, then for many listeners it's by definition more satisfying to know it came from a person, because of what it says about the person.

And for those listeners, if a human "composer" is discovered to have lied about it (saying they wrote it when it was actually a computer), then those listeners would reinterpret their views of the music and consider the "composer" a fraud.

And even a programmer of algorithmic music might have emotional intent, but if the musical output is unknown to the programmer, they did not have the emotional impulse to create that music in particular. While it can be appreciated as its own thing, it's a step removed from the music itself, and qualitatively different than human-composed music.