I Made a New Website Because I'm Doomed.

I’ve got new branding, a new website, a new blog, and a new motto:  Memento Artis Graphicae Mori.  It means, in a rough Latin translation,  “Remember that graphic art must die”.

Its a reflection of how I see the world, and the mindset that will probably drive me forward.  

When Everybody’s Super, No One Is

I’m 40…something.  

For 25 years, I’ve put food on my table through knowing how to make things other people generally couldn’t make.  This doesn’t make me special, lots of people earn their way through life by developing skills and expertise that they can trade for skins or gold or cash or sandwiches.  

Rare things that are useful or shiny have value.  Alas, the more there is some something…the less rare it is…the less value it tends to have.  10 years ago I was relatively rare in that I could pick up a pen or an iPad and draw stuff that people were, thankfully, happy to pay me for.   I could pull value out of thin air.  Sure, lots of people are artists.  But because most people aren’t artists or designers but need art or design, there were few enough artists and designers and so earning a living was merely a matter of applying oneself and a little bit of luck.  

The Genie Cometh

Today, in 2024, in every pocket, there’s a magical artist who can produce a billion works of art on demand.   Tirelessly.  Without losing confidence or creativity or even needing to break for a single sandwich.  That magical artist in your pocket can create impressionist paintings of Sailor Moon, cubist sketches of bears playing checkers, or supernatural vistas I can’t even imagine.  And that magical digital artist is currently the stupidest it will ever be.  

The problem here is not merely that artificial intelligence stands to put legions out of work.  The larger problem is that, once applied to a problem or skill set, there is no level of skill that will allow a human being to outthink or outcompete a sufficiently trained artificial intelligence in a task of the mind.  

“There’s literally no way this could go badly…right?”

Growing up, I was a weird kid.  Yes, I was always drawing and creating things, but science and technology also loomed large in my head.  I was a Star Trek kid.  The future was always obvious, and it was going to be computers you can talk to, screens everywhere, and tools that would let people perform little miracles every day at work and home.  Video calls were always going to happen.  While the iPhone was a nice surprise, it wasn’t a totally incomprehensible one when you grew up with the notion of tricorders in your head.  Artificial intelligence as a concept was totally within reason.  As far as a sciency kid like me was concerned, it was only a matter of time.  

Even then I suspected my future would be in creative services of some kind.  Comic art, science & nature illustration, making movies, and so on.  The kind of thing that came not from spreadsheets or algorithms but from the ineffable depths of the human soul.  No computer would ever replace a human hand in creativity.  

Well.  Big swing and a miss on that one.  

You are not ready for what’s coming. Promise.

For the last year or so, I confess I’ve been in what some might call a kind of existential crisis.  Sometimes I wonder if I would feel less gloom about the situation if I wasn’t also a big nerd for technology.  Thinking about compute and artificial intelligence has been a pastime (maybe more than merely a pastime) for all of my adult life, and books like Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near was the first inkling I had that maybe all this rapid technological progress might have its downside.  

The coming of image-creating platforms like Midjourney and Dall-e were not something I ever really anticipated.  Of course, that’s almost a hilarious failure of imagination….because all the signs were there that we’d be looking at artificial intelligence that can do the things we now see these platforms doing.  What’s insane-giggle-inducing is that these things are still brand new, and its terrifying to contemplate where these tools (is tools really the right word here?) will be in a decade.  

Being a big nerd for technology who is still awaiting his Starfleet uniform (science division), I’ve got some inkling now of where these things are really going…and I’m telling you right now:  you’re not prepared for it.  Nobody is.  

Think of every movie or television show or book you’ve ever read that has human beings interacting with computers who are doing fantastical, magical things.  None of those fictional impressions will hold a candle to what your life is going to be like in 10 years.  Or hell, even the next 5 years.

AI agents who are essentially your clone that will act on your behalf exactly as you would, businesses who move through the world with an AI avatar that can devote billions of cycles to being your (and everyone else’s) best friend.  A million AI scientific researchers working the equivalent of a thousand years to solve riddles about physics and chemistry in a matter of months, weeks, or days.  

And I’m not even going to start on what will happen once those artificial intelligences have even basic robot bodies.  Give it 5 years.

It’s not natural, Mr. Frodo.  None of it.

There’s really two ways this could go.  Well, obviously that’s a radical oversimplification as there’s a million ways it could go, but there’s two likely general directions we can expect as the future begins to coalesce around us.  

Human beings may create an artificial intelligence ecosystem so efficient, smart, and capable that we become something like pets to the machine.  Why sit in a coffee shop sipping a macchiato when you have a global super brain that is capable of doing almost anything if you just ask it to?  Social media has already done a lot to erode how we think and interact.  Attention spans are practically non-existent as it is.  Once everybody has a kind of digital god in their ear who can reach out into the world on your behalf, its pretty hard to resist the natural pull of gravity and take a nap while things just happen to us.  

The other possibility is that human beings will adapt and artificial intelligence might actually bring about something would could unironically call a utopia.  It’s not impossible.  

There’s still some good left in this world.  And its worth fighting for.

I’m out of the habit of writing.  I used to write quite a lot, and I’ve always valued writing as much as I valued reading.  Rumor has it that I have actual poetry reputably published somewhere out in the world, a relic of simpler, happier days.  Writing helps me think, it makes me slow down, and it makes me want to reach people.  

I started this blog, indeed started this website, because I hope it will revive that part of me.  The theory is that as we create more we passively consume less.  

Memento Artis Graphicae Mori is my adaptation of a stoic motto and philosophy originally stated as Memento Mori, or, “remember you must die”.  

It might surprise you that this wasn’t considered grim, but it was uttered as a call-to-action to engage with the life before you and not waste time and energy trying too hard to hang on to things.  The world is not a permanent place by any metric.  And the future looks like a roller coaster from where we currently stand.  Maybe it will be an apocalyptic hellscape, or maybe it will be Star Trek.  Ray Kurzweil defined the ‘technological singularity’ as the point at which the evolution of our technology reaches a kind of escape velocity, creating wonders that will feel like magic.  The term ‘singularity’ is an astronomical term for a black hole.  It is impossible to know what happens in a black hole because essentially no information can escape.

The singularity is the point beyond which we can’t know what happens.  

We’re all in the singularity now.  Weee!

I don’t know what my future is going to be like, given that I’m a bunch of meat and bone with a proclivity toward art and science who will be competing with tireless legions of artificial minds who will soon be able to do anything I could ever think of in a laughably superior way.  But I’m certain that standing still is not an answer.  Hence this website, this blog, and the somewhat gallows-humor addition of a little skull and crossbones to my personal branding.  

We’re all doomed in the end.  Everything and everyone you’ve ever known will one day close up shop on this Earth and be forgotten.  

This is nothing new.

So we might as well get on with it and see what happens.  

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