Some of us like to do our shopping at the market every day, to let the greengrocer or the butcher advise us, to let fresh produce decide our daily menu, to decide on what our wife or grandchildren like best, to cook with love and, if there is time, without rushing, with delight, filling the house with aromas and filling the house with aromas everywhere, being forced to improvise, learning from our successes and making new ones, enjoying watching our loved ones eat... You won't deny that we have the right to them.
Others like to eat without complicating their lives with procedures. Going to a restaurant, ordering from the menu, choosing what they fancy, being served, paying, and without bothering to set the table, wash the dishes, or sweep up the crumbs scattered on the floor—I don't deny they have it.
There have always been these two types of people and they will always be there, the first, lovers of processes, are passionate about going hunting early in the morning;
When we seek immediate results, avoiding the hassle of procedures, AI undoubtedly provides us with phenomenal help. But there's no such thing as a simmering sauce with AI. It offers us the ready-made sauce, but not the experience of the rich broth gradually curdling while giving off the aroma we were looking for. With AI, everything is already prepared and at our disposal. It doesn't force us to improvise creatively with whatever's available to feed our children and our voracious cleaners when they show up unexpectedly on a Sunday for lunch. In real life, action is constantly winking at itself. To live humanly is to live by deciding.
The best way to understand Nietzsche's famous "will to power" is to experience the conquest of the sweet spot, whether it's a color (in the case of a painter), a melody (in the case of a composer), a sequence (in the case of a film director), or the caramel point of a sauce. The will to power is the intense experience of the sweet spot. AI knows nothing about that.
Consider the exact point of friendship. Aristophanes shows it to us in one of his comedies, PeaceTo summarize the scene: a farmer is watching the rain fall gently from the entrance to his house and feels that nothing beats this generous and gratuitous spectacle. The sky, he thinks, is working for him. He can't prune or dig the vineyard because the soil is soaked. The best thing he can do to celebrate the occasion is to invite his neighbors over for a drink. He'll roast beans and grains of wheat and cover the table with dried figs. Someone will bring thrushes and finches, colostrum, and a piece of hare ("if the weasel didn't eat it yesterday afternoon"), and everyone will enjoy it while it rains, because "these hours are beautiful," since "the sky works for us and favors our fields." Friendship is the art of showing processes, of showing time.
Lessing said that a person's value (that is, his exact point) does not lie in the truth he possesses, but in the sincere effort he dedicates to achieving it (which is another way of showing time). Possession makes us calm, indolent, proud. "If God, holding all truth in his right hand and in his left the burning desire to attain it, were to say to me: 'Choose!' at the risk of being mistaken forever and for all eternity, I would humbly incline toward the left."
Let me finish – not without risk – with a Castilian sonnet by an anonymous author of the 17th century: "- What does a young and beautiful woman have / What does he seek at home and with another woman? / Is his less white and more dark / Or weak, cold, thin? – There is no such thing. / - Is she unhappy? – No, but loving. / - Is she evil? – No, indeed, but good / She is a Venus, she is a Siren, / a white lily, a purple rose. / - So what is he seeking? Where is he going? Where does he come from? / Does he think he will find her better than the one he has? / It must be his search in infinity. / - He does not seek this woman, for he already has her. / He seeks the sweet labor of seeking her, / which is what kindles a man's appetite".
A burning appetite does not, by any means, shield us from mistakes, but it does allow us, at least, to learn to make new ones.
It's good to turn to technology to speed up processes when necessary. Machines don't tire. But sometimes, with complex deep learning models, we don't know how they make decisions, something that should worry us, because it wouldn't be wise to leave our appetites in their hands.
