To me that sounds like a very post-romantic interpretation of the past, where everything that happened before now, the enlightened times, was savage,cruel and retrograde. It's my understanding that things were a lot more subtle than that and that's a very simplistic approximation. I don't think Da Vinci, Vauban Euclid or Grosseteste were burnt to the stake, not even Galileo was.

> Obviously, there is nuance. You can take this argument to the limit and say that ultimately the world is made of only two things: Chaos (a.k.a. the vast seas of Wolfram's computational irreducibility, a.k.a. pure noise, a.k.a. quantum randomness) and Logos (the small islands of compressible patterns).

Within computational irreducibility, there's pure noise as well as universal computation, which is neither meaningfully predictable nor random. Since you mentioned Wolfram, in terms of elementary cellular automata, it's the difference between rule 30 and rule 110. The latter seems to me to be on the boundary between Chaos and Logos, and where I would expect to find the human intellect. (I think this is also largely the same distinction I made above where unpredictability can be useful or not.)

Since you also mentioned the economy and the possibility of UBI...I also don't know the answer, but I think it's worth thinking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which to me is pretty tightly coupled to weirdness. Moreover, I think societies similarly have their own hierarchy of needs, but that's something I don't understand very well. In any case, weirdness seems to be coupled to both of these, in that it best flourishes at the higher levels, when the more fundamental needs are mostly taken care of. At the lower levels, there's too much pressure to reduce social friction to cooperate with others for the sake of survival, and you just can't really afford to be too weird. I don't know if UBI is the answer, but there may be some benefit to just solving the lower levels of the needs hierarchy so we can move past this.

Guarantee it's almost (but not quite) universally no.

Maybe we will need humans to experience entirely new things instead. No one knows the taste of a new, bioengineered animal. No one knows what it's like to stimulate specific cell types in their brain. And so on. There are things that are and will remain uniquely human, forever.

The problem with weird is that not everyone can be weird, almost by definition. Moreover, people get things done collectively, and for that to work, the group (at whatever size) has to push in the same direction. Pushing in the wrong direction just to be weird will cause the group to fail.

Instead, I think, the future belongs to those who help change the present.

At the limit, any existing process can be done by AI, given a goal. What AI cannot do (and must not do) is come up with new goals. Coming up with new goals must always remain a human prerogative.

We don't need humans to work the assembly line--we need humans to make the assembly line better. AI can't do that alone because it cannot define "better". Humans must decide what "better" means. Do we want the assembly line to be faster or use fewer resources? Should it continue to produce this product or work on a new one? Should we build a bigger assembly line or turn the whole thing into a park?

As long as the world keeps changing, we will need humans to direct that change. People who fear change, who want everything to stay the same will have the hardest time in the future. Those are the people who will be replaced by AI.

The future belongs to those who change the present.

Uniformity seems to be a feature of scale. Institutions are just one form of scaled human intelligence/activity. Our desire for strong institutions, driven by a belief that strong institutions lead to better overall average outcomes for all humans, therefore creates pressure for uniformity that is shown in our education system. We stop seeing "human" and start seeing "citizen".

But that same need for uniformity to drive massive scale won't be lessened by AI. If I am right, then in order to scale our society AI will require uniformity just as much, if not more. If there is a direct relation between scale and uniformity and if we direct AI towards scale then AI will enforce an even greater uniformity on humanity.

Basically, if we want things cheap then we have to do them at scale. If we want things done at scale then we have to treat the components as uniform. Therefore, AI may lead to more uniformity as we direct it to make things cheaper and scale them out.

I would argue this is precisely backwards. The normal and predictable is more valuable. Human errors are largely predictable. AI errors are not. This is one of the reasons why human code is much easier to review than AI code.

And what about weirdos who are wrong and selfdelusional? Are they minority of majority of weidos? Then can you blame masses who avoid/exclude veridos?

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To have a society in which weirdos thrive means to put at risk so many things the ruling class thrive for: control, power, social status. Such society will need to cultivate curiosity and critical thinking. Good luck with arranging that at scale.

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It's indeed easier times for weird. But way far from thriving or even "having the future".

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There are way more things in the article to argue about. I just outlined couple.

Environmentalists may be weird, but they bring attention to real problems for society generally and have had significant success despite being targeted for murder by corporate criminals globally. Cannabis enthusiasts may be social jokes, but even during a drug war managed to carry on and find ways of not just existing but bonding and and sharing.

This kind of situation keeps coming up and it seems like the weirdness is a side issue relative to the commitment to some specific sharable experience.

That it might actually be remunerative (economically, socially)...

I think it depends.

For measurable goals and simulatable systems, AI and other methods like evolutionary optimization can create weird things on their own.

But what if the goals themselves are weird? This exists, There's a niche for that in the economy, but it's pretty small.

Why would it tend this way before AI? Something to do with the creative potential where tech reduces the consciousness and menial work requirement perhaps.

This is such a great way to summarise the issue facing rank-and-file employees. If your job is predictable, repeatable, systematizable then you're "competing against the price of electricity [and GPUs]"

We are supposed to resist the automation of normalcy with AI by...remodeling the process from some sort of set of civilizational first principles?

Lady Gaga, its already here.

Still only a limited number of slots for weird to be successful.