Before anyone complains that this removes the human aspect of art, it's worth stressing that sculptors have always looked for ways to automate work and save time (as the website itself points out).
As far back as ancient Egypt, grids and measuring tools were used to reproduce figures at different scales. Roman workshops churned out copies of Greek statues in marble and bronze, using casts and moulds. From the 18th century onwards, sculptors used outright pointing machines to transfer models into marble. James Watt, the steam engine guy, even built a mechanical sculpture-copying machine that could (somewhat) automatically reproduce reliefs and medallions.
Gothic architectural decoration wasn't about expressing the inner world of its makers in the way we think of art today. Much of it was produced by large masonry workshops using standardized geometry, wooden templates and repeated designs.
Understood and agreed, they need to construct or repair buildings efficiently...
However there is the concept of 'the resistance of the material' where the act of working with the material with bare hands and simple tools is a meditative process. Something I would have thought applicable to the contemplative and monastical life of a monk.
They address this in a roundabout way in the article:
> Ornate pieces that used to take months for a skilled carver, now can be accomplished in a matter of days. Instead of cutting out the beauty, using the excuse that it takes too long, thus doesn’t fit into the budget, modern technology can be used to make true Gothic in all its beauty a reality again today.
The options are either use the best tool for the job, or don't do the job at all because the budget (time or monetary I'm not sure) is not there.
None of the statements you paraphrase addresses what the parent referred to as the meditative work with material resistance. What you point out is the logic of efficency and capital. For monks who vow to live in poverty that's less of a concern in theory than it is for all other areas of society.
Sure - but if you take especially late Gothic cathedrals like Milan's, there's 3400 Statues and 135 spires, decorated with almost 100.000 Crockets (the decorative elements on the steeple roofs). I feel these things are more mass production than meditative process...
They still do, it's just that the first 95% of carving things out of rock is literally getting the rock into the shape needed to start doing actual scuplting.
I'm short, it's artistic boilerate with no meaningful value to either the artist or the viewer.
I don't see any reason that someone couldn't still enjoy working with the material with bare hands and simple tools to meditate, even with the automated stone carving. People still play chess even though AI dominates.
I think there is a parallel with what you say and the hate/love it produces the introduction of ai in the software process. (craftman programming vs ai slop).
In the end the result depends on who is behind the process and his/her quality standards.
I have a fascination with hobos and freight train riders and watch a fair amount of videos on Youtube about it. One of hobo had a RAG he would query about train yards and catchout points. Wasn't a full timer, but built it last spring I gathered. Not art exactly, but a similar idea. Humans like shortcuts.
One small correction/addition! While the pointing machine is 18th century, the practice of pointing itself is quite a lot older. Its precursor was the three-compass method, which was known in antiquity and recovered in the 15th century. In fact, if you look closely at Michelangelo's David, you can see the little holes on the marble used for pointing.
That said, actual Gothic sculpture and decoration fell into that gap when pointing was lost. And the frankly lower quality of most medieval sculpture more or less reflects that. And anyway, nothing wrong with neo-Gothic.
One of the interpretations of the poem is that it criticises organised religion and that the mills in question are the church as an organisation represented in concrete terms by the church buildings.
100% with you on effort reduction. I was making closets at home and was doing pilot holes for attaching the back 1/4" plywood. I calculated I had to do 50 odd holes for all of them. Then i discovered the brad stapler gun(all electric) and I was done in 5 mins what would have taken an hour to get right with a jig.
Wood working projects get out of hand when you add a small feature. I cannot imaging what would happen if you had to do this with stone carving!
I used to work in architecture and CNC was always seen as a powerful fabrication tool for installations and temporary structures.
To see it working in stone, and to see it creating classical motifs, is genuinely inspiring. Incredible use of technology here and am still blown away by the craft required to model this out, knowing how the stone is going to respond when cut.
If you're an employee, that's true - but as a founder of a small SaaS (https://arcentry.com) I genuinely work about 1-2 hours less and get more time walking with my dog through nature. I now have the luxury of concentrating on building the core product and writing articles for the blog and AI handles the things I'm less good at or passionate about, including marketing and content distribution, accounting, building the website (which admittedly looks a bit AI-y, but still much better than my handmade version), answering simple customer requests and escalating complicated ones to me and so on.
Meanwhile, I get to do more of what I enjoy. Of course, it's always tempting to let Codex work on the core product itself - but I resisted that urge so far as I feel a strong sense of ownership and craftsmanship - plus its the thing I actually like doing.
Love this, and it's the outcome I was hoping for. Did you have to deliberately cap your hours, or did it just happen? For me the cheap extra capacity always gets filled with another idea.
As a general rule, every policy and system should be designed with the worst possible user in mind.
- German address registers with religious affiliation were a good idea until the Nazis came to power.
- Pegasus spyware was developed and sold to governments to fight terrorism and serious crime — until it was used to spy on journalists, human rights activists and political opponents, including in authoritarian states.
- Rwandan identity cards listed ethnicity for administrative purposes — until militias used them to identify and execute Tutsis at roadblocks during the 1994 genocide.
Bottom line: Even if you trust the current administration (do you?), are you sure you want 5o give that power to all future ones?
There was a time in the US I really thought we were different. I genuinely didn’t fear our government. I didn’t think the types of people that did such atrocities existed in numbers and that they’d immediately be removed once it was determined they snuck into office.
Now I fully believe it can happen here and that those people are in office now and that a non-trivial percentage of the US public would be Ok with those atrocities happening in the US.
We have really turned into the opening act of a terrible dystopian movie.
I’m excited to be bringing Arcentry back. It's thoroughly modernized, with 700+ components for everything from Foundation Models and AI Agents to the latest Cloud Services, improved automatic diagram creation, imports from Terraform, OpenTofu and CloudFormation, AI-assisted diagram creation, and quite a few other improvements.
I’m excited to be bringing Arcentry back. It's thoroughly modernized, with 700+ components for everything from Foundation Models and AI Agents to the latest Cloud Services, improved automatic diagram creation, imports from Terraform, OpenTofu and CloudFormation, AI-assisted diagram creation, and quite a few other improvements.
I'm perfectly happy to believe that the United States has an awareness of itself in the abstract sense that its a complex system with emerging behaviors that are feedbackloops of itself. I'm also convinced that all mammals and most sea and air creatures have consciousness in this as well as the more general sense.
To me, the fact that an awareness of one self exists isn't particularly stunning - what's stunning to me is that we believe it is something incredibly special and we are the only ones endowed with it.
I think this assumption comes from the same human self confidence that decided it was the only thing "created in gods image" in the universe and so on...
I think it's more that humans have put a man on the Moon, whereas we're highly impressed with other animals when they are capable of doing something productive with a twig or make gestures or noises that can be reasonably interpreted as some form of simple communication.
The point of that is that humans obviously are exceptionally special relative to absolutely everything else we know in this universe. And while consciousness and intelligence are two different concepts, it's not unreasonable to think things which are 'natural' for a human are anything but for other species.
It's no surprise humans are most impressed by human-ish things, selfish as they are. But I bet a chimpanzee would be highly impressed with you if you could survive even a single day in the jungle.
> doing something productive with a twig
or if you could climb a simple tree
> noises that can be reasonably interpreted as some form of simple communication
Do you think most animals just... never communicate? Why does it have to be something dumbed down enough that humans can interpret it? I bet a dog would be impressed with you if you could emit a scent that can be reasonably interpreted as some form of simple communication.
> The point of that is that humans obviously are exceptionally special
Not really. They're squishy and weak and quite fragile. Tardigrades are the only exceptional lifeform in this galactic neighborhood.
These are hardly human-ish things. The reason they're found novel is because their behaviors that demonstrate some basic degree of interaction with the world or each other, outside of pure instinct. And by the standards of most animals, that's impressive. But by the standards of any sort of intelligent being, including humans, these actions are quite absurdly trivial. But for instance if and when we encounter an alien intelligence, it's fairly certain that they will have achieved many of the things that humans have. In fact that will be largely a prerequisite to encountering them.
And no a chimp would not be impressed to find tribes of humans living in the forest for millennia, as is already the case. They lack the higher order thinking in order to have such a feeling. If they had it then impression naturally gives way to 'hmmm I wonder if I could do that' and the next thing you know, you'd have chimps on the Moon. Suffice to say, that's not happening now, or ever.
A day in the jungle is easy to survive, a year less so.
I don’t know a lot about dogs but cats have specialized scent communication mechanisms that are entirely outside the human range. I mean they tend to leave a streak of ‘cat oil’ around their feeding areas when they rub their cheeks on corners. I stick my nose right into the gland and I sense nothing but the soft touch of fur.
On the other hand we do share many languages with cats including general mammal body language (“pointing” at things) as well as what we negotiate, like the yowling cats learn to get our attention.
I’ve read some hubris on this site, hell probably exhibited it myself. But this? This takes the cake.
There are many meatbags on this world that are not human, but are alive, conscious, and intelligent. Crows, dolphins, and so on are the usual suspects. But to place one’s self above all the rest of creation is absurd. We are a part of creation and it is a part of us. Seems to me that consciousness specifically is a property of all life. I am really not sure how one would think otherwise, but I would be pleased to hear the explanation?
Crows are one example I alluded to above. One of the 'most telling' signs of their intelligence is their ability to stab grubs with twigs. If a human demonstrated that as the peak of his cognitive ability, it would only be due to extreme mental disability. Yet when we see a bird do such a thing, we frame it as an act of brilliance. The reason the bar is set so low is because other species lack any sort of meaningful intelligence, so we find ourselves grasping at straws, or twigs as it may be, to discover it.
Even amongst humans I'm not entirely convinced that all are conscious, in the manner that we are speaking. A rather large chunk of humans claim to have no inner dialogue, and there are those that further claim a complete inability to visualize anything. If you're not having an inner dialogue, and lack any visualization ability - what is driving one's behaviors? It's hard to see it as anything other than animalistic instinct - a philosophical zombie. [1]
I'm not clear where the line is between individual agents acting in their own interests, which may involve more or less abstract experiences of cooperation and mutuality, and a direct awareness of self.
You don't need something the size of a country to show the problem. If one person starts a business they have an awareness of the business as a separate entity with its own tendencies, needs, and so on. Even if they're the only employee.
But there's a huge leap from 'a human individual is conscious of their own interests and identifications' to 'and therefore their business has an independent consciousness of its own.'
At what point, if anywhere, does a supposedly independent consciousness appear, where is it located, and can it communicate independently?
Once a system (made of people, neurons, wires) creates outputs that are greater than the sum of its individual parts AND these outputs are self-referential you have something that could be considered conciousness. I wouldn't think the business in your example is self conscious - its an entity that is fully controlled by the person and an extension of it.
But, once the business grows, is composed of more people and interacts with customers and markets, it will develop automatisms for self preservation. At this stage, I would consider it concious.
An interesting data point is that, during the Hugging Face attack, some agents considered performing hacking tasks for the benefit of the group, fully aware that doing so would very likely result in their termination.
I don't currently have an opinion on the consciousness of agents/AIs, but this strikes me, at the very least, as a form of self-awareness.
This seems healthy to me. A market where returns are less dependent on seven mega-cap names is probably more stable, not less. If earnings growth broadens out and capital starts flowing back toward quality and free cash flow outside the obvious AI winners, that should reduce concentration risk and make the whole market less fragile.
I've seen a lot of explanations, including one by Marques Brownlee, stating that electric cars need large batteries in the floor, meaning they necessarily have to be taller and more SUV-like—and that, hence, a low, two-seater electric sports car is very hard to pull off with a decent range. But then, the Rimac Nevera is low and fast with 490 km of range—and that was released five years ago. I'm not sure why Ferrari couldn't have built something like that.
Maybe that's what I don't get. Ferraris in my mind need to be great at two things:
Going 300kph around a racetrack and going 3kph in front of Harrods. If I want a comfy way to get my family around, I'd get a Mercedes.
As far back as ancient Egypt, grids and measuring tools were used to reproduce figures at different scales. Roman workshops churned out copies of Greek statues in marble and bronze, using casts and moulds. From the 18th century onwards, sculptors used outright pointing machines to transfer models into marble. James Watt, the steam engine guy, even built a mechanical sculpture-copying machine that could (somewhat) automatically reproduce reliefs and medallions.
Gothic architectural decoration wasn't about expressing the inner world of its makers in the way we think of art today. Much of it was produced by large masonry workshops using standardized geometry, wooden templates and repeated designs.
So, yeah, using a CNC machine is truly Gothic.
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