A.R. Moxon: Humans are generative beings; we generate value simply by being. This is the reason why it is not only so inappropriate to view human beings as a cost to eliminate and a problem to solve, but impractical to the point of being unsustainable.

Last week an image went viral online. It was generated by a computer from the classic movie 12 Angry Men. It added no value, and it was being used for no good reason. It's a perfect encapsulation of where our dominant cultural narrative has brought us. www.the-reframe.com/the-human-pr...

The Human Problemwww.the-reframe.com Appreciating the artists who matter to you, and why you should. Paying human artists in the age of A.I. slop, if you can, and why you should.

It's my belief that things that provide positive value to humans are good, and that those who make good things should be compensated for it. I also believe that people should have access to good things whether or not they can pay. It's the reason I love libraries, for example.

This strikes me as an appropriate way to organize society, provided that we believe society is meant to benefit humans rather than money, and that humans—being inherent generators of value and of limitless potential value—deserve the fruits of society even if they can't pay.

But I think we all know that our society is organized around different beliefs, a core one being that the purpose of society is to benefit money rather than humans. If you doubt this, I'd invite you to observe all the ways that, for example, libraries are under attack these days.

I'd invite you to recognize how often labor-saving devices actually remove from increasing numbers of human beings the ability to make a living from their labor, so that people with more than they can ever use can have even more more-than-they-can-ever-use.

Another core belief in our dominant societal narrative seems to involve treating human beings as a cost rather than a value, and still another seems to be that human costs should be eliminated, often at a social expense greater than the cost.

I suppose this might be expected in a country founded in human slavery, but it seems to me an inappropriate and unsustainable way to organize a society, and I write rather extensively about why in The Reframe.

The Reframe is a weekly newsletter. People subscribe to it, even though they don't have to. It's totally free for everybody, because I don't want anybody who enjoys my writing but can't afford to pay for it to have to stop enjoying my writing. www.the-reframe.com

The Reframewww.the-reframe.com Free Weekly Essays on Politics and Fiction from author A.R. Moxon. Pay-What-You-Want support model.

It's also free because I believe that you change society by modeling your personal beliefs and hoping other people will join their similar personal beliefs with your personal beliefs to create a collective belief—which is when a belief can really get cooking, belief-wise.

So, I make sure The Reframe remains free, and in so doing I extend my trust to everybody. My faith is that if readers find enough value in my work to pay for it and can afford to pay, then they will, and if they do not find value, or cannot afford to pay, they will not.

And look: hundreds of people pay. Some pay a little bit every month. Some pay rather a lot every year. I'm very glad and grateful for all of it, because it means that the trust I extended has been honored. A curious and wonderful thing.

Some stop being able to afford paying and they stop paying, and yet go on enjoying my writing all the same—and I'm also grateful for that, too, because it means that I get to honor the trust that has been extended to me. Another curious and wonderful thing.

It strikes me that the grotesque picture generated from 12 Angry Men points toward a compelling reason to pay for a free newsletter, to wit: The distribution of human art is mainly controlled by people who create and enforce our unsustainable and cruel dominant cultural beliefs.

There's a very specific problem that these distributors are trying to solve. The problem they are trying to solve is something you'd expect to find in a society whose dominant narrative treats human beings as a cost rather than a value, and seeks to eliminate all costs.

The problem they are trying to solve is humans—the existence of humans, I mean. They'd like to solve the human problem by removing humans entirely from the act of creating. So increasingly, keeping humans in art takes all of us trusting each other. A curious and wonderful thing.

It’s tougher being a creative person than it used to be, I think. Which means, I think, that it's tougher just being a person—for whom among us is not creative?

Humans are generative beings; we generate value simply by being. This is the reason why it is not only so inappropriate to view human beings as a cost to eliminate and a problem to solve, but impractical to the point of being unsustainable.

The people who view humans as a problem to solve have done with art what they usually do: they made a machine that performs some approximation of what humans do, but faster and more predictably, so that as machine owners they can profit from the elimination of the cost of humans.

Now we've got some tools that do the work that humans would do if they didn't have to work—which would be art. It's a sort of perversion, like creating a machine that will engage in loving your children, or will enjoy a pleasant day by the river, so you won't have to.

And it's unsustainable—because of course it is. An anti-human worldview is not going to see unsustainability as a problem to solve. Unsustainability solves the human problem it is trying to solve, by ridding the world of what it sees as one of its greatest costs—humans www.forbes.com/sites/cindyg...

AI Is Accelerating the Loss of Our Scarcest Natural Resource: Waterwww.forbes.com With the rise of generative AI, companies have significantly raised their water usage, sparking concerns about the sustainability of such practices.

The people who view humans as a problem to solve have whipped up machines that take the totality of actual human artistic expression and use it to create the most grotesque regurgitated schlock you've ever seen, and then they point to it, proud as a newly potty-trained toddler.

Then a bunch of self-professed fans of art—whose main contribution to the proud tradition of art appreciation seems to be expressing how much they hate the artists who make the art they claim to love for challenging their preconceived notions in some way—share it appreciatively.

There is speculation that soon these fans will not need any skill at all to do things to art that only people who hate art would ever want to do. You'll be able to take old movies and change them so they have the endings you'd prefer. You'll be able to put your face on the hero.

I would bet real money that Musk would like a machine that replaces all the energy he spends pretending to have empathy, and would have a robot GF instead of a real one.

This is a profound statement and one that needs repetition. Thank you for saying it.

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