
What's the purpose of humanity if machines can learn ingenuity? - rfreytag
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/marcus-du-sautoy-book-extract-creativity-code
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keiferski
This article is a perfect example of the plague afflicting tech journalism
today. It manages to ask vague unanswerable questions (and subsequently not
answer them), haphazardly reference dozens of famous people (Picasso, Plato,
Shakespeare, and Einstein, to name a few), and include contemporary buzzwords
like "embracing failure". It does all of this while not actually _making any
point._

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erickj
But did you read the article "As Picasso once said: “The chief enemy of
creativity is good sense.” "

It sounds like you are the enemy of creativity!

/s

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erickj
I think I fail to accept the premise that a.) we have a purpose at all and b.)
if we do it's defined by our works.

To accept that we have a purpose and it's defined by our creativity leads to
so many circular arguments that it's more sensible to accept that life is
absurd. There is no purpose. There is only existence. And our existence thus
far has been due to a random series of mutations and fortunate events.

If we create intelligent machines then perhaps they will further humanity's
dominance on the planet. Perhaps they will destroy us and lead to a new era of
evolution.

In that sense the purpose of the earliest primates was to pave the biological
path for humans. Perhaps it's our purpose to create and pave the path for a
better species still, biological or not.

... or maybe even better, waxing and waning about unanswerable philosophical
questions like this is simply intellectual masturbation that conflates issues
and reduces reality to unrealistic black and white absolutes.

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arethuza
I think the best we can hope for is something like the _Culture_ \- where us
slow stupid bags of meat do what we are best at (basically having fun) and our
fellow machine citizens do what they are best at - which is basically
everything else.

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js8
What is the purpose of parents when they are eventually surpassed by their
kids?

The purpose of humanity is to build the machines, teach them what we know
about the world, and make sure they don't destroy themselves in the process.

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doyoulikeworms
I really like this take. It's much more hopeful...

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dgellow
How is it different from other animals being able to be creative and
ingenious? That has never been traits exlusive to humans, or something
defining the purpose of humanity, whatever that could mean.

Human evolution pushed creativity and ingenuity way further than other
species, but those traits aren’t unique to us.

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blocked_again
To train machines that can colonize the Universe like evolution trained
humanity to colonize earth.

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martin-adams
I find the thought that the purpose of humans is to give birth to machine,
that go on to colonize the universe very interesting.

By using machines, we don't need to be as concerned with the vast distances of
the universe.

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marcus_holmes
Iain M Banks put it best: "Machines provide the How, Humans provide the Why"

