Status and the Singularity, Part 1: 8 Billion Aristocrats
The Western artist was born in the fifteenth century and looks set to die in the 21st. Of course there were artists before that time and there will be after it, but the peculiar European conception of the artist as a free spirit, simultaneously creative genius and technical master, blossoms and fades at these points.
If you like painting but have never studied art history, see how many artists you can name who lived before 1400. I can name Giotto, and that's about it, even though if you asked me to visualise a medieval painting, I'd get a pretty clear picture in my mind. Then the renaissance happened and boom - an explosion of artists: Raphael, Botticelli, Michelangelo and of course that ultimate artist, Leonardo. For half a millennium, talented individuals with hard-to-achieve skills could, if they were lucky, achieve fame and fortune through the patronage of wealthy families, and later by selling to the general public. That unique combination of art and artisanship led to a cult of genius that meant a merely well-executed painting was not enough to be a status symbol; it had to be a painting by a certain person. An art collector wouldn't say "I've bought a nice picture of water lilies;" they'd say "I've bought a Monet." Conversely, genius alone was not enough; artists had to be capable of turning out work of a certain technical standard, which for the most part meant photorealistic -- until the advent of actual photographs, that is.
Photography, as we have all been told, put hack artists out of work but freed up the real artists for a spree of creativity. A camera can give you a portrait, but it will never give you Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. All of this has been talked to death, and many have raised the question of whether new developments in AI will also be like photography, putting the hacks out of work, allowing the true creative geniuses to indulge their creative genius further, and maybe giving rise to entirely new forms of creativity through human-machine collaboration. This is a valid question, but what intetests me more is what will happen if AI art is not like photography.
At the moment, AI is pretty good at generating the kind of thing you see on SF book covers or as illustrations to RPG rule books, not least because those are genres the kind of people currently playing around with AI art enjoy. But soon, AI will be producing works of stunning originality, not just in graphic arts but in music, literature and pretty much any field you care to think of. The artist as technical expert is already going the way of any technician, but the artist as creative genius may soon go the same way. And for "artist" here, you can substitute "writer", "scientist" or even that folk hero of our century, "entrepreneur".
We live in a culture where we are valued by what we can do. Status is awarded to those who have achieved great things, and in many areas, this means making great things. Raphael was great because only he could paint Raphaels, but now you can tell an AI to paint you something in the style of Raphael. At the moment, it isn't quite there, but it will be soon. With robot arms, you can even have an oil painting usng the same brush technique that Raphael used. If an AI can paint a better picture, write better software, make more momentous scientific discoveries or run more profitable businesses than a human, that source of status - indeed of meaning - vanishes like used up fairy dust.
Status, though, does not only come from doing. Quentin Crisp, in How to have a Lifestyle said there were making professions, doing professions and being professions. Being professions run the gamut from beggars to celebrities; they are distinguished solely by the fact that the person gains their livelihood and status - high or low - by the simple fact of their existence. Successful artists often move from making and doing to being: Salvador Dali devoted as much energy to being Salvador Dali as he did to producing paintings, and part of being a rock star rather than a mere musician is that you sell yourself as much as your music. But the ultimate being profession is aristocrat. Think back to the patrons of Raphael, Michelangelo and those countless artists, composers and poets that adorn the renaissance and baroque periods. We tend to think of those aristocrats (and churchmen and bankers) as parasites on society who occasionally did good by supporting the really important people like artists, but that's certainly not how they saw it. if you were a marquis or a count or whatever name your society gave your niche in the aristocracy, your existence was a good thing in itself. You didn't need to produce anything or even do much to give meaning to your life, and as for status, you were born with it. The relationship between aristocrat and artist was very like that between me and Midjourney when I told it to imagine Princess Leia in the style of Raphael.
Now I am not for a moment suggesting that we need a new aristocracy. Such calls have been made often, and they never turn out well. What I am suggesting is that we look carefully at aristocrats as a way to imagine how we might live after the singularity. Most European aristocrats, once they stopped doing much real governing, devoted themselves to hunting, socialising and paying other people to beautify their lives. Some of them also painted, wrote poetry, excelled in sports or made scientific discoveries, while others dabbled in politics or the occult. The point is that they did not need to do any of these things to make a living, let alone to justify their existence. Lord Byron did not become a poet in order to craft good poems; it was part of his being Lord Byron, and I'm sure he would have had the same insufferable arrogance if he had devoted his energies to landscape gardening or croquet.
Now imagine a world of eight billion aristocrats. It isn't hard to do; in fact Iain M. Banks has done it for us in his novels depicting the Culture, a vast interstellar society run for the most part by Minds, which are supersentient AIs. Humans and other organic species coexist with the machines and get to do pretty much what they want because the effort for a Mind to indulge most human wishes is inconsequential. Humans do on occasion help the Minds out, largely as agents helping them interact with societies that aren't part of of the Culture (which is where most of the drama of the books comes from) but the vast majority just do things for fun. Unsurprisingly, parties in the Culture are pretty wild, but humans and other sentient species also travel, play games and indulge in obscure hobbies, like eighteenth-century aristocrats with godlike technology. Art is extremely important, but not as a product defined by scarcity: "In the Culture you express yourself creatively because you enjoy it and feel it to be personally fulfilling; you don't do it to prove how completely brilliant you are to peers, potential sexual partners, and the world in general because at the back of your mind you know almost any Mind could do it better" ("A Few Questions About the Culture: An Interview with Iain Banks").
The aristocrat, then, is one way we could survive the singularity with our self-esteem intact; we would be no more bothered by the fact that an AI can paint better pictures than us than we are by the fact that cheetahs can run faster than us. I suspect that the majority of humankind could live quite happily in this way, dabbling in this and that, alternating between self-indulgence and self-imposed discipline, like today's nouveaux riche running ultramarathons. This is not the only way to come to terms with the singularity, and I will consider an alternative model in the second part of this discussion, but it is certainly worth considering the possibility that we consider ourselves in terms of being rather than doing, and as ends rather than means.