There's a forced reframing going on of what it means to be an artist, and what it means to appreciate artistry. Over time we've developed the idea that art, once created, is not free for the observing; the artist has a right to compensation.
It's an understandable position for these reasons:
- We like art and we ant to show our support and appreciation for art
- The most straightforward way to show support and appreciation for art is to give the artist money
- Much of the art we appreciate was only possible due to the promise of monetary gain on the part of the artist
But there are some old, unavoidable questions:
- At what point does the pursuit of monetary gain begin to diminish one's own artistic expression?
- At what point does the pursuit of monetary gain begin to diminish other peoples' artistic expression?
As you point out, there is no art without appropriation and re-creation.
And now there are some new, unavoidable facts:
- Appropriation is becoming easier
- Attribution is therefore becoming more difficult
- Compensation is therefore becoming more difficult
- Rewinding the clock is impossible
The only way out of this would be for humanity to collectively take a puritanical stance on art, where any form of appropriation is demonized. I think this would make art suck.
> Eventually you may arrive at something like the H-index, which is defined as "The highest number H you can pick, where H is the number of papers you have written with H citations."
It's the Google search algorithm all over again. And it's the certificate trust hierarchy all over again. We keep working on the same problems.
Like the two cases I mentioned, this is a matter of making adjustments until you have the desired result. Never perfect, always improving (well, we hope). This means we need liquidity with the rules and heuristics. How do we best get that?
I'm delighted to inform you that I have reproduced every patent-worthy finding of every major research group active in my field in the past 10 years. You can check my data, which is exactly as theory predicts (subject to some noise consistent with experimental error). I accept payment in cash.
Patent revenue is mostly irrelevant, as it's too unpredictable and typically decades in the future. Academics rarely do research that can be expected to produce economic value in the next 10–20 years, because the industry can easily outspend the academia in such topics.
Most papers generate zero patent revenue or even lead to patents at all. For major drugs maybe that works but we already have clinical trials before the drug goes to market that validate the efficacy of the drugs.
> the skeptic in me is cautious that this is the type of reasoning which propels the anti-vax movement
I think there's a difference between questioning your doctor, and questioning advice given by almost every doctor. There are plenty of bad doctors out there, or maybe just doctors who are bad fits for their patients. They don't always listen or pay close attention to your history. And in spite of their education they don't always choose the correct diagnosis.
I also think there's an ever-increasing difference between AI health research and old-school WebMD research.
> I'd love to know what the justification for replacing them in the first place was. I can't think of any device, appliance, etc. I own whose UX is _better_ for not having physical, dedicated buttons or switches and instead having a touch interface or buttons which require a complex series of presses or chords.
I can't speak for other manufacturers, but having lived with a Tesla I can say these are some justifications, beyond cost:
- Standardization. With some exceptions where hardware is different, once you've driven one Tesla you can drive any Tesla. I love physical buttons too, but I don't love finding the drive mode buttons in a different place every time I rent a car, or trying to figure out how this one does the windshield wipers, or headlights, or radio tuning, or parking brake, or whatever.
- Simplification. Along with the mandate to reduce physical controls, Tesla also pushed toward making everything automatic. I never have to think about my headlights (and they dim in a circle around any detected vehicle in front of me), and I don't have to think much about drive modes either. It does a good job of automatically picking the correct direction when you tap the brake, and has a good mechanism for auto-switching between forward and reverse as you manipulate the brake and wheel.
- OTA updates. When something isn't working out for people they can make adjustments. They can also add new features (AI assistant, more automation) without mounting new buttons.
There are some silly choices, like the glove box (which is tiny and not very useful anyway) requiring a voice command or the touchscreen. And some people don't like the touchscreen vents (I do, surprise surprise). But most of it makes good sense.
They have no meaningful choice. To the degree that this does represent consumer preference, however, what it tells us is simply that touchscreen phones are preferred overall: it does not follow that touchscreen keyboards, specifically, are preferred for text-entry tasks.
I feel like, over time, they have though. Blackberry was more than willing to keep the lights on well past the point of viability. Other competitors too. They kept trying to resurrect the physical keyboard popularity and it never happened.
You can still buy niche phones with a physical keyboard right now.
Doesn't look like the Clicks Communicator is actually available yet - the website says it's coming in February - but it's good to learn that there will soon be a physical keyboard option once again. (Or was there some other device you had in mind?)
Although cars have way more touch screens than before, they are not yet ubiquitous. With phones they have pretty much all converged on a single form factor with the only variant being size.
Well we still have demand in the equation. If demand for service workers grows, so will their compensation. (And so will the cost for those services.) So the possibility is there.
People with more disposable income (the high-productivity ones I guess) demand more services. The question will be whether that demand will grow sufficiently to raise the compensation to where we want it to be.
What I also don't know is how we will respond to service jobs being automated. "Premium" service usually shuns automation. Will we have fewer fast food workers and more massage therapists?
Ad delivery services don't care about the user experience because it's not their site, so anything goes. The host justifies their decision because hey, look, money. That money is quantifiable while user experience is less so.
> Even playgrounds are filled with shredded tires, which borders on biohazard.
They don't study it, but you're worried about it? I'm curious to know why these things in particular (brake dust and rubber tires) are on the radar.
(And a quick search shows that people do study this.)
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