Art is easy. Science is hard

 My (sarcastic) answer ref. the quality and value of art: I recognize only the authority of the Supreme High Council for the Certification of Art Quality.

In other words, the quality of art is not a valid, falsifiable, reproduceable question. There are no authorities, standards, or units of measurement for the quality of art.

Until five years ago, the definition of art (and of artistic quality) was a rather inconsequential problem. Art quality was a topic for salons of bored intellectuals, who would debate questions such as: what is the value of a painting made by a monkey, or by a child? 

In fact, we had quite a few famous experiments with experts unable to distinguish between kindergarten drawings and abstract paintings valued at millions.

And here comes AI. 

And we make this astonishing discovery, that it is incredibly easy to make art, but incredibly difficult to do science and engineering. 

Any monkey or child can draw or sing something that we can then interpret artistically in a million different ways (“what did the artist mean?”). 

But only one researcher in a million is capable of discovering and proving a valid, reliable, reproducible scientific theory.

Why I believe in education. And why the global population just started shrinking

I was just asked why I believe in education.

The global natality rate just dropped below replacement rate. From now on, the world population is shrinking.

Why this is bad? It's not about absolute numbers. It's about the trend. A shrinking, aging population means decay. 5 billion people is not necessarily worse than 10 billion, but the trend is a disaster. It's like a company shrinking. It's still a big company. But it's overweight, bureaucratic, static, disillusioned, lacks energy and stamina.

Why is the human population and natality shrinking? Less children, even in underdeveloped countries. Better birth control. Much higher cost for raising children.

Our children start working at 25. Our grand parents were productive at 12.

It's difficult to raise 3-4 kids until 25.

So here comes the question. Why do we educate our kids? Why do we spend 20+ years as parents / taxi drivers / mentors, between school, football, piano lessons, chess and art classes?

In short, I believe education makes us better. More effective, smarter, more reasonable. You earn more money, help more people, and contribute more to the progress of society. You save lives and do more good for those around you. You are less likely to vote for demagogic, populist, or sociopathic politicians. You are better equipped to defend yourself against aggression. You avoid conflicts and help de-escalate them. You build things that are useful to your family, your colleagues, and humanity.

The bar for AGI is ever higher

Every year, AI becomes significantly stronger. But we keep raising the bar for AGI - "real" Artificial General Intelligence.

<< Yes, AI is smart, but cannot solve math problems. So it's not real intelligence.>>

<<Yes, it solves simple math problems, but not difficult problems. >>

<<Yes, it solves complex math problems, but cannot reason. >>

<< Cannot write poems. Cannot draw. Cannot compose music >>

Well, now it can.

One year ago, ChatGPT even passed the Turing test for AI. Still nobody noticed.

The Turing test is the single most important test for AI. The imitation game. Designed over 50 years ago. The single simplest measurable test of real intelligence. Never passed - at least until last year.

Read more about the Turing test: https://blog.stefanmorcov.com/2022/12/can-ai-pass-turing-test-lets-ask-chatgbt.html

OpenAI ChatGPT passed the Turing test in April 2025

But we simply raised the bar even higher. "There is no AGI".

The Handmaid's Tale: a long, sad, boring mockery of contemporary society

I finally forced myself to watch The Handmaid's Tale. 

My intuition was right. It's a long, boring TV show. The story is promising - but rarely convinces. There's no suspension of reality. Low expectations, low quality. 

But it's a show that needed to be made. 

It's a mockery of contemporary religion, superstition, demagoguery, and politics. And we needed to challenge them.

We take religion and politics so seriously, now. So we don't even recognize demagoguery anymore. 

So the show is actually a very sad, sad form of Monty Python. 

We needed this serious, lugubre, boring, sad movie, to mock ourselves, and our society.

It's not tech acceleration. It's an avalanche

I'm reading the printed Financial Times and Daily Mail - for the first time in maybe 10 years. 

Courtesy of Austrian Airlines, who offers wifi, but internet connection not working, so only static content is available (i.e. scanned newspapers). 

Very interesting experience. The gap between online and offline content is amazing.

The printed version is interesting. But... static. No search /filter /browse. Not summarizable. No right-click for additional details, or research /deep search. 

This is a good moment to realize how fast our world is changing. Today's society is significantly different from 10 years ago. The tools used now are so different. It's not only a change between generations. A 10 year gap in learning /re-training is now enormous: it makes you obsolete.

THIS TRANSFORMATION made me change significantly my view on the speed of history, and tech acceleration.

Until a few years ago, I thought that the acceleration was an illusion. A time bias, when we consider recent events as more important than distant events. A kind of speed fallacy, where the nearest objects seem faster than distant objects. I thought that 50k years ago, innovation was as fast as today, but we cannot see it from our distance. (Except for propagation, which obviously was much slower - information travelled by foot, not by internet).

I no longer believe that the transformation is linear.

SEE: there was almost no difference between the tools used 1 mil years ago, and 100k years ago. We used pretty much the same stone tools, or pottery. If you woke up after 5k years, your life wouldn't change very much.

There was almost no difference between the agriculture of 5k years ago, and 300 years ago. If you woke up in a hundred years, you would use similar tools, and grow similar crops.

BUT if you now work in any blue-collar job (modern farm, retailer, factory, delivery, distribution), you operate robots, drones, and satellites that didn't exist 10 years ago.

Or, if you work in a white-collar job, any job that handles information, then you use email and internet that didn't exist 30 years ago; and E-commerce, CRM, videoconference, cloud, content, collaboration, analytics, and productivity tools that didn't exist 5-10 years ago.

Even more: we use AI today, which didn't exist 1 year ago. 

So, printed newspapers, or any static content, are now anacronic.

Of course some people still read printed news. Well, some people are still hunting and gathering, aren't they. But printed information is already anacronic.

We cannot afford to ignore the technology avalanche. 

We live in a completely new world, every year.