Tools to Make Tools

Muybridge, Two Blacksmiths

One way to determine whether AI is useful for something is whether an extensive knowledge is absolutely necessary to produce a result. In the arts, "extensive knowledge" is defined by a combination of talent, knowledge, skill, ingenuity, and the patience to wait for serendipity. With AI, its "consciousness" can only be the data set we give it, which can then become some or all of these things. The main question is what else we would do if machines were doing it all. The other day I picked up a ukulele and started to learn it. It was satisfying just to explore a new instrument. In a sense, I was the imperfect data set. The entire time I hardly even used a computer, perhaps only to find a fretboard diagram. I wasn't thinking of how AI could be used.

One of the human Universals is "tools to make tools". AI is the perfect example of this. If you made robots that would use datasets about useful things made with tools, it could evolve tools to make various forms not easily conceivable by humans. Musical instruments, and to a large degree music itself, is already made unless we view it as a tool.