I agree with Mallory that we make money to live but I also think that modern technological society has turned pursuits into highly specialized perversions that aren't even inspiring any more.
The worldwide coverage of mountain climbing has even turned mountain climbing into a somewhat arbitrary thing in terms of "climbing everests": first it was to the top of the mountain (cool), then it was to the top in a certain time, then it was without supplementary oxygen, then it was climbing all 8,000m+ mountains, then it was doing THAT without oxygen...
At some point it's diminishing returns and becomes stupid -- and results in people just killing themselves, and AI is already on that level.
With every achievement there also comes a responsibility and our society is just achievement without responsibility.
I think you missed the point of the quote entirely. When I do something, I don't do it because nobody has ever done it before. I do it to see if _I_ could do it.
I didn't miss the point of the quotation. I am not really concerned with your motivations. My point was that Mallory's quotation becomes distorted by technological society to present new challenges that are relatively harmful and stupid, like making a small ChatGPT clone (or even making ChatGPT in the first place).
So while I agree that some people's motivations may be sound, it is how they are applied that is a perversion, and that Mallory's quotation has the germ of a phenomenon that is incredibly dangerous and isn't as deserving of awe as it is.
A person had an idea for something they wanted to do. They set about doing it. They undoubtedly ran into difficulties and had to think about how to solve them. They came up with solutions, probably some of the solutions aren't as elegant as they had hoped for, but they reached something that was acceptable, again and again. And eventually they created something that, to some extent, satisfied them.
That process is the joy.
I just don't see the harm in what this person has done? Envisaging something that could be created, and then creating it, is what life is all about.
I just don't see how words like "perversion" and "distortion" can sensibly be applied to this work?
The entire point is that technology shapes society so that joyful activities are subverted to create perversions like AI. The atomic bomb was an intellectually stimulating joy for many physicists for example. Life is about joy but it must be accompanied by the responsibility to seek joy in activities that don't do harm like AI.
The worldwide coverage of mountain climbing has even turned mountain climbing into a somewhat arbitrary thing in terms of "climbing everests": first it was to the top of the mountain (cool), then it was to the top in a certain time, then it was without supplementary oxygen, then it was climbing all 8,000m+ mountains, then it was doing THAT without oxygen...
At some point it's diminishing returns and becomes stupid -- and results in people just killing themselves, and AI is already on that level.
With every achievement there also comes a responsibility and our society is just achievement without responsibility.