for me personally, it's slightly discomforting to use goods that are produced inefficiently with human labor instead of automation. for example, I'd actively prefer to use a mass-produced bowl than a handmade one, because the thought of unnecessarily consuming human labor to produce something that is not any better than the mass-produced one feels wrong to me.
Tractor pulling is a midwestern sport where people compete to build the tractor with the greatest pulling power, and then use it to pull against an ever-increasing drag. Whoever gets furthest wins. There are no restrictions on the types of engine or tractor, aside from overall weight. So it's basically a contest in who can buy the biggest jet engine? No, because the rules require that it be piloted by hand. No gyroscopes, electronics, or mechanical steering. That keeps the sport human and engaging.
The automatic guidance required for superhuman tractor pull driving is pretty simple (I looked into it in about 1991 when I was going to tractor pulls). You could build it out of 1950's missile guidance technology. By 1991, it would have been well within my one-person engineering capabilities. And by 2026, It's trivial. But to even get close to it is illegal. So here's a sport that decided to rule out AI decades ago, because it was decades ago when AI began to impinge on its sorrow, glory and beauty.
nit: When demosceners hand-write assembly, it's not because they're foregoing a compiler for the sake of it. They operate under performance and size constraints that require having assembly that compilers cannot output. They also often build for older platforms, with only comparatively primitive compilers available.
That's a good point, and possibly I should cut that example. But it seems to me that part of what the community is doing is picking arbitrary constraints that (at least until recently, probably much less so now) strongly favored human coding over automation. Do you know how the demoscene is handling the emergence of AI that is very good at coding?
I play for contra dances, and a core part of our culture is that we always have live music. It's not that live music is categorically better: if you ran a test where you put soundproof one-way glass in front of the musicians and secretly played a live recording from a great band playing for the same dance it would probably go really well. Instead, we insist on live music because that's the kind of culture we're trying to build, one where the performers are part of the community, where anyone can start playing for dancing, and where the music grows and changes with the culture.
Other groups went different ways. The late 1940s explosion in square dancing happened in part because of technological progress: it was now practical to record a band once and play it back millions of times to support dancing all over the country. Callers would buy a sound system, including a record player, and all they needed was some dancers and a hall. This let modern square dancing grow enormously.
Contra dance took a different path, coming through the 70s folk revival with a strong commitment to live music. Musicians were drawn to the dance form, and dancers learned to play. With regular opportunities to perform, they learned to adapt playing to support the dancing. As the choreography and musical sensibilities changed over the years, the live tradition could change with it. I love what bands are doing now, and if you compare hall recordings to decades ago it's impressive how much the genre has matured and flourished.
It's not just contra dance: there are communities of people who hand-craft assembly to make demos, even though the software industry has long-since automated this with compilers in typical development. My cousin makes bagpipes out of wood, even though you'd have trouble hearing the difference between these and something injection-molded from plastic. My dad has serving bowls we made out of clay, even though they're heavier and less round than what a machine could press. People still watch humans play Go, even though computers are better now. People watch humans race, even though machines are faster, and they also watch machines race. This can be a categorical decision to always go with human effort, or a case where both forms exist side by side but with prestige or sentiment pushing towards the human.
I like this as a model for what art and achievement could look like in a post-AI world, assuming we make it through to the other side. Some communities can embrace technology and explore what's possible with full AI assistance. Other communities can make an intentional decision to keep doing things the traditional way, accepting that this will be less perfect and less efficient. Yet others can mix them, appreciating what humans have been able to make for what it is, while also getting the practical benefits of automation. I'm not worried that the music I love will disappear, because economically it's been obsolete for decades. It's still here because we want it to be.
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