Why learn when AI does everything better?

In the 2012 Hydrogen Sonata culture novel, Iain M. Banks lets the main character lose interest in learning a musical instrument when the artificial intelligence of a star ship plays the instrument perfectly - just because it is jealous of her:

She duly lost the desire to play the elevenstring; misplaced it for about fifteen years following that performance by the carelessly perfect cobbled-together artificial version of an absurd-looking alien.

What was the point of taking the time learning to play anything as well as you could, when a machine could use something it would think of as little better than its hand puppet to play so achingly, immaculately, ravishingly well, exactly as though it was the creature that had spent a lifetime studying, understanding and empathising with the instrument and all that it signified and meant?

That was 10 years before ChatGPT.


In Use of weapons from 1990 he answers the question:

"Can't machines build these faster?" he asked the woman, looking around the starship shell.

"Why, of course!" she laughed.

"Then why do you do it?"

"It's fun. You see one of these big monsters sail out those doors for the first time, heading for deep space, three hundred people on board, everything working, the Mind quite happy, and you think; I helped build that.
The fact a machine could have done it faster doesn't alter the fact that it was you who actually did it."

Written by Christian Weiske.

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