This robotic arm's cleanup task is bloody endless

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But one of the points it makes is that a machine will mindlessly perform the task it is assigned, regardless of meaning, chance of success, or whether it was programmed by a wizard engineer or an out-of-ideas artist.

I think another OOCU is warranted.

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There can be no mechanical Sisyphus for the simple reason that his task is borne out of punishment, a moral judgement that machines cannot express nor understand. For this robot, the effort is not taxing - this work is its only meaning, its only reason to exist and to consume energy.

I think a more apt parallel can actually been drawn between this robot and demand-stimulating Keynesian economics. Paying people to dig trenches and to fill them up again just to keep the economic cycle alive, is very much akin to sweeping an unsweepable liquid just so that a machine can keep doing something. Which inevitably begs the question of whether an economic cycle is at all useful or meaningful…

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You’e conflating (A) stimulus spending, which (assuming some sort of non-stupid project) builds useful infrastructure and/or a public good and kick-starts the economy, with (B) spending per the fallacy of the broken window, which redistributes some capital and wastes the rest.

Having said that, I have to admit that stimulus spending on art can kinda split the difference…

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Stimulus spending need not be for useful infrastructure, as per Keynes himself: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/modeledbehavior.com/2011/10/31/digging-holes-just-to-fill-them-back-up-again/ of course it is preferable, but not necessary - the point is to determine what the market is willing to invest on and kickstart that particular cycle.

(And I take offense at your implication that art spending is wasteful, of course. A few billions spent on art can ensure economic prosperity for centuries; see Florence, Venice, Rome, Paris and even greedy utilitarian London, which wouldn’t have become so rich without Trafalgar Square, red phone boxes, an extravagant fake-gothic bridge and a bunch of useless jewels.)

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There, Keynes is contrasting a deliberately silly example-- the state hires one set of people to bury banknotes and lets citizens from the free market dig them up-- with the alternative of doing nothing. He’s making a point that even the ill-implemented version of the the idea has some utility: low, but not zero. And snarking a bit at the people who won’t let the state do something sensible like hire folks to build houses. (Which for Keynes, is very restrained.)

Money a polity spends on art can pay for itself eventually, if the state ends up buying art people are willing to travel to the locale to see, and/or the art raises the value of the nearby land enough for property taxes to go up enough to matter. Recently, Leo Villareal’s The Bay Lights seems to be self-sustaining in this way. Most of the big public sculptures, though-- what Dave Barry once characterized as being from the “helicopter crash” school-- I dunno. And dollars-and-centsing high art like opera and ballet is a flame war in the making…

(Sort of related to Keynes’ argument about gold mines: my favorite example of stupid spending by the .01% versus idiotic I-say-we-ban-it-by-law spending by the .01% is to contrast the purchase of a paperweight like Damien Hearst’s For the Love of God with the purchase of a yacht. For the Love of God was very expensive to create and it doesn’t do much-- but it’s going to last a very long time, so it has plenty of time to effectively earn back the capital expended on it. Yachts, though, begin to disintegrate the minute they hit the water. Sometimes they transport some stuff, but they’re still best understood as ongoing expenses that ultimately accomplish nothing but litter the floor of the ocean with yacht parts. So The Love of God, and similar things like Marc Quinn’s Siren, are merely inefficient. But yachts, most not-street-legal sports cars, ice sculptures, and flower arrangements are capital disappearing from the world, and I Do Not Approve.)

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While Larry Ellison is on one of his yachts, he isn’t actively suing somebody or planning new ways to make money out of Sun’s work on Java. So yachts may have a greedy-billionaire-distraction function that gives them a utility value. When we have perfect VR, we’ll be able to put people like Rupert Murdoch into simulators that will keep them perfectly happy while keeping them away from the rest of us, but until then these expensive toys have a use.
[other than this contrived example I totally agree with your post].

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And if it helps emerging local talent that can then attract international recognition and capital, raising the profile of the area. And if it helps building networks that then can kickstart economic activity in new media. And if it keeps alive really-artisanal and traditional centuries-old activities (like puppetry in Sicily, certain musical instrument-making that is extremely localized, etc etc). And if it increases well-being of the population, sense of shared community etc etc.

Art Is Good, period. I’d rather spend more on art than on subsidies for polluting manufacturing sectors that have no realistic economic future nor serve any long-term purpose from an employment or strategic purpose. Will there be an element of pork? Sure, like with all spending (public or private), the well-connected will inevitably fare better than the non-connected, and a lot of the money will never give immediate returns. But the principle should be the same as with scientific research: Art Is Useful, Art Matters, Art Will Pay, Art Creates The New. The mind-power that Hollywood wields around the world is literally unmatched, for example, with clear and staggering returns in economic and strategic terms.

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