Imagine a world where no human contribution matters because a different species already thought of it. No improvisation on any instrument can be novel because a machine already played it exactly like you would have. A world where your children look to a philosopher machine for guidance, because it is wiser, kinder, and deeper than you could ever be.
Human existence will still occur, however, our species's defining characteristic will be no more consequential than a meadowlark's greeting of the sun every morning. Beautiful things will occur, but they will be ghostly imitations of the creations of some other being. Humans will create nothing, except, possibly, more humans.
It's not necessarily about your success vs. the machines. It's about every human who will ever live in the future's impossibility of success vs. the machines that is depressing and inevitable.
> Imagine a world where no human contribution matters because a different species already thought of it
You are begging the question in in the original sense of the phrase "begging the question."
You start by stating your conclusion as an axiom! You state that "no human contribution matters because a different species already thought of it" as if that is necessarily true.
It isn't.
We choose what matters. I play Bach, badly. Bach already thought of that music, and many thousands, possibly millions of people have played the particular pieces I have worked on (The first suite for unaccompanied cello in Gmaj, the Prelude to the first Fuge in Cmaj from Book One of WTC).
Does my playing not matter?
I say it does. Furthermore, Bach's music can be encoded as a number. All numbers already exist. Bach did not create that number any more than I created the number that encodes this comment.
Does my comment not matter?
You find this general idea depressing, and so do many other people.
But it isn't "depressing" in an absolute sense. That's just a word we made up to describe a feeling many of us happen to have.
Your playing doesn't "matter" in the way Bach's original composition "matters." One of these things has been remembered for hundreds of years, and one of these things would never have been remembered unless you reinterpreted the work in some novel way that reached millions of people.
The fact that Bach's compositions can be encoded as a number doesn't mean that it wouldn't take a genius of Bach's level to deserialize that particular number, which could literally be deserialized into a representation of any arbitrary thing in existence with the correct algorithm, any less novel when it was created. The same holds true of your comment. Just because I declare 1001 represents a beautifully unique masterpiece, once it is decoded, does not make that masterpiece actually exist.
Bach was important. In a world with general AI no human will have the ability to be important in that way ever again. At first AI will create crude imitations of human art. Then it will create hundreds of billions of creative works that are more human than human. Then it will create artworks that surpass our ability to comprehend. I don't know about you, but the inability to do anything novel as a species, to learn anything new, is a terribly bleak possibility.
Does the fact that we were the ones who created them in the first place count? Why should we feel depressed at one of our own creations? Why be depressed by looking at a car just because it can move faster than us, while in actuality it was created for that purpose?
Human existence will still occur, however, our species's defining characteristic will be no more consequential than a meadowlark's greeting of the sun every morning. Beautiful things will occur, but they will be ghostly imitations of the creations of some other being. Humans will create nothing, except, possibly, more humans.
It's not necessarily about your success vs. the machines. It's about every human who will ever live in the future's impossibility of success vs. the machines that is depressing and inevitable.