"There's no such thing as a free lunch."
A profound and universal truth? Or is it, rather, a thoughtless pseudo-argument that trivializes, devalues, and ultimately impedes the progress of our collective human consciousness?
I often find myself roused by the questioning of something that burns deeply in my own heart: procedural content generation. "How can a machine possibly generate endless worlds of beautiful content without artist intervention?" "How could a machine ever write a symphony that moves us to tears, or construct a mountainous vista whose beauty gives us pause to reflect on the elegance of our own reality?" It can't. Surely it can't. It's too good to be true. There's no free lunch.
Did anyone ever say there was? Invariably, it's a refutation of a claim that never existed in the first place. In the case of PCG, consider what the so-called 'free lunch' entails. A lifelong journey toward understanding complex algorithmic paradigms. A constant probing of and reflection on the elusive patterns in reality that ignite our sense wonder. The relentless and often-demoralizing conceptualization, testing, and inevitable disposal of a thousand pages worth of inadequate ideas. The exhaustive utilization of a machine that's performing 3,200,000,000 computational operations per second to arrive at a result which still takes minutes to coax out. If and when a world of beauty washes over the crystal matrix of a screen, if and when a touching symphony lifts gently from the diaphragm of a speaker...will it have been for free?
Awe-inspiring feats are not free lunches. Clapping one's hands and becoming GQ's model of the year, a socially-fluid savant, and the King of Saudi Arabia in under three seconds is a free lunch. Toiling for years, pushing through a million failed attempts, building on the knowledge and tools of a two-hundred-thousand-year-old species, and ultimately managing to arrive at the crest of something wonderful -- that is no free lunch. That is simply what it means to be human.
No free lunch is a self-reassuring excuse for non-action. No free lunch is a tragic failure to believe in the power of our own infinite consciousness. No free lunch is a slap in the face of all those who wiped sweat from their brow as they spent a lifetime inching closer to an impossible dream -- a dream that, for many, never unfolded until long after they left this world. No free lunch is a poisonous concept that has impeded too many for too long, and given us naught in return.
Ignore it. Dive off the precipice of limitation into the river of your own ability and start paying the price for your 'free lunch.'
