Comment by TeMPOraL

> I think it's even more pernicious than the paper describes as cultural outputs, art, and writing aren't done to solve a problem, they're expressions that don't have a pure utility purpose. There's no "final form" for these things, and they change constantly, like language.

Being utilitarian and having a "final form" are orthogonal concepts. Individual works of art do usually have a final form - it's what you see in museums, cinemas or buy in book stores. It may not be the ideal the artist had in mind, but the artist needs to say "it's done" for the work to be put in front of an audience.

Contrast that with the most basic form of purely utilitarian automation: a thermostat. A thermostat's job is never done, it doesn't even have a definition of "done". A thermostat is meant to control a dynamic system, it's toiling forever to keep the inputs (temperature readings) within given envelope by altering the outputs (heater/cooler power levels).

I'd go as far as saying that of the two kinds, the utilities that are like thermostats are the more important ones in our lives. People don't appreciate, or even recognize, the dynamic systems driving their everyday lives.