[mikepurvis]

I feel a bit like this with the whole firestorm around AI artwork as well— it's been a big wakeup call to people who have been creating using technology-assisted workflows for decades, but still felt in their gut that they were bringing something unique to the table and were therefore "safe" from being completely automated away. That hitting the button for magic eraser or magic lasso or magic color correction was someone okay in a way that the AI itself sitting in the driver's seat was not.

Now that's been reduced to pointing out minor flaws that the next generation of AI artists will trivially resolve, and sharing memes beseeching other humans to participate in a boycott.

There's real pain and angst there, and I don't want to be callous about it with a comparison to buggy-whip manufacturers or something. But I wish the participants in these types of discussions were able to zoom out a bit and see that there's a larger societal issue here around automation, and that the real solution is going to be rethinking the basic economics of how we distribute wealth in a time of extraordinary machine-driven productivity— productivity that is no longer just about assembly lines and primary industries, but now also includes an increasing bite out of realms previously classified as "knowledge work".

[forgetfulness]

Hard to tell, other knowledge workers and people in creative industries were already squeezed, designers for instance have had a tough time for a very long time. Will things change, politically, because now marketers and Software developers join those ranks, for instance?

Programming was an outlet, if not a gold rush, for many people as the basic technical skills to create Software with the already sophisticated tooling available today presented an economic opportunity, but if "describe your problem, get crappy app" becomes viable, it may squeeze the market for junior developers.

For as long as it has existed, Software has been subject to the Jevons Paradox [1], and every advancement in making its development cheaper and its supply more abundant has only made it so more activities become powered by Software and Software developers, but it's hard to tell how this will impact the job market, especially if Software was absorbing people who didn't find more opportunities in the broader service sector.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[mikepurvis]

Yeah, well, and even looking to the immediate subject of the article... like, whether your lawyer is going to become a bot in ten years, a huge amount of what used to be part of the legal practice has already been automated away in terms of the research side, nevermind specialized firms that just crank through bog-standard family-law or property-transfer cases by plugging the relevant details into an Excel template.

Basically it's the same story as everywhere else, where technological augmentation has already created a huge squeeze, and now suddenly even the senior people are wondering if the writing is on the wall for them too.