[Eisenstein]

How did dock workers feel wen containerized shipping starting gaining popularity? Should we have let them all continue putting things on ships piece b piece and stacking and unstacking each shipment by hand?

How did portrait artists feel when photography was gaining popularity? Should we have let them control the industry so that if we want to record a memory of a person we must have them stand or sit for hours while someone draws them?

etc.

[__loam]

Man there's always someone in these discussions who will smugly tell us that this is all inevitable and our empathy for the creatives in our economy is misplaced. To you I give a hearty fuck you.

[Eisenstein]

No, I am describing what happens when technology makes the market for certain jobs and talents change. The stevedores may have had a bad time for a while but our modern society only exists because we can ship things quickly and efficiently.

I feel bad for copy editors and people who write corporate blog posts or design logos or come up with ad jingles, but their niche is gone now and they need to adapt.

Thanks for being respectful and cordial though.

[__loam]

I often see these processes described as passive economic mechanisms that we are subjected to and not as decisions that we all make collectively and actively accept, making excuses based on the neoliberal understanding of our time as to why those people deserve to have their jobs made redundant and their livings wrenched from them.

To me, it's a kind of cowardice that people like you shrug your shoulders at and sigh and say "that's just the way things are". You can say that's just how the markets work. I don't have to respect you for it.

[Eisenstein]

I am not saying that artists are going to stop being a thing. We will keep buying books written by people and watch movies directed by people and people will still make music and what have you, but it will be different. The music industry was completely different in 1900 when there no available mass recordings, different again in the 1950s with popular radio and records, and the 2000s brought the internet and MP3s.

Things change -- people's jobs will be different. It isn't going to mean artists will stop making art or machines will make everything bland, it is just a new tool that will change industries and make things easier for people to do well and thus make more art. Some people won't be able to live well doing the same thing they do now, but what they do now wasn't what they would have been doing if they were in their grandparents time.

[thomashop]

I'd say you are creating a bit of a straw man there. The commenter you are responding to didn't say that's just the way things are. It feels like you are making their argument for them.

They showed some examples in the past and showed that society adapted.

We could try and improve our society and systems to have a safety net, education that allows us to adapt to rapidly changing technologies, etc sure but that's a whole discussion in itself.

[CuriouslyC]

If you give people freedom (good thing, right?) and tools exist to perform a task in a variety of different ways (some faster/more efficient than others) people will naturally gravitate towards using the most efficient tools to gain a competitive advantage, and other people will prefer work produced with those tools because it's better/cheaper. As long as better tools exist and people are free, this is just the way things are gonna play out.

If you're angry that independent artists are being fucked over by bigcorp, AI tools aren't the battle you should pick, because it's a guaranteed loss for a lot of very logical reasons, and it's just another example of a pattern of oppression enabled by our social and political systems. Even if by magic you managed to change something there'd just be another inequality coming down the pipe shortly after.