[plastic-enjoyer]

The artists will be fine and AI will liberate them. It's the engineers and mathematicians who are walking into the blade. They built their entire sense of self on being the best optimizers in the room and optimization is the first thing the machines take. Their whole identity was a number going up. Now watch it go to zero.

[fc417fc802]

Depends entirely on whether "the market" ends up valuing what humans add to various artistic processes. Same for human engineers, who are still very much needed at least for the time being.

Certainly the scenario where a human touch isn't valued by the market raises lots of very difficult philosophical and economic questions but that's a separate issue.

[plastic-enjoyer]

> Depends entirely on whether "the market" ends up valuing what humans add to various artistic processes.

No, it does not, at least for arts. There is a chance, that AI will free art from it's utility or the necessary to create value. Maybe graphic designers and illustrators will lose their jobs due automatization, but most paid art (concept work, corporate design) was instrumental compromise anyway. Take away the commercial floor and what's left is the part they cared about most. Engineers on the other hand identify mostly by being optimizators and creating value. They may keep their jobs, but at what cost?

[fc417fc802]

That depends entirely on what's meant by "will be fine" and "AI will liberate them". I was assuming you meant something along the lines of gainful employment. If instead you meant performing a meaningful task then I'd counter that most engineers like to build finished products not wallow in minutia. You can still hand roll assembly but I don't think many developers lament the advent of the modern compiler. Instead people build far more complicated systems than would otherwise have been possible.

[plastic-enjoyer]

Sure, but the compiler didn't promote the assembly programmer, it basically ended assembly programming. So which side of that is the engineer on? You're assuming we're the dev who got the compiler. But if the premise is that AI does the actual problem-solving, then we're the assembly and AI is the compiler.

> Engineers like to build finished products, not wallow in minutia

This only works if what you loved was having built the thing. If what you loved was the building itself, the solving, then "here's a way bigger system, the AI figured it out" isn't a win. It's just a promotion from maker to manager. And a lot of engineers specifically tried to avoid this promotion in their career.

[fc417fc802]

My impression is that most developers are motivated to create a finished product for a variety of reasons. If what someone enjoys is the craft purely for its own sake then isn't the resulting situation exactly the same as for artists assuming a hypothetical future where the core activities of both are largely automated? Such people can still engage in the craft purely for their own enjoyment just as anyone who wants to is free to write assembly by hand today.

[luiwammus]

I cant speak for engineers, but as a mathematician I wholeheartedly disagree with everything you claim in your comment. Almost none of the mathematicians that I know care about the optimization aspect of mathematics: the pursuit of optemizing constants in theorems and providing minor technical improvements is mostly seen as pointless unless there are significant new mathematical insights that fuel the improvement. I think most mathematicians rather build their identity around providing actual understanding of problems using mathematics and improving society's understanding of mathematical problems.

Of course AI threatens this too, but the threat is of a much lesser degree. One could even argue that AI is helpful here with getting mathematicians to the 'frontier of knowledge' as AI is usually good in combining ideas from different fields.