AI/ML which can mine through sports footage to create highlight reels and funny clip collections, etc will create tons of consumer goods (videos) which can all be monetized on Youtube. Just one example.
How about Netflix? They use AI/ML quite a bit. It seems to have driven quite a lot more people to watch movies and tv than before.
Amazon uses AI/ML in its Echo, which was quite a high-selling consumer good last holiday season.
... and the word 'cable cutters' is being thrown around with a lot more intensity, plus various charts of rapidly declining cable TV viewership.
> Amazon uses AI/ML in its Echo, which was quite a high-selling consumer good last holiday season.
[gestures at the latest brick-and-mortar bookstore news with B+N on the rocks and Borders in its grave ... given AMZ got it's start as a bookseller.]
A pessimistic response to be sure (and one that I'm reluctantly making), but there's coincidence, and then there's a pattern that starts emerging whenever a disruptor unicorn cements its place into an industry.
Mechanisation of the textile industry led to vast increases in the quantity of production. Prior to the industrial revolution, most peasants would have owned only one set of clothes and replaced them only when they were entirely beyond repair. Cheap cloth created demand for wardrobes and dressers, because a lot of people were now in the peculiar position of owning more clothes than they could wear at once.
The luddites were ultimately wrong because of Jevons paradox - labour efficiencies in the textile industry vastly increased the demand for their product, and with it their demand for labour. Hand-loom weavers didn't lose their livelihoods to the power loom, they just made ten times as much cloth for twice the wage.
Automation and mechanisation in other manufacturing sectors likewise stimulated vastly increased consumer demand, contributing to a virtuous cycle of increasing profit, wages and living standards. Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, the efficiencies of mass-manufacturing gave ordinary people secure employment and access to a dizzying array of consumer goods. The more stuff we made, the more stuff we could afford to buy.
I don't see AI/ML following the same pattern. A lot of tech-heavy businesses seem to be startlingly close to zero-sum. Uber has decimated the taxi industry, but it doesn't seem to have vastly increased overall ridership - the most generous figures I've seen suggest perhaps a 40% increase in some markets. Google and Facebook have become multi-billion dollar companies through advertising revenue, but the overall growth of ad spending across all media has barely outpaced inflation, with the newspaper industry being the most obvious casualty. I can't think of many major tech companies that didn't kill an industry.
I'd love to be proven wrong.