- Greater productivity. A single carriage driver can now drive a bus, so fewer carriages are needed
- Lower costs/ higher demand. Everyone who walked can now afford the bus, so the number of drivers goes up even if fewer drivers are needed per traveler.
And while SD is very impressive, it’s going to be a long time before it’s producing high res imagery, at least without ready access to lots of data center grade hardware)
That's a bit different than inventing a car (which at that time didn't even promise self-driving, so your analogy is doubly bad).
Do you honestly, really would want to read a 1000 novel written by an AI even if I assure you that is as good as what an average human could do?
Now we are all wowed with Stable Diffusion and what not, ok. But give me a library stand with 999 decent AI books and 1 human book, I pick the human.
I want to talk to the human behind the pages, feel the human behind the pages. I don't want a random number very efficiently generated by a machine. Who cares!
Its the content of the book that matters, not how or who made it.
The human behind the pages is a nessecery evil to get to the book, same as food or furniture.
But in the long run it probably _will_ be as good as traditional media, and instantly customisable to your tastes to boot. I suspect it will be a difficult pill to swallow, but we are likely over-estimating the depth and complexity of our souls, just like every other AI task. Some people will still insist on human-authored works and swear they can tell the difference. Money will still be made putting humans on stage to perform. Older generations will insist everything is worse and will possibly be right. I’m sure there will be several billion deprecatingly self-referential AI retellings of Prometheus and Pandora to show us what a bad idea it all was.
I am big into Carnatic music (a form of south indian classical music with a ton of intricacies and improvisation). The actual songs that most performers perform on stage had actualy been written by a handful of folks 3-5 centuries ago. And without any judgement, the style has a lot of homogenity to it and several folks have created compositions (in the past 50-100 years) which mimic a lot of the original style and yet acceptance of them in public performances is limited ("oh its another X wanna be").
Now imagine the same if created by AI.
Stable diffusion, DallE, Midjourney produce absolutely beautiful paintings, drawings, renders, photos of sculptures. We have AIs that write movie scripts, book plots. We are starting to get AIs that are okay at making music. We have transformer models that generate textured 3D models.
On the programming side we have Copilot, which can't yet replace a programmer, but it's definitely a first confident step.
On the science side we have AI tools that fold proteins, predict material properties of novel materials, the wet lab work is getting automated too.
I find it hard to name an area of human work that can't be automated. And not even work, any human activity.
It looks like all the problems that can be solved in software, will be solved first. Robotics will be lagging, but not very far behind. Once we perfect artificial muscles, it's game over. The rest is software and scaling everything up.