One big difference is that art is typically a passion job, whereas most of the previously automated jobs weren't. Being able to draw for a living also takes way longer to learn than being a bank teller, or data entry etc, did.

Not that it matters, AI is only going to get better from here. I'd also feel depressed if I made my living doing digital art.

* * *

Many people have hobbies that are low value skills and they have to work doing things outside their passion if they want to be higher value. This isn't unique to people who draw for a living it's just new to them and they'll have to adjust.

You’re not wrong, but when we replace a factory line job that person also goes through their own little hell, and they probably don’t even have the possibility of going back to college and taking more debt.

If anything, if it is true that AI will render lots of jobs obsolete (I have my doubts), at least there’s a chance this may allow some empathy to grow in those affected. Perhaps we finally get some meaningful social change.

I'm unclear how people got the impression that I'm okay with people's lives getting upended by automation. As I elaborated on elsewhere, my post was to say there was a difference in what is being automated, highly skilled labor with high time/money/education costs vs something you shouldn't require a degree to learn to do.

As you elaborated elsewhere:

> Honestly this whole "adapt" thing is a load of nonsense parroted by people who aren't immediately under threat and have nothing to fear. Who is going to adapt at 30/40/50 years old? How about people who just graduated art school? Go right back into college? Please.

I agree completely, I just don't think a degree being involved has anything to do with it. I assume most people work the best job they could land, so someone doing menial work and losing it due to automation is in about as much pain as someone facing the same situation on a very specialized role. If anything, the person with more education has a much better chance at getting another (perhaps lower paying) job.

I interpreted your first reply as conveying the message that it's not so bad if low skilled labor is automated, and it's a bigger problem if it's high skilled labor that is replaced. My apologies if I misunderstood you.

I understand why I might have come across that way but it wasn't my intention. I could have phrased it better. I agree that losing a job, particularly to automation is painful all around. My take is that low skilled labor getting automated is problematic because people need work and frankly I don't think everyone can/should go to college to make a living and I feel much automation is about margins. We need a strong middle class of homeowners and consumers and enough jobs that people can reasonably achieve it.

But automation has been coming for low skilled work for ages and the wisdom was that high skilled work was supposed to be safe(r). I think it is extraordinarily problematic if high skilled workers are forced to start competing for a diminishing pool of low skill jobs. Moving into another high skilled job would be best but without free/subsidized education puts undue burden on people and who is to say what work is safe 10yrs into the future now? Once high skilled work starts getting automated it means there is no protection and therefore no stability. How can we grow the middle class in such an environment?

This also means automation of low skilled work will accelerate. Order kiosks will be replaced by a specialized ChatGPT customer service version. Acts and sounds like a real person. Maybe it's got a floating head avatar while an automated process in the back assembles the food. One store manager and a guy who inspects the equipment across town.

Today it's the artists but tomorrow it could be IT workers. Companies are pyramids and the room at the top is finite. A healthy economy is not a pyramid.

I understand what you meant better now, and I agree with your position. In particular:

> Today it's the artists but tomorrow it could be IT workers. Companies are pyramids and the room at the top is finite. A healthy economy is not a pyramid.

This is why I said perhaps some meaningful social change may come out of this. If we assume automation will continue to replace jobs higher up the pyramid, at some point it seems the extremes in the range of possible outcomes is "more people competing for a diminishing pool of low skill jobs" on one side, and "we figured out a post-capitalistic () society in which how useful you are to the economy (this is basically your skills vs the demand for them) determines things like if you get the house with the nice view or not, but not whether you get access to good health care, can live in a place without the fear of getting evicted or of getting robbed/murdered when you go out, etc.

I know it's utopic but I rather be utopic than dystopic, I guess.

A great path towards a better (IMHO) arrangement would be to have very good unemployment benefits, including education/training for jobs that are in demand when you get downsized/automated away.

() I use post-capitalistic for lack of a better term, and to make it obvious I don't mean communism. I certainly don't mean that and see societies organized that way closer to dystopia than utopia. My point is, as you say, I believe a pyramid is not a good way to organize an economy (or a society for that matter).

Your lack of empathy for factory workers is hurting your case. They are real, and train for their jobs, and care about the families they provide for.

“technical disruption is hard on people” is a much more sympathetic position than “artists should be exempt because they’re special”.

We all face risks. We all have to adapt. We all have opportunities from adapting to the world rather than clinging to the past. Artists are no different from factory workers (or programmers, or bus drivers)

No a lack of empathy, that's just a mischaracterization on your part. OP was saying there is little difference between automating art and automating a bank teller. For factory workers, I'm not saying its a job that requires no training but it doesn't requires years of college and 40/60k in debt. Clearly the ceiling for getting a decent paid job to raise a family without massive time/money/education investments is skyrocketing but I didn't point that out in my post so obviously I don't care.

Honestly this whole "adapt" thing is a load of nonsense parroted by people who aren't immediately under threat and have nothing to fear. Who is going to adapt at 30/40/50 years old? How about people who just graduated art school? Go right back into college? Please.

Edit: For the record, I care about anyone getting displaced but not all displacement is of equal level. If highly educated/skilled labor is now at risk this world isn't prepared for what's about to come.

Maybe not as big as what's happening with AI, but I can see my parents constantly having to adapt to Microsoft's new redisign of Windows, or <software> having a new version, or laws changing. And that's for jobs considered relatively safe and boring (accounting).

As for art school, I've always heard that it was more fun than IT/computer science/accounting but way more dangerous, as in you weren't guaranteed a job at all. Not everyone has heard that, of course, not everyone has the time/skills/resources to plan their career. I don't really know what to say except that it sucks for them. On the other hand the lower bar of entry may bring way more art in general, like it did with digital art.

Well here's another thing, replacing horse carriages with cars was a major boon for civilization that sped up industrialization, led to more jobs (car builders, mechanics, drivers, gas station attendants, road builders, traffic lights and sign manufacturers), enabled shipping of goods cross country, increase tourism, and allow more flexibility in work and living area. It was worth the trade off. And cars were simpler back in the day whereas now they're all computerized. Cars were also expensive enough that they took a while to spread to the public.

We know why rote labor is being automated. Not just to squeeze as much money out as possible but to reduce failures and liability and increase productivity. If a factory pumps out more medicine to save more lives who can judge maybe automation was worth the tradeoff.

But art? Is this something civilization needed to try automating? It's not going to create more jobs than it replaces. It's not going to advance society to the next industrial level. It's not filling a demand because we're already flooded with more media than we could ever consume.

Stability is important for society and tossing golden apples around "because" and telling people to "adapt" to senseless chaos is awful. People will get squeezed out and career change is a bigger deal than adapting from paper to digital.

They're not guaranteed jobs so why make it harder to get them? So failed artists can compete for jobs with the factory, fast food and coal workers whose time is written on the wall?

I was under the impression that it has _always_ been hard to make a living as an artist.

I think this is just a truth people will have to accept. I used to make music and quickly realized I would have to dedicate 1000s of hours to it if I ever wanted to make it a career. This is simply because there were 1000s of other people that wanted to also make it a career.

Whenever I read a thread like this it makes me wonder how little most individuals know about the history that came before them.

I could take artist out of your statement and put blacksmith in and it would be difficult to tell if this was wrote in 1890.

Everyone seems to fight automation in an individual/industry battle rather at the society level. We keep measuring our worth based on work and when we finally run out of work we're going to have a problem.

"We keep measuring our worth based on work and when we finally run out of work we're going to have a problem."

Yeah, because work pays the bills. Guess what happens when you automate faster than social policy changes? Also people resist change when it threatens their way of life. It's almost like the luddites resisting automation are saying slow down automation people "when we finally run out of work we're going to have a problem".

Unfortunately the luddites were not very effective at slowing down the technology. And with the modern police state being more aligned with wealth and corporate interests the general outlook is "the problem is coming at us full speed".

This is not an artist problem, this is an everyone problem that is unavoidable. Of course here in the US we're playing right versus left instead of a few trillionaires will own everything versus the starving huddled masses that this path seems to be leading to.

I agree.