Comment by Riverheart
3 years ago
You're right. This is harsh. Some people make a living off art. Having valuable skills is good for people's self esteem. We're not replacing a factory line job, we're automating something that takes people 100hrs of classes and self practice to master and people have put themselves in debt to achieve.
But they can doodle in their spare time while they search for another job that isn't being phased out or spend most of their day crafting text prompts. Maybe go back to college take on some more debt.
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.
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 here. 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.
Edit2: Removed my mischaracterization comment. Was wrong to assume bad faith in this response.
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.
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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.
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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? More unemployed artists than blacksmiths. 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.
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