Comment by lemonberry
1 day ago
I can see AI helping some businesses do really well. I can also see it becoming akin to mass manufacturing. Take furniture for example, there's a lot of mass produced furniture of varying quality. But there are still people out there making furniture by hand. A lot of the hand built furniture is commanding higher prices due to the time and skill required. And people buy it!
I think we'll see a ton of games produced by AI or aided heavily by AI but there will still be people "hand crafting" games: the story, the graphics, etc. A subset of these games will have mass appeal and do well. Others will have smaller groups of fans.
It's been some time since I've read it, but these conversation remind me of Walter Benjamin's essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction".
There's always going to be a market for things that feel personal, intentional, and imperfect in a way that only human creators can deliver
Like there's market for hand-made, artisanal spoons and forks.
Is it a large market though?
It'd be larger if wealth inequality werent so staggeringly high.
The first automated-server restaurants (Horn and hardart) appeared in the 1930s during the depression. They were popular because they were cheap.
Far from being the wave of the future, they went out of business in the 1950s when people started having disposable income.
Part of the reason we accept slop, impersonal service and mass produced crud is not because "demand" is indifferent to it, but because disposable income is so often politically repressed, meaning the market is forced to prioritize price.
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> But there are still people out there making furniture by hand.
That is fairly insignificant segment of the market.