Comment by gjsman-1000
6 days ago
I said on a different thread, everyone right now is focused on productivity gains, AI making us faster.
We are only one major incident away from this trend reversing. Now that we have AI, regulation is less burdensome. More testing requirements, more certification requirements, more security requirements, more accessibility requirements.
Everyone keeps their jobs; the bar goes up. Whenever an industry gets better tools, we raise standards instead of making more cheap junk. We make $25K cars instead of $5K cars at 1960s engineering standards.
As with any tech revolution, jobs don’t go away in total but the types of jobs do. There aren’t a lot of buggy whip manufacturers any more. Professionals photography has taken a sharp decline. Certain kinds of white collar work are a dead end now.
I think progessional photography is so wide as a definition that makes no sense. Product photography could be somehow replaced with AI, maybe, but not journalist photography at all. In fact, journalism photography is more importnat than ever with AI now.
There is a lot less of having the picture-taking-man come to take a picture for $$
Not AI related, cell phone camera related. Crushed the sector.
> There aren’t a lot of buggy whip manufacturers any more
Nor horses...
Professional photography is still expected to grow over the next decade. It’s a competitive field but hasn’t actually shrunk much.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0254486700A
Doesn’t look like a stable, growing profession. And if you compare it to the 70s-00’s it got really rough around 2010 for obvious reasons.
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It’s pretty obvious that professional photography takes real skill if you’ve ever experienced the disaster of someone trying to cut costs by hiring an amateur photographer for a major event like a wedding but expecting professional results (the mismatch in expectations being the key cause of disaster here).
I’m not saying it turns out bad 100% of the time, but it’s easy to forget because good professionals make it look effortless. When the skill isn’t there, though, and you're used to only seeing professional photos it becomes very obvious (and again, that's perfectly fine if you're not expecting professional photography).
Even if we completely ignore the artistic and technical merit and complexity (which I would argue mostly moved to post-processing images) or the ability to catch or create the moments you want to capture, simply the fact that someone has to hold and point the camera makes it a job that will continue to exist. If you have a wedding and want pictures, someone has to take them. That won't be the bride or the groom, and shoving the responsibility onto one of the guests isn't nice (it would detract from their enjoyment of the event after all). So you hire someone to do it. Kind of like a job
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You don't pay a photographer to click the shutter button; you pay them to handle all the details of composing a good shot, knowing what you'll want afterwards, etc.
> Everyone keeps their jobs
Company bosses somehow see this differently. Now that the best performers are empowered by AI, cut the worst-performing workforce, and still enjoy efficiency gains!
I don't think that's what's happening.
Companies massively overhired during Covid after receiving trillions in free money and are now cutting the fat after the well's run dry.
AI productivity is just the excuse to save face because people believe it.
Which is funny because they are the most AI replaceable humans in the building. Their entire function is to follow the corporate decision tree to the letter and make sure that all communication upwards gets filtered through their outlook account.
This. Add some agents installed on employee's PC and AI could have exact picture of whole company at any given time, without these weekly managerial meetings - status relays. No politics. No overseeing. If everyone works remote, the better AI is, because all communication channels could be monitored. Perfect estimation, almost perfect allocation of resources.
The point of being the boss is getting to decide who to replace with AI, tbh. The shareholders may not replace you because of relationships/trust/accountability, and also because they don't want to have to be instructing the AI day-to-day (or arguing among themselves about it).
Maybe this will change in the future if AI-run companies emerge, get backing, and outcompete existing players.
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