I didn’t state a number of people making a living on social media. Some people are clearly making a fortune; how many people who are making a living off it, I don’t know. Enough so that I typically have no clue who some random Instagram, TikTok, or YouTuber with a million followers is.
Historically, new technologies create more jobs than they eliminate. Books used to be copied by hand, by the relatively few people who could read and write. The printing press eliminated a lot of the bread and butter scribe work.
Employers love finding ways to eliminate labor. Autonomous vehicles promise to eliminate millions of driving jobs. But eliminating labor is not an end, it’s a means to an end, which is increasing profitability - a function of productivity.
Employees have stayed ahead largely by boosting their productivity faster than labor saving technologies eliminated jobs. The same technologies which eliminate jobs tend to simultaneously increase the productivity of other jobs. Employment is at an all time high.
I have no idea what all the new jobs created around AI art and design tools will be. I presume it will create a new subfield of law. There will be new laws and regulations, regulators, some compliance burden on businesses (e.g., are they illegally exploiting unlicensed commercial content), auditors. There will probably be reviewers and editors for AI generated content. There will probably be considerable AI infrastructure, consultants, support personnel, administrators, AI model and data providers, annotation services.
For most office workers, the level of graphics and visual elements in reports will probably go way up. PowerPoint will be a distant memory, but expectations regarding presentation quality will seem insane by current standards.
> I didn’t state a number of people making a living on social media.
Sorry, I misread your implication then. Twitch had a leak a while back and something like 4500 people were making over $50k USD, which is not nothing, but also not that practical as a career strategy.
Hopefully you're right that AI will open lots of opportunities for everybody, and hopefully those opportunities will be worthwhile. I know historically technology hasn't brought about the end of all jobs, but AI is a pretty new concept and we can't necessarily scale up forever. I think it's reasonable to be concerned about the number and quality of jobs remaining. It does seem like some of the jobs that people really want to do, are some of the ones AI could be taking.
But I don't really know one way or another, just feeling concerned and a bit bummed out about it. I guess we will see over the next 5-10 years.
Historically, new technologies create more jobs than they eliminate. Books used to be copied by hand, by the relatively few people who could read and write. The printing press eliminated a lot of the bread and butter scribe work.
Employers love finding ways to eliminate labor. Autonomous vehicles promise to eliminate millions of driving jobs. But eliminating labor is not an end, it’s a means to an end, which is increasing profitability - a function of productivity.
Employees have stayed ahead largely by boosting their productivity faster than labor saving technologies eliminated jobs. The same technologies which eliminate jobs tend to simultaneously increase the productivity of other jobs. Employment is at an all time high.
I have no idea what all the new jobs created around AI art and design tools will be. I presume it will create a new subfield of law. There will be new laws and regulations, regulators, some compliance burden on businesses (e.g., are they illegally exploiting unlicensed commercial content), auditors. There will probably be reviewers and editors for AI generated content. There will probably be considerable AI infrastructure, consultants, support personnel, administrators, AI model and data providers, annotation services.
For most office workers, the level of graphics and visual elements in reports will probably go way up. PowerPoint will be a distant memory, but expectations regarding presentation quality will seem insane by current standards.