I think what a lot of the answers gloss over is that the period of adjustment to the new technology often does pull the rug from under people who have invested a good deal of time and attention becoming skilled at something. Our lives are of limited length therefore the concern for a generation of people is real and shouldn't be just treated as a detail of history.
Equally in many areas the end result is a loss of something (often intangible) which we accept as "good enough" and which may take a long time to be recaptured.
The steam engine may well have been a good thing in the long run but I'm sure it did tear apart the fabric of many people's lives and I think it's reasonable to commiserate.
This is kind of a general response, but I disagree. AI is not just like any other past technology. Just two ways in which it is totally different from the steam engine: AI is able to make art, it can learn from people and then produce similar results. It can imitate art that is the result of our deepest internal processes. Also, AI is about replacing all human jobs and capabilities. Not just a super narrow subset.
> AI is able to make art, it can learn from people and then produce similar results.
In the jargon of fine arts, "craft" refers "making a thing well / in a particular style" while "art" has something to say, most often challenging a widespread idea.
EG installing a toilet in a room of an art gallery with a plaque stating "this is art" was a bold work of art, but was not an impressive display of craft.
I really appreciate this distinction, because separating those concepts immediately clarifies a lot of the discussion around "AI Art".
AI can imitate _craft_ exceptionally well, but it cannot create _art_ (that is, it can't independently devise a display which challenges a widespread idea).
Working artists are losing out because nearly all of the economic demand for art was actually demand for craft, and they're doubly angry because their past work was needed to create the machine that's now undercutting their income.
Agree. A magnificent example of craft will make make you curious about how it was done, while a correspondingly magnificent example of art will make you curious about why it was done.
An AI-generated work is mainly if not categorically a prompt for "how" questions, as its can-kicking answer to "why" is built right into the first letter of the initialism: because a human wanted it.
The real answer to why is pursued from that point up into its usual unnavigable headwaters, with a few extra twists concerning the question of whether the word artificial itself will turn out to be merely another diguise of the anthropic principle.
Yap yap yap. The camera will ruin painters, movies will cause psychosis , dancing is gods sin, comics will ruin our nation’s youth , photoshop will end the work of photography. Blah blah blah.
This answer sounds like taken from one of the AI startups' investor pitch.
Don't believe in these "too-good-to-be-true" promises that hustlers put into their slide decks. :-)
To me it seemed like an amplification of the parent's point: AI is poised to disrupt the reason behind a great deal of human endeavor. For music, only live performance will count. Sculpture, printmaking, painting, possibly even jewelry-making? Do it by machine, 10x the speed for 0.1x the labor, you're not the actor, the machine is the actor and you're sort of the director.
One thing about many of those past mechanical inventions is that even though they eliminated a lot of manual labor jobs in some fields, they probably created a lot of manual labors jobs to make the machines or obtain the resources to make the machines.
So you might lose your manual labor farm job to a newly invented machine, but there will be a lot of openings for factory workers to assemble those machines and miners to obtain the metal to build them.
When AI takes your job it quite likely doesn't involve any new hardware. It might just be a program running on a computer your (now ex) employer already had. This seems fundamentally more disruptive.
It used to be that 90%+ of citizens were employed in agriculture.
Your hypothesis is that we switched from replacing all those farmers with "even more" factory workers building farming machines.
This seems like an extraordinary claim. If one tractor replaces 10 farmers, why would you need 10 workers, full-time, to build this one tractor?
It seems much more likely that the slow disappearance of all those farming "jobs" was, kind-of coincidentally, timed with the need for building cars, clothing factories etc.
The thing about the steam engine is that it took a long time to develop and permeate society. We're talking 3 generations of people between the first engines able to pump water from coal mines to steam locomotives connecting cities.
Equally in many areas the end result is a loss of something (often intangible) which we accept as "good enough" and which may take a long time to be recaptured.
The steam engine may well have been a good thing in the long run but I'm sure it did tear apart the fabric of many people's lives and I think it's reasonable to commiserate.