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A real government would look into ways to just give basic income to creatives (and anyone else) so even if they didn’t have to slave away illustrating for corps, they could focus efforts on art. That’s how you operate in a post-scarcity world.
But nah. Capitalism.
Oh that’s depressing. Which makes it funny.
…
Not to spoil the joke, but AI isn’t taking creative jobs, it’s destroying them. Becsause people prefer cheap non-creative ai to do things that would, until now, require a creative touch.
Also, it’s only cheap because huge companies are losing billions subsidizing it. The reason factories aren’t entirely automated is because few companies can justify spending a billion dollars to fully automate their assembly line. I work at a factory where one machine outputs product single file and the next machine requires the product come in double file. The company pays a worker to stand on the line and split the output from the one machine into two lines.
I figured that would be super easy to automate but one of the engineers explained the company only gives money to do something if they can prove the money will generate a huge return, and automating that part simply doesn’t generate a big enough return to justify the cost. If a machine breaks down 1 hour a day they’ll fix that before replacing a worker. A machine can generate $100,000 an hour, so it being down an hour each day is a loss of $100,000 per day. Replacing a worker saves the company $250 a day. Replacing the worker that splits 1 line into 2 lines isnt a priority. Keeping machines at 100% uptime is what the focus is.
That’s a great comic, funny and clever. But is that his mouth, mustache or beak?
I was about to confidently comment that it’s a mustache but then I looked again and now I really don’t know what to think…
I’ve solved the mystery with first hand research: it’s a beak.
True. It’s hard to replace people where the process or output of the process is not digitalized. Painting and music is perfect example where output is fully digitalized.
It helps if you recognize that factory labor is quite difficult and complex, while slapping your watermark on someone else’s art is incredibly easy.
Yes, but also no. We took all the difficult and complex processes from humans and gave them to machines a long time ago. Now, humans are there to do the actions that are complex for machines, such as picking up a randomly placed part. Advances in processing power for vision systems means that we are increasingly automating that too.
We took all the difficult and complex processes from humans and gave them to machines a long time ago.
We really haven’t. Automation just adds layers of complexity, often with extra rigidity, so everything becomes hyper specialized.
That said, we’ve capitalized the process such that the real estate and machinery necessary to do the work are fabulously expensive and in an extremely limited number of hands. So a lockout of the labor force can cripple wages, even in a very sophisticated field.
I feel like we may be talking about different things. I’m talking about the automation of the widget manufacturing process. Building the factory and machinery itself is not yet an automated process.
And I know that from the outside, modern factory automation looks super complex and surely it would take an expert to maintain. But trust me, the vast majority is actually hilariously simple.
I’m talking about the automation of the widget manufacturing process. Building the factory and machinery itself is not yet an automated process.
For a specific peculiar type of widget, sure. But then someone comes along and demands a slightly different kind of widget, and that’s where all the money and manpower goes.
And I know that from the outside, modern factory automation looks super complex and surely it would take an expert to maintain. But trust me, the vast majority is actually hilariously simple.
More that everything is very specialized and difficult to adapt in the face of supply chain problems or swings in raw material supplies or downstream demand. But I’ll concede some of the stuff is pretty straightforward. We have these enormous boilers that were bought off the collapsing USSR. And… pretty much just “heat tube, collect output” is the extent of their function. The trick is to build something sturdy enough to handle all the changes in temperature and pressure.
We’ve got much more advanced equipment with more sensors and regulators. Great when they work, but it’s an enormous job getting in to fix things when they don’t. It’s not something you can assign a couple of day laborers outside Home Depot to address. You just have these teams that are intimately familiar with the hardware and how to identify and address problems quickly.
The problem with automation is that when you think you’ve gotten rid of the need for some number of these professional staffers, you’ve put yourself on a clock. Once a step in the process fails that you didn’t document or have someone on hand who understands, you’re way up shit creek.
Yup AI is eventually going to automate all the jobs, good thing we have functioning democracies around the world that are taking serious steps to gradually transition people to a jobless economy!
