> pretty much every advancement in automation across history has sacrificed some fidelity and craftsmanship. That's the cost of automation
Can you help me think through how this looks when considering car manufacturing? Originally hand made cars were things of craftsmanship, but significantly lower quality and reliability than those produced with tiny tolerances on insane production lines. I'd take a modern car over a handmade one just about any day of the week.
I mean one of the main complaints of the luddites was decreasing cloth quality despite the looms originally being able to produce higher quality cloth comparable to their own traditional weaving techniques. Powered looms and the dozens of other loom improvements from the previous 100+ years didn't inherently produce poor quality cloth, they were adjusted to produce lower quality cloths after they were already in operationin factories in order to increase profit margins. Powered looms were originally just modified hand looms, not some radically different design from the ground up. The flying shuttle predates powered looms and the luddites.
Yes, we lose (or pidgeon-hole) artisans and craftsmen. But even in his "woe the times" example of AI kludging together two game properties into a painting, where the lighting isn't right and furry tail is not ideal, etc., etc... That $500 image is something no one could have created 20 years ago with a computer. This isn't centuries of artisan skills we are talking about. What about the artisan who would have been paid $500 to paint it with actual paints on an actual canvas? You can mourn progress in every direction if you like, but I don't think it changes a single thing about the trajectory of where we are going.
Now that AI is coming for my job as a programmer I'm not going to get twisted about it - my job didn't exist when I was a kid and it won't exist (certainly not in the same form) when my kid is an adult. And that's ok, it was a "job of opportunity". And that job has changed dramatically over 20 years. AI is just the continuation of that change.
I started in SE because it was fun to make computers do stuff. Programming has only ever been a tool to achieve that goal, and often a frustrating one. AI is just a better tool. If the job becomes "a guy that talks to the AI" that will still be programming because at the end of the day the computer can't do anything without someone telling it what to do.
...until SkyNet.