Humans in the age of AI
There’s no use fighting AI now. It's going to be everywhere. Way too many of the things we do will be done by AI systems. But does that mean we will not need graphic artists now? Or web designers?
The question really is about taste. Not everything that can be built ought to be built. How do we decide what to build? Maybe machines can answer that question by A/B testing their way through the world. But then maybe not.
Google A/B tests everything. Right down to the shade of blue to use on their buttons. On the other hand, Apple supposedly uses the taste of its developers and designers. Its products reflect the aesthetics of their designers. If Apple had followed what its users asked for, it would have built a monstrosity. Taste is critical.
So that leaves the question of how many people do we need? When something is cheaper, there is far more demand for it. And the marginal effort that humans are required for, are multiplied a thousand-fold and so you still need as many people.
Sometimes that does not happen. That category of job is completely destroyed. But then the cognitive bottleneck moves elsewhere. And you need people there. For example, maybe creating beautiful marketing collateral for a company becomes easier and cheaper. Then many more companies will actually create marketing collateral. Each of them will need people who make the choices from among the variety that a Midjourney or Dall-E can throw up; those that can prompt these systems to come up with plausible suggestions. And then once you have the collateral, there are more people running the campaigns that use that collateral.
Will there be an infinite regress though? Will we always be able to find other things for people to do? Maybe. Maybe not. But almost surely the cognitive burden of the tasks expected of humans will likely only increase. Will we be able to upskill the human population to meet that challenge? It will be incredibly hard, to say the least. Which is why I've maintained for a long time that the defining problem of our lifetime will be that of employment and employability. Why this matters is a question for another post.