I acquire skills to enjoy applying them, period. I'm less concerned about the final result than about the process to get there. That's the different between technical types and artist types I suppose.
Edit: I also should say, we REALLY should distinguish between tasks that you find enjoyable and tasks you find just drudgery to get where you want to go. For you, audio editing might be a drudgery but for me it's enjoyable. For you, debugging might be fun but I hate it. Etc.
But the point is, if AI takes away everything which people find enjoyable, then no one can pick and choose to earn a living on those subset of tasks that they find enjoyable because AI can do everything.
Programmers tend to assume that AI will just take the boring tasks, because high-level software engineering is what they enjoy and unlikely to be automated, but there's a WHOLE world of people out there who enjoy other tasks that can be automated by AI.
I'm with you, I enjoy the craftsmanship of my trade. I'm not relieved that I may not have to do it in the future, I'm bummed that it feels like something I'm good at, and is/was worth something, is being taken away.
I realize how lucky I am to even have a job that I thoroughly enjoy, do well, and get paid well for. So I'm not going to say "It's not fair!", but ... I'm bummed.
I can't tell whether I'm supposed to be the technical type or the artist type in this analogy. In my music making hobby, I'd like a good AI to help me mix, master, or any number of things under my direction. I'm going to be very particular about every aspect of the beat, but maybe it could suggest some non-boring chord progressions and I'll decide if I like one of them. My goal as an artist is to express myself, and a good AI that can faithfully take directions from me would help.
As a software engineer, I need to solve business problems, and much of this requires code changes, testing, deployments, all that stuff we all know. Again, if a good AI could take on a lot of that work, maybe that means I don't have to sit there in dependency hell and fight arcane missing symbol errors for the rest of my fucking career.
> Again, if a good AI could take on a lot of that work, maybe that means I don't have to sit there in dependency hell and fight arcane missing symbol errors for the rest of my fucking career.
My argument really had nothing to do with you and your hobby. It was that AI is signficantly modifying society so that it will be hard for people to do what they like to make money, because AI can do it.
If AI can solve some boring tasks for you, that's fine but the world doesn't revolve around your job or your hobby. I'm talking about a large mass of people who enjoy doing different things, who once were able to do those things to make a living, but are finding it harder to do so because tech companies have found a way to do all those things because they could leverage their economies of scale and massive resource pools to automate all that.
You are in a priveleged position, no doubt about it. But plenty of people are talented and skilled at doing a certain sort of creative work and the main thrust of their work can be automated. It's not like your cushy job where you can just automate a part of it and just become more efficient, but rather it's that people just won't have a job.
It's amazing how you can be so myopic to only think of yourself and what AI can do for you when you are probably in the top 5% of the world, rather than give one minute to think of what AI is doing to others who don't have the luxuries you have.
Everyone should do the tasks where they provide unique value. You could make the same arguments you just made for recorded music, automobiles, computers in general in fact.
Difference is though AI does it much faster and has much fewer central sources that provide the service. The speed and magnitude is important as well, just like a crash at 20km/h is different than a crash at 100km/h. And those other inventions WERE also harmful. Cars -> global warming.
My point is every invention has pros and cons, and tends to displace people who were very tied to the previous way.
You can still do those tasks, but the market value will drop. Automatable work should always be automated, because we best focus on things that can't be automated yet and those gain more market value. Supply and demand and all that. I do hope we have a collective plan about what we do when everything is automated at some point. Some form of UBI?