A few articles like this have hit the front page, and something about them feels really superficial to me, and I'm trying to put my finger on why. Perhaps it's just that it's so myopically focused on day 2 and not on day n. They extrapolate from ways AI can replace humans right now, but lack any calculus which might integrate second or third order effects that such economic changes will incur, and so give the illusion that next year will be business as usual but with AI doing X and humans doing Y.
Maybe it is the fact that they blatantly paint a picture of AI doing flawless production work where the only "bottleneck" is us puny humans needing to review stuff. It exemplifies this race to the bottom where everything needs to be hyperefficient and time to market needs to be even lower.
Which, once you stop to think about it, is insane. There is a complete lack of asking why. To In fact, when you boil it down to its core argument it isn't even about AI at all. It is effectively the same grumblings from management layers heard for decades now where they feel (emphasis) that their product development is slowed down by those pesky engineers and other specialists making things too complex, etc. But now just framed around AI with unrealistic expectations dialed up.
I appreciate this, but also wonder if we are in the middle of a transformation where some forms of creativity (note: not necessarily engineering) are being "flattened". Everyone can output beautiful pixels, beautiful audio, beautiful token sequences.
Maybe it's like the transformation of local-to-global that traveling musicians felt in the early 1900s: now what they do can be experienced for free, over the radio waves, by anyone with a radio.
YouTube showed us that video needn't be produced only by those with $10M+ budgets. But we still appreciate Hollywood.
There are new possibilities in this transformation, where we need to adapt. But there are also existing constraints that don't just disappear.
To me, the "Why" is that people want positive experiences. If the only way to get them is to pay experts, then they will. But if they have alternatives, that's fine too.
The answer to this seems obvious to me. Buyers seek the lowest price, so sellers are incentivized to cut their cost of goods sold.
Investors seek the highest return on investment (people prefer more purchasing power than less purchasing power), so again, businesses are incentivized to cut their cost of goods sold.
The opposing force to this is buyers prefer higher quality to lower quality.
The tradeoff between these parameters is in constant flux.
