I disagree.
I’ve been a professional photographer since 1985 and have seen the entire sector collapse. There are still niches here and there, but the heydays are long past. Only a small fraction of people still make a living at it, and far fewer make a good living from photography. There’s lots of happy-faced photographer bullshit on YouTube, but most of it is just that:BS. They make more from YT than from making pictures. I work with many graphic designers and creative directors, and they all bemoan the collapse. People say that they value creativity and craftsmanship, but when it comes down to it, AI is good enough and a lot cheaper.
Now imagine that ^^^^ applying to pretty much every field.
The coming state of affairs---the Big Picture---is a significant majority of the population will have grown up having learned literally nothing.
They'll sleep, wake up, play online games, socialize online, order their shopping and meals online, and aspire to little except making "influencer" videos that show
other people the best ways to play online games, socialize online, order meals, and shop online. Not to mention style their hair, do their fingernails, do their face makeup, groom their dogs... etc.
Then, they'll go back to sleep.
Rinse, repeat.
In short, they will
produce nothing. Only consume.
And every day there will be more of them and fewer people who engage with the world
other than electronically.
When that "electronic life" group reaches voting age they will, of course, vote for any and all laws and government representatives who will allow them to
continue living the only way they know how.
Until one day only two groups of people are left. The consumers who know no other way to live and who
want no other way to live (their brain development guarantees it); and a much smaller group who
provide the mechanisms and products for the consumers to both continue and expand their digital-everything world.
Sounds almost idyllic, doesn't it? Everyone gets what they want. Providers provide, and consumers consume.
Here's the catch: creatures like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Genghis Khan, Hitler, Caligula, and so forth
ALWAYS appear in the population. Sociopathic Narcissistic Machiavellian Sadists.
Always have, and always will.
They've never had anything close to today's technology---never mind the
coming technology---to monitor, control, and enforce their will, though. By several orders of magnitude. (Those monstrous dictatorships were 100% analog. They managed to kill their dozens of millions with nothing but human spies, human snitches, and human secret police.)
Will the future Stalins, Maos, Hitlers, and Caligulas decide to be nice guys and
NOT to take advantage of having every citizen's smallest daily life details instantly available in digital form, and AI to sift through it, do you think? Because it's unfair?
Or is it more likely they'll use that information to create an iron-fisted dictatorship that will make George Orwell look like an optimist?
